RUSHES: Coronavirus: Downing Street press briefing 28th April 2021

Coronavirus: Downing Street press briefing 28th April 2021; Clip 3 of 13 ENGLAND: London: Downing Street: Media briefing room: INT Professor Jonathan Van-Tam (Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England) press conference SOT - Thank you, secretary of state. Good afternoon. I’m going to just spend the first few minutes going through four data slides which show you where we are in the state of play in the UK at the moment. And then on the fifth slide, I will just talk in a little more detail about the new data that had been published in pre-print form by scientific colleagues from Public Health England this morning, and relating to vaccine related reductions in transmission inside households. First slide, please. So these slides are familiar. It’s a little while since I’ve presented them to you. But you can see this is an array of numbers of people testing positive for COVID-19 in the UK from 1st of September on the left through to late April on the right. Very visible indeed is that very large third wave that we had peaking in mid January. And you can see now that we are really in very low levels that are comparable to where we were in September last year. We’re running as a typical seven day average, just over 2000 people testing positive per day. My sense is that probably we are at or close to the bottom at the moment in terms of this level of disease in the UK. Next slide, please. On slide number two, it’s the same timescale, but this time I’m arraying the number of people in hospital with COVID-19 in the UK. And again, the pattern is the same. This very large and really quite serious third wave that we had. And now we are, I think, close to the bottom, but probably we will find there’s a little further to run in terms of reductions in the total number of people in hospital in the UK with COVID. And on the 26th of April, that was 1,634 people. Next slide, please. Turning now, unfortunately, to deaths. You can see the size of the third peak in the third wav...