Covid-19: Rest and PPE reassurance are needed before NHS services can restart, MPs hear

At a Health and Social Care Select Committee evidence session on 14 May the King's Fund, the Nuffield Trust, and the Health Foundation warned that it would take many more months before core health and care services were able to fully restart. Limited capacity Jennifer Dixon, chief executive officer at the Health Foundation, told the committee that capacity within hospitals would be severely limited because of the need for social distancing, separating out covid and non-covid patients, and more time for deep cleaning of equipment and facilities. Chris Hopson, chief executive officer at NHS Providers, told the committee that NHS staff had worked incredibly hard in the past few months, with leave cancelled, and were very tired as a result.

Covid-19: MPs call on Public Health England to publish evidence for decision to drop community testing

A cross party group of MPs has said that Public Health England's failure to publish the evidence behind its decision to discontinue community testing at the start of the covid-19 outbreak is "unacceptable.” In a 19 page letter to the prime minister, the Science and Technology Committee called for publication of the evidence base and rationale informing Public Health England's decision to concentrate testing for covid-19 in a limited number of its own laboratories and to expand testing capacity gradually, rather than surging capacity through a large number of available laboratories in research institutes, universities, and the public and private sectors.1 This had led to the government announcing on 12 March that testing would stop in the community and would occur principally within hospitals—a decision that was "one of the most consequential made during [the] crisis,” MPs said in the letter. The committee chair, Greg Clark, said, "Greater transparency around scientific advice;putting capacity in place in advance of need, such as in testing and vaccines;collecting more data earlier;and learning from other countries' approaches are some of the early lessons of this pandemic that are relevant to further decisions that will need to be taken during the weeks and months ahead.”