Summary

LIVE: Covid-19 daily briefing - face masks in schools

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  • THE latest from today's Covid-19 daily briefing with health secretary Matt Hancock, Susan Hopkins from Public Health England and Jonathan Van-Tam, deputy chief medical officer for England.
  • Mr Hancock urged Britons not to break coronavirus rules and “blow” progress, despite “exciting” data suggesting the two vaccines being used in the UK reduce hospital admissions in over-70s by 80%.
  • The Health secretary said jabs were already helping to save lives, as he heralded the study by Public Health England which indicated that the Pfizer and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines are highly effective in reducing infections among older people.
  • “A single shot of either the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine or of the Pfizer vaccine works against severe infection among the over-70s with a more than 80% reduction in hospitalisations,” Mr Hancock said.
  • “In fact, the detailed data show that the protection that you get from catching Covid 35 days after a first jab is even slightly better for the Oxford jab than for Pfizer, albeit both results are clearly very strong.”
  • The results “may also help to explain why the number of Covid admissions to intensive care units among people over 80 in the UK have dropped to single figures in the last couple of weeks”.
  • England’s deputy chief medical officer Professor Jonathan Van-Tam added that data for the Pfizer vaccine shows the likelihood of mortality is reduced by 85% in over-70s.
  • Encouraging people to continue to come forward for their first and second doses, he added: “We have to be patient. We have to push on with the vaccine programme.”
  • Government data up to February 28 shows that of the 21,091,267 jabs given in the UK so far, 20,275,451 were first doses – a rise of 185,900 on the previous day.
  • The health secretary also defended the Government’s border arrangements following the detection of the cases of the worrying Manaus variant.
  • Six people are known to be carrying the variant in the UK but only five have been located.
  • Mr Hancock said: “There is no evidence that the sixth case did not follow those quarantine rules – we need to obviously get in contact with the person in question.”
  • The test was taken on February 12 or 13 and “we haven’t seen any further knock-on transmissions in the data”.
  • Three cases are Scottish residents who flew to Aberdeen from Brazil via Paris and London, who all tested positive while self-isolating.
  • Other passengers who were on the same flight to Aberdeen are now being traced.
  • The other two cases in England are from the same household in South Gloucestershire after one person returned from Brazil on February 10 – just days before the Government’s hotel quarantine rule came into force.
  • Officials are searching for passengers who were on the Swiss Air flight LX318 from Sao Paulo to Heathrow, via Zurich, which landed on February 10.
  • Dr Susan Hopkins, of PHE, said they were tracking “very closely” the new Brazilian P1 coronavirus variant following the discovery of six cases in the UK.
  • She said: “The current vaccines have not yet been studied against this variant and we will need to await further clinical and trial data to understand the vaccine effectiveness against this variant.”
  • Dr Hopkins said they were in the process of trying to track down the one person who has yet to be identified who is believed to have taken a test on February 12 or 13.

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