Asked by: Yvette Cooper (Labour - Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the national capacity of (a) intensive care unit beds and (b) ventilators is; what level of capacity he estimates reaching in the next four weeks; and what proportion of covid-19 cases are likely to require (i) intensive care, (ii) oxygen therapy and (iii) ventilation treatment.
Answered by Edward Argar
The standard capacity of the National Health Service’s critical care beds in the United Kingdom is approximately 4,000. The number of critical care beds available to the NHS has risen by over 3,000. This does not include further additional capacity being created in Nightingale Hospitals.
At the start of the crisis in March the NHS across the UK had access to over 8,000 mechanical ventilators. The number of mechanical and non-invasive ventilators sourced for the NHS has increased by over 4,000. These figures are expected to rise as we procure further equipment and products from the Prime Minister’s ventilator challenge.
NHS capacity predictors show that the NHS remains with sufficient capacity to meet and exceed demand. Modelling by Imperial College London has predicted intensive care capacity usage which can be found at:
Asked by: Yvette Cooper (Labour - Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the guidance is for people (a) who are elderly and (b) with relevant underlying heath conditions on how they can reduce or minimise their personal risk of contracting covid-19.
Answered by Jo Churchill
Guidance has been published on social distancing for everyone in the United Kingdom and protecting older people and vulnerable persons. This includes advice for those at increased risk of severe illness from COVID-19 to be particularly strict in following social distancing measures. This guidance is available to view at the following link:
Guidance has also been published for people who are at particularly high risk of severe illness from COVID-19 because of an underlying health condition, and for their family, friends and carers. This guidance is available to view at the following link:
Letters will be sent out from Monday 23 March 2020 strongly advising those most at risk from COVID-19 to self-isolate for at least 12 weeks.
Asked by: Yvette Cooper (Labour - Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how the Government will estimate (a) the level of prevalence of and (b) rates of infection and immunity to covid-19 if symptomatic patients are not tested.
Answered by Nadine Dorries
The levels of prevalence and rates of infection are calculated based on laboratory confirmed cases. Public Health England (PHE) conducts surveillance of COVID-19 infection using a variety of data sources.
These include surveillance of influenza-like illness presenting to primary care, surveillance of outbreaks in schools, care homes and other community settings. PHE and the National Health Service have also established a surveillance system that reports daily on COVID-19 infections in persons requiring hospital and intensive care admissions.
Plans are in place for serological surveillance to collect data on the prevalence of infection as the outbreak progresses. This will involve the testing of samples from different sources to inform the epidemiological characterisation of COVID-19 immunity in the population.