Coronavirus UK live: Boris Johnson's government pushes back against reports that the prime minister missed 5 emergency meetings

Pippa Fowles/10 Downing Street/Handout via REUTER

• Senior UK minister Michael Gove described as "grotesque" a newspaper report which claimed Boris Johnson had missed key meetings on the coronavirus in January and February.
• 15,464 people in the UK have died in UK hospitals since the outbreak began.
• The UK coronavirus death toll continues to rise as the pandemic nears its peak.
• 15,464 people in the UK have died in UK hospitals since the outbreak began.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

April 19: The UK government is pushing back against a weekend newspaper report that said Boris Johnson skipped key meetings on the coronavirus as it spread across the world.

A damning Sunday Times report claimed that Prime Minister Johnson missed multiple emergency meetings on the coronavirus as the virus was beginning to spread in the UK. The result was Britain lost "a crucial five weeks in the fight to tackle the dangerous threat of coronavirus," the newspaper said.

Speaking on Sunday, Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister, denied that Johnson had missed vital meetings on the coronavirus. "The idea that the prime minister slipped meetings that were vital to our response to the coronavirus, I think, is grotesque," he told Sky's Ridge on Sunday.

"The Prime Minister took all the major decisions," he said.

16,060 people have died in the UK after testing positive for the coronavirus. The Department of Health & Social Care on Sunday, April 19 said a further 596 people had passed away in hospitals. 

Read on for the latest updates on how the virus is spreading across Britain.

For the latest global case total, death toll, and travel information, see Business Insider's live updates here.

Kieran Corcoran, Alison Millington, Rachel Hosie, Lindsay Dodgson, Rob Price, and Julian Kosoff contributed reporting to this post.

The UK government is under growing pressure to extend the Brexit transition period to focus on the coronavirus

April 20: Two-thirds of Brits (66%) want Boris Johnson's government to extend the Brexit transition period and focus completely on fighting the coronavirus, according to a new poll for campaign groups Best For Britain and Hope Not Hate.

Downing Street is insistent that the prime minister will not seek an extension to the transition period, which is due to expire at the end of December. Both sides are committed to negotiating a new free trade deal by this deadline. However, the outbreak of the virus has made an already tricky set of negotiations incredibly difficult, and caused concern that the UK is heading for cliff-edge in January when it will move to dramatically new trading arrangements with the EU.

The poll published on Sunday evening said nearly half of Brexit voters (49%) and Conservative voters (48%) support extending the transition period.

Nicola Sturgeon's Scottish government today urged the UK government to extend the transition period by two years, the maximum length allowed by the Withdrawal Agreement.

Scottish Cabinet Secretary Michael Russell said: "The Scottish economy cannot afford the double hit of COVID-19 and the growing likelihood of a 'no deal', or at best a hard Brexit deal, in less than nine months' time."

 

April 19: UK death toll rises past 16,000

April 19: The Department of Health & Social Care said a further 596 people had died after testing positive for the coronavirus in the UK, taking the death toll to at least 16,060.

482 deaths were recorded in England. A further 10 were recorded in Scotland, while 41 were recorded in Wales and one in Northern Ireland. 

The increase is significantly lower than the 888 recorded yesterday, but death rates tend to drop on weekends when fewer fatalities are registered.

It came as Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, said he wanted to see schools reopen but said he was unable to give an exact date, insisting that there needed to be more evidence that death rates were coming down first. A newspaper report on Sunday claimed the government was considering reopening schools in three weeks.

The UK government launches a task force to search for a coronavirus vaccine

The UK government has launched a vaccine task force to step up the search for a vaccine for fighting the coronavirus, Business Secretary Alok Sharma announced on Friday, April 17.

The task force will include members of the government, as well as key figures in industry and academia, Sharma said at the UK government's daily press conference.

It will be led by led by the UK's Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance and Deputy Chief Medical Officer Professor Jonathan van Tam.

Sharma warned that developing a vaccine would take "many months" but that the taskforce was "maximising the chance of success" of finding one as soon as possible.

The UK government has also announced 21 new research projects for finding a vaccine.

 

 

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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