Britain has reached coronavirus herd immunity, a senior minister has claimed, though a leading expert has warned that the virus "isn't quite over".
The number of new Covid-19 cases reported each day in the UK has fallen for seven days in a row, raising hopes the country's third wave of the disease has peaked.
But Prime Minister Boris Johnson stressed the need for caution despite recent falls in the number of coronavirus cases, saying it is "far too early to draw any general conclusions".
Amid the biggest vaccination campaign in British history, hospital admissions and deaths have remained low compared with previous waves that led to national lockdowns.
It appears there is now speculation within the Government that the UK has reached herd immunity, 16 months on from the first lockdown in March last year.
A senior minister, who wasn't named, told the Daily Mail that the vaccination programme and more than 5.7 million infections meant the virus was struggling to find new hosts and herd immunity had effectively been reached.
The minister said: "It is all over bar the shouting, but no one has noticed.
"Of course we have to guard against the emergence of some terrible new variant. But otherwise Covid is on the point of becoming something you live with.
"It drops into the background, but it does not change anything terribly – maybe you have to take a test once in a while."
Professor Neil Ferguson, whose modelling was the basis for the first lockdown, said on Tuesday he was "positive" the UK would be past the worst of the pandemic by October.
Mr Johnson stressed the need for caution despite the latest trend.
The Prime Minister told LBC Radio: “We’ve seen some encouraging recent data, there’s no question about that, but it is far, far too early to draw any general conclusions.”
He added: “The most important thing is for people to recognise that the current situation still calls for a lot of caution and for people just to remember that the virus is still out there, that a lot of people have got it, it still presents a significant risk.”
He rejected Cabinet minister Michael Gove ’s claim that people who refuse to get a vaccine are “selfish”.
Mr Johnson said: “No, I think that I would put it the other way round and say that if you get one you are doing something massively positive for yourself, for your family.”
Mike Tildesley, professor of infectious disease modelling at the University of Warwick, warned that Covid-19 “isn’t necessarily all over bar the shouting quite yet”.
The member of scientific modelling group Spi-M told Times Radio: “I think people are aware that Covid isn’t quite over.
“I really hope that this is the turnaround of the third wave and as we get towards the autumn we really are very much getting back to normal.
“But I think, actually, people are doing pretty well at using their own judgment and exercising caution when necessary.
“It’s pretty clear that we are not back to kind of pre-pandemic levels of mixing – people aren’t socialising in the same way they were before the pandemic, hopefully that will come.
“But I think that’s probably partly what we’re seeing in the data – that we’re not seeing a big surge in infections because people are taking a little bit of time to get back to normality.”
He added that the high level of protection from the vaccines should put the UK in a “better position” in the winter, but added that it is possible a variant of concern could emerge.
Professor Tildesley said the recent falls in Covid-19 case numbers could have occurred because people are less willing to get a test ahead of summer holidays.
Asked about the decline, he said: “Because schools in England closed last week, we haven’t got secondary school pupils doing regular lateral flow testing and so we’re not necessarily detecting as many cases in younger people.
“It’s also been suggested by some that, possibly, because of a high number of cases, because of the summer holidays approaching, people might be less willing to ‘step up’ to testing when they have symptoms.
“What we really need to do is monitor hospital admissions, because at the moment of course they’re still going up – now, of course there is a lag when cases go down, it always takes a couple of weeks before hospital admissions turn around – but if we start to see as we get into August, if we start to see hospital admissions going down as well then I think we would have much stronger evidence to suggest that this third wave is starting to turn around.”
