Hancock says follow the rules or we'll ban all exercise outside

Prof David Oliver, an NHS consultant
physician, has said that there is a “constant anxiety” among healthcare workers
that they could become infected. He told the BBC:
Its widely acknowledged that we could have
been quicker to provide [protective] equipment to frontline staff. And also the
advice has changed two or three times. My perception now is we do have
regularly updated and very clear guidance.
We’re telling everybody else stay at home
and don’t mingle. But its the nature of our work that we have to come into
buildings every day and come into contact with clinical colleagues and we don’t
know what members of the team have already been infected.
Police have visited Scotland’s chief
medical officer Dr Catherine Calderwood and issued her with a warning after she
visited her second home.
Earlier today, local officers visited Dr
Catherine Calderwood and spoke to her about her actions, reiterated crucial
advice and issued a warning about her future conduct, all of which she
accepted. The legal instructions on not leaving your home without a reasonable
excuse apply to everyone.
The former boss of the McLaren Formula One
team, businessman Ron Dennis, has launched an initiative to provide one million
free meals to frontline NHS workers.
He said he co-founded SalutetheNHS.org to
feed thousands of hospital staff because he was “in awe” of their work to save
lives during the coronavirus pandemic.
This is a time when all of us, individuals
and businesses alike, need to stand up and be counted in the effort to combat Covid-19.
We’re all in this together. I am delighted to be leading this initiative to
help ensure that vital NHS workers have nutritious meals while they work every
hour in this fight. It means they have one less thing to worry about.
The Dennis family is donating £1m through
their charity foundation Dreamchasing, alongside 500,000 in match-funding.
Tesco will donate food for the meals and the initiative is supported by
catering group Absolute Taste and delivery service Yodel.
Meals will be made available, for free, to
ICU teams, anaesthetic teams and A&E staff who are unable to leave their
clinical areas during their 12-hour shifts.
Deliveries will start at the John Radcliffe
Hospital in Oxford tomorrow and at London children’s hospital Great Ormond
Street the following week, before being rolled out to Government-targeted
locations.
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A number of employees from Delaware North –
which provides catering and hospitality services at venues such as the Emirates
Stadium, London Stadium, Wembley, Craven Cottage and the Ricoh Arena – have
contacted the Guardian after seeing booked shifts cancelled and receiving no
payments since the Premier League season halted last month.
Some of the workers, who are on zero-hour
or casual arrangements, feel increasingly desperate. The casual workers
complain the company has told them there are no shifts for them because of the
impact of Covid-19 and that it is trying to establish whether they are eligible
to be furloughed under the government’s coronavirus job retention scheme.
A long-standing casual employee at one of
the venues told the Guardian that they work there for up to five days a week
but saw that income stream removed as soon as the season was paused. They said
they had received no payment for the shifts they had committed to.
Alexander Thynn, the 7th Marquess of Bath,
died on Saturday after being admitted to the Royal United Hospital in Bath on
March 28. During his time there, it was confirmed that he had Covid-19.
Longleat Safari Park confirmed the news in
a Facebook post on Sunday, expressing their “deepest sadness” at Lord Bath’s
death.
The family would like to express their
great appreciation for the dedicated team of nurses, doctors and other staff
who cared so professionally and compassionately for Alexander in these
extremely difficult times for everyone. They would politely request a period of
privacy to deal with their loss.
Aspects of our national life are suddenly
in the foreground – from the NHS, through all those low-paid key workers, to
spontaneous community initiatives that transcend most of the social divides we
were told were insurmountable, writes the Guardian’s John Harris.
If the Conservatives cannot turn them into
a national story, someone else should at least try – not for immediate
electoral gain, but for two other reasons. In the short-term, it could help
many of us to get out of bed every morning and face the day. Looking further
ahead, it might start to map out what kind of country we might become when the
horrors of the coronavirus begin to recede.
On the evidence of the past few months,
Starmer may be too bloodless and cautious a politician to pull this off. Maybe
his remainer convictions, and widespread mistrust of his party, will deny him a
big enough audience. But in the speech released as his victory was announced,
there were at least hints of what the moment requires: the elegant recognition
that in the midst of the crisis, “too many will have given too much” and “some
of us will have lost too much”; the unanswerable claim that “we know, in our
hearts, [that] things are going to have to change.”
There are reports of children arriving at
hospitals with illnesses at more advanced stages than they usually would be at
the point of admission, according to the UK’s child health professional body.
The president of the Royal College of
Paediatrics and Child Health, Russell Viner, has privately contacted the chief
medical officer for England, Chris Whitty, to urge for an immediate change in
the government’s public information strategy as parents appear reluctant or
afraid to go to hospital with their children, OpenDemocracy reported.
The volume of calls to the NHS 111 helpline
has surged by 400% since the spread of the coronavirus became a national health
crisis.
The free service, which offers urgent but
non-emergency care advice, has been inundated with calls from Britons since the
start of March when the virus took hold.
Vodafone, which provides the lines and
handles the call traffic for the NHS 111 call centre, said it had doubled
capacity to handle 2,400 calls simultaneously.
The call centre has experienced huge surges
in the number of calls, hitting a peak of 1,100 simultaneously at one point –
four times more than the peaks before the health emergency. Daily peaks vary
widely, but for example last Saturday it was 500.
Waitrose and John Lewis are donating 50,000
boxes of Easter confectionery to NHS workers as a small token of their
appreciation in the run-up to Easter.
Truffles and mini Easter eggs from John
Lewis will be available to NHS staff shopping at 51 stores until the Easter
weekend.
The Waitrose branches have been chosen due
to their proximity to NHS hospitals, with shops based in locations including
London, Dorset, Hampshire, Northumberland and the West Midlands.
In these extremely difficult times, we
wanted to make a small gesture to those working on the frontline. We hope these
gifts will go a little way in helping to express our gratitude and simply
brighten up the day a little for the NHS staff who are working tirelessly in
really challenging circumstances.
John Lewis has also donated care packs with
items such as pillows, phone chargers, eye masks and hand cream to hospitals to
make breaks more comfortable for staff.
Matt Hancock should have stayed home for
longer than seven days after contracting Covid-19, Labour’s newly-elected
deputy leader Angela Rayner has said.
The government’s guidelines state that if
you have symptoms of coronavirus, you need to self-isolate at home for seven
days or for as long as you still have a high temperature, and anyone you live
with should stay in for 14 days even if they do not have any symptoms.
However, the World Health Organisation has
recommended people self-quarantine for a fortnight after possible Covid
exposure or having contracted the virus.
Rayner, who herself has been self-isolating
with coronavirus symptoms, said she was in bed for six days and her symptoms
were “very debilitating”.
I’m disappointed that Matt Hancock, after
seven days of having the virus, went out when the World Health Organisation has
said you should self-isolate for 14 days.
I think it’s right that we do that because
I cannot stress enough the severity of the symptoms that I have suffered, as
you can tell from how breathless I am still now, and I’m day nine, day 10. I
think the government really need to give that clarity and continue to support
people doing the right thing.
Hancock announced on Friday March 27 he had
tested positive for Covid-19, and he came out of isolation on Thursday and
presented the daily Downing Street press conference. He is assumed to have
self-isolated for 24 hours before he made his positive diagnosis public.
Meanwhile, prime minister Boris Johnson
remains in isolation as he still has a temperature after going into isolation
on March 27.