Local lockdowns may have prevented current second wave of coronavirus cases taking hold across UK, Jeremy Hunt says

Local lockdowns may have prevented the current second wave of coronavirus cases from taking hold across the UK, Jeremy Hunt has said.

The former health secretary said the local lockdowns may have stopped the current wave of Covid-19 infections from becoming a national outbreak.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think the evidence from what happened earlier in the year, not just in this country but all over the world, is that acting early, decisively, quickly, is actually the best way to contain the spread of the virus and that’s what I think Chris Whitty and the Prime Minister are saying.

“One of the things that is often not noted about Italy was the successful way in which they managed to contain the outbreak of the virus in northern Italy, in Lombardy, and avoid it spreading to the rest of the country.

“Now, we didn’t manage to do that first time round but it just may be that these local lockdowns, although we haven’t seen a big reduction in transmission within those areas, they may just have contained it and stopped it from becoming the national outbreak that we had before.”

He also called for NHS staff in hotspot areas for Covid-19 infections to be tested on a weekly basis.

The Commons Health Committee chairman said ideally all NHS staff across the country should be regularly tested.

Asked if he was confused about why more frontline testing was not being carried out, he said: “I am puzzled and I know there are some capacity issues.

“Chris Whitty actually moved towards this position somewhat when he said in July that he did agree with routine testing of asymptomatic NHS staff in hotspot areas – I would like it to be everywhere, but he accepted it was the right thing to do in areas where there is growth.

“But that is not happening.

“Some of those hospitals are trying really hard to test all their staff using their own laboratories but to do that on a weekly basis, they need support from NHS Test and Trace, they need additional reagents and what we really need is for the Government to say, ‘You need to make this happen at least in areas where there is high prevalence and we will help you if you can’t do it yourself’.”

Regular testing of all hospital staff would give the public confidence to use NHS services, Mr Hunt said.

“The way you give people confidence is by saying that every member of staff in this hospital, everyone who has any contact with patients, is being tested once or twice a week,” he told Times Radio.

“There are definitely measures that you can take and I think hospitals have shown incredible resilience in tackling these kind of logistical challenges.

“But I do think it’s very important as we go into winter, when hospitals are going to become a lot busier anyway, that we avoid what happened.

“One major London teaching hospital had more than 40 per cent of their staff infected. That’s an incredibly dangerous thing to allow to happen and that’s what we have got to make sure doesn’t happen this time.”

The latest figures showed a further 7,108 lab-confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK, slightly down on the 7,143 reported on Tuesday.

The Government also said a further 71 people had died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 as of Wednesday. This brings the UK total to 42,143.

Separate figures published by the UK’s statistics agencies show there have now been nearly 57,900 deaths registered in the UK where Covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate.