Covid-19 Daily Bulletin

11 Jan

11 January 2021

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

Key Announcements:

  • According to government statistics, the number of new confirmed cases of Coronavirus yesterday was 54,940. A total of 563 people sadly lost their lives within 28 days of testing positive for the virus.
  • Health Secretary Matt Hancock will announce the government’s new ‘Vaccine Delivery Plan’ in a press conference this afternoon. He is set to outline how around 13m priority vaccine recipients, the over-70s, healthcare workers and those required to shield, will receive the jab by February 15th. In addition, daily vaccination data will be available from today.
  • The first seven new NHS vaccination centres are opening their doors this morning. Some 600,000 invites were due to be sent out over the weekend and this coming week to people aged 80 or older who live up to a 45-minute drive from one of the new regional centres. The new centres will be joined later this week by hundreds more GP-led and hospital services along with the first pharmacy-led pilot sites, taking the total to around 1,200, NHS England said.
  • Today marks a year since the first coronavirus death was announced in Wuhan. Twelve months later, Covid-19 has claimed 1.9m lives worldwide.

Regional/Devolved

  • Scottish Deputy First Minister John Swinney has confirmed that the Cabinet is debating whether tougher measures are needed in Scotland as hospitals face growing demand for intensive care beds.
  • In Northern Ireland, hospitals are facing huge ambulance queues, soaring numbers of patients and the potential for inpatient numbers to double by next week. Dr Anne Kilgallen, chief executive of Western Trust, said hospitals across the country are “facing into an abyss”, with patient numbers well up on last spring’s peak.

International

  • Russia has reported 23,315 new cases, including 4,646 in Moscow. This takes the national tally, the world’s fourth highest, to 3,425,269 since the pandemic began.
  • Arnaud Fontanet, a member of the French government’s scientific council, has called for France to consider closing its borders with the UK and other countries that have a strong presence of the UK variant.
  • Mainland China has seen the biggest daily increase in Covid-19 cases in more than five months as new infections in Hebei province surrounding Beijing continue to rise.

Stakeholders

  • New analysis by Edge Health suggests that one in five people in England may have had coronavirus, equivalent to 12.4 million people, as of the 3rd of January. The government’s test-and-trace programme had detected 2.4 million cases by the same date.
  • The government’s chief medical adviser, Chris Whitty, has warned this morning that the worst is yet to come for the UK. “The next few weeks are going to be the worst weeks of this pandemic in terms of numbers into the NHS (National Health Service). What we need to do before the vaccines have had their effect, because it will take several weeks before that happens, we need to really double down,” he said.
  • Chief executive of the NHS Confederation, Danny Mortimer, has criticised the test and trace system. He said “we need the rate of infection to go down well in advance of the benefit of the vaccination programme. We still, for the last few weeks now, have seen growing incidences of infection in our communities. We’ve struggled as a country to have a test, trace and isolate system that works effectively – it just doesn’t work as well as it does in countries like Australia and various other parts of the world. That has to be fixed.”
  • Tracy Nicholls, chief executive of the College of Paramedics, told Sky News that the ambulance service was currently under “unprecedented” pressure and that there were cases of patients having to wait “five, six, seven, eight, even nine hours” to be transferred from an ambulance to a hospital because of a shortage of beds.

Unconfirmed reports

  • Politico reports that according to a government source, deaths are likely to approach a peak of close to 2,000 per day on current projections.