Coronavirus: the symptoms Follow our live coronavirus updates here Who is Robert Jenrick?

Follow our live Covid-19 updates here

We were too slow to implement lockdown and make sure it was policed, Labour leader tells Tories Follow our live coronavirus updates HERE Coronavirus: the symptoms

Follow our live coronavirus updates HERE Coronavirus: The symptoms

Follow our live coronavirus updates here

Coronavirus: the symptoms Read our LIVE updates on the coronavirus here

MPs have approved hybrid proceedings in the House of Commons with some MPs set to attend via video link amid the coronavirus lockdown.

Follow our live Covid-19 updates HERE

Pressure ramped up on ministers to explain how the lockdown will end today as senior Tory MPs warned that businesses around the country "fear for their future" and could pass the point of no recovery.

The EU's chief negotiator has branded progress in post-Brexit talks disappointing and warned the "clock was ticking".

Sir Keir Starmer has urged the Government to publish an exit strategy for the coronavirus lockdown amid warnings the country could "fall behind" without one.

It is "too early" to begin easing any lockdown measures "in any meaningful way", Nicola Sturgeon has said.

Too many workers are still falling through cracks in the Covid rescue package, a former cabinet minister warned today as he called for the lockdown to be eased "as quickly as possible".

Asked by LBC's Nick Ferrari if he would join them, Mr Jenrick said: "No, I don't think I would do. But I'm not going to pass judgement on other people and what they're choosing to do.

Sir Keir Starmer has urged the Prime Minister to form a "national consensus" on the next phase of the Government's coronavirus response as ministers work on plans to ease the lockdown.

Lockdown measures may start to be lifted on Monday "if we possibly can", Boris Johnson has announced.

Matt Hancock has slammed Professor Neil Ferguson for his "extraordinary" breach of coronavirus lockdown rules, adding he was left "speechless" by his actions.

Needing to clear my head, I went down to the Penobscot River. There they were, swimming with the mergansers, following an early pulse of river herring to the mouth of Kenduskeag stream: two harbor seals, raising sleek round heads for a few long breaths before rolling under the waves.

Evidently it’s not uncommon for seals to swim the couple dozen miles between Bangor, Maine, and the Atlantic Ocean, but I’d never seen them here before. They were a balm to my buzzing thoughts: What happens next? Will I become a vector of death to my elderly mother? Is the economy going to implode? For a precious few minutes there were only the seals and mergansers and the fish who drew them there, arriving as the Penobscot’s winter icepack broke and flowed to sea, a ritual enacted ever since glaciers retreated from this continental shelf.

In the months ahead we can look to nature for these respites. The nonhuman world is free of charge; sunlight is a disinfectant, physical distance easily maintained, and no pandemic can suspend it. Nature offers not just escape but reassurance.

The nonhuman world is free of charge; sunlight is a disinfectant, and physical distance is easily maintained.

In 1946, in the aftermath of World War II, with the Nazi threat vanquished but the Cold War looming, George Orwell welcomed spring’s arrival in London’s bombed-out heart. “After the sorts of winters we have had to endure recently, the spring does seem miraculous, because it has become gradually harder and harder to believe that it is actually going to happen,” he wrote in “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad.” “Every February since 1940 I have found myself thinking that this time Winter is going to be permanent. But Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead at about the same moment.”

So she does. And so the slumbering earth warms to life. Two nights before the seals, two nights before World Health Organization declared a pandemic, before the NBA shut down with teams on the floor and fans in the seats, before the fright went beyond viral into logarithmic, was the Worm Moon: the full moon named for the imminent stir of earthworms in thawing soil.

In burrows beneath leaf litter, hibernating toads prepare to open what Orwell called “the most beautiful eye of any living creature,” resembling “the golden-colored semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet rings, and which I think is called a chrysoberyl.” Nearly as beautiful are the eyes of painted turtles waiting on pond bottoms here in eastern Maine, the ice above now retreating from shore, mallard couples dabbling in newly open water.

The birds are the surest sign of spring’s imminence. Downtown the house finches are holding daily concerts. Starlings are starting to replace their gold-streaked winter plumes with more iridescent garb. In the street today I saw two male mockingbirds joust above the pavement, their white wing-bars fluttering territorial semaphores, abandoning the contest only when a car nearly ran them down. 

There are many quieter signs, too: pale tips of shrubs poised to grow, a spider rappelling off a low branch, fresh fox scat in the driveway. It’s red from apples preserved under snow and lined with the fur of field mice and meadow voles whose secret winter tunnels are now revealed in the grass. Somewhere soon mother fox will give birth, nursing her blind hairless charges in underground peace.

Eastern comma butterflies will gather on the trunks of those apple trees and sip their rising sap. Not long after the first orange-belted bumblebee queens will appear, inspecting potential nest sites under fallen leaves and decomposing logs. Warm rainy nights will bring salamanders and newts, just a few spotted glistening inches long, some of them decades old, out from woodland hidey-holes and down ancient paths to vernal pool bacchanals held amidst a chorus of spring peepers. Woodland ephemerals will bloom in sunshine unfiltered by still-bare treetops. My favorite are trout lilies, colonies of which illuminate forest floors with a sea of bright yellow blossoms, petals falling once the canopy unfurls.

“The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers,” Orwell wrote, “but the earth is still going round the sun.”

At this point there’s no end of studies showing how nature is good for our health, how patients recover faster in hospital rooms with windows overlooking trees, how a mindful walk in the woods will lower stress and raise moods. All true, but at this moment something deeper and more urgent is offered. An affirmation of life.

Will the nightmare scenes out of Italy and Spain and now New York City spread across the land? How long will the pandemic last? Will it completely rend our already tattered social fabric? When can I again play hockey or go to a coffee shop or use a credit card machine without feeling like I’m risking my own and other lives? Who will die? Nobody knows for sure, but in a few weeks the swallows will arrive, and tonight above the fields at dusk I heard the cries of woodcock.

Secretive, ground-dwelling birds with limpid black eyes and long, slender beaks attuned to the frequencies of earthworm-rustles, their feathers blend perfectly with leaf litter and old grass. They rely on this camouflage, going still rather than fleeing a walker’s approach, taking wing only as a last resort.

When they do, their flight is notable for its slowness and the quavering whistle of their wings. At no other time than in spring do they dare draw attention, much less put on a show: calling out, with an urgent nasal buzz best described as a peent, and flying straight upward before spiraling against a darkening sky.

Brandon Keim is a freelance nature and science journalist. The author of The Eye of the Sandpiper: Stories from the Living World, he’s now writing Meet the Neighbors, forthcoming from W.W. Norton & Company, about what it means to think of wild animals as fellow persons—and what that means for the future of nature.

Lead image: Tim Zurowski / Shutterstock

The French are facing social disparities in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. With long bread lines and tensions with police, the Paris suburbs are faring poorly under the lockdown.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany denied on Wednesday that the Trump administration had blocked Dr. Anthony Fauci from testifying before a House committee.

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The beady-eyed character of Iseult Golden’s monologue could be an Alan Bennett creation: steely and unsentimental, she speaks her mind smartingly in a video message to her daughter who refuses to talk to her. Her tone is spiky at first but Marion O’Dwyer’s wry, understated delivery gives the drama a quietly pained depth. Part of the Abbey theatre’s monumental series Dear Ireland, it captures the bristling complexities of love between mothers and daughters in eight bittersweet minutes.

Despite everything, the Tory party is sticking to the ideology of the free market, rather than saving lives and jobs

“How on earth did it come to this?” Keir Starmer’s question could skewer Boris Johnson at every PMQs from now on. It encompasses all the damage the government did in the last decade, as well as all it has failed to do to protect the country from Covid-19. The list of derelictions in the early stage of the crisis is long, the testing and the protective equipment still shamefully inadequate. Have lessons been learned? The auguries are not good.

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Boris Johnson will address the nation on Sunday to set out a road map for how England might leave the Covid-19 lockdown. Any immediate changes have been billed as modest and incremental, but people are expecting more details on how life could differ over the next few weeks. Here are the questions the prime minister needs to answer:

The government must be cautious in both the decisions it takes and the messages it sends

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The end is not in sight. With an estimated 20,000 new infections a day, and with experts warning that the reproduction rate of coronavirus may be rising again, any premature loosening of the lockdown will only prolong the crisis. When the prime minister speaks on Sunday evening, it is essential that he makes it clear that people should still be staying at home, not relaxing their guard.

Though so many other countries had been hit, the government did not act soon enough to either contain the threat or prepare for it. Those failures have made a longer and tougher lockdown necessary. It was slow to take the pandemic seriously, slow to impose stringent social distancing, and slow to pursue equipment, testing and tracing, as the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, noted this week.

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The casts of the company's top dramas could soon be isolating together

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