covert 19's relentless spread has
reached this Glasgow care home a
suspected outbreak of coronavirus taking
13 residents in a week two members of
staff are in hospital with the virus
while the home closely monitors the
health of everyone who lives and works
here
the government says another 708 people
have died in UK hospitals since 5 p.m.
on Thursday the highest number of deaths
in a day today cabinet minister Michael
Gove reported startling rises in people
being admitted to hospital in particular
parts of the country the pattern of
hospital admissions in England and Wales
has regional differences in London the
number of admissions fell slightly
between the 1st and 2nd of April
admissions are steady in Wales but in
Yorkshire and the Northeast they've gone
up by 35% and in the Midlands the rate
of hospital admissions has gone up by 47
percent today Watford General in
hartfordshire closed its a and Ian AK
Ovid 19 related critical incident a
problem with oxygen equipment meant it
couldn't take any more patients there
was some hopeful news in some places
hospital numbers have plateaued in
London but the medical message was that
the future of the virus is in our hands
there is reason to be hopeful that some
of the changes that we are observing in
infections and perhaps in
hospitalizations is now reflecting the
benefit of the social distancing that
everybody is complying with but it will
still take time for that to have its
maximum effect the government said 7
health workers have now died of Kove in
19 in London there was news that three
bus drivers and two controllers have
died of the virus their union is calling
for transport workers to get protective
equipment while the government has far
to go to test people for the virus at
scale an app which crunches information
supplied by working age P
who with symptoms and without has found
just under 5% would be positive if
tested extrapolating to the whole UK
population the data suggests that in the
last fortnight an estimated 1.9 million
people have been infected with kovat 19
with hotspots in major cities and South
Wales looking at the team's interactive
map the data collected from people in
Birmingham suggests 6% have coronavirus
symptoms in Liverpool again it's just
over 6% and in Glasgow the data suggests
4% could have the virus when you look at
the map and you see what's going on in
South Wales where you know there are
peaks there that aren't necessarily and
where you would expect right in Cardiff
but in some of those other areas that
don't have much in the way of NHS
facilities so potentially you know this
will allow people give them three weeks
grace to try and mobilise things in some
of these areas and maybe move them away
from other areas and also if you look at
the map you see Liverpool has more
problems relatively than Manchester and
so that could be helpful to people as
well in a move to stem the spread of
coronavirus in jail around 4000 selected
low-risk prisoners in England and Wales
are going to be temporarily freed
although tagged the government wouldn't
put a date on when the country under
lockdown will have a bit more freedom
the Prime Minister after a temperature
yesterday is still behind closed doors
his fiancee Carrie Simmons who's
pregnant has spent a week in bed with
symptoms but says she's now on the mend
trained if there and later in the
program we'll hear from families of
prisoners concerned about the spread of
the virus inside jails now
212 patients in the Midlands have died
after testing positive for corona virus
in the last 24 hours
far more even than London with hospital
admission rates in the region up by
almost 50 percent with intense pressure
on emergency departments work to
complete the new temporary Nightingale
hospital in Birmingham's National
Exhibition Centre is being ramped up
one intensive-care consultant in the
midlands told channel 4 news
he feels his team are at greater risk
because of a lack of staffing our home
affairs correspondent darkness sunny has
this eerily empty silent streets on what
would normally be the busiest shopping
day of the week although not everybody
can stay at home of course this region
has now topped a grim chart ahead of
even London the latest figures show
there are 127 deaths from coronavirus in
London in the last 24 hours in the
Midlands the death rate saw to 212
nearly doubling that of London by far
the highest in England at Birmingham's
NEC they're working on the UK's biggest
field hospital which will eventually
have more capacity than London's Excel
next to the NEC at the airport work has
begun on a temporary mortuary in
preparation for an expected rise in
deaths the authorities are trying to
understand why this region is such a
hotspot for transmissions there's a real
concern that hospitals in the West
Midlands will have reached maximum
capacity by next weekend we've spoken to
an intensive care consultant who works
inside one of these hospitals treating
coronavirus patients they've described
the situation on the wards as being in a
war in normal times the guidelines are
you have one intensive care unit nurse
for every patient you have up to 12
patients for a consultant it will end up
being up to five patients for every ICU
nurse and fifty patients for one
consultant this is going to be intensive
care that is almost like disaster
medicine we're going to have a lot of
deaths a lot of mistakes a lot of things
missed this account comes as the latest
figures show hospital admission rates
are up by 47 percent in the Midlands
so why have there been so many cases in
this region Birmingham is England's
second biggest city by population with
1.1 million residents
so a high number of cases is not
unexpected but some commentators and a
local MP have suggested culture
and religious practices could also be
playing a part as well as the
predominance of multi-generational
families here unhelpful speculation
according to one researcher who says we
need more francs you can't sort of place
that on the fact that there is a high I
think high I think minority population
in Birmingham because I think minority
population in London is so much higher
up until the point at which we know the
facts of who's caught the disease who's
died from it and we've got some ethnic
breakdowns about regional breakdowns
about breakdowns by socio-economic
characteristics can we then start to
make sort of conclusions about it one in
five deaths from coronavirus in England
have happened in the Midlands the
intensive care consultant we spoke to
has these fears at some point we're
going to end up having to say no to some
patients because the politicians have
decided they don't want to take
responsibility it will rest with
frontline staff when you are faced with
that decision when you have one
ventilator and two patients who do you
pick there are no easy answers here
public health officials are examining
transmission patterns in the Midlands to
see if there's anything unusual
happening here but the results could
take weeks or even months the fears
there of one intensive care consultant
speaking to us he has been treating
intensive care patients infected with
this disease we did put their concerns
to the Department of Health and we were
given a statement in which they said
we're working hard to make sure that the
NHS has enough capacity to meet this
increased demand they pointed out for
example that thousands more ventilators
are due to come on board in the next
weeks and months they also stated that
the NHS will receive everything it needs
to respond to this virus it comes at a
worrying time for this region as we've
seen hospital admissions have gone up by
47 percent and in the last 24 hours the
number of people dying who have been
tested positive for coronavirus has
surpassed that even of London and we're
told the worst is yet still to come
because this epidemic hasn't yet reached
its peak
thanks very much Donna well there's
questions over testing continue one
virologist has been
part of a team working on a test in her
spare time in conjunction with Hampshire
Hospitals NHS foundations trust dr.
Veronica Fowler and molecular biologists
with a background in veterinary health
is working on a test which she says can
give a positive result for someone
suffering from covin 19 within 20
minutes sometimes as quick as 10 minutes
a game changer if the government adopted
it as part of their test testing
strategy dr. Fowler has spent today
developing a workflow to introduce this
test into the Health Service and she
told us public health England are
seriously looking at warning this out
well I spoke to her a little early along
with dr. Stephen kid whose call she
answered to work on this project okay so
this test is an isothermal test which
means that it runs at a single
temperature and the the existing test
that's used in laboratories at the
moment requires multiple different
temperatures so high temperatures low
temperatures high temperatures low
temperatures which means you need more
sophisticated equipment to be running
those tests ours is an isothermal method
which runs at a constant 65 degrees for
20 minutes and therefore it's a much
more simpler test you need less
sophisticated equipment so that single
temperature reduces the time by how much
quite significantly so we're rapport
we're able to report with this in 20
minutes whereas the standard test that's
in the laboratories is an hour and 15
now Victoria you normally work on doing
this testing with animals so how have
you had to adapt your way of working so
in my previous research career I have
used this particular test for diagnosing
oh I II Listed diseases in in research
settings so those diseases like foot and
mouth disease really there is no
adaptation required it's so simple to
use you can roll it out into any setting
that you wish to use it in and at the
moment we have it running in a
laboratory setting and a lot of the
skills base which is in veterinary
science it is in clinical sciences very
trans transferable between specialties
so people can get trained up for the
different varmints very quickly now we
believe you're the first in the UK doing
this do you think it should be rolled
out more widely so basically what we
have developed is a user friend
rapid test and which can be used in
multiple different formats and that
allows us to apply it in the bottlenecks
of the current testing systems and that
allows us to increase the time at which
we're reporting it allows us to increase
the number of samples that we are
testing and it enables us to reduce the
amount of critical reagents that we're
also using in the lab so it's a really
good way to so be able to be efficient
with time and resources so if you were
to roll this out more widely how many
people could you test in an hour so we
can do hundreds in an hour and we can do
thousands in a day it's it's a very
scalable technology and that is purely
due to the fact that it is simple and
that it's very quick so you know we can
have a rapid turnaround in 20 minutes
now the government's target is to hit a
hundred thousand tests a day do you then
think that's viable so I think for us I
think that all hospitals will be looking
to ramp up as much as they can so every
Hospital will be doing their best to use
the technology at their disposal and
we'll be using this to add into that
number to make sure that there's enough
tests in the NHS as soon as possible and
how are you hoping to share out the
testing knowledge that you've acquired
more widely across the UK we always like
to any innovation we've come up and a
lot of innovation is being driven around
Cova to be able to be able to scale up
we always look to share as much as this
with whoever needs and requires our help
we're hearing a lot about false
negatives from some types of tests is
there any concern about that with the
tests that you're working on absolutely
not so it'd be much more reliable than
some of the tests that are out there on
the market yeah the way that we're going
to apply it is part of a pipeline and
we've cleverly we very carefully thought
out exactly where and when it will be
applied and we don't anticipate any
problems with false positives or false
negatives how can you be so certain it's
accurate we've compared this test
directly to the gold standard that is
currently being used on a daily basis
but do you believe it should be and
could be rolled out or widely to members
of the public absolutely I mean as I
said earlier this is a technology that
can be located wherever you
to be located so is it something
potentially we could all be doing at
home and then send off the result no no
it will still be in some form of
centralized facility even if that's a
remote centralized facility