Covid news: UK records highest daily death toll as Whitty to front new ‘stay at home’ TV campaign

Ipswich and Colchester hospitals are "full", while the NHS faces a "very, very serious situation", the chief executive of NHS East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust has said.

Nick Hulme told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "The real picture certainly for the two hospitals I'm responsible for - Ipswich and Colchester - is that we're full.

"The problem with looking at capacity data or occupancy data is it doesn't tell a true picture - an empty bed is not necessarily an available bed because we do have to keep some beds empty for infection control reasons.

"The picture is that this is a very, very serious situation for the NHS, the worst I've seen in my career by a long stretch, and we need to be honest about that."

Commons Home Affairs Committee chairwoman Yvette Cooper welcomed pre-departure Covid tests but noted "many countries have had these in place for some time" and there are still "many gaps" in the UK approach.

“Currently the UK still has no testing on arrival and very patchy self-isolation arrangements for arriving travellers in contrast to the strong arrival testing and quarantine arrangements that other countries have,” the Labour MP said.

“Given that arriving travellers could still have contracted the virus in the last 72 hours, or on their journey, the government needs to explain why they aren't also introducing testing on arrival and clearer quarantine and enforcement measures to prevent new variants taking hold or threatening the vaccine programme.”

Police are hunting for a man who posed as an NHS worker and charged a 92-year-old woman £160 for a fake coronavirus vaccine.

City of London police said the victim, who lives in Surbiton, southwest London, allowed the man into her home on 30 December where he jabbed her in the arm with a “dart-like implement”.

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Sian Griffiths, who co-chaired the Hong Kong inquiry into the 2003 Sars outbreak, said a US university report into the Pfizer vaccine's impact on UK and South Africa coronavirus variants is "good news".

Professor Griffiths, an epidemiologist who also serves on an advisory board for Public Health England, told BBC Breakfast: "There's some good news this morning - it's not a peer-reviewed paper yet but it's a report from Texas University where they took blood from patients who had been immunised and tested it against both the Kent and the South African strain and the results were very positive, meaning that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine does protect against those variants and also other variants."

She said the UK's "good genomics" had allowed scientists here to understand the new variant which pushed infections up in London and the South East of England.

Boris Johnson’s father, Stanley Johnson, has compared the prime minister’s vaccine response to Winston Churchill’s leadership during World War II.  

Speaking on Good Morning Britain, he said he thought his son’s handling of Britain’s response to the coronavirus pandemic was “extraordinary”. 

Chantal Da Silva has more details below:

China has placed more than 11 million people in the northern city of Shijiazhuang under a strict lockdown after 117 people tested positive for Covid-19.

Residents will be barred from leaving the city, schools have been closed and residential communities and villages have been closed off.  

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Scotland’s coronavirus case numbers in January “could have been worse” had tougher restrictions not been introduced on Boxing Day but Scots are “not out of the woods yet”, according to a top medical adviser.

All of mainland Scotland and Skye were placed into Level 4 restrictions from 26 December, before a lockdown was enforced earlier this week. 

Interim deputy chief medical officer Dr Dave Caesar said restrictions are working, but compliance needs to remain at a high level to stop the more contagious strain of virus from spreading.

“I hate to say it, but it could have been worse by this time in January," he told the BBC. “We're not out of the woods yet by any stretch of the imagination, but I suppose we're holding our own in very significantly challenging circumstances.”     

Burnley’s manager has called for footballers’ Covid vaccinations to be fast-tracked and money saved on testing to be channelled back into the NHS.

Read his full comments in the piece below:

Four in 10 adults in Britain formed a Christmas bubble to celebrate Christmas Day, figures suggest.

Some 44 per cent of adults in England, Scotland and Wales said they met up to two other households on 25 December, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.

The same proportion said they had not done so, while 10 per cent said this was not permitted in their area.

The Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech does offer protection against two worrying variants of the virus, according to new research.

A study led by Pfizer and University of Texas researchers found neutralising levels of antibodies worked against the mutated variants – one of which was found in the UK, while the other originated in South Africa.

Adam Forrest has more details in this article: