Further coronavirus restrictions are needed in England to prevent a "catastrophe" at the start of 2021, a member of the UK government's New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG) said Tuesday.
"I think we are entering a very dangerous new phase of the pandemic and we're going to need decisive, early, national action to prevent a catastrophe in January and February," Andrew Hayward, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at University College London, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
"A 50% increase in transmissibility means that the previous levels of restrictions that worked before won't work now, and so Tier 4 restrictions are likely to be necessary or even higher than that," Hayward added.
His comments come as figures from NHS England released on Monday showed 20,426 Covid-19 hospitalizations in England – more than the almost 19,000 at the peak of the first wave in April. The number of new cases continues to rise, with the UK recording its highest daily figure so far on Monday.
The government is set to carry out its review of the current coronavirus tiers on Wednesday.
"I think we're really looking at a situation where we're moving into near lockdown, but we've got to learn the lessons from the first lockdown," Hayward warned.
He added that the increase of coronavirus cases is "largely driven by the new variant."
"We've had, you know, control measures that were previously controlling the old variant that are not enough for this variant. And so if we want to control the new variant we're going to need much tighter restrictions."
Asked about the impact of schools reopening on the spread of the virus, Hayward said, "I think we're going to have to get schools back. Maybe a little bit later, but we're going to have to have increased strict restrictions in other areas of society to pay for that."
"We need to be more or less in a similar sort of message of stay at home unless you really, really have to, so there's that combined with incentivisation of testing, incentivisation of isolation – those sorts of things that will carry us through the next few months while we get as many people as possible vaccinated."