Matt Hancock, the health secretary, has refused to deny a claim from Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s former chief adviser, that Hancock told No 10 in the early days of the pandemic that patients would be tested before being discharged into care homes. At a press conference where his evasiveness led to him facing repeated questions on this topic, he said: Of course we committed, and I committed, to getting the policy in place but it took time to build the testing. We didn’t start with a big testing system in the UK and then we built that testing system, and that’s why the 100,000 target was so important because it really accelerated the availability of testing because when you don’t have much testing we had to prioritise it according to clinical need. When pressed on whether he had told the PM in March 2020 that all patients would be tested when being discharged to care homes, as Cummings said he did, Hancock replied: My recollection of events is that I committed to delivering that testing for people going from hospital into care comes when we could do it. I then went away and built the testing capacity for all sorts of reasons and all sorts of uses, including this one, and then delivered on the commitment that I made. Earlier Hancock faced a much happier outing in the Commons where Conservative MPs ignored his failure to answer this particular question and gave him their full support. (See 12.09pm.) At the press conference Hancock also received some support from Dr Jenny Harries, chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency. She said that hospital discharges were only responsible for “a very, very tiny proportion” of Covid cases in care homes. A report from Public Health England (pdf) out today makes the same point. It says: The findings of this report suggest hospital associated seeding accounted for a small proportion of all care home outbreaks. But it also says: Policies on systematic testing prior to hospital discharge for patients discharged to care homes were introduced on 15 April 2020. This may have supported the decline seen in these types of outbreaks, contributing to an overall reduction in care home cases. Boris Johnson has rejected the claim made by Cummings that tens of thousands of people died unnecessarily because of mistakes made by the government. (See 1.19pm.) Up to three-quarters of new UK Covid cases are thought to be caused by the variant first detected in India, Hancock said. Cases of the Indian variant have doubled within a week, a Public Health England report has revealed. PHE says: PHE’s latest weekly variant cases data shows that cases of VOC-21APR-02 [the Indian variant] have risen by 3,535 to 6,959 since last week. The most affected areas continue to be Bolton, Bedford and Blackburn with Darwen, which have seen 1,354, 366 and 361 confirmed cases, respectively. There are small numbers of cases of VOC-21APR-02 in most parts of the country. PHE have published a full breakdown of VOC-21APR-02 cases by lower-tier local authority. In some affected areas, hospitalisations are rising. Hospital attendances and admissions are predominantly in unvaccinated individuals, highlighting how crucial it is that people in these areas come forward to receive vaccination. Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister, has said the decision about whether to introduce “Covid certificates” to allow events and venues to open up this summer remains “finely balanced”. The government has restarted the recruitment process for a new chair of Ofcom after the prime minister’s favoured candidate, the former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, had his application rejected by an interview board. That’s all from me for today. But our coronavirus coverage continues on our global live blog. It’s here.