LET’S GET BRITAIN MOVING
Business chiefs and MPs call for quick lockdown exit as new virus cases plunge
BUSINESS leaders and politicians pleaded last night with the Government to unlock the economy and get Britain moving after figures appeared to show the Covid-19 outbreak was coming under control.
Experts suggested coronavirus was ‘disappearing’ from the UK, with deaths down and new cases in London below 50 a day.
Official figures revealed yesterday how deaths, hospital admissions and new infections have dropped significantly since the epidemic peaked in early April.
The R-rate – which shows how quickly the virus is spreading – is also said to be falling.
Professor Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University, said coronavirus was ‘disappearing at a rate that’s speeding up’, and urged politicians to ‘open up businesses’ to prevent a second wave of deaths caused by economic collapse.
Conservative ex-leader Iain Duncan Smith said: ‘We need to move fast. The threat facing us now, outweighing coronavirus, is that of a failing economy.’
Tory former Cabinet minister John Redwood said: ‘We are going to have unemployment on a scale not seen for many a year... unless we get furloughed people to work.’
London has recorded fewer than 100 new cases of coronavirus every day for the past fortnight, compared to more than 1,000 a day at the beginning of April.
Figures released by Public Health England last night revealed just 24 people in London tested positive on May 16, and just 51 tested positive on May 15 – the most recent days for which reliable data is available.
Deaths in hospitals peaked six weeks ago, and since then three quarters of NHS trusts in England have seen death rates fall.
Yesterday, more than half of NHS hospital trusts – 126 out of 218 – reported no new coronavirus deaths, and a third have gone successive days with no new deaths. This compares with 41 reporting no new deaths on April 8. Two deaths of patients under 40 reported in last two days, both had underlying health conditions.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock revealed last night that around one in six people in London and one in 20 elsewhere in England have had coronavirus.
An antibody surveillance study led by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggests 17 per cent of people in London and around 5 per cent in England have tested positive for antibodies to coronavirus.
Today, the ONS will publish a new estimate of the R-rate, which ministers want to keep below a value of one, or R1. But a Whitehall source said it was already much lower than the headline rate, suggesting ministers have more room to ease lockdown. The source said the headline R-rate was about 0.75, but Government experts said privately that in the community it was more like 0.5. Last night, MPs warned the threat of a tanking economy now outweighed the risk from corona.
They said that unless the exit from lockdown accelerated the UK would face a rate of unemployment not seen since the Thirties.
Business leaders said firms were ‘ fully ready to open’, adding: ‘Another week closed is another week closer to business failure.’
The figures will add to calls to lift lockdown in London, which contributes a quarter of Britain’s GDP.
Some 1.8million people nationwide have signed up for Universal Credit since lockdown began, and the Government’s furlough scheme pays 7.5million people.
Experts have warned that if lockdown continues more firms will shut, triggering redundancies.
Businesses in the hospitality and retail industries are begging the Government to trust them to reopen with social distancing rules.
Kate Nicholls, of the umbrella group UK Hospitality, said: ‘If we leave it much longer many businesses won’t survive and we will see redundancies. We are ready to go from July 4. Parts of the sector... could be ready more quickly.’
Emma McClarkin, of the British Beer & Pub Association, said: ‘The 27,000 pubs in the UK with beer gardens will be amongst the best placed to re-open under social distancing conditions and so should be amongst the first to reopen.’
But Downing Street said it was too early to be certain the virus was under control.
The Prime Minister’s official spokesman insisted that ‘extreme caution’ was needed in order not to ‘risk the sacrifice of the public in suppressing the spread of the infection.’
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