Professor Tim Spector told 5 Live the red list was not the way to tackle the rise of the Omicron variant.
Spector, an epidemiologist and genetics expert, said: “I think within a week it will be a waste of time.
“Once we get sufficient number of cases here and transmission in the community, we would be better off looking at doing more in this country to prevent super spreader events etc, rather than trying to put the blame on other countries, which is what we tended to do in the summer, even when we had more cases here than in most of the countries that we had travel bans on.
“I think it’s often used as a political tool. It was useful for a couple of weeks, it might have brought us a little bit of time if it was done efficiently, although many thought it wasn’t, but now the point of it is being lost.”
He said travel could still take place.
“I think any bans could just move down a notch in a week’s time. Just test people when they leave, test people when they come back, but the idea of banning whole areas of the world, effectively, I don’t think is going to be useful.
“I think we should start relaxing them soon, because our numbers here would be so significant.”
He predicted the Omicron variant would overtake Delta in January, but said its symptoms were less debilitating.
“Most of us who are vaccinated are going to have less severe disease. You will get a few days of being unwell but you’re unlikely to got to hospital. The five million people who haven’t been vaccinated are the ones still likely to go to hospital.
“It could be acting just like a cold and you won’t be able to tell really the difference. We know that one in three people who have cold-like symptoms currently would test positive for Covid because both colds are common at the moment and Covid is common at the moment.”
Spector is principal investigator of the Zoe Covid study app, which with four million users is the world’s largest probe into the virus.
“Sajid Javid said there are around 300 official cases, but we know that number is a lot more than that based on our app.”
Spector agreed the number was “more like in the thousands”.
