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We are in the seventh week of closure and the government is now beginning to draw a roadmap on how we could navigate through this crisis now that we have passed the peak of the epidemic.
On Monday, business department officials held talks with employers, unions and industry bodies as they try to come up with a plan for the country to return to work.
Sky News has seen the seven guidance documents Prepared by ministers, who attend workplaces from hotels and restaurant staff to factory, store and office workers, that forms the basis for people to return to work in the coming weeks.
Employers are expected to help staff and customers keep the distance of 2m (6.5ft), and most employees will work from home. In factories and warehouses, equipment must be cleaned frequently and employers must consider amazing shifts.
Stores should limit the number of customers through their doors. Hotels should keep bars and restaurants closed.
An obvious omission in each document is the instructions on the use of masks and personal protective equipment. In that, it is “guidance to follow”.
This is too vague for unions, who want much more detailed guidelines and have emphasized to ministers and officials that they cannot subscribe to these plans unless they issue binding requirements on worker safety rather than just advice.
As a high-level union figure told me: “We have to make sure that workers feel safe and we want proper guidance on masks and personal protective equipment. We want clear instructions for employers.”
“The government is looking at it from a political point of view of sounds and moving into a new phase. We are looking at it from a practical and security point of view.”
The talks begin behind closed doors, but in the coming days it will become a national conversation between the government and the public on how to lift the shutdown and, critically, convince people to return to work and send their children back to the school.
“It is going to take a little time,” a union figure told me.
“We have to take people on a trip to get them back to work. They are anxious and have seen how tens of thousands of people have died. So the concern is real.”
You can see how the government is preparing the ground to move the public.
A key tool will be a new contact tracking app – being tested this week on the Isle of Wight – to make it easier to track the virus and prevent it from spreading through the population by alerting users when they have come in contact with someone who has had symptoms of coronavirus.
Another will be wearing masks, and the prime minister said last week that he believed face covers “will be useful” in terms of slowing the spread and giving people “confidence” to return to the workplace.
Then there is the science and the laser focus on the rate of reproduction of the disease.
Johnson, on his return to Downing Street, announced last Monday that his priority was to keep the disease’s reproductive rate, R0, below one to stop the spread.
This metric will form the backbone of the government’s strategy to convince the public that the risk of being away from home is decreasing.
Lifting the block will not be a linear route.
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The UK government wants to take a national approach to make it easier for us to return to a “new normal” of living with the disease while waiting for a vaccine or effective treatments, but ministers will have to bend our freedoms and restrictions to the form of the disease.
Local areas may become blocked again if spikes in the disease appear. Everything is designed to show the public that the government controls the epidemic.
The blockade cannot last like this forever.
Our children need to go back to school, our businesses must start operating again. Britain needs to go back to work.
But the slogan will be caution. Our streets, our trains, our tubes are no longer going to be as they used to be for some time.
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