The Chancellor has announced that the furlough scheme will be continued until the end of March 2021.
Rishi Sunak told the House of Commons that the change of direction was due to changes in the Public Health situation.
He also confirmed that the employment support scheme for the self-employed is being made more generous. It will be worth 80% of profits, not 40% of profits and he assured the devolved administrations that the furlough scheme will be available for them until March.
The number of positive COVID-19 cases in England are up 8% on the previous week, the country’s test and trace scheme have announced, slower that the previous week’s 23% rise, but the proportion of contacts of the cases reached stayed near record lows.
Of the 327,203 people identified as coming into close contact with someone who had tested positive between Oct 22 and 28, 59.9% were reached and asked to self-isolate, little changed from the record low proportion of 59.6% reported two weeks ago.
9.3% of people tested had a positive result,this rate has been increasing since the end of August, when the positivity rate was 0.9%.
Turnaround times for pillar 2 (swab testing for the wide population) for all in-person testing routes2 have improved compared to the previous week but continue to be
longer than they were at the end of June.
In the most recent week, 61.8% of inperson test results were received the next day after the test was taken. Turnaround times for satellite/home tests have also improved since the previous week, with 52.4% of results received within 48 hours.
139,781 people were transferred to the contact tracing system between 22 October and 28 October, a 16% increase compared to the previous week.
The number of people transferred has been increasing steeply over the past 8 weeks with over 15 times as many people being transferred in the most recent week compared to the
end of August.
