UK coronavirus live: a third of people testing positive missed by test and trace system, figures reveal

London Zoo’s website is crashing as a result of the number of people trying to buy tickets ahead of its reopening next week.

Responding to customers who were receiving error messages on Thursday afternoon when trying to organise a visit, the zoo tweeted that the site is “struggling to keep up with the number of bookings”.

In another message it said:

It comes as zoos and safari parks prepare to reopen in England from Monday. Some, including London Zoo, Chester Zoo and Bristol Zoo have reported financial struggles during the pandemic and worried they would not survive the crisis.

If you’re still trying to wrap your head around the new rules surrounding “support bubbles” in England, Amelia Hill has answered some of the more pertinent questions here:

The government has been accused of rushing to announce “headline-grabbing policies” without properly engaging with school leaders first.

Boris Johnson announced plans on Wednesday night for a “massive catch-up operation over the summer” for pupils, adding details will come next week.

Paul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders’ union NAHT, warned the scheme was “the latest in a long line of eye-catching announcements that will suffer from a lack of input from the profession”. He said:

As with the announcement that all children would return to primary school before the summer, the government has rushed to announce headline-grabbing policies without properly engaging with the profession first.

The language of summer catch-up completely underplays the scale and the nature of the challenges likely to be faced because of prolonged absence from school. There is no quick fix.

The former Ukip leader Nigel Farage is leaving the broadcaster LBC with immediate effect, it has been announced.

It follows widespread anger over comments made by Farage comparing Black Lives Matter protestors to the Taliban.

Here is the full story from our colleague Jim Waterson

The British Council is in line for a £60m bailout to save it from collapse after being “heavily hit” by the financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Foreign Office said the council, which promotes cultural relations and educational opportunities overseas, is at “risk of insolvency”. The loan would “stabilise” the British Council’s finances until mid-August, Foreign Office minister Nigel Adams told MPs.

The council has already taken measures to reduce its deficit and cut costs, including furloughing staff using the government scheme and similar mechanisms in other countries. But Adams said:

Without additional support from Government, the British Council will shortly become insolvent.

The FCO is therefore seeking a contingencies fund advance to provide an initial loan of up to 60 million to the British Council, drawn down in tranches depending upon need and contingent on the approval of FCO and HM Treasury, to stabilise their financial situation until mid-August 2020.

The terms of the loan will be agreed with HM Treasury.

A further 83 people who tested positive for Covid-19 have died, bringing the total number of confirmed reported deaths in hospitals in England to 27,790.

The number of deaths of patients with Covid-19 by region are as follows:

East of England 8

London 3

Midlands 26

North East & Yorkshire 18

North West 10

South East 16

South West 2

Total 83

One further person with coronavirus has died in Northern Ireland, taking the death toll reported by the Department of Health to 538.

There have been four new confirmed cases of the virus, bring the total since the outbreak began to 4,822.

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said 41,279 people had died in hospitals, care homes and the wider community after testing positive for coronavirus in the UK as of 5pm on Wednesday. That is a rise of 151 from 41,128 the day before.

The government’s figures do not include all deaths involving Covid-19 across the UK, which is thought to have passed 52,000.

The DHSC also said in the 24-hour period up to 9am on Thursday, 197,007 tests were carried out or dispatched, with 1,266 positive results.

Overall, a total of 6,240,801 tests have been carried out and 291,409 cases have been confirmed positive.

The figure for the number of people tested has been “temporarily paused to ensure consistent reporting” across all methods of testing.

Travel firm Tui has extended the suspension of holidays for customers from the UK and Ireland due to coronavirus travel restrictions.

The firm said in a statement:

Tui UK and Ireland today confirms that due to the ongoing travel restrictions all beach holidays up to and including 10 July will be cancelled.

With so much uncertainty around when travel will be able to recommence, customers due to travel before the end of August have the opportunity to amend their holiday for free, so they don’t have to pay until closer to their new departure date.

We are constantly monitoring the situation and will start taking people on holiday again as soon as we are able to do so.

Cambridge University has announced a £1m bursary programme targeted at helping UK adults whose careers have been hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

The university’s Institute of Continuing Education is offering 1,000 bursaries, each worth £1,000, to go towards tuition fees on one of more than 30 part-time courses.

Those eligible to apply for the bursaries include UK residents who have been furloughed and those who have been made redundant on or after 1 April.

Courses included in the scheme include coaching, cognitive psychology and genetics.

Dr James Gazzard, director of the Institute of Continuing Education, said:

The full economic impact of the current pandemic has yet to be fully understood, but there is a risk that the crisis creates a ‘missed generation’ of adults left without jobs and unable to afford the time and cost of full-time retraining.

Our hope is that they will use these open-access Cambridge undergraduate qualifications to improve their employability and incorporate lifelong learning into their broader approach to wellbeing.

The Cambridge Thousand Futures Bursary will mean access to a range of part-time remote qualifications will be available from £1,150.

The typical cost of an equivalent number of undergraduate credits at most UK universities ranges from £3,000 to £4,600, the institute said.

The programme is also open to key workers as defined by the government’s list, those who have received an NHS letter to say they are in the “most at risk” category, and people who were aged 70 before 1 April.

Virtual open days will take place on Friday and Saturday, with applications to be considered on a first-come first-served basis.

The closing date for applications is 31 July.

Public Health Wales said a further six people had died after testing positive for Covid-19, taking the total number of deaths there to 1,425, while the total cases increased by 63 to 14,581.

Nearly a fifth of people in some areas of the UK have been furloughed from their jobs, PA Media reports.

Analysis of new data shows that 25,400 people have been furloughed in Tottenham, north London, making it the worst-hit parliamentary constituency in the country, as just under 18% of people pick up a government-supported pay cheque.

Meanwhile, Crawley, close to Gatwick airport in West Sussex, is the worst-hit local authority by proportion of population. The figures show that 20,000 people, or 17.8% of the local population, including children and pensioners, have been furloughed there.

The government launched its jobs retention scheme in March, allowing companies to send workers home, with the Treasury paying up to 80% of their salaries.

In England, 6.5m jobs had been furloughed by 31 May, dominated by London and the south-east, at more than 1m each.

Around 628,000 workers have been furloughed in Scotland, 317,000 in Wales, and 212,000 in Northern Ireland, the figures show.

The government is soon set to ease the support for businesses using the furlough scheme to keep their employees on the books.

The data shows that around 1.1m businesses have claimed cash to help support their staff. Wholesale and retail businesses were the worst hit, claiming £3.3bn for 1.6 million workers.

It also further reveals the destruction wrought on the hospitality sector, with accommodation and food services companies furloughing 1.4 million people, and claiming £2.6bn in furlough cash.

Tim Montgomerie, the journalist who founded the influential ConservativeHome website, used to be an enthusiastic supporter of Boris Johnson. But, in an article for the New Statesman, he says he has lost faith in the prime minister because he now thinks the PM has given up listening to a wide range of voices and is now intolerant of criticism. Here’s an extract.

It took six years for Margaret Thatcher’s governments to begin to stop listening to alternative voices. The same patterns had emerged within six months of Johnson becoming prime minister, and within six weeks of his general election victory last December. In her early years the Iron Lady relished argument and intellectual debate – and those internal jousts strengthened her for the public battles with her true opponents. In the starkest of contrasts, the team inside today’s No 10 has often preferred to greet internal dissent with retribution – much of it pre-briefed to favoured journalists. Throughout the Westminster village every Tory had quickly learned the score: do, say and tweet as you are told – or else. In February’s reshuffle we learned that earning the disfavour of key prime ministerial adviser Dominic Cummings was fatal, even if you were chancellor of the Exchequer. Everyone was dispensable. Except Dom.

In an interview on the World at One, Montgomerie, who is particularly close to Sajid Javid, the former chancellor who was effectively sacked because he would not let No 10 choose his advisers, said he was especially worried about the influence of Cummings, Johnson’s chief adviser.

What I worry about is that [Cummings] is a brilliant figure, but half of his ideas are crazy, and half of his ideas are good. He shouldn’t be in a leadership position, he shouldn’t be in a dominant position. And I’m afraid that is what has happened inside Downing Street … The Vote Leave operation that Dominic Cummings ran during the EU referendum has essentially been transplanted into Downing Street, and there is a lack of diversity in thought and personnel as a result.

Much of the Downing Street lobby briefing was taken up with a discussion of the test and trace figures. But here are some other lines from the briefing.

• The prime minister’s spokesman said the government had not ruled out the need for the Nightingale hospitals having to reactivated. The emergency hospitals, built within days when it was feared the NHS would be overwhelmed by coronavirus cases, were largely unused. But the spokesman said the government “may still need” them in the months ahead.

• The spokesman said Boris Johnson was urging people not to take part in mass Black Lives Matters demonstrations, in breach of social distancing guidelines. He said:

[The PM] has been very clear that any gatherings of more than six people would be illegal and would urge people not to take part in protests if they can’t be conducted in a lawful way.

• Matt Hancock, the health secretary, will take the daily press conference at 5pm. He will be appearing with Dido Harding, who is in charge of the test and trace programme.

Dido Harding, the Tory peer who runs the test and trace programme, has admitted that the system needs to improve.

Commenting on the first set of performance statistics for it published today (see 1.13pm), she told journalists:

We are not at the gold standard yet that we want to be, of isolating all contacts within 48 hours of someone requesting a test. But you can absolutely see the path of how we are going to get there.

She said the programme was “fit for purpose”. But it would improve, she said.

Just as the infection rate is coming down in the country, so is our capability to test and trace growing.

We have got real scale – this is a national-level service that has stood up in extraordinary time.

Is it completely perfect? No, of course it isn’t. Is there stuff that we all need to do better? Yes there is.

But I think it’s fit for purpose as we stand today and will get better through the summer.

The Department of Health and Social Care has now published its first set of statistics (pdf) about the operation of the new test and trace system.

Here are the key points flagged up by PA Media.

• Some 5,407 (67%) out of 8,117 people who tested positive for Covid-19 between May 28 and June 3 provided details of recent contacts. The other 2,710 (33%) were not reached.

• Of those people who were reached and asked to provide information about their contacts, just over three-quarters (79%) were contacted within 24 hours of their case being transferred to the test and trace system. Some 14% were contacted between 24 and 48 hours, 3% between 48 and 72 hours, and 4% were contacted after 72 hours.

• From 31,794 contacts who were identified over the period, 26,985 (85%) were reached and advised to self-isolate, NHS figures reveal.

It is worth stressing, of course, that the system only went live on 28 May, and so these numbers may change over time.