Government Advisor Warns Third Wave of Coronavirus ‘entirely possible’

One of the government’s top scientific advisors has warned that a third wave of coronavirus in the UK is “entirely possible” unless a vaccine is found soon.

Professor Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology in the Usher Institute from the University of Edinburgh, said the current strategy of stopping flare-ups with lockdowns was failing to solve the problem “in the long-term”. Woolhouse, who sits on the government’s advisory body that models pandemics, said a vaccine needed to be found quickly if the government wanted to provide a lasting solution to the pandemic.

He said, quote: “The government’s strategy is to sit this out for the next six months, that’s what we’re told, and implicitly in that the expectation is that after six months something will be different. And the obvious something is for there to be a vaccine.

“I have to say that most people I have talked to involved with vaccine development think that we may have a vaccine in six months but it’s doubtful that we will have been able to roll it out on a mass scale by then. So we’re in a difficult situation for some months to come I’m afraid.”

Prof Woolhouse admitted that the government’s failure to plan for anything other than a lockdown had actually made the possibility of a second wave even more likely.

“When we started modelling this way back in March, before the first lockdown, it was very apparent from the work that my group did and many other groups did that all a lockdown ever did is defer the problem. It solves an immediate crisis because it reduces transmission quickly, but it doesn’t actually solve the problem in the long-term – it doesn’t make the virus go away, he said.”

The Professor went on to say, quote: “So in the middle of March we were modelling scenarios where it was entirely possible that we would need to lockdown again in September, and that’s exactly the position we find ourselves in. The scenario I mentioned earlier does actually include this possibility [of a third wave]. And this is just another demonstration that lockdown doesn’t solve the problem, it defers it.

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