UK coronavirus: Hancock to consider using rapid-result tests for people told to self-isolate - as it happened

Hunt asks about the efficiency of the system.

He says the ONS says 52,000 people are getting Covid every day. If they all have around three and a half close contacts, that means there are 177,000 every day who should be told to self-isolate.

But NHS test and trace is only finding around a third of positive cases, he says. And it is only reaching 60% of people. And, when people are asked to self-isolate, only 20% do. That is less than 5,000, or around 3% of the theoretical maximum, Hunt says.

Harding says she does not accept all Hunt’s assumptions.

The hardest thing is to know how many people are getting the disease, she says.

If 50,000 people are getting the disease every day, NHS test and trace is finding more than a third a day. It is finding 20-25,000.

She says Hunt’s assumption about contacts reached is a bit low. Last week the service reached 77.8% of people whose details it had, she says.

She says there has been a 17-fold increase in the number of people being contacted.

She says Hunt is being “slightly pessimistic”.

She says there are a number of difference surveys about compliance with self-isolation. Hunt quoted the most pessimistic, she says. It is not black and white. Some of those who said they were not complying may just have popped out for some fresh air.

She says one survey said 54% of people asked to self-isolate did not leave home.

Overall, she says, the system is getting better and better.

UPDATE: Hunt then said that, even allowing for Harding’s arguments, the system was reaching no more than 20% of the people it should be reaching.

Harding replied:

If it’s a tool that contributes to 20%-plus of our fight against Covid, then it’s a hugely valuable and important tool.

I describe it as our second line of defence. Our first line of defence is actually our own behaviour - social distancing, wearing of face masks, washing our hands.

The harsh reality is that that first line of defence and that second line of defence on their own have not been enough to prevent a second wave, and that is true across the whole of Europe.

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Harding says the second wave is not the same as the first.

We are going into it with the R number lower, she says.

And she says test and trace is operating. That means we have a much better idea where the disease is spreading.

She says it would be nice to think that test and trace could hold it back. But that is not the case. She says test and trace is just one of the ways of holding the virus back.

Much as I would love that testing and tracing on its own would be a silver bullet to holding back the tide of Covid, unfortunately the evidence in the UK and in every other country in Europe is that’s not the case.

That, actually, the way we have to tackle the disease is through a variety of different interventions and we are one of the ways, not the only way.

Jeremy Hunt, chair of the health committee, says in east Asian countries test and trace has held the virus back. Why has that not happened here?

Dr Susan Hopkins, the NHS chief medical adviser, who is giving evidence with Harding, says in those countries cases were reduced to very low numbers – the low hundreds.

Clark says Harding must have some idea whether most of the money is being spent nationally or locally.

Harding says she does not have those figures to hand. She has control over some of this spending, but not all of it, she says.

Dido Harding, head of NHS test and trace, is being questioned by MPs from the health and science committees now.

Greg Clark, the science committee chair, starts.

Q: What is the monthly budget for test and trace?

She said, of the total test and trace budget, 80% went on testing. The rest when on contact tracing, technology, and centralised costs.

Q: And, within that 20%, what is spent centrally and what is spent locally?

Harding says she cannot give that figure.

But she says contact tracing is a genuine joint venture. Public Health England and local public health officials are also involved.

Prof Sir John Bell, the regius professor of medicine at Oxford University and a member of the government’s vaccine taskforce, also told MPs from the science and health committees that telling people to self-isolate for 14 days if they were are risk of getting coronavirus was “massively ineffective”.

Greg Clark, the chair of the science committee, asked him if he thought it reasonable to ask people without symptoms to self-isolate for 14 days because they had been in contact with a person with the virus. Bell replied:

The data on this is pretty clear and that is, only very few of those people are actually infected. And in order to prevent a single transmission, you have to isolate 70 of those people for one day. So it is massively ineffective.

And the trouble is that the people out there know it is massively ineffective. That’s why they hate it.

Now, we can do whole lockdowns. It’s 1,000 people a day to stop one transmission, so that’s why people don’t like that either.

Bell said the solution was to use quarantine more precisely.

And he also suggested giving more freedom for three months to people who have had the vaccine, on the grounds that during that period they were very unlikely to be infectious.

UPDATE: See 12.50pm for more quotes from Bell, where he called for regular testing of people told to self-isolate and new freedoms for people who receive the vaccine.

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Bell also told the health and science committees that he thought up to three vaccines might be available by the new year. He said:

I wouldn’t be surprised if we hit the new year with two or three vaccines, all of which could be distributed.

And that’s why I’m quite optimistic of getting enough vaccinations done in the first quarter of next year that by spring things will start to look much more normal than they do now.

Prof Sir John Bell, the regius professor of medicine at Oxford University and a member of the government’s vaccine taskforce, gave the nation a hallelujah moment yesterday when he told the World at One that the the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine efficacy results meant life might get returning to normal in the spring. (See 9.12am.)

But he is giving evidence to the Commons health and science committees this morning he seems to have added a qualification; we could start returning to normal “provided they don’t screw up the distribution of the vaccine”.

This is from Sky’s Rowland Manthorpe.

UPDATE: Here is a fuller version of the quote. Ask what he thought the chance was of vaccinating the most vulnerable by Easter, Bell said:

I think we have got a 70 - 80% chance of doing that. That’s provided they don’t screw up the distribution of a vaccine. That’s not my job, but provided they don’t screw that up it will all be fine.

Here are some more lines from the interviews that Matt Hancock, the health secretary, gave this morning.

• Hancock stressed that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine results did not remove the need for people to follow the current guidelines. He said:

This is very promising news but it is one step of many that we need to take to get out of this and to tackle this pandemic once and for all ...

The critical thing is that for all your viewers is that we all keep our resolve on measures that are currently in place now because it will still take some time for this good news that the Pfizer vaccine is around 90% effective, to proving it is safe, being able to licence it, and then the vast task, which obviously we have been working on for some time, of making sure that everybody in the population can get the jab.

• He said he expected the roll-out of the vaccine to mostly take place in the first part of 2021. He said:

The central expectation of the bulk of the rollout and deployment has always been in the first part of 2021.

This is a promising step but that’s the central expectation of our timescale.

If we got bad news we might have had to push that back, that remains my central expectation.

• He said he did not know when the Oxford vaccine trial was going to report more information. Asked about that, he said:

We don’t know exactly when, the timings of this publication are determined by science, not by some administrative decision.

We are not exactly sure when further news will come from the Oxford trial but we are working again to ensure that that can be deployed should it come off.

The ONS has just published its latest weekly death figures for England and Wales. Here are the main points.

• The number of deaths in England and Wales in the week ending 30 October was 10.1% above the five-year average. These are described as “excess deaths”. The total number of deaths in the week was 10,887. This chart shows how excess deaths (the gaps between the dark blue lines and the light blue lines) have been rising recently, although they remain far, far lower than they were during the first wave.
  

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• 12.7% of all deaths in the week ending 30 October in England and Wales involved coronavirus. That meant 1,379 deaths, up from 978 deaths (9.1%) involving coronavirus in the previous week. “Involving coronavirus” means it was mentioned on the death certificate.

• Of the 1,379 deaths involving coronavirus in the week ending 30 October, 86.7% of them cited Covid-19 as the underlying cause of death.

• London was the only region in England and Wales in the week ending 30 October not to record excess deaths. Here are the regional figures.

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Good morning. Matt Hancock, the health secretary, has been touring the broadcast interviews this morning giving interviews on the back of yesterday’s announcement that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has been shown to be 90% effective in early trials.

Although he stressed that the full safety data for the vaccine was not yet available, he said that he had ordered the NHS to be ready to start distributing the vaccine from December. It would be a “colossal exercise”, he said. The government was providing GPs with £150m to fund the programme.

Hancock also said this would be a seven-days-a-week programme, involving the vaccine being distributed through care homes, GPs and pharmacists as well as “go-to” vaccination centres set up in venues such as sports halls. Vaccination would go on during the day and “into the evenings”, he said.

We will be working across the NHS with the support of the armed forces seven days a week, over weekends, over bank holidays, to get this rolled out into people’s arms as quickly as possible.

But Hancock also expressed a note of caution. Yesterday, in a notable exchange on the BBC’s World at One, Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University, told the presenter, Sarah Montague, that the vaccine news meant he was now confident life should be returning to normal by spring.

Hancock was more equivocal. Asked if he agreed with Bell, he replied:

We want to get life back to normal as quickly as possible. I am not going to put a date on it because there are so many steps we need to go through.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Boris Johnson chairs cabinet.

9.30am: The ONS publishes it weekly death figures for England and Wales.

9.30am: Fiona Hill, Theresa May’s former co-chief of staff, is among various former No 10 aides giving evidence to the Commons public administration and constitutional affairs committee on the role of the PM’s office.

10am: Amanda Spielman, head of Ofsted, gives evidence to the Commons education committee.

10.30am: Dido Harding, head of NHS Test and Trace, gives evidence to the Commons health and science committees, who are holding a joint ‘coronavirus - lessons learnt’ inquiry. Other witnesses include Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University, at 9.45am.

12pm: Downing Street is due to hold its lobby briefing.

12.30pm: A defence minister responds to a Commons urgent question about the use of the military in the roll-out of mass testing.

Around 1pm: Matt Hancock, the health secretary, makes a statement to MPs about coronavirus.

2pm: Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister, makes a statement to the Scottish parliament about coronavirus.

Politics Live is now doubling up as the UK coronavirus live blog and, given the way the Covid crisis eclipses everything, this will continue for the foreseeable future. But we will be covering non-Covid political stories too, like Brexit, and when they seem more important or more interesting, they will take precedence.

Here is our global coronavirus live blog.

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