Covid-19 Daily Bulletin

5 August 2020

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

Key Announcements

• Laws enforcing lockdown restrictions in areas of the north of England including Greater Manchester, parts of east Lancashire and West Yorkshire have come into force today .
• Schools minister Nick Gibb has confirmed the government’s position that all children will return to school in September .
• The spread of coronavirus in the UK could have been slowed with earlier quarantine restrictions on arrivals, a group of MPs has said. The Home Affairs committee said a lack of border measures earlier in the pandemic was a “serious mistake “.
• People from ethnic minority backgrounds in Britain “face greater barriers” when trying to protect themselves from coronavirus, according to a report. The Runnymede Trust, a race equality think-tank, said Bangladeshi and black African people were mostvulnerable .

Regional/devolved

• In Wales, a new £800m stabilisation package has been announced by Ministers, to help the NHS respond and recover from the impact of the pandemic. It comes ahead of anticipated challenges that come with winter, such as usual seasonal challenges as well as the potentiality of a second wave.
• There were 23 additional positive cases in Scotland, which accounts for 0.9% of people newly tested.

International   

• Australia records another daily record in virus cases, driven by an outbreak in Melbourne, which is under a new lockdown
• Global death toll has passed 700,000; more than 11 million people have recovered from the virus
• Donald Trump stumbled through his second damaging interview in as many weeks, floundering in a conversation with the news website Axios over key issues he is tasked with responding to as president .

Stakeholders    

• Ministers have one month to fix the broken test-and-trace system and halt a devastating second wave of coronavirus or Britain will face a “long and bleak winter”, Keir Starmer says today .
• Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, is doing the media rounds this morning. On ITV’s Good Morning Britain he has just urged the government to use the four weeks in August to prevent a second wave of coronavirus in winter. “We’ve seen infection rates beginning to increase again, we’ve also seen hot spots across England, here in Leicester or in Greater Manchester, we’re seeing the virus on the increase in parts of Europe as well,” he said.
• BMW swung to a loss in the second quarter as the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns weighed heavily on car sales. The German carmaker reported a pre-tax loss of €300m over the three months, down from a profit of more than €2bn in the previous year. The group delivered just over 485,000 vehicles to customers in the second quarter, down 25 per cent.
• William Hill, the UK bookmaker, said it will permanently close 119 shops and merge its retail and online operations after lockdown accelerated a trend towards online gambling.