Coronavirus: Deliveries of PPE for NHS staff arrive from Turkey and Burma

PPE equipment is in short supply. Picture: Victoria Jones/PA Images - Credit: PA

An RAF plane, believed to be carrying a delayed consignment of personal protective equipment (PPE) for NHS staff from Turkey, has landed in the UK.

Flight tracker RadarBox showed the Airbus A400-M registered ZM416 depart Istanbul and land just after 3.30am on Wednesday at RAF Brize Norton.

The plane had been dispatched from the Oxfordshire base, where two other planes are on stand-by to pick up further kit from Turkey, late on Monday.

It is not known if the consignment, which was ordered on Thursday and originally due to arrive on Sunday, includes 400,000 badly-needed surgical gowns.

The government has come in for mounting criticism over its failure to ensure NHS staff treating coronavirus patients have the protective equipment they need.


Have your say
Send your letters for publication to The New European by emailing letters@theneweuropean.co.uk and pick up an edition each Thursday for more comment and analysis. Find your nearest stockist here or subscribe to a print or digital edition for just £13. You can also join our readers' Facebook group to keep the discussion and debate going with thousands of fellow pro-Europeans.

Ministers insisted they were pursuing ‘every possible option’ to secure additional kit but said that, with unprecedented worldwide demand, the situation is ‘very challenging’.

Local government minister Simon Clarke could not give a timescale on when the full supplies would arrive earlier this week, saying only that it would be in the ‘next few days’.

Separately, the government said that 140,000 gowns had arrived from Burma – but with the NHS using 150,000 a day, the demand on resources remains intense.’