Covid scientist says UK could be 'completely back to normal' by the end of the year

12 May 2021, 10:22

Professor Graham Medley said the country could be back to normal by the end of 2021 if vaccines continue to work.

A Covid scientist has said that the UK could be 'back to normal' by the end of the year.

Speaking in a recent radio interview, Professor Graham Medley said that life could return to normality by the end of 2021 - provided that there isn't significant threat from new variants not covered by the vaccine.

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Professor Medley, who is chairman of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling group, which advises Government, said, according to the Mirror: "If vaccines continue to work, and we don't have some nasty variants, then potentially we could be completely back to normal by the end of the year.

"But, on the other hand, if there are variants, if the vaccines wane, so the impact wanes and we aren't able to get boosters, then we could have been in a very different position."

He also said that the country is in the 'best position' we've been in since the start of the pandemic, saying: "We're in the best position that we've been in the whole epidemic, prevalence is low, vaccines are working.

"I think the risks going forward, you can think of them in two ways: one is the risk to each individual and the other is the risks to the population, so essentially having to go back into a lockdown again.

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"Both of those are low but there remain challenges in the sense that we don't know what the virus is going to do in terms of the future and it's quite likely that it will start to increase together and start to transmit, and the question is whether the vaccines can hold it."

Under Boris Johnson's roadmap for England, all lockdown restrictions introduced during the pandemic are due to be lifted on June 21 at the earliest.

However, this will be dependent on the following 'four tests' being met ahead of that date.

1. The vaccine deployment continuing successfully
2. There is evidence that the vaccine is effective in reducing deaths
3. There isn't a surge in hospitalisation
4. Assessment of risks are not fundamentally changed by new variants of Covid that cause concern

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