Health News at Your Fingertips

Boris Johnson has has arrived at an RAF base in Moray after spending time in Orkney on his one-day visit to Scotland. As PA Media reports, his visit to RAF Lossiemouth coincides with a £100m home for submarine hunter planes at the base being handed over from Boeing to the Ministry of Defence (MoD). The hangar bay can hold up to three of the nine submarine-hunting Poseidon Maritime Patrol Aircraft the air force will have in its fleet. The facility, jointly funded by Boeing and the MoD, also provides accommodation for two squadrons, as well as training and mission support facilities.

As my colleague Sarah Boseley reported earlier (see 3.41pm), the government’s test-and-trace system is still failing to meet the target of reaching 80% of the people testing positive for coronavirus to ensure that their contacts can be told to self-isolate. It is very, very close (79.7%). But when it comes to identifying the people who have been in contact with those people testing positive, the success rate is only 61.5% if you exclude so-called “complex cases” – outbreaks in hospitals or care homes etc, where it is easier to identify all relevant contacts.

But today’s figures (pdf) also show the government is failing to meet another target. At the start of June Boris Johnson told MPs at PMQs that he wanted to get “all tests turned around in 24 hours by the end of June, except for difficulties with postal tests or insuperable problems like that”. But today’s figures show that only 87.4% of tests being conducted under pillar 1 (in NHS and PHE laboratories) are being completed within 24 hours, and only 46.8% of tests being conducted under pillar 2 (at drive-through centres and mobile centres, and with home testing kits) are hitting that target. Excluding home testing kits (where the post affects the timing), the pillar 2 figure is 57.5%.

Justin Madders, the shadow health minister, said these figures were getting worse. He said:

The prime minister promised we would have a 24-hour turnaround for test results by the end of last month but we are a long way off, with the numbers heading in the wrong direction again this week. How can ministers think it’s acceptable that testing is getting slower rather than faster as promised?

Here are two of the people protesting about Boris Johnson’s visit to Orkney. If you are wondering why one of them is holding up a mug, it’s because he thinks the name of a small Orkney village is appropriate. A reader has been in touch to say that the line “we’ve already got a Twatt in Orkney” is going down well with some locals.

This is from Ian Murray, the shadow Scottish secretary, on Boris Johnson’s visit to Scotland.

Boris Johnson and Nicola Sturgeon are bickering about the constitution in the middle of the worst health and economic crisis of our lifetimes.

The prime minister should be using his visit to announce a sectorial extension to the furlough scheme to protect jobs in hard hit industries like tourism.

What Scotland needs is two governments working together, with the autonomy of devolution and security of the United Kingdom.

The Department for Business has announced a £100m investment in vaccine production, that involves upgrading a plant in Essex to turn it into a fully licensed vaccine factory. The details are in a news release here. And here is an excerpt.

The investment will fund a state-of-the-art cell and gene therapy catapult manufacturing innovation centre to accelerate the mass production of a successful Covid-19 vaccine in the UK. Due to open in December 2021, the centre will have the capacity to produce millions of doses each month, ensuring the UK has the capabilities to manufacture vaccines and advanced medicines, including for emerging diseases, far into the future.

Located in Braintree, Essex, the government initiative will upgrade an existing facility to create a fully licensed manufacturing centre.

Here is the full text of Michel Barnier’s opening statement when he gave his press briefing earlier after the end of the latest round of UK-EU trade talks.

Face coverings will be compulsory in takeaways, banks and post offices as well as shops, supermarkets and stations in England from tomorrow, new government guidelines have confirmed. My colleague Sarah Butler has the details.

Secondary school children from the most advantaged families will take six months to catch up following the Covid-19 closure of schools while those from disadvantaged backgrounds could take up to a year, according to a study. As PA Media reports, researchers from the University of Southampton also found that primary age children from advantaged families would be approximately a year behind while those from disadvantaged backgrounds would be even further behind.

Dr Nic Pensiero, who led the study, said:

Parents who work in professional and management occupations, which are suitable for home working, are better able to assist their children’s home learning.

When you also consider that such parents are better able to provide children with their own computers and other learning resources as well as a suitable learning space, this puts their children in a significantly better situation than those from non-professional, non-managerial families.