A professor of medicine has said people with Covid should be allowed to “go about their normal lives” as they would with a common cold.
Asked on BBC Breakfast about NHS staff shortages due to workers having to isolate, Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia, said: “This is a disease that’s not going away, the infection is not going away, although we’re not going to see as severe disease for much longer.
“Ultimately, we’re going to have to let people who are positive with Covid go about their normal lives as they would do with any other cold. And so, at some point, we’ve got to relax this.
“If the self-isolation rules are what’s making the pain associated with Covid, then we need to do that perhaps sooner rather than later. Maybe not quite just yet.”
Professor Paul Hunter said Covid will eventually be regarded as a cause of the common cold and will not warrant the reporting of daily case numbers.
He told BBC Breakfast: “Covid is only one virus of a family of coronaviruses, and the other coronaviruses throw off new variants typically every year or so, and that’s almost certainly what’s going to happen with Covid – it will become effectively just another cause of the common cold.
“We’re not going to be doing daily reporting on cases of the different causes of the common cold going forward, of which Covid is one.
“So personally, I think it would be unlikely that we are going to do anything like that whilst we’re still coping with Omicron, but once we’re past Easter, perhaps, then maybe we should start to look at scaling back, depending on, of course, what the disease is at that time.”
