‘Couple of years’ before UK gets back to normal, warns former chief scientific adviser

‘We live with flu and we are unfortunately going to have to live with coronavirus,’ says Sir Mark Walport

(REUTERS)

It will be a “couple of years” before the UK returns to normal after the coronavirus pandemic, a former chief scientific adviser to the government has warned.

Sir Mark Walport said that while “very good progress” was being made in beating Covid-19, restrictions will still have to be deployed into the future to beat new surges.

“I suspect we’re going to have to live with some measure of social restrictions at least throughout this year, and we’ll see, hopefully next year we’ll be more and more normal, and in a couple of years we should return to complete normality,” he told BBC Breakfast.

Warning against lifting current rules too soon, he said: “The vaccine rollout is going incredibly well… we’ve seen deaths fall fairly precipitously… all very good news, but we’ve only got to look across the Channel and see that France currently has over 39,000 new cases a day.

“So the virus is still very much around and if we take all the brakes off, then it’s quite clear that there is a very substantial risk of a further wave of infection.”

Sir Mark was the government chief scientific adviser from 2013 to 2017, and is currently chief executive of UK Research and Innovation.

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He said: “What the Spi-M modelling has shown is that even with a pretty effective vaccine, it’s not perfect, not everyone will be vaccinated, and there will still be quite a few people by June who aren’t immune, and that creates the setting for potentially another wave.

"It’s likely to be different from the first one because we know that the vaccines are very good at keeping people out of hospital and stopping people dying. And that’s why it’s important to really focus on what the data at the time are actually showing.”

Asked how long social distancing and face masks might be part of people’s lives, he said: “We’ve lived with flu for many years, and we are unfortunately going to have to live with coronavirus, but we know that over time it will change its relationship with us in the sense that more humans will be immune.”

He said restrictions to international travel remained key in keeping infection rates down so the country could “hold back importations of some of the strains [of Covid-19] that may be able to resist the vaccine”.

He said: “We’re never going to be able to keep them out completely and, indeed, we know that the South African strain is here in very small numbers. But nevertheless we need to give as long as possible for the vaccines to be adapted so that they can deal with future variants as they emerge, and new variants will continue to emerge all around the world.”