Harriett Baldwin
Main Page: Harriett Baldwin (Conservative - West Worcestershire)Department Debates - View all Harriett Baldwin's debates with the Cabinet Office
(3 years, 6 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
The daily test process has gone up by 34% just in the last month, and daily capacity has gone up by 28%. As the right hon. Lady knows, by the end of this month, NHS Test and Trace is confident that it will be doing 500,000 tests—it will have capacity, I should say, for 500,000 tests a day.
Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)
No one envies the Prime Minister having to make these incredibly difficult decisions. Last week’s Office for National Statistics community survey showed that by far and away the biggest age group catching the virus is the student age group. Since age is a much bigger predictor of risk than geography, are the Prime Minister’s advisers considering making recommendations about how individuals can control their own risk by age?
The Prime Minister
One of the issues that we have—I tried to address this point earlier—particularly with the large numbers of multi-generational households such as we have in this country, is that it is very difficult to confine the virus to one age group and one generation. Alas, one of the reasons we are so concerned is that it is starting to spread quite substantially among the over-60s, as we are seeing now in the Merseyside region.