The UK is still 'going through the peak' of Covid-19 but is 'starting to win this struggle' according to Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab
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Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has said the UK is still experiencing the “going through the peak” of the Covid-19 pandemic and so has urged people to persist with the lock down as “we are starting to win this struggle.”
At the regular Downing Street briefing he was joined by Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser who said he would expect the number of confirmed coronavirus cases and hospital admissions to begin to decline after plateauing.
This comes as Mr Raab revealed that more than 11,300 people have do far died from the illness according to confirmed cases in hospital while more than 88,000 have tested positive for the infection.
Mr Raab said: “So far 11,329 have died from coronavirus, every one of them a tragedy and our hearts go out to all of the loved ones who are grieving the loss at such a difficult time. There are also some positive signs from the data that we are starting to win this struggle.
“We have still got a long way to go and as those grisly figures that I just read out show we have still not passed the peak of this virus. So please continue to follow the advice Now more than ever to stay home, save lives and protect our NHS this week.
“We're still going through the peak and we are doing all of the work in government to assess the evidence and we’ll be guided by the science and the medical advice that we get and I think until we have got that evidence we will be getting ahead of ourselves.”
Sir Patrick spoke about figures related to those in hospital with Covid-19 and the comparative international death statistics that show the UK is “tracking behind Italy.”
He said: “This is in some ways harder data, it is data that actually measured things that relate directly to the infection and that is the number of people in hospital beds with covid.
“As I've discussed before this is beginning to flatten off, you can see it beginning to flatten off in many parts of the country not absolutely everywhere but you would expect this to continue to decrease, to flatten and then start to decrease as the effects of that social distancing that we have in place really feed through into the illness.
“This looks at the deaths in hospitals and the reason it looks at deaths in hospitals is that is the international standard and watches what everyone else is doing in terms of reporting deaths there are, of course, unfortunately many deaths that also occur outside hospital.
“We are tracking behind Italy, we are following the same sort of path. What do I expect to see happen? I think this week is difficult. I think this week we're going to see a further increase and thereafter, as the effects of the social distancing come through, that plateau may last for some time and then begin to decrease that's what we would expect to see in this very unfortunate death curve.”
