The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Face masks in, Huawei out and Amazon’s TikTok trouble

issue 18 July 2020

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New regulations would compel people to wear a face covering in shops in England from 24 July on pain of a £100 fine. Similar regulations had been imposed in Scotland. A report requested by Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK’s chief scientific adviser, said that, without lockdowns, treatments or vaccines, in a reasonable worst-case scenario, a second wave of infection could see coronavirus deaths in hospital alone range between 24,500 and 251,000, peaking in January and February. At the beginning of the week, Sunday 12 July, total deaths from Covid-19 stood at 44,798, with a seven-day average of 85 deaths a day; but in the following two days the number of deaths was 21 and 11. About 200 legal migrant fruit-pickers on a farm in Herefordshire were quarantined after 73 of them were found to have Covid-19; but three workers left the farm and were hunted by police. Care workers were excluded from a government points system planned to govern immigration from the end of the year.

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