Street. The health secretary, matt hancock began by giving the latest on the uk government starategy. The government is working through our action plan which has as its core that we must protect life and protect the nhs. Both by slowing the spread of the virus so we flatten the curve, and by ensuring the nhs is always there to treat all people who need its care. According to the most recent figures, 583,496 tests for coronavirus have now been carried out in the uk, including 23,560 tests carried out yesterday. 138,078 people have tested positive for the virus, an increase of 4583 cases since yesterday. 17,615 people have sadly died. Sorry, 17,615 people are currently in hospital, i must correct myself, down from over 18,000. Sadly, of those hospitalised, 18,738 have now died. That is an increase of 616 fatalities since yesterday. Although this number is lower than it has been in previous days, i still stop and think of each one. They will not be forgotten and their stories will live on. We must maintain our resolve and follow the social distancing rules, because they are working, they are protecting the nhs and they are saving lives. To lift the measures too soon and to risk a second peak would be a mistake. It would undo all the hard work that has been done, and it would be both bad for our Nations Health and for our nations economy. We can only start to change the measures when the nhs can continue to cope, when the operational challenges have been met, when the daily death rate falls sustainably and consistently, when the rate of infection is decreasing and, most importantly, when there is no risk of a second peak. We need to bring the incidents of new infection right down. We will then use a vigorous programme of test, track and trace, and keep it down so we can safely release more of the restrictions. Today i want to set down the progress were making on test, track and trace, an important part of the measures we are taking on the work we are doing. First testing, we set the goal of 100,000 tests per day by the end of this month. I knew when we set it that this was a challenging target. Capacity is now ahead of our plans, and even overnight has increased from 40,000 to 51,000. Because capacity has increased so substantially, we are now able to expand who can get the tests. Our ultimate goal is that everyone who could benefit from a test gets a test. But of course we had to start by prioritising patients in hospital followed by nhs and social care colleagues, and by those in care homes. As we expanded the capacity from just 2000 tests per day at the start of march, to 10,000 per day at the start of this month, so we have been able to further expand access. Today i can go further. We can make it easier, faster and simpler for any essential worker in england who needs a test to get a test. From today, employers of essential workers will be able to visit the government website to get a test for any of their staff who need a test, gov,uk. From tomorrow, any essential workers who need a test will be able to book an appointment on gov,uk themselves directly. This all applies for people in essential worker households as well who need a test. It is all part of getting britain back on herfeet. Those included as essential workers will be based on the list for schools and education set out on gov,uk. The whole process will be free and once you have entered your details on the website you will get a text or e mail inviting you to book an appointment. After you have had your test, results will be sent out by text and a help desk will be available to deal with queries. People who cannot go online can still apply through their employer. I want to make it as easy as possible for people to get a test, not least because we are talking about people who are ill. Our network of regional test sites has now reached over 30 locations across the uk and more are being set up each day. I want to take this moment to applaud the private companies who have been involved, as well as my team at Public Health england and the nhs. Boots, amazon, run docs, rush, gsk, astrazeneca, they have really stepped up to the mark and i am grateful to everyone of them. We also introducing home test kits. With support of the armed forces, mobile sites too. The armed forces and mod have played a vital role and i want to pay tribute to their work. I thought at yesterdays briefing, general sir nick carter, when he said coronavirus had presented the single greatest logistical challenge in his 40 years of service, i thought that spoke a truth. 0ur armed forces have played their part in rising to this challenge and i want to thank them all. In addition to testing essential workers, we are also using testing to find out how many people have coronavirus and how many people have had coronavirus. These are critical pieces of information to inform our battle against this novel virus. And we will use it to learn, and we keep learning about it every day. This week we have begun one of the biggest virus infection and antibody studies this country has ever seen. This is a joint project with the office for National Statistics bringing their experience of running large household surveys and the university of oxford bringing their world leading scientific expertise will stop in total, 25,000 people will take part in the first phase with plans to expand it up to 300,000 people over the next 12 months. There will be samples taken from self administered swabs, and questions answered from home visits from Trained Health workers and these tests will help us strengthen our Scientific Understanding and inform us on the big choices we have to make about social distancing measures and how we start returning to a more normal life. Letters are arriving on doorsteps from today. Please, if you are asked, take part in this Vital Research for your country. The early signs from today are that there is huge enthusiasm for those who have received letters taking part in this survey. If you get a letter, please respond to it as soon as you can because you will be doing your bit. As we ramp up our ability to test in large numbers and as we slow the spread of the virus, we also need to make sure we have the ability to trace contacts just as effectively. As we look ahead, this is critical to keep the virus under control. So we are putting infrastructure in place now so we can roll out Contact Tracing on a large scale. We are currently testing the new nhs Contact Tracing app. If you become unwell with symptoms of coronavirus you will be able to tell the nhs through this app, which will then send an alert to other app users that you have been insignificant contact with in recent days, even before you had the symptoms, so they know, and they can act accordingly, so we can get the tests to people even if they are asymptomatic. If we are worried that they have been in significant contact with someone who has the disease, we will be able to let them know. But it isnt just about the technology, we need the people too. We need to really kick start Contact Tracing is the new number of cases begins to fall. We are preparing for this now by hiring an additional 18,000 people, including over 3000 clinicians, including Public Health specialists. We will be training up the massed ranks of contact tracers over the coming weeks and rolled out the service. This test, track and trace will be vital to stop a second peak of the virus. But recent weeks have shown there is something we can all do. And that is to follow the rules on social distancing. I am acutely aware of how difficult this has been. And especially as we enter ramadan, a month that is so special for so many people. This ramadan, many muslims who serve their country in the nhs and in the armed forces, and in so many other ways, will not be sharing the joy of this month as they normally do. I want to say to all british muslims, thank you for staying at home. I know how important the daily ifta is, how important communal prayers are at night and how important the festival of eid is. Thank you for making these allowances. Thank you for your service and citizenship and thank you for your sacrifice. This will help so we can together emerge from this challenge all the more united, all the more grateful to one another and all the more safe. We have travelled together to far to go backwards now. Please, stay at home, protect the nhs and save lives. I am now going to ask sir patrick to set out the latest data on the charts. Thank you, can i have the first slide. A reminder on this slide, the virus spreads between people when we get too close, when we have coughs and exchange because of contact. All of us have actually done a good job in staying away from multiple contacts. You can see on this slide, 90 and more in some cases of people have stayed away from people outside the household. We have tried to avoid contact with vulnerable people, however difficult that has been, but it has made a big difference. You can also see the number of people who have managed to work from home has actually increased. That has been a really important part of making sure we reduce the chance of the virus spreading and it is very clear that actually the transmission in the community is way down from what it was. In terms of the infection spread among the population, the social distancing is having a very big effect. Next slide. This shows new cases. I have said before and will say again, this is new cases as determined by testing. There are many more cases, but we know those cases are coming down. Here it looks fairly flat because it is the testing slide. What you can see here is the number of people being tested for medical reasons in blue is coming down slightly, even on this, even though many more tests are being done, and it is now possible to test a number of essential workers, the orange bar. The real acid test will be what this is turning into interns of the next slide. This is the number of people in hospital with covid 19. You can see a very clear decline in london. You can see in other areas there are declines such as in the midlands and you can see in nearly all areas this is flat or on the way down. This speaks to the point that as we have radically reduced the number of infections in the community, this has turned into a reduction in the number in hospital. We are still at that period coming through the peak but you can see it is heading in the right direction. This in turn, with a delay, translates into what happens in intensive care units. Next slide please. You can see here, the percentage of beds being occupied in intensive care units, the number of course went up, reached a plateau and is gradually decreasing. As ive said before, you would expect this to be gradual decline and take longer in the decrease in admissions. I want to say one other thing about what is happening in hospitals. There is a very large Clinical Trial going on trying to work out which medicines make make a difference with this disease. And one of those studies has recruited 7000 patients, and there will be result coming from that in due course. I would urge, as we enter the phase where the plateau has been reached, a slight decrease we can see, we continue to make sure that we enrolled patients in Clinical Trials so we get the answers to the critical questions about which medicines might work. Final slide. Not surprisingly, we know this is a problem in terms of the severity of the disease, that although the number of patients in intensive care units is coming down slowly, the deaths remain at a plateau, coming down slightly from not coming down fast. I would expect that to continue for another couple of weeks and we will then see a faster decline thereafter. It is crucially important, going back to the beginning, that we all keep firm with our attention to social distancing because it is at that end that we stop the progression through a hospital intensive care unit and ultimately, unfortunately for some people, to death. I think it is crucial we all do our part to keep this going and you can see it is headed in the right direction and we must stay firm with the measures we have taken. Thank you very much. John, if you could update us on where we are on the Testing Programme in a bit more detail . Thank you. I want to use this opportunity to talk about the why and the what of our national Testing Programme. Why do we need it and what are we doing to make sure everybody who would benefit from a test could get one . I should first explain, when we talk about testing, with talking about two different types of test. The first is a swab test for the presence of virus and the second is a blood test to show who has previously had it. Swap testing is currently the main focus because relatively few people have had the virus at this point in the pandemic. Swab test can tell us what treatment the patient should receive in hospital, who needs to be isolated in any care service, and which key workers are currently self isolating can safely return to work and some two thirds of those we have been testing have returned to work which is very gratifying and we have seen some reductions in the nhs Sickness Absence results as a result. In hospitals or care homes where social distancing is more difficult to achieve, testing is vital to help control outbreaks of infection where they occur. Finally, swab test can help us understand the spread of the disease across the population through carefully designed surveys of the type the secretary of state has just described, the one led by the office of National Statistics and oxford university. Although a positive swab test is very reliable, i want to stressed that a negative result does not absolutely guarantee that you are free of the virus. However it is a very good guide for whether it is safe to return to work. Blood testing, by contrast, can tell us who has previously had the infection, again improving our understanding of the spread of the virus when used in surveys. And in individuals it may also be able to tell us about the risks of future infection. Which of course is so important. If you have had the virus, you may have acquired some degree of immunity and i stress may because the science on immunity is still uncertain and it also takes some time for that immunity to build up and for the test to be positive. Our five pillar national Testing Programme is designed to ensure that everyone who needs a test can have one. To make that happen, we are doing two things. Increasing capacity for testing and increasing access. May i have the first slide, please . Here we can see that as the secretary of state said, we have now performed more than 500,000 tests in the uk, which has been steadily increasing over time. The second slide, please. This slide shows the increase in the capacity to undertake tests. We are talking about the swab test, and compared to the start of the month you can see we have increased substantially so we can outdo more than 51,000 tests per day. And the shape of the curve is exponential, you can see that it is rapidly increasing at this point which is what we expected. We have done this by securing supplies of kits and consumables from some of the leading manufacturers the secretary of state mentioned and these are the very best of the kind available in the world. We have also introduced new tests, new types of tests, so at least for example two nhs labs are using a test that has no rna extraction stage which means no need for the chemical reagents which are in such high demand around the world. We have also developed technology within the nhs to direct capacity to where it is needed most and that has made a huge difference. In addition, we have the three new lighthouse labs which are all now on stream, the ones in milton keynes, manchester and glasgow. Each of these labs will be able to process tens of thousands of tests per day and we are introducing automation into those processes, which really ramps up the capacity. We have also entered into partnerships with leading labs in industry and academia in addition to these other labs i have mentioned and this will help increase volume further. We are currently on track to reach 100,000 tests per day as planned and in fact we are somewhat ahead of where we thought we would be at this stage. A huge amount of work has gone into this across the board and i want to take this opportunity to thank everybody involved. Next we are increasing access to testing so if i could have the next slide, please . You can see from the map we already have more than 30 drive through centres and these are increasing to around 48. At the secretary of state mentioned, home testing options are also now in place and we will increase this further. We also want to use an approach we call the satellite approach where test kits are delivered in batches to a single site and then returned in batches. Finally, as you heard, we are also currently working with the army on a new pop up mobile testing option which was developed for us by the army and is really working very well. We are going to have 48 of these pop up facilities which can travel around the country to where they are needed most, for example in care homes. A Key Development that will transform access is this new web portal for employers and essential workers to repair themselves for a test. All this together means any essential worker or member of their household who has symptoms and would benefit test will be able to get one. At the same time, we are developing new and better blood tests. These could be used to help people assess their individual risk, although as i said, the science on this is incomplete. Of the existing tests on the market do not work well enough for individual advice and impact no country in the world is using them for that purpose. The existing tests however can be used with care in surveys to understand the spread of the virus. Finally we will need. So let me summarise the current state of play as faras summarise the current state of play as far as testing goes. We had exponentially increase our Testing Capacity and on target for having capacity and on target for having capacity for 100,000 tests a day. We are opening up access to all essential members of the household and could benefit from the task to get one. At the same time as we had friends or patrick. The success of social distancing has almost certainly reduce the number of people who would benefit from this test at this stage of the pandemic. Perhaps most importantly is as we move to the next phase of the response of the pandemic i can say with confidence we will have a testing capability that we need. Thank you. Thank you, john. And now we will open up to questions. Firstly, Laura Kuenssberg of the bbc. Thank you very much, secretary of state. There is broad public support for the lockdown but the Scottish First minister, the opposition and some of your own mps think you should be more transparent about what might come next. Are they all wrong . Because the five tests you have set out our about when it might be time but not about how we might move on into that next phase. If i could ask sir patrick, what do you think the gap between the peaks in terms of time could be in different parts of the country . Thank you. I understand the thirst for knowledge, but the tests we have set out, which are the basis from which others, for instance the scottish government, have then developed their plans, those tests are the critical tests for when changes can be made. And of course, monitoring what is happening and making sure we move at the right time is absolutely critical. But the message remains to your viewers and everybody across the country, the message is the same, that people need to stay at home to protect the nhs and save lives. The reason we have clarity on that message is that it has succeeded in bringing down and flattening the curve, but were not through that yet. And there is an awful lot of work that still needs to be done and we are absolutely determined to avoid a second peak. We have set out precisely as you said the five tests for when we should move. We have not met them yet and therefore we must keep the social distancing measures in place. It is worth remembering that what we have done it really suppresses the numbers. This is not a natural peak, it is a suppressed peak. And i think london is ahead of the rest of the country, it may be by a couple of weeks, but there is quite a lot of synchrony across the country, its not massively different. I cannot be absolutely sure about this but i think two or three weeks is the sort of order where might you expect to see some differences across the country. Hello it has been yet another dry and mostly sunny day across the uk. The view from space and the satellite picture shows there is patchy high clouds air but low cloud rating that aisles for the day. But otherwise blue sky overhead and we have clear spelt as we overnight. We have clear spelt as we overnight. We have some low cloud rolling its way from the seas and perhaps into the midlands and could turn quite nasty and murky through the early hours of these areas. Temperature wise generally between two and 9 degrees in some spots in scotland might dip below freezing allowing a touch of frost to develop. We will see this area of cloud across Eastern England and it will tend to break up fairly quickly and this will break up and we will see plenty of sunshine to ta ke we will see plenty of sunshine to take us through the day. And a little on the cool side in the far north and east of the uk. Generally speaking another warm day with temperature is getting up into the 20s. As we had your friday evening one 01 20s. As we had your friday evening one or two 20s. As we had your friday evening one 01 two showers 20s. As we had your friday evening one or two showers breaking out and the morris southwest england will remain dry fat chance for showers does tend to increase little bit and it will feel a little cooler as well. A very black pressure pattern. What do i mean by that . The winds are very light and not much to place whether along. The changes will be slow and settle. A lot of dry weather around on saturday and again the odd showerfor a weather around on saturday and again the odd shower for a of wells the southwest. Temperature wise and other fairly warm day for the time of year that you can see the band of cloud up to the far northwest of scotla nd cloud up to the far northwest of scotland and this is a frontal system that will make some progress as you move through saturday night and into sunday. This area of low pressure starts to develop an patients way south. It will turn just a little unsettled. Into the northern parts of scotland, down into england and wales and the odd shower breaking out ahead of it and there will still be a lot of fine weather and spells. Very warm in the south that turning noticeably cooler across northern parts of the uk. This is outside source on bbc news for viewers in the uk and around the world. Were covering all the latest coronavirus developments here in britain and globally. 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