UK coronavirus live: Britain reports lowest daily deaths since before lockdown began
Former prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have sent recorded messages to the husband of Good Morning Britain host Kate Garraway to as he recovers from coronavirus, Lord Mandelson has revealed.
Derek Draper, 52, has been in hospital for 10 weeks battling Covid-19, with Garraway recently revealing she had been warned by doctors he may never fully recover.
Last week, she said the illness had “wreaked extraordinary damage” on Draper, who is a former lobbyist and political adviser.
Speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live’s Emma Barnett, Lord Mandelson said Draper’s fight with coronavirus had “brought an enormous lot of people back together again”.
Lord Mandelson, who served as a minister in Labour governments under Blair and Brown, said:
The whole experience, the whole dreadful, tragic experience of what’s happened to him has actually brought an enormous lot of people, who knew him in the 90s and beyond, who knew him in New Labour and the government.
It’s brought an enormous lot of people back together again.
He’s been a hugely unifying figure, ironically, through this terrible, terrible tragedy.
Both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have sent him recorded messages, as have done the rest of us.
We’re now giving him music, we’re giving him photographs in order to stimulate a response, we’ve all come together, and we just hope, and pray, he will come through it.
Draper was taken to hospital on 29 March after struggling to breathe, with doctors eventually putting him in an induced coma on 5 April.
He is now testing negative for Covid-19, his wife said last week.
Lord Mandelson added: “It is just incredible what that virus has done to him, to his lungs, to his liver, to his kidneys, and there were many, many points along this journey when none of us thought that he could possibly make it.”
BP has announced plans to cut 10,000 jobs, representing about 15% of the oil group’s 70,000 staff, by the end of the year.
Bernard Looney, the chief executive, told employees that the job cuts were essential to enable the company to cope with a global collapse in demand for oil owing to the coronavirus pandemic.
He said BP must reinvent itself and emerge from the crisis a “leaner, faster-moving and lower carbon company”.
The London-headquartered group has not said how many jobs will be lost in the UK but it is thought the figure could be close to 2,000.
Looney told staff in a company-wide email on Monday:
You are already aware that, beyond the clear human tragedy, there has been widespread economic fallout, along with consequences for our industry and our company.
The oil price has plunged well below the level we need to turn a profit. We are spending much, much more than we make – I am talking millions of dollars, every day. And as a result, our net debt rose by $6bn in the first quarter.
Dentists have called for key worker status and access to the government PPE supply chain, as one industry survey suggests only around one third of surgeries have opted to open today (36%).
In an open letter to the health secretary, Matt Hancock, the British Dental Association (BDA) said that “since lockdown, support from across government for our members has been far too limited. That cannot continue”.
One dentist has described the return to work as “nerve-wracking”.
Roy Woodhoo, 36, at Woodford Green Dental Care, told the PA news agency he has been “frustrated” he has not been able to help patients for weeks.
“We’ve had patients calling up since the beginning of lockdown and it’s been frustrating in that we have not been able to help them as much as we could,” he said.
The BDA previously warned there will be no return to “business as usual” for the industry, with patients likely to see a “skeleton service” today.
A polling of 2,053 surgeries found that more than 60% of practices estimate they will be able to treat less than a quarter of the patient numbers they saw prior to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Just one third of practices said they had enough PPE to provide face-to-face care, and only 15% reported they would be able to offer a full range of treatment.
Chair of the BDA, Mick Armstrong, said surgeries are “operating at a fraction of their pre-pandemic capacity” and asked the health secretary to “take responsibility to avert the existential crisis facing a service struggling with sky-high costs and radically reduced patient numbers”. He added:
For years, communities from Cornwall to Cumbria struggled to get appointments but were ignored.
Without action from this government access problems – on an unprecedented scale – are going to be visited on millions of patients, in every part in England.
A department of health and social care spokesman said:
“The safety of patients and those working in dental practices will be our top priority. We are working around the clock to make sure frontline healthcare staff have the PPE they need and have made further supplies available to the dental sector via wholesalers last week.”
The luxury British brand Mulberry is planning to cut at least 25% of its global workforce of almost 1,400 to reduce costs as sales have suffered because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The company, which employs 1,140 staff in the UK, is seeking to make the cuts across its entire business, from head office and retail to manufacturing and distribution.
Mulberry has launched a consultation with the 470 staff whose jobs are at risk, a third of its workforce, with the aim to cut “approximately” a quarter of its global workforce.
Lockdowns had a dramatic impact on the spread of coronavirus in Europe with strict controls on people’s movements preventing an estimated 3.1 million deaths by the beginning of May, and 470,000 deaths averted in the UK alone, researchers say.
Outbreak modellers at Imperial College London said that lockdown slashed the average number of people that contagious individuals infected by 81% and lowered the reproduction number, R, of the epidemic below 1 in all countries they observed.
When R is less than 1 the epidemic is in decline because, on average, each infected person transmits the infection to less than one other. As countries ease out of their lockdown, scientists are watching R closely: if it rises and remains above 1, the epidemic will grow exponentially.
The Imperial team pooled data on Covid-19 deaths from 11 European countries including the UK, Italy, France, Spain and Germany, and worked backwards to calculate the extent of transmission several weeks earlier, to account for the time lag between infections and deaths. Lockdown at the end of March reduced the reproductive number of the UK epidemic from 3.8 to 0.63, they calculate.
The model shows that by 4 May between 12 million and 15 million people had become infected, but some nations were hit far harder than others. According to the model Belgium had the largest number of cases per capita with 8% of the population infected, compared with only 0.46% of Norwegians and 0.85% of Germans. Some 5.1% of the UK population was infected, according to a report published in Nature.
“Our model estimates that we are very far away from herd immunity,” said Axel Grandy, a professor of statistics at Imperial and co-author on the study. Herd immunity is achieved when enough people are immune to a virus that outbreaks die out naturally. In the case of Covid-19, scientists believe upwards of 70% of the population would need to be resistant for herd immunity to kick in.
“It tells us we need to be very careful and not to release too much in one go because then you have no control,” Grandy said. “We need to tread very carefully and do things slowly, so we can backtrack should they not work.”
The Downing Street lobby briefing is over. Here are some of the main lines.
- The prime minister’s spokesman claimed there had been a “good level of compliance” with the quarantine rules being introduced today.
- The spokesman played down the prospect of all EU countries being exempted from the quarantine rules from July. According to a report in the Sun, the PM would like all EU countries to be subject to an exemption from mid-July. The spokesman refused to confirm that. He just reminded journalists that the PM last week confirmed that the government was looking at setting up “air corridors” (exemptions) for particular countries
- The spokesman said that it was still the government’s intention for non-essential shops to open from next Monday, subject to this being deemed safe. The final decision has not yet been taken, the spokesman said. He also said that he expected this to be a decision that would apply England-wide.
- The spokesman claimed that the Covid alert level was still moving down from 4, its current level, to 3. But he did not contest claims that moving to level 3 is no longer a precondition for lockdown measures being eased, as the government said when the alert level system was first announced.
- The spokesman played down a Financial Times report saying pubs and restaurants might be allowed to serve people outdoors from 22 June. The spokesman said that the plan was still for to happen from July.
- The spokesman said that Boris Johnson was “working as normal” when asked if it was true that he needed long naps during the day. The claim was made in a Sunday paper, which suggested Johnson has not recovered fully from coronavirus. Asked about this, the spokesman said that Johnson was working as usual and that another story in the Sunday papers was about the PM playing tennis. When it was put to him that perhaps he needed the naps after playing tennis, the spokesman said: “The PM is working as normal.”
- Matt Hancock would take the government press conference this afternoon at 5pm, the spokesman said.
Second home owners in Wales may get the chance to take a holiday in their properties this summer, the Welsh first minister has said.
Mark Drakeford revealed the Welsh government was discussing the possibility of people being able to use self-contained accommodation – but he said that local communities would have to support such a move.
The first minister said:
There is a distinction to be drawn between people who have their own kitchen and their own bathroom….That will be different, I think, to someone travelling to stay somewhere where they are sharing kitchens, showers, toilets, where inevitably the level of risk will be greater.
Drakeford said that once a visitor arrived at, for example, a self-contained cottage, they would be governed by the Welsh advice not to travel more than five miles from their base.
He acknowledged there had been concern from communities in parts of north-west and south-west Wales who worry that an influx of visitors could lead to a spike in Covid-19 cases. “It’s got to be with community consent,” he said.
Drakeford also said the possibility that pubs and restaurants could re-open in some way if the number of cases continued to fall would be discussed this week.
He said:
This will be on the list [of restrictions to discuss] with many other things. Whether it will be possible to do something at the end of this three-week cycle I can’t make any promises about that.
It will depend on whether the number of new cases in Wales continues to fall and whether that creates any additional headroom for us.
Read the original article at The Guardian