There have been a further 494 deaths in Britain across all settings with the total death toll now standing ay 33,186, according to government figures.
However, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has suggested the death toll is far higher and is most likely to be over 50,000.
Britain’s top statistician, Professor Sir Ian Diamond who is the head of the ONS warned that the number of deaths are not falling quickly enough after hitting the peak.
He said, “We need to be worried as a nation” over the seeds of a second peak in coronavirus being sewn as the country eases its way out of the lockdown.
He further warned the full indirect effects of the coronavirus crisis in the UK may not be known for years.
He told MPs on Wednesday, “We are through the current peak. It does seem to me we need to be worried as a nation that as we come through this current peak, we do not seed another one.”
Professor Anthony Costello, a member of the independent Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) committee, said the easing of the lockdown “will not ensure the suppression of the epidemic.”
The former WHO director added, “In short, the government plans will lead to the epidemic returning early, cases rising, further preventable deaths, and no guarantee that herd immunity will ever occur.
“This is compounding the disastrous policy of March 12.”
Writing in the Guardian newspaper last month Professor Costello wrote, “The basic principles of public health, and the daily mantra of the WHO – to find the virus, test, trace and isolate, to promote social distancing, and to do it all at speed – appear to have been effectively disregarded.”
Dr Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies programme, told a press briefing in Geneva, “Humans are not herds, and, as such, the concept of herd immunity is generally reserved for calculating how many people will need to be vaccinated and the population in order to generate that effect.
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