RUSHES: Coronavirus: Downing Street press conference 1st March 2021

Coronavirus: Downing Street press conference 1st March 2021; Press conference part 2 of 13 ENGLAND: London: Westminster: Downing Street: INT Matt Hancock MP (Health Secretary) statement SOT. - Next slide please. But where you can really see it is in the data on deaths – we can see that the number of deaths each day is thankfully falling much much faster than after the first peak, and again, as you can see from this slide, is falling faster in the over-80s – who got the jab first – than in the under-80s. Final slide please. Taken together, this difference in the data – between older and younger groups – shows a ‘vaccine gap’, you can just see it starting to emerge here over February. This is a gap between the rate of decline in older and younger groups, the rate of decline in terms of people dying each day, is going faster amongst the over-80s and this shows in the real world, across the UK, right now, that the vaccine is helping to protect the NHS and save lives. These real-world effects are backed up by some exciting new data that shows that a single shot of either the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine or Pfizer vaccine works against severe infection amongst over-70s, with a more than 80 per cent reduction in hospitalisations. This is extremely good news. In fact, the detailed data show that the protection that you get from catching COVID, 35 days after a first jab, is even slightly better for the Oxford jab than for Pfizer, albeit both results are clearly very strong. Professor Van-Tam is going to set more details in a moment. These results may also help explain why the number of COVID admissions to intensive care units among people over 80 in the UK have dropped to single figures in the last couple of weeks. Which is something that I know, we all welcome. This is seriously encouraging, it shows the power of science and what it means for you is that when the call comes – get the jab. The evidence shows it will protect you. And I ca...