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Matt Hancock today cautioned that the link between Covid cases and deaths has been 'broken but not completely severed' by vaccines as the number of positive tests spiked again to 6,238 and 11 more deaths were recorded.

The Health Secretary was speaking at a meeting of G7 health ministers in Oxford today when the case count surged by 1,000 more than yesterday at the end of a week of mounting evidence that Covid is coming back in the UK, fuelled by the super-contagious new Indian variant.

He said: 'We always expected cases to rise as the as the country was opened up, the critical thing is the impact on the number of people who end up in hospital for any given number of cases. That link has been broken by the vaccine, but it hasn't been completely severed yet.'