This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen
on .
It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
UK coronavirus live: health secretary Matt Hancock leads daily government briefing
UK coronavirus live: Matt Hancock launches track and tracing app test on Isle of Wight; death toll reaches 28,734
(32 minutes later)
No 10 says it was not a mistake to open Nightingale hospitals despite them being largely unused; England reports 204 new deaths, Northern Ireland six more, Wales 14 more and Scotland five more
UK death toll rises by 288 but full figures may be delayed by weekend reporting; daily testing again falls below 100,000 target; Nightingale hospital in London put ‘on standby’ after running out of patients
Q: The most successful contact tracing systems rely on people, as well as technology. Are you putting too much faith in an app?
Hancock says he accepts that the part played by people, the contact tracers and members of the public, is vital.
Prof John Newton from Public Health England agrees. He says “shoe leather epidemiology”, having people on the streets, is essential too.
He says he hopes the Isle of Wight pilot will provide useful lessons.
Q: Isn’t it hard to pilot this when people are social distancing?
Hancock does not accept that. There are still new cases, he says. So contact tracing can have an impact.
Q: How will businesses be able to get PPE if the NHS also needs those supplies?
Hancock says the government will make sure the NHS take priority.
He says this factor will be taken into account as the government considers the way forward.
Hancock says the government is making rapid progress in recruiting its 18,000 contact tracers.
The first ones will start work this week, as they deal with the Isle of Wight.
But there is no magic about 18,000, he says. If more are needed, the government will hire them.
Hancock reads out a question from Conrad from Ashford. He asks if the aim is to suppress the virus, or to keep it at manageable levels.
Hancock says the aim is to keep the numbers down. Test, track and trace becomes more effective these less transmission there is. The goal is not just to flatten the curve. It is to keep pushing it down. He says he wants to keep the reproduction number below 1.
Hancock is now taking questions from members of the public.
The first is from a man who asks what is being done to protect BAME workers in the NHS.
Hancock says a disproportionate number of NHS and care workers from a BAME background have died. He pays tribute to them. He says a programme has been put in place to help address this.
Van-Tam says the NHS is taking this “incredibly seriously”. A large programme of work has been put in place. He says the NHS will get to the bottom of this.
But it is complicated, he says. He says different age cohorts are a factor. And underlying health factors. And deprivation.
Prof Jonathan Van-Tam, the deputy chief medical officer for England, is going through the daily charts now.
Here are the daily testing figures.
Here are the figures for new cases. Van-Tam says new cases need to fall even lower.
Here is the final slide, showing the global death comparison.
Van-Tam stresses that these figures show numbers, not rates. They are not adjusted per head of population.
Here is the government dashboard with latest UK data for coronavirus cases and deaths.
Hancock confirms that the NHS contract tracing app will be trialed this week in the Isle of Wight.
He appeals to anyone living on the island to download the app. By doing so, they will be protecting themselves and the whole community, he says.
He says he is confident that people will help.
He says he wants to hear how people find it.
And he says this does not mean the end of social distancing.
Hancock says another 288 people have died with coronavirus in the UK, taking the total to 28,734.
He says that is the smallest daily rise since the end of March, although he acknowledges that after a weekend, the daily reported rise in deaths tends to be lower than later in the week.
Hancock says just over 85,000 coronavirus tests took place yesterday.
That’s a second day where the headline total has fallen below 100,000, the target for the end of April.
Matt Hancock, the health secretary, is leading for the government at this afternoon’s press conference. He has just started.
He says he will be focusing mostly on the government’s plans for test, track and trace.
Here is the start of a Twitter thread from the FT’s Chris Giles, who has been trying to model the total number of coronavirus-related deaths.
Here is the start of a Twitter thread from the FT’s Chris Giles, who has been trying to model the total number of coronavirus-related deaths.
Some rough sleepers may have to be put up in hostels or night shelters when lockdown measures begin to be eased, Housing minister Robert Jenrick said.
He said he does not want to “lose the opportunity that we have here and see those people drift back onto the streets when the lockdown starts to be eased in due course”.
But he said there is a limited capacity of “good quality move-on accommodation” for the more than 5,000 rough sleepers currently being put up in places such as hotels.
He said: “What we will do in the days and weeks ahead is assess what the capacity is in accommodation of that nature, how we can build more capacity at pace, what other accommodation is available on an interim basis, some of which will, I think unfortunately, be more basic, such as hostels and night shelters, simply because there isn’t sufficient of the type of accommodation we all want to be available, and then see how we can have a national strategy to try to move as many people as possible into that sort of accommodation and wrap care around them as well, because this is not simply a housing challenge, it’s one of mental health and addiction as well.”
The work and pensions secretary, Thérèse Coffey, has been updating MPs on her department’s work in tackling the economic impact of the Covid-19 crisis. She said the “hidden heroes” in her department had processed an extraordinary 1.8m new claims for universal credit (UC) since mid-March – as well as 250,000 claims for jobseekers’ allowance (JSA), and 20,000 for employment support allowance (ESA).
Job centres have been closed and turned into claim processing centres, Coffey said, and hundreds of civil servants have been redeployed from other departments. The number of new applications has now “stabilised”, at 20,000 to 25,000 a day.
Coffey’s shadow counterpart, Jonathan Reynolds, one of several opposition frontbenchers making their debut today, called for “legacy benefits” such as JSA and ESA to be increased for a year, to help claimants through the crisis, as UC has been.
Coffey said that was not possible, saying that the complexity of the computer systems used to administer those benefits means that it takes “quite some time” to make changes – by which she said she meant months.
Here are the latest figures on take-up of the government’s coronavirus job retention scheme, the initiative that allows employees to be “furloughed” on 80% of wages, up to £2,500 per month. They mean that an extra 6.3m workers have, on a temporary basis, effectively been added to the government’s payroll.
In an article for the Guardian, Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine, says that increasing the amount of coronavirus testing to more than 100,000 tests per day (on one measure, for some of the time) is not by itself enough. He explains:
The full article is here.
Matthew Gould, head of the NHS’s digital arm, has defended his agency’s choice of a “centralised” contact-tracing app as opposed to the type of decentralised system chosen by many other European countries.
Speaking over a videolink to MPs and peers on parliament’s joint committee on human rights, Gould, the head of NHSX, said:
A centralised system gives us the chance to get important data about the virus that will help us, he added. The type of system could be altered. “Just because we have started down one route doesn’t mean we are locked into it,” Gould said.
He acknowledged there could be difficulties on the island of Ireland where the government in Dublin has chosen a non-centralised system. “We are about interoperability,” Gould insisted. “The French are taking a similar approach [to the UK].
It should not be possible to identify individuals from the data sent to the centralised system, Gould noted. “We have said very clearly that data will only be used for public health purposes. It will not be used for law enforcement.”
Elizabeth Denham, the UK information commissioner, denied that her office was compromised by having been involved at an early stage with NHSX as it developed the system. She told peers and MPs that her office would still be able to carry out its independent oversight responsibilities.
Councils could restrict access to rubbish tips by only allowing cars with particular number plates to visit on a given day, the local government secretary has said.
Robert Jenrick said:
He said an “orderly reopening” of sites was possible in most areas and guidance was being updated to class a trip to the tip as a “necessary journey”.
.
Although the UK government has yet to produced details of its plan to relax the lockdown restriction (the term “exit strategy” has apparently been banned by No 10, and given that there may never be an exit in the sense of a return to the status quo ante, perhaps they’ve got a point), that has not stopped lots of other people and organisations having a go. The Scottish government and the Welsh government have published outline proposals, here (pdf) and here respectively. The former prime minister Tony Blair has released at least three papers on the topic (here, here and here). The Institute for Government, a thinktank, has produced its own blueprint. And now the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the public spending thinktank, has also offered its thoughts on the topic.
In a 23-page paper (pdf), it floats the idea of offering firms subsidiesto get employees to work from home. Here is an extract.
There is a summary of the IFS paper here.
A report from a multidisciplinary group convened by the Royal Society called Delve – Data Evaluation and Learning for Viral Epidemics – has weighed up the evidence and come out in favour of the public wearing facemasks, including homemade cloth coverings, in a bid to tackle covid-19. It says:
However the report stresses clear instructions should be given to the public, including that the wearing of masks is to protect others, rather than the wearer themselves, as well as information on reuse, and the importance of other measures such as washing hands.While there has been some concern that masks may cause some to become complacent, the authors say there is no evidence for this. “While there is anecdotal evidence of individual risk compensation behaviour, at a population level the introduction of safety measures like HIV prevention measures, seatbelts and helmets have led to increased safety and even increased safety oriented behaviour,” they write. “There is no evidence for individual risk compensation amongst the public during epidemics.”However, the team say more research is needed, including into the routes of transmission of Covid-19, when a mask may be most necessary and the extent of transmission from those who are infected but asymptomatic.
Thanks to everyone who has been emailing over news tips to me. Please do continue to share your thoughts and insights.
