Sajid Javid compared Covid to the flu during an interview with Sky News as he tried to explain why the government is going to remove free testing from April.
The health secretary was responding to No.10′s controversial new ‘Living with Covid’ strategy, which means the legal obligation for positive cases to self-isolate will be dropped from Thursday.
Covid sick pay will be revoked from March 24 and free public access to Covid testing kits will also be removed from April 1.
Speaking to Javid on Tuesday, Sky News’ Kay Burley asked: “People won’t know if they’ve got Covid or not, will they, from April 1?”
Javid replied: “They won’t. Without a test of course you won’t know.”
“So you could go to work with Covid?”
The health secretary explained: “You could go to work with flu. The reason I say that, one of the things the prime minister said was we’ve got to learn to live with Covid, just as we’ve learnt to live with other respiratory diseases.
“If someone thinks they might have flu, they don’t need to take a test. They recognise the symptoms, ideally you stay away from work, you don’t want to infect your colleagues and friends and that is how we live with viruses.
“Now with Covid, obviously we couldn’t have done anything like that at the start of Covid or throughout most the pandemic, but we didn’t have the tools we have today.
“The situation today is very different.”
However, comparing the flu to Covid is an unusual move especially as many positive cases could still be asymptomatic.
For other people, the symptoms of Covid do not necessarily differ from that of a cold – meaning, unless they test themselves, they might continue on with their regular lives rather than isolating, transmitting even further.
With each new variant, the symptoms seem to be slightly different, as seen in the Omicron, Delta and Alpha strains.
Covid can also be much more deadly than the flu, as seen over the last two years.
Removing the legal obligation to isolate at the same time means some workers may find it difficult to turn down employment if they suspect they have a mild case of Covid.
Even so, the health secretary told Burley that it was right to withdraw free tests and lift the self-isolation rules.
He said: “I think it’s worth remembering that the restrictions we had introduced had an important purpose but they were never intended to become a way of life.
“They also came at a huge cost of our freedoms, education, mental health and other significant costs.
“Being able to remove them in the way we did yesterday was a significant step forward but of course we do need to remain vigilant.
“That means we keep hold of our primary defences, especially vaccines – if we look at the last few months, I think the one thing which made the biggest difference of all was the vaccine programme.”
Despite removing some of the UK’s essential weapons against Covid on Monday, Javid concluded: “We may be done with Covid but it’s certainly not done with us. We have to remain cautious and vigilant.”