Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), said hospital intensive care units will still be strained when the Prime Minister is urged to ease England’s third national lockdown next month. Sir David said the UK would then begin seeing the benefits of the Covid vaccines and added: “The one thing I can be absolutely confident about is that, by this time next month, there is going to be the mother of all arguments.
“There will be enormous pressure to loosen things up.
“Loosening it up will inevitably lead to an increase in cases, a resurgence of the pandemic among younger groups, and we can see then that does seep through into hospitalisations. So there’s going to be a real battle going on.”
Mr Johnson has not ruled out lockdown lasting into summer amid concerns about the highly infectious new virus variant.
The Covid Recovery Group (CRG) of Conservative lockdown-sceptic MPs said ministers “must start easing the restrictions” in March when the top four risk groups should have received some immunity from single jabs.
