Health News at Your Fingertips

More than a quarter of black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) NHS staff are still waiting for a risk assessment for Covid-19, data suggests. Figures seen by the Health Service Journal (HSJ) suggest 73% of BAME staff had had a risk assessment in England by July 17, but in some hospital trusts the figure was just 20%. As PA Media reports, NHS England recommended risk assessments for BAME staff as long ago as April and has now extended the deadline for them to be completed to the end of July.

Imposing an earlier lockdown in England would have saved lives, according to a report into the high death rate of London bus drivers in the pandemic by a leading expert on health and social inequalities. As my colleague Sarah Boseley reports, male London bus drivers aged 20 to 65 were 3.5 times more likely to die from Covid-19 between March and May than men in other occupations across England and Wales, says Sir Michael Marmot. Sarah’s full story is here.

Cancer Research UK has welcomed the government proposal to ban unhealthy food being advertised on TV before 9pm as part of its obesity strategy.

The British Chambers of Commerce has described the snap decision on Saturday to reimpose quarantine restrictions on travellers returning to the UK from Spain as a “hammer blow” to the travel and tourism industries. This is from the BCC’s director general, Adam Marshall. He said:

Abrupt changes to quarantine measures will be yet another hammer blow for the fragile travel and tourism industries, both here in the UK and overseas.

Firms will now have to manage the effects of this unexpected change as returning staff have to quarantine upon their return to the UK. Support measures should be extended to help firms and their employees manage the additional uncertainty generated by this and other government decisions.

Businesses will be asking why Spain was on the safe list on Friday, only to be taken off it on Saturday. Changes to quarantine rules must be communicated clearly by government with as much notice as possible. Continued improvement of the test and trace programme, alongside co-ordinated checks at departure and arrival airports, could alleviate the need for many of these restrictions.

Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has urged the government not to start scaling back the furlough scheme next month. From August employers using the scheme will have to start paying national insurance and pensions contributions. But Khan said some firms in London’s cultural and hospitality sector would not be able to cope, and that new figures from HMRC showed the number of workers in London being furloughed rising by 20% in June, taking the total to 1.3 million – 30% of the capital’s eligible workforce.

In a statement Khan said:

We want to do everything we possibly can to get our businesses and venues in London thriving once again, but many are on financial knife edge with social distancing rules meaning a return to normality is still a long way off. The current financial challenges for business in central London and the West End remain particularly acute.

For sectors such as creative industries and hospitality it is still too early for many businesses to pick up the cost of national insurance and pension contributions – I am deeply concerned this will simply accelerate a surge in unemployment in businesses already struggling to cover their costs.

The government must continue to invest in the furlough scheme now, or I fear we will see the tragic social and economic consequences of further unemployment.

In a briefing on the obesity strategy announced by the government today (see 9.14am and 9.54am), the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the tax and spending thinktank, says the government’s plan for a ban on TV and online adverts for food high in fat, sugar and salt before 9pm might only have a limited impact. The IFS says:

It is unlikely that extending advertising restrictions would lead to such a large reduction in the amount of advertising for unhealthy food and drinks that people actually see. This is because firms could increase their advertising of these products after the watershed or on other types of media.

Research has shown that this happened before. Following the introduction of the 2007 ban on advertising food and drink products that are high in fat, sugar or salt during children’s television, restricted adverts were shifted from children’s television to unrestricted non-children’s television.

The Office for National Statistics has announced that its Covid-19 infection survey is going to be extended to cover Northern Ireland. The survey tracks the incidence of coronavirus not by counting the number of people who fall ill and test positive, but by sending out testing kits by a representative sample of people picked randomly, which means it picks up asymptomatic cases as well as symptomatic cases.

The Northern Ireland health minister, Robin Swann, said:

I very much welcome the fact that the Covid-19 infection survey is being rolled out to Northern Ireland. The research will complement studies already underway into antibody seroprevalence in different population groups.

The more we know and understand about Covid -19, the better equipped we will be to deal with it.

It is particularly important that we build up our knowledge on the spread of the virus within our population.

I would strongly encourage anyone who receives an invitation to take part in the survey to accept.

The ONS survey has already been tracking cases in England and Wales. Its latest report, published last week, estimated that around one person in 2,000 in England had coronavirus in the week from 13 to 19 July, the most recent for which data is available.

It also estimated that new cases that week were running at round 2,800 per day in England.

Siobhan Benita has announced that she is withdrawing as the Lib Dem candidate for London mayor because she cannot commit to campaigning for another year. The election was due to be held in May, but was postponed until 2021 because of coronavirus. She said:

The demands on a candidate are significant and an election of this scale, particularly in an unpaid role, means it’s really difficult to get other work.

And unfortunately with the delay due to the pandemic I’m simply not able to commit to another full year of campaigning and to leading the type of campaign that I really want to lead in London.

On the government’s tackling obesity strategy, these are from my colleague Peter Walker (who posted them on Twitter earlier before joining the 48-hour boycott organised as a protest against Twitter’s complacency in relation to antisemitism). Peter is something of a specialist on this topic, with a book out next year on the health benefits of exercise.

The prime minister – who has previously been a prominent critic of state-backed measures to get people’s weight down – has claimed that the new “Better Health Strategy” would help people “not in an excessively bossy or nannying way”.

A video showing Boris Johnson walking the dog, to the strains of gentle classical music, has been posted on his twitter account, where he adds:

“We want this one really to be sympathetic to people, to understand the difficulties that people face with their weight, the struggles that everybody faces or many, many people face to lose weight, and just to be helpful.

This looks fairly synchronised. The government’s obesity plans also got some backing from chef Jamie Oliver, a longtime campaigner against child obesity, who tweeted this at around the same time as the Johnson tweet came out:

Ryanair will not reduce the number of flights to and from Spain, despite the British government’s decision to impose a 14-day quarantine on visitors returning from the country, which the airline’s chief financial officer called “regrettable,” reports Joanna Partridge.

The requirement for all travellers arriving in the UK from Spain to self-isolate for two weeks came into effect at midnight on Sunday, only hours after it was announced.

“I think it is regrettable, very disappointing,” Neil Sorahan told Reuters in an interview after the release of the Irish airline’s quarterly financial results.

Ryanair has not followed the lead of Tui, Europe’s biggest holiday company, which has cancelled all Britons’ holidays to mainland Spain up and including 9 August.

Travellers who are already there and those who were due to go on holiday in Spain this morning and the coming days have been airing their concerns on social media this morning, in some cases taking aim at the approach of individual companies.

Others have been putting forward a different take