UK public urged to stay home as daily reported coronavirus deaths reach 980

The blazing Easter sun while we are confined indoors is one of the minor cruelties of this crisis.

The silent empty streets seem to occupy a different universe to the frantic efforts in countless hospitals to keep patients alive, the elderly dying alone in care homes, the soul-tearing dilemma who gets the ventilator and who doesn’t, the feeling that when this enforced staycation is over we will live through the worst economic recession in memory.

And every day like the ticker from hell, the announced number of dead. Twenty short of a thousand today.