Covid cases could rise exponentially in UK, warns top medical advisor

London: Britain has turned a corner in the Coronavirus pandemic in a "bad sense", which means infections will rise at a dangerous pace unless tougher action is taken, the UK's top medical advisor said on Monday.

Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Chris Whitty joined the government's Chief Scientific Adviser, Patrick Vallance, at a Downing Street briefing to present a host of charts and data to warn that the rate at which Coronavirus is spreading across the country could see 50,000 new cases a day by mid-October without further restrictions.

Their warnings indicate that tighter lockdown measures on household interactions and hospitality businesses are imminent.

"We have, in a bad sense, literally turned a corner, although only relatively recently," said Whitty.

"If this continued, the number of deaths directly from COVID will continue to rise, potentially on an exponential curve, that means doubling and doubling and doubling again. And you can quickly move from really quite small numbers to really very large numbers because of that exponential process, he warned.

Both senior scientific experts, addressing their first briefing without being accompanied by either Prime Minister Boris Johnson or a senior Cabinet minister, were brought in to issue a stark warning that the UK was headed in the "wrong direction and lay the groundwork for further UK-wide curbs expected to be announced by the government later in the week. On Sunday, a further 3,899 daily cases took the overall Coronavirus cases to 394,257. A further 18 people died within 28 days of testing positive for COVID-19, bringing the UK death toll from the virus to 41,777.

Based on projections if the current trend of roughly doubling infections every seven days is left unchecked, Whitty and Vallance warned that the middle of November could see up to 200-plus deaths per day.

"The challenge therefore is to make sure the doubling time does not stay at seven days," said Vallance.

The government advisers also said that even though different parts of the UK were seeing cases rising at different rates, and even though some age groups are affected more than others, the evolving situation "is all of our problem".

"What we've seen in other countries, and are now clearly seeing here, is that they're not staying just in the younger age groups, and moving up the age bands and the mortality rates will be similar to slightly lower than they were previously but they will be similar to what we saw previously," said

Whitty.