THE GOVERNMENT’s Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance has issued a dire warning that Covid is “evolving rapidly,” adding that measures should remain in place to be able to “ramp things up again” if needed.
Sir Patrick was speaking to the Science and Technology Committee this morning following a steep rise in Covid cases. Quizzed on the Government’s “Living With Covid” plan, Sir Patrick was asked how important advice from SAGE was in the proposals. The expert confirmed that SAGE “clearly” played a big part, before adding his own remarks on the current situation.
He said: “This virus has not gone away. It’s not going to go away. It’s going to be a circulating human virus for as long as we can see forward.
“And it hasn’t stopped evolving. It’s been quite an unstable period, so the virus is changing very rapidly, and it’s got quite a lot of space to evolve into.
“It’s not a foregone conclusion that evolution to increase growth and transmission — which is what the virus does, wants to do — necessarily is associated with reduced severity.”
Sir Vallance also noted that three things were essential to adopting a living-with-Covid approach: being able to monitor how it evolves; to protect the vulnerable both physically and through vaccines and antivirals; and having the capacity to be “able operationally to ramp things up again if you need to — [this] is crucially important.”
Read More: Vallance in dire warning as Covid ‘evolving rapidly’
