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The UK will now ensure daily deliveries of personal protective equipment to frontline workers, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said.
He told the daily coronavirus briefing it had been a “Herculean effort”, after criticism the government was not doing enough to protect critical NHS staff.
Officials told the briefing the lockdown was “beginning to pay off” but it was still a “dangerous situation”.
The UK recorded another 980 hospital deaths, bringing the total to 8,958.
But England’s deputy chief medical officer, Jonathan Van-Tam, warned it was “impossible to say we have peaked”, adding that the measures the country was taking with social distancing needed to continue.
The UK’s daily death toll, which does not include those who died in care homes or the community, has now exceeded the worst daily figures seen in Italy and Spain.
The total number of deaths worldwide has now passed 100,000, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University in the US.
‘Precious resource’
Mr Hancock told the briefing at Downing Street that the daily deliveries of protective equipment to 58,000 health and care providers would start next week, but he said it must be used only where it was most needed.
“There’s enough PPE to go around, but only if it’s used in line with our guidance. We need everyone to treat PPE like the precious resource that it is,” he said.
He also cautioned against using protective gear outside of health and social care settings, saying handwashing, social distancing and staying at home were the best ways for people to stay safe.
“A front door is better than any face mask,” Mr Hancock said.
Those looking after Covid-19 patients are themselves most at risk of catching the virus.
Protective gear and testing are vital not only for protecting staff, but also for minimising the spread of Covid-19.
There have been constant stories of doctors, nurses or care home staff not getting the protection they need.
The government says it has been, in part, a logistical problem. Instead of supplying just over 200 hospital organisations with PPE they now delivering to 58,000 separate organisations including pharmacies, care homes and GP surgeries.
We are still not at the peak of the outbreak, despite some positive signs in the data.
However, even if we pass the peak and cases start to fall it won’t mean all restrictions can be lifted.
The best estimate of the proportion of people infected (and potentially immune in the UK) is 4%. Or to put that another way – more than 63 million are still vulnerable to the infection. So lifting the lockdown could lead to another surge in cases.
Instead the government will have to decide which restrictions to lift, which to keep and what new strategies to introduce in order to suppress the virus.
But Susan Masters, national director of nursing policy and practice at the Royal College of Nursing, said: “These figures on deliveries are only impressive when nursing staff stop contacting me to say what they need to use wasn’t available.
“The calls are still coming through – people are petrified. They have seen colleagues die already.”
At the government’s briefing, chief nursing officer Ruth May paid tribute to frontline staff who had died after contracting coronavirus.
“The NHS is a family and we feel their loss deeply,” she said.
Appealing to the public to continue observing the lockdown rules, she said it was “frustrating” for NHS staff to see people failing to observe the social distancing.
“It is enormously frustrating… there’s also still occasions where my colleagues are getting abuse from their neighbours for driving off to work,” she said.
“Our nurses, our healthcare staff, need to be able to get to work, it’s right and proper they do, but my ask of everybody, please stay at home, save lives and protect my staff.”
Mr Hancock also told the briefing 15 drive-through testing centres had been opened across the UK to enable all frontline NHS and social care staff to be screened for the virus.
The 19,100 tests carried out in the last day still fall well short of the health secretary’s target of 100,000 a day by the end of April.
But he said new “Lighthouse mega-labs” were on track in Cheshire and Glasgow, and another has opened in Milton Keynes. Pharmaceutical giants AstraZeneca and GSK were opening an additional testing facility in Cambridge, he added.
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