Experts have said that the UK could soon see 600,000 Omicron cases a day, meaning scientists would be unable to test them all.
As the pandemic worsens ahead of Christmas, SAGE scientists have warned that cases will continue to rocket.
Speaking on BBC Breakfast, SAGE member Professor Andrew Hayward said he expected to find out how many will end up in hospital from the variant around Christmas or early new year time.
Prof Hayward is a member of the SAGE subcommittee NERVTAG and spoke on behalf of himself.
He said: “If you think about getting a year’s worth of rain over a month, then you’re going to get flooding and potentially severe flooding no matter how much you’ve shored up your defences.
“And that’s the concern here. That the huge wave is going to cause lots of people to be off work, having to isolate, which is going to cause disruption, and it’s going to spill over into people going into hospital.
“The rate at which it spills over is uncertain because we don’t know exactly how severe it is yet. We’ve no particular reason to think it’s less severe than previous strains.”
He warned that what will make the bigger difference is the ability of the country to count the growing rates through the capacity of the testing system.
Currently, he said the capacity maxed out around 600,000 tests a day.
He added: “We’re soon going to exceed that number just in cases alone, so counting the cases is going to become hard.”
Yesterday, 78,610 cases were confirmed but Professor Hayward said that this suggested around 150,000 people had the infection because not everyone infected gets tested.
With cases doubling approximately every two days, the SAGE member warned that “an extraordinary number of cases” were on the way because of how transmissible the variant was and how it evaded two doses of a vaccine.
He said: “That’s going to lead to a huge wave of infection?”
