Covid-19

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Thursday 23rd April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell]

I would like to recruit my noble friend to our testing organisation, because she has exactly the right ideas, and the programme she described is exactly what we are doing. The Army is putting together 50 transit vans with tents and cones to be able to travel to places such as care homes to conduct testing, particularly at times of epidemic. Amazon is putting together home testing kits, which means that no one need drive anywhere to have a test, and we are working with care homes so that care workers can take the swabs and then drop off bags of them at a reasonable place so that they can be processed by our laboratories. Drive-in testing was an early but limited programme, and we have a lot more going on than that.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister; he has had a lot of work to do in the Lords today. He commented on ONS figures and the analysis it has done on the number of people who have so sadly died. The figure he gave in the Statement was, I think, around 18,000. I assume that these are deaths from the virus of people in hospital. I suspect he will have seen a piece in the Financial Times earlier this week which did some analysis of the ONS figures. It suggested that the figure of deaths caused by the pandemic was as much as 41,000. Have his officials looked into this and can he comment on its veracity?

[Lord Bethell]

I have not seen the piece in the FT, so cannot comment on the noble Lord’s remarks. All I would remind him, as I have said in previous answers to similar questions, is that false reporting of a death is an offence. Doctors are required to make a clear report of a death. If it is associated with Covid in any way, the word “Covid” will be in the death certificate. If it is in the death certificate, it will make its way through the CQC to the ONS figures. There should be no ambiguity about this at all.