Iain Duncan Smith takes on the scientists and people aren’t impressed

The effect that lockdowns have on people’s lives is as bad as going to hospital, Sir Iain Duncan Smith has warned amid the rise of the Omicron variant of Covid-19 and uncertainty over whether or not new restrictions will be brought in.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We need to understand the effect of lockdown is dramatic across so many areas of people’s lives, which equates to the same as people going into hospital.”

He said the government to make a decision about further restrictions only when there is a “wider range of information on the effect of lockdown”.

Duncan Smith added: “We do not want to end up where we were last Christmas and we do have a significantly vaccinated population and that has a huge effect on hospitalisation, so we are under different circumstances than we were last January.”

However, Prof Christina Pagel, the director of UCL’s clinical operational research unit, said: “Waiting for definitive evidence that it could cause the NHS to be overwhelmed will be too late to avert the crisis.

“Instead, the government should follow Sage [the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies] advice and return to step 2 of the roadmap immediately to prevent thousands of infections over the coming days and then monitor the situation hour by hour so that measures can be lifted as quickly as possible, hopefully even in time to enable limited household mixing over Christmas weekend.”