Boris Johnson may have ‘got away with’ the ‘gamble’ of not imposing new Covid restrictions over Christmas as case rates appear to be stabilising, according to a statistician.
Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter has ruled out a ‘big rise’ in hospital admissions and deaths from coronavirus across the country.
Daily reported infections have gradually been falling from a record high of 218,724 reported on Tuesday – dropping to 141,472 today, the lowest in 13 days.
There were a further 97 deaths reported on Sunday, taking the total for the last seven days to 1,295 – a 30% increase compared to the previous week.
Mr Johnson declined to tighten rules further over the festive period, leaving England as an outlier compared to the rest of the UK, where limits on socialising and nightclub closures have been enforced.
Prof Spiegelhalter, from the University of Cambridge, told Times Radio: ‘The cases are not going up as fast as they were and may have stabilised over the whole country, but at very high levels and they’re not going to come down rapidly.
He cautioned that daily infection rates could still be hitting around 500,000, which would have had a ‘devastating’ effect without the protection afforded by vaccines.
He added: ‘We’re certainly not going to see a big rise in intensive care admissions and deaths and those really severe outcomes.’
It comes as a minister warned that the country is likely to still be dealing with Covid in five or six years time.
But Nadhim Zahawi said the country is ‘witnessing the transition of the virus from pandemic to endemic’, meaning that people should be able to live with a greater degree of normality than in the last two years.
Meanwhile, the former head of the UK’s vaccine taskforce, Dr Clive Dix, has called for a major rethink in the UK’s strategy to contain the virus and replace the lockdowns and mass vaccination programmes seen in the last two years with a ‘new normality.’
This could bring an end to mandatory isolation periods and jabs could only be offered to the most vulnerable in future.
Appearing on the Sunday morning politics programmes, Mr Zahawi also denied reports that free lateral flow tests are going to be scrapped ‘within weeks.’
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