Coronavirus: Cases in UK jump to 85 – BBC News, BBC News
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The UK has seen its biggest day-on-day increase in coronavirus cases, bringing the total number to 405 Some of the 79 new patients had recently traveled to affected countries or picked it up from others who had done so, the UK’s chief medical officer Prof Chris Whitty said.
But it is not clear how three new patients in England were infected.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock will chair a Cobra meeting at : 17 GMT, Downing Street said.
Prof Whitty – who earlier said an epidemic i n the UK was “likely” – said people who have been in contact with the new patients are being traced. (Of the) cases in the UK, there are in England, three in Scotland, one in Wales and one in Northern Ireland.
Guests who left a quarantined hospital in Tenerife have been told to self-isolate for a further week after a British woman at the hotel tested positive on 2 March
Mr Johnson told the House of Commons that people who self-isolate should not be “penalized for doing the right thing”.
What have we learnt from these new cases?
It’s the biggest daily rise we have had. But this is not unexpected – health officials have been warning we should be braced for an increase.
This could last for two or three months until a peak is reached.
Of the 80 new cases, three are worrying from the perspective that the government has been unable to establish how they were infected. They have no links to people who have been abroad to places where there are significant outbreaks.
That brings the total number of cases like this to five – and could be a sign that the virus is circulating in the community.
Some of the other new cases are not people who had been abroad, but were infected in this country by people who had been.
That in itself is a sign there are clusters developing that the health authorities will be working hard to contain.
No details are being released about where the new cases are or just how big these clusters are, leaving some key questions hanging.
The sick pay announcement means those receiving statutory sick pay would get an extra £ (a week, paid for by their employers.
The government has said up to a fifth of the workforce may be off sick
during the peak of a coronavirus epidemic in the UK.
About , 12 people have been infected globally since the outbreak of coronavirus in Hubei province, China, in December, with cases in more than 80 countries and more than 3, 19 deaths.
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