The UK could be facing another eight to ten waves of coronavirus before herd immunity is achieved, an expert has warned. (Picture: Getty)

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The UK is potentially facing another eight to ten waves of coronavirus before ‘herd immunity’ is achieved, an expert has warned.

Professor Anthony Costello, of University College London’s Institute for Global Health, drew on research from a Dutch study, which suggested that just 3% of Dutch people had developed immunity by the country’s virus peak at the end of the first week of April.

Referring to the study in a video interview with Citizens TV’s COVID REPORT, he said: “This is not one epidemic, this is a cycle of epidemics that are going to hit us, which start in particular areas, particularly cities.”

He said the researchers had come up with what they call the “effective susceptible population”, explaining: “The staggering figure they come up with is at the end of this cycle, whatever the mortality rate is, only 6.4% of the population will have actually been covered by the infection.

“So if you go back to what Sir Patrick Vallance said, which was you need to get 60% if the population to have the infection in order to have herd immunity, it implies that you would have to go through another eight to ten cycles of this kind of infection.”

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Prof Costello repeated his warning in evidence to the Commons Health and Social Care Committee on Friday, in which he warned that Britain will face “further waves” of coronavirus and will probably have the highest death rate in Europe because the Government was “too slow” to act.

The former British director at the World Health Organization said the “harsh reality” is that “we were too slow with a number of things”.

“If we’re going to suppress the chain of transmission of this virus in the next stage we all hope that the national lockdown and social distancing will bring about a large suppression of the epidemic so far – but we’re going to face further waves,” he said.

“And so we need to make sure that we have a system in place that cannot just do a certain number of tests in the laboratory, but has a system at district and community level.”

He said we “should not have any blame at this stage” but that “we can make sure in the second wave we’re not too slow”.

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