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Coronavirus second wave ‘inevitable’, warns Dr Hilary as Leicester goes into lockdown
GOOD Morning Britain’s Dr Hilary Jones has warned a second wave of the coronavirus is “inevitable”.
The show’s resident doctor said the UK didn’t take the pandemic seriously enough and that most people “carried on living normally”.
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His comments come as Leicester has been forced to go into a localised lockdown due to a rise in cases.
The area will remain under the current lockdown measures for two more weeks.
Pubs and restaurants are to open up across the rest of England, but in Leicester they will remain closed with all non-essential shops also closing.
The measures have been implemented due to the fact that 866 people have tested positive for the virus in the last two weeks.
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The equates to almost a third of the city's cases since the epidemic started.
Leicester accounts for 10 per cent of all positive cases reported across the country over the last week. The area currently has 135 cases per 100,000 people.
This morning Dr Hilary said the UK had been “too complacent” about the virus at the beginning of the pandemic.
Speaking on the show today he said even though we had witnessed viruses like MERS and SARS, none of them had “touched the UK in a significant way”.
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“So we were very complacent about this, we saw it beginning to happen in Europe, we thought ‘no it's not going to come to these shores'.
“We didn’t take it seriously enough, people carried on living normally and suddenly we had this upsurge in cases, we had many deaths, we have now had over 70,000 excess deaths and people realised that it was very serious.
“Already people are talking about getting back to normal and we haven’t really got through the first wave let alone worrying about the second wave which is inevitable now and we are beginning to see signs of that already.”
This morning Leicester’s mayor said the area would need more help now due to the localised lockdown.
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Sir Peter Soulsby said the city will now need to be treated differently to others.
Dr Hilary also this morning highlighted other places that had managed to keep the rate of infection down.
He praised New Zealand and said they had “done well in having zero cases” apart from the two cases that had been recorded from people who had come into the country from the UK.
“They are stopping people from flying in until next March, that’s how seriously they are taking it, and here we are opening up everything”, he added.
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So far in the UK over 43,000 people have died in hospitals due to the virus and Dr Hilary said people should think twice before jetting off abroad as air travel was “how this started”.
Dr Hilary’s comments on a second wave come after the World Health Organisation yesterday said that the “worst is yet to come ''.
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During a briefing WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said: "We all want this to be over. We all want to get on with our lives. But the hard reality is this is not even close to being over.
"Although many countries have made some progress, globally the pandemic is actually speeding up."
Laws will be changed to enforce Leicester lockdown and cops will crack down, warns Matt Hancock
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