‘NO HERD IMMUNITY UNTIL SUMMER’

IT could be summer before the UK achieves herd immunity through a Covid-19 vaccination programme, a scientist advising the Government has said.

Calum Semple, professor of outbreak medicine at the University of Liverpool and a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), described the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine as a “game changer” if it is approved in the coming days.

But he told BBC Breakfast: “To get the wider community herd immunity from vaccination rather than through natural infection will take probably 70% to 80% of the population to be vaccinated, and that, I’m afraid, is going to take us right into the summer I expect.”

It comes as hospitals across the four nations are under extreme pressure from the virus.

Dr Katherine Henderson, the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, described her experience of working in a hospital on Christmas Day as one of “wall to wall Covid”.

“We see patients who are coming in who have Covid symptoms and then we have other people coming in with other symptoms who turn out to be Covid positive.

“Between that, there’s a great deal of difficulty getting those patients through into the wards,” she told BBC Breakfast.

“The chances are that we will cope but we cope at a cost - the cost is not doing what we had hoped, which is being able to keep non-Covid activities going.”

The latest figures from Public Health Wales published on December 28 show 2,200 new cases of the virus were recorded in the previous 24-hour period, bringing the total number of cases since the pandemic began to 141,915

The overall death total stands at 3,383 in Wales.

Last week, data from the World Health Organisation showed Wales had the second worst coronavirus infection rate in the world.