Care home and community deaths to be published by the Government: What we learned from Tuesday’s Downing Street coronavirus briefing

Here’s what we learned about the coronavirus pandemic from Tuesday’s Government press conference.
Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock departs from 10 Downing Street (Photo by Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images)Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock departs from 10 Downing Street (Photo by Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images)
Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock departs from 10 Downing Street (Photo by Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images)

Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock was joined by Deputy Chief Scientific Adviser Angela McLean and coordinator of the national testing effort, John Newton.

Latest figures

The Health Secretary set out the latest testing and death toll figures at the daily Downing Street briefing:

- There were 3,260 spare critical care beds across the NHS.

- There have been 763,387 tests including 43,453 on Monday.

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- 161,145 people have tested positive for coronavirus, an increase of 3,996.

- 15,796 people are currently in hospital with coronavirus.

- 21,678 have died in hospital, an increase of 586 since yesterday's figures.

The overall death toll will be higher once deaths in care homes and other settings are included.

Mr Hancock said: "The proportion of coronavirus deaths in care homes is around a sixth of the total, which is just below what we see in normal times."

Testing capacity extended further

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Testing will be expanded to all care home residents and staff, regardless of whether they have Covid-19 symptoms, all those aged 65 and over and anyone who has to leave their home to travel to work with symptoms and their households.

Mr. Hancock said: "From construction workers to emergency plumbers, from research scientists to those in manufacturing, the expansion of access to testing will protect the most vulnerable and help keep people safe.

"It's possible because we've expanded capacity for testing thus far."

Care home deaths to be published by Government

New ONS figures revealed that 4,319 coronavirus deaths have now been recorded outside of hospitals in England and Wales.

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Health Secretary Matt Hancock said deaths in all settings, including hospitals, care homes and in the community, will now be published by the Government as part of the daily briefing.

Government ‘on track’ to hit 100,000 testing target by the end of the month

The Health Secretary set a target of 100,000 daily coronavirus tests by the end of April, this Thursday.

During the daily Downing Street briefing, Mr Hancock said the Government was on track to meet the goal of 100,000 tests a day and now had the capacity to carry out more than 70,000 tests a day.

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He said the dispatch of home test kits would be expanded to 25,000 a day by the end of the week while mobile testing units manned by the army will total more than 70 by the end of the week.

"All of this has led to an increase in daily testing capacity, which now stands at 73,400. This has allowed us progressively to expand access to testing.”

A drug is entering a clinical trial to treat Covid-19

The Health Secretary said that an existing drug was on Tuesday entering an early clinical trial phase to treat coronavirus.

Mr Hancock said a UK therapeutics taskforce working to see if current drugs can be effectively deployed against the disease have identified a number of "promising candidates".

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He said: "Currently, six different treatments have been entered into national clinical trials and the first is ready to enter the next stage, a new early-phase clinical trial platform that we're launching today."

In order to "make best possible use" of all medicines available during the pandemic, Mr Hancock said ministers were updating guidelines so medicines labelled for one patient in a care home can be used by another patient who needs the treatment.

‘Too early’ to consider re-opening schools

Mr Hancock said it was "still too early to say" when schools might reopen.

"There are still too many deaths each day and the five tests that we set out haven't been met.

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"I know, especially as a father of three young children, that there's a yearning from people to know when schools might go back and, of course, it's something that we think about and we talk about."

Responding to a question from Amanda from Hull, he said: "I'm sorry that I can't give you a more definitive answer, but I can't because we don't yet have the number of deaths and the number of infections low enough for that to be safe to reopen the schools, and we don't yet know how fast the number of new cases will fall."

Government tribute to North East lockdown effort

As part of the daily briefing, the Health Secretary responded to a question from the Northern Echo to praise the effort of people in the North East in adhering to lockdown measures.

He said: "I must pay tribute to people of the North East for staying at home and helping to ensure the cases in the North East have been kept relatively low.

“Knowing Newcastle as well as I do, I know the people of the North East very gregarious but have done their duty by staying at home.”