Boris Johnson Says We're Better Prepared For A Second Covid-19 Wave – Is He Right?
While outlining strict new measures to tackle the second wave of Covid-19 cases last week, Boris Johnson offered some reassurance by stating we are better prepared as a country to deal with a surge in cases.
In his speech to the Commons on Tuesday, the prime minister told MPs: “We’re also better prepared for a second wave with ventilators and PPE, the dexamethasone, the Nightingale hospitals and one hundred times as much testing as we began this epidemic with.”
We know ventilators and PPE were major problems at the beginning of the pandemic, while issues with both health workers and the general public getting Covid-19 tests have never really gone away.
So where do things stand now with all the measures mentioned by the PM?
Ventilators
It is understood that the UK currently has 30,000 ventilators at its disposal.
But how does that compare to the number of ventilators the UK had at its disposal at the start of the pandemic?
In mid-March, before the UK was put into lockdown, health secretary Matt Hancock told reporters that the country had 5,000 ventilators.
By June – following the government’s ventilator challenge, which asked British businesses to produce the devices – this figure had jumped to more than 25,000 devices.
At the peak of the first wave, there were as many as 3,301 people in mechanical ventilation beds in UK hospitals.
As of Thursday, there were 243 coronavirus patients relying on ventilators to help them breathe.
PPE
According to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), the government supplied two billion items of PPE to the NHS between March and June.
In an announcement in June, DHSC said it had ordered almost 28 billion items of PPE “to provide a continuous supply in the coming months.”
The latest publicly available department statistics about PPE were published on July 5, 2020.
Almost 12 weeks on, no updated figures on PPE have been published, meaning the government has given no indication of whether or not...
