Coronavirus (COVID-19) roundup, 13 to 17 April 2020

This page contains data and analysis published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) from 13 to 17 April 2020. Go to our live page for the most up-to-date insights on COVID-19.

17 April 2020

Around 151,000 people who are self-employed may not be eligible for financial support as the result of coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdown measures.

Roughly 3% of the 5 million self-employed people in the UK could be ineligible for the Self-employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS), which is making funds available to those businesses affected by the virus.

Eligibility for the scheme is subject to a number of conditions, such as how people receive their income, how long they have been self-employed and when they filed their last tax return.

ONS analysis also looked at characteristics of self-employment such as age and ethnicity. It showed that a quarter of people in the Pakistani ethnic group were self-employed.

Looking at the share of the self-employed workforce aged between 16 and 34 years, the Liverpool City Region had the highest, with 26%, whereas Edinburgh and South East Scotland had the lowest percentage (5%).

17 April 2020

Google has released updated data and statistics on the changing levels of people visiting different types of locations. These insights are created with aggregated, anonymised sets of data from users who have turned on the Location History setting (off by default). Levels of mobility are compared against a baseline period from 3 January 2020 to 6 February 2020, and activity is measured as a percentage change from this.

The Data Science Campus have extracted these data and published them in tabular form. This is being used by policymakers within government in analysis of social distancing measures. As the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has had no role in the production of these data, they are not official statistics and should be interpreted with caution.

Headline findings show that on 5 April 2020:

• visits and time spent at retail and recreation locations had been falling consistently since guidance on working from home was announced on 16 March; by 5 April, it was down by 82% compared with the baseline
• while there was a sizeable increase in grocery shopping activity before school closures were announced on 20 March (24% over the baseline), activity has since fallen; as of 5 April, activity was 41% below usual levels

Mobility at public places in the UK is down substantially

Mobility at selected public places, percentage change compared with base period, 16 February 2020 to 5 April 2020

Mobility at public places is down substantially in other countries too

Mobility at selected public places, percentage change compared with base period, for selected G20 countries 16 February 2020 to 5 April 2020

Further visualisations of these data are available.

16 April 2020

There were 3,912 registered deaths involving COVID-19 in England and Wales in March 2020, 86% of which had the virus as the underlying cause of death.

The rate of COVID-19 deaths in England was much higher than in Wales, at 69.7 per 100,000 people, compared with 44.5 for Wales.

More information is available on COVID-19 deaths by age, sex, place of death, and the causes of death mentioned on the death certificate. However, some deaths involving COVID-19 that occurred in March 2020 are yet to be registered, and will not be included in this analysis.

You can obtain more information on the differences in how we collect data about deaths in our blog post.