TORY Health Secretary Sajid Javid refused to rule out imposing new Covid-19 restrictions before Christmas today after experts warned that current measures could still lead to hundreds of thousands of new Covid-19 cases being reported every day. 

The Sage modelling, published on Saturday, also showed that if ministers stuck to the current “plan B” measures, there could be a peak of 3,000 daily hospital admissions in England.

The sobering analysis warned that the number of people being admitted to hospital with omicron in the UK is “probably around one tenth of the true number” due to a lag in reporting.

The UK Health Security Agency confirmed yesterday that hospital admissions of patients with confirmed or suspected omicron had increased to 104, and that an additional 12,133 confirmed cases of the variant had been reported across the UK.

Responding to Sage’s analysis during an appearance on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, Mr Javid said that officials had to “take into account a broader set of facts” but refused to rule out the implementation of new measures before Christmas.

“There are no guarantees in this pandemic, I don’t think,” he said. “At this point we just have to keep everything under review.”

Experts warned the government that further restrictions, even including a lockdown, may be needed to curb the explosion of omicron cases across Britain. 

The operational sub-group of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, which reports to Sage, said that in almost all modelling, “a significant reduction in transmission (similar in scale to the national lockdown implemented in January 2021 and the ‘pingdemic’ of July 2021) is required to keep hospitalisations below the height of previous peaks.”

The advice from 10 days ago, released by Sage at the weekend, adds: “Earlier intervention also reduces the wave of hospitalisations.”

Minutes from a Sage meeting on Thursday said that stricter measures could be required, including “reducing group sizes, increasing physical distancing, reducing duration of contacts and closing high-risk premises.”

The experts warned that even if transmission rates were reduced, hospital admission levels in England were likely to be between 1,000 and 2,000 per day by the end of the year.

The recent booster drive would not help, they said, as many of those admissions would be those who are infected with the virus now.

They warned that delaying introducing stricter measures until next year would “greatly reduce the effectiveness of such interventions and make it is less likely that these would prevent considerable pressure on health and care settings.”

The experts’ warning comes after reports that officials had drawn up plans for a two-week circuit-breaker lockdown after Christmas.

Professor Sir Mark Walport, a member of Sage, acknowledged that this is the second Christmas that could be “significantly ruined” for people, but that he believed new measures were needed as infections were “rising fast.”

He told Sky News that action needs to be taken “to hold down the rate of hospital admissions [and] reduce the pressure on the workforce,” noting many people are off sick due to infection.

He said that it would, “most importantly of all, give people the chance to get vaccinated, to get boosted, and allow time for those vaccinations to have effect.”

The TUC has called on ministers to step in with further financial support to protect workers, warning that jobs and companies “will go to the wall” without an urgent plan to protect livelihoods in the face of the outbreak.