Coronavirus latest news: Britons should holiday in the UK this year, says Cabinet minister

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• Spain opens borders to all vaccinated tourists

• Ross Clark: Why should we listen to Sage over June 21?

Britons should holiday in the UK this year, a Cabinet minister has said, as frustrated travellers return home from Portugal to quarantine.

Environment secretary George Eustice said he would be holidaying in Cornwall this year, and asked what others should do, he told Sky News: "My advice would be to holiday at home. Our advice has been don't travel unless it's absolutely necessary."

When the travel traffic light system was introduced by the Government, ministers said they were confident more countries would be added to the green list. But at 4am Tuesday, Portugal became an amber-list country, meaning people face a 10-day quarantine at home upon their return.

Mr Eustice added: "Obviously we had hoped, with these three categories that we had, we had hoped that situation would be improving in other parts of the world, that we'd be able to progressively add other countries to the green list.

"Sadly, that's not the situation, we do have this new variant of concern first identified in India that is now cropping up in other countries, and we've just got to take a very cautious approach."

​​Follow the latest updates below.

07:22 AM

Vaccine confidence among younger people 'has increased'

Dr Nikki Kanani, director of primary care at NHS England, said that vaccine confidence in younger people had increased.

Speaking as over-25s were invited to book their Covid-19 jabs, Dr Kanani told BBC Breakfast: "We're still seeing great uptake and we are definitely seeing younger people coming in and asking more questions, which is absolutely fine.

"More than four in five 40 to 49-year-olds have had their first dose and two-thirds of 30 to 39-year-olds have already had theirs, and that is still going to increase, of course, as people come forward, so uptake remains high.

"We had additional polling over the weekend that shows that the confidence in the vaccine has increased by a fifth - by 20% - in those under-40s.

"What's really important as we go into the younger categories is really appealing to people in their own communities and what our teams have done so well is reflect what a community needs locally - whether that's setting up pop-up (vaccination centres) in Gurudwaras or temples, or in shopping malls or at workplaces, that has been critical to making sure that people feel confident to take up the vaccine when they're asked to do so."

07:21 AM

NHS England director has 'goosebumps' over under-30s being vaccinated

Dr Nikki Kanani, director of primary care at NHS England, praised NHS staff as the health service began offering Covid-19 vaccines to under-30s.

She said that entering the final cohort on the vaccine priority list gave her "goosebumps".

"I remember that first day, like all of us will, I was in Croydon at the hospital there and we were watching the footage come in, and you could feel the difference in the air, it felt so special that we had hope and we had a way through the most difficult times that I think all of us have ever faced," she told BBC Breakfast.

"So, my huge thanks, eternal gratitude, to particular NHS teams in front of and behind the scenes who have really worked against all the odds to roll out this programme in an incredible way so that only six months later we can go into the final cohort, the final stages of this vaccination programme, and start offering that life-saving vaccination to over 25-year-olds."

07:08 AM

Study suggests meat-free diet may reduce Covid severity

Vegans and pescatarians may be less likely to get severe Covid-19, a study suggests.

People whose diets are plant-based and those who eat fish but not meat appear to have lower odds of getting a severe infection compared with others.

Low-carbohydrate, high-protein diets appeared to be linked to an increased chance of getting moderate to severe illness, though the findings were not statistically significant.

The new study examined data from healthcare workers across six countries, including the UK.

Patients completed a web-based survey about whether they had Covid and their diets.

06:39 AM

Cabinet minister defends delayed closing of borders to India

Environment secretary George Eustice said the borders were not closed to India earlier when infections there were rising because the country had better testing in place.

He told Sky News: "Initially, the incidence of the virus in people arriving from India was lower and, overall, while they were reporting high numbers of cases, that's because they were doing more testing.

"We were also looking at factors such as their ability to do genome sequencing and we're looking at all of this where we assess other countries."

He denied the decision not to close the borders to India sooner had been a political decision.

He said: "India was added as soon as we saw a spike in rates and as soon as we saw there was a reason to."

06:35 AM

'Critical' June 21 test will be if vaccinated are being infected

Environment secretary George Eustice said the "critical test" ahead of the planned lifting of restrictions on June 21 will be whether those who are vaccinated are being infected.

He told Sky News: "What we're not seeing at the moment is that growth in hospitalisations associated with (infections) and that's because we know that if people have the vaccine, particularly once they've had the second jab of the vaccine, it actually does give them immunity to this new strain that's around."

06:19 AM

Today's front page

Here is your Daily Telegraph on Tuesday, June 8.

05:54 AM

Health staff burnout reaches 'emergency' level

NHS and social care staff burnout has reached an "emergency" level and poses a risk to the future of services, MPs have warned.

In a highly critical report, the Health and Social Care Committee called for immediate action to support exhausted staff who have worked throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, but pointed to long-standing, unresolved issues even beforehand.

The Royal College of Nursing told MPs that, prior to the onset of the pandemic, there were 50,000 nursing vacancies in the UK, while the Royal College of Psychiatrists said a lack of staff was one of the biggest causes of workforce burnout in mental health services.

In their new report, the MPs said: "The emergency that workforce burnout has become will not be solved without a total overhaul of the way the NHS does workforce planning.

"After the pandemic, which revealed so many critical staff shortages, the least we can do for staff is to show there is a long-term solution to those shortages, ultimately the biggest driver of burnout."

The MPs said that, while issues such as excessive workloads may not be solved overnight, staff should be given the confidence that a long-term solution is in place.

04:37 AM

Summer holidays abroad on hold

Matt Hancock has warned Britons that summer holidays abroad are off for the "medium term" because of the need to protect domestic freedoms "at all costs".

The Health Secretary signalled that any significant expansion of the quarantine-free green list of holiday destinations has been put on hold until later in the summer because of the risk from new virus variants.

His comments came as an estimated 30,000 Britons scrambled to return to the UK from Portugal in the face of flight price increases of hundreds of pounds and four-hour queues for pre-departure Covid tests (watch the video below).

Read the full story here.

03:06 AM

Wuhan lab leak plausible, deserves further investigation: report

A report on the origins of Covid-19 by a United States government national laboratory concluded that the hypothesis claiming the virus leaked from a Chinese lab in Wuhan is plausible and deserves further investigation, The Wall Street Journal reported today.

The study was prepared in May 2020 by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and was referred by the State Department when it conducted an inquiry into the pandemic's origins during the final months of the Trump administration.

Lawrence Livermore's assessment drew on genomic analysis of the virus, The Wall Street Journal said.

President Joe Biden said last month he had ordered aides to find answers to the origin of the virus.

US intelligence agencies are considering two likely scenarios - that the virus resulted from a laboratory accident or that it emerged from human contact with an infected animal - but they have not come to a conclusion, he said.

READ MORE:

• US report 'found that Covid may have leaked from Wuhan lab'

• UK intelligence helping US investigate Wuhan lab leak theory

• Why the Wuhan lab theory inquiry will help Biden heal a divided America

02:32 AM

Artificial intelligence platform tracks vascular disease

Charalambos Antoniades - a professor of cardiovascular medicine and British Heart Foundation senior clinical research fellow at the Radcliffe Department of Medicine, University of Oxford - said: "We have built an incredibly adaptable AI platform that tracks vascular disease by decoding information from blood vessel images obtained routinely during hospital admission, and integrating it with a large RNA bioresource from human tissue biopsies.

"By simply adding in one extra step to the routine care of people admitted to hospital with Covid-19 who already have a CT scan, we can now detect patients at high risk of life-threatening complications and could potentially tailor their treatment to aid long-term recovery.

"We know that this exaggerated immune response to the virus can also cause abnormal blood clotting, and so we are developing this AI platform to specifically identify Covid-19 patients who are most at risk of having a future heart attack or stroke.

"We can also pivot our platform with ease to develop a new scanning 'signature' to better understand future viruses and diseases that take hold of our population."

02:28 AM

AI could calculate risk of death from coronavirus

New artificial intelligence that scans for heightened blood vessel inflammation could calculate someone's risk of death from coronavirus and variants, researchers suggest.

The technology could be used to tailor treatment and give people the best chance of recovery, according to new research funded by the British Heart Foundation.

Severe cases of Covid-19 have been associated with a cytokine storm, where the spike protein of the virus causes the immune system to go into overdrive and produces a surge of damaging molecules called cytokines.

By using routine chest CT scans, researchers at the University of Oxford have developed a Covid-19 signature using machine learning.

It detects biological red flags in the fat surrounding blood vessels in the chest to measure the level of inflammation driven by cytokines in people infected with the virus.

02:26 AM

Canada reportedly preparing to ease border restrictions

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is preparing to ease border restrictions for travellers who have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19, Bloomberg reported today.

Canada is making plans to loosen the current 14-day isolation period for travellers who have received two vaccine doses.

Travellers entering Canada would still be tested for coronavirus and may be required to quarantine for a shorter period.

The plan is expected be announced within days.

12:00 AM

Today's top stories

• Sixty-five per cent of people who ended up in hospital with the Indian variant had not received a single jab. Matt Hancock told MPs vaccination is working: "The majority of people in hospital with Covid appear to be those who haven't had the vaccine at all."

• A report on the origins of Covid-19 by a US government national laboratory concluded that the hypothesis claiming the virus leaked from a Chinese lab in Wuhan is plausible and deserves further investigation, according to a report.

• Matt Hancock has warned Britons that summer holidays abroad are off for the "medium term" because of the need to protect domestic freedoms "at all costs".

• Spain is opening to fully vaccinated travellers from around the world in an attempt to kick start its summer tourism season.

• Comment: Boris Johnson should tell world leaders that Covid is now an endemic disease that will never be eliminated, and the best thing the global community – from London to Lusaka – can do is to work together to minimise the threat.

• Fewer than 10 per cent of healthcare workers have been vaccinated in the world’s poorest countries, the World Health Organisation has warned, amid mounting concerns that Covid still has the potential to wipe out a generation of medics.