Health News at Your Fingertips

During the Manchester public health briefing (see 1.25pm) the city council’s director of public health, David Regan, said the infection rate among older people was high and rising.

There were 339 cases per 100,000 people among the over-60s, he said, adding:

That is where we’ve got our greatest concern because, unfortunately, our older population are more at risk of developing complications from Covid, which may result in hospital admissions.

Regan said there had been a marked drop in the infection rate among those aged 17 to 21 – falling from 3,350 cases per 100,000 people on 3 October to 568 cases per 100,000 currently.

This was due to the influx of 74,000 university students into Manchester in September, he said, although they had been able to bring the virus under control in part by quarantining at least 1,700 younger people in halls of residence – a measure which led to criticism at the time.

Regan urged Mancunians to abide by tier 3 restrictions that come into force overnight but said the evidence “isn’t there fully yet” that local lockdowns had worked. He went on:

Where the evidence is really clear is that the national lockdown did work in terms of suppressing the virus. I think we know that [with] these local lockdown arrangements, the evidence isn’t there fully yet.

Nicola Sturgeon has suggested that children should avoid going guising, or trick-or-treating, during Halloween this year, because it is unsafe for people to have unnecessary contact with others.

She said the Scottish government was issuing guidance for Halloween over the weekend, and urged families to devise different ways of celebrating. She said:

It’s not safe right now to do these things as normal. It wouldn’t be fair of me or right of me to say otherwise. To parents, to children: think of ways you can celebrate in a way that’s safe and doesn’t have children or others coming into unnecessary contact with others.

Sturgeon also backed up Jason Leitch’s warnings about Christmas being abnormal this year (see 9.39am), but said the intensity of any controls in force in December rested largely on how well people observed the current restrictions, suppressing the spread of the virus. She said:

I’m not going to stand here and give people false assurances I can’t deliver. It does depend on people doing the right thing now, so by Christmas we can ease up a bit.

Earlier this month Downing Street was non-committal at a briefing when asked if trick-or-treating would have to be abandoned this year in England, although the Department of Health and Social Care later said it should not happen in places where household mixing is banned.

Manchester’s Nightingale hospital will reopen “towards the end of next week” to help relieve the strain on the NHS from the second wave of coronavirus, senior health figures have confirmed.

Prof Jane Eddleston, Greater Manchester’s medical lead on coronavirus, said the large makeshift facility would take recovering Covid patients from hospitals across the badly hit north-west of England.

In a briefing designed to counter some of the “selective statistics” released by Downing Street earlier this week, Eddleston said 35% of critical care beds in the region were currently occupied by Covid patients.

During the April peak there were more than 300 patients filling critical care beds in Greater Manchester, of whom 260 had coronavirus. The latest figures, for Wednesday this week, showed 218 patients in critical care beds, of whom 95 were being treated for Covid.

Eddleston, who appeared alongside Boris Johnson at a Downing Street press conference last week, said that although this number was “significant”, the region was “in a different position now” and would bring in additional capacity where needed.

She said that during the April peak there was capacity for more than 400 critical care patients and that the service could reach this figure again. She said:

I don’t want to belittle the fact that this is a very serious condition and it’s challenging for the system …

[But] we are prepared and we are determined as a system that we will move in the system together. We won’t allow any one of our providers to unintentionally have an increase in pressure in their system.

Eddleston said, however, that the number of non-critical Covid patients in Greater Manchester was approaching the level of the first peak. There were currently just over 600 coronavirus patients in acute hospital beds, she said, compared with just under 900 in April.

The Scottish Retail Consortium, which represents the country’s largest shopping chains, has urged people to “shop early, start wrapping” after Nicola Sturgeon’s public health adviser warned Christmas would be severely impacted by the Covid crisis. (See 9.39am.)

The SRC, the Scottish wing of the British Retail Consortium, said Jason Leitch’s warning that large family gatherings would be highly unlikely to be approved this year added to its anxieties about the impact coronavirus controls were having on shops.

David Lonsdale, the director of the SRC, said:

Whilst celebrations will be a little different this year, we know shoppers will want to keep Christmas special. That’s why we’re encouraging people to shop early and prevent the last minute rush so their fellow customers and all the store colleagues, warehouse workers and delivery drivers working behind the scenes, have the space they need to stay safe and well.