Accurate as of: 5 November 2020
Current UK status:
Visit www.coronavirus.data.gov.uk for all official information.
- As of 4pm on 4 November 2020, a total of 32,309,316 people have been tested for coronavirus (COVID-19), of which 1,099,059 were confirmed positive.
- 47,742 patients in the UK who tested positive for COVID-19 have died.
- From today, England is under a national lockdown for four weeks. The new guidance is to stay at home, and all non-essential shops have closed. On 2 December, at the end of the period, the Government guidance will return to a regional lockdown approach, based on the latest data.
- Guidance for the current national lockdown can be found
UK travel restrictions:
Visit www.gov.uk/government/organisations/foreign-commonwealth-office for all official information.
- The new lockdown guidance states that travel is not permitted, this includes both domestic and international travel, unless for business purposes.
Latest updates:
- England’s four-week national lockdown begins today, meaning that both domestic and international holidays are banned for at least the next month. Anyone leaving home without a reasonable excuse between now and 2 December will be liable to a possible fine that starts at £200 and doubles for subsequent offences (Telegraph)
- The Government’s Global Travel Taskforce is due to submit recommendations to the prime minister on a Covid test regime for travellers this week, with industry leaders targeting the end of lockdown as the start date (Travel Weekly)
- Multiple airlines have cancelled international flights departing from the UK, but some are still yet to do so. Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary has said that passengers won’t be given refunds unless their flights are cancelled, but they can change their flights to a later date with no fee (The Sun)
- Global tourism will take “at least 3-5 years” to recover from Covid-19, according to a report by Euromonitor International (TTG)
- Qantas has pushed back the resumption of UK services until October 2021 at the earliest (TTG)
- Half of all UK travel jobs, as many as 2.4 million roles, could be lost if barriers to global travel remain in place next year, the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) has warned (TTG)
- Which? estimates more than £8 billion worth of package holidays have been cancelled since the start of the pandemic, at least £1 billion it believes is still with travel firms. The watchdog has called on Government to outline how it will support travel through the rest of the pandemic, and to introduce a “travel guarantee fund” to help package providers that are struggling to fulfil their refund obligations to customers (TTG)
- Chancellor Rishi Sunak has confirmed he will extend the furlough scheme until March (paying up to 80% of wages) (BBC)
- The Bank of England has launched a fresh £150bn stimulus package for the UK economy amid the second Covid wave and the reintroduction of lockdown across England (Guardian)
Social media:
- As the US election remains undecided (at the time of this writing), Facebook and Twitter continue to take action to maintain election integrity. Facebook and Instagram continue to display prominent banners on relevant posts, based on post information in both the copy and in the image courtesy of machine vision, and Twitter continues to flag tweets that could be misleading. For all the bluster from both sides about the dangers of social’s impact on democracy, note that both campaigns have spent $1,984 a minute on social in the last week…
- After a decline last quarter, Twitter’s added 2 million more Monetisable Daily Active Users (a Twitter-specific metric that’s designed to help them prioritising advertising) globally but its US users are still flat. Revenue is back up to $926 million for the quarter, way up on Q2’s drop to $683 million and higher than Q3 last year. Find out more courtesy of the shareholder letter here.
- That trend seems to be holding, with Facebook adding users globally but actually losing them in the US while still managing to grow revenues. Key takeaway is that Facebook has nearly 3 billion (!!!) monthly active users. With that kind of audience, it’s important to remember it isn’t even slightly dead but approaches from brands can’t just be crosspost-and-forget.
- Pinterest is also up 26 million users (to 442 million MAUs total) and revenue’s up 58% year on year. Pinterest has had a particularly good year with respect to growth as users look to the platform for optimistic, inspirational, and creative content in a way they don’t quite find on Instagram.
- Facebook has tested upvoting and downvoting before but they’re doing it again, this time just in groups to highlight ‘valuable’ comments. Upvoting and downvoting is the core algorithmic driver on Reddit and, whatever your opinions about that platform. Downvoting a bad comment is likely to be the closest Facebook will ever get to a ‘dislike’ button – but they’ve pulled the option before, so don’t get too attached.
- Politics and Facebook again (sorry), but it’s worth noting that an internal Facebook “Pulse Survey” says that Facebook employees are losing faith in the company’s overall contribution to ‘improving the world’ with only 51% of respondents claiming the social network is a net good. That’s down 23% from May and down 5.5% from the same time last year.
- Snapchat creators seem to have won the clout battle as the yellow app will start displaying subscriber counts on their profiles. Instagram’s been moving away from these kinds of status symbol displays for the last few years (hiding like counts, etc.) but TikTok displays follower counts so Snapchat’s just letting that one go.
- On TikTok, they’ve just inked a new licensing deal with Sony Music Entertainment to help creators use Sony songs in their clips. Nothing will really change for users but now TikTok doesn’t have to worry about potential ‘misuse’ and Sony now gets a cut of any usage.
