Health minister and former PM among those targeted after complaints over virus response
French police have searched the homes and offices of French officials including the former prime minister as part of an investigation into the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.
Current and former ministers have been targeted by at least 90 formal legal complaints from civic groups and members of the public over their response to the health emergency.
Continue reading...The health secretary told the Commons that several areas of England were being moved to the tier 2 level of coronavirus restrictions designed for high-risk areas. The new rules will come into force at one minute past midnight on Saturday, for an undetermined amount of time, in areas including London, Essex, York and north-east Derbyshire
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.
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No 10 also set to extend tier 3 lockdown measures to Greater Manchester as cases rise
London will be placed in high-risk, tier 2 coronavirus restrictions from Friday night as infection rates in the capital continue to increase, MPs and the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, have confirmed.
The decision came as Boris Johnson was expected to sign off on the harshest tier 3 coronavirus measures for millions more people in the north of England later on Thursday, with Downing Street putting last minute pressure on local leaders in Greater Manchester to accept the changes.
Continue reading...Scott Morrison, who is temporarily stuck in Queensland, expects overseas arrival numbers to rise within weeks
A national cabinet meeting due to discuss a plan to bring back thousands of additional Australians stranded overseas has been postponed, after the prime minister himself became stranded in Queensland with “technical problems” grounding his RAAF plane.
Scott Morrison, speaking in Cairns on Thursday, confirmed that more citizens stuck overseas due to Covid flight caps would soon be able to return home with increased repatriation flights and use of the Howard Springs quarantine facility near Darwin.
Continue reading...Review of reported neonatal cases finds most babies with virus contract it in hospital
Nearly a third of coronavirus infections in newborn babies are picked up in the womb or from the mother during labour, a review of reported cases has found.
While Covid-19 is rare in newborns, doctors have been keen to understand the potential risks that babies face should tests reveal they have the infection soon after birth.
Continue reading...Police say they lack resources to prevent people travelling from hotspots elsewhere in UK
The Welsh government has said it is confident the police will be able to enforce rules banning people from travelling to Wales from Covid-19 hotspots in other parts of the UK.
Welsh Police Federation officials expressed concern on Thursday that it would be difficult to stop people travelling to Wales because police did not have the resources and would find it difficult to identify where people were coming from.
Continue reading...Lasting symptoms may not be down to a single syndrome but several different ones
At the start of the pandemic we were told that Covid-19 was a respiratory illness from which most people would recover within two or three weeks, but it’s increasingly clear that there may be tens of thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands, who have been left experiencing symptoms months after becoming infected.
Now, the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) has released a report which suggests that “long Covid” may not be a single syndrome, but up to four different ones, which some patients might be experiencing simultaneously. Here’s what we now know:
Continue reading...Democratic vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris has continued to grill supreme court nominee Amy Coney Barrett on a range of issues, including climate change and racial discrimination in the US. Harris pressed Barrett on whether she believed coronavirus was infectious, smoking caused cancer and climate change was happening. Barrett avoided answering directly to a number of issues during the questioning, including one from Democratic senator Cory Booker on whether it was wrong to separate children from their parents to deter immigrants coming to the US
Continue reading...France will impose a nightly curfew on almost one-third of the country's 67 million people to tackle a resurgence in coronavirus cases, but a new national lockdown is not envisaged, Emmanuel Macron said on Wednesday. The French president announced the curfew, which will take effect from Saturday and run each night from 9pm to 6am the following morning, shortly after the government declared a new public health state of emergency.
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