The number of deaths recorded among people who have contracted coronavirus is expected to continue climbing this week before "plateauing".
Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK Government’s chief scientific adviser, said the UK was tracking behind Italy in the number of hospital deaths among patients with Covid-19 and “following the same sort of path”.
He added: “I think this week we are going to see a further increase, thereafter we should see a plateau as the effects of social distancing come through. That plateau may last for some time and begin to decrease.”
Speaking at the UK Government's daily briefing Sir Patrick said the number of people in hospital beds with Covid-19 is beginning to “flatten off” in many parts of the country. He said it is expected to continue to flatten and decrease as the effects of social distancing “really feed through into the illness we are seeing in hospital”.
But Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said while we are “starting to win this struggle” the peak in the number of cases has yet arrived and there was no change expected in lockdown measures for the time being.
He explained that this week the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) would review the evidence of the effectiveness of social distancing measures.
“We don’t expect to make any changes to the measures currently in place at that point and we won’t until we’re confident, as confident as we realistically can be, that any such changes can be safely made,” Mr Raab added.
Sir Patrick said things like reopening schools would only happen when numbers were “firmly the other side” of the peak.
“Only at that stage do you start looking at what measures might be released and how they might be released,” he added.
When asked how long the plateau is expected to last, Sir Patrick said: “We would expect a much more gradual decrease (of deaths) from the peak time and a bit of a plateau... and we’d expect that to go on for two or three weeks.”
