RUSHES: Coronavirus: Downing Street press conference April 10th

Coronavirus: Downing Street press conference April 10th; ENGLAND: London: Westminster: Downing Street: Number 10: INT Press conference part 9 of 14 Ruth May (Chief Nursing Officer for England), Jonathan Van-Tam (Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England) and Matt Hancock MP (Health Secretary) question and answer session. Ruth May SOT - But I recognise that we will and will want to make sure that we are learning any lessons to be learned, but it’d be inappropriate for me to comment on any individual deaths that we’ve seen, whether that is one of our healthcare workers or not. Question SOT - A question for the health secretary. Economists are on average predicting that there’s going to be a 14 per cent drop in GDP in the second quarter of this year and understand some in government fear that it could be even worse. What would the impact of that be on the numbers of deaths that are not directly related to coronavirus? Matt Hancock SOT - This is a really important question and one that I worry about a lot. The goal that I have as health secretary is to protect life, but you’ve got to make sure that you look at that in the widest context. Of course protecting people from deaths directly due to coronavirus that’s actually the subject in most of the discussions at these press conferences and a huge amount of effort to make sure that the NHS capacity is there. The second type of mortality that we protect against is deaths that occur because the NHS is overrun. And I’m very pleased that thus far in this crisis there is no point at which the NHS has been overrun and every single person with coronavirus has been able to access the best possible care in the NHS because we’ve taken the action to expand the NHS, source the ventilators and increased capacity with the Nightingale hospitals to make sure that there is always the capacity there and that is obviously absolutely top priority as we repeat at the start of each of these press conferences. The third type...