VIRAL SURGE
Chris Whitty warns easing lockdown will trigger third Covid wave that ‘finds those not vaccinated’
ENGLAND'S Chief Medical Officer says "there will be a further surge" in coronavirus cases in the future.
Professor Chris Whitty warned Covid will "find the people who have not been vaccinated", or for whom the jab does not work.
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He said the public should be aware there will be "further deaths" on top of the 125,000 so far, and they only need to look at the rest of Europe, where cases are begining to creep up again, to know the crisis is not "over".
Speaking to MPs in the Science and Technology Committee today, Prof Whitty said: "What we are going to see is as things are opening up, what all the modelling suggests is that at some point we will get a surge in virus.
"Whether that happens, we hope it doesn't happen soon, but it might for example later in the summer if we open up gradually, or if there is a seasonal effect, it might happen over the next autumn and winter.
"But all the modelling suggests there will be a further surge and that will find the people who either have not been vaccinated, or the vaccine has not worked.
"Some of them will end up in hospital, and sadly some of them will die. And that's just the reality of where we are with the current vaccination."
The Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said it was inevitable that coronavirus cases would increase as restrictions on social mixing were eased.
So far in the UK, more than 22.3 million people have been given their first dose of the vaccine.
Prof Whitty was asked why modelling suggests up to 30,000 more people could die even with a slow lockdown lifting - given the success of the vaccine rollout so far.
Prof Whitty said: "Because this is such a common virus against large numbers of people, even if relatively small proportion of people are still remaining vulnerable, that still equates to very large number overall."
He added the vaccines are not 100 per cent effective, so even some people who have been given two jabs could fall sick with the disease.
With huge proportions of the most vulnerable people protected with at least one dose of a Covid vaccine, there have been calls for an earlier unlocking.
The committee chairman Greg Clark said the assumptions in the modelling had been superseded by better-than-expected results from the vaccine and higher take-up of the jabs.
But Prof Whitty warned: "If you open up too fast, a lot more people die. A lot more.
"To pretend that to public would be completely wrong - there will be further deaths - but by opening steadily, models show there will be fewer deaths."
Prof Whitty said younger people, under the age of 60, tend to "drive the wave of infection" compared to the elderly.
"They've not yet been vaccinated, and therefore vaccination will have almost no role to play in reducing transmission in that group for some time", Prof Whitty said.
"So if you released very quickly, you would suddenly get a wave of transmission through younger adults, and that would lead in due course to older adults being infected and some of them - either because they hadn’t had the vaccine or because they weren’t fully protected by the vaccine - would go on to get serious outcomes."
He said the UK would be in a "much better position" when the younger age bands have been given at least one dose of a jab - expected to be by July - because this will help to reduce cases of the disease.
But he reassured the ratio between the number of people infected and those who go on to die would be dramatically reduced as a result of the vaccination programme.
The leading scientist also said it was "easy to forget quite how quickly things can turn bad" if you don’t keep a very close eye on the data.
“I think a lot of people may think that this is all over.
“I would encourage them to look at what is happening in continental Europe at the moment where a lot of countries are going back into rates going up and having to close things down again having not been in that situation before."
Sir Patrick was asked whether "data, not dates" - the strategy being used to move forward with each step of the lockdown - was just slogan.
The chief scientific advisor said: "For us, it's very important that you measure what you've done and we don't know the impact of, for example schools going back, is going to be.
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"And so there's an estimate from the modelling group that it could have an effect on R, between 10 per cent and 15 per cent increase. We don't know within that range exactly what it would be.
"Nobody would say that we know exactly how this is going to roll out over the next few months.
"And the important thing is to measure, adapt and take decisions in the light of information as it emerges."
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The roadmap out of lockdown has been designed in a way so that there are at least four weeks between each step.
It will give officials the ability to look at the impact of each step before moving on to the next one, with both Prof Whitty and Sir Patrick saying there were a "large number" of restrictions being eased in each block.
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