Health Secretary Matt Hancock Urges People to Follow Rules as the NHS Continues to be Stretched

Health Secretary Matt Hancock has told Times Radio it's vital for people to stay at home in order to tackle the spread of coronavirus.

Speaking to Gloria De Piero and Tom Newton Dunn he said:

What really matters from here on in is how people behave and people need to stay at home.I'm at home now talking to you from my own office. Everybody's got to stay at home. What matters of course, the government rules matter. And people should not push the limits of them. People should stay as far inside them as they can. But it's on all of us. And yes always we're looking vigilantly at the data and talking to the scientists...but what matters is the public; the behaviour of the public. And I know I've said this countless times over this pandemic but it matters more now than it has done at any point since March. We've got to get this under control.

On whether too many primary pupils are still in school:

We've got to make sure that key workers can get to work. If you ensure through policy that a nurse can't get to work because she can't get anybody to look after her children then you've taken out more capacity in the NHS than the risk of that key worker's children being in school. It's a very difficult balance.

Are some parents sending their children to school unnecessarily?

I don't know. I haven't seen any evidence of that but the rules are very clear.

On Chris Whitty's comments in the Sunday Times that hospitals are facing their worst crisis in "living memory":

With 30-thousand people in hospital with Coronavirus, delivering on that commitment (to provide care) is getting stretched. And so in the first instance, it means that staff are stretched more. Obviously we've been building physical capacity, and we've been hiring people into the NHS over the summer. But nevertheless there is that pressure on the NHS. We've seen that some non urgent treatment has been postponed. We saw that in the first lockdown and we've seen that again. And I want to make sure that everybody gets the treatment that they need. And you know, postponing something that isn't urgent is not something anybody wants to do, but we will get back and we have been working through the backlog very, very effectively. But the challenge is when things get even more under pressure and then the NHS isn't able to treat everybody, because there's so many people in it.

And Mr Hancock stressed the situation is unlikely to ease soon:

In terms of hospital capacity I expect that to continue to be stretched and you can see the cases; people who've already caught Coronavirus but aren't yet in hospital. But we know based on past experience, more people will end up in hospital before this then gets better.

On whether measures like mask-wearing will become a permanent thing:

I do think that there are going to be quite a lot of things that we do that are essentially very low cost that just become normal and social norms. And wearing face masks, I think is one of them. You know, in the Far East, wearing a face mask is far more normal than it ever was here before 2020 and that's because of their experience of MERS and SARS a decade or so ago. And so I do think there'll be social norms that change.

And on whether or not we should be planning for a relatively normal summer:

I think that we're going to have a brilliant summer, I think that by then we will have vaccinated a huge proportion, especially of the most vulnerable. And in fact all the vulnerable categories I hope we will have got through and I think we're gonna have a great summer. But, you know, these are uncertain times.