THE slowing death toll from coronavirus is evidence that the ‘hard work’ of everybody in the country to maintain social distancing rules is paying off, the national medical director for NHS England has said.

At the daily Downing Street briefing Professor Stephen Powis, national medical director of NHS England, said the benefit of social distancing was beginning to be felt in the stabilisation of the number of new cases.

He added: “You can see we now have a very definite trend of a reduced number of people in hospitals – that is most marked in London.

“But there is the beginnings of that in the Midlands and other areas of the UK.”

Prof Powis said there had been a decline in the number of critical care beds used for Covid-19 patients.

“This is again evidence that all the hard work everybody in the country has been doing to maintain those social distancing rules is paying off.”

As of today, the UK death toll after testing positive for Covid-19 stands at 20,751, after a further 368 people died.

The number only reflects those who died in hospital. The rise in deaths is the lowest daily increase for nearly four weeks, when 180 deaths were confirmed on March 30.

Prof Powis said despite the apparent decline in new cases and a plateauing in deaths, it was too early to say the UK is winning the fight against Covid-19.

“Those benefits have occurred not by luck, but because people have complied with the instructions that we have all been given and they have followed the science.

“The science of this is quite straight forward, if we reduce the number of people that can be infected from an individual person who has the virus to below on average one, then the virus starts to go into decline and the number of infections starts to fall.”

“All our efforts, hard though they may be, have begun to pay off.”

But he said it would only continue to pay off if we continue to comply with social distancing measures.

“My fear, as the fear of all of us, is that those curves won’t continue to be on a down trend but will start to go in an upward trend.

“We are not at a point where any of us can be absolutely confident that that is not going to be the case – we want to avoid a second peak, we want to avoid a rise.”

Professor Powis also repeated his plea to motorists not to breach lockdown rules after data showed traffic levels creeping up by 3 per cent compared to last week.

“We need to ensure that this does not mean that we are not continuing to comply with the government instructions on social distancing which are of course so key to ensuring that we get on top and control the spread of this virus,” he said.

He added mobility data from tech giant Apple also showed “a  little hint of more people walking and driving” as more people requested directions online.

The Environment Secretary George Eustice also spoke at the briefing and gave an update on the food supply chain.

Mr Eustice said staffing levels had increased in supermarkets during the past three weeks.

“The food supply chain has also seen a significant reduction in staff absence over recent weeks, as staff who had been self-isolating through suspected coronavirus have returned to work,” the Environment Secretary told the briefing.

“Absence levels are down from a peak of typically 20 per cent in food businesses three weeks ago, to less than 10 per cent at the end of last week, and, in some cases, individual companies reporting absences as low as 6 per cent.

The Environment Secretary said the Government had been working with local authorities to ensure people who are not clinically vulnerable but in need of help can get the food that they need.

“We recognise that there are others that are not clinically vulnerable and therefore not in that shielded group, but who may also be in need of help,” Mr Eustice said.

“Perhaps through having a disability, or another type of medical condition, or indeed being unable to draw on family and neighbours to help them.

“So we have been working with local authorities to ensure that those people can be allocated a volunteer shopper to help them get their food needs.”

He said charities can now make direct referrals on the Good Samaritan app to locate volunteers for those in need.

Although the international food chain is continuing to “work well”, the Environment Secretary said he expects there to be a need to recruit staff in the UK to harvest crops at the start of summer.

“We’re also acutely aware that we’re about to start the British season in fresh produce, in soft fruits and salads,” Mr Eustice told the briefing.

“We estimate that probably only about a third of the migrant labour that would normally come to the UK is here, and was probably here before lockdown.

“We are working with industry to identify an approach that will encourage those millions of furloughed workers in some cases to consider taking a second job, helping get the harvest in in June.”

He added: “It’s not an issue at the moment since the harvest has barely begun, but we do anticipate that there will be a need to recruit staff for those sectors in the month of June.”

Mr Eustice also dismissed media reports that all travellers returning to the UK from abroad will have to be quarantined on arrival for 14 days as “speculation”.

“As we move to a new phase at some point in the future – we are not there yet – international travel could become a more significant part of the risk to manage.

“At the moment, all of the evidence suggests it is only a tiny proportion of the cause of the coronavirus outbreak – if we got to that point, a number of measures would be considered but no decisions have been taken in this phase yet.”