Forcing pubs and restaurants to close earlier is no “silver bullet” in tackling the rising tide of Covid-19, the UK foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, has said, as a government science adviser warned the package of measures unveiled by the prime minister on Tuesday do not go “anywhere near far enough”. New restrictions coming into force in England from Thursday include hospitality businesses having to shut by 10pm, a renewed ban on indoor team sports and stricter rules on mask-wearing. Office staff will be urged to work from home where possible as part of the measures, which do not go as far as Scotland, where households mixing in homes has also been banned. Prof John Edmunds, a member of the Sage group of scientific advisers, described closing venues early as having a “trivial” impact on the epidemic and sounded caution by saying he did not believe that, overall, the measures had gone “anywhere near far enough”. Official figures released on Tuesday showed the number of coronavirus cases across the UK increased by 4,926. On Tuesday evening, Boris Johnson delivered a stark address to the nation, stressing the importance of complying with the new rules – which include the recently introduced “rule of six” – as he refused to rule out a second national lockdown. Asked what evidence the government has that the 10pm hospitality closing time would make a difference, Raab told BBC Breakfast on Wednesday: “Well, there’s no silver bullet and we’re trying to take the proportionate targeted measures which bank the progress we’ve made in tackling the virus and prevent this uptick from getting out of control. In terms of the 10pm limit on bars, restaurants and other hospitality, that’s one element, it’s not a silver bullet, as I said. “But we’ve got experience now from the lockdowns locally in the north-east, the north-west and the Midlands, we’re surveying the practice internationally so, for example in Belgium, when they had uptick in the virus, this was one of the measures that they took which helped them to get back control over the virus.” He said compliance with measures had been “pretty good” but had “frayed a little bit”, adding: “And that becomes a challenge with bars and restaurants the longer you go into the evening as people have had maybe one or two drinks.” Edmunds, who is dean of the faculty of epidemiology and population health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said he welcomed the fact the government had “done something”. However, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think working from home if you can is certainly a good idea. I think that the measures in terms of closing bars an hour early and restaurants at 10 – I mean, nobody goes to a restaurant after 10 anyway. I think that’s fairly trivial in terms of it’ll have a small impact on the epidemic. “Overall I don’t think that the measures have gone anywhere near far enough. In fact I don’t even think the measures in Scotland have gone far enough.” Edmunds said the original lockdown in March was “a combination of many, many, many different measures” – including shutting schools, universities and the majority of businesses – which reduced the reproduction number from about 2.7 to 0.7. “Each one of those individual measures, if you break it up, is going to have quite a small effect, actually, on the overall reproduction number, which is probably somewhere round about 2 at the moment,” he added. “And so in order to stop the epidemic from growing any further, we have to put a large range of measures in place.”