A letter to the UK Government calling for face coverings and social distancing to be scrapped in June has been signed by 22 leading scientists.
They are calling for the measures to end on June 22, the same date that Boris Johnson has proposed could see the end of legal limits on social contact in England. No similar date has been set for Wales and the Welsh Government as well as chief medical officer Dr Frank Atherton have consistently said Wales will take a cautious approach.
In response to the letter, Dr Atherton said: "Wales is currently experiencing the lowest levels of transmission in the UK due to the decisions that have been made to date and the control measures we have in place."
Dr Roland Salmon, the former director of the communicable disease centre in Wales, is one of those scientists who has added their name to the letter.
He told BBC Radio Wales: "I am not venting my frustration but I do think some dialogue is well overdue. I have always felt that there has been little credible evidence benefit for many of the measures that we take."
Find out about coronavirus cases in your area:
Dr Salmon claimed the restrictions on travel and business "haven't delivered anything" and Wales would have seen higher cases over the winter regardless of any restrictions.
"I am not particularly focused on people if they wish to wear face coverings or indeed keeping people out of their own personal space but I think the more general restrictions on travel and business really haven't delivered anything," he said.
"We have had the epidemic over the winter that we were always going to have. It might have been a little bit worse than we might otherwise have had because of course by famously flattening the curve we have ensured that the virus was around for a bit longer and given that a high proportion of fatal infections are actually contracted in our hospitals we may have actually presented the opportunity for vulnerable people to catch it more frequently."
Dr Salmon said the letter is not just about easing the restrictions from June 22, but encouraging the government to focus protection in the future on vulnerable people, rather than the masses.
When asked about the threat posed by variants, he said we need to deal with the "here and now", adding that the vaccine has shown it prevents severe disease and death.
"We can't stop living forever while we wait for things to happen," he said.
Dr Salmon also said that if he was in charge of Wales' Covid response, he would not have gone for a general lockdown but would not suggest a free for all.
In his timetable to ease lockdown restrictions though spring and summer, announced in February, Boris Johnson said the fourth step in that easing would potentially see all legal limits on social contact removed, with the final closed sectors of the economy reopened, such as nightclubs.
In response to that announcement, prominent epidemiologist Prof Neil Ferguson, of Imperial College London, said he thought Johnson's plan struck the "right balance" and UK chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said "baseline" measures like face coverings in certain situations, hand washing, and self-isolation may be necessary next winter.
Earlier this month, new research from the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) suggested that the risk of contracting coronavirus from touching a contaminated surface is very low, less than 1 in 10,000. Throughout the pandemic experts have consistently warned of the danger posed by surfaces and hand-washing has been one of the key instructions to people over the last 12 months.
But now it is understood that people are far more likely to contract coronavirus by airborne transmission in indoor, crowded and inadequately ventilated spaces, where infected people spend long periods of time with others. Cleaning and hand-sanitising will not prevent this.
