The United Kingdom Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said that he believes new treatments and vaccines will turn COVID-19 into a disease "we can live with like we do flu".

Hancock, who was speaking on Saturday to the Daily Telegraph newspaper, said that new drugs should arrive in 2021 that will make coronavirus much more treatable.

He said vaccines would reduce the number of people admitted to hospital, bring down the number of deaths and cut transmission of the virus.

"I hope that COVID-19 will become a treatable disease by the end of the year," he said.

"If COVID-19 ends up being like flu, so we live our normal lives and we mitigate through vaccines and treatments, then we can get on with everything again," he said.

Hancock's remarks will spark speculation that the British government is not pursuing an elimination strategy aimed at ruling out COVID-19 in Britain, according to the Evening Standard newspaper.

Over 14 million people in Britain have now been vaccinated and on Friday the coronavirus reproduction rate, also known as the R number, dropped below one for the first time since July.

According to official data, the R number is now between 0.7 and 0.9 in every region of the UK.

England is currently under the third national lockdown since the outbreak of the pandemic in the country. Similar restriction measures are also in place in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

To bring life back to normal, countries such as Britain, China, Germany, Russia and the United States have been racing against time to roll out coronavirus vaccines.