UK coronavirus live: R value for all regions close to 1 as death toll rises by 202 to 41,481
Fewer than one in six adults in England “strongly support” the easing of stay at home measures across the country, a survey suggests.
Only 15.6% of almost 2,000 adults surveyed by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said they strongly backed the easing of the lockdown, which started on 10 May in England.
A third said they “tend to support” the easing, while a similar proportion (34%) said they tend to or strongly oppose the move.
This compares with 37% of adults in Wales and 44% in Scotland who said they strongly support relaxing the measures, which happened separately in the two countries.
The ONS analysed responses from 1,914 adults in Great Britain aged 16 and over between 4 and 7 June.
It also found that more than a fifth of 130 adults who have returned to the workplace, where they have direct physical contact with others, said they have not worn protective gear in the last week.
Over a third of employed adults said they had travelled to and from work in the past seven days.
Of these, 46% said their work requires direct physical contact with other people, 22% of whom said they had never worn PPE during the past seven days.
Almost two-thirds (63%) said they often or always wore PPE.
Among those who have returned to their offices or workplaces where they do not need to be in physical contact with others, under half said they had always kept two metres apart.
More than a third (36%) said they had managed to do this often.
Four in 10 said they had often or always worn PPE during the last seven days at work.
ONS spokesman Hugh Stickland said:
As stay at home guidance is being relaxed, with more shops and outdoor entertainment spaces opening, we will continue to monitor how safe people feel in different environments, including the workplace.
The R-values for all regions of the country are hovering close to the critical threshold of 1, according to government estimates published today, suggesting the epidemic is continuing to decline slowly.
The average R value for the UK, as a whole, remains at 0.7-0.9, with values ranging from 0.7-0.9 in the east of England to 0.8-1 in London, the Midlands and north-west England, with the highest value seen in south-west England at 0.8-1.1.
The south-west currently has very low rates of infection, meaning that higher R value there is not necessarily a cause for concern.
Prof Matt Keeling, of the University of Warwick, said the values were all closer to 1 “than we would ideally like to see”. “This also means we haven’t got much wiggle room for additional relaxation of social distancing measures,” he said.
The Turner-prize winning sculptor, Anish Kapoor, described the prime minister’s opinion on statues as “bullshit”, adding:
Statues are not history; they are emblematic monuments to our past which can be thought to represent how we see ourselves and our history.
It is long overdue that we reassess these emblems and get rid of the bigots they portray. We must acknowledge the horror perpetrated in our names by these horrid individuals and seek to find nobler ways to make spaces of commemoration and history. This must now mean looking at the forgotten amongst us.
Boris Johnson had said that removing statues, including of imperialist figures, was to “lie about our history”. He tweeted:
We cannot now try to edit or censor our past. We cannot pretend to have a different history. The statues in our cities and towns were put up by previous generations.
They had different perspectives, different understandings of right and wrong. But those statues teach us about our past, with all its faults. To tear them down would be to lie about our history and impoverish the education of generations to come.
Now for some lighter news. A zebra born at a Gloucestershire wildlife park has been named after Dame Vera Lynn in a nod to wartime lyrics used to inspire hope during the coronavirus pandemic.
Born on 7 June, Vera was named after the Queen punctuated a speech to the UK public during lockdown with words from Dame Vera’s 1939 song We’ll Meet Again.
The baby zebra is the first of her near-threatened species ever to have been born at the Wild Place Project, Bristol, which has been closed since 20 March.
Most demonstrators were face masks during a Black Lives Matter protest in St Albans. Photograph: Peter Cziborra/Reuters
The reproduction number, or R, of coronavirus across the UK remains between 0.7 and 0.9, while across England it is 0.8-1.0, according to the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies.
Sage also published regional values for R in England for the first time, with thesouth-west having the highest range at 0.8-1.1.
The east of England is at 0.7-0.9, London, the Midlands, the north-west and the south-east at 0.8-1.0, and the north-east and Yorkshire at 0.7-1.0.
But experts cautioned against the use of regional R values – the average number of people an infected person passes the disease on to – saying that as the number of infections falls, regional R values become less reliable.
Instead, from next week the government will publish the growth rates for regions that are based on data and make fewer assumptions.
Public Health Wales said a further 10 people had died after testing positive for Covid-19, taking the total number of deaths in Wales to 1,435, while the total cases increased by 77 to 14,658.
Public Health Wales (@PublicHealthW)
The latest number of confirmed cases of Coronavirus in Wales has been updated.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said 41,481 people had died in hospitals, care homes and the wider community after testing positive for coronavirus in the UK as of 5pm on Thursday, up by 202 from 41,279 the day before.
The government 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 Friday, 193,253 tests were carried out or dispatched, with 1,541 positive results.
Overall, a total of 6,434,713 tests have been carried out and 292,950 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.
Department of Health and Social Care (@DHSCgovuk)
As of 9am 12 June, there have been 6,434,713 tests, with 193,253 tests on 11 June.
292,950 people have tested positive.
As of 5pm on 11 June, of those tested positive for coronavirus, across all settings, 41,481 have sadly died.
NHS England said another 70 people who tested positive for Covid-19 have died, bringing the total number of confirmed, reported deaths in hospitals in England to 27,860.
The number of deaths of patients with Covid-19 by region are as follows:
East of England 4
London 8
Midlands 13
North East & Yorkshire 8
North West 23
South East 11
South West 3
Total: 70
One further coronavirus-linked death has been reported in NorthernIreland, taking the total reported by the Department of Health to 539.
There were 16 new confirmed cases of the virus, bringing the total to 4,838 since the pandemic began.
England’s chief nurse, Ruth May, was dropped from one of Downing Street’s daily coronavirus briefings after refusing to publicly back Dominic Cummings’ behaviour during the lockdown, according to the Independent.
A senior NHS source was quoted as saying:
A No 10 Spad [special adviser] asked her directly how she would answer the Dominic Cummings question and she refused to play along and told them she would answer the same way as Jonathan Van-Tam. She was dropped immediately from the press briefing.
The EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, has given his reaction to Michael Gove’s confirmation that the UK will not be seeking an extension to the transition period.
Michel Barnier (@MichelBarnier)
🇪🇺 has always been open to an extension of the transition period. At today’s Joint Committee, we took note of UK’s decision not to extend. We must now make progress on substance. To give every chance to the negotiations, we agreed to intensify talks in the next weeks and months.
