Health News at Your Fingertips

Q: When will hotel quarantine start? And will you give more help to people who have to self-isolate? If not, aren’t there two huge holes in your policy?

Johnson says the UK has one of the toughest border regimes in the world. But he does not want to totally close the borders. Food and medicines must come in from abroad.

But the government has made it illegal to go on holiday, or to come here from some countries.

Matt Hancock, the health secretary, will make a further announcement about the hotel quarantine plans tomorrow, he says.

On self-isolation, Johnson says overwhelmingly people are isolating.

(Dido Harding told MPs this morning at least 20% of people who should be isolating weren’t. See 11.45am.)

Q: Is there scope for opening schools in England before 8 March?

Whitty says the date is a matter for ministers.

But there are two arguments – and both are true.

First, he says, there is clear evidence that being in school is good for children. Schools are safe for them. That is not disputed, he says. And school opening is good for parents.

He says they were holding the line before the new variant arrived.

But the new variant is more transmissible, and so schools had to close.

He says it is for ministers to judge when the balance of interests will favour opening schools.

Whitty says people who are vaccinated have no protection in the first two or three weeks after getting the vaccine. In older people it may be longer, he says.

And he says people should continue to obey social distancing rules after having their first dose.

He says vaccines will protect in three ways. They will protect the person vaccinated to a very real degree.

They will reduce the risk to people who interact with those vaccinated, although at this point they don’t know fully the impact on transmission, he says.

And he says vaccines also reduce the amount of virus circulating in the whole population. But we are “nowhere near” that, he says. The rate of virus in the community is “incredibly high”.

A substantial number of people have been vaccinated, Whitty says.

Whitty says his final slide shows deaths and hospital cases, by age.

He says once all people in the first four priority groups have been vaccinated – and they are due to have been offered a first dose by 15 February – most of those who die from Covid will have been covered. But there will still be a lot of people likely to end up in hospital.

Once all nine priority groups have been vaccinated, there will be much less pressure on hospitals, he says.

And deaths are “beginning to come down”, Whitty says.

Whitty next shows a slide showing hospital numbers starting to decline.

Prof Chris Whitty shows the first slide, showing cases falling.

Boris Johnson starts by saying when Captain Sir Tom Moore launched his fundraising campaign in his garden, he knew instinctively what institution he wanted to support: the NHS. And he was right.

He says it is thanks to the NHS that we have passed the milestone of getting 10 million people vaccinated with a first dose.

He says new research from Oxford shows how effective the AstraZeneca vaccine is after just one dose.

No vaccine is ever 100% perfect, but increasingly the evidence shows that the vaccines will cut deaths and serious illness.

He says deaths are still alarmingly high. People should still stay at home to protect it, he says.

And he urges people to clap for Captain Tom and for the NHS at 6pm.

Boris Johnson is about to hold a press conference at No 10. He will be with Prof Chris Whitty, the government’s chief medical adviser.

Today’s coronavirus figures for Scotland are here. There have been 88 further deaths (down from 92 a week ago today) and 978 further cases (down from 1,330 a week ago today).

Of all the new tests carried out, only 5.1% were positive. This is the lowest positivity rate since late December, and very close to the 5% target often mentioned by Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister, as the benchmark set by the WHO for countries that have got Covid under control.

And there are 1,871 coronavirus patients in hospital. That is the first time the figure has been below 1,900 since mid-January.

Sir Keir Starmer has admitted that he was wrong to say Boris Johnson was talking “nonsense” when Johnson told MPs that Starmer had called for the UK to stay in the European Medicines Agency. (See 1.41pm.) A spokesman for Starmer said in a statement this afternoon:

On a number of occasions the prime minister has wrongly claimed that Labour wanted to join the EU’s vaccine programme. That is inaccurate and the claim has been found to be untrue.

This afternoon during prime minister’s questions, Keir misheard the prime minister and assumed he was making the same false accusation again.

Keir accepts that, on this occasion, the prime minister was referring to old comments about the European Medicines Agency and Keir admits he was wrong and made a mistake in his response.

It’s not Labour policy to join either the European Medicines Agency or the EU vaccine programme. We have never called for the UK to be in the EU vaccine programme. We remain committed to working with the government to ensure we can be the first in the world to roll out the vaccine.

At PMQs Johnson raised Starmer’s stance on the EMA as part of a claim that, under Labour, the UK’s vaccine rollout would have been worse. “If we had listened to [Stamer], we would still be at the starting blocks, because he wanted to stay in the European Medicines Agency,” Johnson said.

However, as this Channel 4 FactCheck article explains, even if the UK had remained in the EMA, it would still have been able to run its own vaccine programme independent of the EU’s. Starmer, and Labour HQ, never called for the UK to join the EU’s vaccine procurement scheme when it was launched last year, although one Labour frontbencher did post a tweet criticising the government’s decision to opt out of the EU scheme, as the FactCheck blog explains.