Covid-19 Daily Bulletin

10 June 2020

A series of daily updates for CHO members regarding relevant updates pertaining to Coronavirus from home and abroad.

Key Announcements   

• World Health Organisation (WHO) experts said on Tuesday that studies show people with coronavirus are most infectious just at the point they begin to feel unwell.
• PM Boris Johnson will later announce plans to further ease lockdown restrictions in England.
• All shops in England can reopen from 15 June – however pubs, bars, restaurants and hairdressers will not be able to reopen until 4 July at the earliest.
• Only one in four children returned to schools in England last week.
• Alok Sharma, has said the 2 metre distancing rule remains under review in England.
• Analysis by Pro Bono Economics, an independent charity, says the coronavirus crisis will trigger a £6.4bn loss of income for charities over the next six months.
• Parents who return to work following extended leave after the June cut-off date for furlough payments will still be eligible for them, the Treasury has said.

Regional/ Devolved   

• The first part of a £60m consignment of personal protective equipment (PPE) has been delivered to Northern Ireland from China.
• NI’s health minister decided not to make public the best-case scenario laid out in pandemic modelling. A leaked executive document showed that Robin Swann chose to keep the scenario secret to try to ensure public adherence to the lockdown.
• Calls for Wales’ housing market to “cautiously reopen” have been made to the Welsh Government after an 11-week hiatus during the coronavirus lockdown.
• People in Wales are being asked to wear three-layer face coverings on public transport and other situations where social distancing is not possible.
• Wales’ education minister is facing calls to drop her plans to reopen schools at the end of this month.
• KPMG have warned that Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire will see the steepest economic decline of any council areas in Scotland this year, due to the oil price’s expected collapse in the wake of the pandemic.
• The Scottish government will announce the numbers of people that have already gone through Scotland’s new Covid-19 tracking system this afternoon.
• Nicola Sturgeon has announced an expert group to look at the impact of Covid-19 on Scotland’s ethnic minorities.

International   

• Asylum applications in Europe fell to the lowest level for over a decade in April as borders closed to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, European Union figures show.
• The leaders of Denmark, Spain and Germany, as well as France, Belgium and Poland, called for measures to boost the bloc’s long-term resilience to public health crises.
• Coronavirus cases in Mumbai, India have passed 51,000, according to the Indian Express. The last 24 hours alone saw close to 10,000 new confirmed infections, with 9,985.
• On Tuesday, 21 US states reported weekly increases in new cases of Covid-19. Arizona, Utah and New Mexico all posted rises of 40% or higher for the week ended Sunday.
• South Korea’s coronavirus cases spiked to 50 new cases on Wednesday, after two consecutive days of fewer than 40 cases.
• The world faces a food crisis worse than any seen for at least 50 years, the UN has warned.

Stakeholders    

• The NHS Confederation has warned that the Covid-19 crisis could see the number of people waiting for NHS treatment to double to 10 million by the end of the year.
• The general secretary of the head teachers union, the NAHT, has said that schools would have been better equipped to cope with the current crisis if they had not been neglected before the pandemic.
• Helen Dickinson, chief executive of the British Retail Consortium, on the announcement that non-essential shops in England can open next Monday, said: “Retailers who are not yet open have been working hard to install perspex screens, hygiene systems and apply social distancing measures. Nonetheless, the challenge for these stores is not over. Many firms will continue to struggle as the 2-metre rule will limit sales while retailers continue to face the same rent and other fixed costs.”
• Property sales in most of England have swiftly rebounded to the same levels they were just before the lockdown, although London lags behind the rest of the country, according to website Zoopla.
• Unions and cross-party MPs have highlighted the need for an urgent national plan to get all pupils back to school in England from September, with an army of support staff, the requisitioning of public buildings and extra help for disadvantaged students.

Unconfirmed reports   

• The Prime Minister is to announce zoos, safari parks and drive-in cinemas are set to reopen from Monday.
• The two-metre rule is to be relaxed once coronavirus infections fall sufficiently to open up the hospitality sector.
• Britain’s streets could be swamped by one million extra cars during the rush hour because of limits on the use of public transport, according to research .