Image source, PA Media

Here's what you need to know this evening:

• The search for an individual infected with the Covid variant first found in Brazil has narrowed to 379 households in south-east England, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has announced
• He said the batch of home testing kits in question had been identified and each household was being contacted
• All secondary school pupils in Scotland will return to classrooms part-time from 15 March, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has said
• Northern Ireland's deputy first minister Michelle O'Neill has described the nation's newly-published plan for easing the coronavirus lockdown as "cautious and hopeful"
• And business support including furlough and the VAT cut for hospitality firms will continue "while lockdown persists", the business secretary has revealed, ahead of Wednesday's Budget
• The UK recorded 6,391 new coronavirus cases on Tuesday, and another 343 deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid test

Our live page today was brought to you by Marie Jackson, Paul Gribben, Ella Wills, Jennifer Meierhans, Robert Greenall, David Gritten, Sarah Collerton and Claire Heald.

Join us for more coverage tomorrow.

Here's a recap of some of the latest stories from around the world:

• The French government has revised its stance on the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, allowing its use for people aged 65-74 with pre-existing conditions
• The head of the US Centers for Disease Control has warned of a "potential fourth surge" of Covid-19 fuelled by highly contagious variants from the UK, Brazil and South Africa
• Sweden's top epidemiologist has also warned of a new spike, amid concerns about the rapid spread of the UK variant in the Scandinavian country
• More than 200 million doses of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine are to be sent to 142 countries by the end of May under the international Covax scheme, the WHO says
• Nearly four million shots have arrived in Nigeria under the scheme, following deliveries to Ghana and Ivory Coast
• Austria and Denmark say they plan to join forces with Israel to produce second-generation vaccines, amid frustrations about the slow vaccine rollout in the EU
• China's top respiratory disease expert confirms plans to vaccinate 40% of the country's 1.4 billion population by June

Image source, Getty Images

The UK government's global travel taskforce has met for the first time to start planning the UK's return to foreign travel.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps held a meeting with government departments, travel firms, transport operators and industry bodies.

Boris Johnson announced last month that foreign leisure travel for people in England could be permitted from May 17 at the earliest.

This is dependant on various factors related to the coronavirus pandemic, such as vaccine rollouts and the prevalence of Covid-19 variants.

The taskforce will give a report to the prime minister on April 12 setting out recommendations for how and when overseas trips could resume.

• When can I go on holiday in the UK or travel abroad?
• Which countries trigger hotel quarantine?
• You're finally abroad, but was it worth it?

Shapps says: "The UK's leading vaccine rollout has created a wave of optimism and, as a result, the global travel taskforce is charged with exploring safe and secure ways to restart international travel when the time is right."

He added: "We will not only consider the progress of our world-beating domestic vaccine programme, but also need to review where destination countries have got to with both vaccine and testing capabilities."

Kerry Allen
BBC Monitoring, Chinese Media Analyst

Image source, EPA

China has so far delivered more than 52.5 million Covid-19 vaccinations. If these are single doses, that means that roughly 3-4% of the country’s 1.4 billion population have been inoculated.

However, the country has ambitious plans to rapidly step up its vaccination programme over the next four months. Today, China’s top respiratory disease expert Zhong Nanshan confirmed that China’s centre for disease control and prevention had plans to administer 40 doses per 100 people by the end of June, external.

It was perhaps to be expected that China had plans to imminently accelerate its domestic vaccine drive, given that it already has the capacity to produce at least one billion doses, external and is increasingly rolling out vaccine aid overseas - to at least 53 developing countries, external.

China’s had some practice at rolling out medical care to huge populations. It showed last year that it had the capacity to mass-test entire cities with millions of residents for Covid-19 within days.

In October, it took just five days to test nine million residents across the eastern city of Qingdao.

Anna Holligan
BBC News Hague correspondent

Image source, Reuters

Sex workers have gathered outside the Dutch parliament, in protest at not being allowed to return to work when other contact professions can reopen for business on Wednesday.

"Sex work is work" and "no stigma" are among the words written on the banners brandished by women dressed in red. All contact professionals - hairdressers, beauticians, tattoo artists - can start seeing clients again from 3 March but sex workers can't.

This might not strike you as surprising - in many countries these trades are considered entirely different - but here in the Netherlands they usually enjoy equal status. Prostitution was legalised more than two decades ago.

Sex workers pay taxes, the industry is tightly regulated. But sex work is still considered too risky during the pandemic. So they have brought their peep show to parliament along with a plea, to be allowed to get back to business.

Image source, Reuters

Iraq has begun its Covid-19 vaccination programme, as the country struggles to contain a new spike in infections ahead of a historic visit by Pope Francis.

Front-line health workers were among the first people to be vaccinated on Tuesday, a day after the arrival of 50,000 Sinopharm vaccines donated by China.

The government says it has ordered another two million doses from Sinopharm to help protect the population of 40 million. It will also receive at least two million Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines via the global Covax scheme, while the World Bank has reportedly agreed to fund 1.5 million doses from Pfizer-BioNTech.

Iraq is battling a second wave of its epidemic. It reported more than 4,600 new cases and 30 deaths on Tuesday, only six weeks after the daily figures fell to 596 and three respectively.

The government has imposed 24-hour curfews on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays to combat the surge, but huge crowds are still expected to turn out to greet Pope Francis this weekend.

The Pope, who has been vaccinated, chose Iraq for his first international trip since the start of the pandemic despite his predecessor Benedict XVI and others warning of the health and security risks.

Marianna Spring
Disinformation and social media reporter

Image source, Getty Images

Twitter has announced it plans to ban users who repeatedly tweet harmful misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines.

Under the scheme, members will face a lock being placed on their account and if they accrue "five strikes", they face a permanent ban.

Twitter has said it will also start labelling misleading tweets about the jab.

Since the beginning of the pandemic - almost 12 months ago - conspiracy influencers have grown huge followings on social media by repeatedly sharing falsehoods about vaccines.

I investigated the boom in the following of accounts promoting anti-vaccine content on Twitter for BBC Panorama - exposing the harm it had caused to communities across the UK.

Vulnerable people I interviewed were scared off the vaccines by the latest tactics of a committed minority of activists, who use Twitter and other platforms.

Twitter has repeatedly committed to tackling harmful misinformation - but it will take some time to see whether this updated strike system results in those repeat offenders having their accounts removed.

While many of those influencers sharing vaccine mistruths in the UK have already been suspended from the site, accounts of those in the US - central to the disinformation ecosystem that repeatedly distorts stories about the vaccine - remain live at this time.

Image source, Getty Images

Sri Lanka has chosen a remote island where the country's minority Christian and Muslim communities can bury their dead, following a row about the cremation of Covid victims.

The government said Iranathivu island in the Gulf of Mannar northwest of the mainland had been chosen because it was thinly populated.

The minorities had previously been forced to cremate their dead in line with the practice of the majority Buddhists, but the government backed down last week in the face of vehement criticism from rights groups.

Muslims were angered by the ban, introduced last April, saying there was no scientific basis to claims that burials contaminated the groundwater. Muslims make up nearly 10% of the population.

However, the head of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress, Rauff Hakeem, also criticised the latest move, saying it was "pathetic racism", external.

Read more here

One BBC reporter, Juliana Gragnani, was on a flight arriving to Heathrow around the same time as the other flight into London from Brazil, which has been the focus of some of Public Health England's investigations as they try to trace the Brazil variant.

She talked about travellers’ experiences at the time, here.

Now, Juliana tells us how she has been sent a kit to test for Covid, along with other passengers on her flight:

"I had to travel last year to Brazil due to urgent family matters. I quarantined before I returned, took a test, and flew back to the UK, arriving in Heathrow on February 10th, via Paris. Both flights were packed.

I interviewed a few people who told me they were returning hastily before the hotel quarantine was put in place. My flight, AF1580, arrived around the same time as the São Paulo-Zurich-London flight, where the case from Gloucestershire was traced back to.

Border control was very busy. Passengers from different flights, including at least one from Italy, another from India, and both from Brazil (via Paris and Zurich) were in a queue for three hours with no social distancing.

After quarantining for more than two weeks (just to make sure), this afternoon I got a call from Test and Trace. They’re sending me a Covid kit and said this is being done with all passengers in my flight - AF1580. They also asked if I had taken a test after arriving in England.

Image source, PA Media

There's been lots of discussion around the UK's discovery of six cases of a new coronavirus variant first discovered in Brazil - so here's where we are:

• Six cases of the Brazil variant have been detected - three in Scotland and three in England
• Five of the six people have been traced and quarantined - you can read about them here
• Health Secretary Hancock says there is "no information to suggest the variant has spread further"
• One infected person has not yet been traced as they used a home test and did not fill in their details
• But the batch of tests they used has been narrowed down to 379 households in south-east England and the government is contacting them all
• The reason politicians are concerned about the Brazil variant is because scientists say it appears more contagious and vaccines have not yet been tested on it
• But updated vaccines could be ready within months, meaning we could receive a booster jab before next winter to protect against new variants

Image source, Getty Images

Please save the date, says Hannah Ingram-Moore, who is organising a celebration of the life of her father, Captain Sir Tom Moore, on 30 April, which would have been his 101st birthday.

At a private funeral over the weekend, she described her father, who raised almost £33m for NHS charities by walking laps of his garden, as "a beacon of light and hope to the world".

Now she's planning an event through the Captain Tom Foundation for people all around the world to "celebrate his generosity of spirit, the hope and joy he brought to millions and his sense of fun".

In a statement, external posted on Twitter, she thanked people for their "continuing support and compassion" shown to her family over the past few weeks.

"On Saturday we were able to give my father a fitting send-off adhering to his wishes in every way," she wrote.

"We played music he loved, spoke words that filled us with joy and the addition of full military honours would have had him bursting with pride."

You can read more about Captain Sir Tom Moore, a hero who gave a nation hope, here.

Image source, Getty Images

Image source, EPA

Earlier we reported that France had revised its stance on the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, allowing it for some people over the age of 65.

President Emmanuel Macron has also said he would happily receive the jab if offered it.

And yet just a month ago Mr Macron said the vaccine was "almost ineffective" in the over-65s, while his Europe minister was accusing the UK of taking "massive risks" by depending too heavily on it.

So what has changed? Have the French now seen the limits of criticising AstraZeneca and come to understand that there can be no such thing as too many vaccines?

Or have the UK's accusations of French vaccine nationalism been wide of the mark?

As the BBC's Hugh Schofield reports, it's probably a mixture of the two.

Artists from 41 countries will appear live at Eurovision, organisers have told the BBC’s Newscast podcast.

The contest's Martin Osterdahl says the performances were considered "necessary travel".

But delegations will be limited to 20 people, down from an average of 38 in normal times, he says.

He hopes there will be a live audience - but the decision has not been made yet.

"It makes a huge difference to the atmosphere of the broadcast if we have some people present," he says.

But if artists get ‘douze points’, they’ll need to reconsider the usual exuberant celebrations.

“We want to avoid that people start hugging and kissing each other in spouts of happiness,” says Osterdahl.

Commentators like the BBC’s Graham Norton will broadcast from ventilated commentary booths.

“I certainly hope [Norton] will be able to come," says Osterdahl. "I did have the pleasure of running into him in Stockholm when I produced the show and he’s always a very welcome visitor to the contest.”

Reality Check

As coronavirus vaccines are distributed across the world, misleading claims about them are also spreading.

There are concerns that false information shared online is fuelling hesitancy among some people about taking the vaccine.

BBC Reality Check's Jack Goodman looks at five viral claims and explains why they're wrong.

Secondary school pupils will take a Covid test before returning to the classroom on 8 March.

Children of key workers have been at school since January so they've been key in helping schools prepare for mass testing.

They've been showing our social affairs correspondent Fiona Lamdin how it's done.

Maddy Savage
BBC News, Stockholm

It looks like we’re heading towards a third wave, is the message Sweden’s top state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell delivered at the Swedish public health agency’s latest news conference.

The agency’s data suggest that the number of people being hospitalised with Covid-19 is on the rise and there are concerns about the pace at which the UK variant of Covid-19 is spreading.

Sweden has never had a lockdown but has toughened its approach in recent months, for example closing bars and restaurants early, and limiting organised public gatherings to a maximum of eight people.

Now, Tegnell has proposed that from 6 March a maximum of 500 people should be allowed inside shopping malls and large stores, a move that is expected to be approved by the government.

There are already rules in place that require stores to ensure at least 10 square metres of space per customer, but there have been concerns about overcrowding in shopping centres during recent school holidays.

Image source, Reuters

Image source, Getty Images

As we've been mentioning today, Chancellor Rishi Sunak will deliver the Budget tomorrow.

Ahead of the speech, Sunak has promised:

• more money for the vaccination rollout;
• a £5bn scheme to help High Street businesses reopen;
• a mortgage guarantee scheme to help first-time buyers.

So, what else you should be looking out for?

We break down what might be included here, including more support for jobs and workers, a stamp duty holiday extension, and the question of whether the chancellor will extend the business rates holiday.

And here is what we know already.

Former prime minister David Cameron has received a Covid vaccination.

He shared a photo of himself getting the jab on Twitter, external and urged others to do the same.

"It's crucial we look after ourselves and each other," he wrote.

Image source, PA Media

The search for an individual in the UK infected with the Brazil variant has narrowed to 379 households in south-east England, says the health secretary. It is one of six cases of the P.1 variant found in the UK in February. But what do we know about the other five cases?

• Two of the cases are from the same household in South Gloucestershire. They tested positive after someone returned from Brazil on 10 February - five days before the government's hotel quarantine rule came into force for arrivals high-risk countries.
• Everyone in five postcode areas of South Gloucestershire is now being invited to take a Covid test, even if they do not have symptoms.
• Two other people in the same household have also tested positive but are not currently included in the UK case total of six, while tests on their type of coronavirus continue.
• Officials are searching for passengers who were on the Swiss Air flight LX318 from Sao Paulo to Heathrow, via Zurich, which landed on 10 February.
• The other three cases are Scottish residents who flew to Aberdeen from Brazil via Paris and London, the Scottish government says.
• Passengers who were on the same flight to Aberdeen are now being contacted but there is no reason to believe the variant is in circulation in Scotland, Scottish Health Secretary Jeane Freeman says.

There are concerns that the variant first identified in Brazil could spread more easily and vaccines have not yet been tested on it. Read more about it here.

Image source, LDRS

A man has claimed he was strip-searched in police custody after officers arrested him on suspicion of breaching Covid rules with a trip to the beach.

On Sunday, Radek Kotlarek, 39, from Rhos-on-Sea, Conwy, drove more than 20 miles to the beauty spot of Talacre in Flintshire, with his wife and teenage son.

He said it was for a "mental break" as the couple were concerned their son was struggling in lockdown and affected by the separation from sick family members in Poland.

North Wales Police said officers arrested Mr Kotlarek after he refused to give his name when they suspected he had breached regulations. He was released without charge and has not been given a fixed penalty notice.

Allegations that Mr Kotlarek was strip-searched while in custody were put to the force, but it did not respond.

Wales' lockdown rules state all exercise must start from home and travel must only be for essential reasons.

Read the full story here.