This morning’s NHS briefing has revealed that Nightingale hospitals in Manchester, Sunderland, and Harrogate are being put on “standby“, as hospitalisations begin to rise across the north. Each hospital will as of today enter “a higher state of readiness”…

While the boffins were sombre about the spread of the virus, and particularly how it is beginning to move from young people to older age categories, they also stressed that the NHS is better placed to handle the pandemic than in the first wave.

There is now a stockpile for four months of medical grade PPE, the trialled and tested therapeutic Dexamethasone which reduces ventilated patient deaths by up to one third, as well as a general better understanding how to deal with oxygen and when ventilators are needed.

See the official slides from this morning’s briefing in full below: