Today’s children face losing £350bn in lifetime earnings unless the UK’s governments invest in radical catch-up efforts when the pandemic is over, according to a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
The IFS is urging policymakers to consider options including nearly nine million children repeating a year of schooling, the use of large-scale tuition in summer holidays and extended hours to make up for the classroom time lost during the Covid-19 lockdowns.
The activists have been in the tunnel close to Euston station since Tuesday to raise awareness of the climate emergency and to try to halt work on the HS2 project which is under way in the Euston area. They argue that many ancient woodlands will be destroyed by the project. HS2 says it is planting 7m new trees.
A leading infectious disease expert predicted on Sunday that the deadlier British variant of Covid-19 will become the dominant strain of the virus in the US and could hit the country like a hurricane.
The worrying forecast came as the total of confirmed infections in the US passed the 26m mark, with the death toll advancing steadily towards the grim milestone of half a million after on Sunday surpassing the total of 440,000, by far the highest in the world according to data gathered by the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus research center.
A World Health Organization team has visited the Huanan food market in Wuhan as part of its fieldwork in a politically sensitive mission to investigate the origins of the pandemic, AFP reports.
Their visit is being tightly controlled, and the WHO has already lowered expectations of pinpointing the source of the virus, which is known to have infected more than 102 million people so far with over 2.2 million deaths.
The NHS has been warned it is putting lives at risk after the service admitted it was not collecting data on who was not accepting invitations to be vaccinated and why.
Early research has shown vaccine take-up was twice as high among white people compared with black people in the first five weeks of the rollout, with lower rates among people with severe mental illness, dementia and learning disabilities.
