Emergency measures to protect the food supply will allow thousands of workers in up to 500 key locations to avoid the need to self-quarantine when they are identified as contacts of coronavirus cases.
This move and other key economic sectors and important public services have limited self-isolation rules and relaxed Boris Johnson Facing more and more warnings about the impact of “Ping Pest”.
According to the plan to maintain inventory on supermarket shelves, daily testing will be provided in important links of the food supply chain as an alternative to self-isolation.
Sanitation Committee Sajid Javid Said: “While we manage this virus and make every effort to break the chain of transmission, routine contact testing of workers in this important sector will help minimize the interference caused by the increase in cases in the coming weeks, and at the same time Ensure that workers are not at risk.”
The retail owner urged shoppers not to stock up on food and stated that there was enough food, but the company was hit as employees were contacted by the app “ping” or NHS Test and Trace.
Supermarkets such as Co-op said that they found supply problems for certain products, but emphasized that the shortages in each store are “different.”
Priority testing locations—including the largest supermarket distribution centers—have been identified for emergency implementation this week, with plans to add hundreds more next week.
This means that staff who have received an NHS Covid-19 application alert for isolation or have been called by Test and Trace will be able to continue working if the test result is negative.
Helen Dickinson, chief executive of the British Retail Federation, welcomed the new measures, but said that ministers must be prepared to take further action if necessary.
“It is absolutely crucial for the government to make up for lost time and launch this new plan as soon as possible,” she said
“Currently the interference is limited and retailers are closely monitoring the situation.”
Environment minister George Eustis Said: “The past 18 months have proven that we have a highly resilient food supply chain.
“There is an adequate supply of food in the system, and people can and should shop as usual.”
The latest data shows that a record number of people in England and Wales were “pinged” by the app as contacts and told to self-quarantine for up to 10 days, so urgent action is urgently needed.
NHS data shows that in the week ending July 14, 618,903 alerts were sent to users of coronavirus apps, a period of time before England lifted restrictions and allowed more social contacts.
Former Minister of Health Jeremy Hunt He said that if the government does not immediately propose to relax the quarantine rules for full vaccination, it may “lose the consent of the society” to quarantine.
people In England, starting on August 16, almost a month after social restrictions were lifted, when the number of cases surged, if they were identified as contacts, fully vaccinated people would not have to self-isolate.
In addition to measures to protect the food supply, the government also issued guidelines on Thursday night that provide for limited exemptions for other key workers.
Employees who provide critical services can only continue to work and avoid self-isolation after they are identified as contacts if their names are listed on the official updated list.
Exemptions-mainly in 16 sectors including basic transportation, emergency services, and energy industries-will allow people identified as contacts by NHS testing and tracking or apps to continue working, if they fail to do so, it will produce Significant adverse effects” or risk national security.
This policy only applies to designated workers who have been fully vaccinated. It is not a “bundle exemption” for all employees in an industry-for example, although the railway signal operator on which the network relies may be exempted, individual train drivers are unlikely to become .
Hannah Essex of the British Chamber of Commerce said: “Although announcing a procedure that will exempt certain key workers in England from self-isolation is a relief for some companies, it will leave more companies still facing Severe staff shortages and because the number of people required to be quarantined is still high, income has been lost.”
Tony Danker, director general of the Confederation of British Industry, said: “The current method of self-isolation is to close the economy rather than open it.”
He said that the company has exhausted its contingency plans to increase its staff, and “it may come to a standstill in the next few weeks.”
At the same time, officials announced that there were 39,906 laboratory-confirmed Covid-19 cases in the UK, and another 84 people died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19.
Professor Stephen Reicher, a member of the Scientific Pandemic Behavior Insight Group (Spi-B) that advises the government, told BBC News Night: “I hope we stop talking about’pingdemic’ because’pings’ actually tells us you Know there is a problem, so you can do something.
“The problem is that people have contact with infected people because there are too many infected people.
“The final question is: how will we deal with this level of infection?”
