Covid-19

Steve Baker Excerpts

Thursday 22nd October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. We have an advertising campaign, “Help us to help you”, to make the simple point to people that, if they are asked to go to hospital by a clinician, then it is safer to go to hospital than not to do so. In fact, we call them green sites and blue sites. Green means free from covid—we are as confident as we can be that they are. It is blue, not red, which means that we still want people to come to hospital, even if they have to come to A&E, because there is only likely to be, at worst, as much covid as in the general population, unless, of course, a person is in a covid ward treating only covid patients. The NHS has learned a huge amount both about the microbiology of the disease and about how to run health services in a world when covid is at large.

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

Of course this is a dangerous disease and, of course, cases are rising, including in my own area, so it is with some humility that I have a look at the daily excess all-cause deaths in all ages in England, which show that there has been no significant excess all-cause mortality observed in week 40 overall. Is it not the case that the good news in this second wave is that the disease is not progressing as it did in the first?

[Matt Hancock]

I want to keep it that way. It is true that the all-cause mortality rates are around the typical levels for this time of year, and that is partly because non-covid deaths are actually lower at the moment than in most years, and because, thus far, we have worked to keep this virus under control. We know from the basic mathematics of compounding growth and the exponential nature of the growth of any virus that the number of deaths will increase if the number of cases increase exponentially, hence the need for the actions that we in this House have voted for.