Dr David Nabarro told LBC that there needs to be a continued effort from everyone to keep the number of coronavirus cases down. He stressed the importance of this in order to allow cancer screenings and treatment to resume so that indirect deaths do not increase as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dr Nabarro said: “You’ve got to keep the numbers down because that will build up super fast.
“If you just let COVID go, it will become much worse than influenza.
“So we’ve got to have the effort to keep the numbers down, while at the same time as we’ve done that and as we get life going, we can get cancer treatment and screening back in place again. We want both.
“So what I’m saying to everybody, do what we’ve got to do about this virus.
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“We’ve almost got to make it second nature. And then let’s get on with our lives.”
He added: “We can’t live completely without fear because we’re going to have to be on the defence against this virus all the time.
“That’s going to be the state of life for the next few months.
“Fend against it, get ahead of it, hold it at bay, stop it getting up.”
The UK has recorded more than 453,000 coronavirus cases at the time of writing.
The death toll in Britain is currently over 42,000.
Worldwide there have been more than 34.1 million COVID-19 cases.
The death toll has reached more than 1,000,000.
