England to face 'pretty miserable winter' due to potential rise in COVID-19 cases: UK scientists

British scientists have predicted a ‘pretty miserable winter’ for the country with further restrictions on the cards. Public Health England (PHE) has warned on Sunday that England may have to impose a lockdown later this year amid a possible rise in COVID-19 cases.

According to Professor Calum Semple of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), a British government advisory group, children and the elderly will be particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 by the end of the year.

Speaking to Times Radio, Semple said that “there’s a sting in the tail after every pandemic” because social distancing will have reduced people’s exposure to usual endemic respiratory viruses such as pneumonia and bronchiolitis.

He added, “I suspect we’ll have a pretty miserable winter because the other respiratory viruses are going to come back and bite us quite hard. But after that, I think we’ll be seeing business as normal next year.”

Dr Susan Hopkins, Public Health England`s director for COVID-19, said that "We may have to do further lockdowns this winter, I can't predict the future, it really depends on whether the hospitals start to become overwhelmed at some point.”

"I think we will have alternative ways to manage this, through vaccination, through anti-virals, through drugs, through testing that we didn`t have last winter," she told the BBC.

Scientists have said that the third wave of coronavirus infection is probably started in the UK due to the rapid spread of the Delta variant.

Experts have also warned that this deadly virus could mutate for years and the available vaccines could eventually fail to protect against transmission, illness and perhaps death.