Powerscourt Coronavirus Briefing – 17 August 2020

The UK is pushing to help provide economic support for workers affected by coronavirus into the autumn, investigating whether it can offer state-backed loans to debt-laden private equity companies, who are currently forbidden under EU rules from receiving state support.

The move aims to provide support for a clutch of UK high street chains, among them Pizza Express, Prezzo and Merlin, to keep employees at firms exposed to the crisis in work.

With 750,000 job losses in the UK since the start of the crisis and nearly a million people working in private equity backed industries, the government is trying to protect as many people as possible

With the British health service still struggling effectively to monitor the spread of the virus in the way it promised at the start of the crisis, a blame game has erupted between different arms of the British government over where the buck stops for test and trace across the UK.

This week Matt Hancock, the Secretary of State for Health, will announce a merger of Public Health England’s pandemic response team with NHS Test and Trace. Ahead of a public inquiry into whether failings occurred in the Government’s response to the pandemic, officials are jockeying to avoid blame, but critics, including a former UK health secretary Andrew Lansley, have questioned whether a reshuffle of different departments is the best way to resolve this. The UK government is still mired in a crisis over a continuing fiasco over examination grades which has seen results for millions of A level students arbitrarily downgraded.

European countries are trying different strategies to prevent local resurgences growing into a full-blow second European wave. France is planning to propose that masks be worn in all shared workspaces after recording more than 3,000 new infections for a second day in a row. Spain has restricted bars and nightclubs and banned the drinking of alcohol in public. Italy, formerly the European epicentre of the virus, has also introduced curbs after seeing its cases rise.

New Zealand, formerly the poster child for effective management of coronavirus, has recorded 13 new cases, prompting the government to delay the election by four weeks.

As countries around the world approach the start of a new academic year in fraught circumstances, officials around the world are exploring whether outdoor classes could be a good short-term approach for getting children back to work. School authorities in Seattle, Massachusetts, Detroit and Vermont in the US are considering holding outside classes for the first few weeks of term. Saudi Arabia has mandated that its public schools system will teach all classes outside for the first seven weeks of the school year.

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