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Lockdowns are unlikely to be needed again as Britain learns to treat coronavirus like the flu, said Professor Chris Whitty.
The medical director said that up to 25,000 people die in a year from the flu without anyone noticing and that accepting some Covid deaths would be the price of keeping schools and businesses open and allowing people to live a “whole life.”
Professor Whitty, speaking at a Royal School of Medicine webinar, said the government would only be forced to “pull the alarm wire” if a dangerous variant came along, against which people had no immunity and which caused a exponential growth.
“Covid is not going away,” he said. “You have to figure out what is a rational policy for this and here I would quite differentiate between a pandemic environment and what you get from seasonal flu.
“Every year, between 7,000 and 9,000 citizens die of the flu, most of them very old, and every few years they contract a year of severe flu in which 20,000 to 25,000 die. The last time we had it was three years ago and no one noticed.
“So it is clear that we are going to have to handle it, at some point, as we do with the flu. There is a very dangerous, seasonal disease here that kills thousands of people and society has chosen a particular way to avoid it.”
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