Covid: Wales’ mask law to end in shops and watchdog reports on testing contractson March 25, 2022 at 7:57 am

Here are five things you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic this Friday morning.

Rules requiring people to wear face coverings in shops, on buses and trains in Wales will not be extended beyond Monday. Earlier this week, the Welsh government said it might delay the planned 28 March end to restrictions but it has decided to restrict the mask requirement to just health and social care settings. Self-isolation rules will be scrapped and PCR tests will no longer be available, although rapid tests are expected to remain free until June. More on when lateral flow testing around the UK here.

The government failed to fully document how it decided to award Covid testing contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds to health company Randox, the National Audit Office says. The watchdog accepts ministers were acting quickly in exceptional circumstances and found no evidence Department of Health contracts had been awarded improperly. But the probe criticises “gaps in the audit trail”, with Labour accusing the government of acting “fast and loose”. Former health secretary Matt Hancock said the report “confirms a total clean bill of health on ministers’ work”.

Anyone with a persistent cough and fever should not automatically assume it is Covid – and should consider other infectious illnesses like tuberculosis (TB), the UK’s top public health doctor says. Dr Jenny Harries’ warning comes as provisional data shows there were 4,430 TB cases recorded in England in 2021, despite sharp declines in recent years.

A man has been jailed for nine months for driving his car into another motorist, after attacking him in a petrol station for not wearing a face mask. Darren Smith, 47, admitted assault and dangerous driving at Morrisons in Caerphilly. “He looked at my Covid exemption badge, said something I didn’t fully understand and then headbutted me,” victim Stephen Callaghan says.

A project launched in the first days of the March 2020 lockdown asked people to while away the hours by helping to digitise a series of pre-1960 weather records form the UK Met Office archive. In just 16 days, the British public raced through 66,000 scanned paper sheets, with 5.4 million individual rainfall observations – each recorded four times for quality control purposes. And now meteorologists say it will help us understand climate change. Find out more.

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You can find more information, advice and guides on our coronavirus page.

The provision of free lateral flow tests ends soon for most of us. Find out how long you will still be able to get them in your area – and how you can buy them once you run out.

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