CORONAVIRUS IN OUR ARMED FORCES

Armed Forces personnel half as likely to get Covid

IT is safer to be a soldier when it comes to avoiding coronavirus. New data from the Ministry of Defence shows that you are half as likely to have caught the disease if you are employed by the UK Armed Forces. As of November 19, the forces had seen a total of 1,686 cases of Covid-19 confirmed after a test.

They employed a total of 193,460 people when the last count was made in July 2020.

This means the rate of people with coronavirus is 0.9 per cent of the population.

However, the most recent cumulative data from the NHS says that there have been a total of 1,430,339 cases of coronavirus in the UK.

Mid-year estimates of the UK population in 2019 show that there are 66,796,800 people living in the country.

This puts the rate of people getting Covid-19 at 2.1 per cent in the wider population, double the rate of the Armed Forces.

The Ministry of Defence says that the reasons behind this are strict hygiene routines, social distancing and protective equipment distribution.

The Army has seen the most Covid-19 cases with 803 positive tests.

But this is 0.7 per cent of the total 116,800 people in the Army.

The Navy has seen 507 positive cases, 1.5 per cent of the total 39,420 servicepeople.

And the RAF saw 306, around 0.8 per cent of the population of 37,240.

A MoD spokesperson said: “We take the health and wellbeing of our people very seriously and the Army, Navy and RAF have adopted a range of measures to keep personnel safe, including social distancing, strict hygiene routines and the distribution of PPE.

“We also carry out regular tests to minimise the risk to the armed forces as they carry out their duties.”

By November 19, UK Armed

Forces personnel had taken 51,881 tests for Covid-19, the equivalent of nearly one in four personnel taking one.

Of these tests, 9,789 were taken by Army staff, 10,553 by the Navy and a mere 1,119 were taken by RAF staff.

The rest were performed at UK Strategic Command, the branch dedicated to coordinating support across the other departments, or at “other” departments.

For comparison, as of November 17, 238,385 coronavirus tests were being carried out daily in the UK.