Sir Keir Starmer is to address the nation this evening in a pre-recorded message which is to be broadcast on BBC One

The Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has announced that he is to address the nation this evening at 7pm in a pre-recorded message.

This will be in response to the Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressing the nation on Sunday evening with his message on people to get their booster jabs.

The Prime Minister warned last night that the country is facing a “tidal wave” of the new Omicron variant which has already claimed on life today.

Johnson warned the nation on Sunday evening that Omicron could cause “very many deaths” and is “must urgently reinforce our wall of vaccine protection.”

Dr Kit Yates, a senior lecturer in mathematical biology at the University of Bath, has warned hospital admissions could far surpass what we saw last January.

“Nadhim Zahawi [the Education Secretary] has done a calculation which is based on exponential growth – yesterday we recorded 1,239 Omicron cases, it’s likely that there were more in the community, we’re missing some,” Dr Yates told Sky News.

“If we are doubling every three days, that could increase to 100,000 by the end of the month.

“If it’s doubling every two days – and we think it’s somewhere in between – then we could be talking about maybe 900,000 cases a day by the end of the month, and that’s the ones that we are catching, not the ones that were missing.

“And certainly in terms of hospitalisations, there’s been some estimates from Denmark suggesting about 1% of Omicron cases being hospitalised, so if we are up at a million cases, then we could be talking about 10,000 hospitalisations a day, which is more than double what we saw last January.”

Dr Yates said that he is “surprised” the UK is not doing more to slow the spread of Omicron as it is highly transmissible and one person has died from the new variant.