Up to 10,000 employees in the UK food industry will no longer have to be quarantined when alerted by the Covid-19 app. Instead, they are tested daily and only need to stay at home with a positive test result. This should solve the food shortages in the shops, which have been caused by the fact that work in the food sector has been partially stopped due to quarantine.

Environment Minister George Eustice told Sky News that the staff of 500 key locations, including distribution centers and food producers, will be exempted from quarantine regulations. The new policy will be rolled out next week. For people who work in supermarkets, nothing changes. The quarantine policy will continue to apply to this group.

Britons should spend ten days in home quarantine if they may have become infected with the coronavirus. This is the case, for example, if they have been in the vicinity of a coronary. Then they are ‘pinged’ by the app of the National Health Service (NHS). With an average of almost 50,000 new infections a day, hundreds of thousands of people have already been affected. The ‘pingdemic’, as media call it, led to personnel problems in various sectors.

Some supermarkets suffer from a shortage of products, especially products that are in high demand in hot weather, while some gas stations had to close after staff were ordered by the app to go into quarantine. According to NHS data, the app told nearly 620,000 people in England and Wales to go to home quarantine in the week until 14 July.