Covid news - live: New ‘highly infectious’ XBB.1.5 subvariant ‘a wake-up’ call for UK

Most European Union countries favour introducing pre-departure Covid testing for travellers from China, the European Commission said on Tuesday.

The common EU approach emerged after a meeting on Tuesday of the Health Security Committee, an EU advisory body of national health experts from the EU’s 27 countries.

It follows Beijing’s plans to lift travel restrictions on its citizens despite a wave of Covid infections in the country.

ICYMI: A senior doctor at one of Shanghai’s top hospitals has claimed that 70 per cent of the city’s population has been infected with Covid as China continues to battle a massive surge in cases.

The wave of cases comes after the Communist regime loosened draconian Covid restrictions overnight, overwhelming hospitals and crematoriums.

Chen Erzhen, vice president at Ruijin Hospital in Shanghai and a member of the city’s Covid-19 expert advisory panel, was quoted as saying the majority of the city’s 25 million people may have been infected.

Maroosha Muzaffar has more:

The United States has echoed calls for more transparent Covid data from Beijing, after Washington became one of the first governments to reimpose coronavirus testing requirements on people travelling from China since Xi Jinping’s “zero Covid” policy was eased.

A World Health Organisation committee was holding a virtual, closed-doors meeting with experts at China’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention today, prior to which some scientists present had expressed hopes for a “more realistic picture” of the situation in China (see post at 4:43pm).

A White House national security council official would not comment on Tuesday’s meeting, but echoed WHO calls for more information.

“Public health experts and officials, including in the United States, have been clear it is important that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) share more adequate and transparent epidemiological and viral genomic sequence data,” the official told Reuters.

“This is in the interest of the PRC and the international community and critical to identify any potential variants.”

Despite repeated warnings from health leaders that immediate investment is needed to protect patients, Rishi Sunak has said the NHS has all the funding it needs to deal with the crisis engulfing hospitals.

But critics said claims the NHS had enough resources were “an insult to all those suffering in hospital corridors or in the back of ambulances because the Government refused to act sooner.”

Our Whitehall editor Kate Devlin has the report:

As children return to school at a time when high levels of flu, Covid-19 and scarlet fever are all being reported, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has issued fresh guidance in a bid to minimise the diseases’ spread.

Parents have been urged to keep children at home if they are unwell and have a fever, with adults told to only go out if necessary and wear face coverings if they are ill and avoid visiting vulnerable people, while an already crisis-stricken NHS faces down multiple waves of winter illnesses.

You can read more on the UKHSA’s “back-to-school advice” here:

Any contribution of China’s coronavirus outbreak to what we see in the UK “is likely to be minimal”, an expert in mathematical statistics has suggested.

On the “complex” issue of surveillance testing, “it is worth noting that the capacity for such surveillance is always limited”, said Professor Thomas House of the University of Manchester.

But he warned that testing travellers needs to be balanced against “potential enhanced surveillance in our health and social care sectors”.

Professor Rowland Kao, an expert on veterinary epidemiology and data science from the University of Edinburgh, said that the surveillance testing could fill an “important gap”, adding: “Testing on arrival is not to prevent spread but to gather data – we know very little about what is happening in China.

“If we and other countries are able to in particular gather viral sequences, this will give us knowledge of what variants might be emerging in China.”

Devastating delays in ambulance handovers causing issues at hospitals across the country are largely triggered “by those who are fit to leave hospital but delayed in doing so”, the health secretary has said.

Asked why he will not give NHS staff a real-terms pay increase given the record number of vacancies, the Steve Barclay told broadcasters: “Well, because we’re focusing the funding onto the operations backlogs, for example, getting more diagnostic hubs in place, getting the surgical hubs that we are rolling out, getting the backlog from the pandemic reduced, that’s been the key priority.

“That’s where we’ve surged additional funding, but we also recognise the big pressure that we’re seeing played through in terms of ambulance handover delays. It is largely triggered by those who are fit to leave hospital but delayed in doing so and we need to free up that bed capacity and that is often about having the right social care provision to do so.

“That’s why we’ve got an extra £7.5bn going into social care over the next two years, an extra £6.6bn into the NHS to tackle that issue of patients who are fit to leave, who are often delayed in doing so. That in turn is the best way of relieving the pressure on A&E and ensuring that ambulance handover times are reduced.”

Speaking to broadcasters about the pressures facing A&E units, health secretary Steve Barclay has said the government is focused on “getting the people out of the hospital who don’t need to be there” in order to “speed up the ambulance handover delays”.

“It has always been part of the recognition of the pressures of Covid that that would have an impact on people seeking services during the pandemic, for example, people were more reluctant to go and see their GPs. That in particular has had an impact on cardiovascular risk,” said Mr Barclay.

“There’s other factors as well in terms of the backlogs on operations. Yes, it’s important that we get the ambulances to people quickly, as well but there’s a range of factors that have played in, particularly into those cardiovascular deaths, which is the prime issue when we’re looking at the challenge in terms of excess deaths.

“So, this is something the chief medical officer, the NHS medical director have been looking at very closely.

“It is why we are so focused on getting the people out of the hospital who don’t need to be there because that in turn will speed up the ambulance handover delays and get those ambulances back out responding to calls.”

The European Union’s health security committee has announced that member states have agreed on a “coordinated approach” to the changing Covid-19 situation – including implications for increased travel from China.

The committee has worked on targeted measures, including pre-departure testing for travellers from China, increased wastewater monitoring and increased domestic surveillance, said EU health chief Stella Kyriakides.

Over the past week, however, EU nations have reacted unilaterally to the crisis in China, disregarding an earlier commitment to act in unity.

China has appeared to reject an offer of Covid variant-adapted vaccine donations from the European Union, announced by the EU executive on Tuesday.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said that the situation was “under control” and medical provisions “in adequate supply” – but added that China was open to “strengthening solidarity and cooperation with the international community” to better meet its pandemic challenges.

However, China can “meet the demand of anyone who wants to be vaccinated”, he said. It was not clear how many vaccines were being offered by the EU.

China has so far insisted on using only Chinese-made vaccines – which are of the inactivated virus type and not based on the Western mRNA technology – for its own population.