A health professor has warned the UK is facing a "very damaging wave" of Covid infections as cases continue to surge.
Dr Stephen Griffin, associate professor at the University of Leeds, urged Britons to be more vigilant as Covid infection levels hit a record high across the UK.
He warned that too many people "are behaving as though this has become some kind of endemic".
The health expert stressed that Covid is "clearly not" the same as seasonal flu.
Dr Griffin said: “We are in this situation – an unfortunate situation for many people – because we have high vaccination coverage in our elderly population.
“That’s why you can get away with relaxing some of these restrictions, in the view of the Health Secretary.”
Defending the Government’s Living with Covid plan, Health Secretary Sajid Javid said: “Thanks to our plan to tackle Covid we are leading the way in learning to live with the virus.
“We have made enormous progress but will keep the ability to respond to future threats including potential variants.
“Vaccines remain our best defence and we are now offering spring boosters to the elderly, care home residents and the most vulnerable.”
But Dr Griffin told The Daily Express said this was a simplification of the virus and its impact.
He said: “This virus does not just make older people unwell. It does not just make clinically vulnerable people unwell.
"It causes all manner of different and long term health problems in people, even sometimes after a mild infection.”
He added: “Social norms are being restructured towards pre-pandemic when the pandemic is still raging.
"That really is going to be problematic, and I'm very worried that unless this booster campaign is incredibly successful, we’re going to see a really damaging wave of this virus as BA.2 takes hold."
Some 4.9million people in the UK are estimated to have had Covid-19 in the week ending March 2, up from 4.3 million in the previous week, the Office for National Statistics said.
The ONS data shows one in 13 people in England are estimated to have had Covid during that week, up from one in 16 the week before, and in Wales the figure is one in 14 people, up from one in 16.
Both are record highs and it comes after experts warned that at such levels anyone in the population who can catch Covid is likely to get it.
Earlier this week, the Government's chief scientific adviser for England, Sir Patrick Vallance, warned the "world needs to be ready" for inevitable future pandemics which look very different to the current one.
"It's very obvious to everyone in this meeting that there will be a future pandemic," he said.
"That I think is clear. It's also clear this one is not over and we've got very high infection rates at the moment.
"And the room for this virus to evolve remains very large, so we could be taken by surprise again with a variant that escapes immunity."
