UK coronavirus live: England had highest levels of excess deaths in Europe in first half of 2020, ONS says – as it happened

• Boris Johnson has urged Britons not to “delude” themselves that the coronavirus crisis is over. (See 1.46pm.)

• China will not recognise the British national (overseas) passport as a legal travel document, raising the prospect that the 3 million Hong Kong citizens eligible for the passport will be banned from leaving Hong Kong by the Chinese government. As Patrick Wintour reports, the warning was made at a press conference by the Chinese ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming, in which he also warned it was hard to imagine a global Britain that bypassed or excluded China. Decoupling from China would mean decoupling from growth and the future, he suggested.

That’s all from me for today.

Our coronavirus coverage continues on our global coronavirus live blog. It’s here.

From Sky’s Joe Pike

The Ambassador Theatre Group (ATG), one of the biggest employers in British theatre, is to lay off more than 1,200 casual staff in September, with unions saying the delay in releasing the £1.57bn arts recovery package continues to put jobs at risk, my colleague Lanre Bakare reports.

The headlines from the ONS report into excess deaths in Europe have focused on England, because the main report treats the UK as four separate countries. It justifies this by saying that “each of the four nations of the UK has its own health services and policies, and has made different decisions around responses to the pandemic, such as the date and extent of implementation of lockdown measures” and that “it is therefore meaningful to report on each of the nations of the UK separately”.

But the ONS has also produced data for the UK and this shows that, although England’s record is worse than the UK’s as a whole, the UK’s was worse than any other country too in the relevant period.

If you are interested in the detail, it is worth looking at the data tables published alongside the main reports. The key one is probably the one that shows relative cumulative age-standardised mortality rates (rcASMRs) for countries, for every week up until week 24 (the week ending 12 June). But it has focused on week 22 (the week ending 29 May) because that is the last week for which full data from all countries is available.

In week 22, the rcASMR for England was 7.55. That means that the death rate in England up to that point in the year was 7.55% higher than you would expect from the average from 2015-19.

The figure for the UK in week 22 was 6.9. The figure for Spain, the country with the next highest total, was 6.65.

Here is a chart from the ONS report showing all countries in order in week 19 (the week ending 8 May) and week 22. This shows that in week 19, Spain had the worst record (when it was ahead of both England and the UK), but that by week 22 England and the UK were both ahead of Spain.

The data for week 24, which is in the tables but not highlighted in the main report, shows that by then England and the UK were in an even worse position in relation to other European countries. Spain was still in second place, with an rcASMR of 6, but England’s was 7.61, and the UK’s was 6.94 – both higher than two weeks earlier. (The rcASMR can go down as the year goes on if death rates in a country fall below the long-term average.)

According to a snap poll by YouGov, there is overwhelming public support for the decision today to tell people with coronavirus symptoms to self-isolate for 10 days, not seven days.

Public Health England has published its latest weekly excess mortality report for England. It’s here.

It says there have been 53,857 excess deaths in England since 20 March.

This is a more accurate guide to the impact of coronavirus on England than the headline NHS England figure produced every afternoon, which only covers hospital deaths for people who have tested positive for coronavirus. This afternoon that total was running at 29,329.

From the Welsh government

The Department of Health in Northern Ireland has published its latest estimate of R, the reproduction number, in Northern Ireland. It says it is between 0.5 and 1.

Since the launch of the UK government’s test and trace scheme, 184,703 close contacts of people who have tested positive for Covid-19 have been reached through the tracing system and asked to self-isolate, PA Media reports. This is 83%of the 222,589 people identified as close contacts. The remaining 37,886 people (17%) were identified as close contacts, but were not reached.

The latest weekly figures out today (pdf) show that 75.1% of close contacts were reached in the week ending 22 July, down from 78.4% in the previous week, and down on the 90.8% reached in the first week of test and trace (week ending 3 June).

A McDonald’s restaurant has shut its doors after five staff tested positive for Covid-19 in an area of the West Midlands where there has been a surge in infections, PA Media reports. The restaurant in Great Bridge, Sandwell, has been closed “as a precautionary measure following a rise of Covid-19 cases in the local area”, McDonald’s said.

The UK car dealership Pendragon plans to cut 1,800 jobs, in the latest sign of the turmoil hitting the automotive industry because of the coronavirus crisis, my colleague Jasper Jolly reports.

Tui is to shut 166 stores in the UK and Ireland and shift hundreds of affected staff to a homeworking operation as the pandemic hastens the move away from booking holidays on the high street to online, my colleague Mark Sweney reports.