Covid-19 Daily Bulletin

10 Feb

10 February 2021

A series of daily updates for CHO members regarding relevant updates pertaining to Coronavirus from home and abroad.

Key Announcements:

  • Transport Secretary Grant Shapps has defended the UK’s new hotel quarantine policy for arrivals from high-risk countries, saying that there was a risk from new variants of the virus.
  • Pharmacists in England are considering strike action unless the Treasury writes off a £370m debt from a support package awarded during the pandemic, which saw many chemists help deliver vaccines.
  • Care home staff were not given personal protective equipment (PPE) early in the pandemic because the government prioritised the NHS, MPs have said.
  • A single dose of the Pfizer vaccine delivers around 65 percent protection against coronavirus in both older people and young adults, provisional results have found. The jab begins to become effective in just two weeks, according to The Sun, and after the second dose people’s protection soars to 84 percent.
  • School catch-up plans have been thrown into doubt after the UK’s largest union insisted all teachers’ contracts will need to be renegotiated if they are required to work longer hours.

Devolved

  • An NHS boss said critical care deaths in Welsh hospitals could be 25 percent higher due to the number of patients being admitted for Covid-19.
  • The chief executive of NHS Wales, Andrew Goodall, said there were encouraging signs that coronavirus cases were coming down in the country.
  • Relatives of care home residents are pleading with the Scottish Government to allow them to visit their loved ones. MSPs are due to consider a petition on Wednesday calling for one designated visitor per care home resident to permitted.

International

  • The US vaccine tsar said on Tuesday that weekly deliveries of jabs would soon rise to 11m a week, up from 8.6m when Joe Biden took office as president.
  • Singapore will from Wednesday loosen entry requirements for arrivals who have visited the Australian state of New South Wales, while tightening the border for visitors from Vietnam.
  • Ireland is likely to gradually emerge from its strict lockdown between April and June with outdoor dining and domestic tourism likely to be possible during the summer, deputy prime minister Leo Varadkar has said.
  • Today saw zero deaths from Covid-19 in Delhi. The first coronavirus fatality-free day in the Indian capital since May.

Stakeholders

  • Pub sales plummeted by more than half in the UK last year as closures and social distancing restrictions hit trading, the sector’s biggest trade body has said. The British Beer and Pub Association, which represents the UK’s 47,000 pubs, said on Wednesday that sales across the pub industry fell by £7.8bn in 2020 — 56 per cent below 2019’s levels.

Unconfirmed reports

  • Britain should “take the pain” of longer restrictions to reduce the risk of mutations needing repeated lockdowns, government scientific advisers have said.