Portrait of the week: Vaccination, inauguration and a food box denunciation

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The government undertook to offer a first dose of vaccine to the adult population of the UK by September. More than four million had now been vaccinated. The campaign was on target to vaccinate 15 million by mid-February. A ten-day trial would see some hospitals open for vaccinations 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Racecourses, sports arenas and even cathedrals such as Salisbury, Lichfield and Blackburn became vaccination centres. St Paul’s Cathedral in London suspended public worship because of the danger of coronavirus, as did more than half of Church of England churches.

At the beginning of the week, Sunday 17 January, total deaths (within 28 days of testing positive for the coronavirus) had stood at 88,590, including 7,722 in the past week. Hospitals came under great pressure, with more than 37,000 in-patients with Covid. One of the Brazilian variants was found in Britain and another was suspected. All visitors from abroad would have to show a negative test and keep to a ten-day quarantine on arrival, unless a second test after five days showed negative. In December about one in ten people had been found to have Covid-19 antibodies. By the beginning of December, 4.46 million people in England were waiting for hospital treatment other than for Covid. Some 1.3 million immigrants had left Britain by the third quarter of 2020, according to an estimate by the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence, 700,000 of them from London, reducing the population of the capital by 8 per cent. Philip Tartaglia, the Catholic Archbishop of Glasgow, died aged 70 after contracting Covid-19. A Labour member of the Welsh parliament or Senedd was suspended from the Labour group after it was reported that he and some Tory members had drunk alcohol there last month, when pubs could not serve drink.

The accidental loss of 400,000 fingerprint, DNA and arrest records from the Police National Computer was ‘unacceptable’, Kit Malthouse, the Policing Minister, told the Commons; but accepted it was.