Professor Mark Woolhouse Speaks to Daisy Mcandrew on the COVID Infection Rate and More

Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, has told Times Radio a return to covid restrictions should not be ruled out.

The professor who advises the UK and Scottish governments told Daisy McAndrew that the "determination" to "never go backwards" has been "quite unhelpful":

For people like myself, trying to advise government on how to proceed and how fast to unlock this determination that we could never go backwards has actually been quite unhelpful. It inevitably makes the advice more cautious. If we can't go backwards, then we're very, very cautious about unlocking.

We're dealing with a novel virus with still uncertain potential. We don't know how much this thing will evolve in the future...We should leave the door open to responding in whatever way is necessary in the future. I very, very much hope we won't have to go backwards, at least not backwards too far, but I think we have to have that possibility and keep it open just in case there is a public health emergency that none of us have foreseen at this stage.

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