Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what steps he is taking to support less economically developed countries with tackling COVID-19.

To prioritise international support, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has assessed which countries are most at risk of the importation of cases and how prepared they are for a potential outbreak. The UK assessment is that Covid-19 poses an immediate health risk to less economically developed countries as well as secondary health and socio-economic impacts. Diseases are global threats and to save lives around the world we need a strong international response. The UK has announced up to £241 million of UK aid funding to support the global efforts to combat the outbreak of Covid-19 and to support multilateral actors, including the WHO and the IMF, to mitigate the impacts for low- and middle-income countries.