Latest news on Coronavirus
We are continuing our world-leading efforts to combat the spread of coronavirus.
- Latest news today (24th February) is that there are four new cases of coronavirus in the UK, bringing the total number of cases of this disease in the UK to thirteen.
- Public safety is the government's top priority - the UK health authorities are using tried and tested infection control procedures to prevent further spread of the virus and Public Health England is continuing to work hard tracing patient contacts from the UK cases.
- The NHS remains well-prepared and well-equipped, with a number of robust measures in place and access to capital funding if they need further support.
- The UK is one of the first countries in the world to have developed an accurate test for this coronavirus and we are undertaking continuous refinement of this test – in addition to investing £20 million to develop a new vaccine for coronavirus and other infectious diseases.
Comments
Ten years of pointless Tory austerity has brought us to this.
"Well-equipped" my arse - the current nursing shortage is in the tens of thousands isn't it, Chris?
“At the moment, as I speak there have not been that many cases in the UK at all, nine detected in the UK (the latest figure is now 11 cases).
“A very small number of cases. I think Cumbria is very well equipped to deal with cases on that sort of level, if we have a case here we’ll be able to cope with that absolutely fine."
So we're well equipped to deal with "a very small number" of cases - if we have "a case here" we'll be able to cope absolutely fine.
Thanks for pointing out the typo - I hadn't lost the end, just accidentally repeated the first few words at the end. Now corrected.
The NHS is not underequipped - it has more modern equipment than ever before. Staffing is more of an issue.
Resources given to the NHS have continued to rise faster than inflation. The problem is that demand is effectively infinite and whenever you manage to improve public health - which is of course a very good thing - people live longer, so more of us live to old age - again, a very good thing - but it inevitably means that we get more conditions which put more pressure on the NHS.
That is not a reason not to put more resources into the NHS, which I support and is what the government is doing. It just means that concepts like "understaffing" and "underfunding" are not terribly helpful because there is no level of funding, staffing or NHS capacity for which rising demand will not ultimately reach that NHS capacity and put great pressure on the service.
But yes, there is a shortage of professional staff which is being addressed by training 25% more doctors - that was started under Jeremy Hunt and is happening but the benefits will take decades to work through - training more nurses & reinstating the nurse training bursary - and I think we need to do even more.
In the short term we need to continue to change the immigration rules to make it easier to recruit medical professionals from abroad (as the government did by exempting people coming to work in the NHS from a skilled labour cap, and as the new points system is intended to do.)
In the long term we need a fundamental overhaul of the system of doctor training which makes us self-sufficient in medical professionals.
What you call "lukewarm" I call not being complacent about the scale of the potential challenge.
Nevertheless the government is taking all necessary measures to keep the public safe and have a clear plan to contain, delay, research and mitigate this virus.
The government has also already put in place enhanced monitoring measures at UK airports, and health information is available at all international airports, ports and international train stations.
At the moment the Chief medical officer to the NHS says that the risk to the UK is low, but obviously we cannot be complacent.
With regard to NHS resourcing, the NHS in England has more doctors than it has ever had before. Over the last 15 years the number of hospital medical staff has risen substantially from 87,000 in 2004 to over 120,000 in July 2019 – a 38% increase. Within that figure, the number of hospital consultants rose by 67% (from 30,650 to 51,250)
The number of full-time equivalent adult nurses has increased from 169,400 in 2009 to 183,700 in July 2019.
Full-time equivalent ambulance staff numbers rose from 30,000 in November 2009 to over 38,000 in July 2019.
Source for the above figures is the Nuffield Trust.
This is however not enough and I believe we need to build on the 25% increase in doctor training places which the present government put in place three years ago with further increases, make sure the re-introduction of nurse training bursaries drives the significant increases promised in the Conservative manifesto - it wasn't just improving retention though that is actually an important thing to do - and continue these increases so that that Britain becomes self-sufficient in all medical specialities, which at the moment we are not.
There remain a number of specialities and areas in which the NHS suffers from significant shortages of professional staff, these include GPs, dentists and several kinds of nurse and this must be addressed.
We have not trained enough medical professionals in this country for the last thirty years under governments of any political colour. The first steps have been taken to put this right but more needs to be done.
"Dear @MattHancock what are you doing to protect GPs from coronavirus outbreak? Currently we have 2 masks for the whole surgery and no full PPE or training in how to use PPE. What will happen to our patients when we catch it?"
I have quote-tweeted it to you, so you can satisfy yourself that it is entirely genuine.
Will you now accept that you were wrong when you wrote that the NHS is "well-prepared and well-equipped" to deal with the coronavirus outbreak?
"tried and tested infection control procedure to prevent further spread of the virus".
Will you now accept that public health is not this government's top priority, as it is willing to compromise international infection control procedures purely to bolster its negotiating position with the EU?
Details of the steps to be taken to help combat the spread of Coronavirus are to be announced tomorrow. Let's see what they say about support for GP practices.
Britain has not at this point in time withdrawn from EWRS. Paul Cosford of Public Health England said on BBC Radio 4's Today programme ‘We are still part of that at this stage.’
As I understand matters the government does intend to put alternative arrangements in place to co-operate with EU member states in infection control.
The prime minister’s spokesman said the government was ‘open to discussing ways of working with member states on sharing info’.
The spokesman added:
‘We have continued to work closely with our EU allies throughout this process. One practical example I could point you to is how closely we have worked together on repatriation flights.’
Then carry on with the whitewash.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/03/icu-doctor-nhs-coronavirus-pandemic-hospitals?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
The World Health Organisation has described the world as being in "uncharted territory" with this virus and it is difficult to assess exactly how severe the risk is though I don't think anyone argues that it is not a serious problem.
The UK government certainly doesn't argue that Coronavirus is not a serious threat and I don't think anything I have posted on this blog could reasonably be interpreted as suggesting that it isn't going to present major challenges. (Did I not think the problem was serious I would hardly have published four posts in a week on the subject. And if anyone reading this thinks anything here gives the impression that the problem is not serious, please tell me which words you think gave that impression and I will remove or amend them because I don't wish to send that signal.)
I do not pretend to be an expert on the subject of Coronavirus and everything I have posted here on the subject reflects advice I have been given by people who know more than me.
So am I in a position to say that Doctor Cook is wrong? Absolutely not.
When he says that "we need to be honest and transparent about the potential impact of a Wuhan-type epidemic here in the UK, which no doubt will pose a major challenge to everyone working in the NHS."
he is undoubtedly right that if an epidemic on that scale happened, it would indeed pose such a challenge.
The UK has a four part strategy to deal with Coronavirus (which has been guided by the expert recommendations of the four UK Chief Medical Officers and the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies.) are designed to prevent or delay us getting to that stage, those stages being Contain, Delay, research and finally mitigate. The first stages of the plan are designed to prevent, or at least delay, us reaching that sort of level of problem.
If we do reach such a position, however, described as a "reasonable worst case" then the fourth stage "Mitigate" is a plan to care for those who are most seriously ill and keeping essential services running at a time when large parts of the workforce may be off sick.
The main body of Dr Cook's article doesn't say "in terms" the words you attribute to him. The headline does, but surely you know better than to assume that the author of a piece in a newspaper also wrote the headline?
An example is when anyone in the retail trade says
"There's no demand for it,"
a comment which when used is invariably made to someone who is indeed demanding the very product which supposedly there is no demand for.
And another example is when a comment accusing a blog or website of "whitewash" is published on that blog.
If the charge was accurate the blog or website would not have allowed it to be published.
The default setting on blogger is for comment moderation to be on, in which case comments can only appear if the site author approves them: alternatively as I have done (something very unusual among people involved in politics) the blog author can turn comment moderation off so that comments will (usually) appear immediately they are made.
If I was trying to apply whitewash to the coronavirus situation or suppress expression of any views on this blog which I disagree with, I could turn comment moderation back on and ensure that those comments above which I might find politically inconvenient or anything else which I might not want to appear here never saw the light of day.
I would not even have to lie about it if challenged on another platform. I could simply say that sometimes comments which I would have expected to be published do get caught by comment moderation or put into the SPAM filter, which is true - it happened to one of your comments and one from "Cumbrian Nerd" last week and I only found them because he also emailed me.
So please don't insult the intelligence of my other readers by accusing me of whitewashing - if I were, they would not see the comment.
How many nurses are we short at present?
How many doctors are we short?
How many ancillary staff?
How many beds?
Whitewashing is not the same as suppressing views you disagree with, it's swamping them with (in this instance) governmental spin on the true state of the NHS.
BTW, I do think it's genuinely very refreshing that you keep moderation turned off here - good for you.
There does seem to be a range of views among medical professionals about how bad the Coronavirus in the UK is likely to be - the main issues on which there appears to something close to a consensus being that we don't really know how many cases we will get or how long we delay the peak impact. It also seems to be generally accepted that Matt Hancock called the "reasonable worst case" would involve a very substantial number of cases and a large fraction of the population being off work and isolated.
As I understand it the action plan now in place is a modified version, adapted to meet what we know of the current Coronavirus from existing plans, which were already drawn up and ready for implementation, to deal with a major flu epidemic.
The Department for Health and Social Care is busy taking all sorts of actions to prepare: I don't see any signs of complacency but if the scale of the infection stays within the scale of previous disease outbreaks we have seen before in this country, then the statements coming out of government that the NHS is well prepared and equipped to deal with them seem likely to be a defensible view.
If this one turns out to be much bigger than anything which has ever hit the UK in the modern era, then it is very difficult to assess how well prepared we are: we will find out.
I think it was correct when posted but to update:
the most recent risk classification from the four Chief Medical Officers for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland has since been raised from "low" to "moderate."
So I'll ask you - once again:
How many nurses are we short at present?
How many doctors are we short?
How many ancillary staff?
How many beds?
Answer these questions - honestly - and the argument is finished.
And you know it.
There IS no right answer to any of those four questions. To say how many beds we are short you would have to agree on a "right answer" for how many beds are needed and there is no perfect answer to that question.
You could quote the difference between the theoretical establishment and the actual number of people in post to get some idea of the shortage but this is a very imperfect measure because it assumes that the "establishment" number of posts is a sensible one and that is not always the case.
I have repeatedly had the argument with the CCG and Trusts in North Cumbria and in Morecambe Bay, and before that used to have it in Hertfordshire, that whenever an NHS organisation comes up with plans to treat people closer to home which should enable better care to be provided with fewer beds, they always take too many beds out, and we need to plan on the basis of a lower occupancy rate.
But if I gave you an honest answer to your beds question based on how many beds I would like to see, people who thought it should be a higher or lower figure could legitimately ask on what basis I think I know better than the professionals, while others would accuse me of understating the need. I suspect you would be one of the first to do it.
I have said again and again - including higher up this thread - that we need more medical professionals. I would like to see more doctors, nurses, dentists and midwives and recognise that there are serious shortages in a number of specialities, because we have not been training enough medical professionals in this country for decades, something for which all four of the main political parties in the country must take a share of responsibility.
The number of doctors has increased - I gave the figures above - but as I also said above, we need to increase it further.
In terms of nurses, in August 2019 there were about 281,000 FTE nurses and 6,000 FTE health visitors in the NHS in England. That's the highest comparable figure for the number of nurses in any August for the last ten years, according to Full Fact.
So the overall number of nurses is going up, although not in every speciality. But I don't think anyone would dispute your suggestion higher up the thread - I certainly don't - that if you compare it with where we would like to be, we would want to increase the number of nurses by a figure in the tens of thousands.
As I've said, the number of vacancies is not a perfect measure of where we need to be - I would like to see the number of nurses increased by more than the current number of vacancies - but for what it's worth I understand it to currently be just under 40,000 FTE some of which are currently covered by temporary staff.
Last year's Conservative manifesto proposed to recruit another 31,500 more nurses and make the profession more attractive so that as to improve retention by another 18,500 others who would otherwise leave. I think it is very important that we make every effort to at the very least deliver that promise.
Three months ago Unison said there were 106,000 vacancies across the NHS in England, of which 44,000 were in nursing.
The Healthcare Service Journal suggests we are short about 4,000 beds.
As a result of these chronic shortages and a decade of underfunding, A&E departments are putting in their worst performance since records began. Every winter the NHS struggles to cope with existing demands placed on it.
Yet you claim it is well-prepared and well-equipped to deal with a potential pandemic.
Your government knows it has a big problem persuading the electorate that the NHS is safe in Tory hands. That's why in September last year Matt Hancock, totally untruthfully, said:
“Over the next decade we will build, not ten, not twenty, but forty new state of the art hospitals.”
It's why you have parroted the (again totally untruthful) claim that the Tories will deliver 50,000 "more" nurses, when a large chunk of that "more" is actually "existing".
These fabrications are not believed, but they do indicate that even your own party knows the NHS is breaking under the strain of years of underfunding - it is NOT well-prepared and well-equipped to deal even with existing demands upon it, much less those existing demands plus Covid19.
I thought you were better than the comment above indicates. Apparently I was wrong.
For someone who has posted such a large number of comments here criticising the truthfulness of others to now post a comment making a blatantly false and misleading allegation about the comment immediately above it, as anyone who scrolls up a few paragraphs can verify, is astonishing.
I had written, quote,
"Last year's Conservative manifesto proposed to recruit another 31,500 more nurses and make the profession more attractive so that as to improve retention by another 18,500 others who would otherwise leave."
For you to misrepresent this statement in the words
'you have parroted the (again totally untruthful) claim that the Tories will deliver 50,000 "more" nurses, when a large chunk of that "more" is actually "existing" '
is a travesty of the truth. I had applied the word "more" to the figure 31,500 rather than 50,000 and had been quite open about the other part of the policy being to try to increase the retention of existing nurses by 18,500.
There is a nasty word for someone who attacks others for a particular sin while being guilty of exactly the same thing himself. I can't think of a better example than accusing the statements of others of being "untruthful" when the very sentence in which that word appears is itself very far from being the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
You are no longer in a position to criticise the veracity of anyone else and I will not again engage with you if you make any further attempts to do so on this blog.
This is what you wrote:
"...making a net increase of 50,000 in the number of nurses (some of which is recruitment and some is making the job less stressful so we don't lose so many of the ones we've already got)..."
So, my apology, you didn't use the phrase "more nurses". Instead you said "a net increase of 50,000 in the number of nurses" - which amounts to the same thing.
Your quote continues:
"...building 40 new hospitals..."
That is also untruthful, Chris, isn't it?
FullFact has pulled this to pieces - there are no "new hospitals" in the pipeline. The truth is that just six hospitals are getting upgraded.
The following is lifted directly from FullFact's analysis of your government's false claim (that you have repeated, making you untruthful, too):
"The health think tank the Health Foundation has said: “The government’s announcement today amounts to almost £3bn of additional capital funding over the next 5 years focused on upgrading six NHS hospitals. While this money is very much needed following years of underinvestment in the NHS's crumbling infrastructure, it falls well short of the scale of the challenge. With a backlog of maintenance and repairs that amounts to more than £6bn – much of which threatens patient's safety – and dozens of NHS trust upgrade projects that have been delayed or cancelled, the figure needed is closer to £3bn each year for the next 5 years.”"
Does that sound like "40 new hospitals" to you, Chris?
Or is it "40 new hospitals, net" because propping up the existing crumbling infrastructure means we hang on to hospitals we would otherwise have lost? That's how Johnsonian Newspeak works, does it?
What your government *actually* has is aspirations for "40 new hospital projects" - as in 40 new projects for existing hospitals, NOT projects for 40 new hospitals!
If you want to stop engaging with me because I'm correctly calling out instances when you have been untruthful, Chris, that's understandable. But it seems uncharacteristically, um, timid, don't you think?
I used the word "net" to refer to the net difference made by the two halves of the policy compared with where we would otherwise be.
What I cannot recall doing at any stage - and certainly didn't do in the post above on this thread, or the other one you quoted, or anything you managed to find when you waded back through earlier posts trying desperately to justify yourself by finding a post in which I had said what you wrongly implied I had said - was pretend that the whole of the 50,000 figure was newly recruited nurses. I explicitly stated in both posts that a large part of it was trying to improve retention of the existing ones.
You were right that an apology was in order, but it was not due because of semantic quibbling about a different way of saying the same thing but because I had explicitly said something you clearly implied that I had tried to conceal.
I'm not going to get into a semantic argument about the best why to describe the hospital investment programme either.
The manifesto and the Long Term plan for the NHS includes what I understand to be one of the largest programmes of investment in new facilities in the history of the NHS. It will ultimately includes forty major projects to build new hospital buildings.
Whether we are talking about "Forty new hospitals" or Forty new hospital projects" is not worth getting into an argument about. The hospital building investment programme is real and in our county you only need to take one look at the new hospital buildings at West Cumberland Hospital or those under construction at CIC in Carlisle to see that this Conservative government really is constructing lots of new hospital buildings.
I am not refusing to engage with you about the facts. I am refusing to engage with any further comments you make or attempt to make on this blog to cast doubt on anyone else's veracity, e.g. if you accuse me or any third party of being deliberately untruthful.
Despite CCHQ mischievously rebranding as a fact checking site, the real fact checkers have been quite clear: the "40 new hospitals" claim - that you perpetuated after it had been thoroughly debunked - was guff.
And your creative use of "net" is just ridiculous.
If my salary was set to be cut by £5k, and then my employer headed-off that threat and gave me a £1k rise instead , would you seriously suggest I'd had a "net" pay rise of £6k?
"Gross refers to the total amount before anything is deducted. Many important accounting statistics use this method, such as gross earnings and grossprofit. Net refers to the amount remaining after certain adjustments have been made for debts, deductions or expenses."
Net - the amount remaining.
The only desperation here is you trying to distance yourself from your own untruthful comments, while unjustifiably slagging me off
You very clearly referred to an increase in nurses. That's the same as more nurses, unless you persist in your fairytale world where stopping nurses leaving equates to an increase in nurses.
In the salary change analogy you describe one would have to be careful not to create confusion between your position relative to the status quo, which is £1k better off, and your position relative to what would have happened if the pay cut had gone ahead, which is £6k better off.
Your employer would be perfectly correct to say that the combined effect of cancelling the £5k pay cut and giving you a £1k pay increase would leave you £6k better off than you would have been had neither of those changes been made.
However, he or she would leave themselves open to the charge of being misleading if they said that you were £6k better off in a way which did not explain this and could be taken as meaning that you were £6k better off in absolute terms rather than relative to a £5k pay cut.
It was for a very similar reason that I was careful NOT to simply quote the 50k figure without making absolutely clear and explicit that the whole of that number did not mean new nurses, some of it was preventing existing nurses from leaving.
If I had quoted the 50,000 nurses claim without that qualification, you would have had a case in the criticisms you are making against what I wrote about nursing numbers.
Because I didn't, you don't.
Perhaps with 20:20 hindsight I would have been less open to a false charge of misrepresenting the situation if I had used the expression "combined effect" rather than the word "net" but there was nothing misleading in what I wrote.
Both the post on this thread about nursing numbers and the similar post on a previous thread which you quoted made absolutely crystal clear that the policy had two elements - one was recruiting some extra nurses and the other was trying to make the job more attractive so that fewer of our existing nurses leave.
I cannot recall at any stage doing what you effectively accused me of doing, e.g. parroting the 50,000 number without making clear that a large part of the "more" was actually "existing." I certainly didn't do so in either of the posts made or referred to in this thread and I'm sure if you had managed to find a post in which I had you would have highlighted it.
You'll notice that I have not thrown the "L" word at you. That is because I suspect that the unfair allegation you made against me in your post six above this one was the result not of a deliberate falsehood but because you had misremembered or made a wrong assumption about what I had previously written.
When I called you on it your first reaction was to post that you would now have to trawl back through previous posts to find where I had written what you thought I had written.
Obviously you failed to do so.
I hope that if I found myself in such a position I would give a wholehearted apology.
Instead you gave a half-hearted non-apology apology and have put up two posts using Jesuitical logic-chopping and semantic arguments like the red herring over the use of the word "net" to try make out that what I wrote was essentially the same as what you thought I had written.
Which my post that you quoted damned well wasn't.
We've both made our views clear and to be honest I think we both have better things to do than continue this argument.
You would have received a wholehearted apology if you'd deserved it. You didn't, so you didn't.
Just heard your latest chancellor once again spouting the false claim of "40 new hospitals" in his budget speech.
It will once again be shown to be without foundation, but you're in good company in refusing to accept that this is a gross falsehood.
It's not true.
You know it.
Sunak knows it.
In repeating it, he deserves the L word, even by your own criteria. But I won't use it, because that'd give you a convenient excuse for once again deleting this post.
Which I'm guessing you might be tempted to do anyway, even though you've signally failed to justify your own propagation of the falsehood, and therefore by extension Sunak's falsehood just now.
"Oh yes you did!" "Oh No I didn't" pantomime territory.
Paul has expressed his opinion of things I wrote.
I've explained why I think those criticisms were unfair.
Paul has explained why he thinks they stand
This is now post number 28 of the game of ping-pong.
Debate can be interesting or amusing if it's done in a constructive way but there comes a point when people are repeating essentially the same things and neither will budge. Godwin's law is one measure of when it's time to close the discussion and walk away but I think when people are accusing one another of being less than honest and neither side will budge is another.
I think this thread is on life-support and it's time to pull the plug.
I'm not going to block new posts on this thread just in case anyone has anything genuinely new to say but any further posts on this specific thread which just rehash the same accusations, or which imply dishonesty, even if the specific words are those like "untruthful" which I would normally allow, will be deleted.