The Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty today predicted that we will never fully extinguish Covid-19 and said there will come a point where a difficult decision must be taken about how to live alongside the virus.
Speaking at a Downing Street press conference this afternoon, Mr Whitty made the sobering prediction that the virus will always be with us in some form.
He said it was 'not realistic' to think that we will get to a stage where coronavirus is not circulating and said it is likely to continue to cause deaths for the foreseeable future as the Flu virus does each year.
The CMO said that as more and more vulnerable people become vaccinated against Covid-19, there will come a point where political leaders will have to make a 'difficult decision' about the risk we take as a society in reopening our normal lives.
Mr Whitty was responding to a question from a member of the public about when social distancing may end altogether.
He said: "Initially the vaccine will help to reduce the number of people who die from this disease, but we will need to keep the social distancing measures in place, because if we let go at that point there would be a huge surge and the people who are a bit below the highest risk groups would get infected in very large numbers, some would end up in hospital and some would die."
"Population immunity will occur if we have vaccines that can actually reduce transmission between people.
"We have a high level of confidence that the Pfizer vaccine reduces the risk of people having severe and clinical disease by a very large amount.
"The data implies that the next two vaccines also reduce that risk - but we don't yet know if these vaccines will lead to reduced transmission.
"If it doesn't do that then we will never achieve herd immunity and what we would then need is for the vaccines to be at the highest possible rate, because only people who have been vaccinated would be protected."
He said he hoped that we will have a vaccine that both protects the person who has it and protects people around them, but said whatever the situation with vaccines, we will never fully be rid of the virus.
He added: "It is not realistic to think that we will get to a stage where coronavirus is not circulating, but we will get to a stage where it is at a much lower level.
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"There will probably be more deaths for the foreseeable future, but at a much lower level, just as every year there are flu deaths, as many as 20,000 in a high year.
"This happens with infections unfortunately.
"We will not get to the point where there is zero risk and a decision for society, led by political leaders will be at which point we raise these measures - and that's going to be a difficult choice, but we are not anywhere near that point."
