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UK coronavirus live: Dominic Raab to lead daily briefing after PM urges caution on lockdown easing
UK coronavirus live: Dominic Raab says any change to lockdown will be modest; death toll reaches 30,615
(32 minutes later)
ONS says black people at higher risk of dying from Covid-19; Sturgeon will consider allowing more outdoor exercise; PM to make lockdown statement at 7pm on Sunday
Government misses 100k testing target for fifth day in a row; PM urges ‘maximum caution’ on lockdown easing; Welsh schools will not reopen on 1 June
It sounds as if opposition party leaders at Westminter got exactly the same line from the PM as the cabinet (see 1.36pm) when he spoke to them at lunchtime. Commenting on the talks, a No 10 spokesman said:
Q: Will you take steps to protect BAME workers in frontline jobs?
Boris Johnson has posted this on Twitter. It’s a direct quote from the speech he gave outside No 10 on Monday last week (the El Alamein one).
Raab says the government is looking very carefully at why BAME people are more at risk. When it gets those findings, it will consider what action to take.
It will be seen as yet more evidence that Downing Street is trying to contain expectations for next week. (See 1.36pm.)
The government dashboard with the daily death figures has now just been updated with today’s figures.
Peter MacMahon from ITV Border thinks the PM may also be seeking to reduce tensions with the Scottish government.
Raab says the CQC figures show the number of deaths in care homes going down.
The number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 in jails in England and Wales continues to rise slowly, the latest update from the Ministry of Justice shows, as the first official report into post-lockdown prison life was published.
But there is still a lot of work to do on this, he says.
As of 5pm on Wednesday, there were 390 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in prisoners across 74 prisons, a 1% rise in 24 hours, while the number of infected prison staff rose 3% to 447 workers in the same period.
Q: Can you confirm you are renewing the lockdown restrictions. They have to be reviewed today. And Nicola Sturgeon says it could be catastrophic moving from the ‘stay home’ message. Is that safe?
At least 19 prisoners and six prison staff have contracted Covid-19 and died. There are 80,800 prisoners in England and Wales across 117 prisons, and around 33,000 prison staff in public-sector prisons.
Raab says there is no change today in the rules.
Prisons are currently operating on a restricted regime. HM Inspectorate of Prisons published its first scrutiny report on Thursday on the function of prisons during the crisis, looking at three young offender institutions (YOI).
But the PM will set out a roadmap on Sunday.
The report was broadly positive but found inconsistencies in the restrictive regime across the jails with one of the YOIs - Cookham Wood, in Kent - only releasing teenage inmates from cells for 40 minutes a day.
He says the PM spoke to Sturgeon today, and the PM set out his determination to maintain a four-nations approach, even if some countries move forward at slightly different speeds.
A charity for people with learning disabilities such as autism has released a “statement of rights” for people to show police on their mobile phones if they are questioned for potentially breaching the lockdown.
Q: How does R vary regionally?
Enable Scotland said the statement, which has been designed in consultation with Police Scotland to be downloaded onto mobiles, followed complaints that many people with autism and other learning disabilities found the rules very stressful.
Diamond says it varies a bit, and would be lowest in London.
Guidance in Scotland states people should only leave home for exercise, once a day and for an hour, and to stay close to home. For some people those restrictions have caused distress and ill-health, Enable Scotland said, because leaving home several times a day is part of their normal routines and coping strategies.
Harries is now presenting the daily slides.
They feared being stopped and challenged by the police. The latest Police Scotland data showed that by 24 April, the force had stopped nearly 8,000 for breaching the lockdown.
She says all regions are now showing a decline in the number of hospital coronavirus cases.
And here are is the latest global death comparison.
EU trade commissioner Phil Hogan has claimed the British team negotiating with Brussels on the future trade and security relationship plans to blame the economic costs of a no-deal result at the end of the year on the coronavirus pandemic.
Boris Johnson did not share any details of his plans for easing the lockdown with Nicola Sturgeon or other devolved government leaders in a phone call which ended a short while ago, Sturgeon’s office has said.
Hogan, a former Irish minister, told the Irish national broadcaster RTE:
In a brief statement issued after the call, the first minister’s spokesman said she told the prime minister the only easing she planned was to relax the rules on daily exercise, which are limited in Scotland to one one-hour outing a day.
He also claimed the British government did not want the talks to succeed. He said:
However, a further call between the governments was expected before Sunday, when Johnson is due to give a speech on his proposals to begin relaxing the lockdown. Sturgeon’s spokesman said:
As reported earlier, Downing Street rejected this claim. (See 2.02pm.)
Raab confirms that the PM will set out a “roadmap” on Sunday for moving forward, with conditions for reaching each milestone.
Hogan’s analysis is quite similar to Rafael Behr’s in his Guardian column today.
Raab says 86,583 tests were carried out yesterday. That is an increase on yesterday, but it means the government has missed the 100,000 tests per day target for a fifth day in a row.
Essential personal protective equipment worth £166,000 has been stolen from a warehouse in Greater Manchester, police have said.
He says 30,615 people have now died. That means there have been an extra 539 deaths, according to the official count (which only covers people who have died and tested positive for coronavirus – others will have died from it without testing positive).
Officers were called to the Trafalgar Business Park in Salford following reports that a large amount of PPE had been taken.
He also says the reproduction number, R, is now between 0.5 and 0.
Last month, Greater Manchester police launched an investigation after a masked thief ransacked an NHS office and stole PPE as well as number of laptops and a quantity of petty cash.
Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary and first secretary of state, has just arrived for the press conference. He is with Sir Ian Diamond, the national statistician, and Dr Jenny Harries, the deputy chief medical officer for England.
The raid took place at the offices of the Care Homes Medical Practice in Windsor Street, Salford, which cares for patients living in nursing and residential homes.
Jeremy Hunt, who was the health secretary at the time that Exercise Cygnus was carried out and the report completed, has previously said he believed the report should be published.
The British public has already started to venture out and about more, despite lockdown measures not yet being relaxed, researchers have found.
He told the Guardian that he had agreed with its recommendations and had fought within the government for an expansion of both the NHS and social care budgets but was not successful in securing extra money for the care sector. He said:
The analysis, by researchers at University College London, is based on data from the company Huq Industries that collected anonymised data, via an app, on where people are using their mobile phones, giving a sense of how many people are passing through an area across a given hour. This was then summed together to gauge activity levels across a day and then a week.
The royal family have praised “all of the journalists and broadcasters working to keep us informed” during the coronavirus crisis.
Overall, looking across Greater London, Liverpool, Greater Manchester, Greater Glasgow, South Hampshire and the West Midlands, the team found such activity levels were 50% lower on average between 13-19 April compared with levels during 9-15 March, shortly before strong social distancing began. However, by early May levels had risen, and are now back at 60% of the level before 16 March.
The message closely follows an appeal from the communities secretary, Robert Jenrick, on Wednesday calling on the public to buy a newspaper to support the media.
When the team looked at areas with different characteristics, for example zones known to be financial hubs or shopping areas, they further found that activity levels are higher in areas linked to jobs such as construction and domestic work than those associated with activities including tourism or finance. That, the team adds, could shed light on which jobs can be done from home – and which cannot.
At the daily press briefing, Jenrick said much of the frontline effort in the fight against coronavirus “is being coordinated in our own communities”, adding:
Prof James Cheshire, a co-author of the study and deputy director of the ESRC Consumer Data Research Centre, said:
It sounds as if opposition party leaders at Westminster got exactly the same line from the PM as the cabinet (see 1.36pm) when he spoke to them at lunchtime. Commenting on the talks, a No 10 spokesman said:
Schools in Wales will not reopen on 1 June, regardless of decisions in England, the Welsh government announced this afternoon.
Kirtsy Williams, the Welsh education minister, said that “the situation in Wales will not change” on 1 June, in a statement designed to curtail speculation ahead of Boris Johnson’s speech on Sunday on when schools in England will be ending their lockdown.
The Welsh decision follows Nicola Sturgeon’s comment earlier this week that schools in Scotland may not return until the end of summer.
The health department in Northern Ireland has released its latest coronavirus death figures. There have been four new coronavirus deaths, taking the total to 422.
The full details are here.
Labour has called on Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary and other ministers to explain “what they knew and why they didn’t fix the problems that were so clearly identified” in a secret government report from 2017 warned about problems with the UK’s flu pandemic preparedness. Liz Kendall, the shadow care minister, highlighted the warning in the Exercise Cygnus report, revealed today by the Guardian, about care homes’ lack of readiness to accept large numbers of patients discharged from hospital. She said the plan to protect the NHS relied on removing thousands of people from hospitals into care homes and without mandatory testing, and “care homes have struggled to cope mainly because they can’t effectively isolate them”.Kendall said:
Covid-19 has spread rapidly in care homes, killing 6,686 people up to 1 May in England and Wales, and deaths in care homes now account for a third of all virus fatalities.
