A leading medical expert has predicted riots if the government tries to impose another lockdown.
After two months of falling coronavirus case figures, infections are now rising again in the UK.
Since the beginning of the month daily infections have more than doubled, from 30,000 cases a day on average per week, to 70,000 now.
Professor Roger Kirby, president of the Royal Society of Medicine, has suggested the government may be forced to take some preventative action if the numbers continue rising.
He said that the country was not out of the pandemic yet, and that the government should not risk being complacent.
When it came to the question of a third full lockdown, Professor Kirby believes the population at large would not accept it.
"Locking down people again, I don’t think people would tolerate it again," he told Mail Online.
"There would be riots like there were in Belgium if they tried to do that."
In November last year large demonstrations against coronavirus restrictions in Brussels turned violent.
Stones were thrown by demonstrators calling for the lifting of measures put in place against the Omicron variant, despite Belgium being among the worst hit by coronavirus in Europe.
In the UK anti-lockdown protests never reached such a high octane.
The closest things got to bubbling over was in December 2021 when thousands of protesters have marched through London to voice their anger over the then latest Covid restrictions.
Crowds assembled in Parliament Square as part of a "Freedom Rally" against vaccine passports and other virus rules.
Demonstrators shouted "shame on you" as they clashed with police.
Some officers suffered minor injuries while escorting a police motorcyclist through the area.
As much as the conflict in Ukraine had diverted attention away from the pandemic over the past month, the threat of Covid-19 has not fully passed.
Doctors are have warned about a new wave triggered by social mixing and the rise of a more transmissible variant of Omicron called BA.2.
At the moment case rates among the elderly are at a record high, with one in 29 people over 70 in England infected.
Although the vaccine has helped to keep the impact of those infections lower than in 2020 and the start of 2021, hospitalisation rates are now rising again.
There are currently about 1,900 Covid admissions a day across the UK - a 50% rise on this time a month ago.
Last week medical experts warned the pandemic was not over yet on a global scale.
World Health Organisation official Margaret Harris told a conference in Geneva on Friday that it was “far from over”, adding: “We are definitely in the middle of the pandemic.”
The current situation is being fuelled by the BA.2 mutation, which could be of the most infectious diseases the world has ever seen, according to Professor Adrian Esterman.
The epidemiologist and biostatistican says the variant is up to six times more transmissible than the original strain of Covid - and we can expect most people to catch it.
While it is less deadly, BA.2 is a mutation of the Omicron variant of coronavirus and now accounts for the majority of new infections in the UK.
BA.2's R number, the rate at which it can spread, is 12, compared to 2.5 for the original virus.
In a bid to dull the impact of the new strain, the government is rolling out fourth jabs for five million people.
All over-75s and those over 12 whose immune systems are weakened will have the chance to receive a fourth dose.
The first 600,000 invitations will go out in the coming days.
