The latest coronavirus variant, Omicron, is "not the same disease" as we saw at the start of the pandemic, a UK leading scientist has claimed.
Sir John Bell, professor of medicine at Oxford University and the government’s life sciences adviser, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme Omicron is “not the same disease we were seeing a year ago”.
He added although hospital admissions had increased in recent weeks as the new variant spreads across the UK, the disease “appears to be less severe and many people spend a relatively short time in hospital”.
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However, a number of scientists have criticised the government’s decision not to introduce further Covid restrictions over the festive period.
They have expressed concern that while the Omicron variant appears to be milder, it is highly transmissible, meaning hospital numbers and deaths could rise rapidly without intervention.
The NHS Providers chief executive, Chris Hopson, said it was still unclear what would happen when infection rates in older people started to rise.
He told BBC Breakfast: "We’ve had a lot of mixing over Christmas, so we all are still waiting to see, are we going to see a significant number of increases in terms of the number of patients coming into hospital with serious Omicron-related disease.
"We’re now seeing a significant increase in the level of staff absences, and quite a few of our chief executives are saying that they think that that’s probably going to be a bigger problem and a bigger challenge for them than necessarily the number of people coming in who need treatment because of Covid."
George Eustice, the environment secretary, said the government was keeping the level of Covid hospital admissions under “very close review”.
He acknowledged infection rates from the new Omicron variant were rising but said there was evidence it was not resulting in the same level of hospital admissions as previous waves.
John Bell told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: "The horrific scenes that we saw a year ago of intensive care units being full, lots of people dying prematurely, that is now history, in my view, and I think we should be reassured that that’s likely to continue."
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