Covid-19 Update

Baroness Watkins of Tavistock Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I am extremely grateful to my noble friend for her insight. She is entirely right; this awful pandemic does have a silver lining, which is that it can be an inflection point for a complete transformation in our public health messaging. The work we are doing on communicating the threat of the variants is one example of that. The next front line will be the flu jab rollout in the autumn, where take-up rates have been okay but not great. I hope that, when the flu jab campaign begins this autumn, a completely different generation and spread of people will step up to that opportunity. We are working extremely hard to use the public mood and sentiment behind preventive medicine to full effect to ensure that the flu jab works, that therefore a much smaller proportion of the population will transmit flu, and that deaths and severe disease from flu will be reduced. That can be the legacy of this awful pandemic.

[Baroness Watkins of Tavistock (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I welcome the vigilant focus described in this Statement that has been adopted by the Government, and that the response is being co-ordinated through the UK Health Security Agency. Could the Minister explain how England is working with the other three countries in the UK to ensure that a proactive approach is taken to the new virus variant, that the uptake of vaccines increases, that the monitoring of transmission continues, and to enable early intervention should the number of cases increase? In particular, what data are the Government collecting on the number of people in quarantine hotels testing positive for coronavirus and how many people have absconded from quarantine? Would the Government consider adopting a process similar to the electronic tagging undertaken in South Korea, to more accurately monitor the movement of people in and out of the country at its borders?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I am enormously grateful to the noble Baroness for that creative and thoughtful question. The good news is that the number of absconding residents from managed quarantine is minimal; it can be counted on one hand and many of them have been retrieved. The bad news is that the positivity rate in managed quarantine is far too high. I do not have the precise number in front of me and do not want to guess at it, but it is clearly true that far too many people are getting on planes when they are infected and far too many people are catching the disease on their travels. When we think of how to manage any vaccine-evading and highly transmissible variants, we have to look to the red list for secure protection for this country. She asked another question I cannot remember, but I will be glad to write to her about it.