The UK is unlikely to achieve herd immunity through a Covid-19 vaccination programme before the summer, a scientist advising the Government has said.

Calum Semple, professor of outbreak medicine at the University of Liverpool and a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), described the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine as a “game changer” if it is approved by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in the coming days.

But he warned: “To get the wider community herd immunity from vaccination rather than through natural infection will take probably 70 per cent to 80 per cent of the population to be vaccinated, and that, I’m afraid, is going to take us right into the summer I expect.”

It comes as hospitals in the South of England face a rise in pressure as the number of coronavirus patients receiving treatment heads towards the April peak.

Dr Katherine Henderson, the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, described her experience of working in a hospital on Christmas Day as one of “wall to wall Covid”.

She added: “We see patients who are coming in who have Covid symptoms and then we have other people coming in with other symptoms who turn out to be Covid positive.

“Between that, there’s a great deal of difficulty getting those patients through into the wards.

“The chances are that we will cope but we cope at a cost – the cost is not doing what we had hoped, which is being able to keep non-Covid activities going.

“So we will stretch staff, the problem is at the moment we have a lot of staff sickness.”

Professor Jackie Taylor, president of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, told the programme London and the South East are now experiencing what Scotland went through in the autumn.

“We are still seeing significant amounts of patients with Covid and large amounts of standard respiratory infections and other emergency that we see at this time of year that mount up to a standard winter pressure,” she said.

The Government said a further 316 people had died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 as of Sunday, bringing the UK total to 70,752, with a further 30,501 lab-confirmed cases of coronavirus.

But the figures for deaths and cases are likely to be higher as Scotland is not releasing death data between December 24 and 28, and Northern Ireland is not providing either case or death data over the same period.

According to the Government’s Covid dashboard, there were 21,286 people in hospital with coronavirus across the UK on December 22, which is the last day for which data is available.

This is slightly less than the 21,683 patients recorded on April 12.