Medical team arrive from China to help UK response to coronavirus

Medical staff have arrived from China to help with the UK response to the coronavirus crisis.

A video posted on Twitter shows around a dozen staff unloading equipment from a coach in London, after workers flew in on Friday.

The boxes have the Chinese flag alongside the Union Jack printed on the side, with phrases such as: ‘We will get through this together!’ and ‘Keep calm and combat coronavirus’.

The footage was shared by Samantha Harvey, the country’s first Chinese-born UK district councillor, who is based in Wakefield.

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It has been viewed and shared thousands of times, with a number of racist and negative comments criticising China’s response to the pandemic.

The news comes after Chinese authorities finally ended a draconian two-month lockdown in Wuhan last week, reopening borders and allowing metro services to run.

Some semblance of normality has been allowed to return to the city, where the epidemic first appeared in late December and forced millions of people to be confined to their homes.

The reopening marked a turning point in China’s fight against the virus, though the contagion has since spread to over 200 countries.

Both Spain and Italy have now overtaken China’s death toll, while the US officially has the highest number of cases anywhere in the world.

The UK’s chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance has said the situation is set to get worse in the country over the next couple of weeks.

Making a presentation on the latest data this afternoon, Sir Patrick said at the moment the UK is seeing around 1,000 new cases of Covid-19 a day, but added data does not suggest we are experiencing a fast acceleration of cases, suggesting social distancing measures are working.

He said that ‘we’re tracking roughly along the same path as France’ in terms of deaths of patients who have contracted the virus.

The UK coronavirus death toll has reached 1,408 after another 180 people were confirmed dead today.

The NHS said another 159 patients died in England, and Wales recorded 14 more deaths.

A further six people were confirmed dead in Scotland, while Northern Ireland recorded one more death today.

These latest figures follow a sharp rise of 260 deaths on Saturday, which is the biggest day-on-day increase since the outbreak began.

A total of 22,141 people in the UK have tested positive for coronavirus, while 112,805 have tested negative.

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