Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: I did not lie about care home tests, says Hancock

The Health Secretary was back in front of the cameras this morning, and there was plenty to discuss, from the planned lifting of all restrictions on 21 June to the fallout from Dominic Cummings’ testimony before MPs last week. Dominic Cummings’ most wounding accusation last week was that Hancock had deliberately lied to the Prime Minister’s face during a cabinet meeting in the early days of the pandemic. The allegation concerns the testing of patients who were to be moved directly from hospitals into care homes. Cummings claims thousands of deaths resulted from outbreaks in care homes because such tests were not carried out, despite Hancock confirming to the Prime Minister that they were. Hancock categorically denied Cummings’ allegation:

AM: Did you tell Boris Johnson in March that people sent from hospitals into care homes were being tested when you knew they weren’t?

MH: No, I did not.

AM: …So Dominic Cummings was lying about that?

MH: …He said that people ‘would be’, and the truth is, of course that was the policy… but I had to build this testing capacity… The testing wasn’t available to test everybody… At the time, the clinical advice was that very few people would be able to pass on Covid if they didn’t have any symptoms, so the testing was reserved for those who had symptoms.


Delta variant is around 40 per cent more transmissible

Perhaps of most pressing concern is the progress of the Indian variant of the coronavirus, which has recently been rebranded as the ‘Delta variant’ by the World Health Organisation. This variant has now been judged by Public Health England to be the UK’s dominant strain.

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