The UK is likely to be among the European countries worst affected by coronavirus, one of the government’s senior scientific advisers has said.
The warning, from Sir Jeremy Farrar, comes as UK deaths from the virus are expected to pass 10,000 on Sunday.
In response, Business Secretary Alok Sharma said countries were on “different trajectories”.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been discharged from hospital after being treated for coronavirus.
On the advice of his medical team, Mr Johnson will not immediately return to work and will continue his recovery at his country residence, Chequers, a No 10 spokesman said.
He had three nights in intensive care before returning to a general ward on Thursday.
On Saturday, the UK recorded 917 new coronavirus deaths, taking the total number of hospital deaths to 9,875.
The figure does not include deaths outside of hospitals, such as in care homes or in the community.
Ministers are continuing to urge people to stay at home over the Easter weekend to curb the spread of the virus, despite warm and sunny weather across parts of the UK.
Wellcome Trust director Sir Jeremy Farrar told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show the UK was likely to be “one of the worst, if not the worst affected country in Europe”.
Currently Italy has the highest number of deaths of any European country – with more than 19,000 deaths – followed by Spain, France and the UK, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Germany has kept deaths below 3,000 so far.
Sir Jeremy, a member of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show the “remarkable” scale of testing in Germany had been key to keeping the number of hospital admissions for coronavirus lower than in the UK.
Sir Jeremy said testing allowed countries to isolate people with Covid-19, preventing them from transmitting the virus to others, as well as buying time for hospitals to prepare.
“Undoubtedly there are lessons to learn from that,” he added.
The UK government has said it wants to do 100,000 coronavirus tests a day by the end of April but has faced criticism for not increasing the number more quickly.
Sir Jeremy said a second or third wave of the virus “was probably inevitable” and treatment and a vaccine was “our only true exit strategy”.
He said a vaccine could be available by autumn but it would take longer to ramp up manufacturing to the scale required to vaccinate many millions of people.
“I would hope we would get [that] done in 12 months but that is in itself an unprecedented ambition,” he said.
Asked whether he agreed with Sir Jeremy’s analysis of the UK’s death rate, Business Secretary Alok Sharma said: “Different countries are at different stages of this cycle.”
“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,” he told the programme.
“We are starting to see these measures work,” he added, but said it was too early for them to be lifted yet.
Prof Keith Neal, emeritus professor in the epidemiology of infectious diseases at the University of Nottingham, said it was likely the UK would have one of the largest numbers of coronavirus deaths because it had the second largest population in western Europe after Germany.
“The important figure is the death rate per million and not the total number of deaths. On this count Belgium seems to be heading for a serious
Source: BBC