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I came across the expressions "It came as" and "It comes as" in the BBC News article, but I couldn't find the meaning of it in dictionaries. What do they mean?

1) He also said employers should be sympathetic to workers who do not have access to childcare. It came as new rules said people in England can soon meet one person from outside their household, at a distance.

2) "If people find themselves in conditions that they think are unsafe, then they should immediately report it and we will take action, and that goes for all work." It comes as a further 210 people have died in the UK after testing positive for coronavirus, taking the total number of deaths recorded to 32,065.

3) Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all have devolved powers over their own lockdown restrictions. It comes as the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy released new guidance for UK employers on how to implement social distancing measures, with eight separate documents published for sectors which can now reopen.

BBC News, ‘Coronavirus: PM 'not expecting' flood of people back to work,’ https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52626822

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X "comes as" Y means, "X occurs at the same time as Y," or "X comes together with Y."

This is a conjunction.

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  • In that case, does "it" refer to its previous sentence as a normal pronoun? Can the verb "come" take a clause as its subject?
    – Kazuhiro7299
    Commented May 15, 2020 at 23:57
  • @Kazuhiro7299: Yes to both questions.
    – Tom Au
    Commented May 16, 2020 at 0:02
  • If you are right, does the tense difference as in "It comes" and "It came" make no difference? The expressions "It comes as" and "It came as" virtually mean nothing in the examples I'm using?
    – Kazuhiro7299
    Commented May 16, 2020 at 1:35
  • @Kazuhiro7299 Tenses always make a difference. In this case, X comes as Y means both things happen at the same time in the present, while X came as Y means both things happened at the same time in the past. (X will come as Y, which hasn't been used yet, means that both things will happen at the same time in the future.)
    – Jason Bassford
    Commented May 16, 2020 at 19:22

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