UK Covid live: up to 15% of Omicron cases are reinfections, says top scientist

Q: Do you support Sadiq Khan’s proposal to effectively decriminalise class B drugs in London?

(The Telegraph today reports that Khan plans to end the prosecution of young people caught with cannabis in the capital, in line with a proposal he made when running for re-election.)

Starmer says he is not in favour of changing the law on drugs or decriminalistion.

Q: Wales still has what are effectively level two restrictions, where people can be fined for going to work. Do you support the Welsh Labour government in maintaining these?

Starmer says every nation in the UK has tried to get the balance right. Mark Drakeford, the Welsh first minister, has led the country very well, Starmer says. He says that is one reason Labour did well in the elections in Wales last year. He says he knows how seriously Drakeford takes these measures.

And that’s it. The Q&A is over.

Starmer says the government should take stronger action against anti-vaxxers. It is unacceptable that they are allowed to protest outside schools, he says.

Q: You have mentioned Attlee, Wilson and Blair, but not Labour leaders like Jeremy Corbyn. Why is that? Do you want people to think you are distancing yourself from Corbyn?

Starmer says he mentioned those three because they all led Labour governments that made a difference. He wants to lead the fourth such government.

The whole purpose of Labour is to win power and change lives, he says.

Q: Do you agree that giving further booster jabs is unsustainable? (See 10.48am.)

Starmer says Labour would listen to the scientists and make a judgment call.

Q: What policies do you have that will appeal to voters?

Starmer insists Labour does have strong policies. He cites housing, saying Labour would apply a proper defintion of affordable housing, and stop investors buying homes as assets ahead of first-time buyers.

Labour also has a very strong policy on giving workers rights from day one, he says.

And it is also proposing to spend £28bn a year on a programme that would deliver green jobs.

Starmer says he does not think Boris Johnson has done enough to deserve a knighthood. But Tony Blair did to enough to deserve one, he says.

Q: Martin Lewis has said some people will face a choice between heating and eating this year. What would Labour do on this?

Starmer says this will quickly be the major story of this winter and this spring. There are almost too many elements to it. He says the government is putting up tax just when other costs are going up. Labour would not have done that; it voted against the tax rise.

And Labour supports cutting VAT on fuel.

Q: Do you still support nationalising energy companies?

Starmer says he stands by the pledges he made in the Labour leadership contest (when he spoke of putting energy companies back into public ownership, which he claims is not the same as nationalisation).

Q: There are shortages in many areas, not just schools. What would Labour do about this? Do you favour reducing the isolation period from seven to five days?

Starmer says mass testing must be an important part of the way forward, so the infected can be separated from the uninfected. It is “simply unacceptable” for the government to say there are not enough tests.

(The government does not accept there is a shortage of tests per se. It does, though, admit there have been supply issues.)

Keir Starmer has finished his speech. I will post a full summary soon.

Now he is taking questions from journalists.

Q: Is the government right to stick to plan B? Or are new restrictions needed?

Starmer says the current restrictions would not be in place if Labour had not voted for them. He says the PM could not pass them on his own.

He says he hopes further restrictions won’t be needed.

But more children need to be vaccinated.

There should be better ventilation in schools, he says. But the ventilators offered only cover one school in four. In other schools people have been told to open windows and put on coats. That is not acceptable, he says.

Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, told Times Radio this morning that he feared ministers were engaged in a “politicised attempt” to play down the seriousness of the Omicron crisis. He said:

We should feel some hope and confidence about the medium term, that we hope we will gradually become more able to live with Covid as the prime minister has said, that when Omicron has gone through us that we make it to that stage and the NHS will recover.

On the other hand, we’ve got to recognise where we are now, that, in the next few weeks at least, things are very, very difficult and I think that one thing that people in our service find difficult is that it does seem as though there’s a kind of almost politicised attempt to suggest that things aren’t as difficult as they are …

If you’re working in health service, you see the reality, and what you want politicians to be driven by is the data and what’s happening at the front line, and let’s not be in the business of … getting away from the reality of this.

He also suggested that resisting further restrictions has become “political virility symbolism” for Boris Johnson. Asked if he wanted to see further restrictions in place, he said:

The government has to make this balance between public health on the one hand and pressures on the NHS on the other hand [and] people’s desire to socialise. That’s a very difficult judgement.

What I’m saying is that judgment needs to be driven by the data and what’s in the best interests of the country. It doesn’t, shouldn’t be driven by a kind of political virility symbolism, where the sooner we can be free, the better it is, regardless of the effect.

Let’s carry on being driven by the data and the reality is the data has been all over the place for the last few days.

It’s been pretty grim but, because of bank holidays and Christmas, we’re not really, I don’t think, going to know until the end of this week into next week what the patterns are showing us. So let’s wait and see what the data says and act in the public interest.

Taylor, of course, used to be head of Tony Blair’s policy unit in No 10. He and Chris Hopson, his opposite number at NHS Providers, another body representing health leaders, have become two of the most powerful voices on Covid policy. Both of them try to avoid sounding partisan, because they know to do so would undermine their credibility.

Keir Starmer will be delivering his big speech at 11am. Labour has posted a link on Twitter to a live feed. I’ll write up the speech once I’ve read the full text, but I will be covering the Q&A afterwards as it happens.

Judging by the pre-brief (see 9.54am), there will be a strong patriotic flavour to it, and, yes, there are union flags at the venue.

This is from Daisy Cooper, the Lib Dem health spokesperson, on Maggie Throup’s failure this morning to say how many NHS trusts have declared critical incidents. (See 10.10am.)

If ever proof was needed that the government is asleep at the wheel with this staff shortage crisis, the vaccine minister’s non-answers this morning just about sum it up.

Our hospitals are at breaking point and schools are spread thin, yet hapless ministers haven’t got a clue about the true extent of the problems in these settings.

It’s high time the government gets a grip on this. Families deserve reassurance that their children’s education won’t be disrupted and that loved ones can get the care they need, when they need it.

Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, chairman of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (but not chair of the JCVI’s Covid committee), has told the Daily Telegraph in an interview that further booster jabs should not be offered to everyone until there is more evidence to justify them. “We can’t vaccinate the planet every four to six months. It’s not sustainable or affordable,” he said.

Pollard, who is also head of the Oxford Vaccine Group, told Sky News this morning:

It’s just not – from a global perspective – affordable, sustainable or deliverable to give fourth doses to everyone on the planet every six months. Remember that, today, less than 10% of people in low-income countries have even had their first dose, so the whole idea of regular fourth doses globally is just not sensible.

Asked about Pollard’s comments, Maggie Throup, the vaccines minister, told the Today programme this morning that the government would take advice from the JCVI but also that it would “look at it seriously and decide whether it’s appropriate for our population”.

Last summer Pollard was saying he was not convinced of the need for a third-jab booster programme for all adults – at a time when the government was planning just such a programme. Pollard thought vaccinating people in developing countries should take priority. A universal booster programme subsequently became critical to the government’s Covid strategy this winter.

Ministers have in the past sometimes been frustrated by the JCVI’s caution in relation to approving vaccine rollouts. In September last year a decision on vaccinating 12- to 15-year-olds was effectively taken out of the JCVI’s hands when it agreed that chief medical officers should have the final say.

Keir Starmer – or Sir Keir, as I suppose we should call him in this context – has commented on the row about Tony Blair’s knighthood, saying that the former PM deserves his honour. In an interview with ITV’s Good Morning Britain, Starmer rejected the suggestion that the issue was “thorny”. He told the programme:

I don’t think it’s thorny at all, I think he deserves the honour, obviously I respect the fact that people have different views.

I understand there are strong views on the Iraq war, there were back at the time and there still are, but that does not detract from the fact that Tony Blair was a very successful prime minister of this country and made a huge difference to the lives of millions of people in this country.

As Jessica Elgot reports, more than 500,000 people have signed an online petition saying they take a different view.

As the Guardian reports in our overnight splash, multiple NHS trusts across England have declared “critical incidents” amid soaring staff absences caused by Covid-19.

We report that more than half a dozen NHS trusts have issued critical incident alerts, but we do not give a firm figure in the report (because we did not have one).

You might have thought that the Department of Health and Social Care would have a number. But Maggie Throup, the vaccines minister who was doing an interview round this morning, refused to say how many trusts had declared critical incidents. She told Sky News:

It is fast moving and that’s why it would be wrong of me to actually say a number because quite shortly there could be another one or another trust could actually say ‘no, we’re back on track now and we’re okay’ and it’s a mechanism that’s been put in place in the past …

The critical incidents are announced and then they can be very short-term ones and it’s saying to the other trusts around ‘can we have some extra help, can we have some mutual aid’.

Sometimes it’s just a matter of hours that the critical incident is in place for, other times it’s longer, but it’s actually reaching out to the wider NHS to say we have got a problem in this particular area and it’s sometimes quite geographical as well and for different reasons, it can be staff shortages, it could be other reasons.

Asked if the government had a handle on the situation, she replied:

It definitely does and obviously there’s meetings on a very, very – well, on a daily basis with the key people within NHS England and there’ll be an update later on that situation.

Keir Starmer will deliver what is being billed as a major speech later, and in it he will identify “security, prosperity and respect” as the key to Labour’s election offer to Britain. In an overnight press release ahead of the speech, Labour said Starmer would set out “Labour’s ambition for a new Britain in which ‘you and your family get the security, prosperity and respect that they deserve’”.

These are abstract concepts, but this is how Labour in its news release explains them.

Security

Everyone has the basic right to feel safe in their own community.

We all need to know that the NHS is there for us when we need it.

And if we work hard we should also have a right to job security.

Prosperity

Everyone should have the opportunity to thrive.

To realise our ambitions and make a good life for ourselves.

To have the skills they need to prosper.

Respect

Respect is a less obvious political virtue than security and prosperity.

But it is every bit as important.

Everyone has the right to live in places we care for and to have our lives and ambitions taken seriously to be valued for who we are and what we do.

As Aubrey Allegretti reports in his preview of the speech, Starmer will also stress that Labour has to earn the trust of voters, and emphasise his pride in Britain, while arguing that identifying “flaws” with the country isn’t unpatriotic. Starmer will say:

I am personally thankful that I grew up in a country which had a national health service to care for my mum when she needed help, that gave me the opportunity to go to university and become a lawyer and fight for what is right.

This country has presented me with great opportunities. It’s a great place to live. But I don’t think you cease to be a patriot because you notice your country has flaws.

On the contrary, the reason we in this party want to correct those flaws is precisely because we are patriotic. I came into politics to make things happen not just to talk about them.

And here is a full summary of the lines from Prof Neil Ferguson’s interview on the Today programme.

• Ferguson, a key government adviser on epidemic modelling, said that Omicron infections may have plateaued in London in the under-50s. (See 9.08am.) My colleague Matthew Weaver has more here.

• But he said hospital admissions may take longer to plateau than case numbers because older people were infected later. He explained:

This epidemic has spread so quickly [in the 18-50 age group] it hasn’t had time to really spread into the older age groups which are at much, much greater risk of severe outcomes and hospitalisation. So we may see a different pattern in hospitalisations. Hospitalisations are still generally going up across the country and we may see high levels for for some weeks.

• He said shortage of tests may have kept Covid case numbers lower than they otherwise would have been. He said:

[Case numbers are] not as useful as they used to be because there has been, frankly, demand management of cases by region, which means we’ve been running out of tests. And so in some regions, as we’ve heard over Christmas, numbers of tests have been limited. So almost certainly case numbers, true infection rates, have been much higher than [the published figures].

• He said up to 15% of Omicron cases were reinfections. He said the official headline case numbers did not include reinfections. But the scientists did see the reinfection numbers, he said.

The data we see includes reinfections. Between 10 and 15% of Omicron cases are reinfections, so you have to just interpret the numbers through that lens.

• He said school reopening was likely to lead to an increase in Omicron infections in children. He explained:

The Delta infections in the last few months have been really driven by school-age children and by the older age groups in the population.

Omicron slipped in the middle in 18 to 45-year-olds really but it didn’t have much time to get into schoolchildren before schools shut and we expect to now see quite high infection levels, of mild infection I should emphasise, in school-age children.

Good morning. And happy new year to everyone.

Or happy new year (medium confidence), as they might put it in a Sage report, using the standard formula scientists apply to show how confident they are about the judgments they make. (It’s not a habit that lobby correspondents have adopted, although perhaps we should.)

Medium confidence is probably also good way of summing up Prof Neil Ferguson’s overall mood when he was interviewed on the Today programme this morning. Ferguson, the Imperial College epidemiologist whose modelling is closely followed by government, said he was “cautiously optimistic” that the Omicron pandemic may have plateaued in London (where cases have been highest) amongst the under-50s. He told the programme:

I think I’m cautiously optimistic that infection rates in London in that key 18-50 age group, which has been driving the Omicron epidemic, may possibly have plateaued, it’s too early to say whether they’re going down yet.

And this is what he said when he was asked whether he thought, overall, the effect of Omicron was as bad as originally feared, or whether it was better. He replied:

I think the good news here is it is certainly less severe. We think, if you’ve never been infected before, never had a vaccine, [there is] about a one third drop in the risk of just any hospital admission, probably a two thirds drop in the risk of dying from Omicron. So [it is] substantially less severe. And that has helped us undoubtedly. We would be seeing much higher infection case numbers in hospital otherwise.

And vaccines, as we always expected they would, are holding up against severe outcomes well.

Well that doesn’t mean it’s not going to be, as the prime minister said, a difficult few weeks for the NHS.

This may not sound definitive, but Ferguson sounded noticeably more confident today about Omicron being less severe than Delta than he was two weeks ago, when Imperial College published early research on this topic.

I will post more from his interview shortly.

Here is the agenda for the day.

11am: Keir Starmer delivers his speech in Birmingham. As Aubrey Allegretti reports, Starmer will use it to launch his plan to maintain the momentum of Labour’s poll lead in the runup to the next election.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

Today I will be focusing mostly on UK Covid developments and on Starmer’s speech. For wider Covid coverage, do read our global live blog.

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