UK coronavirus live: self-isolate if you lose your sense of smell, new advice from chief medical officers says

The Downing Street lobby briefing is over. It went on for longer than usual, and covered a wide range of topics. Here are the main points.

• Downing Street has played down prospects of its new contract tracing system being up and running nationwide before the end of this month. The system is being piloted in the Isle of Wight. At one point Matt Hancock, the health secretary, said that he wanted to have the whole system up and running by the middle of May. But, when the prime minister’s spokesman was asked when it would be fully operational, he just said that this would happen “in the coming weeks”.

• The spokesman said that 17,000 contract tracers were already in place and that the government was “very confident” of getting the numbers up to 18,000 by the end of this week, as planned. The contract tracers are getting a range of training, he said.

• A decision is likely this week as to whether the government will go ahead with plans for some primary school pupils in England to start going back on 1 June (a fortnight today), the spokesman signalled. The UK government’s coronavirus recovery plan said Reception, Year 1 and Year 6 pupils would go back “no earlier than Monday 1 June”. The spokesman confirmed that this was still the position, but he accepted that 1 June (the Monday after half term, for many pupils) remained an ambition. Asked when the government would be able to say if this would be the date, he replied:

You can see from the discussions that have taken place … that we are working to seek to resolve this as soon as we can.

When it was put to him that in practice this meant a decision this week, because next week is half term, the spokesman did not challenge this assumption. He said that the safety of pupils came first, but that the government was also aware of the damage being done to children from their not being in education.

• The spokesman said the government would publish its scientific advice about the safety of children being in school “as soon as possible”. On Friday the government published an overview on this topic (pdf), he said. But the teaching unions want to see the full scientific advice. Asked when they would get it, the spokesman said:

The Sage [Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies] papers are being published in batches, and the DfE papers will be published as soon as possible.

• The government does not necessarily need to have its new contract tracing system operational nationwide for it to move to the “step two” stage of the lockdown relaxation measures set out in its plan, the spokesman suggested. He said various factors would be taken into account before the government moved to step two, such as the reproduction number. But he said the government had not made having the contract tracing system up and running an essential condition.

• The quarantine rules being imposed on new arrivals to the UK will be reviewed every three weeks, the prime minister’s spokesman said. He confirmed that the government is planning to issue more details of how the scheme will work “in due course”. But when the quarantine rules are introduced, they will be “subject to rolling review every three weeks”, the spokesman said, to ensure that they are in line with the latest scientific advice. That suggests that they will be reviewed in parallel with the existing lockdown regulations, which also have to be reviewed every three weeks. Those rules are next being reviewed on 28 May. The spokesman would not say whether this meant the quarantine rules could come into force on that date.

There was never an exemption for France. All the statement ever said was that there would be no quarantine in relation to France at this time. It was never correct to suggest that there was going to be an exemption for France only.

The spokesman claimed the original statement had been misreported by the media.

• The spokesman defended the government’s decision to maintain the immigration health surcharge – a charge paid by immigrants to cover their possible use of the NHS. This has become particularly controversial because it applies to people who are actually working themselves for the NHS. Asked to justify the charge, the spokesman said that the government committed to increasing it in its election manifesto and that it had raised £900m directly for the NHS by the end of the 2018-19 financial year.

• The spokesman said that latest data showed that 38% of care homes in England have had a coronavirus outbreak.

• The spokesman said that the decision to add loss of smell to the official list of coronavirus symptoms (see 11.29am) was expected to increase the number of cases by 2%.

• The spokesman said that the NHS Nightingale hospital at the Birmingham NEC was now on standby. Like the one at the ExCel centre in London, it has effectively been mothballed. The spokesman said that the Manchester one has patients. But another three of the seven in England, in Harrogate, Bristol and Sunderland, are open but without patients, he said. He said an eighth was being built in Exeter and would be operational at the end of the month.

• The spokesman rejected suggestions that Boris Johnson was responsible for people not realising that Wales now has tighter lockdown rules than England. At the weekend English people travelling to Wales to walk in the countryside were turned away, even though this is allowed in England. When Johnson announced the rules were being relaxed in his TV address, he was criticised for not being more explicit about how this only applied to England. But, when asked if he was responsible for English people being fined by Welsh police, the spokesman did not accept that. He said:

We were very clear from the outset that people would need to respect the rules in Wales.

• The spokesman said the prime minister was feeling “absolutely fine”. Asked why the PM was not taking more press conferences himself (like Nicola Sturgeon, who almost always leads the Scottish government’s one), the spokesman said: “Not for a specific reason. The PM did the press conference last week and I’m sure you will see him again shortly.”

• Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, will take this afternoon’s press conference, the spokesman said. Raab will appear with Prof Jonathan Van-Tam, the deputy chief medical officer for England.

• The spokesman indicated that the PM was happy about Sir Mark Sedwill being cabinet secretary and national security adviser. Some MPs reportedly want him to separate the two roles. In the Spectator last week James Forsyth wrote:

One hawk in government says that this issue has been compounded by cabinet secretary Sir Mark Sedwill staying on as national security adviser. They complain that in a well-functioning system the national security adviser would have challenged the cabinet secretary on the Huawei decision, but that can’t happen when the national security adviser and the cabinet secretary are the same person. A break-up of Sir Mark’s empire looks inevitable.

But the spokesman said today that Sedwill had been “successfully fulfilling both roles since June 2018”.

The Welsh first minister has denied his government has been slow to offer Covid-19 tests to everyone in care homes in Wales.

Opposition politicians said the original decision not to test all residents and staff in care homes should be the subject of a future inquiry.

Mark Drakeford insisted the government’s position had been led by the science and initially the focus needed to be on care homes where there had been confirmed or suspected cases.

He said: “Governments act on advice. Ministers don’t pluck policies out of the air. They rely on the advice we are given.

“The advice changed on Thursday, we made the decision on Friday, we published it on Saturday.

“The advice has changed because up until now our focus has been on responding to those care homes where there has been an actual or suspected case of coronavirus.

“But eight out of 10 care home homes in Wales have had no confirmed case of coronavirus. Now with coronavirus declining in the community and probably having peaked and just be beginning to decline in the care home sector too, we want to put more attention on stopping coronavirus from getting into those eight out of 10 care homes where there has been no case.”

More on the education select committee from our colleague Rachel Hall:

Students will have to wait until they complete their online courses to find out whether they are of a high enough standard to justify tuition fees, according to the universities watchdog.

The Office for Students (OfS) will use responses to the annual National Student Survey, published in April, as well as students’ grades and graduate jobs to determine the success of online courses, according to its chief executive, Nicola Dandridge, who appeared before the committee this morning.

“If however it transpires that online learning is not what they expected, not what they wanted, not leading to the outcomes, they will tell us that and we will intervene. Likewise if we find that students who are studying online, don’t get the graduate outcomes and aren’t getting the jobs. […] But we’re not prejudging online as good or bad until we assess it,” she said.

Dandridge said that because the OfS does not have an inspection system it is unable to directly monitor online courses. She added that the regulator was in dialogue with students’ unions to get real time information on poor-performing courses. “It can’t just be bunging lectures online, it’s got to be more sophisticated than that,” she said.

Many students have complained about their low quality online teaching. OfS chair, Michael Barber, who also appeared before the committee, said that despite the uncertainty students should be expected to pay for now because universities are in a “transition phase”. “We should go into this with a very positive frame of mind that universities are going to do all they can,” he said.

In the meantime, if students have urgent concerns, the regulators said individuals should complain to the Office of the Independent Adjudicator, or seek legal recourse.

Dandridge said that tuition fee refunds would “depend on what is offered to them and whether that represents a breach of contract”.

The Welsh first minister, Mark Drakeford, has expressed concern that police officers have been assaulted and coughed and spat at as they have enforced the lockdown in Wales. “This is simply and absolutely unacceptable,” he said.

Drakeford said that there had been some examples of people breaking the Welsh “stay at home” rules by travelling from England to Wales over the weekend.

He said one family of four from Birmingham had been found on Pen y Fan, a mountain in the Brecon Beacons, south Wales. A man who had driven from Devon to Brecon was also caught. The man claimed he was there to buy dog food.

The first minister said he would look at evidence from the four police forces in Wales about the level of fines people who break the rules should incur. There have been calls from some police chiefs for fines to be increased.

The Scottish Human Rights Commission, a statutory body that advises ministers and MSPs, has tabled a complaint that the Scottish prison service is allegedly breaching the rights of inmates during the coronavirus crisis.

The SHRC has told the Scottish parliament’s justice committee it has “serious concerns” the prison service is breaching the European convention on human rights which prohibit inhumane and degrading treatment in prisons.

It told MSPs the commission “has knowledge of” inmates confined to their cells for 24 hours a day for extended periods without access to showers or outdoor exercise; inmates who are confined to cells for Covid-19 reasons given limited telephone access to lawyers; some prisoners “unable to maintain any form of telephone contact with their families”.

In a letter to the committee, Judith Robertson, the commission’s chair, said:

“The commission is deeply concerned about the current conditions being experienced by some people within Scotland’s prisons. People in prison are likely to be more vulnerable to the risks and impacts of Covid-19.

“Measures taken to protect health cannot override people’s fundamental rights. It is not acceptable to confine anyone to their cell for 24 hours a day, with no access to shower facilities or outdoor exercise, and with limited contact with the outside world.

“Given the serious nature of our concerns, we have urged the Scottish government to take action to ensure that all prisoners are being held in conditions which are fully in accordance with the state’s human rights obligations. To date, we have not received the assurances we would wish to see in this regard.”

Only a limited number of inmates and staff are thought to have contracted Covid-19 in Scotland’s prisons, but emergency measures have been put in place to reduce transmission inside prison. Humza Yousaf, the Scottish justice secretary, has authorised the early release of some prisoners to relieve pressure on jails.

Amid the continued coronavirus crisis, other government business is rolling on – including talks with the US over a new, post-Brexit trade deal. Liz Truss, the international trade secretary, has just released a statement calling the just-ended first round of talks “positive and constructive”.

That is, however, more or less as much as we learn from the 560-word statement on the virtual talks, which took place from 5 to 15 May. It says:

Both sides are hopeful that negotiations for a comprehensive trade agreement can proceed at an accelerated pace. The meetings were positive and constructive, reflecting the mutual commitment to secure an ambitious agreement that significantly boosts trade and investment between our economies, the first and fifth largest in the world.

A list of 30 subjects discussed included “market access for goods, agriculture”, but this was the only mention of what still seems the most difficult subject – whether the US will demand access to foodstuffs produced to lower standards, such as chlorine-washed chicken, which the UK government has so far resisted. There is a long way to go.