With 2 988 cases recorded on Sunday, Britain’s Health Secretary Matt Hancock says the sharp rise in daily COVID-19 was “concerning”. The UK is reporting the highest cases since May, mostly among younger people.

Al Jazeerah reports that Hancock said that in other countries across the world, and in Europe this sort of rise in the cases amongst younger people had led a rise across the population as a whole. He urged social distancing to prevent the spread of infections, adding that while the government would continue to use local lockdowns to help keep outbreaks of the disease under control, social distancing remained the first line of defence. Hancock said: “[It is] important that people don’t allow this illness to infect their grandparents and to lead to the sort of problems that we saw earlier in the year.”

According to Al Jazeerah, Sunday’s confirmed cases were the highest daily total since May 23. On that day Britain reported 2,959 cases, 29 cases less than Sundays.

Meanwhile, the Independent reports that Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon said that the country yesterday recorded its highest number of daily cases since May, with 208 confirmed infections. She said, “Comparisons with earlier in the year need a bit of context – back then, we were testing far fewer people and mainly those in hospital, so reported case numbers then were likely to have been a much bigger underestimate of true prevalence.” However, Professor Devi Sridhar, a public health expert at the University of Edinburgh, warned that the opening of schools combined with workers being encouraged to abandon working from home and return to their workplaces, risked overwhelming the UK’s test and trace system.

Umm Muhammed Umar