Top Scientist warns Britain could suffer the most deaths in Europe unless a vaccine is available soon

ONE of the UK’s top Scientific advisers has warned that Britain could end up with the most deaths from coronavirus of any European country.

Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, said increasing testing would ‘buy you time’ to allow the health service to deal with the crisis, and there were ‘lessons to be learned from that.’

It comes amid a furious row over the number of tests carried out in the UK, with the government insisting it can get to 100,000 per day by the end of April.

‘Different countries are at different stages of this cycle,’ Alok Sharma said.

‘We are at different trajectories. What we have done with the advice that we have now set out to people, to stay at home, is precisely because we want to make sure that we have a flattening of the curve, that infection rates aren’t going up, and ultimately people’s lives are being saved.

‘We are starting to see these measures work but they will stay in place until we have advice from Sage (the Government’s scientific advisers) in terms of the evidence that is out there.’

Sir Jeremy, an infectious disease expert, also said that it was ‘probably inevitable’ there would be more waves of Covid-19 around the world unless a successful vaccine becomes widely available.