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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Politics
Andrew Sparrow

Priti Patel insists 'rules are clear'; 1,243 more deaths recorded, second highest daily toll – as it happened

Home secretary Priti Patel at 10 Downing Street.
Home secretary Priti Patel at 10 Downing Street. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

Early evening summary

  • The UK has recorded 1,243 more Covid deaths - the second highest daily total on this measure. (See 5.12pm.) Priti Patel, the home secretary, announced the figure at a press conference where she twice dodged questions about why the current lockdown is less strict than last spring’s, even though the new variant of coronavirus poses a much greater risk because it is much more transmissible. Patel claimed the current rules were “tough enough”. But she also said that they were being kept under “constant review” and that conversations were going on within government about whether they might need to be tightened.
  • Martin Hewitt, chair of the National Police Chiefs Council, told the press conference that officers will not “linger” trying to encourage the public to obey lockdown rules. He also gave examples of recent breaches including a boat party in Hertfordshire with more than 40 people who had each paid £30 each for a ticket, and a minibus full of people from different households travelling from Cheltenham into Wales for a walk. In an article this morning Dame Cressida Dick, the Met police commissioner, said that people who break lockdown rules were now “increasingly likely to face fines”. (See 9.05am.)
  • Hewitt has admitted that Derbyshire police officers made a mistake when they fined two women for going for a walk five miles from home. Asked about the case, he said the police were having to deal with “highly unusual” health regulations and that they were dealing with the public on “hundreds of thousands” of occasions. He went on:

Sometimes mistakes will be made, but we always have looked at those, we have looked at them quickly, we have dealt with the members of the public concerned and we have said when we have got something wrong.

The fines have now been rescinded. Asked about the same case, Patel said the police were “outstanding”, but she also pointed out that those fines have been withdrawn.

  • Hewitt has indicated that he is not in favour of setting an exact distance people are allowed to travel when exercising away from home under the Covid regulations. Earlier the Met commissioner suggested the exercise guidance should be clarified. (See 10.04am.) But at the press conference Hewitt said:

If you tried to make a definition for every possible circumstance that would be really challenging. I don’t think we are in a position where we want to set a particular distance because how would - if a police officer stopped somebody - [they] prove that a person is within or outside that distance.

At the press conference Patel defended Boris Johnson’s decision to go on a bike ride seven miles from his No 10 home on Sunday, but she also stressed the importance of people staying local.

  • MPs have been told that hospitals might not the Covid pressure on hospitals in England may not reach its peak until February. (See 3.37pm.)
  • The Chinese government has accused Boris Johnson of “groundless conjecture” after the prime minister suggested coronavirus could have spread from people grinding up the scales of pangolins. (See 4.50pm.)

That’s all from me for today. But our coverage continues on our global coronavirus blog. It’s here.

Updated

These are from my colleague Jessica Elgot on Priti Patel’s comments at the press conference.

Here is the government’s coronavirus dashboard. And here are the key charts.

Amid all the gloom, it is worth pointing out that the figures contain some good news; they confirm that the daily number of new cases is starting to fall. That has been apparent for a few days now, but for the first time now the week-on-week figure is heading down. The number of new cases over the last seven days is 0.5% lower than during the previous week. Yesterday the week-on-week figure was showing a 5.5% increase.

What makes these figures even more significant is that fact that positive tests are going down week on week while the number of tests being carried out week on week is up by almost a third (32.6%).

Government dashboard
Government dashboard Photograph: Gov.UK

The press conference is now over. This is from ITV’s Robert Peston on Priti Patel’s two glaring non-answers earlier. (See 5.18pm and 5.24pm.)

Q: How can the public know what “local” means when Derbyshire police fine two women for going five miles for a walk, but the PM goes seven miles for a bike ride.

Patel says the police are excellent. They have to use their judgment, she says. But she says, in the case of Derbyshire, those fines were rescinded.

On exercise, she says people should stay local. That is crucial. And they should stay away from other people. That is what the PM did when he was taking his exercise.

Hewitt repeats the point about the Derbyshire fines being rescinded. He says this is unprecedented territory. Officers are dealing with unusual health regulations. There have been decisions that have subsequently been reviewed. “Sometimes mistakes will be made,” he says. But they get looked at. The police admit when they have got something wrong.

Q: Hospitals in France and Italy could cope with almost 40,000 patients without having to tell people to stay at home. Could the NHS have done more to prepare for this?

Diwakar says the NHS spent a lot of time preparing over the summer. It invested in more capacity. But the virus has progressed extremely quickly. He says hundreds more beds have been acquired.

Q: When might you take a decision about tightening rules?

Patel says there are constant discussions in government. These issues are “live”. The rules are always under review constantly.

But currently they are focusing on compliance and enforcement, she says.

Q: Are you concentrating too much on the easy targets, like park, instead of enforcing social distancing at workplaces and on public transport?

Patel says the government is trying to save lives. It is not about picking on particular groups, she says.

She says it is right that the police go after egregious breaches. She says she has seen “my police officers” doing this.

Q: Will the police ensure workplaces are Covid secure?

Hewitt says the police operate in the public space. But he says they have worked hard to make their own workplaces Covid secure.

Q: The rules may be clear, but are they tough enough?

Patel says the rules are tough enough. She says the message is clear. The more we follow the rules, the sooner we can drive the pandemic down.

Q: Do the rules need to be even clearer?

Hewitt says there has been a lot of talk about the definition of local. But he says there might be a problem with specifying what distance from home is allowed. How would police officers know how far people have travelled?

He says people understand the exemptions. People should ask themselves if their travel is essential.

Patel says people understand the stay at home message. And they understand the need to stay local.

Q: ( From the BBC’s Mark Easton) Why are the rules not as tough as last spring?

This is the same question as the one posed by a member of the public. (See 5.18pm.) But Easton has no more luck at getting Patel to address it.

Patel says the rules are clear. She says people should stay local. There are only limited reasons for people being allowed to leave home.

Hewitt says it is clear what people need to do. They have to accept personal responsibility, he says.

Q: When will people like police officers, teacher and supermarket staff get prioritised for the vaccine?

Patel says the government is following the advice of the Joint Committee for Vaccination and Immunisation. She says they have drawn up a priority list covering 88% of people who die from Covid.

But she says the government is looking at who might be in future priority groups.

Diwakar says the JCVI has been driven by the evidence.

Q: (From a member of the public) If the new variant is more transmissible than the original ones, why are the lockdown rules not as strict as last spring.

It’s a very good question. But Patel does not really address it. She just says it is important for everyone to follow the rules.

Diwakar says the hospitals in London are under intense pressure. If hospital numbers continue to rise, patients will have to be sent to hospitals outside the capital, he says. But he says in other areas there are problems too.

Hewitt said 45,000 fixed penalty notices had been issued since the start of the pandemic.

Updated

UK has recorded 1,243 daily Covid deaths, Patel says

Patel starts by reading out the latest Covid figures.

  • Patel says 2,431,648 people have now had a vaccine injection.
  • Another 45,533 cases have been recorded from positive tests, she says.
  • She says on Sunday there were 35,075 people in hospital with coronavirus - a 22% increase on last week.
  • She says there have been 1,243 more deaths. That is the second highest ever daily total for reported deaths. The only day with a higher total (1,325) was Friday last week. The highest daily total on this measure during the first wave came on 21 April, when 1,224 deaths were reported.

The full figures are now on the government’s dashboard.

Updated

Priti Patel's press conference

Priti Patel, the home secretary, is about to hold a press conference. It is the first time she has appeared at a No 10 press conference sine May last year, according to Politico’s Alex Wickham.

She will be appearing with Dr Vin Diwakar, the NHS England medical director for London, and Martin Hewitt, chair of the National Police Chiefs Council.

Asda and Waitrose have joined supermarkets including Tesco (see 1.11pm) in saying they will insist on customers wearing face masks unless they have a good reason not to.

An Asda spokesman said:

If a customer has forgotten their face covering, we will continue to offer them one free of charge. But should a customer refuse to wear a covering without a valid medical reason and be in any way challenging to our colleagues about doing so, our security colleagues will refuse their entry.

Waitrose is also following suit with marshals at entrances to offer disposable masks and deny entry to anyone refusing to comply.

Updated

China criticises Johnson for 'groundless conjecture' about origins of coronavirus

The Chinese government has accused Boris Johnson of “groundless conjecture” after the prime minister suggested coronavirus could have spread from people grinding up the scales of pangolins.

In a speech to the One Planet summit yesterday, Johnson said:

Don’t forget that the coronavirus pandemic was the product of an imbalance in man’s relationship with the natural world.

Like the original plague which struck the Greeks I seem to remember in book one of the Iliad, it is a zoonotic disease. It originates from bats or pangolins, from the demented belief that if you grind up the scales of a pangolin you will somehow become more potent or whatever it is people believe, it originates from this collision between mankind and the natural world and we’ve got to stop it.

In response Beijing’s foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said “careful and meticulous” studies were needed to discover the origin of the coronavirus outbreak. He went on:

Groundless conjecture or hype-up of the issue will only disrupt normal international cooperation on origin-tracing.

The Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian.
The Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian. Photograph: Carlos García Rawlins/Reuters

Updated

The UK government has been told it is “disappointing” that a review of devolution was not published in 2020 as promised. As PA Media reports, MPs on four Westminster committees have now written to Cabinet Office minister, Michael Gove, calling for the Dunlop Review to be made public. It was charged with looking at how the union between the four nations could be strengthened, and was commissioned by the then-prime minister Theresa May.

Former Scotland Office minister Lord Dunlop - who also advised David Cameron on issues of devolution - was put in charge of the work. Now the chairs of the public administration and constitutional affairs committee, and the Scottish affairs, Welsh affairs and Northern Ireland affairs committees, have all joined together to demand its publication. They said:

Our committees have been awaiting the publication of Lord Dunlop’s review and the government’s response to it for some time. It was therefore disappointing to learn that, contrary to earlier commitments, these would not be published before the end of 2020.

Updated

The daily coronavirus case numbers for Northern Ireland have now been released. Today’s total, 1,205, is higher than yesterday’s (759) but lower than last Tuesday’s (1,378).

Some 200 Scottish church leaders have written to Nicola Sturgeon urging her to re-open churches for public worship, warning that the ban “may be unlawful”.

Sturgeon’s decision last month to halt gathering for worship was immediately criticised by Scottish Catholic bishops, who described the move – not followed in England or Wales – as “arbitrary and unfair”.

Now the ministers of some of Scotland’s largest churches, including Charlotte Chapel in Edinburgh and the Tron Church in Glasgow, have coordinated a letter telling Sturgeon:

We urge you not to be the government which denies our nation the collective prayer of the churches of our land in days when it is most greatly needed.

The letter argues that article 9 of the European convention on human rights prohibits governments from interfering with religious practice unless demonstrated as essential for public health. It continues:

We know of no evidence of any tangible contribution to community transmission through churches in Scotland; to the contrary, since churches re-opened in July we have demonstrated that places of worship and public worship can be made safe from Covid transmission.

The letter is also signed by 300 church leaders across the rest of the UK who have added their signatures in support.

Updated

From Tom Newton Dunn from Times Radio

Scottish seafood firms and opposition politicians are pressing for the Treasury to compensate fishers and seafood exporters following a crisis due to new Brexit regulations and costs of exporting to the EU.

The industry body Scottish Seafood has reported about a third of the Scottish fleet is tied up in harbour, with some fish prices falling 80% yesterday, because the delays, costs and bureaucracy since 1 January has choked off exports.

Fishing bodies report time-sensitive live seafood, such as langoustine and crab, and fresh fish is failing to get to market on time because of delays with veterinary inspections or paperwork. Hauliers have stopped taking multiple consignments from different trawlers and suppliers on the same lorry, because government vets have to take off and inspect every box.

Live seafood has to get to market in Boulogne within 24 hours of being landed, or face being unsold. Some exporters said last week, as the teething problems first emerged, it was now taking three days.

James Withers, chief executive of Scotland Food and Drink, a trade body, tweeted that boats are now heading to Denmark to land their catches, rather than Scotland.

While that was quite normal when the UK was part of the EU, Withers argues this cuts even further the work for British fish processing firms and exporters at a time when work has fallen sharply. He tweeted this:

Alistair Carmichael, the Lib Dem MP for Orkney and Shetland, told Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, on Monday one exporter had told him of losing £50,000 worth of stock. Carmichael urged Sunak to introduce compensation schemes.

David Leiper, managing director of Seafood Ecosse, a wholesaler in Peterhead, told PoliticsHome the government had to compensate traders for their losses. “I would like to be reimbursed for the total failings in the government systems. Why should private companies take the pain for government incompetence?”

Updated

Prof Ian Young, Northern Ireland’s chief scientific adviser, has said the R number for coronavirus in the region was somewhere between 1.5 and 1.9 last week. But since then it had “passed the peak” and R had fallen, he said.

But he said hospital admission rates would continue to rise due to the time lag between high case numbers and hospital admissions.

We expect that to continue for a little longer and pressures in hospitals will not peak until some time in the last weeks in January.

What we do now is critical to determining how rapidly those numbers fall once they peak, and that’s the challenge.

We can see that the current restrictions work in terms of falling case numbers, we need to make sure that that benefit, that the effort is sustained so that hospital admissions, inpatient numbers, ICU occupancy and deaths will also fall as quickly and steeply as possible towards the end of this month.

There have been 22 further deaths in Northern Ireland. The latest figures for cases and hospital numbers are not available.

This chart, from the Northern Ireland dashboard, shows how Covid cases in the region have been falling sharply.

Covid cases in Northern Ireland
Covid cases in Northern Ireland. Photograph: Department of Health, NI

Updated

In an evidence session for the Commons health committee, as part of their inquiry into NHS and social care staff burnout and resilience, black leaders across the NHS and social care services have called for more support for black, Asian and minority ethnic staff.

Lord Adebowale, chair of the NHS Confederation, said:

If we’re going to respond to this crisis, we’re going to need BME communities in places like London, Leeds, Bristol, to work with us. If we don’t have black leaders at the top of the tree then how are we going to understand the people, the experiences of communities at the bottom of the tree? This is not a case of ‘either/or’, we either look at race, or we look at the rest of the system, it’s ‘and/and’. The impact on black staff is tremendous.

And Tricia Pereira, from the adult social care team at Merton council in London, said:

At the beginning of the pandemic, there were concerns when it started to be known certain communities were perhaps more at risk of Covid. Staff were asking about risk assessments to enable them to do their work safely. And they were made to feel that they’re being over-anxious. They don’t want to let their colleagues down. They want to keep going on and they will still keep going on.

Hospitals may have to wait until February until Covid pressure peaks, MPs told

Jeremy Hunt, the chair of the Commons health committee, told the World at One that the NHS was facing a “triple whammy” that could make this winter even worse than feared. Summing up evidence that his committee heard in a session this morning, he said:

We heard of a triple whammy which is that because, of this new strain, infections are not coming down as fast as they did in the first wave. That means that the peak for the NHS may be pushed back into February, which is a much longer period of sustained pressure. And it’s also spreading out from the south-east to the north, the Midlands and the south-west.

One of the witnesses giving evidence to the committee was Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents hospitals and other NHS trust. He said that hospitals may not reach peak demand until early next month, instead of mid to late January had been assumed. He told the committee:

We were hoping for a sharper peak that came sooner and shorter - so something, for example, where we saw the peak and started to crest it in mid to late January. It now looks like the peak for NHS demand may actually be in February.

If that is right, that’s going to mean there’s a higher level and more extended period of pressure on the NHS.

When asked about the peak being delayed a month, Hopson said: “I wouldn’t necessarily say a month, I may say two or three weeks perhaps, so early to mid February.”

Hospital admissions lag behind infections by around two to three weeks and it had been assumed that social mixing at Christmas would generate to a spike, affecting hospital figures in mid January, followed by a sharp fall in infections as the impact of restrictions and the lockdown kicked in.

Jeremy Hunt, chair of the Commons health committee.
Jeremy Hunt, chair of the Commons health committee. Photograph: PA

Mavis Webb (front), 87, giving a thumbs-up today as she left the NHS Nightingale Covid-19 vaccination facility at the ExCel Centre in London.
Mavis Webb (front), 87, giving a thumbs-up today as she left the NHS Nightingale Covid-19 vaccination facility at the ExCel Centre in London. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

Updated

Social visits to care homes in Essex should stop in most circumstances to limit the spread of Covid, an official has recommended. As PA Media reports, Dr Mike Gogarty, Essex county council’s director of wellbeing, public health and communities, gave the advice in a letter sent to care homes across the county. He admitted the restriction “will cause distress” but said the risk of continuing with visits is “too great”.

Sir Michael Barber, who was head of Tony Blair’s delivery unit, has been asked to conduct “a rapid review of government delivery to ensure it remains focused, effective and efficient”, Downing Street has announced. The PM’s spokesman said Barber “has a unique experience that will complement the knowledge and experience of civil service senior leaders, and it is important that we draw on the best expertise for us to ensure that we are delivering effectively for the public”.

Barber is currently chair of the Office for Students.

Last year Barber was involved in a project looking at which countries around the world have recovered best from coronavirus. “For the first time in history, every government on the planet has been set the same homework assignment at the same time,” Barber said at the time. The UK was at that point ranked 28th out of 184 countries by the research. Thailand and South Korea came out best.

The dashboard is updated daily and it is still operating. Currently the UK is ranked 161st out of 180.

Michael Barber
Michael Barber. Photograph: OfS

Updated

NHS England records 747 more Covid hospital deaths

NHS England has recorded 747 more coronavirus hospital deaths. There were 149 in London, 123 in the east of England, 118 in the Midlands, 110 in the south-east, 108 in the north-east and Yorkshire, 97 in the north-west and 42 in the south-west. The details are here.

These are deaths of hospital patients who have tested positive for coronavirus. Most of the deaths occurred in the last week, although some were from earlier, going back to 23 November. The patients were aged between 24 and 101, and all but 41 of them had underlying health conditions.

This is the highest daily figure for recorded hospital deaths from NHS England in this wave of the pandemic and only the second time in this wave the daily total has passed 700. The previous highest total was on Friday, when 715 deaths were recorded.

Updated

Some free school meal parcels being distributed 'completely unacceptable', says No 10

Here are the main lines from the Downing Street lobby briefing.

  • The prime minister’s spokesman said the contents of some free school meal food parcels being sent to families (see 12.49pm) was “completely unacceptable”. He said:

We’re aware of those images circulating on social media, and it is clear that the contents of those food parcels are completely unacceptable. The Department for Education is looking into this urgently and the minister for children, Vicky Ford, is speaking to the company responsible and they will be making it clear that boxes like this should not be given to families.

The spokesman said the national free school meals voucher scheme would shortly be reopened.

  • The spokesman said Boris Johnson told cabinet this morning that the pandemic was at a “pivotal stage”.
  • The spokesman played down but did not deny a report in the Daily Mail claiming that the government is under pressure to introduce a new three-metre social distancing rule. He said:

There are no current plans to change social distancing rules but obviously we keep our measures and restrictions under constant review.

  • The spokesman insisted that Johnson’s bike ride in the Olympic Park on Sunday was within the government’s coronavirus guidance. But he did not say how far someone can travel to take exercise and sidestepped a question on whether people can drive or take public transport to exercise.

Public Health Wales has recorded 1,332 further cases and 16 further deaths.

Today’s figure for new cases is well below the figures for yesterday (1,793), for last Tuesday (2,069) and for the Tuesday before (2,510).

But the figure for deaths is much the same as for yesterday (17) and for Tuesday last week (also 17).

The dashboard also says that 91,239 people have now received their first dose of a vaccine.

Updated

The Department for Education has announced that a further 300,000 laptops and tablets will be delivered to schools in England to help disadvantaged pupils learn at home.

Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, said: “These additional devices, on top of the 100,000 delivered last week, add to the significant support we are making available to help schools deliver high-quality online learning, as we know they have been doing.”

More than one third of people feel closer to their local community as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, a survey suggests. PA Media says almost 70% of people said they feel part of their locality, and 35% said Covid has boosted this sense of belonging, according to a poll of 7,000 Britons by market researcher Opinium.

Tesco has become the latest supermarket to ban customers who refuse to wear a face covering without a medical exemption, following in the footsteps of Morrisons and Sainsbury’s. In a statement, a Tesco spokesperson said:

To protect our customers and colleagues, we won’t let anyone into our stores who is not wearing a face covering, unless they are exempt in line with government guidance.

We are also asking our customers to shop alone, unless they’re a carer or with children.

To support our colleagues, we will have additional security in stores to help manage this.

People arriving at the NHS vaccination centre at the Centre for Life in Times Square, Newcastle today.
People arriving at the NHS vaccination centre at the Centre for Life in Times Square, Newcastle today. Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PA

And here are the latest coronavirus figures for Scotland announced by Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister, at her news conference.

  • Sturgeon said there were 1,717 Covid patients in hospital, up 53 from yesterday. That is well above the figure for the peak of the first wave, when hospital numbers were just over 1,500 at their highest.
  • She said that there had been 1,875 more positive cases, and that 12% of tests were positive. She said the case numbers appeared to be stabilising. This chart, from the Scottish government’s dashboard, illustrates this point.
Positive cases in Scotland
Positive cases in Scotland Photograph: Scottish government
  • She said there had been 54 further deaths.
  • She said that 175,942 people had received their first dose of vaccine.

Updated

Military helicopters could be used within days to airlift coronavirus patients from the Isle of Wight, the island’s medical director has said, after an “astronomical” rise in infections fuelled by mixing and visitors over Christmas. My colleague Josh Halliday has the story here.

Sturgeon to make statement to MSPs tomorrow about possible further restrictions

Nicola Sturgeon has said she will update the Holyrood parliament tomorrow on potential further restrictions to prevent people mixing as the number of people who have died after testing positive for coronavirus in Scotland passes 5,000.

Reminding her daily briefing that the faster-spreading variant is now the dominant strain in Scotland, present in around 60% of cases, she said that her cabinet had this morning considered tightening rules around takeaways and non-essential click and collect.

She asked the public to “think very hard” about whether they were leaving their homes for a genuinely essential purpose, and in particular to avoid places like parks and beaches that are busy.

She said that the Scottish cabinet had not discussed the possibility of a three-metre distancing rule, as reported by some news outlets this morning.

She added that it appeared that cases in Scotland were stabilising, and “not shooting up” as seen elsewhere in the UK, although “test positivity [around 12%] is still far too high”.

Sturgeon said it was “highly unlikely” that there would be a full lifting of restrictions by the end of the month, and also reiterated that obtaining a reliable negative Covid test result before travelling to Scotland from overseas would be a requirement for all visitors from Friday.

Updated

Marcus Rashford has condemned free school meal packages being sent to some children and families learning from home as “unacceptable”, my colleague Lucy Campbell reports.

Rashford posted a further thread on this on Twitter this morning, following a conversation he had had with Chartwells, the company said to have provided the one of the food parcels that triggered his original comments. It starts here.

Rashford said one problem with the government scheme was that only lunches were being provided.

Police Federation leaders have joined the Met police commissioner, Dame Cressida Dick, in calling for the rules on exercising in England during the lockdown to be clarified. (See 10.04am.)

Brian Booth, chairman of the West Yorkshire Police Federation, told PA Media:

The guidance is that you should be local in your own community near where you live but people are far exceeding that. Officers have no power in law to deal with it, so it is a bit of a nonsense really.

The guidance is people’s moral judgment, should they be doing it, but with regard to policing it - it’s impossible.

Booth said the law should be more specific.

If you say to people you are going to limit their civil liberties, and you are going to place them in lockdown, state it very clearly. Because it’s not fair on the public either.

Don’t expect officers to work a miracle and pull law out of their back pocket. We’ve got to have a sound foundation of law to apply properly. If not, the public starts to mistrust us.

And Adam Commons, chairman of Leicestershire Police Federation, said officers were “trying to interpret something that’s incredibly vague and needs amending”. He said:

This just puts the pressure back on my colleagues who then get the criticism in the media for enforcing it and then if it’s wrong or interpreted differently it is used as a stick to beat them with.

Updated

Priti Patel, the home secretary, will take the No 10 press conference at 5pm this afternoon, No 10 has said.

In the Commons Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, asked Matt Hancock for an assurance that no hospital will run out of oxygen in the next few weeks. Yesterday Boris Johnson admitted that in some places hospitals are running short of oxygen.

But Hancock told MPs there was no national oxygen shortage. He said:

I can assure [Ashworth] that there is no constraint that we are anywhere near on the national availability of oxygen ... oxygenated beds.

It does mean, as he knows and as we’ve seen reported, that sometimes we have to move patients to a different part of the ... as local as possible, but occasionally across the country to make sure they get the treatment that they need.

Updated

In the House of Commons Matt Hancock, the health secretary, has just defended the use of lateral flow tests.

He was responding to a question from the SNP MP Neal Hanvey. Hanvey did not mention the new concerns raised by Prof Jon Deeks (see 12.05pm), but he said he was concerned about the government relying on them when they produce misleading results.

But Hancock said lateral flow tests were “incredibly important” because they allowed officials to identify asymptomatic cases that would not otherwise come to light. He went on:

One in three people have this disease without knowing it and finding those positive cases helps us to break the chains of transmission.

Lateral flow tests 'may increase not reduce' Covid spread because of inaccuracies, experts claim

A leading health expert has accused the government of making misleading claims about the accuracy of lateral flow tests, which are being increasing used by the government for mass testing because they produce rapid results. Jon Deeks, professor of biostatistics at the University of Birmingham, told Sky News:

Just before Christmas schools were given a template letter, which had the wording in it, and it went to parents saying: ‘This test [the lateral flow test] is as good at detecting cases as the PCR [the standard Covid test, which has to be processed in a laboratory].’

Now, frankly, that is completely incorrect, and that is the sort of wrong messaging which we have to make sure the government doesn’t continue to put forward.

This weekend the business minister [Kwasi Kwarteng] was quoted as saying: ‘This will make workplaces completely safe’. It’s not the right way to tell people about this.

Deeks said that when the lateral flow tests were used in Liverpool for a mass testing pilot they missed 60% of the cases which would have been picked up by PCR. He said:

Most of us have never done a diagnostic test in our lives ourselves, and we would expect a positive to mean ‘yes’ and a negative to mean ‘no’. But here a positive means ‘probably’ and a negative means ‘we really can’t tell’.

Deeks and two colleagues have written an article for the BMJ saying that extending the use of lateral flow tests, as announced by the government on Sunday, “may increase and not reduce disease spread, illness, and death”.

At the end of last week the government Scientific Advisory Committee for Emergencies (Sage) published a paper (pdf) evaluating the Liverpool mass testing pilot. One of its conclusions was: “Mass testing is not feasible.”

Updated

Core staff could leave the NHS after the coronavirus crisis due to the “unsustainable” workloads they face, the Commons health committee has been told. As PA Media reports, Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents hospitals and other NHS trusts, said that while staff will do everything they need to in the “immediate phase”, health leaders are worried about core staff leaving the health service because of the “unsustainable” workload.

Giving evidence to the committee, Hopson said:

We cannot keep trying to run the NHS and close that capacity-demand mismatch by effectively asking our staff to work harder and harder and harder.

It was already pretty unsustainable before we got into Covid, it seems to us this is just really reinforcing it.

The message we are getting very, very clearly is that people will do everything they need to do in this immediate period, because they don’t want to let their colleagues down, they don’t want to let patients down.

All of our chief executives, they are worried that when we get through this immediate phase we will start to see people, like for example those who are near to retirement, those junior doctors or people who have come over here from overseas who wanted to train, they will leave the NHS and we will get core workers leaving in the NHS because effectively this whole concept of trying to close that gap by asking our staff to work harder and harder and harder is creating an impossible, an unsustainable workload for our staff.

Matt Hancock, the health secretary, has just started taking questions in the Commons. In response to the first question, he said 2.3 million people have now been vaccinated.

Detailed vaccination figures are now being published on the government’s coronavirus dashboard.

Updated

These are from Carl Baker, a statistician in the House of Commons library, showing the current spread of Covid in England.

Earlier I said in Scotland people who leave the house to exercise have to start their exercise from their front door. Sorry, that’s not quite right. The level 4 guidance says: “Travel no further than you need to reach to a safe, non-crowded place to exercise in a socially distanced way.”

But it is true of Wales where the lockdown guidance says: “You can leave home as often as you like to exercise as long as you do so from home.”

I’ve corrected the earlier post. (See 10.04am.)

Last night, before publication of the latest death figures from England and Wales, Sky’s economics editor Ed Conway published an excellent article putting the 2020 death figures in context. He also summarised his findings in a Twitter thread starting here. “On almost every metric, the mortality change in 2020 was disastrously bad,” he says.

This chart illustrates how total deaths have been higher than in any year since 1918, when the UK had to deal with the first world war and the flu pandemic. But the population was much smaller 100 years ago, and in relative terms deaths have only fallen back to 2003 numbers, Conway says.

But excess deaths are at their highest level since 1940, Conway says.

And, using an age-standardised measures of excess deaths, the picture looks even worse; it has been the worse year since 1929, when there was a financial crash and a flu epidemic, Conway says.

Updated

2020 worst year for total number of deaths in England and Wales since 1918 flu pandemic, latest figures show

Last year was the deadliest in a century, with almost as many fatalities documented in absolute terms in England and Wales in 2020 as at the height of the flu pandemic in 1918.

More than 608,000 deaths were recorded, with 81,653 attributable to coronavirus, last year according to new figures released by the Office for National Statistics.

April was the deadliest month for the virus in 2020, with more than 33,000 fatalities accounting for almost a third of the deaths attributed to the virus in the UK to date. More than 1,000 people died in the UK on 23 consecutive days during the month, at the height of the pandemic’s first wave.

The death toll is second in absolute terms to the record set in 1918, when 611,861 people died at the peak of the flu pandemic in England and Wales. However, the mortality rate was higher in 1918, when approximately 38.4 million people lived in England and Wales, compared with 59.4 million today.

Updated

Met chief calls for exercise guidance to be clarified after row about PM's cycle ride

Here are the main points from Dame Cressida Dick’s interview with the Today programme.

  • Dick, the Metropolitan police commissioner, has said that she would like to see the rules about what is and is not allowed during the lockdown in England clarified. She said the restrictions could be “complex” for the police to to understand, as well as for members of the public. Asked if she would like to see the law or the guidance, clarified, she said:

That is certainly something that government could consider, absolutely.

Asked again if it would be helpful to the police, she replied:

I think it would depend how it is done. With all these things, the devil is in the detail. But anything that brings greater clarity for officers and the public in general will be a good thing, of course.

Dick was responding to questions from the presenter, Martha Kearney, who was asking specifically about the law and the guidance relating to what exercise is allowed away from home. She linked this to the controversy about whether it was right for Boris Johnson to exercise on Sunday in a park seven miles from his home in Downing Street.

  • Dick said she viewed local exercise as starting and ending at home. Johnson did not break the law with his bike ride on Sunday because people are allowed to leave the home for exercise and the law does not say they have to remain within a certain distance of home. But the government guidance says people should “stay local”. There would be nothing unusual about a cyclist ending up seven miles away from home, but Downing Street has not said whether Johnson set off from No 10 or whether he was went to the Olympic Park by car to start his exercise (although No 10 sources say, even if he did, that would be allowed). Asked for her definition of local, Dick replied:

I would just say that people need to try to stay local. For me, a reasonable interpretation of that is that if you can - I appreciate some people can’t, but if you can - go for your exercise from your front door and come back to your front door. That’s my view of local.

But some people will need to get in a car to get over three dual carriageways to get to where they’re going to walk dog. It is complicated, I understand that.

In Wales people who leave the house to exercise have to start their exercise from their front door. When asked about Johnson specifically, Dick said she would not comment on an individual case. But, in what seemed a reference to what Johnson did, she said: “It’s not against the law, that’s for sure.”

  • She said she did not think the police needed “the power of entry” (ie, the right to enter people’s homes) to help them enforce the lockdown rules. In fact, she said she had argued against this. She told the programme:

We don’t have the power of entry, and in fact when I’ve been asked for my advice over the last year now I have said that .... I think we can deal with most of these things [breaches of lockdown rules] without that power. And, secondly, I don’t think the general public want to know, or fear, that the police are going to come barging through their door for what might potentially be a misunderstanding, or a very, very minor infringement.

  • She said in the last 24-hours the Met had issued more than 300 fixed-penalty notices for breaches of lockdown rules. “That’s quite a lot, and I think it will have an impact,” she said.
Cressida Dick.
Cressida Dick. Photograph: DW Images/REX/Shutterstock

Updated

Covid involved in 31% of all deaths in England and Wales in final week of 2020, says ONS

The Office for National Statistics has released its latest death figures for England and Wales. It has tweeted the main findings.

Good morning. Ministers are still mulling over whether to tighten certain lockdown regulations - the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg has a useful guide to the main options here - but they are still hoping that they won’t need to, and that instead the power of persuasion, using messaging to get people to limit their social mixing even more, will work.

One part of the message is that the NHS is under unprecedented threat, and that we’re close to the point where if you needed to go to hospital, you might not get looked after properly because beds, staff, equipment and oxygen are all in short supply. That’s why Prof Chris Whitty, the government’s chief medical adviser, was on the airwaves yesterday.

And this morning another part of the message is being amplified; if you don’t obey the rules, you’re increasingly likely to get nicked. This was implicit in a statement issued by the Metropolitan police last week. But just to make the point even more bluntly, Dame Cressida Dick, the Met police commissioner, has been out this morning, with an article in the Times (paywall) and an interview on Today. In her article she says:

It is preposterous to me that anyone could be unaware of our duty to do all we can to stop the spread of the virus. We have been clear that those who breach Covid-19 legislation are increasingly likely to face fines.

We will still be engaging, explaining and encouraging but those who break the rules or refuse to comply where they should without good reason will find officers moving much more quickly to enforcement action.

I will post more from her interview shortly.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Boris Johnson chairs a virtual meeting of cabinet.

9.30am: The ONS publishes its weekly death figures for England and Wales.

11.30am: Matt Hancock, the health secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

12pm: Downing Street is due to hold its daily lobby briefing.

12.15pm: Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, holds her daily coronavirus briefing.

Around 1.30pm: Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, makes a statement to MPs about defence support for the Covid response.

Politics Live is now doubling up as the UK coronavirus live blog and, given the way the Covid crisis eclipses everything, this will continue for the foreseeable future. But we will be covering non-Covid political stories too, and when they seem more important or more interesting, they will take precedence.

Here is our global coronavirus live blog.

I try to monitor the comments below the line (BTL) but it is impossible to read them all. If you have a direct question, do include “Andrew” in it somewhere and I’m more likely to find it. I do try to answer questions, and if they are of general interest, I will post the question and reply above the line (ATL), although I can’t promise to do this for everyone.

If you want to attract my attention quickly, it is probably better to use Twitter. I’m on @AndrewSparrow.

Updated

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