A leading scientist has warned Britain will have to continue living with a "substantial" death rate as the fight against coronavirus continues.
Professor Andrew Hayward, a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), said society will, however, "get back to normal" in time and the country has already seen the worst.
He added that when the country was thrust into lockdown last year there was "conflicting advice" and experts continually failed to learn lessons as the pandemic progressed.
"I think, you know, given the societal trade-offs, we are going to have to live with a degree of mortality that will be substantial," he told Times Radio.
"I think it will get less over time as more people get vaccinated, and as more people get immune, and I do believe that we've been through the worst of this."
Prof Hayward said he does not think new variants of Covid-19 will completely evade vaccine-related immunity.
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"The vaccines will still take the sting out of it, if you like, and reduce the case fatality rates," he said.
"Of course, we have the technology to update the vaccines and I think that's where we're going really, a situation that will be much more like flu, the numbers of deaths will be much more like flu, the approach to surveillance of new strains and development of new vaccines and regular annual vaccinations will be like that.
"And we will get back to normal."
Asked if he thought epidemiologists did not really have the ear of Government in early March last year, Prof Hayward said: "The concept, you know, the political concept of going into lockdown and doing something like that seemed so extraordinary...
"Also, I think there was conflicting advice...there was some advice if you go too early then people will get tired of it, but it did seem to be fairly inevitable that we would need to do something like that at some stage.
"I think the timing of it was something that they were getting conflicting advice on.
"However, I think we didn't learn our lesson from that and we didn't really learn the lesson that lockdowns are going to be way, way more effective if you start them earlier."
Prof Hayward said it is much easier to put out a very small fire than it is to put out a really big forest fire.
"When it came to the following autumn, we didn't learn that lesson," he said.