Bars and restaurants should stay shut until May, a Government scientific advisor has warned.
Dr Marc Baguelin, Imperial College London, who sits on the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M), a sub-group of Sage, said the premature opening of the hospitality sector would lead to a "bump" in Covid-19 cases.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4's World at One programme, he said: "We looked at the partial reopening and the increase in the R number, it will generate an increase in the R number, the extent of which we don't know really.
"Something of this scale, if it was to happen earlier than May, would generate a bump in transmission, which is already really bad.
"So you have a lot of pressure on hospital, you will have another wave of some extent.
"At best you will keep on having very, very unsustainable level of pressure on the NHS."
It comes after worrying data from the biggest national Covid-19 surveillance study suggested new infections are still not falling.
The REACT study by Imperial College London has analysed swab tests carried out on 111,000 people across England between January 6 and 15.
The trend from the previous round of swab testing before Christmas suggests rates started going down towards the end of December but may have started to rise again when people went back to work in January.
Researchers identified an R value of 1.04 over the period and warned hospitalisations will continue to rise for at least a fortnight before they expect a very slow decline.
Prof Paul Elliott, director of the REACT programme, said: “R is either flat or possibly going up a bit, that seems to be the trend unless something changes.
“The fact that it’s not going down as potentially serious consequences to the main kind of impacts of this in the health terms between impacts of this.”
