UK coronavirus live: more ‘timely and reliable’ information needed for local lockdowns, say doctors

Turkey is hoping to welcome British tourists again shortly and expects to be on the list of destinations to be exempted from the UK’s quarantine measures. Umit Yalcin, the Turkish ambassador to the UK told the Today programme this morning that his country believes it will be among those to form so-called air bridges when an announcement is made later this week. As PA Media reports, Yalcin insisted it is safe to open up travel with Turkey despite a recent spike in cases after lockdown restrictions to combat the spread of Covid-19 were eased.

Families of children with special educational needs feel they have been forgotten and abandoned during the lockdown, the Commons education committee has been told this morning.

Amanda Batten, chair of the Disabled Children’s Partnership, told the committee that that was message from a survey of 4,000 families that her organisation has carried out. She said:

That was a predominant finding really, that families feel very much forgotten and I think the overall picture from the survey was one of exhaustion and stress. A lot of families aren’t only home-schooling, they’re home nursing, administering therapies, some doing 24/7 care generally with very little support.

Batten said that 45% of parents surveyed said their child’s physical health had deteriorated during the lockdown and just over 70% said their child’s emotional health had declined.

Ali Fiddy, chief executive of the Independent Provider of Special Education Advice (IPSEA) told the committee that some families felt “utterly abandoned”. She said:

I think it’s really important to recognise that children and young people with Send are not vulnerable by virtue of having Send, they are vulnerable by virtue of the way that the system treats them …

What we’re certainly hearing from families is that very many children and young people with Send [special educational needs] who are apparently in school are actually on very part-time timetables.

What we’re certainly seeing is the risk assessment process being used really as a blanket excuse for not meeting the needs of children and young people and not having them in their education sessions.

Imogen Jolley, head of public law at Simpson Millar, told the committee that some health provision for children with special educational needs and disabilities had “effectively dropped off a cliff”. She said occupational therapies, speech and language therapies and physiotherapy had largely stopped and would need to be taken into account.

This is from the Department of Health and Social Care, on its latest initiative to speed up testing times.

It is 1 July, and that means we’ve hit the deadline for the government to ensure that all coronavirus test results should be available within 24 hours. Boris Johnson made this commitment at PMQs at the start of this month when he said:

We already turn around 90% of tests within 48 hours. The tests conducted at the 199 testing centres, as well as the mobile test centres, are all done within 24 hours, and I can undertake to him now to get all tests turned around in 24 hours by the end of June, except for difficulties with postal tests or insuperable problems like that.

Johnson was speaking in response to a question from Jeremy Hunt, his main rival for the Tory leadership in 2019 and the chair of the Commons health committee, who has repeatedly said testing in Britain is inadequate.

Today Johnson is certain to be asked if the 24 hours target is now being met. We have no real idea how close it has been to this, because the government has never published figures for what percentage of tests are completed within 24 hours. When No 10 was asked about this last week, it just said the majority of tests were completed within this timescale.

The issue is important because test and trace only works if people who have been in contact with someone testing positive for coronavirus are told to self-isolate quickly. According to one report (pdf) presented to Sage, the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, in South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and New Zealand – four of the countries with the most effective contact tracing systems – test results are available in four to five hours.

Leicestershire Police Federation chairman Dave Stokes admitted to Sky News that the local force didn’t know how it was supposed to enforce the local lockdown in Leicester:

We don’t know. And that’s simply because we are waiting for the government strategy and the legislation, which will obviously support us locally about how we are going to police it. It’s a moving picture and I’m sure the information will be fed down but at the moment that clarity isn’t there.”

Asked if he sees a role for the police in enforcing a ban on “non-essential travel” in Leicester, Stokes said that enforcement was always a last resort. He said:

What has worked really well in Leicestershire is public engagement. In terms of enforcement, it’s been quite limited. And it has worked.

The challenge is more about fatigue, officers working long hours. And when I say fatigue, that is each and every officer, there has been a really difficult period working long hours.

A key scientist in the coronavirus response has said there is a window of just a few weeks to resolve “teething problems” in order to have systems up and running for the scheduled full return of schools in England.

Imperial College London’s Prof Neil Ferguson, who used to advise the Government, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

I think we have not a huge amount of time, but a few weeks now, to resolve those teething problems and get the data systems in place and get the modes of operation between local and national government working well, because we will desperately need them to work efficiently from September onwards.

I think we need to get the systems working, but I also agree that Public Health England and everybody involved is doing their best. It’s a very complex system to combine data from multiple sources from across the whole country. I don’t think we have any time to lose but I’m not going to sit here and start criticising people at the moment.

Ferguson said infection rates in Bradford and Doncaster were also a cause for concern.

Those are areas, where not as high as Leicester, but they have some of the highest numbers of cases per 100,000 of the population, which is the relevant measure, so they’re clearly of concern.

Leicestershire county council leader Nicholas Rushton has just been on Talk Radio talking about the “very difficult” local lockdown in place in Leicester. He said the government had promised special funding compensate the region for the “substantial” losses caused by the lockdown. But he said he didn’t know how much money that would be. He said:

The secretary of state has promised myself and Sir Peter [Soulsby – the mayor of Leicester] that there will be some funding given to the county council and city council to businesses to help them, but we don’t know how much it is, we are not sure when it’s coming and we are not sure what strings will be attached.

He said he hoped residents would abide by the new lockdown to stop the disease spreading, saying the region had not had particular problems with non-compliance in the past three months. He said:

We haven’t had particularly bad outbreaks of people abusing the regulations in Leicester or Leicestershire to be honest, but ultimately the police will have the powers to be able to stop people travelling around.

A scientist advising the Government on the coronavirus response warned that more local lockdowns should be expected, as per the Guardian’s front page splash this morning.

Oxford University’s Prof Peter Horby, who chairs the new and emerging respiratory virus threats advisory group (Nervtag), was asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme if the public should brace for more local outbreaks. He replied:

Unfortunately I think we should. We’ve seen the epidemic is focal, which is often the case, it’s not the same in all places.

And we saw that London unfortunately led the way in the UK and now Leicester is unfortunately leading the way and we can expect more of that, so I think there will have to be local responses to local outbreaks.

Ryanair’s chief executive Michael O’Leary has been talking on Sky News as it today expands its service to put 150 planes in the sky.

He said the airline was flying from 26 UK airports and would operate almost a thousand services “with a load factor of almost 70%”, amounting to 104,000 passengers.

He railed against the “stupid” quarantine which requires travellers returning to the UK to isolate for two weeks:

It’s irritating, the government has been causing a huge amount of damage with its badly thought out quarantine measures that aren’t a quarantine; filling in forms at airports which are then thrown in the bin and not followed up, but are deterring visitors to the UK in July and August. These badly thought-out, badly implemented policies have no effect on Covid are doing untold damage to British tourism, to British jobs and to the wider British economy. We need to get this stupid quarantine lifted.

On Friday airlines including Ryanair are taking the UK government to court to challenge the legality of the quarantine and O’Leary said he was “reasonably confident” they would win. “The government has been unable to come up with scientific evidence for this form-filling exercise,” he said.

Speaking on BBC Breakfast, the business secretary Alok Sharma twice dodged the question of whether he would extend the furlough scheme beyond October to help the airline sector survive. He said:

The furlough scheme will have been in place for a total of eight months and I think like any international standard, it has been groundbreaking. You talked about the airline sector specifically: of course, as you know, work is going on in terms air bridges and later in the week I hope we will be able to set out some of those low-risk countries so that when people return from these countries they will not be faced with quarantine.

Asked whether there would be localised extra support for businesses and workers in Leicester during the city’s local lockdown, Sharma seemed to suggest not, harking back instead to earlier business grants and the national furlough scheme:

Anyone in Leicester will be incredibly disappointed and in fact worried about having to go back into lockdown and I know that businesses will be incredibly concerned as well. In terms of support to businesses in Leicester, we have provided over 5,900 businesses — small businesses — with grants to the value of £68m. We have also ensured that 40,000 jobs have been protected through the Job Retention Scheme and that is going to continue.

Presenter Louise Minchin also extracted from Sharma that rarest of things in Westminster — an apology — after he gave out incorrect testing figures on the programme last week. He had said 240,000 people had been tested for Covid-19 on Monday 22 June. In fact, he accepted, it was the number of tests:

I was wrong and I apologise for that. It was an inadvertent mistake.

Up to 5,000 jobs are under threat at Upper Crust and Caffe Ritazza owner SSP amid a shake-up following plunging passengers numbers at railway stations and airports due to the coronavirus pandemic, my colleague Kalyeena Makortoff reports.

The group warned it expects to open only around a fifth of its sites in the UK by the autumn as travel is set to remain at very low levels amid the Covid-19 crisis. It has launched a consultation on a restructure to “simplify and reshape” the business in the face of the pandemic, which it said could lead to more than half of its 9,000-strong peak season workforce being axed.

The group said head office and UK staff would be affected by the cuts. Chief executive Simon Smith said:

In the UK the pace of the recovery continues to be slow. In response to this, we are now taking further action to protect the business and create the right base from which to rebuild our operations. Regrettably, we are starting a collective consultation which will affect our UK colleagues.

These are extremely difficult decisions, and our main priority will be to conduct the process carefully and fairly.

As pubs in England get set to reopen on Saturday (apart from in Leicester), the Royal College of Emergency Medicine has warned that medics are “bracing” themselves for the reopening of pubs during the coronavirus crisis.

President Dr Katherine Henderson told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

We’re bracing ourselves, I think would be a fair way to say it. It actually is quite serious, we have emergency departments having to work in a very different way than they did before because we have to keep vulnerable patients safe so we can’t have crowded emergency departments.

What we can’t do is have a department that gets overwhelmed by people who are injured because they have got themselves into a fight, they have fallen off something, they have drunk so much that they actually need the health service’s help.

People have been standing at doorways clapping the NHS, well more important than clapping the NHS is using the resources responsibly and anybody who goes out and gets so drunk that they need an ambulance and they need to come to an emergency department is not supporting the NHS.

Good morning. I’m Helen Pidd and I will be keeping the live blog warm until Andrew Sparrow clocks in later this morning.

It is day two of the UK’s first local lockdown in Leicester, with leading doctors urging the government to give councils accurate and up-to-date data to manage localised spikes, 101 days after the national lockdown.

The British Medical Association (BMA) said local authorities need “timely, comprehensive and reliable” information to all those involved in the management of new cases at a local level.

The mayor of Leicester has complained that he only received a full picture of local infection patterns last Thursday. Until then, the government had not shared detailed results of so-called “pillar 2” tests conducted at pop-up drive-through testing centres and completed via post.

The BMA also called for clarity about how regional spikes will be managed in the future.

Dr Chaand Nagpaul, chairman of the BMA Council, said:

The prime minister has talked about a ‘whack a mole’ strategy to tackle local outbreaks, but this is no use if the people leading the response on the ground – be they public health teams or local leaders – are not given the most accurate up-to-date data possible.

This is crucial to allow swift action and to protect lives and the health service, and something that is not happening right now. This is all the more important given that the ‘world-leading’ test and trace app is not in place, meaning local leaders and teams armed with up-to-date information will be vital in containing spread of outbreaks.

Ahead of further lockdown restrictions being eased at the weekend, the BMA made a series of demands from the government.

These include the use of set “metric trigger points” at which action will be taken to reintroduce local and national restrictions, which would take into consideration the regional reproductive rate – known as the R rate – as well as the level of infections in communities.