“Covid is not going to go away,” Whitty said in a Royal Society of Medicine webinar on Thursday. “This is now a disease that for the rest of our careers is going to be around. So, it is clear that we are going to have to manage it, at some point, rather like we manage the flu.”
Whitty, who has been nicknamed ‘Dr. Doom’ for his overly gloomy Covid-19 projections, noted that up to 25,000 people in the UK die from the flu each year without making headlines, because society has struck a balance between an acceptable level of risk and restrictions people are ready to tolerate. Similarly with Covid-19, and its many future variants that will inevitably emerge, the government aims to push deaths as low as possible, but lockdowns will likely end after current restrictions are lifted in June, he acknowledged.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said he aims for the UK’s Covid-19 restrictions to end for good on June 21. Understanding that debilitating restrictions can’t persist “indefinitely,” he said, the road map for recovery must be “cautious but also irreversible.”
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