Coronavirus live: Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak will now isolate after anger following health secretary’s diagnosis | World news

Keir Starmer, the Labour party leader, said the British government was in “chaos”.

He said:

Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak have been busted yet again for thinking the rules that we are all following don’t apply to them.

Here’s some reaction from politicians and political commentators to the -turn from Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak.

Dominic Cummings has offered his thoughts on the reversal of plans for the prime minister and chancellor to skip quarantine after being potentially exposed to coronavirus.

In a tweet (which resembles a word salad), he said being forced to U-turn “by your [chancellor] is what happens when this PM tries to be ‘my own chief of staff’.”

David Gauke, the former lord chancellor, posted a series of tweets predicting the U-turn and saying he sympathised with Robert Jenrick, who was doing the rounds on TV defending Johnson and Sunak earlier on Sunday.

Labour MP David Lammy said it shouldn’t have taken public pressure for the government to do the right thing.

Meanwhile, Mikey Smith of the Mirror had this take:

Boris Johnson was at Chequers when he was contacted by NHS test and trace which is why he will self-isolate there, Downing Street have confirmed.

In a dramatic turnaround Downing Street said the prime minister and chancellor Rishi Sunak would be self-isolating rather than taking part in a daily contact testing pilot as had previously been announced.

A spokesman said:

The prime minister has been contacted by NHS Test and Trace to say he is a contact of someone with Covid.

He was at Chequers when contacted by Test and Trace and will remain there to isolate. He will not be taking part in the testing pilot.

He will continue to conduct meetings with ministers remotely.

The Chancellor has also been contacted and will also isolate as required and will not be taking part in the pilot.

Boris Johnson is to isolate at Chequers and will not take part in the pilot daily testing programme, a Downing Street spokesman said.

Rishi Sunak, who was also pinged by NHS test and trace, will self-isolate rather than taking part in the daily testing pilot, contrary to a statement released by Downing Street earlier on Sunday.

The announcement that the pair were abandoning their heavily criticised plans came less than three hours after the initial statement was released.

The chancellor said on Twitter:

I recognise that even the sense that the rules aren’t the same for everyone is wrong.

If coronavirus cases continue to rise in the UK, they could still yet place a “significant burden” on the health system, Prof Neil Ferguson warned.

The government scientific adviser told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show that a level of 2,000 hospital admissions a day was “roughly half what we got to before Christmas with the second wave”.

He said:

There you are talking about major disruption of services and cancellation of elective surgery and the backlog in the NHS getting longer and longer.

Ferguson said it looked like people currently being admitted to hospital were not as severely ill as those in December and January, with the mortality rate “much, much lower”.

He said:

Still, if you have enough cases you can still have quite significant burden on the healthcare system.

Asked what success at this stage of the pandemic looked like, Ferguson said:

Success would be keeping hospitalisations at around 1,000 a day level and then declining.

Case numbers maybe peaking a little over 100,000 a day and then slowly declining. It is likely to be a slow decline.

South Africa have confirmed three positive Covid-19 cases in their soccer squad for the Olympic Games in Tokyo, including players Thabiso Monyane and Kamohelo Mahlatsi.

Video Analyst Mario Masha also tested positive on arrival in Tokyo as the team prepares to face hosts Japan on Thursday, Reuters reports.

Team manager Mxolisi Sibam said in a media release from the South African Football Association on Sunday.

We have three positive cases of Covid-19 in the camp here, two players and an official.

There is daily screening … Masha and Monyane reported high temperatures and positive saliva tests, and were then taken to do the nasal test … and they unfortunately tested positive for Covid-19. Mahlatsi is the latest player to go through the same process.

He said as a result, the team has been quarantined until cleared to train, waiting for results from tests earlier on Sunday.

He said:

This unfortunate situation has made us miss our first intensive training session last night.

Mexico and France are also in South Africa’s first round group.

It is “almost inevitable” that coronavirus infections in the UK will reach 100,000 daily cases alongside 1,000 people admitted to hospital a day, a government scientific adviser has said on the eve of restrictions being lifted in England.

Prof Neil Ferguson, from Imperial College London and a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show that these these figures could double, but this was “much less certain”.

Asked where the country was heading amid the lifting of restrictions, Ferguson said:

It’s very difficult to say for certain, but I think 100,000 cases a day is almost inevitable.

He highlighted that the relaxation of measures coincided with the start of school holidays, which will probably see contact rates among teenagers “tick down”.

While emphasising it was “very difficult to make precise predictions”, Ferguson said:

I think it’s almost certain we’ll get to 1,000 hospitalisations per day. It’ll almost certainly get to 100,000 cases a day. The real question is, do we get to double that or even higher? And that’s where the crystal ball starts to fail. We could get to 2,000 hospitalisations a day, 200,000 cases a day, but it’s much less certain.

The shadow health secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, said Boris Johnson still retained the ability to “join a Zoom call” and could work from home, following news that the prime minister has avoided a period of self-isolation.

He told Sky News:

I’m not sure how the prime minister joining Zoom calls in the flat above Downing Street inhibits him doing his job, to be frank.

He’ll still be able to use the telephone, he’ll still be able to use a computer and he’s still able to join a Zoom call, as lots of us have had to do in these past 16 months throughout the crisis.

Meanwhile, Damian Green, the Conservative MP for Ashford, has supported the prime minister’s decision to take part in a pilot scheme allowing him to work from No 10 rather than self-isolating.

Speaking to Trevor Phillips on Sky News, Green said:

It’s not clear who has got access to it but I think in practical terms allowing the prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer to work as normally as possible is actually quite sensible.

I hope one of the effects of this is to accelerate the pilot scheme, and indeed the analysis of the pilot scheme, because this might be a way out of the current problems of people not being able to go to work.

Nigeria has put six states on red alert after recording a “worrisome” rise in Covid-19 infections, a government official said, urging people to curb gatherings and hold prayers outside mosques during this week’s Muslim festival of Eid-el-Kabir.

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, is like most parts of the continent facing a third wave of the virus after detecting the more transmissible Delta variant, Reuters reports.

The head of the presidential steering committee on Covid-19, Boss Mustapha, said Lagos, Oyo, Rivers, Kaduna, Kano, Plateau and the Federal Capital Territory had been placed on red alert as part of preventive measures against the pandemic.

A red alert allows authorities in the states to restrict celebrations and gatherings to a minimum.

Mustapha said in a statement:

These steps are critical as we begin to see worrisome early signs of increasing cases in Nigeria.

Mustapha said there was potential for wider spread of the virus during the Eid-el-Kabir gatherings and said Friday prayers should be held outside local mosques.

He also suspended Durbar, an annual Muslim festival in northern Nigeria, which is marked by colourful horse riding events watched by large gatherings.

Last week, Nigeria, which has recorded 169,329 cases and 2,126 deaths said it expected to receive nearly 8m additional doses of vaccines by the end of August, including from a US government donation.