To prevent new variants arriving in the country, all travel corridors will be closed from 4am on Monday. All arrivals will need a negative Covid test and must quarantine for 10 days upon arrival. The vaccine is ‘steadily protecting those most at risk’, Boris Johnson said. Almost 45% of over-80s and 45% of care home residents have been vaccinated. The spread of the virus is ‘slowing right down’ in most parts of the UK, Chris Whitty said, but warned hospitalisations and deaths would likely continue to rise into next week. There are early signs the restrictions are working, with the R number estimated to have narrowed to between 1.2 and 1.3, compared to 1 and 1.4 last week. In London, where tougher restrictions came in earlier, the R number is lower, estimated - based on data up until 11 January - to be between 0.9 and 1.2, compared with 1.1 and 1.4 the previous week. The UK government said a further 1,280 people had died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 as of Friday, bringing the official total to 87,295. The government also said that, as of 9am on Friday, there had been a further 55,761 lab-confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK. It brings the total number of cases in the UK to 3,316,019. You can view the data dashboard here. Separate figures published by the UK’s statistics agencies for deaths where Covid-19 has been mentioned on the death certificate, together with additional data on deaths that have occurred in recent days, show there have now been 102,000 deaths involving Covid-19 in the UK. Wales will introduce new Covid risk assessments for workplaces, shops and supermarkets amid concerns some businesses are not taking restrictions seriously enough. All retailers will be required by law to put in place measures such as limiting the number of customers, while workplaces are to be obliged to carry out Covid assessments taking into account the new more easily transmissible variant. Wales also introduced mandatory testing for international arrivals. Passengers planning to travel into Wales from abroad will have to prove they have tested negative for coronavirus before their departure from 4am on 18 January. The new Brazilian variant of concern has not yet been detected in the UK, Prof Wendy Barclay, G2P-UK lead and head of department of infectious disease and chair in influenza virology at Imperial College London, said. It comes as Britain’s ban on the arrivals of travellers from South American countries and Portugal came into effect at 4am on Friday morning, to limit the spread of a concerning new variant. The Supreme Court “substantially allowed” an appeal brought by the FCA in a landmark £1.2bn legal battle over businesses’ ability to claim on insurance for coronavirus-related disruption. The UK economy is edging towards a double-dip recession as GDP fell 2.6%. Official figures confirmed a renewed slump in November fuelled by the second national coronavirus lockdown in England. That’s all from me for today. You can continue to follow our coverage of the coronavirus pandemic over on the global live blog, where the news has just broken that a tragic global milestone has been reached. More than two million lives across the world have now been lost to Covid-19. My colleague Mattha Busby has this very sobering reminder: It took eight months to hit 1 million dead. It took less than four months after that to reach the next million.