UK coronavirus live: no plans to make people wear masks in offices, says Matt Hancock

Here is the Guardian report on Matt Hancock ruling out masks in offices.

Back on the question of masks, Matt Hancock has said face coverings will have to be worn in shops in England for the “foreseeable future”.

The health secretary told BBC Breakfast:

People will have to wear masks in shops and on public transport and in the NHS for the foreseeable future.

The virus exists only to multiply and, without any measures, we know that each person infects another two to three people so we do have to have these measures in place, even though the number of cases are really low, to keep a grip on the virus.”

Explaining the thinking behind not making face coverings mandatory in offices, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

That isn’t going to happen and the reason is in offices you tend to spend a lot of time with the same people.

Where the mask benefits is from you spreading the disease to other people when you have relatively short interactions with lots of different people.

Blackburn is facing a “rising tide” of coronavirus cases, centred on its large Asian community, with two weeks to get the numbers down before lockdown measures are reversed, the area’s public health director warned.

The Lancashire town brought in extra restrictions on Tuesday and Prof Dominic Harrison, the local authority’s director of public health, said the borough of 148,000 people was facing a “rising tide” of cases.

Harrison, speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, said:

We have what we call a rising tide event rather than an outbreak, and by that we mean that we’ve got a number of cases rising in specific areas across a significant community, but not a single big outbreak like Kirklees or other areas that had a workplace outbreak.

It can have the same effect because it can drive up the cases, but what we are seeing from looking at the postcode data of those cases is, in the last couple of weeks, is that what we are seeing is a single case being infected, then going back to a household and all that household becoming infected.

And when we look at the data what we can see is clusters in a part of the town, but the clusters are household clusters, so a number of those are causing the rising tide event and we know that they are in mainly south Asian areas, and they are in areas with high number of terraced houses with high numbers of occupants in the house, so four or more, five or more people in the household.

He said the Blackburn with Darwen borough, which has an Asian population of about 28%, had 114 cases in the last two weeks and 97 of those cases were among south Asians.

The rate of confirmed cases per 100,000 has gone up to 47 per 100,000, up from 31.6 cases in the seven days to 4 July.

The authority is third on the list of highest weekly rates, behind Leicester, which has a rate of 118.2 cases per 100,000 and is subject to a local lockdown, and nearby Pendle, with a rate of 76.6.

More than 1 million British smokers have apparently kicked the habit since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the charity Action on Smoking and Health (Ash).

It calculated that 1,036,000 smokers and recent ex-smokers had quit or continued their abstinence since coronavirus cases began circulating in the UK.

The charity surveyed more than 10,000 people across England, Wales and Scotland, including 1,700 smokers and people who had quit in the last four months.

It found that younger smokers were more likely to have stopped than older smokers – 17% of smokers and recent ex-smokers aged between 16-29 said they had quit compared with 7% of those older than 50. And 13% aged 30 to 49 had quit during the pandemic.

A regional breakdown found that smokers in the north-east of England were more likely to have quit than anywhere else in the country – 20% of smokers said they had kicked the habit since the pandemic.

Wales and the east Midlands recorded the smallest quit rates, with 8% of smokers and former smokers saying they had stopped smoking.

Nurses not wearing face masks or staying two metres apart led to an outbreak of Covid-19 that shut an A&E unit after 70 staff at a hospital had to go into quarantine, an inquiry has found.

An investigation by Hillingdon hospital in north-west London has found that a nurse who had coronavirus unwittingly infected 16 others during a training session they all attended on 30 June, in what was described by a doctor as a “super-spreading event”.

The hospital, which serves Boris Johnson’s constituency, made headlines last week when it stopped accepting emergency admissions because the outbreak had led to 70 staff being off work and in isolation.

The government has no plans to make people wear face coverings in offices, health secretary Matt Hancock has said.

He told Sky News:

We will not be recommending masks in the office.

Asked to clear up confusion over mask-wearing, he said it would be mandatory in shops from 24 July. But in hospitality, such as in a restaurant, there needs to be table service so it was not necessary to wear a mask.

On how long the extended lockdown in Leicester would last, he said:

We are taking the decision later this week. By the end of the week we will announce the next steps, whether to make any changes and if so what changes to make. It’s all driven by the data and our assessment of how well the team are doing locally.

He denied reports that chancellor Rishi Sunak is looking to raise capital gain tax to claw back some of the money used to fund thew Covid-19 crisis.

He said:

As far as I understand there is no proposal and the chancellor is not looking at tax changes now.

A quick look at some of today’s front pages.

The Guardian , the FT and the i newspaper lead on the Huawei story.

The FT

The i newspaper

The Times looks at the threat of homes tax to pay for the coronavirus pandemic.

The Telegraph leads on advice over face masks.

The Daily Mail, meanwhile, has a US judge’s decision to refuse Ghislaine Maxwell bail as its lead.

The Mirror headlines the advice over masks.

The Daily Star runs as its lead a story about “woke”snowflakes and vegan aliens, with an eye-catching headline.

Good morning and welcome to the UK liveblog.

A new study has found that the rate of coronavirus infection in England was significantly reduced in May , the month before lockdown restrictions were lifted.

The research, from Imperial College London found that the overall reproduction number was 0.57 – lower than previously thought.

According to the study the rate of infection throughout the country was halving every eight to nine days during May.

There were on average 13 positive cases for every 10,000 people, with an overall reproduction number of 0.57 – lower than previously reported.

For the study, researchers tested more than 120,000 volunteers aged over five across the country for Covid-19.

About 69% of those who tested positive reported no symptoms on the day of the test or the previous week, though they may have developed symptoms later.

The report provides an insight into who was infected with the virus between 1 May and 1 June, comparing geography, age, sex, ethnicity, key worker status and symptoms.

In other news, the government’s decision to strip Huawei equipment from its 5G network features prominently in today’s papers. China’s ambassador in London claimed the decision is “disappointing” and “wrong” in a tweet last night.

Prime minister Boris Johnson yesterday ordered telecoms firms to strip equipment from the Chinese tech giant out of 5G networks by 2027.