Who is popular today?

Latest updates: head of NHS test and trace says system is ‘not the single silver bullet’ for tackling virus

Extend furlough or risk mass unemployment, Sunak warned
Britain’s Covid unemployed: ‘I’m going to the food bank for handouts’
MPs condemn video seemingly showing Whitty being verbally abused
MPs call for ban on care home visits in England to be made illegal
Global coronavirus updates – live

10.45am GMT
Dido Harding, head of NHS test and trace, is giving evidence to the Commons science committee. Here are some of the main lines from her evidence so far.
It’s entirely understandable that everyone out wants there to be a single, clear and straightforward route out of the Covid crisis. I think it’s very tempting to view ... that test and trace stands single-handedly to prevent the virus spreading, and lockdowns coming.
But actually we are part of an overall system ... Test and trace is only one of the elements that enables us to fight Covid. We are not the single silver bullet.
"None of us were able to predict" coronavirus would mutate or variants would emerge - Dido Harding, head of the National Institute for Health Protection
Woth saying that Harding has used a similar excuse before when she was under-fire for testing capacity battling to reach demand levels in early autumn https://t.co/QaqT7ezzJA
Dido Harding says "none of us were able to predict" that the virus would mutate or that new variants would emerge.Err... https://t.co/8Nd1su7q2k
Dido Harding suggests "key thing" people want fr Test & Trace is results back the next day - rather than w/in exact 24 hour target - thus their figures. Science committee chair Greg Clark disagrees, saying exact info is "crucial" for decisions that will be made on lockdown.
The new variant, which is now endemic and accounts for, I think, more than 70% of cases across the country, I think has broad implications, not just for NHS test and trace, but for the whole country, the whole world’s fight against Covid.
It means that we all have to keep our distance more rigorously, more hand washing, more face-mask wearing.
What became clear as contact tracing scaled through the autumn was that that was really annoying families with having multiple phone calls into the same household, particularly as then you’d extended to the isolation support calls that we also make to people who are isolating.
There was a lot of evidence that we gathered from our local authority colleagues and directly through our contact tracing teams that this was acting as a counterproductive element of our journey that was putting people off following the guidance.
10.02am GMT
Michael Gove says the UK government is offering help with the vaccine rollout to all nations, after the Scottish secretary, Alister Jack, wrote to Nicola Sturgeon offering further military assistance to her government to accelerate the vaccine roll-out.
Gove, the Cabinet Office minister, told BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland programme: “We’re doing everything we can to help.”
It was an essential visit because the prime as prime minister of the UK wants to make sure that we learn from different aspects of the vaccine rollout. There was absolutely no risk to anyone as a consequence of it. Continue reading...