[Chris Whitty]Thank you Prime Minister,First slide please.


This is a version of a slide thatlisteners and watchers may have seen several times before,but as you can see the weekly case rate for COVIDwhich is in the darker coloursmean that the numbers are worseit's spreading steadilywas quite heavily concentrated in particular areasand is now over quite a large part of the country on the leftand on the right you can see the rate of change.

Anything in brown or yellow,the rate is increasing,the darker the colour,the more rapid the rate of increase.And again, across virtually the entire country nowthere is a significant rate of increase.

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The thing which correlates most with future NHS capacityand NHS activity from COVIDis the spread in people over the age of sixtyalthough people younger than that can certainly get severe COVIDand some of them may need hospitalizationand indeed intensive careThe majority of the disease that causes really severe disease is in that age groupand as you can see that's a smaller areabut again that has widened very considerablyand it's going up across the country.

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Data from the ONS (The Office For National Statistics),which is the official datawhich is done as a survey across the countryshows that the prevalence of this diseasehas been going up extremely rapidly over the last few weekshaving been very flat due to the work of everybody in the countryover spring and summerand we now have around 50,000 new cases a day and that is rising.

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If you look around the countrythanks to the work everyone is still doingthe R is substantially lower than it would have been if people were not doing the social distancingwere not doing all the things in families, in firms around the country,it would be going up much more rapidly than it is at the moment,but there is an increase in virtually every part of the countryapart possibly from the Northeastwhere they have been taking additional measuressubstantial additional measuresand there is some evidence of some flatteningbut not yet of any evidence of the coronavirus falling.And that is important because it is now at quite a high leveland if things went wrong,the margin of error is very small,we have very little headroomeven in the one area where there is some flattening at the momentso things are going up across the whole country.

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And it's probably important to think about this in terms of agesthese heat maps go from left to right over time.So the right is the most recent and from bottom,which is children under the age of 16 up to top,which is people over 60as you can see what happens in every area is that it gets darker,meaning there's more cases all the way through the period we're looking atand it steadily moves up the agesso it doesn't remain constrained just to one age groupand the top line is beginning to darken in every part of the countryand those are the people over 60 who as I say will translate over timeinto some cases going into the NHS

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And we're now beginning to see thisthis is moving over to NHS activity.We're beginning to see thiswith a rise in the number of hospital admissions in England by age groupand this is just looking at people at different age groupsthere is a rise in virtually every age group in older adultsbasically anyone over the age of 45there's a rise in number of people going into hospital with COVID over timeand this is obviously going up not in a straight line,but in an accelerating line

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If we compare the number of people in hospital at this momentwith the first peak of COVIDThese are people in NHS beds in England by NHS regioncurrently only in the northwest is this coming close to the peak that we previously hadbut it is increasing in every areaand if we do nothing the inevitable result is that these numbers will go upand they will eventually exceed the peak that we saw in Spring of this year.

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and therefore if you look at the NHS as a whole, inpatient bedsdark blue is Augustlight blue is Septemberand purple is Octoberyou can see it was still falling in Augustin September initially flat and a very gradual increase in numbersbut now it is going up steadily on an exponential curve

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looking at individual hospitals (NHS hospitals)these are the hospitals with more than a hundred COVID inpatients in themthis number will increase over the next weeksand in green are hospitals which have got below half of their previous peakin orange is the point where they actually get to half the numberof people in hospital they had at the COVID peakand in red is where they exceed the number of hospital inpatientsthey had at the peak of the first wave of thisso as you can see the progression is steadyand we now have several hospitals with more inpatients with COVIDthan we had during the peak in Spring

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Fortunately the death rate although rising is still significantly below the peakbut the mortalities ratethe death ratewill track the number of peoplegoing into the NHS over time with a significant delayand we're seeing increases now that are quite noticeablein the northwest,Yorkshire and Humber,the northeast,and increasingly in the Midlands as wellbut the other areas will follow because they will follow the NHS admissions

That's all the data in terms of looking backwardsThose data — those have already happened.

Patrick is now going to talk briefly about the projections forward.