Coronavirus won't be circulating in UK by August, says outgoing vaccine chief Clive Dix

Coronavirus won’t be circulating in the UK by August, according to the outgoing chief of the country’s vaccine rollout scheme, Dr Clive Dix.

Dix led the programme from December until he stepped down last week and told the Daily Telegraph that the UK’s vaccination campaign should be enough to protect from the virus and its known variants by the summer.

He told the newspaper that the country is on track to meet its target of giving at least one shot of coronavirus vaccine to all adults by the end of July.

Dix said the UK will have “probably protected the population from all the variants that are known and we’ll be safe over the coming winter”.

At some point in August there will be no circulating virus in the UK, according to Dix, whose predictions are decidedly more optimistic than the government’s other scientific advisers and experts.

According to the Observer, professor Martin Hibberd, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said that proposals to allow limited international travel without need for quarantine from later this month could lead to more variants entering the country.

He said more testing was necessary before international travel should be allowed to reopen.

According to Hibberd, “imports are more likely to become an increasingly important part of new transmissions circulating within the UK.

“We should develop an effective strategy to cope with the competing desires to allow international travel, while keeping circulating virus in the UK to a minimum,” he added.

Hibberd called for professionally taken swabs and more support for quarantining at home when is its possible.

This should be tracked for compliance and backed with an effective tracing programme.

Other experts are even more cautious with Gurch Randhawa, professor of diversity in public health at the University of Bedfordshire saying that people should only take holidays in the UK at present.