Health News at Your Fingertips

The majority of secondary schools in England sent home at least one student because of coronavirus last week, UK government figures show.

Around 6-7% of state school pupils – excluding schools on half term – did not attend class for Covid-19-related reasons on 22 October, the Department for Education statistics suggest.

More than a quarter (26%) of schools said they had one or more pupils self-isolating due to potential contact with a case of coronavirus inside the school.
This equates to 55% of secondary schools and 20% of primary schools.

Overall, approximately 86% of students on the roll in state schools, excluding schools on half-term breaks, were in attendance on 22 October.

Around 82% of secondary school pupils and 90% of primary school pupils were in school last week, the figures show.

A health watchdog has raised concerns about patients who were sent home from hospital before they got the result of their Covid-19 test, PA Media reports.

A new investigation by Healthwatch England and the British Red Cross found that 30% of those who were tested for Covid-19 while in hospital did not receive their test results before they left, according to a poll of 500 patients and carers.

Experts said more must be done to improve hospital discharges as the second wave of Covid-19 hits alongside traditional winter pressures.

The poll also found that 82% of respondents did not receive a follow-up visit and assessment at home after being discharged. Of these, 18% had some form of unmet need. Some told researchers they did not feel ready to leave hospital and 35% said they did not get a contact for further advice.

Healthwatch England and the British Red Cross have made a number of recommendations to help manage hospital discharges during a second peak of the crisis. These include: post-discharge check-ins and assessments, discharge checklists and giving patients a single point of contact for further support.

Sir Robert Francis, chairman of Healthwatch England, said it was essential to learn the lessons from March, “when hospitals were asked to discharge patients with little or no notice and the speed with which this took place was important but led to mistakes”.

It’s essential that we learn from what people have shared with us about the impact that a poorly-handled discharge can have on them and their loved ones. Taking action now will not only reduce the risk to patients but will also help improve the way people leave hospital in the future.

British Red Cross chief executive Mike Adamson said simple interventions, like getting equipment and medicine delivered, or follow-up visits “can make the difference between good recovery or someone regressing to the point of readmission – precisely at the time we want people to stay well and stay at home.”

Prof Stephen Powis, NHS England’s national medical director, said:

There has long been a wide consensus about the benefits for patients of being able to return home as soon as their specialist hospital care is complete. And it is good that delays have been reduced in recent times. While this is a very small snapshot survey, local hospitals will want to take account of the points it makes.

Structural racism led to the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus pandemic on black, Asian and minority ethnic communities, a review by Dame Doreen Lawrence has concluded.

The report, commissioned by Labour, contradicts the government’s adviser on ethnicity, Dr Raghib Ali, who last week dismissed claims that inequalities within government, health, employment and the education system help to explain why Covid-19 killed disproportionately more people from minority ethnic communities.

Lawrence’s review found BAME people are over-represented in public-facing industries where they cannot work from home, are more likely to live in overcrowded housing and have been put at risk by the government’s alleged failure to facilitate Covid-secure workplaces.

She demanded that the government set out an urgent winter plan to tackle the disproportionate impact of Covid on BAME people and ensure comprehensive ethnicity data is collected across the NHS and social care.

In the report’s foreword, Lawrence said minority ethnic people have been “overexposed, under protected, stigmatised and overlooked”.

This has been generations in the making. The impact of Covid is not random, but foreseeable and inevitable – the consequence of decades of structural injustice, inequality and discrimination that blights our society. We are in the middle of an avoidable crisis. And this report is a rallying cry to break that clear and tragic pattern.

My colleague Rajeev Syal has the story:

We asked readers what they wanted to know about the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. From the ins and outs of exiting local lockdowns to why Dominic Cummings wasn’t sacked, the Guardian’s political correspondent, Peter Walker, has the answers.

Drivers are being warned to expect a rise in collisions with deer due to the latest coronavirus restrictions, PA Media reports.

The British Deer Society and the AA said the combination of quieter roads, a twilight rush-hour and seasonal migrations has led to a “new danger”. Empty roads are believed to lull animals into a false sense of security.

The latest government figures show that car traffic is down to 85% of pre-pandemic levels, amid measures such as the 10pm curfew for hospitality venues.

In May, emergency services in the south-west warned of more deer activity on the roads during the first coronavirus lockdown.

An AA poll of 13,800 drivers suggested that 16% had seen an increase in deer or other wildlife on roads during or since lockdown. This figure rises to 42% for 18- to 24-year-olds, who are the most likely to drive in the evening for sport and social activities.

The British Deer Society’s chief executive, David McAuley, urged drivers to be careful, particularly on roads with wildlife warning signs and when driving through rural areas, as road traffic accidents involving deer are especially frequent in autumn and winter during the breeding season.

The quieter roads due to Covid-19 restrictions have also made this year’s statistics more concerning and we would especially urge all drivers to be more deer-aware as the evidence shows an increase in collisions during the first Covid-19 lockdown.

Motorists are advised to reduce their speed and watch out for deer on the edges of roads, especially at dawn and dusk. If they see a deer crossing in front of their car, they should slow down and expect more to follow.

The AA’s president, Edmund King, warned early-morning and evening drivers to be on their guard, as during lockdown there was a greater incidence of deer and other wildlife “being spotted on roads you would not normally expect to see them, such as closer to and even within villages and other places of human population”.

Boris Johnson is preparing to give councils extra money for a holiday club pilot scheme to be extended so children could receive at least one free meal a day outside term time, the Daily Telegraph (paywall) reports.

Ministers are examining the proposal made by the government’s food tsar, Henry Dimbleby, and reports suggest the government could combine the scheme with extra study time for children still catching up on learning after schools were closed during the spring.

This political manoeuvring would, my colleague Sally Weale reports, enable the government to mitigate the damaging impact of its refusal to accede to Marcus Rashford’s campaign without appearing to perform yet another U-turn.

The holiday activity and food programme (HAF) was trialled across 17 local authorities over the summer, catering for 50,000 disadvantaged children.

Rashford has backed some of the recommendations made by Dimbleby, who leads the National Food Strategy and has called for the HAF to be extended across England to help an additional 1.1 million children.

Dimbleby told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the government wasn’t doing enough to address the issue of child hunger and called for urgent action:

This problem is real. It should go without saying it’s serious. It’s immediate and it’s going to get worse as employment gets worse and the government isn’t doing enough. One in seven families already are reporting not being able to afford enough food.

He said that “in-kind support” through holiday clubs, providing food and education, had been shown to have a better impact than putting the same “small amount of money” into universal credit.

I haven’t been backward in coming forward with ideas that I have been feeding in to Treasury, to [the Department for] Education and to No 10, ideas of how they could rapidly implement this by Christmas. But … the dark centre of government is invisible to me and I have no idea exactly what they’re working on as we speak.

Nicola Davis reports that the proportion of people in England with coronavirus antibodies dropped by more than a quarter in the space of three months, fuelling concerns over reinfection.

The findings come from the React-2 study, which is based on home finger-prick antibody test results from random participants across all 314 local authorities.

The first results, based on data from 100,000 people, were released in August, revealing that about 6% of the population of England had the antibodies – protective proteins produced in response to an infection – although the team say that could be a slight underestimate.

The new work – not yet peer-reviewed – extends this with more testing in two fresh cohorts, each yielding results from more than 100,000 adults.

The results reveal that just 4.4% of those tested in the most recent round, between 15 and 28 September, had detectable coronavirus antibodies.

Graham Cooke, co-author of the report and professor of infectious diseases at Imperial College London, said:

As a whole, these data suggest the possibility that decreasing population immunity will lead to an increased risk of reinfection as detectable antibodies decline in the population.

The Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson has said he would back tier 4 restrictions “if necessary” to bring infection rates down.

The city is one of five northern locations currently under the nation’s strictest level of lockdown measures due to a surge in coronavirus cases.

In an interview with BBC Breakfast, Anderson, whose brother Bill was one of 61 people in the city to die after contracting the virus in one week, said he is not opposed to the introduction of “tougher measures if necessary”.

He told the programme:

[The pandemic] has taken untold damage on people’s wellbeing and a huge toll on families where people have died. If anything was required to bring it down faster I would do that. However, I want to make sure that we are giving tier three a chance to see if the measures have an impact.

Anderson added he would review the results of the current tier 3 restrictions in 14 to 16 days’ time to determine whether they had gone far enough in halting the spread of the virus.

Good morning. Leading the front pages today is the letter sent to the prime minister by more than 50 Conservative MPs in parts of the north of England – many from former “red wall” seats won in the last election – that have been hardest hit by the pandemic, demanding a “clear roadmap” for exiting lockdown restrictions and arguing that Covid-19 “has exposed in sharp relief the deep structural and systemic disadvantage faced by our communities”.

More regions were placed under the toughest coronavirus restrictions on Monday, meaning 8.2 million people in England – one in seven – will soon be living under tier 3. Of these, 92% are in the north of England. In the letter, the 55 MPs express fears that the government’s “levelling up” is being abandoned and warn of economic hardship “with no end in sight” without a regional recovery plan.

Here is our north of England editor Helen Pidd’s report:

Throughout the day please feel free, as always, to get in touch with me as I work if you have a tip or story to share. Your thoughts for coverage are always welcome!

Email: lucy.campbell@theguardian.com
Twitter: @lucy_campbell_