Covid UK news – live: Masks in classrooms return, amid fears quarter of workers may be off sick with Omicron

There is still no need for tougher Covid restrictions in England based on hospital data up to the end of 2021, a health minister has insisted.

Edward Argar said the numbers on wards and in intensive care was dramatically down on one year ago, showing vaccines and better treatment had put the country in “a very, very different position”, writes Rob Merrick.

Rolling out ventilation units to schools will raise a number of practical problems, an academic has warned.

Professor Mark Mon-Williams, of the University of Leeds, which is leading a trial of air cleaning equipment in 30 schools in Bradford, told BBC News: “There are a number of different issues, such as does the room have enough plug sockets, how many units are you going to put in classrooms?

“There are other issues, such as delivering the units and cleaning the filters that are present in these systems.

“There are a number of different practical issues that really need to be understood in order for the rollout to be effective.”

He added: “The more units you put in the lower the cost, but the cost is still substantial so the question is this – is this the best investment to make?”

Prof Williams, who said his university’s trial aims to provide evidence so that policy decisions can be made, added: “Ventilation is an incredibly powerful tool but not all schools are able to ventilate adequately and, of course, a number of our schools are positioned in areas of very poor air quality so opening up windows may produce other adverse consequences.

“Ventilation is a fantastic tool but the question is, can we supplement that with these other air cleaning technologies?”

The government does not need to bring in new coronavirus restrictions to tackle Omicron, a health minister has insisted.

Edward Argar told Times Radio “nothing at the moment in the data in front of me” to suggest such a move was necessary.

However, he admitted the government “expects to see hospitalisation numbers continue to go up for a little while yet”.

Self-isolation will not be cut to five days for asymptomatic people, he added.

Dr Mary Bousted, the joint general secretary of the National Education Union, has disagreed with concerns about possible negative mental health effects of making masks compulsory in secondary schools.

Responding to a suggestion by Robert Halfon, chair of the House of Commons Education Select Committee – who said he worried about the “negative impact” on young people’s mental wellbeing – she told Times Radio she wanted to see evidence of such claims.

She said: “Robert Halfon says it has a significant mental health effect. So I would really want to see the study that shows that.

“We have mask-wearing in secondary schools in Wales and Scotland, and I don’t think that it is causing a huge problem.

“Secondary school pupils wear masks in corridors and hallways and surely, Robert Halfon has been, you know, campaigning hard, quite rightly, to keep schools open.

“Schools are crowded buildings. Even in secondary only just under half the pupils have been vaccinated. And we know that mask-wearing does have an effect of suppressing transmission.”

Ministers’ plans to help schools beat coronavirus by improving classroom ventilation are inadequate, Labour has warned.

Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, told Sky News: “They’ve made an announcement today that they’re going to send out 7,000 air purifiers to schools across the country.

“I mean, that’s only one in four schools across England, so nowhere near enough. And I’m not clear from what the government said whether this is one system per school, or one air purifier per school – because obviously [there’s] a big difference between the two.

“And again, I’m afraid it looks a little bit like a rushed last-minute announcement to give the appearance of doing something on a big issue where they should have taken action a lot sooner.

“So I think the government’s got a lot more to do on ventilation in schools as well, as a key defence, a key mitigation, against the virus.”

Covid-19 conspiracy groups may pivot to pushing climate misinformation in 2022, experts have warned.

Ciaran O’Connor, an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told the PA news agency that coronavirus misinformation on topics such as vaccines and lockdowns could evolve to focus on climate policy.

“‘Green lockdowns’ is a term that’s bandied about in these conspiracy communities… that’s a merging of Covid worlds and climate disinformation worlds,” he said.

Schools in England have been given the go-ahead to send pupils home and return to online teaching if they have a critical shortage of teachers, writes Rob Merrick.

The advice comes in an open letter from Nadhim Zahawi, the education secretary – one day after he announced the return of mask-wearing in secondary school classes.

Israel has recorded the first case of a rare mixture of two diseases, influenza and coronavirus, dubbed “flurona”.

Local reports said that the patient was a young pregnant woman, who was in hospital, although her symptoms were mild, writes Svrasti Dasgupta.

“She was diagnosed with the flu and coronavirus as soon as she arrived,” said Arnon Vizhnitser, director of the gynaecology department of Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva city.

India reported more than 27,000 new Covid-19 cases on Sunday, with infections sharply rising for a fifth consecutive day.

However, the chief minister of the capital New Delhi insisted there was no need to panic, citing low hospital admission rates.

The country’s largest cities, including Delhi and the financial capital Mumbai, have seen a recent spike in Covid-19 cases, including those of the Omicron variant, which has triggered a fresh wave of infections in other parts of the world.

Although the number of active cases in Delhi has tripled in just the last three days, chief minister Arvind Kejriwal said that hospitalisations had not gone up.

A surge of Omicron infections could see Israel reaching herd immunity, the country’s top health official said on Sunday as daily cases continued to climb.

The highly transmissible variant has brought a surge in coronavirus cases across the globe. Worldwide infections have hit a record high, with an average of just over a million cases detected a day between 24 and 30 December, according to Reuters data. Deaths, however, have not risen in kind, bringing hope the new variant is less lethal.

Until late December, Israel managed to stave off Omicron to some degree but with infection rates now gaining pace, daily cases are expected to reach record highs in the coming three weeks. This could result in herd immunity, said director-general of the health ministry, Nachman Ash.

“The cost will be a great many infections,” Mr Ash told 103FM Radio. “The numbers will have to be very high in order to reach herd immunity. This is possible but we don’t want to reach it by means of infections, we want it to happen as a result of many people vaccinating.”