good afternoon. the government's denied reports that it has drawn up plans to allow some schools and businesses to open in mid—may. ministers say it'll only happen when the scientific advice indicates it is safe to do so. elsewhere, a delivery of some protective equipment for health care workers, that was due to arrive in the uk today from turkey has been delayed. here's our health correspondent, jane dreaper.

stephen pearson, who died from coronavirus over the weekend aged 51 was devoted to his wife and two daughters. he was also a mental health nurse who had given the nhs in the north—east of england more than 30 years service. his younger daughter bethany told me about their shock. i said, on a scale of one to ten, how do you feel? he said he was five. he said, you are worrying about nothing. he slept upstairs in the bedroom and my mum slept away from him and we woke up in the morning and he was gone. bethany, her mum and sister have since tested positive for covid—i9 and have felt ill from the virus in the midst of their grief. please stay at home while you can. my dad couldn't and he lost his life. if you can't, i know it is horrible, no one wants to be stuck at home 2a hours of the

day, every day but it is what we need to do right now. if it saves one life by staying in the house, thenit one life by staying in the house, then it is absolutely worth it. the government says there isn't enough information yet that would allow the lockdown restrictions to be lifted. ministers confirmed today that hotels, pubs and restaurants will be among the last businesses to reopen and suggestions that children might be back in classroom soon have been denied. we want to make sure we make a balanced judgments about which restrictions can be relaxed at what time. and you are quite right to say that we have stressed the reporting in today's newspapers that schools will open on may the 11th, that is not true, we have not made that decision. lockdown is a blunt tool in and of itself. we need a testing and tracing strategy alongside it to help us manage and cope with this virus for the coming months. so let's see where we get to, but so

far the government has not met the promises it made before on testing. uk scientists are working at a pace to research a vaccine that could protect against the virus, but as well as testing any jab protect against the virus, but as well as testing anyjab for protect against the virus, but as well as testing any jab for safety, which will take time, researchers say they will have to be a massive effort to sort out manufacturing efforts. those companies need new equipment, they need to have their staff trained in using new protocols and quality control assessments. all of that can happen but the companies we will be working with are going to have to stop doing what they normally do and make this vaccine instead. so we need support for them all to make sure it is done in a fairwait all to make sure it is done in a fair wait while they are trying to do something that is very important. today, the drive to get vital protective equipment to nhs staff suffered a setback. a flight from turkey with a vital shipment, including 400,000 surgical gowns isn't expected to arrive. although the government hopes it will be here

in the coming days. jane dreaper, bbc news. so the government's poured cold water on reports that it had drawn up plans to start easing the coronavirus lockdown within weeks. with me now is our political correspondent, jonathan blake. where do we stand on easing restrictions? it seems any talk on lifting restrictions on the coming weeks is premature. the government has said it doesn't want to get into a discussion about how and when those decisions will be made because it wants the focus to be on the message for people to stay at home. it says it is a critical time in the fight against coronavirus and that is the best way to slow the spread of the disease. but it is clear there are discussions being had across whitehall across various government departments about how and when to lift the restrictions. gove saying this morning the time is not right for that yet. there has also been scrutiny of the government's response early on to the coronavirus outbreak. mr gove suggesting it was

grotesque, as he put it, to say the prime minister was not engaged in this pandemic from the early stages. there have been reports of him skipping cobra meetings and others have said it is not always the prime minister who attends or chairs cobra meetings and in any case, we did know at the time in january and february that it was the health secretary matt hancock, in the chair then. ministers trying to grapple with the day—to—day problems this crisis is throwing up still and signs again things don't go as planned, with the shipment due from turkey of personal protective equipment now not arriving today as hoped. hopefully though, in the coming days. jonathan, many thanks. hundreds of people took to the streets of cities in a number of american states last night to demand an early end to the coronavirus lockdown. president trump said some businesses would re—open tomorrow in texas and vermont and accused some democrat state governors of "getting carried away" with their restrictions. andy moore has this report. my body, my choice. 0pen 0hio now!

in states across the us, there have been noisy protests against lockdown. america will reopen. for many of these trump supporters, the right to liberty is as fundamental as their right to bear arms. we need to reopen our country. we need to bring our economy back up, it's killing businesses doing this. i feel the government has taken advantage of a virus and overstated it. we have 37 deceased in our state and that's a very low number. mr trump has been accused of fuelling these protests with tweets about the need to liberate some states. a charge he didn't exactly deny. i know there's a lot of protests out there. i just think that some of the governors have gotten carried away. you know, we have a lot of people that don't have to be told to do what they're doing.

graphs were unveiled to show that america's per capita mortality rate was lower than most countries. with the accusation china was faking its figures. china's number one by a lot, it's not even close. they're way ahead of us in terms of deaths. it's not even close. you know it, i know it, they know it. in new york, the state hit hardest by coronavirus, another much smaller protest outside mr trump's hotel. demonstrators laid out fake body bags, claiming the policies of the president and the vice president have been responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. andy moore, bbc news. some of the biggest names in music have joined forces to celebrate healthcare workers and raise money in a globally televised concert. lady gaga, paul mccartney and billie eilish were among those who performed songs from their homes. the rolling stones even managed to play from four separate locations.

0ur entertainment correspondent, colin paterson, was watching. # when i saw her today at the reception. # a glass of wine in her hand #. one world together at home has already been dubbed the living room live aid. the rolling stones filmed their parts individually on mobile phones. # so i went down to the demonstration #. charlie watts clearly didn't have a proper drum kit to hand. there was a beatle via broadband. sir paul mccartney. let's tell our leaders that we need them to strengthen the health care systems all around the world. so that a crisis like this

never happens again. # i'm still standing betterthan i everdid. and sir eltonjohn's piano had been wheeled into the garden. # smile though your heart is breaking. the event was curated by lady gaga, who opened the show with a charlie chaplin classic. # sunny, you smiled at me. billie eilish played a cover of the 1960s standard sonny. while taylor swift showed off some

very natty wallpaper. a uk version will be shown on bbc one tonight with extra british performances, calling it the wi—fi woodstock might bea calling it the wi—fi woodstock might be a bit ofa calling it the wi—fi woodstock might be a bit of a stretch but they won't be a bit of a stretch but they won't be many more occasions when one of the beatles and the rolling stones appear on the same bill. colin paterson, bbc news, the living room. and just to say you can see coverage of the "one world: together at home" concert on bbc one at a 7:15 tonight. the next news on bbc one is at a 5:45. goodbye. so what i am interested in is working with my colleagues in economics and policy to come back with an optimal route to get back to normal. the fact is, we just have slowed hello. you're watching the bbc news channel. president trump has said the us states of texas and vermont will allow certain businesses to reopen from monday. at the daily white house briefing, mr trump said there were signs

that the virus had passed its peak. in major cities around the country, demonstrators have been demanding an end to the stay at home orders. professor bhramar mukherjee, professor of global health and epidemiology at the university of michigan, said the us would have to be careful as it eased the lockdown. i want to filter out the political biases and agenda from the scientific conversation. so what i am interested in is working with my colleagues in economics and policy to come back with an optimal route to get back to normal. the fact is, we just have slowed down in our case counts, we have not turned the corner in many places and there are new peaks coming up, so it would be quite short—sighted to open in a hasty way and really undo the social distancing work that all of us have done together. humans are finally, ultimately, beating the dire model projections, so we have to be really careful as we reopen. i think we have to go through a step of stabilisation,

and then reactivate the workforce. that's my own opinion. it's not a question of the number of case counts or time, but we have to look around and say, are we ready to follow the three principles of test, trace and treat? then work on the viral control and the economic recovery simultaneously. south korea has reported only eight new coronavirus cases in the last 24 hours. it's the first time in two months that the country has seen only a single digit increase in infections. as our correspondent laura bicker reports, the authorities in seoul have now announced they plan to ease restrictions on social gatherings. right from the very first case, which was 20th of january — remember, that's the same day as the united states announced its first case of coronavirus — the difference here was that within 17 days, this country had created a test and 100 laboratories ready to process those tests.

right from the outset, they decided to go after this virus aggressively. way back at the end of february, when i was in the worst hit area of daegu, and there were around 100 ambulances lining up outside the hospital, i said to officials, "are you ever going to get this under control?" they said to me at the time, "yes, we are determined". now, just eight weeks later, here we are, and they have now announced eight new cases. the last six days, it has all been under 20 daily new cases. it is worth mentioning, reeta, that five of those eight new cases today come from overseas arrivals, where they are testing everyone at the airport and also demanding that everyone arriving undergoes i4 days' of quarantine. and what was it in south korea that gave them this efficiency and determination? had it been previous experience? south korea had been exposed to sars, hasn't it? yes.

it's notjust sars, it was mers, middle east respiratory syndrome, back in 2015. south korea had the worst outbreak outside of the middle east, and at that time they realised that they couldn't trace where patient zero had come from and where he had travelled to. at that point, they recreated laws to try to track and trace those with the infection. so it means that, right now, if i had coronavirus, the government would track me using my phone. i would also be required to fill in details of how i was feeling each day. the minute that i went outside my quarantine area, the phone would ring. that's the kind of tracking and tracing measures that are used. also at the time, i have been told that the day the first patient was diagnosed, they started to realise how contagious this virus was, so they realised they needed a test and they needed a test quickly. they told four laboratories that they needed a test and they had this partnership between private

and public health, which allowed one laboratory to come up with a test within a week. four others came up with other tests. so that's how they had managed to do it quite quickly — experience, and also this kind of public—private partnership, which has allowed infectious disease specialists to come to the forefront. while some countries in europe are beginning to ease restrictions, many others have extended the measures introduced to fight the virus. tim allman reports. this is madrid, one of the world's great capital cities, looking more like a ghost town. spain has been one of the ha rdest—hit countries with more than 20,000 dead. the prime minister says the state of emergency is to be extended for another 15 days. nearly 500 more fatalities in italy, but that figure is down from the day before, the death rate appears to be slowing.

in france, more positive news, this military field hospital is being partly dismantled as the city in the country improves. heading east, the capital of azerbaijan, where the streets are being sprayed with disinfectant. quarantine will last at least another two weeks. the country's borders remain closed. in lithuania, they have seen a record jump on the number of coronavirus cases, just one day after the health minister insisted the outbreak and reached its peak. had reached its peak. the hotspot, this town just outside vilnius, military police stopping anyone getting in or out. translation: it's been decided to test all adult residents in town. tests will be carried out to not only find active cases of the disease, but also to try to identify residents who already might have immunity. this situation is indeed dangerous.

in poland, the presidential election is due to take place next month, but how does a country of 40 million people vote in the middle of a global pandemic? translation: the coronavirus epidemic is the reality for a couple of months coming, and a presidential election will be possible in two year's time at the earliest. if the parties don't agree, the only secure form of conducting a presidential election is postal voting. this is istanbul, where europe meets asia, another place where the streets are deserted. a two—day curfew is in place, anyone younger than 20 or older than 65 has been told to stay home. the fight against the virus goes on. tim allman, bbc news. a team of scientists at oxford university has reported encouraging developments in the search for a

coronavirus vaccine. patients are expected to take part in trials next week. professor sarah gilbert, who is leading the team, warned the bbc‘s andrew marr show nobody could be sure it would be successful. no, nobody can be absolutely sure it's possible, that is why we have to do trials, we have to find out. i think the prospects are very good but it's clearly not completely certain. and to get the vaccine to a stage where it is absolutely safe you have to do a lot of trials and that can take some time. where on that process have you got to? we haven't immunised anybody yet. we are about to start clinical trials, we hope, towards the end of next week. we are waiting for the final safety test to be done on the vaccine and the final approvals to be given. but, in the meantime, we have been given permission to start recruiting volunteers and explaining the process of the vaccine trial to them, to take blood samples from them, to check their health status before we recruit them. and so by the time we have all

the approvals for the vaccine ready, we should have a good pool of volunteers to draw from and we will be able to get going quite quickly. and so if all that goes well and, fingers crossed, when might it be ready? it depends what you mean by ready. there are a lot of complex stages in vaccine development. first of all, we have to immunise healthy people between the ages of 18 and 55. we are looking at the safety of the vaccine as we go. we have used this type of vaccine many times before, so we are not expecting any surprises with this. it has a very well characterised profile of what happens to people after vaccination. they may have the usual things that you have after vaccination, a slightly sore arm, a slight fever for a day or two, but that is expected. we will then increasingly immunise more people. we will go into older people, we will start to look at the safety and the immune response to the vaccine in older people, as well as younger people. that is important because it is the older population that we really need to protect with the vaccine, but with vaccines in general you get

not so good immune responses as the immune system ages. so we need to find out with this vaccine how good it is looking in older people compared to younger people, just by measuring the immune response to the vaccination. and we are also going to be looking to see if the vaccine works to protect people and stop them getting infected. the way we do that is that half the people in the trial will receive the coronavirus vaccine and half of them get something else, another vaccine that is licensed to protect against meningitis. people don't know which vaccine they are having. over time as people become infected, or have symptoms of coronavirus, they will come to us to get tested and we will arrange to have them tested very quickly. when enough people have become positive to the coronavirus, the statisticians will look at which groups those people were in to find out were they in the group that had the coronavirus vaccine? or are they all in the group that had the meningitis vaccine? obviously we are hoping for the infections only to happen in the meningitis vaccine group.

if that is the case, we will then be able to say that this vaccine works, at least in the age range that we have vaccinated, and we can then start expanding the studies and we can start to apply for emergency use license so the vaccine can be used more widely. it does sound to me from what you are saying that it is very unlikely this vaccine will be ready for the wider population until the end of the year or thereabouts. it is very difficult to predict and there are two parts to that. one is demonstrating that the vaccine works. that is going to be affected by how much virus transmission there is at the time we are doing the testing. obviously we are seeing a drop in hospital admissions now, probably a drop in transmission in the community, and that is great for the population as a whole. it makes vaccine testing more difficult, though, because we need a small number of people to become infected, and it is really a very small number, in order to know that the vaccine is actually working. we need a situation in which some people could have been infected but they weren't and other people who had the vaccine

were infected. and so that might take a long time if there is not very much virus transmission. the other part is having enough vaccine ready to use. so in parallel with a clinical trials what we need to do is start preparing to manufacture large amounts of the vaccine. so people are talking about millions of doses being available by this autumn potentially. what do you need from the government to ensure that happens? what we need from government is support to help us accelerate the manufacturing. there aren't any manufacturing facilities in this country that at the moment can make very large amounts of the vaccine. we have a pilot plant in the university that can make small amounts of doses and that is what we are using for the first clinical trials. but we need to go to a much bigger scale. those companies need to have new equipment, they need to have their staff trained in using new protocols and new quality control assessments, and all of that can happen, but the companies we are going to be working with are going to need to stop doing what they would normally do and make this vaccine instead. so we need support for them all to make sure that is done in a fair way whilst they are trying

to do something that is really very important. millions of 0rthodox christians are holding their easter celebrations under tight restrictions. officials in europe, the middle east and africa urged people not to attend services, fearing it would lead to a spike in coronavirus infections. but in the former soviet republic of georgia, 0rthodox leaders have decided to keep churches open and offer holy communion using a shared spoon. from georgia, rayhan demytrie reports. holy communion in the time of pandemic, taken from a shared spoon. georgia's orthodox church has refused to adapt the sacred ritual, despite the risk of spreading infection. translation: we parishioners come here in such high spirits that it is impossible to have doubts and fears.

holy communion is the greatest thing. under georgia's state of emergency gatherings of more than three people are banned, but last week on palm sunday in tbilisi's main cathedral, there were no police to enforce it. these markings here indicate the distance that people should be keeping apart from each other, but unfortunately outside, and most importantly inside the cathedral, these rules are not being observed. inside the cathedral, worshippers are kissing icons with no disinfection in sight. some keep their distance, but it is difficult to maintain even in a building of this size. georgia's most revered man, the patriarch, ilya ii, has ruled that the easter services

will go ahead. this promo video shows the georgian police in action, issuing hefty fines for those not complying with the state of emergency. so, many people are questioning why the authorities have not penalised the church. they believe that the church is a chief political ally which it cannot alienate. they came to power in 2012 to a large extent because of the support of the church. the country's prime minister says his government has been trying to strike a balance. by keeping its doors open, the church says it is providing a much—needed spiritual relief to the nation. but with covid—19 infection rates going up, the country's health authorities are calling on people to listen to the science

for the sake of their country. supermarkets in the uk are asking people not to use online shopping if they don't have to, in order to free up delivery slots for the most vulnerable. stores say they have seen huge demand. our business correspondent emma simpson reports. my whole day is taken up trying to get a slot. frank kane is scared to go to the supermarket. he is 66 with chronic kidney disease and lives on his own in hull. i'm pretty worried. food is essential and also your health is essential. if you can't get any food delivered, then you've got to literally go out and risk your health to get it. and here is his question. why is it so difficult for vulnerable people to get online delivery slots? there are millions of people who may

be feeling vulnerable right now, whether it is having health problems, like frank, being pregnant or elderly. it's no wonder, then, that demand for home delivery slots has gone through the roof. 5.00am and the online orders are being picked. sainsbury‘s have added extra hours, extra workers and hundreds of vans to ramp up capacity. they are increasing their online slots by 76%, and it is a similar story at our other big grocers, all coming up with ways to boost supply. including more click—and—collect. even so, all of this is never going to be enough. we can't do it all and we can't do it on our own. meet sainsbury‘s' head of online. how do you prioritise customers? we are desperately trying to do the right thing. we have proactively reached out to over 700,000 who we know to be vulnerable, but we know that that isn't everyone and this

is where we are looking for everyone to play their part. so if you do have an online order and you can shop for someone else while you have it, please do. equally, when you are coming into our stores, please to shop for people in your locality. ciaran tom and is part of a group thatis ciaran tom and is part of a group that is now at the front of any online grocery crew because she is recovering from cancer, she is classed as extremely vulnerable by the government. she shops with tesco and has been logging on at midnight to make sure she got slot.|j and has been logging on at midnight to make sure she got slot. i am just exhausted. my energy levels from the treatment that i had last year are still really low, i'm still trying to get back to normal and ijust can't sustain having such late nightsjust to can't sustain having such late nights just to try and get a slot for shopping. tesco says it is doing everything it can to support this most vulnerable customers. with

demand outstripping supply, the message from all the supermarket says these online deliveries should be for those who need them the most. now it's time for a look at the weather. for many of us we have had clear blue some sunny skies today. high pressure is firmly in charge of our weather. 0vernight will keep the clear skies. it will be a dry night with a fairly brisk easterly breeze blowing around our eastern shores. it never gets tackled here, 7 degrees in london, five for norwich, maybe a few patches of frost in the sheltered glens of scotland. tomorrow, the high pressure is still with us, but will have stronger easterly winds, gusting between 30 and 40 miles an hour. although for most of us it is sunny from dawn to dusk, those winds will knock the edge of the temperatures, particularly so across eastern areas

of england and scotland. on the coast, about 12 degrees, inland 19 is the high and carla. the winds will eventually fall lighter towards wednesday and it is them that the temperatures will be pushing well up into the 20s. hello, this is bbc news. the headlines...