LONDON, Nov. 22 (Xinhua) -- As British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is expected to announce up to a week of relaxed COVID-19 restrictions during Christmas season, a leading British statistician warned Sunday that "there will be a price to pay for relaxing rules at Christmas".
If restrictions are changed to allow greater mixing at Christmas then infections will inevitably go up, David Spiegelhalter from the University of Cambridge, told Times Radio.
"There will be a price to pay for it, obviously, you relax restrictions and infection rates go up, you constrain and infection rates will come down as they are going down at the moment," he was quoted as saying.
"So, if you get a burst of extra cases it takes more time to get things back to where they were before," Spiegelhalter saif.
Meanwhile, Susan Hopkins, deputy director of the National Infections Service at Public Health England, suggested earlier that for every day of relaxed restrictions five days of extra lockdown may be needed to compensate.
Earlier Saturday, the British government's former chief scientific adviser, Mark Walport, said that even though there was "something iconic in people's minds" about the festivities during the Christmas season, it "doesn't make sense to have big parties" amid the current coronavirus pandemic.
Walport, who sits at the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), said that people should continue to follow the rules.
England is currently under a month-long national lockdown until Dec. 2, the second of its kind since the coronavirus outbreak in Britain, in a bid to quell the resurgence of coronavirus.
To bring life back to normal, countries such as Britain, China, Germany, Russia and the United States are racing against time to develop coronavirus vaccines. Enditem
