Sunday 19th April 2020

Today’s update includes:

• Requests and Offers from the Stroud Coronavirus Community Response team and beyond
• Summary of local news
• Key national and international news

Requests and Offers from the Stroud Coronavirus Community Response team and beyond

• Barton & Tredworth COVID Support Group told us they dropped off PPE equipment to charity run care homes such as the Sue Ryder hospice in Leckhampton.
• Brand Zero announced they had smashed through their fundraising target to make hand creams for nurses and carers (at time of writing £432 rather than £250 asked for) and have raised the bar to £500. “With immense gratitude to everyone who has helped so far. We are going to buy lots of ingredients to make lots of hand cream for as many nurses and carers as possible” 
• We shared a piece from ITV about the “14 emergency dental centres have opened across the South West”. To get access to these centres people should phone their own dentist. Out of usual surgery hours, people should call NHS111, as should those without a dentist or anyone who cannot get through to their usual surgery. Confident Dental & Implant Clinic have also set up a free advice group here on Facebook: Gloucestershire Dental Free Advice Group.
• Jacqui Stearn passed on details on “How to care for your pets when carrying out ‘social distancing’ or staying at home due to Coronavirus” from the RSPCA.
• We are still adding local groups to our list and map at: https://neighbournetworks.uk/neighbourhoods. Please let us know if your group is not listed, and please help us map which streets your group covers/has leafletted.
• We now have over 4,175 members in our Facebook group. However, only 497 are following our Stroud Coronavirus Updates page. Please like our page as well as joining the group – and select to receive notification from it so you receive our most important updates.
• We posted a reminder to please use our OFFER/REQUEST/IMPORTANT UPDATE/QUESTION system when submitting posts to our Facebook Group. We’re dealing with around 80 posts in the past week, and it makes moderating much easier if people use this system

Local updates:

• “Five more patients have died in NHS hospitals in Gloucestershire after testing positive for coronavirus. The latest figures from NHS England brings the total number of Gloucestershire deaths to 130, that breaks down as 115 across the Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which runs the two main hospitals in Gloucester and Cheltenham, with a total of 15 across Gloucestershire Health and Care NHS Foundation Trust which runs community hospitals and mental health settings. (Gloucestershire Live)
• The number of discharged patients has now “risen to 235 with the news that a further 19 patients are now safely home”. (Gloucestershire Live)
• The leader of Stroud District Council, Doina Cornell, says that those who have died must not become just statistics in her latest column for the Stroud News and Journal 
• Glastonbury festival have donated 1,000 rain ponchos intended for summer festival goers to five GP surgeries covering Cheltenham, Bishops Cleeve and Winchcombe to be used as vital PPE (Gloucestershire Live)

National news:

• “As of 9am 19 April, 482,063 tests have concluded, with 21,626 tests on 18 April. 372,967 people have been tested of which 120,067 tested positive. As of 5pm on 18 April, of those hospitalised in the UK who tested positive for coronavirus, 16,060 have sadly died.” (Department of Health and Social Care pinned tweet)
• The Sunday Times published a piece entitled “Coronavirus: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster”. It describes how “Boris Johnson skipped five Cobra meetings on the virus, calls to order protective gear were ignored and scientists’ warnings fell on deaf ears” and argues “Failings in February may have cost thousands of lives”. The piece can only be read by subscribers.
• However, there is a write-up based on the Sunday Times piece in The Guardian: “Michael Gove has conceded that Boris Johnson missed five consecutive emergency meetings in the buildup to the coronavirus crisis, and that the UK shipped protective equipment to China in February.”
• “Scientists working on a coronavirus vaccine in Britain hope to start clinical trials towards the end of next week. The leader of a team working on a vaccine, Professor Sarah Gilbert, from Oxford University said scientists believed it was possible to become infected with Covid-19 more than once and a vaccine-induced immunity could last longer than the infected-induced immunity” (BBC News)
• “The education secretary, Gavin Williamson, has said he cannot give a date for when schools will reopen, four weeks after they were shut to curb the spread of coronavirus. He said five “tests” must be met before schools could reopen, including a fall in infections and the daily death rate. His comments came after a report in the Sunday Times said schools could reopen as early as 11 May.” (BBC News)
• “Some 400,000 gowns had been expected to arrive from Turkey on Sunday, but the government said it had been delayed. Gavin Williamson was asked by the BBC why British suppliers offering to make protective kit had not been contacted. He responded that government hoped to speak to them within the next 24 hours, and the gowns should arrive on Monday.” (BBC News)
• “The Cabinet Office minister, Michael Gove, said on Sunday that the government was confident that the goal of 100,000 tests daily by the end of April would be met. However, scepticism is building. On Saturday, only 21,626 tests were carried out… Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, said he viewed the target as impossible. “I cannot see that being achieved,” he is quoted in The Guardian as saying.
• “One hundred people with severe disabilities and chronic illness say they have been rejected for the government’s register and thereby left without any support to access food without leaving their home, despite being particularly vulnerable to coronavirus. Their conditions include cancer being treated with chemotherapy, heart disease, tetraplegia, motor neurone disease (MND), myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) and muscular dystrophy. Some disabled people reported sleeping to avoid hunger pains, or living off fruit. At least one rejected for assistance has gone on to contract coronavirus.” (The Guardian)
• “Since mid-March, the BBC has seen a huge increase in numbers watching its news programmes. The audience for the BBC News at One has risen 85%, the News at Six 74%, and the News at Ten of by 50%. The evening news programmes, and the two on which Walsh and his colleague Hugh Pym, the BBC’s health editor, appear most often, now have a combined nightly audience of around 12.8 million” (The Guardian)

International developments:

• There are now over 2,367,758 confirmed cases of Covid-19 globally and sadly 163,134 people have died in the 185 countries/regions where it is present according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker. There are now 25 countries with over 10,000 confirmed cases, 16 countries with over 20,000 confirmed cases, and seven countries where over 5,000 people have died after testing positive for the virus.
• “The figures from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center record 100,316 deaths in total in European countries” (The Guardian)
• Germany: “will permit small retail spaces to reopen from Monday alongside car dealerships, cycling stores and bookshops, though people will be “urgently” advised to wear masks while in public.”
• Poland: “will reopen parks and forests from Monday,
• Norway: children  “will return to kindergarten” 
• Czech Republic: “open-air markets… will be permitted to trade as part of a six-week strategy to gradually lift restrictions”
• Spain: “authorities said at the weekend they would hold off on lifting one of Europe’s tightest lockdowns” (there are over 195,000 confirmed cases in Spain, and more than 20,000 people have died).
• Israel: is “easing the stringent quarantine measures in place for the past five weeks. It will allow the partial reopening of hardware, electronic and office supply stores, and group prayer outdoors – for up to 19 people, standing two metres apart – and extend the perimeter for exercise to 500 metres from a person’s home.”
• South Korea: “reported only eight new coronavirus cases on Sunday and [the government said they] would consider opening public outdoor facilities and would relax guidelines on the circumstances in which sports facilities and restaurants can open. Other measures that were due to expire on Sunday were extended until 5 May“ (above all from a Guardian article on lockdowns)

Notes

Please remember we have a (growing) list of resources to support your emotional and mental health during this time on our website.
Thanks to everyone who helped create this update through our Facebook group. If you submit posts, we will often decline posting them to the discussion directly and instead hold them till the single daily summary – to try to reduce the number of posts in the feed and make it easier for people to follow the information. Please continue to submit posts to admins for this purpose with a flag REQUEST / OFFER / UPDATE / QUESTION