Sir Patrick Vallance has said restrictions may need to be reintroduced as coronavirus continues to evolve.
The government has continued to ease measures across the UK since it announced the "Living with Covid" plan earlier this year. The law requiring people to stay at home if you test positive for coronavirus in England was lifted on February 24.
The government has also confirmed that lateral flow tests will no longer be free for most people in England from tomorrow. The free tests will only be available from next month to over-75s and over-12s with weakened immune systems.
READ MORE: New guidance warns people with a cough or cold to 'stay home' from Friday
However, cases are continuing to surge across the country - and covid infections have increased by more than 10% in the Liverpool City Region this week. Sir Patrick Vallance spoke at the Science and Technology Committee yesterday and warned the "virus has not gone away" - as Wales Online reports.
He said: "It’s not going to go away. It’s going to be a circulating human virus for as long as we can see forward. And it hasn’t stopped evolving. It’s been quite an unstable period, so the virus is changing very rapidly, and it’s got quite a lot of space to evolve into. It’s not a foregone conclusion that evolution to increase growth and transmission — which is what the virus does, wants to do — necessarily is associated with reduced severity.”
Sir Patrick said we need to keep monitoring how the virus evolves, we need to keep protecting the vulnerable and we need to be “able operationally to ramp things up again if you need to — [this] is crucially important.” He added: “That in a sense, is also a lesson from the very beginning of the pandemic where the underfunding of Public Health England for many years had caused a diminution in capacity.
“I expect to see further hospitalisations because of the lag time and further deaths with this. So, that is the consequence of the high levels of infection rates. We should also be aware that there may well be long term problems with covid infection — long covid is still being studied. It's not a sort of a completely stable situation and it's not a risk-free situation to run very high levels of infection.”
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