Britain will have to learn to live with Covid as an 'endemic' illness for many years, according to leaked documents obtained by the Mail on Sunday.
The virus is expected to remain widespread within the population, with 'seasonal surges' in the winter like flu and other respiratory diseases.
But thanks to vaccine booster jabs, Covid is forecast to enter what Government health experts are calling a 'steady state', with hospital admissions not expected to exceed recent levels of about 750 patients per day.
'Given the extent of transmission throughout the world, we now have to consider how society might concurrently suppress and live with the virus and reach an endemic state for years to come,' one document, outlining the autumn strategy for the NHS Test and Trace service, states.
The virus is expected to remain widespread within the population, with 'seasonal surges' in the winter like flu and other respiratory diseases
The documents describe in detail for the first time the four different planning scenarios that have underpinned Boris Johnson's response to the third wave of the virus. They include an optimistic scenario, named 'quick farewell', in which Covid cases would have peaked in July at 30,000 per day, and a 'reasonable worst case' scenario, named 'long goodbye', which forecast a summer peak of 85,000 cases per day.
The central planning assumption is known as 'leaving soon' and would have involved a peak in July of 65,000 cases a day, with 'modest levels' by October. In fact, all of the scenarios were wrong.
Daily UK cases in the third wave peaked in July at 54,674 but then remained high for three months, hitting 52,009
