Reality Check

President Biden's announcement that the US will donate half a billion vaccines to help the fight against coronavirus seems like a huge figure.

It will involve giving away 200 million Pfizer-BioNTech jabs this year, and another 300 million by June 2022 to be used by poorer countries.

But is that enough to make a difference?

The scale of the task is enormous, and the Covax vaccine-sharing programme for poorer countries is facing severe shortages.

It aims to distribute 1.8 billion doses globally by early next year, so the US donation will help.

But experts believe that the US vaccines, and smaller commitments made by other countries, still fall far short of what’s needed.

Read more in our Reality Check piece here.

Some people have criticised the UK prime minister for travelling by plane to the G7 summit.

Reality Check

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the UK did not close its borders, following advice from the World Health Organization (WHO).

In February 2020, the WHO advised that: “Travel bans to affected areas or denial of entry to passengers coming from affected areas are usually not effective in preventing the importation of cases but may have a significant economic and social impact."

But a number of countries ignored this advice. Australia, New Zealand and India almost entirely closed their borders – and they were comparatively well protected during the first wave of Covid.

Other countries brought in much more stringent restrictions than the UK, banning entry to all but their citizens or residents, including Singapore, Vietnam, Israel, the Philippines, Taiwan and Argentina.

Between January and March 2020, the UK introduced some measures including imposing quarantine on 273 people travelling from Wuhan in China.

Others from "high-risk countries" including China, Iran and Northern Italy were asked to voluntarily isolate for 14 days (though the self-isolation requirements were withdrawn on 13 March).

One study found, external the virus was introduced to the UK "well over a thousand times in early 2020", with a third of transmission chains brought in from Spain, followed by 29% from France, neither of which faced any restrictions. China accounted for just 0.4% of imported cases.

You can read more about UK borders during the pandemic here.

Low testing levels mean outbreaks were missedpublished at 13:03 British Summer Time 10 June 2021

13:03 BST 10 June 2021

Robert Cuffe
BBC head of statistics

Matt Hancock was asked whether failing to test people being discharged from hospital had contributed to the spread of coronavirus in care homes.

In response he cited evidence from Public Health England which he said showed that “1.6% of the transmission into care homes came through this route [from hospital discharges]”.

But this figure can't be taken to mean there was enough testing in hospitals or care homes. In fact, the figure is only that low because we weren’t testing enough.

The analysis doesn’t include any people who were never tested. It misses some outbreaks and misses people who spread the virus but hadn’t been tested because they didn’t show symptoms, or because there weren’t enough tests.

It also misses outbreaks triggered when someone passed it on to a care worker who then did a shift in another home and brought the virus there.

As Hancock explained, discharges may not have been the main source of care home spread.

There were far fewer hospital discharges going into care homes each day than there were staff or visitors, each of whom could have brought in the virus.

But he was told it is a “stretch of the imagination” to say that the figure is as vanishingly small as 1.6% when the data can’t properly spot all the seeding events by Science and Technology committee chairman Greg Clark.

Reality Check

Matt Hancock claimed that “there is no country in the world that uses only testing and doesn't have some form of lockdown as well”.

Jeremy Hunt said that South Korea has not had a lockdown.

It’s true that, unlike other countries, South Korea did not implement a national lockdown at the start of the pandemic, but managed to control transmissions by rapidly developing a “test, trace, isolate” system.

From 20 February 2020, all symptomatic people were tested, as well as their close contacts (regardless of whether they had symptoms or not).

Mass testing was also used in high-risk facilities such as hospitals and care homes, from mid-March.

All confirmed cases were either isolated in a hospital, at home, or in a residential treatment centre.

South Korea did implement some lockdown measures later including moving schools to remote learning in late February 2021 (they gradually reopened in May) and, in regions with a high rate of infections, people were asked to refrain from leaving their homes for at least 2 weeks.

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Health Secretary Matt Hancock was asked an initial question about access to personal protective equipment (PPE).

“There was never a point at which NHS providers couldn’t get access to PPE,” he said, citing a report on the subject from the National Audit Office (NAO)., external

The report said: “The NHS provider organisations we spoke to told us that, while they were concerned about the low stocks of PPE, they were always able to get what they needed in time.”

But it went on to say that this “was not the experience reported by many front-line workers” and “feedback from care workers, doctors and nurses show that significant numbers of them considered that they were not adequately protected during the height of the first wave”.

It added that “government structures were overwhelmed in March 2020” and that while the government did then set up structures to obtain PPE, that “it took a long time for it to receive the large volumes of PPE ordered”.

“There were further difficulties with distribution to providers and many front-line workers reported experiencing shortages of PPE as a result,” the report concluded.

It also said: “The initial focus on the NHS meant adult social care providers felt particularly unsupported.”

Clarification: This post has been edited, with more detail added, to make clear that the NAO report stated NHS providers said they had been able to get what they needed, but it also said this did not reflect the experiences reported by many front-line workers.

Reality Check

Labour leader Keir Starmer said the prime minister was “the only G7 leader cutting his aid budget”.

In 2015, G7 countries committed to spending 0.7% of their gross national income on international aid.

The UK achieved this but is planning to cut spending to 0.5% this year.

Germany was above 0.7% in 2020. France was at 0.53% but has said it will be increasing to 0.7% by 2025.

Other G7 members are at a lower level, external, including the United States (on 0.17%)

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says it cannot confirm whether the UK is the only G7 country cutting foreign aid because it doesn’t have 2021 data for all seven countries.

However, it was not aware of any other country having announced cuts to its aid budgets.

You can read more here.

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Peru has one of the highest coronavirus death rates in the world - why?

Boris Johnson's former chief adviser made a series of claims and allegations about the government's response to the pandemic.

Reality Check

Most of the questions from journalists to Health Secretary Matt Hancock at the Downing Street press conference focused on a claim about care homes made by Dominic Cummings yesterday.

"We were told categorically in March that people would be tested before they went back to care homes. We only subsequently found out that that hadn't happened," Cummings said, adding that it was Hancock who had made that claim.

But Hancock said that the testing capacity was not available at the time.

“My recollection of events is that I committed to delivering that testing for people going from hospital into care homes when we could do it,” he said.

“I then went away and built the testing capacity… and then delivered on the commitment that I made.”

You can read more about Cummings' claims here.

The total is the largest but for deaths per 100,000 people the UK is no longer top.

Reality Check

Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner this morning told BBC Radio 4's Today Programme: "We have the highest death toll in Europe.”

That is correct if you do not take into account population size. Some smaller countries have reported higher rates of deaths per 100,000 people.

The UK did have the worst figures across most measures in the first wave of coronavirus, but has since been overtaken by countries that had worse winters.

Our current toll of nearly 128,000 reported deaths is just ahead of Italy's 125,000.

But Italy has a smaller population.

If you look at deaths per 100,000 people instead of total deaths Italy looks about 5% worse than the UK.

And smaller countries such as Hungary and the Czech Republic have much worse death rates per 100,000 people.

You can read more about it here.

Reality Check

Dominic Cummings has held up Taiwan as an example of a country that acted decisively early on in the pandemic.

He said: "They did a whole bunch of things right off the bat in January".

So, what did they do?

Taiwan closed its borders to all visitors from China on 23 January 2020 – as soon as China said there was evidence of human-to-human transmission of Covid-19.

It also imposed mandatory quarantine for all Taiwanese citizens returning home. These measures are still in place.

The island's 23 million people were also proactively wearing face masks, even before they were required to do so.

However, this month, Taiwan has seen a sudden rise in cases, after it relaxed its testing regime and reduced quarantine for non-vaccinated airline pilots from 14 to three days.

Reality Check

Dominic Cummings has disputed the government’s claims that herd immunity was not part of the plan for dealing with the pandemic.

“It is not that people are thinking this is a good thing and we actively want it, it is that it is a complete inevitability,” he said.

“The only real question is one of timing - it’s either herd immunity by September or it’s in January after a second peak.”

Herd immunity is a scientific term describing the point at which a population is protected from a disease, either by enough people being vaccinated or by people having developed antibodies by having the disease.

Early in the pandemic, chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said: "It's not possible to stop everybody getting it and it's also actually not desirable, because you want some immunity in the population, we need to have immunity to protect ourselves in the future."

Other advisers made similar comments.

But the government later denied that herd immunity was its policy. Imperial College modelling had suggested that a "mitigation" policy of just trying to prevent a massive peak in cases while protecting the most vulnerable would lead to 250,000 deaths and the NHS being overrun.

You can read more about herd immunity here.

Reality Check

Image source, PA Media

For many people outside Westminster, Dominic Cummings is best known for his trip to County Durham and Barnard Castle during the first lockdown.

On 27 March he drove his family from London to Durham to stay at his father’s farm after his wife fell ill with coronavirus symptoms. The next day he too developed symptoms and was self-isolating.

According to government guidelines, the whole family should have stayed at home in London. But Cummings said he feared that if both he and his wife became ill they would be unable to look after their young son.

Durham police said Cummings did not break the law.

Two weeks later he was cleared to return to work, but decided to go for a drive first to see if he could safely make the journey back to London.

On 12 April, his wife’s birthday, he drove his family to Barnard Castle, where they walked by the riverbank. Durham police subsequently said that if he had been stopped on the way to or from the town he would have been told to return to his father’s property.

Mr Cummings insisted he did nothing wrong at any point. But he was heavily criticised for ignoring government guidelines, and undermining the credibility of its public statements.

Reality Check looked at the some of the claims surrounding the Barnard Castle row at the time, which you can read here.