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The government put its mind to the puzzle of how to get people back to work. Draft advice was for office workers to avoid sharing staplers and to face the wall in lifts. An Ipsos Mori poll found that 61 per cent of people would feel not very comfortable about using public transport. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, appeared at a daily coronavirus press conference and said: ‘We have come through the peak, or rather we have come under what could have been a vast peak, as though we have been going through some huge Alpine tunnel, and we can now see the sunlight and the pasture ahead of us.’ Professor Neil Ferguson resigned from the government’s Sage scientific advisory body after accepting visits to his house by a woman friend. In the month to 27 April, 9,176 fines had been issued in England and Wales for breaches of the coronavirus regulations.
The number of people in hospitals and care homes who had died after being suspected of catching Covid-19 reached 28,131 by Sunday 3 May. Though the daily number of new deaths declined, two days later the total was the highest for any country in Europe at 29,427. The recording of deaths had changed, to include those in care homes as well as in hospital; the total by Sunday 26 April was adjusted retrospectively from 20,319 to 23,635. Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, said that his target of 100,000 tests a day for coronavirus by the end of April had been met by 122,347 being done in the 24 hours up to
9 a.m. on 1 May. In the days after, numbers fell back. The NHS, having rejected an app for contact and tracing developed by Apple and Google, tried out an app of its own on the Isle of Wight.
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