Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England Jenny Harries said it will be around half a year until everything goes back to the way it was before the crisis (Picture: Pippa Fowles/10 Downing Street)

It could be at least six months until the country goes back to operating as normal following the coronavirus pandemic, the deputy chief medical officer for England has said.

Doctor Jenny Harries told a Downing Street press conference on Sunday evening that the initial three-week lockdown and the time period other restrictions will remain in place, will be a ‘moving target’. She said lockdown measures will be reviewed every two to three weeks, to assess how well the spread of the virus is responding.

Dr Harries said the nation will not be in ‘complete lockdown’ for half a year but social distancing measures will be lifted gradually.



She said: ‘We actually anticipate our numbers will get worse over the next week, possibly two, and then we are looking to see whether we have managed to push that curve down and we start to see a decline.’


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Shoppers walk down Market Street in Manchester as stores remain closed (Picture: PA)

An empty stretch of the M5 motorway in Strensham, Worcestershire as the UK continues in lockdown (Picture: PA)

King’s Cross St. Prancras Northern Line station remains empty amid the lockdown (Picture: AP)

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She added: ‘This is not to say we would be in complete lockdown for six months, but as a nation we have to be really, really responsible and keep doing what we’re all doing until we’re sure we can gradually start lifting various interventions which are likely to be spaced – based on the science and our data – until we gradually come back to a normal way of living.’

Her warning at the press conference came as the Government placed all parts of the UK on an ’emergency footing’ in an ‘unprecedented step in peace time’ by establishing strategic co-ordination centre across the country.

Members of the armed forces, along with the police, the NHS, the fire and ambulance services and local authorities have been embedded in these groups to help plan the ‘local response’ to the virus.

Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick also said ‘we simply cannot’ ask health workers to go on to the frontline without adequate protective equipment, and announced 170,000,000 masks and protective equipment is being delivered to NHS workers across the UK.

Dr Harries added that people had taken ‘quite some time to get used to this new way of living’, but there was evidence the country was getting better at social distancing and we must ‘stick to that’.

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Police officers patrol a deserted Corporation Street in Birmingham city centre (Picture: Getty)

Robert Jenrick told the press conference emergency footing has been implemented across the UK (Picture: Pippa Fowles/10 Downing Street)

She said the nation must ‘keep that lid on’ and hopefully social distancing measures will eventually be adjusted to gradually get the nation back to their way of living before the pandemic broke out.

She said: ‘As a population we have evidence we are getting better at that as we go through. People are staying home more as they should, they are using transport less, they are only going to work when it’s essential.

‘Those measures have now been in place solidly for a week or two, we need a couple of weeks to see that through. The issue of the three weeks is for us to review where we are and to see if we’ve had an impact, jointly, on the slope of that curve.



‘To make it clear to the public, if we are successful we would have squashed the top of that curve, which is brilliant, but we must not then suddenly revert to our normal way of living – that would be quite dangerous.

‘If we stop then, all of our efforts would be wasted and we could potentially see a second peak. So over time, probably over the next six months, we will have a three-week review, we will see where we’re going’.

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The government is setting up local response centres to deal with the pandemic (Picture: AFP)

The comments came as a total of 19,522 people in the UK tested positive for coronavirus, while 108,215 have tested negative.

The death toll jumped to 1,228 after another 209 died. Today’s leap in deaths is the latest worrying daily increase, which follows a sharp rise of 260 deaths on Saturday – the biggest day-on-day increase since the outbreak began.

One of those included a 55-year-old consultant who died after contracting the virus – the first frontline worker to lose their life amid the pandemic.

Consultant Amged El-Hawrani passed away at Leicester Royal Infirmary, University Hospitals of Derby and Burton (UHDB) confirmed today.

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