HERE are the key coronavirus updates from the last 24-hours.

  • A further 30 people who tested positive for coronavirus have died in hospital in England, bringing the total number of confirmed reported deaths in hospitals to 29,838, NHS England said on Thursday. Patients were aged between 18 and 101 and all except two, aged 53 and 82, had known underlying health conditions. The dates of the deaths were between September 17 and September 23. Seven other deaths were reported with no positive Covid-19 test result.
  • Rishi Sunak confirmed yesterday that the new ‘job support scheme’ will allow staff to be paid by their employer for working at least a third of their usual hours, with the Government topping up part of their salary that would have otherwise been lost due to working reduced hours.
  • Rishi Sunak said the extension of the VAT cut would add around £800 million to the existing £2.5 billion cost of the measure. He confirmed that the 'Job Support Scheme' would be around £300 million a month for each million employees involved. “It’s very tricky to be precise about exactly how much that will cost because we don’t know the exact take-up,” he said. The average furloughed employee makes about £1,400 a month, if that person was working a third of their hours that would cost the taxpayer about £300 a month. “So if you scale that up, that would be just over £300 million per million per month,” he said.
  • The Government said that as of 9am on Thursday, there had been a further 6,634 lab-confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK, taking the overall number of cases confirmed to 416,363.It said a further 40 people had died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 as of Thursday. This brings the UK total to 41,902. Separate figures published by the UK’s statistics agencies show there have now been 57,600 deaths registered in the UK where Covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate.
  • Fewer than one in three people who have an “in-person” Covid-19 test get their result within 24 hours, new data shows, as Chancellor Rishi Sunak told MPs the programme could cost more than £12 billion.
  • Some 28.2% of people who were tested for Covid-19 in England in the week ending September 16 at a regional site, local site or mobile testing unit – a so-called “in-person” test – received their result within this time frame.
  • A further 609 people have tested positive for Covid in the North-East and North Yorkshire