He claimed to have misheard the question on Sky News.
Dominic Raab had to be corrected by officials after wrongly claiming that there were 250 people in hospital with the Omicron variant of Covid-19 before backtracking to nine, which was also wrong.
The justice secretary made the initial error during an appearance on Sky News, where he was quizzed on the numbers. He said: “Last I saw it was in the low hundreds, 250 the last time I looked, but of course the data is being updated all the time.
“The problem is the rate at which it is transmitting and if that continues, we will see those numbers increase very dramatically.”
He later told the BBC in the same hour that there were nine people in hospital with the Omicron variant.
He claimed to have misheard the question on Sky News.
Government officials later clarified there were 10 people in hospital.
The SNP’s Ian Blackford tweeted: “This is extraordinary, all Governments are going to have to make decisions to control the spread of the virus. Knowing the difference between 9 and 250 in hospital is pretty fundamental. @DominicRaab showing the same failure to be over the detail as his boss @BorisJohnson.”
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
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