Covid-19 Daily Bulletin

15 December 2020

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

Key Announcements:

• London, most of Essex and parts of Hertfordshire will join tier three at 00:01 GMT on Wednesday.
• Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, revealed yesterday that a new strain of coronavirus had been identified, predominantly in the South East of England.
• The government has told Greenwich council it must keep schools open or face legal action.
• Making masks mandatory in busy London shopping streets could help to slow the spread of coronavirus, some scientists have said, after the capital’s mayor announced he was considering the policy.
• Some GP surgeries had to cancel appointments when deliveries of the Pfizer vaccine failed to arrive.
• There were 819,000 fewer workers on UK company payrolls in November than at the start of the pandemic, official figures show.

Devolved/Regional

• A weekly review of Scotland’s Covid-19 levels system will be held later today.
• Some of Scotland’s island communities cannot currently get the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine.
• NHS Fife has confirmed that six people with Covid-19 have died at a care home in Dunfermline.
• A new variant of coronavirus which was found to be circulating in England is already present in Wales, the Welsh Government has confirmed.
• Wales is already in breach of some of the key indicators used to determine future lockdowns.
• Wales experienced the steepest rise in unemployment between August and October of any nation or region of the UK.
• More than 10,000 redundancies have been proposed by Northern Ireland firms since March, according to official statistics.
• Northern Ireland’s six health trusts have warned of “unbearable pressures” across the system, in the event of a likely Covid-19 spike in early January.
• Northern Ireland’s Education Minister Peter Weir is expected to announce that A-level students will take fewer exams next summer.

International

• Sandra Lindsay, a critical care nurse at the Long Island Jewish Medical Centre in Queens, New York, received the first known dose of the Pfizer-Biontech vaccine since US regulators granted it emergency authorisation last Friday.
• Canada kicked off its inoculation campaign against Covid-19 on Monday by injecting frontline healthcare workers and elderly nursing home residents.
• Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte imposed a tough new five-week nationwide lockdown Monday, saying schools, nonessential shops, museums and gyms will close down at midnight until 19 January.
• Italy’s will need to impose new restrictions during the holiday season to rein in contagion, the Italian prime minister has said.

Stakeholders

• Sir Michael Marmot has said pre-existing social inequalities contributed to the UK recording the highest death rates from Covid in Europe