Covid-19 Daily Bulletin

11 Nov

11 November 2020

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

Key Announcements:

  • An evacuation-style operation will take place to get students home safely for Christmas after England’s lockdown. Working with their local public health bodies, universities will allocate their students travel slots during the week of 3 to 9 December.
  • GP services will be cut back well into 2021 so family doctors can immunise millions of people against coronavirus at new seven-day-a-week clinics, NHS England has said.
  • The head of the NHS’s test and trace programme, Baroness Dido Harding, told the joint meeting of the Health and Social Care and Science and Technology Committees that it failed to predict the scale of demand for coronavirus testing as schools and universities returned this autumn.
  • A million people a week could be vaccinated against coronavirus under NHS plans to ensure a jab can be administered as quickly as it is manufactured.
  • The government is preparing to spend £40bn to help deliver on Boris Johnson’s “moonshot” pledge for mass coronavirus testing and to expand the UK’s laboratory capacity.

Regional/Devolved

  • Less than 48 hours before Northern Ireland’s four-week lockdown is due to end ministers still haven’t decided what happens next.
  • Wales faces a wave of mental health problems in the wake of Covid-19 – with younger adults, women and people from deprived areas suffering the most, according to researchers at Swansea and Cardiff universities.
  • Fife, Angus and Perth and Kinross will all be moved from level two to level three of Scotland’s five-tier system.

International

  • Brazil has suspended late-stage clinical trials of China’s Sinovac coronavirus vaccine after what the regulator described as a “severe adverse event”.
  • The US has authorised, bamlanivimab, the first treatment to protect people with a milder form of Covid-19 from developing severe symptoms as cases of the virus across the country continue to rise.
  • Officials in Japan have warned of an impending third wave of coronavirus infections amid a rise in cases blamed on colder weather and a government campaign to encourage domestic tourism.
  • The Covid-Tracking project reports that the US on Tuesday saw its highest number of people hospitalised with coronavirus during the pandemic so far.

Stakeholders

  • The north has been hit harder than the rest of England during the coronavirus pandemic, “exacerbating” regional inequalities, according to the Northern Health Science Alliance.
  • Graduate recruitment suffered the biggest drop this year since the 2008 financial crash as employers cut back on hiring workers to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic.
  • Referrals for routine NHS hospital care have dropped by a third due to the pandemic, say the Health Foundation who warn of the hidden backlog of untreated patients.

Unconfirmed reports

  • 50 Conservative MPs have formed a new group to fight the imposition of any further blanket restrictions in England beyond the end of the current lockdown on 2 December.