A leading scientist says there are “a number of reasons” why the UK has higher Covid infection levels than many other European countries.
Covid-19 cases in the UK are at their highest level for almost three months, with the seven-day average standing at 44,145 cases per day.
Hospital admissions and deaths are also slowly creeping up, though vaccines are still working well overall to prevent severe disease.
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Professor Neil Ferguson, a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), told BBC Radio 4's Today programme, the UK has lower "functional immunity" in our population than most other Western European countries.
He said: “Partly, we were very successful in getting vaccination rolled out early and we know that gradually immunity wanes over time after you’ve had that second dose, so how early we were means we are a bit more vulnerable.
“Second, we relied more on the AstraZeneca vaccine and, while that protects very well against very severe outcomes of Covid, it protects slightly less well than Pfizer against infection and transmission, particularly in the face of the Delta variant.
“And finally, we just sit behind a few other countries, not dramatically, but we’re no longer in the top rank of European countries in terms of overall vaccination coverage, particularly vaccinating teenagers.
"Overall coverage rates here are considerably lower, for instance, than in Spain, Portugal and Denmark.”
On future lockdowns and restrictions, Professor Neil Ferguson said the Government “was very clear that it wanted to move away from social distancing measures."
He added: "But it’s notable, clearly, that most Western European countries have kept in place more control measures, vaccine mandates, mask-wearing mandates, and tend to have lower case numbers and certainly not case numbers which are going up as fast as we’ve got.
"But at the end of the day this is a policy decision for Government to make.”
The SAGE member added that “people need to be aware that we have currently higher levels of infection in the community than we’ve almost ever had during the pandemic – for the last three or four months we’ve been up at well over 1% of the population infected at any point in time”.
On whether people are now too relaxed, he said: “Nobody likes having their freedoms curtailed by measures but it’s prudent to be cautious in everyday interactions – certainly wear(ing) masks helps that, it reminds people that we’re not completely out of the woods yet.”
Asked if the country should be worrying about another lockdown, he said: “I don’t think we’re looking at another lockdown… the worst case here are demands on the NHS… it’s very unlikely we’ll see anything like the levels of deaths we saw last year, for instance.
“Coming into the winter, there may be a Plan B which needs to be implemented, which involves some rolling back of measures, but I doubt that we’ll ever get close to lockdown we were in in January of this year.”
