Covid-19 Daily Bulletin

21 Jul

21 July 2020

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

Key Announcements

  • Public sector workers– including Armed Forces, teachers, police Officers, the National Crime Agency, prison Officers, doctors and dentists, the Judiciary, senior civil servants and senior military personnel – will receive above inflation pay rises . The Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak said: ” These past months have underlined what we always knew – that our public sector workers make a vital contribution to our country and that we can rely on them when we need them.”
  • Health Secretary, Matt Hancock and the permanent secretary at the DfH, Chris Wormald, will appear in front of the Science and Technology Select Committee at 2:30pm today to answer questions about the Government’s response to the pandemic and next steps.
  • Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty and his deputies Jenny Harries and Jonathan Van-Tam will appear in front of the Health Select Committee at 10:30am today.
  • The Prime Minister will convene a full physical cabinet meeting today for the first time since March. Cabinet members are still expected to adhere to social distancing.
  • Research published in the Lancet indicates there could be 3,500 avoidable cancer deaths in England in the next five years as a result of the pandemic. The model assumes that disruptions due to the pandemic will affect access to routine and urgent cancer diagnostic services and alter health-seeking behaviour for a 12-month period.
  • Initial findings from the vaccine trials led by the University of Oxford have shown that a number of patients ended up making antibodies and T-cells that can fight coronavirus as a result of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 injection.
  • The UK government borrowed £35.5bn in June, about five times more than the same month last year, as a result of the pandemic and associated lockdown measures.

Regional/Devolved

  • Blackburn with Darwen has overtaken Leicester as England’s coronavirus hotspot. In the week to last Friday, the local authority recorded an infection rate of 79.2 cases per 100,000. Cases in Leicester have fallen to a rate of 77.7 per 100,000. The spike is thought to have originated from hundreds of mourners who attended a funeral, but this is not definitive.
  • Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon will give her first televised briefing today on a visit to a North Lanarkshire call centre.

International   

  • Globally there have been 14.6m infections and more than 600,000 recorded deaths from the coronavirus.
  • The European Union have agreed details of an economic recovery fund, following four days of intense talks. The package will provide €750bn (£677bn; $859bn) in loans and grants to member states to help them recovery from the pandemic. The package now needs to be ratified by member states and the European Parliament.
  • The World Health Organisation has warned about a spike in infections in Africa, stating that South Africa could be a “precursor” for outbreaks across the continent. S Africa now has 350,000 cases.
  • Brazil is to begin testing a Chinese-made vaccine on volunteers from today.
  • Reuters is reporting that the United States recorded 61,671 new cases of Covid-19 on Monday, taking the total cases to 3.85m.

Stakeholders    

  • Labour have responded to comments from the Chief Nursing Officer on being dropped from Government Coronavirus press conferences, saying “It is scandalous that the nation’s most senior nurse was silenced at the height of the pandemic because she wasn’t prepared to parrot Downing Street spin about Dominic Cummings ‘ blatant rule breaking.”
  • Chief Executive of the NHS Confederation, Niall Dickson, has said responded to findings from the University of Oxford trial: “This is exciting news although we still need larger trials to know whether the vaccine offers the right level of protection. When a vaccine does become available health and care staff must be a priority alongside other key workers and those who are vulnerable. Until then the advice is the same; to protect yourself and others, maintain social distance and wash your hands. “