Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock on 23 December 2020 at the Downing Street coronavirus briefing was joined by Dr Jenny Harries, Deputy Chief Medical Officer, and Dr Susan Hopkins, the Chief Medical Advisor to Public Health England and NHS Test and Trace.
Matt Hancock said, The average daily COVID hospital admissions are 1,909 a day – that’s the highest figure since mid-April.
There are 18,943 people in hospital right now, that’s almost as many as at the peak.
And yesterday, 691 deaths from coronavirus were reported. That’s 691 people who have died just before Christmas. And our hearts go out to their families and loved ones as with all those that have died from this horrible disease. I know the pain this causes.
So against this backdrop of rising infections, rising hospitalisations and rising number of people dying from coronavirus, it is absolutely vital that we act.
We simply cannot have the kind of Christmas that we all yearn for.
Of course, it’s the social contact that makes Christmas so special. But it is that social contact that the virus thrives on, and that’s how the virus has spread from one person to another.
So it’s important that we all minimise our social contact as much as is possible this Christmas, and that will help protect ourselves, our loved ones and the whole country.
We’ve got to keep our resolve. We’ve got to keep going through this.
And there are 4 areas of our response that I want to update you on today very specifically.
Local action
The first are those tiering decisions that I’ve just mentioned.
We know that the 3-tiered system worked to control the old variant, and is working now in large parts of the country, especially in Northern England.
But, we also know that Tier 3 is not enough to control the new variant. That is not a hypothesis, it is a fact, and we’ve seen it on the ground.
We have seen case rates rise in some of places close to where the current Tier 4 restrictions are, in places like East Anglia, where we’ve also detected a significant number of the new variant as we’ve seen case rates rise sharply.
It is therefore necessary to put more of the East and South East of England into Tier 4.
We are also taking action in parts of the South West, where there are some early signs of the new variant, and where cases are rising.
Even though case rates in some of these areas are not as high as in some areas badly affected, in London for instance and in Kent, the direction is clear, and in many cases is quite stark.The doubling times are short.
And we have learnt that when it’s a matter of when, not if we take action. It is better to act sooner.
So, from one minute past midnight on Boxing Day, Sussex, Oxfordshire, Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, those parts of Essex not yet in Tier 4, Waverley in Surrey, and Hampshire, including Portsmouth and Southampton, but with the exception of the New Forest, will be escalated to Tier 4.
Bristol, Gloucestershire, Somerset, including the North Somerset Council area, Swindon, the Isle of Wight, New Forest and Northamptonshire, as well as Cheshire and Warrington, will be escalated to Tier 3.
And I’m afraid Cornwall and Herefordshire have seen sharply rising rates and need to be escalated to Tier 2. This is not news that anybody wants to deliver. And I am truly sorry for the disruption that it causes.
But I think people know how important it is that we take decisions like this to keep people safe and to protect the NHS.
South Africa
The second piece of new I want to tell you about is developments on another new strain of this virus.
Of course, the fight against this virus is a global effort.
And we are constantly vigilant and looking around the world.
As part of our surveillance, and thanks to the impressive genomic capability of the South Africans, we have detected 2 cases of another new variant of coronavirus here in the UK.
Both are contacts of cases who have travelled from South Africa over the past few weeks.
The Chief Scientific Advisor and Chief Medical Officer and others met their South African counterparts over the last day.
We are incredibly grateful to the South African Government for the rigour of their science, and the openness and the transparency with which they have rightly acted, as we did when we discovered the new variant here.
This new variant is highly concerning, because it is yet more transmissible and it appeared to have mutated further than the new variant that has been discovered here. We have taken the following action.
First, we are quarantining cases, and close contacts of cases, found here in the UK.
Second, we are placing immediate restrictions on travel from South Africa.
Finally, and most importantly, anyone in the UK who has been in South Africa in the past fortnight, and anyone who has been in close contact with anyone who has been in South Africa in the last fortnight, must quarantine immediately.
By quarantine, I mean they must restrict all contact with any other person whatsoever.
We will be changing the law to give this legal effect imminently.
These measures are temporary, while we investigate this further new strain, which is currently being analysed at Porton Down.
And I want to thank everyone involved for the seriousness with which I know they will take these instructions.
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