Frontline NHS and social care staff can attend work rather than self-isolate with testing mitigations in exceptional circumstances under updated guidance announced this morning.
From today (Monday 19 July), double vaccinated frontline NHS and social care staff in England who have been told to self-isolate will be permitted to attend work in exceptional circumstances and replaced by testing mitigations.
This will include staff who have been contacted as a close contact of a case of COVID-19 by NHS Test and Trace, or advised to self-isolate by the NHS Covid-19 app.
This measure is being introduced to alleviate pressure on NHS and social care services and will be contingent on staff members only working after having a negative PCR test and also taking daily negative lateral flow tests for a minimum of seven days, and up to 10 days or completion of the identified self-isolation period.
This measure is being introduced to alleviate pressure on NHS and social care services and will be contingent on staff members only working after having a negative PCR test and daily negative lateral flow tests.
The government is clear the change applies only to frontline NHS and social care staff where their absence may lead to a significant risk of harm.
The decision to allow NHS and social care staff to attend work after being told to self-isolate should be made on a case-by-case basis, and only after a risk assessment by the organisation’s management.
This must be authorised by the organisation’s local Director of Infection Prevention and Control, the lead professional for health protection, or the Director of Public Health relevant to the organisation.
Health Secretary Sajid Javid said: “As we learn to live with this virus, it’s important that we ensure frontline staff can keep providing the best possible care and support to people up and down the country.
“The government has backed healthcare services at every turn through this global pandemic and these new rules will fortify our collective defences against this awful virus, by allowing fully vaccinated frontline NHS and social care staff to continue to work when needed.”
Careful consideration should be given by local NHS and social care organisations to the risk of onward transmission compared to the risk to delivery of critical services.
Staff who are permitted to attend work will remain under a legal duty to self-isolate as a close contact when not at work, but will be considered to have a ‘reasonable excuse’ under the Self-Isolation regulations to leave self-isolation to attend work where their absence could result in harm. They will continue to receive self-isolation reminders.
UK Health Security Agency Chief Executive, Jenny Harries, said: “With the number of cases continuing to rise, it is imperative that we do everything we can to manage this virus and support our NHS and social care services under the strain of increased demand and sustained pressure.
“We have provided specific guidance to NHS and social care settings for circumstances where there is a significant risk to health or safety resulting from staff absence or a critical service cannot run.
“This measure only applies to double vaccinated staff, who will only be able to attend work after testing negative on PCR and daily lateral flow tests, and following a risk assessment and the supervision of the health service.”
In order to mitigate the increased risk associated with attending work, the following mitigations must be implemented:
The staff member should be fully vaccinated, defined as having received both doses of an MHRA approved vaccination, with 14 days having elapsed since the final dose.
The staff member should undertake a PCR test and should self-isolate until they receive the result. They should only attend work if this result is negative.
They should undertake daily LFD tests prior to starting work each day. Test results should be reported to NHS Test and Trace via the web portal and to their duty manager. Any staff member who has a positive LFD test during this period should not attend work and should arrange a PCR test as soon as possible.
If the staff member develops any COVID symptoms, they should stay at home and immediately arrange a PCR test.
Staff working during this 10-day period should comply with all relevant infection control precautions and PPE should be properly worn throughout the day. Any breaches should be reported immediately to their line manager.
The staff member should not work with clinically extremely vulnerable patients or residents, as determined by the organisation.
Existing guidance will be updated by Public Health England today (Monday 19 July), and shared with NHS trusts and relevant social care organisations across England.
These changes apply in England only. The Scottish Government will announce any changes to exisiting arrangements, if necessary, in due course.
A new digital service to support businesses in collecting contact details for contact tracing purposes, Check in Scotland, is now available in participating venues.
More than 6,400 venues have so far signed up to use this voluntary service for businesses in Scotland, supporting them to effectively collect the contact details of their visitors and customers.
The Check in Scotland service will enable people to quickly and securely provide their contact details by scanning the official Test & Protect Check in Scotland QR code poster via their smartphone camera or by downloading the Check in Scotland app.
Any contact details collected will be held in a secure, encrypted data store unique to each venue for 21 days. Unless information is requested by public health officials as part of their contact tracing efforts, visitor data is automatically deleted on day 22. Venue and visitor details will not be used for any other purpose.
Businesses that can use Check in Scotland include:
pubs, bars, restaurants and cafes
tourism and leisure businesses, such as theme parks, museums and cinemas
close contact services, including hairdressers, barbers, beauticians, tattooists, sports and massage therapists
services run by local councils, such as libraries, leisure centres and registration offices
cremation authorities, burial authorities, places of worship or funeral director service rooms offering funeral services
places of worship
Chief Medical Officer Dr Gregor Smith said: “As travel, retail and hospitality restrictions begin to ease and venues start to re-open, it’s vital that any close contacts of new positive cases can be quickly contacted and given advice to self-isolate.
“Check in Scotland is designed to give businesses an easy way to collect contact details from customers for contact tracing purposes. It is entirely voluntary and up to individual venues to decide what method they prefer to use to collect the required contact details.
“Together with the Protect Scotland app, Check in Scotland will help contact tracers reach people faster if there are coronavirus (COVID-19) cases linked to a venue they have recently visited.
“The faster we can contact people who might have been exposed to COVID-19, the faster we can stop the spread of the virus, and keep moving towards the return of everyday activities.”
Alerts will be sent by SMS, email or letter depending on what details users provide and will be clearly marked as being from NHS Scotland Test and Protect.
The Check In Scotland service is designed to complement the separate Protect Scotland app, which alerts users if they have been in close contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19.
People will only be advised to self-isolate if contact tracers believe they were in close contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19. Otherwise they may be advised to watch out for symptoms of COVID-19, and to book a test only if they or someone in their household displays symptoms.
Statement given by the First Minister Nicola Sturgeon at a media briefing in St Andrew’s House yesterday (Tuesday 15 September):
Good afternoon, and thanks for joining us again today.
I will start with the usual run through of the daily statistics with apologies in advance. Parts of my briefing today are a little bit technical because it’s about how we report figures and while it might seem a bit difficult to follow today, what I’m going to report to you, particularly around people in hospital, is in the interest of making these figures more accurate and more transparent as we go into the next phase of tackling the pandemic.
But I can report firstly today, that the total number of positive cases reported yesterday was 267. This represents 3.6% of people newly tested.
101 of those cases were in Greater Glasgow and Clyde, 59 were in in Lanarkshire, 53 were in Lothian and 13 were in Ayrshire and Arran.
The remaining 41 were spread amongst the other seven mainland health board areas.
However to be clear, and this is the point I want to stress today, these, as indeed our daily figures always are, are test results that were reported yesterday.
Because of the backlog in the UK wide system that I referred to yesterday, this figure will include – a bit more than it normally would – results from swabs taken over the past few days.
We hope that the backlog of the past few days will have worked its way through the system shortly.
And just to be clear, to reassure you, for the purposes of our trend analysis, tests are looked at by day of the sample, not just by date of reporting, to ensure that we are tracking the increase in cases accurately. From that analysis of course, right now unfortunately, we do know that cases are rising .
Now as I said yesterday, I do have a concern about the capacity constraints right now within the UK wide system – for Scotland in recent days, just to be clear, this has not been an issue of access to testing slots, regional testing centres or mobile testing units but instead it’s been one of access to sufficient lighthouse laboratory processing.
And it has been this that has led to a backlog in the system and longer turnaround times for tests than we want to be the case.
Now as this is a UK wide system, we are not able to resolve this on our own. And the issues are impacted by demand elsewhere in the UK.
To that end, I had a conference call, a constructive conference call, last night with Matt Hancock, UK Health Secretary and Dido Harding, who is head of the UK testing system, to seek firstly assurances that Scotland is and will continue to get fair access to the UK wide laboratory capacity and also to discuss how we can resolve these issues. I hope to see improvement in next few days, but of course I will continue to provide updates.
I also, and this takes me into the slightly technical bit of the briefing, I want to provide some context before providing today’s update for the number of people in hospital with Covid.
Now, if you cast your mind back a couple of weeks now I think if you are one of the regular viewers of this briefing, I indicated then we were looking at how we report on numbers of people in hospital.
Under that measure, the one we have been using up until now, lots of people are classified as being Covid patients, even if they have recovered from Covid and are now being treated for a condition that is unrelated to it.
That old measure was providing accurate information at the peak the epidemic of this first phase back in the year when there were 1,500 Covid patients in hospital.
But as the pandemic has progressed, we have been reporting a higher number of hospital cases than is probably justified and that’s the issue I alluded to a couple of weeks ago.
For example in late August, Scotland officially accounted for almost one third of the hospital patients with Covid in the UK – despite having one twelfth of the UK’s population, and a relatively low incidence of the virus at that stage.
To try to ensure we are no longer counting patients who no longer really have Covid, we are from now, and I’ll report under the new measurement today, but then regularly from tomorrow, we’re moving to a new definition.
From now on, we will only count patients who first test positive for Covid during their current stay in hospital, or in the two weeks before their admission.
In addition, we will stop classifying them as Covid patients, for statistical purposes after 28 days in hospital – or 28 days after the date of their positive test, whichever is later.
This new measure will be an improvement on the old one – but it is important for me to point out that it will not be absolutely perfect.
The effects of Covid sometimes require hospital stays of longer than 28 days, and so a small number of patients with Covid may not be captured by the measure I’ve just outlined there
I have therefore asked Public Health Scotland to develop analysis about patients who unfortunately end up spending longer in hospital.
But overall, this new measure will give us a better picture both of the current situation in hospitals, and crucially, given the phase of the pandemic we are going into, it will be more sensitive to the changes in hospital admissions caused by new cases. So it will enable us to more accurately reflect and report any increase in hospital admissions over the next period.
So, under the old measure, I would be telling you, and I am going to tell you, that 262 patients are in hospital. That is two fewer than yesterday.
But that is the last time I’m going to give you that old measure, instead I’m going to move to the new and more accurate measure and I will use that solely from tomorrow onwards and under that measure, as of today there are 48 patients in hospital under that more narrow but more accurate measurement and we will be able to track it better now the increase in hospital admissions from here on in.
And using the new definition, I can report, there are six people are in intensive care. Under the old definition I would have been reporting seven in intensive care so clearly the change in measurement doesn’t have the same impact towards numbers in intensive care as it does on broader hospital numbers. .
And finally, in terms of my daily statistics update, I regret to have to report that in the past 24 hours, one additional death has been registered of a patient who first tested positive over the previous 28 days.
That means that the total number of deaths, under this daily measurement, is now 2,500.
That total serves again to remind us of the impact of this virus and why we can never, ever be complacent about the risks it poses and I want again to pass on my condolences to everybody who has lost a loved one – including of course everyone who is grieving as a result of the death that was registered yesterday.
There are a couple of other issues I want to address before Jason Leitch and I take questions from the media as normal.
The first is just to report here, we made this public last night but I thought it was worth reporting, that we had a meeting yesterday as I indicated earlier yesterday we would, to discuss the current position in Greater Glasgow and Clyde
And the good news is, that early indications suggest that the restrictions in place in Glasgow City, East and West Dunbartonshire, Renfrewshire and East Renfrewshire might be helping to slow down the increase in new cases. So that at this stage is positive.
But the number of new cases in these parts of Greater Glasgow and Clyde remains very high and is still increasing, all be it, we think, at a slower rate than would’ve been the case without these restrictions being in place. So taking all of that into account and the local authorities for these areas were present at the meeting yesterday. We agreed that the existing restrictions should remain in place for a further week and then they will be reviewed again at that stage.
That means people in these areas, Glasgow City, East or West Dunbartonshire, Renfrewshire and East Renfrewshire should not visit other households at all.
Those same restrictions now also apply as of last Friday, in North and South Lanarkshire,
In all of these seven local authority areas, you should not host someone in your home – unless it is for essential care purposes. And you should not visit someone else in their home – again unless it’s for care purposes or delivery of shopping to a venerable or elderly person and that is regardless of where they live. So I live in Glasgow City, I can’t have people in my home but equally I can’t go and visit my parents for example, who live in Ayrshire and Arran which is not one of these affected areas.
The second issue I want to cover today relates to the Test and Protect service.
We are aware that some fake callers are pretending to work for Test and Protect , and are trying to con people by claiming that payment is needed for a test.
Sadly, this reminds us that there are always a small number of people, a tiny minority , but never the less they’re there, who will try to exploit any situation they can to defraud people. And it is truly and utterly despicable particularly at this time of crisis that we are living though.
But in light of it, I wanted to take the opportunity today to remind you and ask you to remind others that you know, that Covid tests are free, and will always be free for those who need them.
Nobody from Test and Protect will ever ask you for financial information –they will never ask you for your bank or credit card details – and they will never try to sell you anything.
The only thing Test and Protect staff will ask you about, is where you’ve been and details of the people you have been in contact with.
Genuine contact tracers will often also first send you a text to let you know that you will shortly receive a call from NHS Scotland.
Callers will always introduce themselves and state the reason for their call. They will know your name. They will ask you for details of people you have come into contact with, in a relevant time period. They will tell you that you will receive further information by e-mail or post.
And they will always call from the same number – 0800 030 8012 – and they will give you the option of calling back on that number if you need to verify the service.
There is a lot of useful information about this on the Coronavirus sections of the Trading Standards Scotland website, and the Advice Direct Scotland website.
You can report any concerns about calls you have received to Advice Direct Scotland. And if you are unfortunate enough to have been the victim of a scam, or an attempted scam, you should contact the police on 101.
Fundamentally, if a person claiming to be a contact tracer is asking about things that aren’t necessary – in particular your bank details or computer passwords – then put the phone down straight away because they are not a legitimate contact tracer .
As I mentioned earlier, if you do get phoned by a legitimate contact tracer you have the option of phoning them back – on 0800 030 8012 – if you want to verify the call.
Genuine contact tracers will only ever ask about your movements, and details of the people you have been in contact with. This is a small minority of people, hopefully it won’t happen to any of you watching, but I thought it was important to take the opportunity to stress what will and will not be asked of you if you do get one of these calls, so that together we can make sure these people who attempt theses scams, these despicable people don’t get anywhere in Scotland.
The final point I want to make just to round off, is to remind you of the new rules which came into force yesterday, and of our other important public health guidance.
As you should all know, unless you live in one of the areas I’ve already spoken about where stricter restrictions are in place, no more than six people can now meet up together – and those six people can come from no more than two households.
Children under the age of 12, do not count as part of the total of six, but they do count towards the total for households. I said on Friday I would look at further advice on whether we could give greater flexibility for children and I hope to give the outcome of that later this week.
That rule – six people and two households – applies indoors and outdoors: in homes, pubs and restaurants, and in outdoor spaces such as parks and private gardens.
So please make sure that you are not breaching those limits.
This step – limiting the number of people and households you interact with – is a tough one and it’s really not an easy one or a welcome one at all. But it is a really vital step in helping us to keep the virus under control by limiting the interactions that we know are most likely to cause it to spread.
Please also, if you haven’t already done so, download the Protect Scotland app if you can. I know that last time I looked this morning 950,000 of you have already done that, but we want as many people as possible to do so.
It is very quick and easy to do. It’s a simple but very powerful way of all of us as individuals helping the country collectively.
And as always, and this will be my final comment, remember all the other things and we all need to do to try to minimise the risk of Covid spreading and all of that of course is encapsulated in FACTS. The five golden rules to try to minimise the spread.
• Face coverings should be worn in enclosed spaces • Avoid crowded places. • Clean your hands and hard surfaces regularly. • keep Two metres away from other households • and Self isolate, and book a test, if you have symptoms.
So thank you for bearing with me though what I know was a bit of a technical briefing today. Occasionally they will be like this because we are trying as we are go through the pandemic to make sure that we are reporting information in a clear, accurate and as transparent way as possible.
As we go through different phases sometimes that means changing definitions that we have used previously and so explaining that takes a bit of time and hopefully over the next period, these things will become much clearer for all of us.
Statement given by the First Minister Nicola Sturgeon at a media briefing at St Andrew’s House yesterday (Tuesday 25 August):
Hello everybody and welcome to today’s update. I will start with the usual update on the COVID statistics. I can tell you that an additional 44 positive cases were confirmed yesterday which is 0.8% of people newly tested, and means that the total number of cases now 19,921.
The full health board breakdown will be available later, but my provisional information is that 7 of the 44 new cases are in Tayside, where of course, we are dealing with the cluster involving the Two Sisters food processing plant.
I can also confirm that a total of 243 patients are currently in hospital with confirmed COVID which five fewer than yesterday.
And one person is currently in intensive care and that’s the same as yesterday.
Again in the past 24 hours, no deaths were registered of patients who had tested positive in the previous 28 days for the virus. Which means that the number of deaths under that measurement is still 2,492.
This week’s more comprehensive figure, which includes deaths where COVID was either confirmed through a test or presumed will be published by National Records of Scotland tomorrow.
These figures obviously continue to be a stark reminder of the impact this COVID has had and again I want to express condolences to everybody who has been bereaved as a result of it.
And again today my thanks go to everyone who is working hard in a whole number of different ways across the country to help us through this difficult period.
There are three issues I want to cover today.Firstly, I’ll give just a bit more detail on the main clusters that we are dealing with right now.
In Aberdeen, there are 261 cases associated with the cluster linked to pubs in the city. That’s an increase of two since yesterday. But it’s worth noting that one of those cases had already been reported – but has only now been linked to the original cluster.
These figures generally point to the good progress that has been made, in containing this outbreak. And I’m very grateful to everyone in Aberdeen for their patience – and their compliance with the restrictions that have been in place.
In relation to the outbreak linked to the 2 Sisters plant in Coupar Angus, as of yesterday, there were 152 positive cases linked to it – 134 of those were workers of the factory, and 18 were contacts of those workers.
The process of contact tracing there continues. And so I would expect that we’ll see these numbers rise a bit more in the days to come.
Just to give you some context, over the past six days, the mobile testing unit, at the 2 Sisters plant itself, has tested more than 900 people – and other testing sites in Dundee, Forfar and Perth have, between them, tested more than 2,500 people.
And the bit I want to stress, although I would repeat that we’re not complacent about this, but at this stage there is still no evidence of wider community transmission from this outbreak and that of course is positive, given the scale of the outbreak that we have been dealing with.
I want to thank everyone who is involved in managing it. It’s a huge amount of work that is being done and let me thank also, employees at the factory – and their households – who of course are now self-isolating.
And let me stress how important it is that people in those households do self-isolate for the entire period advised and that is until Monday 31 August.
I can understand that there will be a temptation to nip out, maybe to go to a shop or to go to see other people, but please do not do that. Even if you have had a negative test in the last few days, it is still possible that you could still develop and spread the virus so please follow all of the guidance and stay at home.
It is because people are complying with that, that so far we are managing to avoid this outbreak seeping into the community. So please bear with it and stick with it so that we can continue with that success.
Finally, there are a number of cases not least in Lanarkshire, involving individuals who attend schools.
The health protection teams locally are dealing with all of these cases, where necessary they have and will continue to write to parents and carers of children in relevant classes, advising them that their children should self-isolate.
I want to stress in relation to all of these outbreaks that we’re dealing with just now, and indeed, the situation with schools, we are not unduly concerned by any of these situations right at this moment.
That said, we are not complacent either. As you will appreciate, we will continue to monitor, all cases, clusters and outbreaks very very closely indeed.
The second issue I want to talk about today concerns some issues that people have been over the last day or so in booking tests, through the UK-wide booking system.
Over the weekend, there was a major spike in demand for testing, not just in Scotland, but we think across the UK, and that led to some constraints on the booking portal, throughout the day yesterday. And that in turn resulted in a surge of calls to our COVID-19 helpline.
I know this will have been frustrating for people trying to book a test. I want to thank you all for bearing with us, as we’ve worked to address these issues and I want to just run through some of the work that is being done to do just that.
Now some of what I would describe as technical issues, for example, people in Scotland being offered tests in centres outside Scotland are being resolved – that shouldn’t be happening.
Where any technical issues do arise, as unfortunately with a system of this scale and complexity might sometimes do, we will endeavour to have those sorted as quickly as possible.
On the issue of capacity though, which is the more significant issue, we’ve always known that there will be fluctuations in demand for testing. That’s why we have contingency plans in place and these contingency plans are already, as we speak, being activated.
For example, over the course of this week, we will be deploying three additional mobile testing units, across the central belt of Scotland. The first of these will be operational in Glasgow today, this afternoon, and the other two will be operational later this week. In total, they will increase capacity by around 1,200-1,500 tests every day.
We are also, over the course of this week, further increasing the number of tests that can be carried out at the regional testing centres, across the country and we are also utilizing additional NHS testing capacity. For example, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde will be activating drive-through facilities to help manage demand in their local area.
In the more medium term, but already this is work that has been in progress, we are also establishing eleven local walk-through testing centres. The first of these will be housed in the Victory Memorial Hall in St Andrews. And together, they will help to increase sampling capacity by more than 3,000 tests a day.
So we will continue to implement these plans to further increase capacity as we head into winter, as we have always been preparing to do.
But we will also continue work to sure appropriate contingencies are in place for periods when we have higher than expected demand for testing – which is likely to happen as we go into winter but, at any point, if there perhaps is another virus circulating, a cold that is leading, perhaps in particular, to children having symptoms similar to COVID then we know we will see these spikes in demand and that’s why we need to have these contingencies in place to deal with them.
But let me take this opportunity, just to remind everyone, that you should only book a test, either for yourself or for a family member, if you or they do have one of the COVID symptoms; a new persistent cough, a fever, or a loss of or change in your sense of taste or smell.
The exceptions to that general position of only booking a test if you have symptoms are firstly if you are advised to do by Test and Protect, sometimes Test and Protect will advise people, who have been contacts of confirmed cases but who don’t have symptoms, to go for a test.
And secondly, if you work in a profession with agreed access to testing, for example, staff working in schools, but otherwise, only book a test if you have one of the symptoms that we often and regularly remind you of.
Now the third issue I want to cover today is the use of face coverings in schools.
As I said yesterday, our scientific advisory group has been looking closely at this issue – particularly in light of the new World Health Organisation guidance, which was published at the weekend.
As a result of that work, the advisory group has recommended changes to our current guidance in Scotland. Their recommendations are based on the latest scientific evidence – as well as the real-life experiences of schools, since they reopened a number of days ago. And the Scottish Government – in consultation with the Education Recovery Group – has now agreed the changes proposed.
It’s possibly worth just reminding people of what the current guidance says before I set out what the changes to that are. In general, the current guidance advises that face coverings in the classroom are not necessary. However, it says that staff should wear them, if they can’t physically distance, and are having face-to-face interaction with pupils for more than around 15 minutes.
The guidance also currently emphasises that staff and pupils should be supported to wear face coverings, if they wish to do so. That advice remains unchanged.
However, the new guidance will now include two additional situations where face coverings should be worn.
Firstly, as I indicated yesterday, adults and pupils in secondary schools should wear face coverings when they are moving around school in areas where distancing is challenging – for example, through corridors or in communal spaces.
And secondly, adults and children aged 5 and over should wear face coverings on dedicated school transport. That of course simply now mirrors the situation on public transport more generally.
Now in both of these situations, there is a greater potential for different groups to mix. There is more chance of voices being raised – resulting in the creation of aerosols. And of course, there is less scope for distancing and effective ventilation. So we believe that face coverings could provide an additional layer of protection, in mitigating these factors.
The guidance will also now emphasise how face coverings can be used to address specific issues – for example, where there is a concern about a particular school, or where there is an outbreak or greater transmission in a particular area.
All of these changes will apply from next Monday – 31 August. Before then, schools will be expected to provide pupils with clear instructions on the use of face coverings.
We expect that most children and young people will have access to face coverings already as part of their daily lives. However, we will work with local authorities, to ensure that schools also have supplies – so that no child is disadvantaged.
There are of course people for whom wearing a face covering is not appropriate – which is why there are already exemptions in place for individuals with breathing difficulties or certain disabilities when it comes to wearing a covering in places like supermarkets.
So there will also be young people for whom it is not appropriate to wear a face covering in school and schools will of course discuss that with pupils and parents. But let me be clear that nobody should be stigmatised in a school because they cannot, for one of those reasons, wear a face covering.
We hope that these changes provide some additional assurance to pupils, staff, and parents. We know it’s not easy, none of what we ‘re all having to live with right now, generally or in schools, is easy but it is all about trying to minimise the risk of transmission. And we will of course continue to keep the guidance under review.
I want to emphasise though, and this applies not just in schools but applies more generally, face coverings are just one additional layer of protection. They are not a substitute for the other things we’re asking people to do. All of the other safety measures –good hand hygiene, regular cleaning, and where possible in schools, physical distancing – remain vitally important.
Of course, that applies not just to people in schools, but to all of us. So to close today, I want to quickly remind everyone – again – of the key public health guidance.
We know indoor transmission is a risk, we’ve always known that, and we see the evidence of that coming through our data right now, so can I take the opportunity to remind everybody that when you are indoors, no more than eight people from a maximum of three households should be meeting up. That applies whenever you are in somebody’s house, or in a pub, a bar or a restaurant.
You should – at all times – physically distance from members of other households. And remember to wash your hands and hard surfaces.
All of this, if we all follow these rules, minimises our chances of getting the virus and it also minimises the risk of us passing the virus on to others.
And as I said yesterday, and it’s worth everybody bearing this in mind, as Test and Protect operates around the country, if you follow all of these rules, particularly around physical distancing, you are less likely to be a contact, a close contact, of someone with COVID. So you are less likely to get that call from Test and Protect advising you to self-isolate for 14 days.
Let me absolutely bring my remarks to a close now by just reminding everybody of the FACTS rules – the five golden rules that everybody must follow to try to keep this virus under control:
Face coverings in enclosed spaces
Avoid crowded places
Clean your hands and hard surfaces regularly
Two metre distancing remains the overall rule
and self-isolate, and book a test, if you have symptoms.
Customers of major holiday firms could be left out of pocket by thousands of pounds if told not to travel by the NHS ‘test and track’ service, according to new Which? research.
