Excess death figures will appear to be “back to normal” by March, but an expert is warning that the country will still need to be cautious.
Speaking to Times Radio, Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter said that Covid deaths were “halving every two weeks or so” and will drop to under 200 a day by March.
He added: “It’s quite plausible that we won’t then have any excess deaths, and in other words deaths would be back to normal for the time of year.”
Sir David said that in the second wave of the pandemic there were fewer deaths from other conditions.
He explained this was because some Covid deaths would have happened anyway, social distancing had helped prevent the spread of flu, and many people, such as the elderly, had already died earlier in the pandemic, with their deaths “brought forward” by the earlier wave.
Sir David said: “I’m anxious that next month somebody’s going to say ‘oh, well, look, we haven’t got any excess deaths, we’re normal, why have we got all these restrictions?’.”
He added: “I’m just pre-empting it to say, no, actually things are not normal. Things are not normal. And we still will have to be very cautious.”
Sir David also suggested three weeks may be needed to assess the impact of changes to lockdown.
He said the Government was “quite right to be very cautious”, warning “there is so much uncertainty” on the trajectory of the pandemic.
“Things can change and we noticed they can change pretty rapidly, and that’s quite worrying,” he said.
He said “three weeks” might be needed “to have a feeling for what’s happening so that any impact can feed through the charts”.
“I do like this idea of an adaptive strategy,” he said, adding: “Something I wish they’d done right at the beginning, of admitting the uncertainty, that there’s so much we still don’t know and things can be taken by surprise.”
