Norway halts AstraZeneca vaccine as homeless prioritised for jab, Hancock says

Hundreds of homeless EU nationals were sent back to their home countries under a controversial “reconnection” process during the first eight months of the pandemic, new figures reveal.

Data obtained through freedom of information (FOI) law and seen by The Independent shows 396 EU citizens in England were subject to voluntary reconnection between March and October 2020. This was up from the annual average of 338 in the previous five years.

The true figure for the pandemic expected to be higher, as 28 per cent of local authorities did not respond to the FOI request submitted by researchers at the University of Cambridge.

Read May Bulman’s exclusive here:

Train ticket sales plunged by 77 per cent in the year up to March 2021 compare to the previous year, Trainline has said.

The train and coach ticket travel platform said net sales for the 12 months to the end of February were 23 per cent of levels before the pandemic, with revenues of just £473 million, compared with £2 billion a year earlier.

Meanwhile, business travel made just £75 million in net ticket sales, compared with £1.2 billion a year earlier.

Bosses said they were optimistic for the future and saw a rise in sales during the summer months when restrictions were eased.

The company said: “Encouragingly, when lockdowns and restrictions were eased during the summer months of 2020, leisure and commuter passenger volumes recovered relatively quickly in Trainline’s key European markets, while Trainline’s UK consumer net ticket sales recovered faster than the market, reflecting an acceleration in the shift to online and digital channels.”

More than 300,000 NHS patients in England have now been waiting more than a year for routine surgery, according to the latest NHS data.

The statistics for waiting times in January show the impact of the second wave of coronavirus, with year-long waits jumping by 75,000 in a month from December 2020.

The number of people having to wait more than 52 weeks for hospital treatment stood at 304,044 in January 2021, the highest number for any calendar month since January 2008. There were just 1,643 patients waiting over a year in January 2020.

Read Shaun Lintern’s report here:

The proportion of people successfully contacted by Test and Trace in the week to 3 March has fallen slightly since the previous week.

Of the 44,508 people transferred to the Test and Trace system in the week to 3 March, 88.6 per cent were reached and asked to provide details of recent close contacts, compared to 89.1 per cent the week before.

More than one in ten (10.9 per cent) of people transferred to Test and Trace were not reached, while a further 0.5 per cent did not provide any communication details.

Denmark has temporarily paused its AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine programme after reports of cases of blood clots forming, including one death, Danish authorities said on Thursday.

The vaccine will be suspended for 14 days but officials have not disclosed how many reports of blood clots there had been.

Any complications with the vaccine are likely to stem from a specific batch rather than a wider issue.

Tom Batchelor reports:

The proportion of NHS workers in England who reported feeling unwell due to work-related stress in 2020 has risen past four in ten, a survey of more than half a million employees has found.

Rises were sharpest in acute and community trusts and acute specialist trusts, the annual survey found.

More than four in ten workers (44 per cent) reported feeling unwell because of work-related stress in the previous 12 months, up from 40 per cent the previous year.

A total of 595,270 NHS employees in England responded to the NHS Staff Survey 2020, which was carried out between September and December last year.

The proportion of staff members who said they had worked shifts in the last three months while feeling unwell fell from 59 per cent in 2019 to 46 in 2020, as people were told to stay home if they had Covid symptoms.

Danny Mortimer, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said the general findings were encouraging but there were “significant areas of concern”.

He said: “The overall picture is encouraging given the unprecedented and most challenging of times NHS staff have worked through over the past 12 months. There are, though, significant areas of concern and the recent data on the continued poorer experience of ethnic minority staff starkly reminds NHS leaders that staff experience varies unacceptably in their organisations.”

Mr Mortimer said with nearly one in five people (18.2 per cent) considering leaving the health service, there can be “no room for complacency”, referring to the government’s “intention to offer only a 1 per cent pay rise” to NHS workers.

On the one-year anniversary of Covid-19 being declared a pandemic, a leading animal-welfare organisation is writing to United Nations and World Health Organisation chiefs, calling on them to lead radical overhauls by governments of how humans treat animals to prevent future pandemics.

They call for a ban on fur farms, live animal markets, the dog and cat meat trade and wildlife trade, and a crackdown on dangerous factory farming practices. My report on the warning that the world must stop tackling the symptoms without tackling the root causes of the pandemic:

Progress in the fight against Covid-19 has meant the next phase of opening schools and changes to outdoor mixing will go ahead in Scotland, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon says.

She confirmed all primary school pupils and more secondary pupils will be back in school from Monday, while changes to current rules will allow four people from two households to mix outdoors from Friday.

The British public have more confidence in vaccines than those in other countries, a survey for The Independent suggests.

Elsewhere, people are particularly wary of the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab, whereas in the UK, as many people believe it is effective as believe the Pfizer/Biontech jab is.

Less than 40 per cent of the French public has confidence in the Oxford and Moderna vaccines, and less than 60 per cent has confidence in the Pfizer.

Graphic by Statista:

A pharmaceutical chief has suggested scientists may look to produce vaccines in single-use plastic vials, rather than multiple-dose glass vials in future as demand grows.

Ian Muir, chief executive of Porton Biopharma and lead for the contract manufacture team of the UK’s Vaccine Task Force, said there were only a few manufacturers in the world who can make the specialised vials the vaccines are currently delivered in.

He said the supply chain for the vials was getting longer as demand for them grew around the world.

“As we look forward more globally, I think the question that needs to be addressed is whether 10-dose glass vials are really the answer for seven billion people and whether we need to look at other delivery systems.

“So whether that is single-use plastic vials or single-use prefilled syringes or other alternative technologies that are out there, because just making enough glass, anywhere in the world, and filling it is going to be a real constraint,” he said.