Living With Covid Government Update
Living with COVID-19 has now been published and is available online here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-response-living-with-covid-19
The Government’s response has four principles:
Living with COVID-19: removing domestic restrictions while encouraging safer behaviours through public health advice, in common with longstanding ways of managing most other respiratory illnesses;
Protecting people most vulnerable to COVID-19: vaccination guided by Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) advice, supporting the NHS and social care and deploying targeted testing.
Maintaining resilience: ongoing surveillance, contingency planning and the ability to reintroduce key capabilities such as mass vaccination and testing in an emergency; and
Securing innovations and opportunities from the COVID-19 response, including investment in life sciences.
Testing
From 21 February, the Government is removing the guidance for staff and students in most education and childcare settings to undertake twice weekly asymptomatic testing.
From 1 April, the Government will no longer provide free universal symptomatic and asymptomatic testing for the general public in England.
From 1 April, there will be some limited ongoing free testing:
Limited symptomatic testing available for a small number of at-risk groups - the Government will set out further details on which groups will be eligible.
Free symptomatic testing will remain available to social care staff
Isolation
The legal requirement to self-isolate following a positive COVID-19 test will end on 24 February.
Positive cases will be advised to stay at home and avoid contact with other people for at least five full days and continue following this advice until they have received two negative test results on consecutive days.
Household close contacts are advised to work from home if possible, avoid contact with high-risk individuals and limit close contact with other people. Non-household contacts are advised to follow more general advice on ventilation, wearing masks and hygiene.
From 24 March, the COVID-19 provisions within Statutory Sick Pay and Employment and Support Allowance regulations will end. People with COVID-19 may still be eligible, subject to the normal conditions of entitlement.
Advice for the former CEV group and people whose immune system means they are at higher risk
The shielding programme ended on 15 September 2021 and the government wrote to everyone on the Shielded Patient List at this time informing them of this. There is no longer a centrally defined Clinically Extremely Vulnerable group or Shielded Patient List.
There is a smaller group of people for whom vaccines may be less effective because of their immune system. There is separate guidance for this group containing additional public health advice and information on vaccinations and treatments. This guidance will be updated in due course.
What this means for adult social care
While the vast majority of care recipients in adult social care are vaccinated, individuals are still at a greater risk of hospitalisation and death from COVID-19 relative to the general population, and the transmission risk remains high in vulnerable settings due to the kind of close contact care individuals receive. Therefore, the current protections will remain in place for those in adult social care settings.
As we ease restrictions in society and restrictions on freedoms in care settings, it therefore remains important to ensure that robust protections are in place in vulnerable settings to continue keeping staff and care recipients safe as we transition to living with COVID. For advice on caring for people in adult social care settings, please see the Coronavirus (COVID-19): adult social care guidance - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
The Government will carefully review measures in adult social care settings further over the coming weeks where staff care for the most vulnerable in society. The updated position will be set out in out in guidance by 1 April.
ASC policy are working through the next steps for ASC. We remain committed to supporting the adult social care sector through the next phase of COVID-19 response and protecting the most vulnerable whilst enabling people to live their lives with as few restrictions as possible. From the emails we’ve received, we’ve put together a few top FAQs about next steps, IPC and testing. I hope you find it helpful – please let me know if you have further questions or concerns.
What does the removal of self-isolation regulations mean for ASC? Should staff still self-isolate if necessary from Thursday 24th?
There will be no change in advice for staff who currently need to self-isolate across ASC from Thursday 24th. Guidance will be updated to remove references to the legal requirement but anyone who tests positive and who is an unvaccinated contact should still stay at home and avoid contact, and should stay away from work. This advice will also be provided to the general public so although self-isolation will no longer be the law, there will continue to be strong guidance to stay at home and avoid contact with people. The same applies for care home residents where guidance currently advises self-isolation.
From Thursday 24th, does anything change about testing to reduce isolation periods e.g. if you’re a vaccinated contact or if you’ve tested positive?
There will be no change in advice in when to test from Thursday 24th apart from updates to guidance to remove references to the legal requirement. For example, if staff are asymptomatic vaccinated contacts, advice remains that they should stay away from work, take a PCR, and if negative, they can return to work whilst testing daily. Or, if an individual has tested positive, the advice continues to be that individuals should stay home, and only come back to work following two negative consecutive LFD tests from days 5 and 6.
Is the ICTF still available to fund ICF and testing measures including self-isolation?
Providers can still use the ICTF to pay their staff full wages whilst they are self-isolating, and is available until the end of March 2022. This is not impacted by the legal duty to self-isolate being dropped.
If everything is staying the same for ASC right now, when will there be changes to IPC guidance?
We are reviewing measures over the coming weeks, and as discussed, we are looking at providing updates guidance by 1st April. We want to develop this with the sector and will continue engagement with you on what the future guidance to the sector will be over the coming weeks.
The PM’s speech and Living with Covid document didn’t mention continued free asymptomatic testing for staff. Should we keep testing now and will testing provision end?
Testing for all staff, residents, and visitors should continue in line with the relevant testing regimes set out here – testing remains important to quickly identify individuals who are likely to be highly infectious and enables them to self-isolate to reduce transmission and keep the most vulnerable safe. Further detail on future testing will be provided in due course.