Leicestershire's health chief has said a new Covid-19 variant is 'bound to crop' up – but we might not be able to react immediately to it when it does.

Mike Sandys, director of public health at Leicestershire County Council, has warned that, while the threat of new variants is nothing new, recent changes put in place by the Government will make them harder to spot.

The Government ended free testing in England at the start of the month, including PCR tests for people with symptoms.

But Mr Sandys says this free testing should have stayed in place.

PCR tests allowed the Government to determine which variant of the virus someone was infected with. This would also find if it was an unknown mutation.

Mr Sandys said: "I would have wanted to have seen [free] testing remain. Although I think vaccination is great, I do think there needs to be something there alongside it.

"Variants will crop up, they're bound to.

"But that always has been an ever-present threat and it has been for two years.

"The thing that worries me is that we're not going to know if there's a new variant.

"If there's one thing worse than knowing what's going on, it's not knowing what's going on."

Mr Sandys also warned that there was no guarantee that each variant will be less severe than the one before it, as Omicron has been compared to Delta.

He echoed assessments that this will depend on the 'family tree' of the new variant. "You can't necessarily say that Alpha begot Beta, which begot Delta, which begot Omicron," he said. "The next one could be a son of Delta and could be stronger than Omicron. "And there is always a risk with variants, as well as being more transmissible, potentially being more severe than the one before it, that it does evade to some extent evade the vaccine. "I wouldn't want to get too hung up on the idea that we're going to get visited by some super-virus that defeats everything completely, but the more we do mix and go on there is a risk of a new variant out there." The Government's Living with Covid plan was announced in February. As well as ending free testing, it also removed the legal requirement to isolate if you have symptoms or test positive and venues like theatres no longer need to check the Covid statuses of attendees. The Government said in a press release at the time: "Thanks to our hugely successful vaccination programme, the immunity built up in the population and our new antiviral and therapeutics tools, the UK is in the strongest possible position to learn how to live with Covid and end government regulation. The Test & Trace programme cost £15.7 billion in 2021/22. "With Omicron now the dominant variant and less severe, levels of high immunity across the country and a range of strategies in place including vaccines, treatments, and public health knowledge, the value for taxpayers' money is now less clear. Free testing should rightly be focused on at-risk groups." Some at-risk groups and NHS and social care staff still have access to free tests. You can find out if you are eligible for a free test on the NHS website.