Could easing restrictions make this third wave even worse?

Q How bad could a third wave of Covid get?

A On Friday 51,870 new Covid cases were reported, despite hopes earlier this month that the third wave was slowing at a peak of about 33,000 a day.

Experts now say the 100,000 new cases a day ‘over the summer’ that was predicted by Health Secretary Sajid Javid shortly after he took office could come far sooner after most lockdown restrictions are lifted tomorrow on so-called Freedom Day.

Biology expert Professor James Naismith of the University of Oxford said: ‘With nearly 52,000 cases, we are less than one doubling away from 100,000.

‘We have not plateaued at 33,000, in fact we are heading into the unlocking with a large and rapidly growing wave of cases.

‘We can expect pressure on hospitals to grow and become apparent by early August.’

Dr Jonathan Stoye, a group leader at the Retrovirus-Host Interactions Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute, said: ‘The increasing numbers on the daily dashboard stats are a grave cause for concern.’

In early July, Government advisers SAGE released modelling to try to give some idea about the impact of 100,000 cases per day. Compared with the second wave, there now appears to be a fourfold lower chance of hospitalisation from Covid infection and roughly tenfold lower chance of death.

But even then it would be expected that each day there could be between 1,000 and

2,000 hospitalisations and 100 to 200 deaths.

‘Given this uncertainty, it would be prudent for contingency plans to be put in place for how to respond if hospital admissions approached levels that could disrupt the smooth functioning of health services,’ cautioned the SAGE document.

It expects the peak of deaths in the third wave to be ‘considerably smaller’ than in January, when few people were vaccinated and there were about 1,000 deaths a day.

Despite this, epidemiologist Professor Neil Ferguson, the former Government adviser who encouraged Ministers to press ahead with the first lockdown, said he believed the plan to remove all restrictions was ‘justifiable’, and he was ‘reasonably optimistic’ that the reality will not be as bleak as some scientists’ predictions.