A school has created a wellbeing garden for children and teachers whose mental health have been affected by the pandemic.

An unused courtyard at Chapel Allerton primary in Leeds has been transformed into an “oasis of calm”.

Community groups have worked alongside the school to create a space where pupils can relax and enjoy nature.

Headteacher Nicholas Sykes said the “mental and emotional wellbeing” of everyone at school was very important.

The garden will be used for mindful activities and lessons and also be a place that pupils and staff can got to for some quiet time.

Demand for labour (that’s all employment plus vacancies) has recovered to almost exactly its pre-pandemic level. But the data indicates that the increase in vacancies is not due to a surge in demand for labour, but because the labour force is shrinking: it dropped by 1.6% or 561,000 between the first quarters (Jan-March) of 2020 and 2022, which is greater than the increase in job vacancies over the same period (492,000).

Notably, people’s reasons for being economically inactive have changed over the past couple of years. Following the first COVID lockdown, the large drop in labour supply among 16-64s (those of working age) was mainly driven by rises in long-term sickness (139,000) and early retirement (70,000).

The drop in the workforce also masks a considerable churn within it, which may be adding to employers’ difficulties in recruiting staff. During the first lockdown, the number of EU workers fell by some 300,000. This has partially recovered, as you can see in the chart below, but there are still around 100,000 fewer than at the start of the pandemic.

Yet this has been more than offset by continued long-term growth in the number of non-EU foreign-born workers in the UK, increasing by some 170,000 since the start of the pandemic. Brexit, in other words, in tandem with the pandemic, has been a source of churn in the labour market.

The rise in the rate of job vacancies appears remarkably uneven across local authority districts in Great Britain. The two maps below show the change from before the pandemic in February 2020 (on the left) to July 2021 (on the right), the most recent month for which we have been able to compute data. This is likely to still be indicative of the most recent geographic pattern.

It shows huge increases in vacancies in relatively few districts, while most others show either modest increases or falls. The highest rates are particularly found in remoter rural areas, particularly in the south-west and north-west of England, and in parts of inner London.

Many of these districts are dependent on foreign labour, particularly for agriculture in rural areas, and hospitality and other sectors in London. Again, this may be a sign of the effect of Brexit and the pandemic choking off the growth in the number of EU workers.

About 1.3 million adults have become inactive since the height of Covid, with at least 12 million taking less than an average of 30 minutes’ exercise a week, as activity levels only just begin to recover towards pre-pandemic rates.

The Active Lives Adult Survey, which is the largest study of the matter in England and has 175,000 respondents, tracked adults’ activity for a year from November 2020, with the data taking into account the impact lockdowns had on activity levels.

Just over 60% of adults (28 million) were active, achieving more than 150 minutes of activity a week, while 27%, or 12.4 million adults, were inactive, with less than 30 minutes of activity a week. A further 11.5%, or 5.2 million adults, were fairly active but did not reach an average of 150 minutes a week.

The data also showed that while activity levels dropped during periods of lockdown restriction, since coronavirus became less prevalent and restrictions were eased activity levels had begun to stabilise and were now recovering. In mid-March 2021, 61% of the population were active, compared with 58% 12 months earlier.

Former health secretary Matt Hancock has blamed Public Health England (PHE) for failing to alert him to asymptomatic transmission of Covid after a court ruled that the government policy of discharging patients to care homes during the early stages of the pandemic was unlawful.

In a ruling on Wednesday, Lord Justice Bean and Mr Justice Garnham concluded that policies contained in documents released in March and early April 2020 were unlawful because they failed to take into account the risk to elderly and vulnerable residents from non-symptomatic transmission of the virus.

They also said that, despite there being “growing awareness” of the risk of asymptomatic transmission throughout March 2020, there was no evidence that the then-health secretary addressed the issue of the risk to care home residents of such transmission.

Come the end of March, the lights will dim on the UK’s Covid epidemic. Despite infection levels rising, cases will plummet, as free lateral flow and PCR tests are stopped for the majority of people in England, with other countries in the UK also set to reduce free testing in the coming weeks and months.

But while the government has argued it is time to manage Covid as we do other infectious diseases such as flu, scientists have warned ending community testing could put vulnerable people at risk and undermine efforts to understand the virus.

From 1 April, symptomatic testing will be free only for certain groups, such as hospital patients and social care staff. However, the Department of Health and Social Care has yet to give details on which other groups will be eligible.

After a winter of “flow before you go”, the change in policy seems dramatic.

Tackling Covid has undoubtedly been expensive: free testing, contact tracing and research studies do not come cheap. And, as the government points out, there is a high level of immunity across the country and the Omicron variant is less severe – the threat to most people is very different now to what it was at the start of the pandemic.

However, the end of free community testing means most individuals will be in the dark as to whether they have the virus, unless they are able to pay for a test, meaning they may go into public places while infected, passing the virus on to those they would otherwise have tried to protect. The situation is likely to be worse in more deprived communities.

While the success of vaccines and other approaches in tackling the severity of Covid, as well as less severe variants, may suggest that is not the problem it once was, rising infections have once again put significant pressure on the NHS. Experts warn even hospitalisations with Covid, rather than because of it, can cause logistical difficulties, exacerbate existing health problems and put vulnerable people at risk.