Nightclubs in Scotland are to close for at least three weeks in a bid to curb the spread of covid and the new variant omicron.
There has been record high cases this month and numbers are expected to peak even further according to Professor Leitch around "mid to late January, maybe even pushing into February."
But despite the restrictions that are currently in place, a professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia, Paul Hunter, has said that restrictions, at some point, must come to an end so we can carry on our with normal lives.
Speaking on BBC Breakfast, he 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."
Discussing the self-isolation rules for those who test positive, the university professor added: "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."
He then suggested that this might be able to happen "once we're past Easter" depending on the effects of the disease at that time.
He continued to tell 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."
