Covid UK news live: Food workers given isolation exemption amid ‘pingdemic’

Environment secretary George Eustice has said that he is continuing to wear a face mask on public transport but would prefer not to as they are “very uncomfortable”.

When asked by Sky News if he was happy to wear a face covering, Mr Eustice said: “Well, I don’t want to wear a mask, no, but I am still, I can tell you, wearing a mask on trains and in crowded areas…

“I think it’s a courteous thing to do if you go to a shop, and they are asking you to wear a mask and have that on the door, you know, of course, you should do the right thing and continue to wear it.”

He added: “I’d love to get to the time when we no longer have to wear masks, I find them very uncomfortable, but while they still perform a function in dampening the spread of the virus, and while people are asking me to do it on trains and in shops, I’ll continue to.”

The environment secretary has said that ministers will not be able to give an exemption from self-isolation to the hospitality industry before 16 August amid concerns over staff shortages.

“The reason we’ve made a special exception for food is for very obvious reasons – we need to make sure that we maintain our food supply, we will never take risks with our food supply,” George Eustice told Sky News.

“When it comes to other sectors, yes, of course, the fact that they are also carrying high absence levels is causing some stress for them and making it more difficult.

“You also have to bear in mind why we’re doing this and we are trying to still just dampen the pace and the velocity at which this infection is spreading because we have to keep a very close eye on those hospitalisations.”

You can find his comments in full below:

Environment secretary George Eustice has said that more than 10,000 people in the food sector will be able to avoid isolation if they are double-jabbed.

“We’ve identified close to 500 key sites, that includes around 170 supermarket depots, and then another couple of hundred key manufacturers like our bread manufacturers, dairy companies and so on,” Mr Eustice told Sky News.

“All of the people working in those key strategic sites, distribution depots and those manufacturing facilities will be able to use this scheme, and probably well over 10,000 people.”

He added that there were two different schemes and that in the food sector all employees at identified sites would be automatically included.

“For sectors like the nuclear power industry, the rail network, the water industry, where you have a small number of highly-skilled professionals that you need to ensure can come to work, we’re having an exemption for them as well … but it’s quite a narrow exemption,” the minister said.

“For the food sector, it’s very different. This is quite a big exemption.”

The UK’s food industry is at “crisis point” due to a combination of staff abscenes from self-isolation, Brexit-related shortages and general Covid issues, the owner of one of the country’s largest food producers has said.

Ranjit Singh Boparan, of the 2 Sisters Food Group, warned this week that the government needed to act or face the “most serious food shortages that the country has seen in over 75 years”.

“No-one could possibly have predicted that this toxic cocktail would come together at this time,” Mr Boparan said.

“It started with the pandemic – and in the last week or so with pingdemic, but since May this year the operating environment has deteriorated so profoundly I can see no other outcome than major food shortages in the UK.

“Supply of chicken and turkey is under threat. Our retail partners and the wider supply chain have worked together closer than ever before to ensure we retain food supply and this is of huge credit to everyone. But we are at crisis point.”

Mr Boparan, who is known as the Chicken King due to 2 Sisters’ work in the poultry trade, added that labour was a concern, with 15 per cent shortages reported among the company’s 16,000-strong workforce – partly due to Brexit reducing available staff in the sector.

“The critical labour issue alone means we walk a tightrope every week at the moment,” he said.

“We’re just about coping, but I can see if no support is forthcoming – and urgently – from government, then shelves will be empty, food waste will rocket simply because it cannot be processed, or delivered, and the shortages we saw last year will be peanuts in comparison to what could come.”

A testing scheme for food industry workers has been announced to allow staff deemed critical to the supply chain to avoid self-isolation if “pinged” by the NHS Covid app.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said that the scheme would be rolled out to around 500 sites next week, in a bid to keep around 10,000 staff at work.

Our reporter, Adam Forrest, has the full story below:

Director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Dr Randeep Guleria, has said that the Indian government should consider reopening schools in a staggered way.

He told India Today in an interview that the reopening can be planned for places which have a positivity rate of below 5 per cent.

Most states closed schools last year when India went into its first lockdown to stem the spread of Covid-19, and are yet to allow them to reopen.

Dr Guleria said that a lot of the children in India have developed natural immunity because they have been exposed to the virus.

After the national capital Delhi, the state of Rajasthan has also contended the central government’s claim in Parliament that no death due to lack of oxygen has been specifically reported by the states or Union Territories during the second wave of the pandemic in India.

Rajasthan has now said that the central government did not seek information on Covid patients who died because of a shortage of oxygen before making the claim.

Health minister Raghu Sharma told The Times of India that if the Centre had asked, the state government would have informed that majority of the Covid casualties happened due to oxygen crisis.

This comes after the Delhi government said that it had no data about deaths due to the lack of oxygen because the Centre did not let it form a committee to look into claims of such deaths.

New Zealand has suspended its travel bubble with Australia for at least eight weeks due to a surge in Covid-19 infections in Australia.

The country has been battling an increase in the number of cases driven by the Delta variant of Covid-19, which was first detected in India. It has imposed restrictions to curb the spread of the virus, putting half the country’s population in lockdown.

Prime minister Jacinda Ardern said the “Delta variant has materially changed the risk profile” and shutting down the quarantine-free travel bubble is the right decision to keep New Zealanders safe.

Around 3 million people in the Indian state of Rajasthan have already completed the mandatory wait period between two doses of Covid-19 vaccine, but they are yet to receive their second dose due to a shortage, according to reports.

While 894,565 people are waiting for a dose of India’s homegrown vaccine ‘Covaxin’, over 2 million people are yet to get their second dose of Covidshield — the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine locally made by Serum Institute of India — according to The Indian Express.

State officials have said they have run out of vaccine doses and it’s not yet clear when the next batch will arrive.