Coronavirus live news: UK will face 'enormous strains', says chancellor; New Zealand PM says Auckland to go into lockdown for seven days

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Rishi Sunak warns of risk to economy; Joe Biden tells US ‘now is not the time to relax - follow all the day’s news as it happens

In the UK, former Conservative chancellor, Ken Clarke, has said Rishi Sunak should not halt emergency job support schemes yet, while adding that the public debt must be reined in.

Clarke, who was led the Treasury under John Major, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

“He has to keep in place things like the furlough scheme, the successful parts of the package that stopped the economy collapsing and kept alive good business, good jobs, that will revive if we can get ourselves through the end of this Covid crisis.

Russia has reported a further 11,534 Covid-19 cases, including 1,825 in Moscow, taking the national tally to 4,234,720 since the pandemic began.

There were an additional 439 deaths in the same period, the government coronavirus task force said, bringing the official death toll to 85,743.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3aZmLzL

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