Latest updates: mass testing after two people with no history of travel reportedly catch variant; some care home staff yet to receive first jab
- Two London clinics mistakenly offer Covid jab to young people
- UK Covid patients dying needlessly over unfounded ventilator fears
- Covid could cost children £350bn in earnings from lost learning, says IFS
- NHS has offered Covid jab to all older residents in care homes in England
- UK Covid cases, deaths and vaccinations today
This is from ITV’s Robert Peston on the South African variant. (See 12.16m.)
The kind of door-to-door physical contact tracing and testing, in order to quarantine those with the SA variant, which I reported on Friday, will start in Surrey, Kent, London, Herts and Walsall – because (as I mentioned) cases have been found with no links to known travellers https://t.co/kjMTTRBtL0
There is no evidence the variant causes a more severe illness but the issue will no doubt be raised when parliament debates border measures later today with @uklabour calling for more widespread hotel quarantine of arrivals
Aim here is to help check how far the South African variant has spread in UK https://t.co/H1FZYT7Qee
Residents in parts of Surrey will be offered Covid tests after two people with no travel links were found to have caught the variant discovered in South Africa, Sky News’s Aubrey Allegretti reports.
Eight days ago Matt Hancock, the health secretary, told the BBC that at that point just 77 cases of the South African variant had been found in the UK. All those cases were linked to travellers arriving in the UK, he said. The new cases are worrying because they are not linked to new arrivals, suggesting the South African variant is now spreading via community transmission.
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