Deputy Chief Medical Officer Dr Jenny Harries said that “many thousands of people” would contract coronavirus as the disease continued to spread in the UK.
“We currently have relatively few cases here, which is why we are still in the containment phase,” she told Sky News.
“Obviously we will have significant numbers in a way in which the country is not used to. This is the sort of thing that professionally we’re trained for and very rarely see, almost in a professional lifetime.
“Large numbers of the population will become infected because it’s a naive population, nobody has got antibodies to this virus currently.
“We will see many thousands of people infected by coronavirus, that’s what we’re seeing in other countries and the important thing for us is to make sure that we manage those infections.”
Dr Harries said the UK will soon begin to see its coronavirus cases peak in the same way that China has.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme about the number of new cases compared to China in the past 24 hours, she said: “China is in a very different position. They are at the end of their current epidemic peak and we will be shortly at the start of ours.
“If you have a new disease, the normal thing is, it will take off gradually. It will rise very rapidly at one point and come back down again when it effectively runs out of people in the population to infect.”
