Covid-19: Calls for clarity over new England lockdown - BBC News
Scientists answer MPs questions on data, while questions remain over the furlough scheme outside of England.
As we've been reporting, chief medical officer for England Prof Chris Whitty and chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance are being questioned by MPs about the figures they gave at Saturday’s briefing when the prime minister announced the new lockdown for England.

There has been much focus on the chart above, which included one model that gave a scenario of 4,000 people a day dying of coronavirus over winter (roughly four times the figure during the worst days of the first wave).

Sir Patrick said he hoped the focus had not been on the longer term models in that chart, but on the six week forecasts in other charts in the presentation.

Prof Whitty said “I have never used anything beyond six weeks in anything I have ever said to any minister on this issue”, but Sir Patrick then said that the chart had indeed been shown to the prime minister.

There has also been criticism that the curves in the chart were all produced at the start of October, just after the rapid rise in cases that followed students returning to university. These were based on models for worst-case planning that assumed no changes in policy or behaviour.

But, since then, England has introduced a three-tier system of stricter measures and the epidemic has grown more slowly than the curves assumed it would.

Indeed, on the day the chart was used, an average of 215 deaths had been reported each day in the previous week. That was far below the 1,000 a day envisioned by the most pessimistic model.