PLUS: Sunak plans state aid for jobs until September.
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thetimes.co.uk
Wednesday March 3 2021
Coronavirus update
 
  Global confirmed cases 114,140,104 280,653  
  Global deaths 2,535,520 6,630  
 
 
  UK confirmed cases 4,188,400 6,391  
  UK deaths 123,296 343  

View our coronavirus tracker to see the data in full.

Good morning

Rishi Sunak will announce today multibillion-pound plans to extend the furlough scheme until September and pledge to use the “full measure of our fiscal firepower” to save jobs as Britain emerges from the lockdown.

It comes after Matt Hancock rejected calls to ease restrictions early for low-infection areas, while Nicola Sturgeon said that lockdown could be lifted faster in Scotland because of falling cases.

Meanwhile, vaccination will stop people passing on coronavirus “almost completely”, the Public Health England head of immunisation has forecast.

UK response

Summer schools should be targeted at pupils starting secondary school in England this autumn, the government “catch-up tsar” has told MPs.

Wearing masks in the classroom could slow primary school children’s development by covering up facial expressions, Public Health England’s leading covid scientist has said.

The hunt for a missing case of the Brazilian coronavirus variant has been narrowed to 379 households, which are being contacted individually. The news came as Matt Hancock, the health secretary, said that as well as trying to stamp out new strains likely to be resistant to vaccines, he wanted to “develop an updated vaccine that works on all these variants of concern”.

High-risk asthma patients are being ­denied priority access to vaccines because of problems with GP databases. Vulnerable people with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) are also encountering different approaches despite the health secretary promising they would “not be forgotten”.

World response

The EU’s collective approach to buying vaccines suffered further blows yesterday as Austria and Denmark announced a pact with Israel, and Slovakia received its first shipment of doses from Russia.

Takings at some Spanish hotels have fallen to £10 a night as the tourism sector continues to struggle during the pandemic. Overnight stays are down 85 percentage points on the same time last year, according to the National Statistics Institute.

In the US, an archbishop in New Orleans has told Catholics that the newly authorised Johnson & Johnson vaccine is "morally compromised" because it uses “abortion-derived cell lines”.

Chinese officials said that they hope to vaccinate 40 per cent of the country’s population, or 560 million people, by the end of June.

Business

Rishi Sunak faces opposition from a senior cabinet minister to his expected tax rises, as the chancellor seeks to rebuild the government’s finances in today’s budget.

Philip Aldrick reveals what we know is coming in the budget, what the chancellor is expected to do and what he ought to do as he seeks to stimulate the economy and start repairing the public finances, to fill an estimated £20 billion “structural” hole in the deficit.

Nationwide’s house price index rose by 0.7 per cent month-on-month in February, defying economists’ expectations of a further decline after prices slipped by 0.2 per cent in January.

The demerger of the Wickes do-it-yourself chain from Travis Perkins, halted a year ago because of the onset of the pandemic, is back on.

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