NO MORE LOCKDOWNS!
But boffin warns we’re in for ‘miserable’ winter
THE UK is unlikely to see a return to lockdowns even though winter will be “rough”, a government scientific adviser has suggested.
Calum Semple, a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) said measures such as mask-wearing could be reintroduced over the winter to deal with a spike in COVID cases.
Speaking in a personal capacity, the professor of child health and outbreak medicine at the University of Liverpool said the “winter bump” of cases would be “miserable” due to a mixture of COVID-19 and the respiratory viruses that have not been seen for the last year as people stayed at home.
Asked whether restrictions would come back, Prof Semple said: “Possibly, and it may just be about reinforcing some common sense.
“It may be bringing back some mask-wearing in certain environments, but I don’t foresee the lockdowns or the school suspensions that we’ve seen.”
Prof Semple said he thought “there’s no right time to unlock” but suggested it was “quite realistic” there could be up to 2,000 hospital admissions per day, as predicted in central modelling assumptions submitted to Sage.
Harm
He added: “My big message to people now is, sure we’ve weakened the link between community cases and hospital cases, but that link is not broken. It’s the people that are not vaccinated that are still coming to harm.”
Of the people currently going into hospital, he said: “They’re nearly all unvaccinated and what’s surprising is that, although they’re not dying, they are suffering quite a lot of injuries, so we’re seeing a lot of kidney injuries and lung injuries in younger people.”
Prof Semple said he would continue to wear a face mask “particularly in enclosed areas”.
On Monday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson confirmed that most mandatory restrictions will end next week.
But he appealed to people to proceed with caution and emphasised that the pandemic “is not over”.