Public Health: Coronavirus Regulations

The business of the House motion that the House has just agreed to provides for motions 3 to 9 on today’s Order Paper to be debated together, but I assure the House that the Question will be put separately on each motion at the end of the debate.

I beg to move,

That the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Local Covid-19 Alert Level) (Medium) (England) Regulations 2020, (S.I., 2020, No. 1103), dated 12 October 2020, a copy of which was laid before this House on 12 October, be approved.

With this we shall take the following motions, on public health:

That the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Local Covid-19 Alert Level) (High) (England) Regulations 2020, (S.I., 2020, No. 1104), dated 12 October 2020, a copy of which was laid before this House on 12 October, be approved.

That the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Local Covid-19 Alert Level) (Very High) (England) Regulations 2020, (S.I., 2020, No. 1105), dated 12 October 2020, a copy of which was laid before this House on 12 October, be approved.

That the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Collection of Contact Details etc and Related Requirements) Regulations 2020 (S.I., 2020, No. 1005), dated 17 September 2020, a copy of which was laid before this House on 17 September, be approved.

That the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Obligations of Hospitality Undertakings) (England) Regulations 2020 (S.I., 2020, No. 1008), dated 17 September 2020, a copy of which was laid before this House on 17 September, be approved.

That the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Obligations of Undertakings) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2020 (S.I., 2020, No. 1046), dated 26 September 2020, a copy of which was laid before this House on 28 September, be approved.

That the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (No. 2) (England) (Amendment) (No. 5) Regulations 2020 (S.I., 2020, No. 1029), dated 24 September 2020, a copy of which was laid before this House on 24 September, be approved.

Two weeks ago, I pledged to the House that for significant national measures we will consult Parliament in advance of their coming into force wherever possible, and today we deliver on that commitment with votes tonight on national measures to slow the spread of coronavirus. This pandemic remains a formidable threat. Our strategy is to suppress the virus, supporting the economy, education and the NHS, until a vaccine makes us safe, and I must report to the House that the number of cases of coronavirus has quadrupled in the last three weeks.

There are now more people in hospital with coronavirus than there were on 23 March, and in the last four weeks hospitals in the north-west and north-east of England have seen a sevenfold increase in the number of covid patients in intensive care. In those worst-affected areas, the virus is spreading just as quickly in older age groups, not just among younger adults.

Given that the Liverpool city region, which includes my constituency of Wallasey, was placed in tier 3 yesterday, could the Secretary of State outline whether there are plans to reopen or revive the Nightingale hospitals to serve that region? I do not mean the hospital in Manchester.

Yes, as the hon. Lady will know, three Nightingale hospitals were put on alert yesterday to be reopened. The closest Nightingale is in Manchester, but we keep that under review because expanding the capacity of the NHS is one of the things that we can do. Nevertheless, no matter how big the NHS is, if the virus is not under control it will make more people need hospital treatment than there could possibly be hospital treatment available for. While we are, of course, restarting the Nightingales, which have been mothballed for months, that is only a precaution; it cannot be the full answer to the question. We had a very good discussion yesterday about the measures in Liverpool city region, which I will come on to in some detail.

To follow on from what my right hon. Friend said about our strategy being to suppress the virus until a vaccine makes us safe—until science saves us—the Prime Minister yesterday was, very wisely, cautious in his answer to our hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker) on the vaccine. What if it does not come, and what if it comes and the efficacy of it is not good enough, and there are challenges with roll-out and all sorts of other challenges that he and I know about—the anti-vaxxers notwithstanding? Can he give those of us who are nervous about—

Order. This is not a question but a very quick intervention. I have 89 people who want to speak. If there are to be interventions, they must be short.

Of course, the work on a vaccine continues. No vaccine technology is certain, but we have already bought six different vaccines and there are more than 100 in development around the world. That is what underpins the strategy, and the work on the leading vaccines, including the AstraZeneca Oxford vaccine, continues effectively. We have seen, both here and overseas, just how quickly the virus can take hold, and we have to act now to get it under control.

At the beginning of August, Calderdale had just four people in hospital with covid, zero in intensive care units, and spikes in just two wards. This morning, we have 43 people in hospital with covid, six in ICUs, 12 deaths this month, and almost 800 positive cases coming through. Can my right hon. Friend say what steps he is taking to ensure that the NHS is not overwhelmed by the virus in the coming months?

Order. I have just said that we must not have long interventions. These points are for the speeches that people are waiting to make later. If a Member wants to intervene on the Secretary of State about something that he has just said, that is all very well, but if they make points about their constituencies at this stage rather than waiting until later, it is simply dishonourable; it is just not right.

My hon. Friend—and he is an honourable man—makes an important point that has a wider context than just his constituency, which is that we must make sure that we control the virus. My heart goes out to the families of those in his constituency who have died. The only alternative to suppressing the virus is that it then expands exponentially. That is what happens with a virus when the R is above 1. I know that some people feel that we should adopt a more relaxed approach, but that will lead to more of the sort of thing that my hon. Friend has related from his constituency.

Some people have set out this more relaxed approach, including those in the so-called Great Barrington declaration. I want to take this argument head-on, because on the substance, the Great Barrington declaration is underpinned by two central claims and both are emphatically false. First, it says that if enough people get covid, we will reach herd immunity. That is not true. Many infectious diseases never reach herd immunity, such as measles, malaria, AIDS and flu, and with increasing evidence of reinfection, we should have no confidence that we would ever reach herd immunity to covid, even if everyone caught it. Herd immunity is a flawed goal without a vaccine, even if we could get to it, which we cannot.

The second central claim is that we can segregate the old and vulnerable on our way to herd immunity. That is simply not possible. As the medical director of the NHS said yesterday, we cannot somehow fence off the elderly and the vulnerable from risk while everyone else returns to normal. It is neither conscionable nor practicable—not when so many people live in inter- generational homes, not when older people need carers who of course themselves live in the community, and not when young people can suffer the debilitating impact of long covid. Whenever we have seen cases among young people rise sharply, we then see cases among the over-60s rise inevitably thereafter, and we are not the kind of country that abandons our vulnerable or just locks them up.

How long do the scientists think we will need these lockdowns for, and what is their exit plan?

We have seen the exit plan from local lockdowns. For instance, in Leicester, where we had a firm local lockdown, the case rate came right down. We lifted that and we have sadly seen it start to rise again. The case rate is determined by the amount of social mixing, and it reduces during a lockdown. In some parts of the country where the case rate has continued to rise, there is an argument for further ensuring that we do not reach the level of contact that is at the root of the virus spreading. The challenge is how to calibrate the lockdown to get the virus under control while doing the minimum damage to the economy and to education.

Will the Secretary of State acknowledge—a simple yes or no—that we should not be in this position in the first place and that the best exit strategy is having an effective system of testing, tracing and isolating that is locally led? If that were working properly—even SAGE has admitted that it is not—we would not be here.

We have one of the biggest systems of tracking and tracing in the world. The idea that I sometimes get from people in this House is that, somehow, it is not one of the biggest systems in the world or one of the most effective in the world. I get that in this House, but I do not get it when I talk to my international colleagues. They ask me, “How did you manage to build this capacity so fast?” That is the truth of it.

Of course we need to continue to build the system and to make sure it is continuously more integrated into the local communities, who can often go to reach the contacts that the national system finds it hard to reach. However, to argue that the enormous system that is working so effectively, with so many brilliant people working on it, is at the root of this challenge is, unfortunately, to miss the big picture, which is that, sadly, until we have a vaccine or a massive testing capacity that nobody yet has, this virus is passed on through social contact and that is, unfortunately, what we need to tackle in order to get it under control.

Let me make a point about the numbers. In the first peak, about 8% of people caught covid and 42,000 people died. If we do not have the virus under control, even with the better survival rates we now have, thanks to both drug discoveries by British science and improvements in clinical practice, those figures will multiply. In addition, harder economic measures would then inevitably be needed to get it under control and they would be needed for longer. If you, Madam Deputy Speaker, like me, want our economy back on full throttle, we need to keep this virus in check.

Yesterday, in his call with Merseyside MPs, the Health Secretary was asked about a circuit breaker lockdown and he did not say that SAGE had recommended one three weeks ago. Is that the case? Will he now publish the full scientific evidence for a circuit breaker lockdown?