ECONOMY 'TO SHRINK' BY 6.5 PER CENT AS SURVEY REVEALS ONLY TWO PER CENT ABLE TO ACCESS GOVERNMENT LOAN SCHEME

THE WORLD'S money men and women are warning of the worst year since the Great Depression of the 1930s as coronavirus is forecast to shrink the UK economy by 6.5 per cent this year.

The International Monetary Fund says Covid-19 will effect a three per cent fall in GDP around the globe with 5.9 per cent in the US, 7.5 per cent in the Eurozone, 5.2 per cent in Japan.

The bleak assessment in a Houston-style "we have a problem warning" represents a breathtaking reversal by the IMF which in its previous forecast in January talked of moderate global growth of 3.3 per cent in 2020.

The organisation will provide debt service relief to 25 member countries hit hard by the coronavirus, it has said as the global total of cases is just thousands away from two million and deaths stand at more than 125,000.

Through the organisation's Catastrophe Containment and Relief Trust, about £400 million in resources will be allocated to countries struggling with the outbreak.

This includes new pledges of $185m from the UK and $100m from Japan. The IMF hopes to raise the amount available to $1.4 billion.

UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak said he was "deeply troubled" by the Office for Budget

Responsibility predicting a 35 per cent shrinkage in the UK economy if the lockdown lasts three months. But he said he would "not choose" between health and wealth and said it would be "self-defeating" to separate the two as the UK's coronavirus death tally reached 12,107 – up 778 on the previous day. Around one in three British businesses has furloughed between three quarters to all of its workforce due to the coronavirus crisis, a new survey says. But the British Chambers of Commerce also found just two per cent of firms surveyed said they had successfully accessed the Government's Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme. Nub News revealed Atherstone, along with the rest of the nation, will be told on Thursday to continue living with Covid-19 lockdown until at least May 7 as new figures are being released to reveal the true extent of every death linked to the virus. With its own sad loss of former 3M worker Roy Allitt last week, Atherstone continues to be close to the heart of outbreak's worst statistics with Birmingham in top spot of an upper tier local authorities' table which saw its confirmed cases rise from 1,774 to 1,853 in the last 24 hours. Warwickshire, 31st in the table, now has 626 recorded cases – up 53 on the previous day and a FIVEFOLD increase since the end of March. UK chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said that hospital admissions are "stabilising and plateauing" due to social distancing measures, though it may take longer for this to have an effect on the daily death toll. Public Health England head Professor Yvonne Doyle says that the Government is working with the Office of National Statistics to try to get "more rapid data" for deaths in care homes. The issue of 'outside hospital' deaths is a vexed question for the Boris Johnson administration. Health bodies are "working towards" ensuring coronavirus-related deaths in care homes are published daily, Prof Doyle said. It comes as weekly data from the ONS showed around 10 per cent of deaths registered up to April 3 in England and Wales were outside hospitals. Experts have called for care home deaths to be included with daily updates for deaths in hospitals, amid fears they are going "under the radar". Prof Doyle told the daily Downing Street press conference that PHE was working with the ONS to get faster data on deaths in care homes, hospices, private homes and elsewhere. The PHE director said: "In these very dispersed systems we just need to be absolutely clear that the cause of death that is attributed is correct, and that is what takes time on the death certificate to get right. "But we would like to have much more rapid data, preferably on a daily basis, and that's what we're working towards." Also during the briefing, Mr Sunak said that care home residents and workers "have absolutely not been forgotten" and pointed to the need for data that is "consistent and accurate and timely". Asked whether it would be more "respectful" to publish care home deaths along with the hospital deaths, he said: "There is absolutely no desire not to respect what's happening in care homes and to provide that data." There are tens of thousands of social care settings from which to collect data, compared with several hundred NHS trusts with an existing consistent system for providing data, he added. Separately, the Care Quality Commission said from this week, care providers will be able to report which deaths were of people with suspected or confirmed Covid-19 to give a "more accurate and timely

picture".

It has not been confirmed how often this data will be shared publicly, or by which agency.

A total of 406 registered deaths took place outside hospitals, according to the provisional ONS figures.

These include: 217 deaths registered in care homes, 33 in hospices, 136 in private homes, three in other communal establishments and 17 elsewhere, while 3,716 deaths occurred in hospitals.

Meanwhile, virus-hit care homes are struggling to pay "unsustainable" prices for personal protective equipment as they try to shield staff and vulnerable residents from Covid-19, an industry association claims.

The spotlight has shifted to Britain's social care sector after industry bosses said daily death tolls are "airbrushing out" hundreds of older people who have died in the care system.

Britain's largest care home operator, said Covid-19 is present in 232 of their homes, around two-thirds of all its facilities while the chief executive of Care England said thousands are showing symptoms with people dying.

Nadra Ahmed, chairman of the National Care Association, said the Government had removed VAT on essential personal protective equipment (PPE) kit for the NHS but claimed it had not done the same for the social care sector.

Ms Ahmed said one provider had paid £8,500 for just one week's worth of PPE, describing it as "unsustainable", adding: "To be told at the very beginning of this by our suppliers that all supplies were being requisitioned to the NHS, which we absolutely understand ... but what did it do for our sector?

"Absolutely nothing but drive the prices up. My mailbag is absolutely full every single day with members asking us where they can get PPE.

"If the social care sector fails, if there is provider failure, the problem is going to be much bigger for the Government."

Nub News revealed this morning that elderly and infirm nursing home residents have been linked to around half of all coronavirus deaths in a new study using data from five European countries.

Data collected from official sources by a London School of Economics-based team found 42-57 per cent of all deaths linked to the virus were among care home residents. The countries studied included Italy, Spain, Ireland, Belgium and France.

Around the world, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi today extended the current lockdown in his country to control the spread of coronavirus until May 3 and said the restrictions would be reviewed next week.

There daily toll was up 39 to 339 coronavirus deaths in 11,487 confirmed cases, according to the latest data.

Thousands of shops will opened on Tuesday as Austria became one of the first European nations to loosen the lockdown measures.

Spain, which on Sunday reported its lowest daily growth in infections for three weeks, allowed workers in some non-essential industries to return to factories and construction sites on Monday.

The World Health Organisation executive director Dr Mike Ryan says it's "unknown" whether people who have beaten coronavirus will develop antibodies to it a second time while scientists in Thailand discovered that people can contract the Covid-19 virus from an infected corpse.

America has now topped 25,000 deaths in its 603,000 recorded cases and could be the peak of daily fatalities, according to a White House model projecting 2,150.

It comes as president Donald Trump asserted in tweets that it would be up to him, and not the governors, to reopen the country as well as retweeting a call to fire his top infectious-disease specialist, Anthony S. Fauci after he said in a CNN interview that a stronger early response by the administration "could have saved lives.

At least 41 US shop workers have died of Covid-19 and thousands more have tested positive in recent weeks.

More than 10,000 of deaths in America are in New York alone with Governor Andrew Cuomo said admitting death toll was "horrific" and that it dwarfed the number of New Yorkers killed in the 9/11 terrorist attack.

Taiwan has begun the use of vending machines to distribute face masks, according to AFP.