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Tuesday 21 July 2020 18:19
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Professor Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, has warned that the chances of a “highly effective” vaccine being ready for distribution by Christmas are “very low”.
Giving evidence to the Commons Health and Social Care Select Committee on Tuesday, Prof Whitty said although he was “cautiously optimistic” there would be a vaccine this side of Christmas, the chances of it being “actually highly effective is in my view very low.”
It comes as a Nobel Prize winning geneticist has warned the UK government risks sleepwalking into a “winter of discontent” unless clear governance structures are implemented for the remainder of the pandemic. Professor Sir Paul Nurse, a distinguished scientist and director of the Francis Crick Institute, criticised what he described as the government’s “pass the parcel” approach. Matt Hancock has since told MPs preparing for winter was a ‘priority’ for his department.
Florida’s skyrocketing coronavirus death rate is now higher than any other state, edging out Texas, which has about 25 per cent more people.
Florida recorded another 134 deaths Tuesday, bringing its daily average for the past week to 115, topping the 112 deaths a day Texas has reported during that time, according to news agency the Associated Press.
A month prior, Florida was averaging 33 coronavirus deaths a day.
Overall, 5,317 people have died in Florida from Covid-19 since 1 March and nearly 370,000 have tested positive for the disease. About 19 per cent of tests have returned positive in Florida over the last week, compared to 10 per cent a month ago and 2.3 per cent in late May.
The state reported that an additional 517 people have been admitted to hospitals with the disease.
Coronavirus infections across the US likely much higher than initially reported, according to newly released report from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
The agency’s report suggests that people who did not present any Covid-19 symptoms unknowingly transmitted the virus in their communities, underscoring health officials’ early warnings that testing is only capturing a fraction of the scale of infections.
For most areas, “it is likely that greater than 10 times more” infections occurred than there were cases reported, though most residents were not symptomatic, the report says.
More below:
The United States has charged two hackers and accused the Chinese government of sponsoring criminal breaches of international biotech firms developing treatments and vaccinations for the novel coronavirus.
Li Xiaoyu and Dong Jiazhi were both charged in an 11-count indictment that alleges the former engineering students hacked computers and attempted to steal terabytes of data surrounding the coronavirus pandemic.
The indictment said the two hackers “researched vulnerabilities in the networks of biotech and other firms publicly known for work on Covid-19 vaccines, treatments and testing technology”.
The novel coronavirus pandemic is showing “no signs of slowing down” in the Americas, the Pan American Health Organization director has said, with the virus landing in Guianese shield countries on the continent`s northeastern coast and surges in Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia and Peru.
Carissa Etienne told a virtual briefing from PAHO’s Washington base that some central American nations were seeing their highest weekly increase of cases since the virus landed, and that because of the high burden of infectious diseases and chronic conditions in the Americas, three out of ten people – 325 million – were at “increased risk” of developing complications from COVID-19.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock told the Commons Science and Technology Committee that his priority is “controlling the virus and preparing for winter”.
When asked if he was engaged in reforming Public Health England (PHE), Mr Hancock said: “Well there will be a time for that, my priority now is on controlling the virus and preparing for winter.
“For now, my focus is on getting the virus down, controlling the level of the virus and preparing for winter.
“So for instance, PHE is doing incredibly important work right now in local lockdowns, in local action.
“There are PHE boots on the ground in Leicester and they’re working with Blackburn and Bradford and all of the other areas where we’ve got a much higher prevalence than elsewhere.”
The US Justice Department has accused two Chinese hackers of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars of trade secrets from companies across the world and targeting firms developing a vaccine for coronavirus.
The indictment says the hackers in recent months had researched vulnerabilities in the computer networks of companies publicly known for their work in developing vaccines and treatments.
The indictment includes charges of trade secret theft and wire fraud conspiracy against the hackers, who federal prosecutors say stole information they knew would be of interest to the Chinese government.
There was no immediate indication from the indictment that the hackers had obtained any Covid-19 research, despite efforts to snoop on the companies.
The case was filed earlier this month in federal court in Washington state and was unsealed on Tuesday.
The Government said 45,422 people had died in hospitals, care homes and the wider community after testing positive for coronavirus in the UK as of 5pm on Monday, up by 110 from the day before.
Separate figures published by the UK’s statistics agencies show there have now been 56,100 deaths registered in the UK where Covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate.
“At the start it was perfectly reasonable to say that if somebody had ever registered positive with Covid and died, they died from Covid,” he told the Commons Science and Technology Committee.
“For the first few weeks of the crisis and indeed in the peak, that was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. However, that is no longer reasonable.
“Because if you have Covid in March and fully recovered, or even were asymptomatic and now die of something completely different, then the way it was being measured until last week counted that as a death with Covid, that clearly is no longer appropriate and PHE are currently reviewing that time series.”
Asked if the review by PHE was in place already, Mr Hancock said: “They’ll publish very, very shortly a revised methodology for how to get an accurate measure of deaths with Covid.”
Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the “rate-limiting factor” on delivery of a vaccine is its manufacture.
He told the Commons Science and Technology Committee: “There are a series of really important and difficult steps. From the moment a regulator signs off a vaccine as being both efficacious and safe, there are two critical parts to the next steps, but there are many other parts too that have got to go right.
“The first is the manufacture of the vaccine, which is starting before the vaccine is approved, and then the next is the distribution and administration of the vaccine, administration as in injecting it into people’s arms.
“Now, the distribution is not simple because you need a cold chain because the vaccine needs to be kept below room temperature, and then the administration of it needs to be done by people who are qualified.
“And in fact we’re changing the law, we propose to change the law, to broaden the range of qualifications that are allowed to do the vaccination.
“Getting both the manufacture and the distribution and administration right is critical.”
It comes as various US states struggle to stop the spread of the virus, with slow testing turnarounds and dwindling supplies making their efforts even harder.
Uber, which has long been sharing data with US authorities in criminal cases and emergencies, is promoting the new free service to health officials in all countries where it operates.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock said Chancellor Rishi Sunak had told him he had set a “big, hairy, audacious goal” in terms of Covid-19 testing.
“I’ve been accused of over-promising and sometimes delivering,” Mr Hancock told the Commons Science and Technology Committee.
“And the point is that when you’re handling a pandemic response and the response you need is to scale-up at a speed that is almost unprecedented within Government at a national scale, the tools that I found worked were to set demanding goals.
“In fact the Chancellor told me afterwards that I set a ‘big, hairy, audacious goal’, apparently this is a classic business school doctrine that I didn’t know that I was following.
“The point of the big, hairy, audacious goal is to say to the whole system, ‘this is where we’re going, you do your bit, let’s get there’.
“And we did that on a series of areas, because we then did it when we were building up contact tracing as well.”
Health secretary Matt Hancock has said asymptomatic coronavirus testing in settings similar to care homes but not registered by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) will begin this week.
He told the Commons Science and Technology Committee: “The systematic roll out of asymptomatic testing to environments that are essentially sheltered accommodation, that aren’t care homes, will start this week.”
During the evidence session, chair Greg Clark said the health secretary had told him in the chamber three weeks ago that it was about to begin and would be completed “within three to four weeks”.
Mr Hancock replied: “No, I said that it would be rolled out, and we couldn’t test all these settings in that period.
“It’s a challenge because there is a spectrum of what these settings are, because they’re not registered, if they were registered by the CQC, then they’d be care homes.
“And so we’re starting the roll-out of that this week.”
Will-writing service Farewill said that in April, over £35m worth of charity donations were written into wills, up from £3.5m in February and an average of £4m per month in 2019.
It said this will be welcome news for charities which have struggled as fundraising streams have dwindled due to events having to be cancelled.
Austria is reintroducing a requirement that face masks be worn in supermarkets, banks and post offices because of an increase in coronavirus infections in recent weeks.
“We have therefore decided that we will make face masks compulsory again in supermarkets, in banks, in post offices.”
But in the entire month the site remained open, it treated just three patients from the Queens Hospital Centre emergency department, records show. Overall, the field hospital cost more than $52m (£40.9m) and served only 79 patients.
The chief medical officer for England said major risks in social care settings were not considered early on in the pandemic, including staff working in multiple residences and those not paid sick leave.
He added it was clear the UK and other countries across the world had “not handled this well” in relation to issues in social care settings.
Representatives of healthcare workers have demanded that the Health and Safety Authority (HSA) be allowed to examine the high coronavirus infection rate among staff.
Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) general secretary Phil Ni Sheaghdha called for the Government to change regulations that would include Covid-19 as an occupationally acquired illness.
She also told the the Oireachtas Covid-19 Committee that healthcare workers are exhausted, adding that their biggest concern is the prospect of a second wave of coronavirus cases.
As at last Friday, there were 8,347 Covid-19 infections among healthcare workers – 32% of all cases.
The committee was told this is more than European and world averages.
Of the 8,347 cases there were 319 hospital admissions, 49 admissions to intensive care and seven deaths.
Andy Haldane said Britain has seen a V-shaped recovery, telling parliament’s Treasury Committee: “Roughly half of the roughly 25 per cent fall in activity during March and April has been clawed back over the period since.
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