Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will publish statistics on the number of (a) staff, (b) patients and (c) visitors who are believed to have contracted covid-19 in hospital.

Given the incubation period of the virus and local differences in application of testing protocols, it is not possible to definitively determine the number of people who contracted the virus while in hospital in England state or the number of nosocomial infections amongst National Health Service staff and how many have been infected through contacts outside the NHS. NHS England and NHS Improvement do not hold any data on visitors infected.

Since October 2020, NHS England and NHS Improvement has published data on COVID-19 hospital activity from 1 August including the numbers of people diagnosed in, or admitted to, hospital with COVID-19. NHS England and NHS Improvement also collect data the time between admission to hospital and first positive swab for COVID-19 and the number of patients admitted to hospital after a diagnosis in the community or diagnosed within eight days after admission.