number of deaths within 28 days as a positive of a positive test is reported as 203. patients admitted to hospital, this is the data provided on the 27th of december, 1715. in terms of cases, similar to yesterday, but still going up. the whole week yesterday, but still going up. tue: whole week the yesterday, but still going up. tte: whole week the going yesterday, but still going up. tt2 whole week the going up, and as i said, a million cases reported in a week but we need to be careful about the numbers we get over christmas because people are staying with families and they don t necessarily get a test and we are starting to see pressures on the testing system because not everybody can get a test so we are not exactly sure what it is telling us, apart from that this is telling us, apart from that this is a big number. a bigger number than we have ever seen before and the first number you are getting is 2.3 million people from the
emmanuel, the provost at the university of pennsylvania, author of the book which country has the world s best health care. he also co-authored that washington post op-ed about why omicron could be the worst public health challenge of our lifetimes. thanks so much for being here. let s talk about what you go through in this op-ed. you lay it out, a step by step process to basically mitigating the risks, but at first you talk about our testing system. we keep talking about how many cases we re seeing, a million cases in the last 24 hours. you warned this could happen, but is looking at the case number right now the best way to figure out how this disease is affecting us? no, and because many of the omicron cases are very mild or even asymptomatic, that s the first thing. the second thing is a lot of people aren t being tested because they can t get a test. local public health agencies
tests as you implied with your question, because they have always been seen as second class. this would kind of give them almost parity with pcr tests. but also it would mean that many fewer people go into the official testing system. you know what it s like when you get a pcr test, bar codes this qr code that, text message this and you are kept quite an eye on, with the lateral flow test it is left up to the individual person to scan the qr code on the test and then upload it. the government would have a lot less oversight of what is actually going on by relying more largely on lateral flow tests. the health and social care administered gillian keegan was doing interviews this morning and would not be drawn on the change because it is still to be finalised but she touched on some of the changes to the testing programme and the increasing confidence in the lateral flow testing programme that means you could make a decision like this. as i say, i don t have any
meanwhile, almost 8 million test kits will be made available to pharmacies by tomorrow, amid warnings of patchy supplies following the changes to self isolation rules. our health correspondent jim reed joins me now. what s the latest picture in terms of testing, capacity, and what impact these extra 8 million kids will have? fist impact these extra 8 million kids will have? ., , ., will have? at the moment there s an awful lot of will have? at the moment there s an awful lot of pressure will have? at the moment there s an awful lot of pressure on will have? at the moment there s an awful lot of pressure on the - will have? at the moment there s an awful lot of pressure on the testing i awful lot of pressure on the testing system across the uk and i think it s worth splitting it into these lateral flow tests and the pcr test. the lateral flows are those you take it home by yourself, they give you a result within 15 minutes or 30 minutes depending on the kit, it s proving to b
to tackle omicron by adding vaccination and booster capacity, hospital equipment, staff and more. we re going to get through this by working together. so, an interesting flip flop there. noticeably absent from his new discovered federal plan. always had one in the basement, was testing. this is startling to me, will, the fact that testing is missing in this. and i think when you compare 2020 under president trump to 2021, there s a real difference in the story of testing. in 2020, there was a novel passage that came into our country for which there was no testing. there were no therapeutics, what did president trump do? he got emergency use authorizations, 100 of them to get new tests. between, i believe it was march and july, he upscaled testing by 32,000%. and by last fall we had the most advanced testing system in the world. testing more than western europe