Coronavirus: Up to 90,000 people could be infected in England each day, Patrick Vallance says

‘We do need to do more if the aim is to get R below one,’ chief scientific officer says

The government’s chief scientific adviser has suggested as many as 90,000 people per day could be contracting coronavirus in England, as he warned the country needs “to do more” to shrink the epidemic.

Sir Patrick Vallance’s comments came as Boris Johnson’s defended the government’s regional approach to the virus, suggesting a “extreme laissez faire” strategy, giving people greater freedom, would result in “many thousands more deaths”.

Speaking alongside the prime minister, who also dismissed calls for a nationwide circuit-breaker lockdown once again, Sir Patrick said: “The measures are having an effect, but we do need to do more if the aim is to get R below one and shrink the epidemic.”

On transmission of the virus, he said the modelling consensus suggests between 53,000 and 90,000 new infections per day may be occurring across England.

He said: “Obviously with that number of infections you expect to see an increase in hospitalisations as well. So the number of infections overall across the country continues to increase.”

“It’s worth remembering the number of infections leads to hospitalisations a week or two later and that in turn has the effect of increasing intensive care unit numbers and of course, unfortunately, the number of people who die as a result of that.”

Sir Patrick also stressed the need to reduce infections of Covid-19 in order to avoid pressure on the NHS, telling the No 10 press conference: “One of the reasons that care for other conditions like cardiovascular disease and oncology, cancer care, gets affected is not the measures taken to stop Covid, it’s the patients with Covid who start to occupy beds.”

Mr Johnson added another national lockdown was “not the right course” for England, “not when the psychological cost of lockdown is known to us, the economic cost, and not when it has been suggested that we might have to perform the same sort of brutal lockdowns again and again in the months ahead”.

On the government’s measures, Sir Patrick went on: “"I think it is likely that some measures of restriction are going to need to be in place for a while to try and get those numbers down.

"The quicker you get the R below one, the quicker the numbers come down and things then give a bit of room. A lot depends now on what happens now over the next few weeks.

"At the moment, the numbers are heading in the wrong direction but there are some signs in some places of a potential flattening off of that. We need to wait and see and monitor the numbers very carefully."