Portrait of the week: Unemployment up, bathers banned and Corbyn’s brother arrested

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The United Kingdom seemed reluctant to come out of its lockdown. ‘We are likely to face a severe recession, the likes of which we haven’t seen,’ said Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Unemployment rose by 856,500 in April to 2.1 million. More than two million claims had been made for the grant scheme for self-employed people. The government was estimated to be paying ten million of the UK’s 27.5 million private-sector workers. At quiet railway stations, wardens supposedly trained in crowd control stood around talking to each other. Police in England and Wales issued 14,444 fixed penalty notices for breach of the coronavirus regulations up to 11 May; one person was fined nine times. Piers Corbyn, the elder brother of Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader, was among 19 arrested at a demonstration at Speakers’ Corner; ‘5G towers will be installed everywhere,’ he said through a megaphone. The Old Bailey began its first new jury trial during the emergency. Police arrested 27 men and boys aged between 16 and 57 in connection with online child sexual exploitation in Bradford. The City of London Corporation banned bathing in Highgate Ponds lest its lifeguards be asked to resuscitate bathers carrying coronavirus.

At the beginning of the week, on 17 May, the number of coronavirus deaths in the UK stood at 34,636; a week earlier it had been 31,587. The rate of fatalities and admissions to hospitals had slowed markedly. A Cambridge study showed that the R number, indicating the number of people each Covid-19 sufferer infects, was about 0.4 in London but 0.8 in the North-East and Yorkshire. Anyone aged five or more with symptoms was now eligible to be tested for coronavirus, Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, said.