UK coronavirus live: local lockdown imposed in Aberdeen; official UK death toll rises by 65

Nicola Sturgeon orders closure of pubs and restaurants, plus bans on non-essential travel and indoor meetings

• Schools reopening in England risks sharp rise in cases, says expert
• England’s contact tracers ‘making handful of calls’ a month
• BAME groups face ‘greater barriers’ than white people avoiding Covid-19
• UK tourists would rather cancel trip than enter quarantine or wear masks
• Global coronavirus updates – live

4.36pm BST

Different coronavirus vaccines could be used on different parts of the population if laboratories succeed in developing a range of successful types, the business secretary has said.

Alok Sharma visited a high-security factory in Livingston, near Edinburgh, where the French firm Valneva is developing a new vaccine using a deactivated Covid-19 virus, one of up to a dozen the UK government has said it may invest in.

We’re, of course, investing in a range of vaccine candidates which have different underlying and technical properties. At the end of the day, what we hope in an ideal world, is that all the vaccines we’re investing in are successful.

However, it’s also the case it will depend very much on the individual properties of individual vaccines, in terms of what part of the population they could be deployed into. So it is entirely possible to imagine that you have a number of successful vaccines but they’re deployed in different parts of the population.

4.28pm BST

The latest official figures show 46,364 people have died in hospitals, care homes and the wider UK community after testing positive for coronavirus as of 5pm on Tuesday; up by 65 from the day before.

Separate figures published by the UK’s statistics agencies show there have now been 56,600 deaths registered in the UK where Covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate.

Continue reading…

Source link