AN infectious disease expert has described England's "freedom day" as "somewhat naive" and indicated that the country should follow Scotland in keeping some prevention measures.

All legal Covid restrictions in England are set to be eased on Monday (July 19) when all of Scotland will move to Level 0 of the country's coronavirus restrictions.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has said that keeping certain prevention measures in place are "important" while Scots continue to get vaccinated.

She tweeted: "As talk of ‘freedom day’ dominates, remember that it applies to England only. We’re all desperate to be ‘free’ of Covid but we can’t simply wish it away. Even though cases falling in just now, virus is still a threat. Keeping certain measures while we vaccinate is important."

It comes as there are fears that lockdown restrictions may need to be reimposed if Covid cases continue to rise over the summer and into autumn.

READ MORE: UK's initial Covid response 'did not click in fast enough', says leading scientist

Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Edinburgh University, advises both the UK and Scottish governments.

He spoke to Times Radio about why England should keep some infection prevention measures in place after July 19.

He said: “What I have been concerned about for many months is that if the unlocking really is a big release… then there’s potential for a very large wave indeed.

“I was always concerned, and I’ve said so many times, that this idea that it would be a final ‘freedom day’ was, I have to say, somewhat naive.

“The public health expectation was that we would need additional measures to keep the rate of increase of cases under control.”

Prof Woolhouse added that the insistence by the UK Government that unlocking would be irreversible “painted [them] into both a political and public health corner” should circumstances change.

“This is an unprecedented situation, it’s a new pandemic and flexibility is extremely important in the public health response,” he said.

READ MORE: Daily reported cases of Covid in UK top 50k for first time since January

Prof Woolhouse also said that all countries will experience an "exit wave" of Covid cases when countries unlock from restrictions fully but said that describing the July 19 relaxation as a “dangerous, unethical experiment” was “very inaccurate”.

He said: "The concern at the moment is that the trajectory of hospitalisations and deaths in the UK is upwards, fairly slowly … and we want to see what that trend does.

“It’s widely accepted the number of cases would increase, we’ve known this would happen when we unlocked for many months now, we’d expect it ... so ‘dangerous, unethical experiment’ seems to be a very inaccurate description of what’s going on.

“This is unprecedented, it’s not an experiment but it’s an unprecedented situation because we’ve got a new pandemic here and the UK is in a particularly interesting position because we have such a successful vaccine programme.”

The National:

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Former UK health secretary Jeremy Hunt (above) has warned that lockdown restrictions may need to be reimposed if coronavirus cases continue to rise as the situation is "very serious".

The chair of the Commons Health and Social Care Committee told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the "warning light on the NHS dashboard is not flashing amber, it is flashing red" and that the UK could be heading for 10,000 Covid hospital patients by the end of August - about 20 times higher than this time last year.

He added: “I think coming into September we are almost certainly going to see infections reach a new daily peak going above the 68,000 daily level, which was the previous daily record in January.

“If they are still going up as the schools are coming back I think we are going to have to reconsider some very difficult decisions. How we behave over the next few weeks will have a material difference.”