Coronavirus Response

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 4:48 pm on 20 July 2020.

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Photo of Philippa Whitford Philippa Whitford Shadow SNP Spokesperson (Health and Social Care), Shadow SNP Spokesperson (Europe) 4:48, 20 July 2020

I, too, welcome the progress being made regarding vaccine development by research centres and companies across the UK, including Valneva in Scotland, but a widely available vaccine is still some way off. In the meantime, avoiding the social and economic impact of repeated local lockdowns depends on driving down community transmission. Professor Dominic Harrison, public health director of Blackburn with Darwen Council, has highlighted that only half of contacts are being traced by the central system and called to be given information in individual covid cases so that their contacts can be traced and isolated in the short window before they, too, become infectious.

In the covid statement last Thursday, I again raised the issue of delays in providing individual test results to local public health teams. The Health Secretary said he could not answer so many questions from me, so he chose not to answer any. To make it simple, I will ask only one. Postcode information was utterly insufficient, so by what date can he guarantee that every single director of public health in England will receive the identifiable details of all new positive cases on a daily basis?