Government to make travel rule change announcement for England today

The Government is expected to announce some changes to the travel rules for England today.

The nation's Transport Secretary Grant Shapps will be making an announcement to MPs in the House of Commons.

Currently, as the rules stand, those arriving in the UK have to follow a set of strict rules even if they have been fully vaccinated.

Anyone returning from countries on the amber or red travel lists must self isolate for a total of 10 days after they return to England.

The changes being announced today mean that fully vaccinated people coming back into the UK from amber list countries will not have to quarantine.

It is not yet clear how it will work, when the rule change comes into force, or if unvaccinated children will be able to avoid self isolating if their parents have been double jabbed.

The announcement is expected to take place today at 11:30am.

The global death toll from Covid-19 has passed four million as the crisis increasingly becomes a race between the vaccine and the highly contagious delta variant.

The tally of lives lost over the past year and a half, as compiled from official sources by Johns Hopkins University, is about equal to the number of people killed in battle in all of the world’s wars since 1982, according to estimates from the Peace Research Institute Oslo.

The toll is three times the number of people killed in road accidents around the globe every year and, even then, it is widely believed to be an undercount because of overlooked cases or deliberate concealment.

With the advent of the vaccine, deaths per day have fallen to around 7,900, after peaking at over 18,000 a day in January.

But in recent weeks, the mutant delta version of the virus first identified in India has set off alarms around the world, spreading rapidly even in vaccination success stories like the US, Britain and Israel.

Britain, in fact, recorded a one-day total this week of more than 30,000 new infections for the first time since January, even as the government prepares to lift all remaining lockdown restrictions in England later this month.