Portrait of the week: Boris recovers, flour sales soar and France and India extend lockdowns

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The number of people with the coronavirus disease Covid-19 who had died in hospitals by the beginning of the week, Sunday 12 April, was 9,875, compared with a total of 4,313 a week earlier. Three days later it was 12,107. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, was discharged from hospital after a week, three days of which were in intensive care. Thanking staff and nurses who saved his life ‘when things could have gone either way’, he said: ‘We will win because our NHS is the beating heart of this country. It is the best of this country. It is unconquerable. It is powered by love.’ He recuperated at Chequers despite harsh criticism of other ministers for moving between town and country houses. It had fallen to Dominic Raab, the First Secretary of State, to act as primus inter pares in the government. He said that the 21-day review (initially by 16 April) written into the Coronavirus Regulations 2020 would not see a raising of the lockdown.

In an Easter radio message, the Queen said: ‘Dark as death can be — particularly for those suffering with grief — light and life are greater.’ The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Revd Justin Welby, appealed to crematoriums and local authorities: ‘Don’t just dispose of bodies like we did in the foot-and-mouth episode with cattle.’ Nick Adderley, the chief constable of Northamptonshire, said that if people didn’t heed his warning, police would start ‘checking the items in baskets and trolleys to see whether it’s a legitimate, necessary item’. Shop sales of flour had increased by 92 per cent in the four weeks to 22 March. The Office for Budget Responsibility warned that the economy could shrink by 35 per cent by June.