Coronavirus

As ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ kickstarts this month – giving customers 50 per cent off their meals (up to £10) at restaurants and pubs that have signed up to the scheme – the centrepiece of the Treasury’s Covid-19 policy package starts to wind down. From this month, employers will be asked to pay a small part of their employees’ wages: 5 per cent now, 10 per cent next month, and 20 per cent in October, before furlough officially comes to an end. A policy that was initially expected to have take-up from 10 per cent of businesses has become the crutch of more than one million businesses across the

In an effort to avoid another national lockdown at all costs, the government is relying on two tools: a comprehensive track-and-trace scheme and localised lockdowns. The first isn’t expected to be up and running until autumn at the earliest, after a series of setbacks and U-turns (the pains of which are already being felt, as infection rates have started to creep up). The second is arguably in full swing, as East Lancashire, Greater Manchester and parts of West Yorkshire join Leicester in having specific rules and restrictions imposed, due to fears of a rising R-number. But are these really local lockdowns, or regional ones? The restrictions that came in at

Two weeks ago, I updated you from this podium on the progress we had made as a country against coronavirus. And in many ways that progress continues: the number of patients admitted to hospitals is still falling, and now stands at just over 100 each day; in April there were more than 3,000 coronavirus patients in mechanical ventilation beds, but now the latest figure is 87; the number of deaths continues to fall. That is obviously encouraging But I have also consistently warned that this virus could come back and that we would not hesitate to take swift and decisive action as required. I am afraid that in parts of

My weekend plans have been ruined by Matt Hancock. The government has announced new lockdown restrictions for over four million people – banning separate households from meeting indoors – in Greater Manchester (where I live) along with parts of Lancashire and West Yorkshire. What does that mean in practice? When announcing the lockdown on Thursday evening, the Health Secretary tweeted that ‘people from different households will not be allowed to meet each other indoors’, which sounds pretty rudimentary. But would this mean we go back to working from home; that spaces like pubs and restaurants would be closed even if you only visit with your household; could a cleaner come

Somewhere, possibly in the land of big sheds, just off the M1 in Leicestershire, must be a burgeoning NHS surplus store. Its shelves will be groaning with ventilators and testing kits which turned out not to work, surgical gloves, bibs and masks which turned out to be defective – and quite possibly, in months to come, with millions of shots of vaccines which won’t be able to be used. It was announced this morning that the government has signed up for 60 million doses of a vaccine being developed by GSK and Sanofi – although the financial details of the deal were not released. GSK says the vaccine will enter

On a visit to Nottingham this morning, Boris Johnson warned that a second wave of Covid-19 could be on the verge of ‘starting to bubble up’ in Europe. Meanwhile, he defended his government’s lightning-speed reintroduction of a 14-day quarantine for travellers entering the UK from Spain. But concerns of a second wave are not solely related to Spain or select European countries. Yesterday the Financial Times revealed the Prime Minister’s warning to over a dozen businesses that the threat of another Covid wave in autumn is very real. It’s not just what’s happening abroad, but the possibility of infection rates spiking within the UK that has captured the government’s attention. It is not

The last time a U.S. President lost re-election, the year was 1992 and the victim was George H.W. Bush. President Donald Trump is currently doing everything in his power to make sure he isn’t the first incumbent in 28 years to vacate the White House after a single, four-year term; if that means ditching the improvisation and unconventionality he wears on his lapel every day, so be it. That Trump gave two consecutive press conferences, on 21 and 22 July, about the coronavirus now rampaging the American South and West is not surprising. You may remember this past April, when Trump and his advisers thought it would be a good