Is the office dead? Not an office, which everyone needs, but “the office”, the institution, the corporate HQ, the great overhead in the sky. Just as once the farm gave way to the factory and the factory to the desk, so technology transforms the nature of work. At the turn of the 21st century the digital revolution shrank offices to tiny screens. From then on offices have lived on borrowed time. Coronavirus has called their bluff. But has bluff also been called on the office’s sovereign domain, the city centre?

When in March Boris Johnson ordered Britons to “stay at home”, I heard a death-knell sound. So shocking was this fear-based lockdown that a new Morgan Stanley survey shows that even now only 34% of British office workers have gone back to work. This compares with 76% in Italy and 83% in France.

Two weeks ago Johnson abruptly changed his mind and told office workers to report for duty. Few have obeyed. Walk through London’s Canary Wharf, Manchester’s Deansgate or Birmingham’s Colmore Row, and you see ghost cities. Offices stand vacant, shops, pubs and cafes closed and even boarded up. Come September, some workers will return, but I can find no expert who expects them in anything like their previous numbers.

In his classic biography of the Cambridgeshire village of Foxton, The Common Stream, Rowland Parker described its many traumas. They included invading Saxons, the Black Death and, most recently, the arrival of combine harvesters in the 1920s. The machines slashed the need for farm labour. The village emptied. Rural vitality was devastated.

Since then Foxton has recovered as a dormitory suburb for office workers in Cambridge and even London. But does it now face another change, that of home-working? Across Britain there must be many people wondering if they really want to fight their way to a city office block when their home can be their office. Morgan Stanley reports a mere 18% of European office workers wanting to return to an office five days a week. Fulltime home working is estimated to raise productivity by more than 16 days over a full year.

The media is awash in studies declaring that offices are good for us after all. They promote social diversity and informal contacts, offering relief from relationship claustrophobia in “getting out of the house”. Management ideology has long identified “the company” with its headquarters, its physical presence and hierarchy. The New Scientist reports the boss of Microsoft worrying that unmonitored home working will eat into the “social capital” built up in an office environment. Zoom cannot replace the gossip of “those two minutes before and after” a meeting. We know that from TV’s The Office.

None the less, office workers seem certain to vote with their feet. As a Birmingham lawyer told the Guardian, “There is absolutely no reason for us to be in this office every day – I can do my job perfectly well from anywhere.” He spoke for millions. Hence the three-quarters of American CFOs now accepting that they must introduce remote working.

How drastic the impact on city business districts will be is uncertain. Those in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds have been planned for decades on an assumption of rising office demand. The LSE cities expert Prof Tony Travers says that for them, “It’s like death, too frightening to predict. But a conservative guess might be that half of workers opt for some form of remote working, perhaps for half their time.” That is a roughly 25% cut in traditional office occupancy.

Emptying city centres of a quarter of their office workers would be commercially devastating. It would wipe out the profit margins of the shops, cafes and pubs that depend on them. Rents would plummet on newly emergent office blocks, lacking as they do the adaptability of the old Victorian streets they replace. Towers will blight townscapes as corporate dinosaurs.

Commuting has come to be seen as an unnecessary health hazard. A worker visiting his or her office will be like going shopping, an occasional discretionary activity. Yes, we will value the human contact with workplace friends, clients and associates, but not 9-to-5, five days a week. This treadmill was the ethos of Dickens’ factory work carried into the office. It is out of date.

This need not be bad news for cities. The decline in offices will leave more space for housing. Cultural and leisure activities will recover. Historic quarters – if conserved – will attract the creative industries that are seen as holding the key to modern city economies, industries that thrive on urban concentration. I was intrigued by Angus Thirlwell of the Hotel Chocolat chain bewailing to the BBC the fate of his big city outlets, while lauding his successes in Cheltenham, St Albans, Stamford and Harrogate. These are the new work hubs. If I was in the property game, I would buy anywhere with a cathedral.

Clearly the idea of corporate space, of the company building, is in crisis. As for office work, I sense the future lies with small towns and suburban villages, those not about to be wrecked by Robert Jenrick’s Los Angeles-style planning changes. It lies in places commuters call home, where they can replace the ties of office with those of neighbourhood. The shift may be no more than 25%, but in demography a trend is a revolution.

• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

The new app has been designed in collaboration with Google, Apple and other tech companies so that it works with 99% of phones. It no longer has the major failing of the original which did not work with iPhones.

But it will struggle to compute the precise 2-metre boundary that is considered to be a safe distance from someone with the virus. Many people will be told they should self-isolate even though they spent 15 minutes just slightly further away – for instance 2.1 metres.

The designers of the app are understood to believe, from some 100,000 simulations, that this margin of error is acceptable, on the basis that people who were that close may still be at risk.

The trial which started on the Isle of Wight on Thursday will next week be extended to the London borough of Newham, to test its performance in one of the most diverse populations in the country. It will also be offered to NHS volunteer responders across England.

The new app is not a cut-down version of failed earlier attempts, but has more features, say government sources, who hope it will win the public’s trust and confidence. The contact-tracing element will depend on substantial numbers of people downloading it.

“It’s really important that we make it as easy as possible for everyone to engage with NHS test and trace. By launching an app that supports our integrated, localised approach to NHS test and trace, anyone with a smartphone will be able to find out if they are at risk of having caught the virus, quickly and easily order a test, and access the right guidance and advice,” said Dido Harding, executive chair of the NHS test and trace programme.

Simon Thompson, managing director of the app, said it was vital to controlling the spread of coronavirus and designed to give people maximum freedom at minimum risk.

“We have worked with some of the most innovative organisations in the world, such as Apple, Google, scientists from the Alan Turing Institute and Oxford University and governments across the world to come up with a state-of-the-art product which works to protect people everyday. It’s like NHS test and trace in your pocket,” he said.

“By giving access to the Isle of Wight, Newham and NHS volunteers first we can make this app even better before rolling out nationwide so the rest of the nation can benefit.”

The app will track the virus, not people, the government insists, anxious to avoid issues over data privacy. User data will not be centralised, as was the earlier plan, but will stay in the phone and can be deleted at any time. People using the app will get a warning to self-isolate if they have been near another app user with coronavirus, but they will not be contacted or monitored for their compliance.

If the contact is somebody in their family or at work, however, it is likely they will separately get a call or a visit from the contact tracing teams.

“There is no silver bullet when it comes to tackling coronavirus,” said Harding. “The app is a great step forward and will complement all of the work we are doing with local areas across the country to reach more people in their communities and work towards our vision of helping more people get back to the most normal life possible at the lowest risk.”

The app will also allow owners of venues such as pubs and restaurants to obtain and print a QR code that app users can scan on their phones when they visit. If there is subsequently an outbreak at the venue, app users can be alerted.

There is also a symptom checker, which will alert the user to self-isolate if they are suffering from one of the major known four symptoms of Covid-19, and a countdown function and advice for those told to self-isolate.

The latest test and trace data showed the service reached 79% of all those who tested positive, and 83.4% of their contacts where contact details were provided. The government says that is “in line with the recognised metric of success for contact tracing services across the world”.

However, critics say the system needs to do better if it is to keep the virus in check ahead of schools going back and then the winter months when people will socialise indoors.

Today it’s A-level maladministration, but every day some new failure shames this government beset with epochal crises. Abysmal handling of Covid-19 casts England as having the highest excess deaths in Europe, and the UK as suffering the deepest recession in the G7, while Brexit still looms.

That’s enough to busy this cabinet of incompetents. Yet the great disrupters digging No 10 into ever deeper holes are still at it with pickaxe and shovel. What a time to launch a colossal centralising reorganisation of local government, but that’s what next month’s white paper will do, under the misleading rubric of “devolution”. The intent is to force unitary councils everywhere, sweeping away the district councils beneath them: it looks neat – but it’s devoid of evidence that another great upheaval does anything but disrupt, cost money and distract council officials who are already overstretched coping with Covid rather better than Whitehall is.

District councils of all hues are putting up a fight. Why No 10 would choose this moment to rile battalions of Tory councillors, backed by their Tory MPs, is a mystery to observers. As the London School of Economics’ Prof Tony Travers reminds me, all local government reorganisations favour the party in power. This one sweeps away irritating Labour and Liberal Democrat urban district blobs holding their forts against a sea of blue county councils. Norwich, Leicester, Oxford and scores more towns and cities will put up a fight not to be swallowed into Torydom. Green- and Lib-Dem-controlled Lewes will never go quietly into the great East Sussex blue. The government is starting with North Yorkshire – but don’t expect yellow York or red Scarborough to kowtow. Nor will many Tory districts agree to be swallowed into the whales of their bigger counties.

Large sums are being squandered by districts and county councils hiring expensive consultancies to write opposing reports proving which is most efficient. Some districts’ plans bid to divide counties into fewer larger districts, though this may also gerrymander red to blue. England, says Travers, suffers “an endless churn” of reorganisations.

A prime motor for all this is No 10’s contempt for local government. Odd timing, now Whitehall is forced into a belated climb-down over test and trace, finally admitting only local council public health expertise can do it. Look how, when push comes to shove, Whitehall summons top-quality local government chief executives to run their programmes: first Leeds’ chief executive, now Oldham’s excellent leaders are recruited to repair Whitehall’s failed test and trace. Every observer notes how the calibre of local government leaders and chief executives has soared in recent years, unlike this decadent cabinet.

Whitehall departments and their ministers are the ones that should be threatened with special measures, whether it’s the Home Office over Windrush, the Department of Education over abysmal lockdown failures and now A-levels, or the Department for Work and Pensions over universal-credit fiascos. Traducing local government is just a distracting blame-shift.

The lesson is not learned: local government will be plunged into turmoil, every officer reapplying for their job under new brass plates on No 10’s whim. Subtly done, the white paper will force councils themselves to come up with their own plans to turn unitary, or receive no growth funds.

There is no optimum size, but the ministry has proclaimed a random 300-400,000 population minimum (with optional decorations of tiny parish councils with no power or money). Since the abolition of the Audit Commission, there’s no evidence on efficacy.

The more local, the more trusted the politician. Satisfaction with councillors improves with their nearness: distant county councillors elected by 9,000 voters are less trusted than nearby districts, with councillors elected by 2,000.

This is all a deliberate distraction from the one great problem: councils are crippled by cuts and an inability to raise finance, rendering them powerless. But expect no plan for financial renewal – no local sales or income tax, no Amazon tax on deliveries, no hotel and tourism tax nor any reform of council tax and business rates.

The social care crisis may summon more cash, but don’t expect that to fall to councils’ control. The “devolution” white paper will not devolve things that matter most, as Whitehall departments’ plans ignore the shape of localities: the new NHS integrated care systems don’t match existing councils, let alone planned new ones. Nor do local enterprise partnerships, local enterprise boards, nor transport authorities, nor Homes England’s social housing plans. None of the necessary push for retraining, upskilling and a “kickstart” youth employment programme will be devolved from the iron grip of the DWP to councils who know their labour markets. Lack of joined-up government in the silos at the top is reflected in each department’s hotchpotch local delivery.

Councils, in their sorry plight, need a monster reorganisation. “Take back control” turns out to be only central control. One local government think-tanker sighs and asks, “But do people care?” Let’s see how much noise the beleaguered red and yellow districts make and how angry Tory MPs will be about their own disappearing districts. Already there are signs of something amiss: the transcript of the speech by the minister for local government, Simon Clarke, in which he set out his devolution plans, was mysteriously taken down from the government’s website soon after it was put there. Just possibly, another rapid retreat by No 10 beckons.

• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

In the UK the R number is about 1. This means that on average each person infects one other. However, this is only an average. Most people infect no one while a few people infect many others. This, scientists say, makes the disease especially suitable for backwards contact tracing.

“We estimate that probably about 80 per cent of transmission comes from about 10 per cent of cases,” Adam Kucharski, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said.

This is a headache for public health officials because clusters can appear suddenly as a result of “superspreading events”. It is also an opportunity.

“If you have superspreading, if you identify a case, the chances are it will have come from an event or cluster that’s generated a lot of other cases too,” Dr Kucharski said. “If you’re just asking who those people infected you might get quite a few cases but if you’re asking where did they get infected that will often lead you to a sizable cluster.

“What a number of countries are doing — Japan and South Korea, for example — is really working very hard to identify people who are associated with large transmission events that can give you a disproportionate effect.”

Dr Kucharski has co-authored a paper with colleagues at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, including Graham Medley, who sits on the Sage committee. It estimates that if the test-and-trace system were able to include backwards tracing there could be dramatic benefits. “Backward tracing increases this maximum number of traceable individuals by a factor of two to three,” they write in a paper published online before peer review.

At the moment, contact tracers only ask infected people about their movements on the two days before they got ill. Backwards contact tracing means asking them about the previous 14 days, taking up much more of tracers’ time. It had been hoped that infections could be driven down before beginning this strategy. In Leicester, the method is credited with helping to control infection rates, but has been given less importance nationally.

NHS Test and Trace is expected to launch a scaled-back version of its troubled coronavirus app today. The Times revealed last week that after the failure of trials of automated contact tracing the app has been changed to a source of personalised information, including infection levels in local areas.

Officials insist that the app will still contain some element of contact tracing, such as telling people that they have been near someone who later tested positive. But the Bluetooth signalling which shows that phones have been near each other is not yet trusted on its own as a basis for instructing people to isolate for two weeks. Instead Test and Trace will continue to rely on human contact tracers to decide.

However, Professor Christophe Fraser, a scientific adviser to the Department of Health, told the BBC: “We need the app to help stop transmission by tracing close-proximity contacts as quickly and as comprehensively as possible, capturing those contacts we don’t know or don’t remember meeting.

“The app should enable us to return to more normal daily activities with the reassurance that our contacts can be rapidly and anonymously notified if we get infected.”

FT Visual & Data Journalism team yesterday (12 August) www.ft.com 

The human cost of coronavirus has continued to mount, with more than 20.2m cases confirmed globally and more than 733,800 people known to have died.

The World Health Organization declared the outbreak a pandemic in March and it has spread to more than 200 countries, with severe public health and economic consequences. This page provides an up-to-date visual narrative of the spread of Covid-19, so please check back regularly because we are refreshing it with new graphics and features as the story evolves.

Latin America is the current epicentre of the pandemic, with the region accounting for almost half of all deaths each day. This has been fuelled by a surge in Covid-19 fatalities in Brazil, Mexico and several other countries in Central and South America.

Europe’s average count of coronavirus-related deaths overtook Asia’s in early March, with Italy, Spain and the UK becoming the global hotspots. From mid-April the focus shifted to the US, where the number of deaths has remained consistently high, with the country currently accounting for 18 per cent of global fatalities, although the focus of the epidemic has shifted from the northeast to southern and western states.

Has your country’s epidemic peaked?

Explore the data here

This FT interactive tool allows you to explore data about the pandemic to better understand the disease’s spread and trajectory in countries around the world, and in US states.

Global coronavirus cases and deaths have climbed again since the beginning of June. The centre of the pandemic has shifted to Latin America with Panama, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia currently reporting the greatest number of daily deaths as a share of population.

Large emerging market countries such as Brazil, Russia, Mexico, India and South Africa are all showing fatalities on an upward trend.

New confirmed cases have also been increasing in the US, particularly in southern and western states such as Florida, Texas, Arizona and California, and there are indications of a resurgence of cases in several EU countries.

There are concerns, however, that reported Covid-19 deaths are not capturing the true impact of coronavirus on mortality around the world. The FT has gathered and analysed data on excess mortality — the numbers of deaths over and above the historical average — across the globe, and has found that numbers of deaths in some countries are more than 50 per cent higher than usual. In many countries, these excess deaths exceed reported numbers of Covid-19 deaths by large margins.

The picture is even starker in the hardest-hit cities and regions. In Ecuador’s Guayas province, there have been 10,000 more deaths than normal since the start of March, an increase of more than 300 per cent. London has seen overall deaths more than double, and New York City’s total death numbers since mid-March are more than four times the norm.

There are several different ways of comparing excess deaths figures between countries. In absolute numbers, more people than would usually be expected have died in the in the US than in any of the other countries for which recent all-cause mortality data is available.

Adjusting for population size, the hardest hit countries are Peru and Ecuador, each of which have seen more than 1,000 excess deaths per million inhabitants. The two Latin American countries also have the highest excess percentage — excess deaths expressed as a share of normal deaths for the same period.

The death toll has now passed 100 in 31 European countries. The region currently only accounts for 5 per cent of new daily cases, well down from the peak of more than 80 per cent in March.

Coronavirus has spread to all 50 states in the US. More than 5.1m cases and 155,900 deaths have been confirmed in the country.

Reporting, data analysis and graphics by Steven Bernard, David Blood, John Burn-Murdoch, Max Harlow, Joanna S Kao, Caroline Nevitt, Alan Smith, Martin Stabe, Cale Tilford and Aleksandra Wisniewska. Edited by Adrienne Klasa

Corrections: Due to a typographical error, the first paragraph of this story incorrectly stated the number of people who had died from Covid-19 for several hours on April 9. At the time, that figure should have read 87,741. Due to a typographical error, a map on this story temporarily showed an incorrect number of deaths from Covid-19 in Italy on May 14. At the time, that figure should have read 31,106.

The results from the study, known as React-2, are based on home finger-prick antibody test results from 100,000 participants across the 314 local authorities in England.

“It gives us the most robust, cross-sectional estimate of the number of people who have been infected during the first wave of the pandemic,” said Prof Graham Cooke, a co-author of the research from Imperial College London. “Because we have done it in scale we can have more confidence about the differences between different groups,” he added.

Cooke said the study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, provides important insights, both for easing lockdown and preparing for a second wave.

“There is no evidence of anything near high-enough levels of herd immunity for this to be helpful at a population level and that it is likely there is a high proportion of susceptible people out there still that need to be protected,” he said.

The 3.4 million people that it represents is many times higher than the tally of known cases for the UK as posted by Johns Hopkins University in the US – whose aggregated numbers have become the main reference for monitoring the disease – and which listed the country’s case numbers at 315,546 as of Thursday morning.

The study tracked the spread of infection across England after the pandemic’s first peak, with randomly selected adults testing themselves at home between 20 June and 13 July.

The results show considerable geographical differences. While 13% of people in London had antibodies, this was the case for less than 3% of people in the south-west.

Infections were also more common members of BAME communities, at 17% for black ethnicity compared with 5% for white.

“That probably goes a long way to explain some of the differences in mortality that we have seen between black, Asian and white populations,” said Cooke. Cooked added this greater prevalence of infections can largely be explained by factors such as being more likely to have key-worker status, living in urban centres – particularly London – living in families with larger households, and living in more deprived areas, all of which were linked to a greater prevalence of antibodies.

“From what we can see, it is the social-demographic factors that make the greatest difference,” said Cooke.

People working in care homes (16%) and healthcare (12%) returned far higher results than people who were not key workers, at 5%.

The study also suggests 32% of people who had Covid-19 had no symptoms of the disease – previous research has suggested the figure could be anywhere between 30% and 70% of infections.

“The number we are coming up with is at the lower end, but it is clearly still a lot,” said Cooke.

Cooke said the test correctly picked up antibodies 84% of the time in individuals with non-hospitalised disease at over 21 days since their illness; nearly all those who had previously had a positive Covid-19 test were found to have antibodies.

The team used antibody test results from NHS healthcare workers who had previously tested positive for Covid, to estimate the proportion of people who have been infected but do not subsequently show antibodies. “We do see a clear association between severity of illness and the likelihood of having antibodies,” said Cooke.

Cooke said the team plan to do another round of the study in mid-September in 200,000 people to coincide with the return of schools. But Cooke warned such antibody tests remain of limited value for personal use, noting they are not yet accurate enough for such purpose while it is unclear how protective antibodies are against future Covid-19 infections, and at what levels or for how long.

Health minister Edward Argar said:“Large scale antibody surveillance studies are crucial to helping us understand how the virus has spread across the country and whether there are specific groups who are more vulnerable, as we continue our work to drive down the spread of the disease.”

David Heymann, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who was not involved in the study welcomed the work.

“This is a very important study, and it shows that the population is very willing to participate in activities towards better understanding of Covid-19 and its spread within England – hopefully this will lead to greater interest in participating in activities that will decrease the risk of transmission.”

Simon Chant, public health specialist, told the meeting that in the last ten weeks, there have only been two occasions when three or more cases in a week from a Middle Super Output Area – statistical areas of around 7,500 people – were recorded, and that in the most recent week of statistics, there were no areas in Devon that met the threshold.

And he said that of the cases that were being found in each of the district council areas, they were being distributed among the area with the cases ‘popping up in different areas and different towns’, but with no clusters of cases forming and with them being isolated incidents.

Steve Brown, the deputy director of public health, added that Devon was doing ‘much better’ than other parts of the country in terms of contact tracing, added: “In terms of more complex cases, we are contacting more of less 100 per cent of those people.”

At the previous Team Devon meeting two weeks ago, it was stated that none of the confirmed cases in county had been linked to tourism, and Dame Suzi Leather asked when would any impact of tourists flooded into the county show up in the dataset, or whether it would have already seen the impact if there was to be one.

In response, Mr Chant confirmed that the impact would have already started to emerge if it was there, but it was one that they continued to watch. He added: “To date, we have still not seen any cases related to tourism. The cases have been related to resident population and not tourists or any tourist accommodation site, but we continue to actively monitor this.”

Cllr John Hart, leader of the council, added: “The residents of Devon don’t need to worry about tourists coming to the area. People of Devon, please accept the tourists, but tourists please remember, the people of Devon live here. Tourism is the lifeblood of the economy and the lockdown has had a very serious impact on it.”

The meeting also heard how the new Coronavirus in Devon dashboard worked, with it collating all the information on confirmed cases, deaths, and MSOA clusters into one easy to use location.

In the week from August 3 to August 9 – the latest available data after the Government dashboard was unable to update on Monday due to technical difficulties, there were five confirmed in Devon (one in East Devon, Torridge and West Devon, and two in the South Hams), two in Torbay, three in Plymouth, and 13 in Cornwall, with the confirmed rate per 100,000 in Devon being 0.6.

Mr Chant added: “The threshold for being on the Government watch list is around 20 per 100,000, so the Devon rate is a long way away from the threshold for further action.”

Mr Brown added that the positivity rate per test was between 0.1 and 0.3 per cent in Devon, well under the national average of 0.6 per cent, and the 5 per cent figure for which anything underneath suggests the pandemic is under control, showing that the low number of cases in Devon isn’t just because testing is not being carried out.

And answering questions about what may happen when schools, colleges, and universities go back in September, he added that Devon had a plan in place to deal with any outbreaks.

He said: “There are anxiety levels from some about all pupils returning to schools, but all schools have had guidance about what to do to prepare for September and we have put in place plans if there is an outbreak. There is similar concern about schools and pupils going back as there was to tourists coming to the region, but the data hasn’t supported those concerns. Ultimately, the confidence will be assured or not if we do or don’t have to deal with any outbreaks.”

Cllr Hart added: “There is currently no concern over community spread or linked cases,” but in the key messages from the meeting, added: “The number of cases are still very low in Devon and we want to keep it that way. We are continuing to monitor the local situation very closely based on good local data and local intelligence.

“It is vital that we continue to work together to encourage everyone to keep it up and to promote prevention measures, test and trace, and adherence to the latest government guidance. We will not hesitate to take appropriate and proportionate local action if it becomes necessary.”

At the heart of the tale is a prime minister who promised NHS test and trace would be a “world beating” operation. Next to him sits Matt Hancock, the health secretary whose record is now indelibly associated with the smartphone app that was meant to be integral to controlling the virus, but has yet to materialise. Other key actors include Serco, the multinational outsourcing company that has previously been contracted to run everything from prisons to air traffic control – and, at a cost of £108m, was recently put in charge of recruiting and training thousands of call centre workers to establish contact with infected people and ensure that anyone they had been close to went into self-isolation.

Over the five months since lockdown began, one other set of voices has been central to the drama: local authorities, whose 140-odd directors of public health are expert in disease control and contact tracing, and whose councillors, officials and staff are forensically familiar with the areas they serve, even after a decade of crushing austerity. During the outbreak’s initial phase – roughly, from February to the end of May – many of these people complained of being cut out of decision-making about the pandemic, and deprived of resources and the all-important data that would allow them to get on top of local outbreaks.

According to Sir Chris Ham, a lifelong NHS insider and the former chief executive of the health charity the Kings Fund, the basic insight either ignored or misunderstood by the government was plain. “Contact tracing has to be led locally by people who work in the communities that are affected and understand them,” he says.

“They’re part-detectives, part-anthropologists: they work with leaders in faith groups, in community organisations, and public services, to understand why there are more cases in a particular area, and how to work with everyone to contain and reduce the challenges. You can’t do that sitting in a remote call centre.”

But now, with the reopening of schools in England less than a month away, everything is to change. From 24 August, nationally-recruited call-centre staff will be “ringfenced” into individual teams that will be linked to specific councils, and the national test-and-trace effort will take a new “integrated” and “localised” approach. This shift follows the arrival of local measures aimed at controlling Covid-19 flare-ups in Leicester and Greater Manchester – and the trailblazing creation of dedicated local test-and-trace operations in Blackburn, Lancashire, Calderdale in West Yorkshire, and Liverpool.

Last week, figures were published showing that whereas call-centre or online workers managed to trace 56% of people’s contacts, the figure was 98% among local health protection teams. The imbalance between the two approaches was perhaps most clearly demonstrated by stories of call-centre workers making handfuls of calls per month, while council staff were worked off their feet.

For those of us who have been following this story, disentangling the confounding mess that was hastily built to administer testing and tracing has been an onerous task. If the tale has a single point of origin, it was the abandonment of initial efforts on 12 March, and the outbreak therefore being allowed to slip free of any meaningful monitoring or official control. When the government then resolved to begin mass testing, its network of regional testing centres was outsourced to yet another private company, Deloitte.

Serco was joined at the heart of the national contact-tracing system by the US “customer services” giant Sitel. Local directors of public health, meanwhile, complained that they were unsure of their relationship with these players, and had woefully insufficient access to detailed data which – in theory at least – was being harvested by the government’s testing machine: information showing people’s age, address, and ethnic origin, all vital to local control of the pandemic.

Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, said that people on the ground had ended up being “like local detectives being asked to solve crimes without being given the names of any of the victims or suspects.” Even when Leicester became the first area of the UK to impose a local lockdown, the city council initially bemoaned its lack of access to crucial infection data.

Belatedly, however, the basic orientation of the test-and-trace system had begun to change. In mid-May, NHS test and trace had announced the recruitment as a “national lead on tracing” of Tom Riordan, a highly-respected figure in local government, seconded from his job as the chief executive of Leeds City council. Insiders say that as he worked with Dido Harding, the Tory peer and former CEO of the mobile phone company TalkTalk who is now the executive chair of the test-and-trace operation, its workings at least began to tilt in a more localised direction. Insiders now talk about a “reverse takeover”, whereby the very councils that were initially cut out of the national test-and-trace system have been belatedly pushed to its forefront.

Nonetheless, change has taken months to materialise. On 1 July, it was announced that councils were to be offered the postcode-level infection data that they had been frantically requesting for months. Two weeks later, the government said that councils would be granted powers to close sites and premises hit by coronavirus outbreaks – and on 6 August, their access to information about local Covid-19 levels was enhanced to “near real-time data”.

If these things suggest palpable improvement, big questions remain. Concerns continue to be expressed about the numbers of test-and-trace workers councils are able to call on. Even if the national test-and-trace operation is now set to shed 6,000 workers, what will the continuing role of outsourcing companies be, and how much will it cost?

There is also a low rumble of concern about base politics. With signs of a second wave and the looming arrival of autumn, councils’ expertise will be essential for any meaningful control of the virus. But if England’s woeful experience of Covid-19 takes another turn for the worse, putting them at the core of how the disease is dealt with may also allow Boris Johnson and his colleagues to slip free of blame – something that must have at least flitted across the collective mind of this most calculating of governments.

Shocking numbers, for now. But by Christmas such vignettes will be piled higher than the snow because, if the official projections are correct, the UK faces a jobs crisis the likes of which it hasn’t confronted for two generations. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecasts that this winter unemployment will rocket to levels last seen in the early 1980s under Margaret Thatcher, with nearly one in eight workers unemployed. Thought you’d been hurt badly by the banking crash of 2008? Just wait.

Here is the ultimate implication of the OBR’s analysis: if you are under 50, chances are you will never have been in a labour market as tough as the one that lies just ahead. The face of the 1980s recession was The Full Monty: male, middle-aged and on the scrapheap, alongside his heavy industrial employer. The face of the 2020 depression is more likely to be young, female and just let go from a restaurant – but in the early surge it will include a lot of people, from every walk of life.

Once the summer lull is over, an earthquake will shake Britain. Its early tremors can be felt already, as unemployment rises, yet few in the political classes have paused to consider the havoc it will wreak, let alone what might seriously be done about it. If anything, the government is helping to bring on the jobless crisis. This week, the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has begun cutting the subsidy he gives employers to keep workers on the payroll. That scheme has helped protect 9.5 million jobs and its gradual withdrawal will immediately mean more P45s being handed out. Not that you’ll hear much about it: Sunak prefers doing photo-ops to publicise his scheme to give voters half-price Happy Meals.

The government that had to be shamed into finding £120m to feed hungry kids over the school holidays happily chucks four times that – half a billion pounds – on a 13-day gimmick. Priorities, eh? Yet Sunak’s reward is ever more newspaper profiles. Last Saturday the Times magazine embellished its portrait of the chancellor with a Photoshopped halo.

Any pundits with stocks in the chancellor should cash them in now, because from this sunlit peak his standing can only fall. After doing many of the right things in March to save jobs, Sunak has done precious little since. The result will be to waste much of the £200bn he has spent to keep businesses and workers afloat.

The Treasury fully shuts its job retention scheme entirely at the end of October. Firms will be offered a small bonus to hold on to staff, but many will make redundancies. At that point, temporarily-idled employees who have been drawing 80% of their wages will crash through a trapdoor into the harsh world of unemployment benefits.

David Cameron’s government spent much of the past decade deliberately shredding the social safety net. “This is not an easy life any more, chum,” boasted welfare secretary Iain Duncan Smith in 2012. He and his chums helped ensure the UK went into the current crisis with one of the meanest employment safety nets in the industrialised world. And while Sunak has raised some benefits, they remain abysmally low.

What awaits those unlucky millions who go from being “strivers”, as George Osborne called them, to “skivers”? A massive shock. Early surveys by the Resolution Foundation show that of those starting to claim universal credit since the lockdown, one in three are already falling behind on bills. Later this month, landlords will be allowed to evict tenants who can’t pay their rent, and mortgage lenders will again be able to repossess homes.

In her just-completed book, Abusing Power, journalist Kate Belgrave documents the toll the welfare state takes on those who need it most. She records how Paul, battling in his filthy caravan to keep himself presentable, is told by a housing officer, “You’re too well-dressed to be homeless”, while jobcentre staff interrogate Marsha, who has mental health problems, about her childhood abuse. The government suspended much of this bullying early in the pandemic, but soon enough it will restart.

The welfare system has been reconfigured to punish Other People, not to help People Like Us. It is not fit for an era of mass unemployment. But neither is much else about polarised, privatised Britain during this pandemic. An economy addicted to consumerism looks useless at this point – when the last thing anyone wants is cafes, hotels and consumer services. The low-paid precarious jobs fostered by Tory ministers over the past decade will be among the first to go in this depression.

Over the crises of the past 40 years, the political class has always offered a better tomorrow. Thatcher responded to industrial decline with a services revolution and a credit boom. Tony Blair promised a knowledge economy. Cameron urged us on in the global race. For all his bombast and bluster, Boris Johnson can’t point to any sunlit upland just ahead. This time, there’s just a dead end.

• Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

Serco is facing growing calls to be axed from any future involvement in contact-tracing services amid concerns over the performance of private firms contracted to trace people who have mixed with infected individuals.

An email leaked to Justin Madders, the shadow health minister, showed the company was approached by Public Health England in January over preparations to tackle the pandemic, prompting questions over whether it was “cherry picked” by the government and given the inside track.

The £108m contract was directly awarded to Serco by the Crown Commercial Service on behalf of the Department of Health and Social Care (DoHSC) in May. It was not put out to open tender but selected via an existing framework of suppliers.

It comes after the government announced on Monday that NHS test and trace was cutting 6,000 contact-tracer jobs and allocating roles to regional teams to work with councils, after criticism that the centrally run system was failing to tackle local outbreaks.

Along with outsourcing firm Sitel, Serco has been contracted by the government to oversee “non-complex” contact-tracing cases in England, where call centre workers contact individuals who have spent time with an infected person. The firm has been forced to defend its performance, however, after figures showed just over half of people from the same household as an infected person were being contacted. Concerns have been raised by contact tracers that they have made just a handful of calls and feel untrained.

With Serco’s £108m three-month contract up for renewal on 23 August, the shadow health secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, and the shadow Cabinet Office minister, Rachel Reeves, jointly wrote this week to the health secretary, Matt Hancock, urging him not to hand Serco any more money to run contact tracing. They are calling on the government not to extend the contract, which could be worth up to £410m.

On Tuesday Madders released an email that he said was sent to Serco contact tracers in early June on behalf of the firm’s customer services director, Garry Robinson, which suggested the company had been contacted by health officials in January asking for help.

In the email, Robinson conceded it had been a slow start but stated there would be a “steady increase in the workload” in the coming weeks. In a section titled “journey so far”, he detailed the company’s early involvement in the pandemic response, writing: “I received a call from Public Health England officials on 22 January, explaining there was a virus in China, which was causing them concern, and they asked if I could stand up a small team in case they required urgent support. Since then, I have been responsible for a number of support lines across various government departments offering support to citizens of the UK concerned about their health, the financial impact CV-19 has had on them, their children’s education and the impact on their companies.”

Madders told the Guardian: “That email went out to contact tracers in early June and suggests Serco was cherry picked very early on by the government to get involved in the pandemic response. It looks like they’ve had the inside track from the start. It begs the question, why was Serco asked as early as January to get involved in the government’s response to the pandemic?

“It’s clear that adequate procurement processes were not followed when Serco was later awarded a £108m government contract to oversee contact tracing. Like with some PPE contracts, this seems to be creating a bit of stench. It’s up to the government to demonstrate there was no favouritism at play here.”

Cat Hobbs, director of We Own It, an organisation that campaigns for public ownership of public services, urged the government to give the money it could spend on renewing private contact-tracing contracts to local authorities. “Local teams have the tools and the local knowledge they need to do this vital work before any second wave this winter. Now they need the money,” she said.

A Serco spokesperson said: “Serco was appointed to the test-and-trace programme under the Crown Commercial Service’s contact centre services framework. We gained our place on the framework through fair and open competition. Serco has played an important part in helping to reach hundreds of thousands of people who might otherwise have passed on the virus. Our team of call handlers has been 93% successful in persuading people to isolate where we are able to have conversations.”

A government spokesperson said: “As a result of public and private sector organisations working together at pace, we were able to protect our NHS and strengthen our response to this unprecedented global pandemic. Contracts have been awarded completely in line with procurement regulations for exceptional circumstances, where being able to procure at speed has been critical in the national response to Covid-19.”

After the number of tested and confirmed cases rose to 1,062 in 24 hours at the weekend – the first time the daily total has exceeded 1,000 since late June – a senior public health expert said the escalation was “unacceptable, ineffective and dangerous”.

Prof Gabriel Scally, president of epidemiology and public health at the Royal Society of Medicine and a member of Independent Sage, said the government was failing to suppress the virus by its own standards.

“Something’s got to change, otherwise we are really in for an extraordinarily difficult time,” he said.

“It’s bad, and at the back of it all is that the government does not have a strategy. The last time they published a strategy for Covid-19 was 3 March. What they have published is a strategy for removing social restriction, but that’s not about dealing with the virus. They have no strategy for dealing with the virus that they have ever made public.”

In a 20 May document on the website of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), the Joint Biosecurity Centre set out targets that it felt needed to be met if “flare-ups” of Covid-19 were to be avoided.

Top of the list was keeping the caseload below 1,000 confirmed infections a day. “Decreasing daily incidence of symptomatic cases in all regions across the UK until the target acceptable incidence is reached, then incidence kept below that target. This target is yet to be specified and needs to be spelt out. We suggest 1,000 new symptomatic swab +ve [positive] cases per day in the UK,” it says.

The government’s official dashboard says there were 1,062 tested and confirmed cases as of 9am on Sunday 9 August. New cases dropped to 816 on Monday morning, the government said; infections counted on Sunday tend to be lower than on other days.

Other sources, including the Office for National Statistics, suggest far more infections are not being picked up by testing, many of them symptomless. Last week they estimated that there were 3,700 new cases per day. The NHS test-and-trace programme has appealed for more people to come forward for testing.

Independent Sage, the group of scientists who came together amid concerns over government policy and lack of transparency, said the current test-and-trace system in the community does not work. The centralised, privatised call centre system should be scrapped when it comes up for renewal on 23 August, they said in a report published on Monday.

Contracts with the private providers Serco and Sitel should be cancelled, it added. Their contact tracers reached only 56% of the 91,785 contacts of newly infected people transferred from the test system over nine weeks, the report said.

The group called for help and support, including financial assistance, for people asked to self-isolate, and warned that many would be living in crowded conditions or in multi-generational families and that those on zero hours contracts would feel obliged to carry on working.

“If we don’t take isolation seriously, our economy will spiral downwards. We should have had an effective isolation policy in February, with better pandemic planning. Not to have one six months later is nothing short of public health malpractice,” said the report.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said of the rise in cases to more than 1,000 in a day: “The UK continues to have low levels of disease compared to the start of the pandemic and, thanks to our large testing capacity, we are able to detect more cases now than ever before. We will not hesitate to take necessary steps to stop the spread of the virus and continue to urge the public to play their part by following government guidance.”

Another 21 deaths were added to the official government statistics on Monday, bringing the total confirmed to have died with Covid-19 to 46,526. More than 1,000 people are in hospital, of whom 67 are on ventilators.