Lockdown ‘having an effect’
Measures ‘making a difference on spread of virus’
THE STRINGENT measures imposed on society to fight coronavirus are beginning to have an impact, the Government’s chief scientific adviser said, as he pressed upon the public how vital it was to continue to adhere to advice to tackle the disease.
Speaking at the daily Downing Street briefing yesterday, Sir Patrick Vallance revealed data showed that while hospital admissions due to Covid-19 continued to rise, they did so in a “constant amount” rather than an “increasing amount”.
He said that “may suggest that we’re already beginning to see some effect through”, and added: “The measures are in place, they are making a difference, they are decreasing the contact which is so important to spread the disease and we’re doing a good job at cutting that down.”
But he warned the country not to become complacent as he said the “stay at home” message and social distancing were vital in making sure this trajectory continued.
He said: “It’s important that we do this now to get the numbers below NHS ICU (intensive care unit) capacity, that is the absolute priority at the moment.
“Once that is achieved, once we know that we’ve got this curve below the ICU capacity and stable, then of course it’s time to start asking the question which is being asked across the world at the moment – how do we release those measures and manage this going forward?”
It comes as 1,408 people are now confirmed to have died in UK hospitals after testing positive for Covid-19, as of 5pm on Sunday.
This is up 180 from 1,228 the day before, with 17 further deaths in Yorkshire in that time.
Sir Patrick said: “So the message stay at home, protect the NHS, and save lives, is true everywhere in the UK – we all need to do this in order to break and slow the transmission of this virus, decrease the number of cases, and in turn, decrease the number of people coming into hospital.”
He added that “we expect this to get worse over the next couple of weeks because there’s a lag phase” and that this period will last “at least over two or three weeks”.
As of yesterday 9,000 people were in hospital with coronavirus, up from 6,200 on Friday.
Sir Patrick said the NHS was seeing around an additional 1,000 patients a day and described this daily rise as “stable” and showed “we’re not on a fast acceleration”.
He told reporters: “I do expect that number to continue. I expect people coming every day to be about that, it may go up a little bit.
“And in two or three weeks you would expect that to stabilise and to start to go down a bit.”
Later this week, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) will release figures on deaths involving Covid-19 in the wider community, such as care homes.
The ONS will look at deaths where Covid-19 was mentioned anywhere on the death certificate, including in combination with other health conditions.
These figures are likely to offer detail on how many community deaths involve coronavirus, rather than just looking at deaths in hospitals. Sir Patrick said these ONS figures would provide “extra numbers” but they would not be “large”.
Public Health England (PHE) also announced that almost 11,000 coronavirus tests a day can now be carried out.
The Government had set a target of carrying out 10,000 tests a day by Sunday but PHE figures show 9,114 had been carried out as of 9am on Saturday and 8,278 had been carried out by the same time on Sunday.