This morning, the government published some of the advice it has received from its emergency scientific committee, known as Sage.

It has been under pressure to release more of this advice and be more transparent about how it is making decisions during the pandemic.

But Downing Street has said that it would not be appropriate for the government to release scientific evidence that is "under live consideration for policy decisions".

The prime minister's spokesman said releasing policy that was "still under formulation" could cause "unnecessary confusion to the public"

He said that further papers from Sage would be published in "organised tranches".

We should be hearing from the UK government in the next 30 minutes, and we'll bring you the most important updates from the briefing then.

In the meantime, here's the latest from around the UK:

• Virgin Atlantic has announced it is to cut about 3,000 jobs in the UK and end its operation at Gatwick airport, amid the pandemic
• The UK’s chief scientific adviser has told MPs it would have been “beneficial” to have ramped up Covid-19 testing sooner
• The Scottish government has set out options for lifting the coronavirus lockdown
• Scientists advising the UK government have published some of their advice – with the documents suggesting there were fears about people buying fake test results if "immunity passports" were introduced
• And, as we heard in yesterday’s briefing, an NHS app that aims to track the spread of coronavirus is being rolled out for the first time, as part of a trial on the Isle of Wight

US President Donald Trump has said he will release details to support the theory that coronavirus was released from a laboratory in the Chinese city in Wuhan, where the pandemic began.

"We will be reporting very definitively over a period of time," the president told reporters at the White House on Tuesday.

Early cases of the virus were linked to a food market in Wuhan late last year, and the head of US national intelligence has rejected conspiracy theories that the virus was intended for use as a weapon.

But information obtained by the Washington Post found that diplomats had sent two warnings to Washington about a Chinese research facility, over fears that the institute's research on bat coronaviruses could risk a new Sars-like pandemic.

China rejects the idea and has criticised the US response to the crisis.

Read more on this from our Science Editor Paul Rincon.

As expected, the UK government will give its daily briefing at 17:00 BST (16:00 GMT).

The briefing will be led by Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab.

He will be joined by Deputy Chief Scientific Adviser Angela McLean.

Image source, PA Media

Sport bosses warned of huge financial losses due to the coronavirus pandemic when they appeared before the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) committee of MPs.

English Football League chairman Rick Parry warned clubs could face a £200m hole by September while the English and Wales Cricket Board chief Tom Harrison said it could cost the body £380m.

Rugby Football Union chief executive Bill Sweeney added cancelling England's Autumn Tests, against New Zealand, Tonga, Argentina and Australia, could cost £107m.

Parry also warned that the "lawyers are going to get wealthy" if the Premier League tried to stop three teams being promoted and relegated as part of plans to bring the season to a close.

Sport England chief executive Tim Hollingsworth said his organisation's Community Emergency Fund for grassroots clubs hit by effects of the Covid-19 outbreak was oversubscribed.

"We would expect 4,000 applications in a year - over the last five weeks we have had 7,500 applications," he told the DCMS committee.

More than 1,000 people have now died in Wales after testing positive for coronavirus, official figures show.

Health Minister Vaughan Gething used the milestone to ask the public to reflect on the "devastating grief" felt by families across the country.

He told a press conference in Cardiff that measures such as social distancing were helping to reduce the spread of Covid-19 but warned transmission would continue until a vaccine was developed or there was more widespread acquired immunity.

Public Health Wales said that 1,023 people in Wales have died with the virus, an increase of 26 on Monday's figures.

There are now 10,669 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the country.

Northern Ireland has recorded 17 more coronavirus deaths, taking the nation's total to 404.

Six of the deaths occured in the 24 hours to 09:30 on Tuesday while 11 died previously, according to the figures from the Department of Health in Northern Ireland.

The department's figures mainly comprise deaths in hospital but do include some, but not all, deaths in other settings such as care homes.

There have been a further 45 new confirmed cases of the virus, bringing Northern Ireland to 3,881 cases overall.

President Trump has told reporters travelling with him to a mask production factory in Arizona that a federal government report leaked yesterday, which forecast 3,000 US deaths per day by June, was not accurate.

“That report is a no mitigation report, and we are mitigating,” he said, referring to the memo from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).

The president also defended state governors who have begun to loosen restrictions, saying residents of those states are continuing to social-distance and take virus mitigation measures.

Trump suggested that continuing lockdown measures would also take lives, through suicide and drug abuse.

This is one of Trump's first visits outside the White House in over a month. The Secret Service has taken extra precautions on his trip to the Honeywell aerospace facility in Phoenix, Arizona - a key battleground state in the 2020 presidential election.

"We have great testing or they wouldn't be allowed to travel with me," Trump says about those travelling with him on Air Force One.

Even as news of Iran's deadly Covid-19 outbreak spread earlier this year, its largest airline continued to operate across the Middle East despite government flight bans, a BBC Arabic investigation has discovered.

Mahan Air - which is linked to the powerful Iranian Revolutionary Guard - continued to fly to China and a number of Middle Eastern countries even after bans were introduced.

Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and Syria continued to allow the airline to land despite having stopped routine flights from Iran.

Sources within the airline told the BBC that dozens of cabin crew members showed symptoms of Covid-19 and that staff who tried to raise concerns about the airline’s management of the crisis and provision of safety equipment were silenced.

Earlier, we brought you the Office for National Statistics figures which include the number of deaths in care homes for which Covid-19 has been given as a contributing factor.

Now NHS England has put out the latest figures for coronavirus deaths in hospital.

There have been 366 more deaths recorded as of 17:00 yesterday, taking the total to 21,750.

The figures show that 65 of those people died more than a week ago.

Bethany Bell
BBC News, Vienna

Austria’s Health Minister Rudi Anschober says the first relaxation of its coronavirus lockdown three weeks ago has not led to a new increase in infections.

Thousands of small shops, garden centres and DIY stores re-opened on 14 April.

"The situation is very, very constant, very, very stable and that is a really very, very positive, good situation,” Anschober said.

But he called on Austrians to be careful, after further steps to ease the coronavirus lockdown were introduced at the beginning of May.

"May will be the decisive month," he said.

All shops, hairdressers and beauty salons have been allowed to reopen in the second step of easing restrictions.

People are now free to leave their homes, although working from home is still encouraged.

Anschober called on people to continue to cover their mouths and noses, to maintain the distance of at least a metre and to wash their hands.

Image source, @juliaroberts

It's usually one of the THE highlights of the fashion calendar.

But like most events, the annual Met Gala - which was scheduled to take place in New York on Monday - was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

It normally sees stars like Lady Gaga, Billy Porter and Katy Perry gracing the red carpet in elaborate outfits.

However, all was not lost.

There was still an official live stream, actresses Julia Roberts, external and Amanda Seyfried dressed up regardless in isolation and Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine belted out You've Got the Love in front of some marvellous wallpaper.

Read more - and revel in the photos - here.

Robert Cuffe
BBC head of statistics

Is 32,000 the worst death toll in Europe?

We don’t have the information to know. There are different ways of counting coronavirus deaths.

The figure of 32,000 comes from a measure that’s calculated once a week in the UK and isn’t available yet in many other countries.

It’s based on all death registrations in all settings and looking to see whether Covid-19 is mentioned.

The figure you hear about most days, announced at the UK government’s daily press conference or available on the comparison websites, is based on deaths of people who have tested positive for coronavirus.

It’s available more quickly but is less complete.

It’s difficult enough to make comparisons between countries based on these daily figures – definitions are slightly different, testing regimes are different and so it’s hard to be sure you’re comparing apples with apples.

For example, if testing is largely limited to people in hospitals in one country (as it was in the UK for a long time), then the figures will miss deaths in the community.

But going one step further and comparing the death registration figures in the UK with daily figures based on positive tests from other countries is comparing apples with bananas.

Tom Burridge
Transport correspondent

Image source, Getty Images

It was 28% at British Airways. Now 30% of jobs will be lost at Virgin Atlantic.

The UK’s aviation sector is shrinking in size.

Virgin Atlantic was Gatwick’s ninth largest airline so it’s a blow but not a knock-out punch. However British Airways, which is Gatwick’s second biggest customer, has indicated that it also might not restart its Gatwick operation.

If BA does pull out it would carry deeper ramifications.

Just a few weeks ago, several UK airports had elaborate, expensive and very controversial expansion plans in the pipeline. The big ones were operating at or very near capacity.

But the whole aviation sector is living a new reality.

When lockdown restrictions ease and flight schedules are increased again there will be fewer passengers, fewer and probably more expensive flights and sadly thousands of cabin crew, pilots and ground staff will have lost jobs.

It will take years for the aviation sector to bounce back to where it was before the pandemic.

Image source, PA Media

Earlier we brought you the news that Virgin Atlantic was to cut 3,000 jobs.

The airline has clarified that 3,150 jobs are to be lost worldwide and while they cannot give a country-by-country breakdown the majority will be in the UK.

Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has confirmed a further 44 people who had tested positive for Covid-19 have died, taking the total to 1,620 in Scotland.

Sturgeon said it was "almost certain" there would be no significant change to lockdown restrictions on Thursday.

She said there were estimated to be about 26,000 infectious people in Scotland which was "too high" to consider the virus under control.

The Scottish government is considering measures which would allow people to leave their homes more often but only within their local area, she said.

Read more here.

Image source, Getty

India has recorded its sharpest rise in daily cases with 3,900 fresh infections reported in the last 24 hours.

The total of number of people to get the virus now stands at 46,433, with the climb in numbers following an increase in testing.

More than 80,000 tests were carried out on Monday as India moves to ease the lockdown restrictions introduced on 24 March.

This has seen the opening of standalone shops, the re-opening of workplaces with reduced staffing, and the return of private vehicles in some areas. Public transport remains banned.

None of the new guidelines on relaxation apply to areas with high levels of infection that have been designated as containment zones.

Read more here.

Michelle Roberts
Health editor, BBC News online

Could coronavirus have been circulating in Europe in late 2019, many weeks before it was officially recognised and declared a threat there? That is the suggestion being made after a French doctor has revealed that he treated a patient in Paris with all of the symptoms of coronavirus just after Christmas.

How does this change what we know about the pandemic? It might be that the test result is an error and so does not change a thing.

But it if is correct, it could mean spread of the disease was going unchecked in Europe while all eyes were on the East in Wuhan.

Certainly, any laboratories in Europe with samples from patients sick with similar symptoms around that time might want to run a test for coronavirus to see what it reveals so that we can learn more about this new disease.

Nick Triggle
Health Correspondent

Image source, Getty Images

Much like the problems in getting personal protective equipment for staff, the UK’s record on testing is going to come under scrutiny for years to come.

There are many reasons why other countries, such as South Korea and Germany, had a better testing infrastructure to start with.

But what remains more difficult to understand is why the UK did not act sooner to rectify that.

Certainly rapid progress was made from the start of April when Health Secretary Matt Hancock set the 100,000-tests-a-day target.

But why it took until then to turbo-boost the effort is unclear. The first confirmed case was at the end of January.

By mid-March the UK had to virtually abandon testing in the community – it did not have the capacity so had to prioritise patients in hospital.

One school of thought is that because the policy at the time was to have a managed spread of the virus in the community, widespread testing was not needed to contain outbreaks and suppress the epidemic.

Image source, AFP / PRU

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the government is working "resolutely to defeat the coronavirus".

Responding to an urgent question on the pandemic from Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth, he said the scale of the national testing structure meant symptomatic staff and residents at care homes could now be tested and said the government was working to build "resilience" in the NHS.

"As a result, we are now able to start to restore some NHS services and we're in a position to be able to place the London Nightingale on standby," he said.

"This is good news because our NHS has not been overwhelmed by this crisis and remains open to those who need care."

Labour MP Catherine McKinnell described the current death toll as "devastating" and said many were wondering how the government could claim its response to be a success.

Hancock said the government was learning all the time.