Covid lockdown news UK: Boris Johnson delays lifting restrictions

Britain’s biggest budget airline is moving capacity for Spanish flights from the UK to Germany.

In response to the continuing severe restrictions on international travel from the UK, easyJet has switched flights to continental Europe. Some aircraft that were expected to connect British airports with Palma in Mallorca have been switched to to Berlin.

Our travel correspondent Simon Calder has more details:

Labour’s shadow health secretary has claimed the reason the nation is in the current situation is because the government did not impose travel restrictions sooner.

Jonathan Ashworth Radio 4’s Today programme: “Rather than red listing this variant, we essentially gave it the red carpet treatment as 20,000 people were allowed to arrive from India over a number of weeks in April, even though the warning signs were there.

“That essentially seeded this Delta variant across the country.

“Nobody wanted to be in this place and we could have avoided this if it was not for the Delta variant, and I’m afraid this is on Boris Johnson for his puny weak border policy, which was secure as a sieve.”

A member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) advising the government has said future restrictions are a “possibility”.

Professor Graham Medley told the Today programme: “It really depends upon what the prospects look like in terms of the way this virus reacts with the vaccine, and that has actually turned out to be good news and uncertainty is solidified in terms of being good news.

“There is that possibility though; I think that depending on what the government wants to achieve, they may well have to make decisions that are against what they would much prefer not to do which is to make the changes that we’ve got irreversible.

“It is possible we could end up with a situation whereby the numbers of people going to hospital, really mean that the government have to take some kind of action that they don’t want to, but I think that’s always been the case – government has always taken action to that it didn’t want to, it never wanted to lockdown.

“And it’s always going to be the case in the sense that there is this pandemic ongoing but the next pandemic will happen at some point unknown, and then having used lockdowns once it’s quite possible that the government would choose to use them again.”

Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove said something “unprecedented and remarkable” would have to happen for the 19 July date to be extended further.

He told Sky News: “It would require an unprecedented and remarkable alteration in the progress of the disease.”

Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove said it was “regrettable” that ministers had to order a delay of up to a month to the final phase of the road map.

Asked if restrictions would ease on 19 July or whether there could be another delay, he told Sky News: “That will be the terminus date.

“What we said is that we won’t lift those restrictions before 21 June, in the road map it says not before, and the whole point about the road map was to build in an element of flexibility and caution.

“It is regrettable that we do have this pause before moving to Step 4, but what we want to do is to make sure that when we do make that move, that we don’t go back.

“Because the worst thing for business, worst thing for any of us, would be to open up again and then to very quickly find that we have to reimpose restrictions.”

UK employers added 200,000 people to payrolls in May as more people returned to work and the unemployment rate fell as the economic recovery from the pandemic strengthened.

The number of people in payrolled employment rose 197,000 between April and May but remains 553,000 below the level reached before the pandemic began, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported.

Our business correspondent Ben Chapman has more details:

Scientists have warned more than 40,000 people could die this summer as the Delta variant of coronavirus sweeps through the UK, even after Boris Johnson’s decision to delay the lifting of lockdown restrictions by four weeks.

A paper submitted to the government’s Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (Sage) said a summer wave of infections, hospitalisations and deaths was “likely” whether or not restrictions were lifted because of the highly virulent nature of the variant.

Our political editor Andrew Woodcock and health correspondent Shaun Lintern have the full story:

Boris Johnson has set a new “terminus date” of 19 July for the end of England’s coronavirus restrictions after being warned easing measures as planned could lead to thousands of deaths.

The prime minister ordered a delay of up to a month to the final phase of his roadmap out of lockdown due to concerns over the rapidly spreading Delta variant first identified in India.

Experts feared going ahead with Step 4 on 21 June as anticipated could lead to hospital admissions on the scale of the first wave of Covid-19, heaping unsustainable pressure on the health service.

To avoid this, Mr Johnson told a Downing Street press conference it was “sensible to wait just a little longer” as he put back the end of all legal limits on social contact by a month.

The densely populated slum area of Dharavi in India’s Mumbai city reported zero Covid-19 cases on Monday, the first time since the second wave of the pandemic hit the country.

Dharavi, one of Asia’s biggest slums, has reported 6,861 cases of coronavirus till date, and out of these, 2,900 infections were reported in the second wave, according to The Indian Express analysis.

Nearly 73 per cent of the elderly population in India suffered increased abuse during the lockdown imposed to contain the deadly second wave of Covid-19, according to a new report.

The Agewell Foundation, a Delhi-based not-for-profit, said 61 per cent of those claimed that interpersonal relationships was the main reason for the increasing incidences of elder abuse, according to news agency PTI.