Boris Johnson warns Britons to avoid non-essential contact as Covid-19 death toll rises – as it happened

• Boris Johnson has unveiled a series of hugely stringent new restrictions to slow what he said was the now-rapid spread of coronavirus in the UK, including a 14-day isolation for all households with symptoms, a warning against “non-essential” contact, including trips to pubs and clubs, and an end to all mass gatherings. See 6.15pm for a summary of Johnson’s unprecedented announcement.

• The UK government has promised to ramp up testing of suspected coronavirus cases, although the measures still fall significantly short of the levels called for by the World Health Organization (WHO).

• Major British manufacturers have been sent blueprints showing them how to make up to 20,000 ventilators to treat coronavirus patients in the event of an surge in cases.

• The Old Vic, The Institute of Contemporary Arts and the National Gallery are the latest British cultural institutions to close or postpone shows as the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the UK’s arts and culture sector spreads.

• World leaders at a G7 video summit told Donald Trump that medical firms must share and coordinate research on coronavirus vaccines rather than provide products exclusively to one country.

That’s all from me for today.

But for further coverage, do read our coronavirus outbreak live blog, which will be running all evening. It’s here.

The Creative Industries Federation has described today’s announcement as “a crippling blow to the UK’s creative industries”, my colleague Mark Sweney reports.

In his response to Matt Hancock, Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, said the government should come up with a package of measures to protect workers and businesses that would lose out from these measures. He said:

The poorest who struggle to pay the rent, those who struggle about putting food on their table, those who have no savings who dip into will be faced with impossible choices between hardship or health.

From sick pay and lost earnings protection to Universal Credit changes to rent and mortgage payment deferrals - we need a package of financial support and we look forward to working with him on that front.

And Ed Miliband, the former Labour leader, asked Hancock “to match unprecedented public health measures he has announced today with unprecedented economic measures to support all the businesses large and small, their workers, the self-employed who will be affected”. Miliband went on:

It is no fault of the chancellor of the exchequer that his budget was last Wednesday and it is now out of date, but can I use the secretary of state to urge him to come back to the House with economic measures that match the gravity of the moment.

Hancock replied:

Of course these are matters for the chancellor of the exchequer rather than me and there was a G7 call today which the prime minister participated in, in which the economic considerations like this were considered.

He also said that the government has their “eyes wide open” to the economic consequences of coronavirus.

Here are two new points from Matt Hancock’s opening statement to MPs.

• He said the government would soon be contacting people with significant health conditions who should be “largely shielded from social contact” for three months under the PM’s plan. (See 6.15pm.) He said:

For those who have significant health conditions, the NHS will be in contact with you over the next week. We’ll publish a list of those conditions and if you think you should have been contacted and you haven’t by next week, then get in contact with the NHS.

• He said non-urgent operations were being cancelled. He said:

We will be cancelling or postponing non-time sensitive elective surgery and the NHS will make a statement about this later today.

16 Mar 202015.08 EDT

Kate Proctor

In the Commons Theresa May, the former prime minister, and Jeremy Hunt, the former foreign secretary and Boris Johnson’s main rival for the Tory leadership, both challenged Matt Hancock over the government’s coronavirus testing policy.

May said the WHO advice was very clear that their guidance was “test, test, test” for coronavirus. She asked why the government changed its testing requirements recently so people with mild symptoms self isolate. She said surely the testing has to be very significantly increased and know exactly who is going to be tested.

And Hunt asked why the government was not testing for coronavirus and isolate every single case of the virus, as per World Health Organisation advice.

Hancock replied:

I strongly agree with the WHO about the need for testing.

The question is how fast can you ramp up testing capability when the tests you need, which are the blood tests to know who has had coronavirus, and the bed-side test, or the home test, so these tests can be expanded rapidly across the whole country. The first of those is yet to be invented, although we hope that it is fairly soon. The second of those has just been invented in the last few days and we are in intense negotiations about rolling those out very rapidly here.

From ITV’s Paul Brand

In the Commons, where Matt Hancock, the health secretary, has been making a statement about the PM’s announcement, Labour’s Ian Murray has just asked the point made by the landlord who called the Guardian (see 6.22pm): Murray asked the government to order pubs to close, so that they would be able to claim on their insurance.

Hancock said he would consider this point.

I will post more highlights from the session shortly.

Boris Johnson, whose political outlook was summed up by one of his biographers as Merrie England Conservatism, will have never imagined that he would end up being the prime minister who should shut down much of Britain by telling people to stay at home and avoid the pub for the foreseeable future. In his closing comments he said that no PM has every delivered such a statement in peacetime, and he is surely right. People are inclined to support their leaders at times of crisis and, given that the news has been dominated in recent days by reports of countries around the world going into effective lock-down, Johnson was addressing an audience who may at least have guessed that something like this was coming.

But no one can really know how long consent for these measures will last. What people may feel tonight may have changed in a week’s time, and in a month’s time. Johnson made a reasonably good fist of explaining what his proposals were, and why he thought they were necessary, but there was an enormous gap in the statement that a more experienced or strategic prime minister would have addressed. Johnson announced measures that could close down parts of the economy, particularly in the hospitality sector, and pitch hundreds of thousands of people into worklessness, but he had almost nothing to say about what the government might to to help. The fact he seemed to think the national living wage might make a difference (see 5.36pm) was indicative of how little thought he had given to this, and his prediction about the economy “roaring back” (see 5.33pm) came over as naive utopianism. Some sort of correction seems likely, probably quite soon.

16 Mar 202014.22 EDT

Rajeev Syal

Gareth Bentham, a joint pub landlord in Altrincham, said Boris Johnson’s decision to urge people to avoid pubs means he and thousands of other landlords won’t be able to claim for the coronavirus outbreak on business interruption insurance. Speaking from the Old Roebuck pub, he told the Guardian:

Because the prime minister is just advising the public not to go to pubs and restaurants, our insurance won’t cover us. If he had said that we cannot open, then we would have been able to claim. But this has left us in limbo and struggling to cover our costs and overheads without any insurance cover. It is not good enough.

A further 19 people have died after testing positive for Covid-19, bringing the total number of deaths in England to 53, NHS England said. There has also been one death in Wales and one in Scotland bringing the total number of deaths in the UK to 55.

Here are the main points from Boris Johnson’s opening statement.

• Johnson said everyone in the UK was now being asked to avoid all “non-essential contact” with other people. That meant they should be working from home if possible and avoiding pubs, clubs and theatres etc. He said:

Now is the time for everyone to stop non-essential contact with others and to stop all unnecessary travel. We need people to start working from home where they possibly can. And you should avoid pubs, clubs, theatres and other such social venues.

It goes without saying, we should all only use the NHS when we really need to. And please go online rather than ringing NHS 111.

• He said the advice to avoid unnecessary social contact was particularly important for the over-70s, people with underlying health conditions and pregnant women. He said:

This advice about avoiding all unnecessary social contact, is particularly important for people over 70, for pregnant women and for those with some health conditions.

• He said the government was now advising entire households to self-isolate for 14 days if someone developed a fever or a persistent cough. On Thursday last week the advice was just that the person with the illness should stay at home for seven days. He said:

We need to ask you to ensure that if you or anyone in your household has one of those two symptoms, then you should stay at home for fourteen days.

That means that if possible you should not go out even to buy food or essentials, other than for exercise, and in that case at a safe distance from others.

If necessary, you should ask for help from others for your daily necessities.

And if that is not possible, then you should do what you can to limit your social contact when you leave the house to get supplies.

• He said there would be specific advice soon for people with the most serious health conditions. He said:

In a few days’ time – by this coming weekend – it will be necessary to go further and to ensure that those with the most serious health conditions are largely shielded from social contact for around 12 weeks.

And again the reason for doing this in the next few days, rather than earlier or later, is that this is going to be very disruptive for people who have such conditions, and difficult for them, but, I believe, it’s now necessary.

And we want to ensure that this period of shielding, this period of maximum protection coincides with the peak of the disease.

• He said the measures were particularly important for Londoners.

It’s now clear that the peak of the epidemic is coming faster in some parts of the country than in others. And it looks as though London is now a few weeks ahead.

So, to relieve the pressure on the London health system and to slow the spread in London, it’s important that Londoners now pay special attention to what we are saying about avoiding non-essential contact, and to take particularly seriously the advice about working from home, and avoiding confined spaces such as pubs and restaurants.

• He said from tomorrow the UK government would not support mass gatherings. He said:

It remains true as we have said in the last few weeks that risks of transmission of the disease at mass gatherings such as sporting events are relatively low.

But obviously, logically as we advise against unnecessary social contact of all kinds, it is right that we should extend this advice to mass gatherings as well.

And so we’ve also got to ensure that we have the critical workers we need, that might otherwise be deployed at those gatherings, to deal with this emergency.

So from tomorrow, we will no longer be supporting mass gatherings with emergency workers in the way that we normally do. So mass gatherings, we are now moving emphatically away from.

• He said the UK was now approaching “the fast growth part of the upward curve” for coronavirus.

According to SAGE [the scientific advisory group for emergencies] it looks as though we’re now approaching the fast growth part of the upward curve. And without drastic action, cases could double every five or six days.

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