E3: UK coronavirus live: Johnson sets target for 750,000 NHS volunteers as London hospitals see 'tsunami' of patients

Rolling coverage of all the latest UK coronavirus developments

Childline has given more than 900 counselling sessions to children worried about coronavirus, with the majority taking place over the last week.

Almost two thirds – 597 – of sessions relating to the Covid-19 outbreak took place between March 16 and March 22, as school closures were announced.

The price farmers are getting for selling lamb has collapsed due to the coronavirus shutdown, according to the chief executive of the National Sheep Association.
Phil Stocker said:

It is the number one priority that the health of society is protected at this time. However, the result is proving highly damaging for many businesses, and industries, and the sheep farming sector is now amongst these.”

“The trade collapsed at the start of this week with prices down by £1 per kg liveweight – on a 45kg lamb that’s between £40 and £50 a head less, on a value that was maybe just over the £100 mark. The main underlying reason is the closure of the restaurant and catering trade, both here and in the EU.”

Pest control technicians have warned of potential rat infestations due to the stockpiling and hoarding of food during the Covid-19 outbreak.

The National Pest Technicians Association (NPTA) said people buying huge quantities of perishable goods coupled with rubbish piling up due to missed bin collections could lead to the problem.

Move any rubbish to an outside bin as soon as possible and try and ensure that this is tightly sealed.

“Inspect your home or office for cracks or holes in walls, unfilled voids around pipework etc, and remember that mice can squeeze through gaps as small as 5mm. If you find any, fill or seal them as soon as possible.

North Yorkshire Police has said it will use checkpoints to stop vehicles and ask drivers if their journey is essential during the lockdown.

Officers will ask motorists where they are going and why, and remind them of the message to stay at home.

The new and significant restrictions announced by the Prime Minister on Monday evening spell out very clearly what each and every one of us must do to save lives. The message is clear and the warning stark. Stay at home, save lives.

“These are the lives of the people we know and love. Our partners, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children, grandparents.”

The Downing Street lobby briefing has just finished. Here are two of the top lines.

If we can reach 750,000, that would be fantastic.

More than 1,000 people have contacted MPs to raise concerns about being told to continue travelling into work despite the government’s plea for them to stay at home.

Office and call centre workers, TV engineers, and estate agents are among the workers who have replied to an appeal for information by the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy committee (BEIS).

“From the evidence we’ve received it’s clear that many businesses are still not doing the right thing. This must change now. This is a health emergency - it cannot be business as usual.

“Workplaces, even those deemed essential, should be doing all they can to ensure that their workers are able to work from home or, if they do have to attend work, that they can undertake social distancing.

While we await confirmation of the government’s plan to pay the self-employed whose incomes have collapsed during the virus outbreak, the Royal Society of Arts has run the numbers and thinks the chancellor’s widely trailed strategy is not as effective as it could be.

Rishi Sunak, who has said working out a solution for the self-employed has been “extremely complicated”, is expected to offer the self-employed payments equivalent to 80% of their earnings over the last three years up to £30k. But the RSA thinks a temporary basic income of £1,500 initially to help manage immediate cashflow, followed by a weekly payment of £100 per week for three months would leave more people better off. It says:

For people earning £17,000 – the average earnings for a self-employed person, according to the ONS – they would be better off under the scheme. This would therefore cover people in vulnerable roles like Deliveroo riders and Uber drivers. For people earning more than £17,000, the benefits of this proposal compared to the government programme would taper off progressively.

Our worry is that basing grants on 80% of average earnings over three years, or even one, will throw up too many anomalies given the changeable nature of year-to-year earnings of this segment of the workforce, leaving some with very low incomes short. It may also prove to be too slow and bureaucratic. It will also mean that some who are fit and healthy to work would be discouraged from doing so.

Members of the public are being urged to take part in a national round of applause for NHS employees at 8pm this evening.

The Clap for our Carers campaign is trying to get as many people as possible to take part in the event from their gardens, front doors, balconies and windows to show their appreciation and support for health workers.

Let’s show our appreciation for our brilliant #NHS staff and all carers TONIGHT at 8pm - we owe them so much - please do share
#clapforcarers #clapforourcarers pic.twitter.com/Gvagajcj9p

A group of youths spat in the face of an RSPCA officer and shouted “have corona bitch”, as she tried to rescue a swan, the animal charity have said.

Leanne Honess-Heather was helping the bird, which had become tangled in a fishing line, when five teenagers – aged around 16 – approached her close to Rush Lyvars Fishing Lake in Hedon, Hull.

The NHS in Wales has issued around 3.5m extra pieces of PPE (personal protective equipment) to staff from its pandemic supplies, the chief executive of NHS Wales, Dr Andrew Goodall, said. This includes face-masks, gloves and clothing.

Goodall told a press conference in Cardiff this had gone to hospitals, GP surgeries and social care workers.

The mayor of London’s press office has said early-morning tube use was down by another 13% on Thursday compared with yesterday, while early-morning bus usage in the capital was down by a further 8%.

It added that compared with this time last year, tube passengers were down by a whopping 92%.

In the comments some readers have been asking about the fact that the government released the UK coronavirus death figures yesterday much later than usual, and that the increase on the previous day (41) was much lower than the previous day’s increase (87).

According to Newsnight’s Nicholas Watt, that is because the government is changing the way it is compiling the figures.

Well, this is very interesting from @nicholaswatt – the govt is changing the way it is releasing death figures, which “may not actually be the deaths that have taken place over the last 24 hrs” as family consent is now required: pic.twitter.com/dks70PDK1I

The Royal Manchester children’s hospital is asking for donations of food, drink and toiletries for its workforce during the coronavirus outbreak.

Requested donations from the hospital’s charity include tea, coffee, snacks, deodorant and toothpaste for those who may have to sleep over.

John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, is saying that the Treasury employment support package for the self-employed being announced by the government this afternoon must include measures that can be delivered quickly. In a statement he said:

Many self-employed people have been hit hard in the pocket by the coronavirus crisis and have been calling for proper protection of their incomes by the government ... After days of delay and uncertainty the government must announce a package today that can be delivered quickly, giving the self-employed the same level of security as other workers.

Officials have discussed plans which will mean people’s income being assessed on the basis of a “blended” mixture of their revenues and profits over the past three years. They would then be paid a significant proportion of their usual income up to a capped amount, which some in industry have suggested should be £1,700 a month.

The scheme will be designed to ensure that wealthier people who are self-employed such as lawyers and TV presenters are not able to take advantage. There are an estimated 5 million self-employed workers in the UK, but not all will have been directly affected by the outbreak. The bailout is expected to be means-tested, with discussions that those earning over £50,000 a year should not be able to benefit.

An eligibility cap is expected to be set at around the median income level – £30,353 last year – meaning it will include cleaners, childminders and cab drivers but not high-earning professions like lawyers or tech programmers.

One likely option being studied last night is to use January’s tax return for the financial year 2018-19 as the new scheme’s benchmark.

That the self-employed are far less protected from temporary job loss is particularly worrying in light of the jobs they do. Figure 3 [see below] shows the share of self-employed workers in sectors that are directly affected by social distancing measures. It shows that 22% of the self-employed work in sectors that are badly hit, compared to 17% of employees (note that the total number of employees affected is still much larger). This is because the self-employed are much more likely to work in personal services (eg cleaning and hairdressing), arts and leisure (eg performing arts or fitness instruction) and passenger transport (eg taxi services).

In total, nearly a million (0.9 million) self-employed people work in sectors that will be mostly shut down during the crisis period. If restrictions are tightened further, the 0.8 million self-employed workers in the construction sector may also be affected (if they haven’t been already). And on top of the 0.9 million workers in badly hit sectors, a further 0.4 million self-employed workers have a young child (aged 0-9) and no key workers or non-working adults in the family, such that they may have to disrupt their work to provide childcare.

A rise in the number of domestic abuse incidents during the lockdown has already been observed, according to a Greater Manchester police leader.

Beverley Hughes, the deputy mayor for policing and crime, said there had been cases of abuse linked to the coronavirus outbreak and the force was anticipating more serious incidents.

I think we are beginning to see a rise in domestic abuse incidents. We anticipated this might happen in the very stressful circumstances for many families.

The potential for tension to arise in the home as a result of what we are asking people to cope with, in order to suppress the virus, is going to increase and therefore we would be right to think this might display itself in an increase in the number of domestic incidents we are called to.

Rick Stein has refused to to pay his workers’ wages for over a month while his restaurants are closed, according to the Daily Mail.

The Mail reports that the celebrity chef and TV presenter told staff across the 14 sites they would not be paid until the end of April when the government is scheduled to pay wage subsidies to businesses that have shut down.

The proximity of south-east Wales to the English border is believed to be one of the reasons behind a cluster of Covid-19 cases there, the Welsh chief medical officer has said.

Frank Atherton added that there may be more cases in the area because more testing has been done there. He said: “As the epidemic unfolds, there will be areas that will flare up and calm down.”

In Gwent, we are seeing a rapidly rising increase in the number of cases of coronavirus in all our communities and a daily increase in the number of people being admitted to hospital and the number of people dying from the virus.

The pattern we are seeing in Gwent is the same pattern as was seen in Italy, where their healthcare system is now overwhelmed.

The Department for Work and Pensions has published a report today (pdf) on households living in poverty, looking at the trends going up to 2018-19. Its headline finding is that “median household income before housing costs (BHC) decreased slightly between 2017/18 and 2018/19 and was flat after housing costs”.

Pascale Bourquin, a researcher at the Institute for Fiscal Studies who has published an analysis of the figures (pdf), said:

The current crisis will almost certainly result in a sharp, if hopefully temporary, fall in living standards. It comes on top of a desperately disappointing decade for living standards, and most recently three years of essentially stagnant incomes.

Incomes were starting to rise again before 2016. That rise was choked off by the higher inflation caused in part by the depreciation of sterling following the Brexit referendum. There are signs from other sources of data that income growth had just begun to pick up again during 2019–20. The coronavirus crisis will have abruptly put a halt to that recovery.

Co-op has announced new measures to enforce social distancing in its stores.

The retailer has introduced tactics including floor markers which will define a one-metre distance throughout the store, and two-metre spacing for customer queues across its 2,600 stores.

Banks are under pressure to revise the fineprint of emergency coronavirus loans that mean business owners could be personally liable for government-backed debts.

The government and banking industry have been criticised after it emerged some company owners had been told they must give personal guarantees to access the taxpayer-backed loans.

The terms of the loans mean that banks can seek to seize assets owned by directors if their business fails and they cannot pay back the emergency loan.

According to Matt Hancock, the health secretary, more than 500,000 people have now expressed interest in joining the NHS volunteer responders scheme. Yesterday afternoon the figure was 405.000.

NEWS: Fantastic that 560,000 people have now responded to our call to volunteer to support our NHS to defeat #Coronavirus. Join us: https://t.co/gtYR6xW0jE pic.twitter.com/Ajvy31aa3y

NHS leaders are identifying staff to be imminently deployed to the new 4,000-bed temporary hospital being set up to treat seriously ill coronavirus patients.

Health secretary Matt Hancock announced earlier this week that the ExCeL centre in east London would become a field hospital. The site will have two wards of 2,000 beds to cope with any dramatic increase of patients in the capital.

The Today programme also interviewed Prof Neil Ferguson, the lead author on the Imperial College paper that persuaded the government to drastically escalate its social distancing strategy. Repeating a point he made in evidence to the Commons science committee yesterday, he said he thought the NHS would now be able to cope with the peak of the coronavirus epidemic, which he said would come in about three weeks’ time. He told the programme:

We are going to have a very difficult few weeks, particularly in hotspots - London for instance.

But we think, overall, with the capacity which is rapidly being put in place across the country, that whilst the health system will be intensely stressed, particularly in areas of London, it won’t break.

London hospitals are facing a “continuous tsunami” of seriously-ill patients because of coronavirus, a health service leader said this morning. Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents NHS trusts, used the phrase in an interview on the Today programme. Commenting on the situation in London, he said:

They are struggling with two things. The first is the explosion of demand they are seeing in seriously ill patients. They talk about wave after wave after wave - the word that’s often used to me is a continuous tsunami.

We are now seeing 30%, 40% and indeed in some places 50% sickness rates as staff catch the virus or are in vulnerable groups or have to self-isolate. That’s an unprecedented absence rate.

The government has ordered 10,000 ventilators to help tackle the coronavirus pandemic, billionaire entrepreneur Sir James Dyson has said. As PA Media reports, in an email to staff, the inventor said his eponymous company designed the “CoVent” at the request of Boris Johnson, and promised to donate 5,000 to the international relief effort. Dyson said teams of engineers had been working solidly on the design since receiving the call from PM 10 days ago, and the UK government had placed an initial order of 10,000 units. He added:

We have received an initial order of 10,000 units from the UK government, which we will supply on an open-book basis.

We are also looking at ways of making it available internationally.

The core challenge was how to design and deliver a new, sophisticated medical product in volume and in an extremely short space of time. The race is now on to get it into production.

Ventilators are a regulated product so Dyson and TTP will be working with the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory products Agency and the government to ensure that the product and the manufacturing process is approved.

John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, wants the government and the media to name and shame companies that are forcing people to go into work for non-essential business.

Reports pouring in to MPs of businesses ignoring lockdown & forcing workers to work, putting them at risk of Covid 19 & spreading it. They are putting all our lives at risk by their greed.The Gvt must act to shut them down & the media should be naming & shaming.#phoneylockdown https://t.co/nmpWKqvxnq

Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has been criticised by ministers in recent days for not running more services on the tube (leading to some carriages being crowded, increasing the coronavirus transmission risk). This morning he has been tweeting to say that he cannot run more services, and to thank Londoners for reducing their uses of buses and the tube this week.

⚠️ One in three @TfL staff are off sick or self-isolating: we cannot run more services

⚠️ Employers: staff must work from home wherever possible to help protect our key workers who need to travel

⚠️ If you have to go to work, please don’t travel at rush hour #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/67SmQ7q3kp

Thank you to all Londoners who are following the rules and staying home.

Early-morning tube use is down another 13% compared to yesterday, bus use by a further 8%.

The more we stay at home the more lives we can save. #StayAtHome

Hospital car parking charges are to be waived for all NHS and social care staff in England while they tackle the coronavirus outbreak, health secretary Matt Hancock announced last night.

The move follows huge public support for an online petition calling on the government to suspend charges for frontline staff during the Covid-19 outbreak, which attracted over 415,000 signatures in four days.

This is a HUGE announcement and it would not have been possible without you. The momentum you created and the clarity in the message that you delivered have brought about this change.

I am in no doubt that our government did not begin this week intending to cover the cost of all parking charges for NHS staff. This is a massive success, thanks to the hundreds of thousands of you who signed this petition. I would like to pay special thanks, directly and sincerely to the secretary of state for health and social care, Matt Hancock. I cannot overstate how refreshing it feels as a doctor to have somebody in that position actually listen and respond.

Our NHS is facing an unprecedented challenge, and I will do everything I can to ensure our dedicated staff have whatever they need during this unprecedented time. So we will provide free car parking for our NHS staff who are going above and beyond every day in hospitals in England. My enormous gratitude goes out to the many NHS trusts and other organisations already providing free car parking and I urge other trusts to do the same with our backing.

Good morning. Today we’re expecting the Treasury to release details of its plan to support the self-employed who are losing work because of the coronavirus crisis. Here is an extract from our overnight preview story.

The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, is expected to announce that the taxpayer will pay self-employed workers up to 80% of their recent earnings to help contain the economic impact of coronavirus, as 470,000 extra benefits claims sparked warnings of an “unemployment crisis”.

Sunak has been under growing pressure to do more for the UK’s 5 million self-employed after announcing an unprecedented job retention scheme for employees last Friday, that will see thousands paid to stay at home ...

Related: UK government fends off criticism with plan to pay self-employed

Continue reading...

Back Original Source