Covid-19 Update

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Monday 19th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

That is the approach we have taken so far since the introduction of the red list and the hotel quarantine. Through the testing of every single passenger who comes here, we essentially now have a survey of the world. We can see where the new variants are from the people coming through the testing regime. I am grateful for my right hon. Friend’s wise counsel.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

The Health Secretary is clearly right to put India on the red list and to safeguard the vaccine programme from new variants. However, the India variant has been under investigation for three weeks, and other neighbouring countries with lower and slower covid rates were put on the red list 10 days ago. This week, Hong Kong identified 47 covid cases on a single Delhi flight. Before Friday, we still had 16 direct flights from India and many more indirect ones. Can he explain, contrary to his previous answer, why India was not put on a red list 10 days ago, when other countries were? Can he publish the Joint Biosecurity Centre’s assessments, recommendations and criteria and also publish a full genomic analysis of which countries all the new variant cases are arriving from, so that we can see where the border gaps still are in the measures that he has in place and make sure that we do not keep having these delays?

[Matt Hancock]

We keep all these decisions for each country under constant review. The challenge of the genomic data is that some countries have excellent coverage of genomic sequencing and others do not. Actually, that is not particularly correlated with their income. For instance, South Africa, a middle-income country, has excellent genomic sequencing. We take the decisions very rapidly when we need to. We keep all this under constant review and I am glad that she welcomes the decision to put India on the red list today.