Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the answer by Lord Bethell that “the nosocomial infection that we are seeing is at dramatically lower rates that it was in the past” in relation to COVID-19 on 12 November (HL Deb, col 1256), to quantify the reduction of nosocomial infection rate which took place in the period referred to.

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 to date.

In my answer of 12 November I did not make a direct comparison with hospital cases, but with the number of COVID-19 cases overall, taking into account nosocomial infections in other settings.