A leading doctor has estimated people will still be getting infected with Covid-19 into the 2030s and believes test and trace measures could be needed for decades.
Dr Richard Harling, director of public health for Staffordshire, said the UK must learn to live with the virus because it might be around forever.
He was speaking alongside Greg Fell, his counterpart in Sheffield, at a virtual House of Commons Science and Technology Committee meeting yesterday.
The pair were being quizzed about the failings of the NHS Test and Trace system which they said could have been avoided if contact tracers were brought on board sooner.
Dr Harling told the committee he expects to be "dealing with cases of coronavirus throughout the 2020s and into the 2030s".
Mr Fell argued Britain's hold on the pandemic would be "in a better place" now if Test and Trace hadn't relied solely on call centres last summer.
He described the relationship between local health officials and the national system as "fundamentally broken" for months after the system launched and still "has a long way to go".
Both Dr Harling and Mr Fell did, however, claim the vast majority of transmissions have come in people's homes rather than public venues like pubs and restaurants.
Test and Trace failed to meet its target of isolating 80 percent of close contacts of patients for much of the last year.
Local public health officials were only brought on board in the autumn when contact tracers were then also deployed.
Dr Harding said: "Our staff are invested in this, if they are successful in isolating contacts it affects them directly. It’s their community and their families. That's not quite true with the remote system."
He added that Test and Trace is "still relatively remote" and has a "long chain of command" which often slows things down too much.
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