Areas with higher coronavirus rates have urged residents to stay at home amid fears the Government's change of message to ‘stay alert' was confusing.

Local authorities in Merseyside, which has a ‘significantly higher' death rate than England and the rest of the north-west, warned that the region was not ‘through the worst of this' while the message in the north-east, which has the highest rate of coronavirus infection in the country, continues to be for people to stay home.