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Day 15: Key points from today's conference

Posted on March 2020 By Jamie Southwell

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Presenting the conference tonight was Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, who joined by the UK's Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, and the Medical Director at Public Health England Dr Yvonne Doyle.

We're told the number of cases have risen the same amount for the last couple of days, but 'this may suggest that we're already beginning to see some effects from asking the public to stay indoors' says Sir Patrick Vallance.

Key points to take away from today's speech are:

  • There have been 8,000 hospital admissions since the middle of march, and that half of those are in London alone.

  • New arrangement between airlines and the government to fly home British citizens, airlines involved are British Airways, Virgin, and EasyJet. Dominic Raab advised those who still have the option to fly home, to do so now, and if you're unable to fly home, the government will provide special charter flights for you.

  • Mr Raab realises that it's difficult for travellers to get through to call centres at the moment, as he announced "We normally receive over 1,000 calls a day - last Tuesday we had nearly 15,000." That being the highest number on record.

The overall amount of cases in the UK has now risen to 22,141, with that being 2,619 new cases since yesterday. Total number of deaths is now at 1,408.

To read a brief summary of last night's points and important measuresclick here.

Here's the full conference, courtesy of HuffPost UK: