Easing lockdown has to be done “very cautiously”, warns UK expert

London, Feb 1 : Lifting coronavirus lockdown measures would have to be done “very slowly, very cautiously” to avoid a resurge in infections, a British medical expert warned.
Susan Hopkins, chief of Covid strategy at Public Health England, said lessons have to be learned from the past, Xinhua news agency reported on Sunday.
“We have learned, as we did on the first occasion, we have to relax things really quite slowly, so that if cases start to increase we can clamp down quite fast,” she told the BBC.
Hopkins noted that the British National Health Service (NHS) would remain under huge pressure at least until the end of March, as normal during winter, but even more so with the number of inpatients they still have with Covid-19.
“Any releases that we have will have to happen very slowly, very cautiously, watching and waiting as we go, with a two-week period to watch and see the impact of that relaxation because it takes that to see what’s happening in the population,” she said.
Another 23,275 people in Britain have tested positive for Covid-19, bringing the total number of coronavirus cases in the country to 3,796,088, according to official figures released Saturday.