UK coronavirus live: PM claims Covid response ‘astonishing’ as Starmer says death rate near world’s worst
The number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 among prisons in England and Wales continues to rise, a Ministry of Justice figures shows.
As at 5pm on Tuesday, 490 prisoners had tested positive for the coronavirus across 80 prisons, a rise of less than 1% in 24 hours, while there were 956 infected staff across 105 prisons, a rise of 0.5% in the same period.
There are around 79,800 prisoners across 117 prisons in England and Wales, and around 33,000 staff working in public sector prisons.
At least 23 prisoners and nine staff are known to have died, as well as one prison escort driver and one NHS trust employee working in a secure training centre.
Scotland’s tourism sector could open from 15 July, for a truncated summer season, Holyrood’s tourism secretary, Fergus Ewing, has announced as he acknowledged that businesses have been “devastated” by lockdown measures.
Ewing confirmed the Scottish government hopes to give the green light to reopening the sector at the 9 July review, and that businesses should prepare to reopen from 15 July, which will allow them to cash in on the anticipated rise in staycations across the UK this summer.
The Scottish Tourism Alliance welcomed the clarity but said it remained hopeful that an earlier date for reopening would be given for certain sectors which are more easily placed to do so safely by their nature, for example self-catering, caravan and camping parks.
The STA added that urgent solutions or alternative measures must be found for the current 2-metre distancing restrictions, which it argues threaten the economic viability of many businesses. Scottish ferries – which transport tens of thousands of visitors to Scotland’s islands during the summer months – have warned that they may only be able to return to under 20% capacity.
Q: Do you think the government has been too reliant on epidemiological models?
Ferguson says he is a modeller. That is like asking a turkey to vote for Christmas.
He says he thinks models are valuable because they “codify assumptions and knowledge”.
But they should not be taken as “literal truth”, he says. He says they are reliant on the information and assumptions that go into them.
Back at the Commons science committee Labour’s Graham Stringer is now asking questions.
Q: Do you know yet if the summer weather has an impact on transmission?
Ferguson says he has seen some research saying transmission might be 20% lower in the summer than in winter. But it is just a small effect, he says.
Q: Was there not concern within Sage that sending people back into care homes from hospital might intensify the epidemic.
Ferguson says he only became aware of this policy later.
Contrary to warnings by academics at Cambridge University that Covid infections might be on the increase in the north-west, there are promising signs in Greater Manchester that the virus is on the retreat.
At his weekly press conference, the region’s mayor, Andy Burnham, said there were just 168 new cases in Greater Manchester last week; 66 people are currently in ICU (the figure was 67 last week); 468 people are in hospital with Covid (down from 523 last week) and there have been just 11 hospital admissions, down from 29 last week. Currently 20% of care homes in GM have at least one infected resident, down from 24% last week.
But Burnham said he was still in the dark about where local infection hotspots were as he and the 10 local authorities still had no “pillar 2” testing data from drive-through centres or postal tests.
Burnham also said it was “worth looking into” the idea of giving shielding people a dedicated hour to go out and exercise safely, after Labour MP Vicky Foxcroft earlier asked the prime minister to support a ‘safe-hour walk’ for shielded people.
As the lockdown is eased, Burnham also announced a £21.5m bid for temporary measures for walking and cycling, including 200km of pop-up bike lanes — 94km of which is on “strategic” routes. A row has been brewing in the region over the past week after it emerged Manchester city council (MCC) had refused to build any pop-up cycle lanes to help commuters from the surrounding nine districts get into the city by bike and was instead concentrating on pedestrianising parts of the centre.
The Guardian understands that the nine boroughs all want to install segregated bike lanes on key routes into Manchester, but that MCC’s refusal to cooperate means they all stop abruptly at the Manchester border. More than 200,000 people who normally commute under three miles to Manchester city centre will not be able to use public transport if social distancing is observed on buses, trains and trams, with 45% of Mancunian households having no car.
Q: What other lessons are there?
Ferguson says a focus on where infections are happening is crucial.
Q: Do you think the right decisions were taken at the right time?
Ferguson says the right decisions were taken.
He says the epidemic was doubling every three to four days before the lockdown was introduced.
So if the lockdown had been introduced earlier, the death toll could have been halved, he says.
Q: What is your current estimate for the likely overall death rate?
Ferguson says the challenge now is to decide what the impact of the lockdown will be, and whether there will be a second wave.
He says he expects the total from the first wave to be around 50,000.
Q: When did Sage become aware of the problems in care homes?
Ferguson says Sage anticipated problems in care homes in February and early March.
But you can only protect care homes with extensive testing, he says.
Q: On 25 March you said deaths were unlikely to exceed 20,000. At the stage the lockdown policy was known. And you knew what the policy was for care homes.
Ferguson says the policy, protecting care homes and the elderly, was obvious. But it “failed to be enacted”.
He says it is common for care home staff to work in more than one place. That contributed to the spread, he says.
He says at that point, in March, they had not realised how serious the problem would be in care homes.
Ferguson says Spain and Italy had large epidemics before they fully realised.
They led to the virus spreading into the UK, he says.
If the UK had had the testing capacity, and if it had tested people coming into the country, the government could have had a much better assessment of the spread of the disease.
Ferguson tells the committee that he is still providing advice to government through his Imperial College team.
Greg Clark, the committee chair, asks why the death toll is higher than Ferguson originally expected. (At one point in early April Ferguson said it could end up at around 20,000.)
Ferguson says it is clear now that the infection had by then spread more widely than people realised at the time.
Prof Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College academic whose team wrote the paper that led to the government announcing the lockdown is giving evidence to the Commons science committee now. He is appearing with two other academics who have produced pandemic modelling considered by the government, Prof Matt Keeling from Warwick University and Dr Nicholas Davis from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
This is not Ferguson’s first appearance in public since he had to resign as a member of Sage after his lover visited him at home in breach of lockdown guidance. Ferguson gave evidence to a Lords committee recently. But the Lords committee asked him nothing about the circumstances of his resignation.
The Downing Street lobby briefing is over. Here are the main points.
No 10 confirmed that the two-metre rule could be reduced in England but not other parts of the UK. At PMQs Boris Johnson said it was being kept under review. He is under strong pressure to replace it with a one-metre or 1.5-metre rule, which would make it much easier for schools and commercial premises, especially pubs and restaurants, to open in a Covid-secure way. “Matters of public health are devolved, so it is a theoretical possibility that the position could be different in different parts of the UK,” the prime minister’s spokesman said.
Downing Street would not rule out the possibility of retired teachers being called back to the profession to help schools cope with the coronavirus crisis. The spokesman said:
The education secretary has said that we will do whatever we can to make sure that no child falls behind as a result of coronavirus.
We have already committed over £100m to support children to learn at home and pupil premium funding continues to be paid at the highest-ever rate to help schools to support disadvantaged pupils.
We are working to bring all children back in September and are considering what more is needed to support pupils.
We have also said that we are looking at what further support we can provide over the summer.
Private hospitals are being used to help clear the backlog of NHS cases built up during the coronavirus outbreak, Downing Street said. The spokesman said:
We reached agreements with private hospitals at the beginning of the outbreak to ensure that we had the potential for surge capacity for coronavirus patients. With the number of cases falling, these private hospitals are now helping to bring back wider NHS services.
