Boris Johnson Resumes Work Today After Total Recovery From Covid-19

Boris Johnson returned to Downing Street on Sunday night with his government under pressure over its handling of coronavirus, as ministers warned that physical distancing must become the “new normal” – even when the lockdown is eased.

With the prime minister pressed to explain how schools and businesses can reopen without putting lives at risk, the government has given the clearest signal yet of how it hopes to manage the next phase of the pandemic, including imposing quarantine restrictions on all arrivals at UK airports.

Hospital deaths from the virus announced on Sunday were 413, taking the total to 20,732. That was the lowest daily total since the end of March, though is expected to increase again during the week.

Dominic Raab, who has been deputising since Johnson was taken into hospital with Covid-19 at the start of the month, said on Sunday it was inconceivable that children could return to school, without “further measures” to check the spread of the virus.

He also suggested businesses hoping to return to work in what he called the “second phase” of the crisis would have to learn from the essential shops and other workplaces that have remained open, giving the example of distanced queues outside supermarkets.

“There are all sorts of precautions that businesses have taken. If you think that those are the measures that we’ve taken for essential businesses that haven’t shut down, you can see how in various different ways they could be expanded to non-essential businesses currently closed,” he told the BBC’s Andrew Marr.

“We won’t just have this binary easing up of measures. We will end up moving to a new normal.”

Raab said Johnson would be “back at work full-time, properly, at the helm” and is “raring to go”. The lockdown measures, imposed on 23 March, are due to be formally reviewed by 7 May.

The prime minister’s personal role in the earlier stage of managing the outbreak has come under criticism in his absence, while the government has been under relentless pressure over the lack of PPE for frontline health workers and the shortfall in testing.

Matt Hancock, the health secretary, finally announced last week that he will seek 18,000 volunteers to track and trace Covid-19 cases. Labour has been calling for contact-tracing for weeks, as have public health experts and Hancock’s predecessor Jeremy Hunt.

Health checks and quarantine restrictions for passengers arriving at airports have also been implemented by many other countries.

Confirming the government is now considering such measures, Raab insisted that medical advice had previously suggested this would not be effective while the virus was freely circulating within the UK.

In a letter to Johnson at the weekend, the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, said: “I fear we are falling behind the rest of the world.”