Health secretary suggests that variant could be linked with the rapid spread of the virus in south-east England, although it was highly unlikely a vaccine would not work against it
The arrival of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine marks the ‘beginning of the end’ of the pandemic, the health secretary said, as hospitals across the country prepare to begin vaccinating the public on 8 December.
About 800,000 doses are expected to be available within the first week, with care home residents and carers, the over-80s and some health workers first to receive the shots
Continue reading...Latest updates: PM holds press conference after earlier warning people not to ‘get hopes up too soon’ about early vaccination
Stevens is talking about the vaccination guidelines. (See 11.23am.)
The roll-out will be phased, he says.
Johnson urges people in tier 3 areas to take part in community testing.
And people should follow the restrictions, he says.
Continue reading...Analysis: the two regions have emerged with contrasting fortunes from their dealings with Westminster
As Matt Hancock put the final touches to England’s new lockdown regime on Wednesday night, the mood of leaders in Manchester and Liverpool could not have been more different.
On Merseyside the leaders felt they had done all they could to have become the first English region to leave the strictest coronavirus measures introduced six weeks ago. The Liverpool city region has now been moved down to tier 2.
Continue reading...Signs of growing parliamentary rebellion amid fears measures could stay in place until spring
The majority of England will enter the two toughest tiers of Covid restrictions from next week, ministers are set to announce, amid signs of a growing parliamentary rebellion and fears that the measures could remain unchanged until spring.
On Thursday Matt Hancock, the health secretary, is expected to say that most of the country will be placed into tiers 2 or 3, which imply significant restrictions on hospitality, after the national lockdown ends on 2 December.
Continue reading...Latest updates: health secretary says tests for relatives should make visits safe; Boris Johnson self-isolating after contact with Covid-19 case
The four other Conservative MPs present at the meeting last week with Boris Johnson and Lee Anderson, the Tory who has subsequently tested positive, are also self-isolating.
According to the BBC, they are: Katherine Fletcher, Andy Carter, Lia Nici and Brendan Clarke-Smith.
I have been contacted by NHS Test and Trace following a work meeting last week with Lee Anderson MP and the Prime Minister.
As a result I will be self-isolating in line with the rules.
I currently have no symptoms and will be working from home
Yes, I had a call from test and trace yesterday following a work meeting at 10 Downing Street last Thursday. In line with the rules I am self isolating. https://t.co/IZLWwqBytO
In the words of Patrick Swayze... “Ditto” https://t.co/kxR3vEI6Vj
Residents in a dozen Scottish council areas, including Glasgow, Stirling and Inverclyde, face a two-week lockdown from later this week after the failure of Scottish government efforts to suppress Covid-19 across the country.
Business leaders were warned on Friday the 12 highly-populated areas were likely to be put at the highest level, tier 4 of the Scottish government’s Covid restrictions, from 6am on Friday morning.
Glasgow has 90 out of the top 100 Covid infection hot spots. So in schools in those catchment areas, we think you have to look seriously at closing them as part of the community mitigation to drive down infection levels.
Our default position is we should be looking at remote learning at level 4, but given the Scottish parliament has voted against that, we want at the very least to look at individual schools to see what action should be taken.
Continue reading...UK government is pinning hopes on mass testing but public health directors find flaws in thinking
Operation Moonshot, the government’s mass testing mission to screen millions of asymptomatic people every week, is having a bumpy lift-off.
The project only emerged because of a leak last month and such was the stated ambition – £100bn to deliver 10m tests a day – that MPs laughed when Matt Hancock talked about it in parliament.
Continue reading...Barrow-in-Furness, York, north-east Derbyshire, Erewash and Chesterfield move into tier 2 alongside London, Essex and Elmbridge; no decision yet on moving Greater Manchester and Lancashire into tier 3
In his response to Matt Hancock, Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, asked why some contractors were being paid more than £6,000 a day to work on the much-criticised NHS Test and Trace. He said:
Today, new figures show just 62% of contacts reached, that’s the equivalent to 81,000 people not reached circulating in society - even though they’ve been exposed to the virus. This is another record low.
And yesterday we learnt that consultants working on test and trace are being paid over £6,000 a day to run this failing service. In a single week this government is paying these senior consultants more than they pay an experienced nurse in a year.
In the Commons the Manchester MP Lucy Powell said there were was “unanimous fury” from local MPs earlier when they were being briefed on the situation by one of Matt Hancock’s ministerial colleagues.
Continue reading...Matt Hancock says no lockdowns need to be changed because of 16,000 unreported cases
Ministers have been accused of “putting lives at risk” through data failures which led to nearly 16,000 coronavirus cases going unreported in England, but Matt Hancock insisted the problem had been addressed.
Updating the Commons after it emerged that data transfer errors between laboratories and Public Health England (PHE) meant 15,841 positive results were left off daily figures between 25 September and 2 October, the health secretary said just over half those missed were now having their contacts traced.
Continue reading...Government recommends no social mixing between people from different households in these areas; NHS Test and Trace going backwards
Council leaders and MPs from Merseyside have issued a joint statement describing today’s new restrictions as “a step in the right direction”.
But they are also saying the government should publish the scientific evidence showing why the government thinks these measures will be enough.
The measures announced today are a step toward restricting the spread but we need to understand if they are enough to arrest the rise cases across our region.
We're asking for Government to share their scientific evidence and provide us with more substantial financial support. pic.twitter.com/8gV1uJs87n
Graham Morgan, the leader of Knowsley council, says the new restrictions announced for Merseyside this morning may not be enough.
I'm still concerned that these new COVID-19 restrictions won't be enough to stop the spread of the virus here. We're at a critical point & need swift, effective solutions to protect our residents. Our conversations with Government will continue. https://t.co/Z5DZ8azYDl
Continue reading...People refusing to self-isolate will face penalties starting at £1,000, and police will act on tip-offs from neighbours
A new, more robust chapter in English coronavirus regulations begins on Monday, with fines of up to £10,000 for people who refuse to self-isolate when asked, and enforcement including tip-offs from people who believe that others are breaching the rules.
The changes come with the duty to self-isolate moving into law. It becomes a legal obligation if someone is told to do so by test-and-trace staff, but not for those simply using the Covid-19 phone app, which is anonymous.
Continue reading...New infections grow by up to 7% daily; UK cases surge; Welsh leader slams ‘vacancy at heart of UK’; Scotland given ‘advance notice of hard decisions’
Coronavirus cases in England almost doubled in the space of a week, with infections becoming more widespread across all ages, leading one expert to say a second wave had begun.
Almost 60,000 people are thought to have had the virus from 4 to 10 September 2020 – one in every 900 people – with about 6,000 new cases per day, according to the ONS survey of randomly selected people in the community.
Related: England Covid cases almost doubled within a week, according to ONS
A further 4,322 people have tested positive for coronavirus in the UK, an increase of nearly 1,000 cases from the following day.
Overall, 385,936 people have tested positive for coronavirus since the pandemic began.
Continue reading...Nearly 2 million people in north-east England will be banned from mixing with other families, under the strictest measures imposed since the country eased out of nationwide lockdown. The restrictions include a 10pm curfew on nightlife.
The health secretary, Matt Hancock, announced the measures following a sharp rise in coronavirus cases in the north-east and amid growing concern about a UK-wide rise in cases. 'With winter on the horizon, we must prepare, bolster our defences and come together once again against this common foe,' he said.
The rules will apply to people in Newcastle, Northumberland, North Tyneside, South Tyneside, Gateshead, County Durham and Sunderland
Continue reading...News updates: Edward Argar says Boris Johnson does not want a new national lockdown; Matt Hancock due to announce restrictions in north-east of England
Care providers in England will receive more than £500m extra funding to help reduce transmission of Covid-19 during the winter, the government has announced. As PA Media reports, the infection control fund will help pay staff full wages when they are self-isolating and ensure carers work in only one care home, reducing the risk of spreading the infection. The fund was set up in May but has now been extended until March 2021 and will offer the sector an extra £546m ahead of an anticipated second wave of the virus over the winter months.
Continue reading...News updates: health secretary signals access to testing could be prioritised for those most in need; just 1% of deaths in England and Wales linked to Covid, ONS says
Almost nine in 10 pupils have attended schools in England since their full reopening this month, government figures show. Around 92% of state schools were fully open on Thursday September 10, and approximately 88% of students were back in class on the same day, the Department for Education analysis suggests.
There have been a further 110 cases of Covid-19 in Wales, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in the country to 19,681. Public Health Wales said no further deaths had been reported, with the total number of deaths since the beginning of the pandemic remaining at 1,597.
Continue reading...Queues for tests are growing, Tory MPs are agitated and doctors are sceptical about the ‘moonshot’
For Alex, an NHS call centre worker, the signs that coronavirus was back in earnest came when his phone wouldn’t stop ringing.
Over the summer, Alex would log on at home to see 70 or 80 people in the queue for advice on booking an appointment for a Covid test. “You’d get answered in a few minutes,” he said. “Last week, that went up to about 100. By this week it was 1,500.”
Continue reading...From the £100bn cost to the plan for getting football crowds back: what the official documents reveal
Operation Moonshot – the government’s bid to accelerate testing from around 200,000 a day to 10m a day by early 2021 – was met with derision by Labour MPs in the House of Commons on Thursday when the health and care secretary Matt Hancock set out the scale of the ambition. They were “naysayers”, Hancock responded. “They would do far better to support their constituents and get with the programme.”
Here are five key parts of that programme as revealed in the leaked official documents obtained by the British Medical Journal and the Guardian.
Continue reading...Rates growing fastest among those aged 10-29, and decreasing in the older age groups
The health secretary, Matt Hancock, implored young people to stick to the rules as Covid-19 infections in the UK rose to their highest levels since early May.
It is not known why case rates are higher among young people, but England-level data shows they are rising steeply.
Continue reading...Grant Shapps says Lesvos, Tinos, Serifos, Mykonos, Crete, Santorini and Zakynthos will be added on Wednesday
The Department for Transport press release about Grant Shapps’ announcement has now arrived. This is what it says about the inclusion of the seven Greek islands on the quarantine list for England.
The first changes under the new process were also made today, with seven Greek islands to be removed from exemption list – Lesvos, Tinos, Serifos, Mykonos, Crete, Santorini and Zakynthos. People arriving in England from those islands from Wednesday 9 September 04.00am will need to self-isolate for two weeks. Data from the Joint Biosecurity Centre and Public Health England has indicated a significant risk to UK public health from those islands, leading to Ministers removing them from the current list of travel corridors.
At the same time, the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) has updated its travel advice for Greece to advise against all but essential travel to Lesvos, Tinos, Serifos, Mykonos, Crete, Santorini and Zakynthos. The rest of Greece remains exempt from the FCDO’s advice against all non-essential international travel.
Shapps says he is not lifting quarantine for Spain’s Canary or Balearic islands.
He says there might have been a case for this when quarantine was imposed on Spain. But the number of cases in country has risen sharply, he says, and now it has 127 cases per 100,000. He say it is not safe to reduce quarantine for those islands.
Lesvos, Tinos, Serifos, Mykonos, Crete, Santorini and Zakynthos removed from air corridor exemption list.
Continue reading...Labour calls on Matt Hancock to explain reasons behind increase and testing centre problems
The UK has recorded a massive rise in the number of people testing positive for coronavirus, amid concerns the government has lost control of the epidemic just as people are returning to work and universities prepare to reopen.
Labour has demanded the health secretary, Matt Hancock, give an urgent statement to the House of Commons to explain the increase and why some people are still being told to drive hundreds of miles to have a test.
Continue reading...