There's been a flurry of good news stories about Covid today. How do we know that the UK vaccination programme is having an impact? @FactCheckchannel4.com/news/factcheck…
A massive new study from Scotland suggest both the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines cut hospital admissions significantly. ed.ac.uk/files/atoms/fi…
Data from Public Health England shows that deaths and hospital cases are falling fastest among the oldest people - those most likely to have already been given a jab. assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…
There are a lot of positives, but government scientific advisers are preaching caution when it comes to moving out of lockdown. Sir Patrick Vallance says that even with high population coverage and very effective vaccines, "a large number of people (will) remain unprotected".
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Boris Johnson told #PMQs today that staying in the European Medicines Agency would have made the UK vaccine rollout "impossible". In fact, Britain was still bound by EMA rules when the Covid vaccination programme began. (@FactCheck thread)
We were in the Brexit transition period when the vaccine programme was planned, and the rollout started. It didn't matter, because EU legislation enacted into British law already allowed countries to temporarily authorise vaccines without waiting for approval from the EMA.
The UK government made it clear that it could authorise vaccines unilaterally under European law in a press release in November last year. gov.uk/government/new…
Matt Hancock has said we "never had a national shortage" of PPE, citing a National Audit Office report. But the NAO said that "many front-line workers in health and adult social care reported not having access to the PPE they needed during the height of the shortages". (1/6)
The NAO said: "The NHS provider organisations we spoke to told us that, while they were concerned about the low stocks of PPE, they were always able to get what they needed in time. However, this was not the experience reported by many front-line workers." (2/6)
"Feedback from care workers, doctors and nurses show that significant numbers of them considered that they were not adequately protected during the height of the first wave of the pandemic." (3/6) nao.org.uk/wp-content/upl…
Becoming seriously ill with Covid-19 is associated with a fall in cognitive abilities comparable with suddenly ageing ten years or losing eight IQ points, according to a new study of more than 80,000 people. medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
Scientists at Imperial College and King's College, London, looked at 84,285 people with suspected or confirmed Covid who had done a range of online cognitive tests for BBC2 Horizon's Great British Intelligence Test show.
Coronavirus infection was associated with lower scores on the brain games, even after differences like age and education were accounted for. The worse the illness, the greater the fall in cognitive ability.
Some good news on #COVID19: cheap, widely available drugs called corticosteroids can cut deaths among the sickest Covid patients by 20 per cent, according to a new analysis.
Doctors from around the world pooled data on 1,703 seriously ill coronavirus patients. Around 32 out of 100 people given corticosteroids died, compared to 40 out of 100 patients who received normal care.
Corticosteroids lower inflammation and suppress the immune system. They are very cheap, widely used around the world, have been around for decades and appear to work in low doses.
As @FactCheck reported yesterday, the independent @ONS is now publishing data on deaths in England and Wales where #Covid-19 is mentioned by the doctor on the death certificate. ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulati…
Unlike the death toll the @DHSCgovuk publishes every day, these figures include people dying outside hospital - in care homes, for example - and cases where the diagnosis of #coronavirus has not been confirmed by a test.
So the ONS data captures more deaths. We learn today that ONS is aware of 210 deaths involving Covid-19 occurring before 20 March, 40 more than the 170 announced by DHSC by that date.