UK faces thousands of coronavirus deaths every year, warn scientists

BRITAIN-HEALTH-VIRUS
Scientists have warned the annual death toll could reach thousands for some time
AFP via Getty Images
Lily Waddell1 August 2021

The UK could have thousands of deaths from Covid every year, scientists have warned.

Every winter, Britons could face problems with coronavirus like many other seasonal viruses for instance influenza.

Coronavirus infections have dipped but scientists have warned the annual death toll could reach thousands for some time.

Professor Adam Finn of Bristol University told The Guardian: “We are going to see problems with Covid for a long time.

“The virus has shown itself to be genetically more nimble than we expected, though not as much as the influenza virus. So I would envisage Covid being a continuing problem for some time, with annual death tolls reaching thousands and possibly tens of thousands.”

Professor James Naismith, director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute in Oxford, said he believes there will be “waves of the illness” like flu.

He added: “A wave that kills a few thousand seems a reasonable measure of what you might expect in a future winter wave. And then, you might get a bad wave one year and have the tens of thousands of deaths.”

However, Professor Jonathan Ball of Nottingham University has predicted the numbers of Covid deaths will dip over time as immunity broadens.

The scientist branded the warning of thousands of deaths as “overly pessimistic”.

Already SAGE have said there is a “realistic possibility” a future Covid variant could kill one in three.

Documents published by SAGE said a future Covid strain as deadly as MERS, which has a case fatality rate of 35 per cent, could emerge.

Uber, Bolt, Deliveroo and Pizza Pilgrims lead the brands who plan to put discounts on the table in a bid to encourage more younger people to get vaccinated.

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) revealed taxi app firm Uber will send text reminders to users to urge them to get the jab.

As many as 84,938,000 vaccinations have been rolled out across the UK, 46,811,298 were first doses and 38,126,702 were second jabs.

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