Vocal Voices

Those are the figures for June and July as reported to the government. They are a seven fold+ rise on last year.

Any company planning to make 20 or more staff redundant has to notify the government on form HR1, that's the law, and that is where the figures come from. In mid August the government confirmed that the furlough scheme will end in October, as planned, and that will no doubt impact the figures for August and September. Nobody wants to guess what they might look like, but they do expect them to be bad. Also, the figures do not contain those from smaller businesses with a handful of staff that might have to close.

This all comes on the back of the news that Covid cases are increasing "exponentially".(Prof John Edmunds, SAGE) across the country and that the government is considering bringing in tougher measures on social distancing, masks and gatherings etc.

However, the new figures for cases, about 3,000 per day compared to 6,000 per day at their peak, are skewed somewhat. We are now testing about five times more people than we were back in May so we are bound to find more new cases. .And let us not forget that they are rising from some of the lowest numbers seen since the peak. Nevertheless they are a cause for concern.

Also, as importantly, how many new entrants into hospital are there as a result of the increased numbers?

I'm told almost zero. By far the largest number of new infected are young and show few or no symptoms. As WM says, the number of infected are going up due to highly targetted testing of people who have been in contact with a detected case.

This is not testing as it was carried out during the height of the pandemic in the UK; then people were tested if they were ill. So we had 6,000 sick people a day. Today we have a low number of sick people and 3,000 people who test positive for the virus.

I hope the whole world of difference between the two is obvious.

France was bumping along with 1.5 million people tested and very few "cases". Then France tested 3.5m more people and, magically, the cases rocketed to 7,000 per day.

As for jobs lost, I believe it was some time ago that I stated the only thing keeping people in jobs was the government paying their wages.

You and many other observers.

Suspicions were around long before the pandemic that there were plenty of people doing 'non-jobs' in companies that were simply limping along not producing much but not losing much, either, or "Zombie" companies as they were commonly known. All the pandemic has done is to hasten their demise and in quick time.

Once we come out the other side of this pandemic the economy is going to need a major restructuring to get these people back into real work and that is going to take some time, a lot of effort, and a lot of investment.

Agree with that totally.