Reality Check

The prime minister earlier told the House of Commons: “To go from 3,000 tests a day – 2,000 tests a day – to 500,000 is a quite remarkable feat.”

Boris Johnson was talking about the government’s target to reach 500,000 daily testing capacity (the amount of tests labs can process in theory) by the end of October.

The data for 31 October did indeed show that 525,000 tests could have been done on 31 October, which was a doubling of capacity in two months, although fewer than 300,000 tests were actually processed.

Officials say it is natural that all the capacity is not being used up. They say there needs to be flexibility in the system to cope with surges in demand or problems occurring with equipment or staff.

You can read more about the testing target here.

Reality Check

Conservative MP Mark Harper has questioned some of the evidence used by the government to support the new lockdown.

He referred to a chart that was leaked to news organisations but not used in the prime minister’s news conference.

According to that chart, he said, the South West's hospital capacity should have been exceeded already, but "it has not”.

Another interesting thing about this chart is that it predicts the South West will exceed its hospital capacity before other parts of the country, despite having relatively low rates of infection at the moment.

NHS chief executive Simon Stevens has told the BBC that was because it was hard to maximise capacity by moving people between hospitals in the region.

“The geography of the South West means that it is harder for patients and nurses and doctors to move around,” he said.

But David Strain, from University of Exeter, said the problem was a combination of the region’s relatively high age profile as well as many of the South West’s hospital beds being unsuitable for Covid sufferers.

Reality Check

Former prime minister Theresa May was one of a number of MPs criticising the use of a chart in Saturday’s lockdown news conference that gave a scenario of 4,000 coronavirus deaths a day over the winter (roughly four times the figure during the worst days of the first wave).

"It looks as if the figures are chosen to support the policy rather than the policy being based on the figures," she told Parliament's debate on the lockdown this afternoon.

Image source, COBR

The curves in the chart were all produced at the start of October, just after the rapid rise in cases that followed students returning to university. These were based on models for worst-case planning that assumed no changes in policy or behaviour.

But, since then, England has introduced a three-tier system of stricter measures and the epidemic has grown more slowly than the curves assumed it would.

On the day the chart was shown, we know of 171 people dying with coronavirus, which is far below the 1,000 a day envisioned by the most pessimistic model.

"The prediction was wrong before it was even used," Mrs May said.

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Reality Check
Dan Isaacs

In an interview with the Fox News channel this morning, Trump reeled off a list of his achievements in office, some we’ve fact-checked before and found misleading, including this one.

On Fox, he claimed his administration “saved two million people” from dying with coronavirus, but that's not accurate.

The figure 2m was mentioned in a study published in March by Imperial College in London that modeled the case for an “unmitigated epidemic”.

The study describes 2.2m deaths from Covid-19 in the US as what would happen "in the [unlikely] absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour".

So far, there have been more than 230,000 Covid-19 deaths reported deaths in the US.

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Reality Check

Image source, Getty Images

Unlike the March lockdown, universities will not be required to close during this new period of tougher restrictions.

On 21 September, government advisory group Sage recommended that all university teaching should be moved online unless absolutely essential. The group has suggested closing universities would have a “moderate impact” on transmission, as the high level of close contact students have at university – through shared halls, socialising and during lectures – makes outbreaks very likely.

This has proved to be the case; within weeks of students returning to university, about 40 universities had reports of coronavirus, with thousands of students having to self-isolate. Many universities have been switching tuition online.

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Shruti Menon
BBC Reality Check

Image source, Getty Images

India’s capital city is witnessing a fresh spike in coronavirus cases, although overall numbers have been declining in the country since a peak in September.

On Tuesday, Delhi recorded 4,853 cases, the most detected so far in a single day since the pandemic hit India in March.

This spike in cases comes after a change in testing strategy, with the Delhi authorities moving to the gold standard PCR tests from less accurate (but faster) rapid antigen tests.

The city has re-tested about 85% of those who had tested negative in rapid antigen tests in October, but still had symptoms, compared with 10-15% in September.

Delhi is conducting nearly 60,000 tests a day - a number that’s been more or less constant for some months. The proportion of positive tests is going up steadily, which suggests the city needs a further ramping up of reliable testing.

Read more on India's testing strategies here.

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