UK Covid live: almost 4.5m people waiting for hospital treatments in England after virus backlog

Latest updates: government’s chief scientific adviser says UK’s daily death figures likely to stay at high levels ‘for some weeks’UK Covid travel testing delay ‘to help out business’Recovering from Covid gives similar level of protection to vaccineCoronavirus – latest updatesSee all our coronavirus coverage 10.54am GMT The latest data from NHS England (see 10.12am) this morning indicates that non-Covid services have not been impacted to the same extent as they were in the first wave. Cancer treatments in November reached or were approaching pre-Covid levels across most categories. As an example, 205,182 people got their first cancer consultation within two weeks of an urgent referral from their GP in November. This is in stark contrast to April and May of this year where just 79,573 and 106,535 people received treatment respectively by that same metric. 10.48am GMT Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the DUP leader at Westminster, has warned that the Good Friday agreement risks being breached as a result of disruption to post-Brexit Irish Sea trade. In an interview on the Today programme about the impact the new border checks are having on supplies to shops in Northern Ireland, he said:The protocol [which governs the new arrangements] is damaging the Northern Ireland economy and if it damages the Northern Ireland economy it actually undermines the Good Friday agreement.And furthermore, that agreement makes clear that Northern Ireland will remain an integral part of the United Kingdom unless the people of Northern Ireland vote otherwise.With respect, the problem is not Brexit because people in Scotland, Wales and England are not experiencing the problems that we’re experiencing here. Continue reading... https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2021/jan/14/uk-covid-live-daily-death-figures-levels-vallance-coronavirus-vaccine-lockdown-latest-updates #coronavirus #politics #uk_news #boris_johnson #infectious_diseases #science #medical_research #patrick_vallance #health #nhs