According to new modelling which has been seen by the government Covid cases will plummet by 85% to 5,000 cases a day by Christmas.
The Telegraph has reported that modelling from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine suggests that cases will dramatically fall over the winter months
Sage member John Edmunds, a professor in the Centre for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases, said, “When we were doing the work about two weeks ago, the Health Secretary had made it very clear that the government was not planning to introduce Plan B in the near future
“Our model was projecting that cases would start to decline some time in the autumn.
“However, the model also suggests that cases may start to climb again in the spring, due to a combination of waning immunity and increased contacts.”
Other experts are cautioning that vaccines will not be enough to stop Covid, whilst cases in schools are thought to be what it is driving the current wave, which will wane as children will build immunity.
Professor Adam Finn, who is on the Joint Committee of Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), warned against complacency over the “worsening situation in the NHS.”
Professor Finn told Sky News, “The vaccines principally are very effective at stopping people from getting seriously ill.
“They’re not so effective unfortunately at stopping infections altogether or stopping the virus from being spread about.
“They do have an effect on that, but they’re not by themselves going to be enough at the present time to keep the spread of the virus under control.
“And we do need to see people continuing to make efforts to avoid contact, to avoid transmission, and to do other things as well as get vaccinated if we’re going to stop this rise from going up further.”
He added, “Just giving more people vaccines, including people who maybe don’t actually need the vaccines yet, could actually run the risk of making things worse rather than better.
“If you boost people before they actually need the vaccine, it is in some senses a waste of vaccine, but also it means that you are immunising them earlier and they may make a smaller response to the vaccine and that response may wear off earlier.
“So I think the idea of just getting more doses indiscriminately into people’s arms is not really necessarily going to solve the problem.”
The Health Secretary Sajid Javid told Times Radio, “We’ve been very clear and open about this, working with our friends in the NHS, and the reason for this is if you’re working in the NHS, that fantastic work you’re doing every day, you yourself are more susceptible to this virus because you’re just much more likely to come into contact with it, but also the people that you’re looking after are more vulnerable and that’s why they’re in hospital, they’ve got health needs, and this is about protecting them and protecting yourself.”
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