Only eight countries would make the government’s green list for safe travel, industry modelling suggests.

So far only Ireland, the US, Iceland, Australia, New Zealand, Malta, Gibraltar and Israel meet what is thought to be the government’s criteria.

According to The Telegraph, research from the former strategy chief at BA, Robert Boyle, suggests the criteria includes vaccination rates, prevalence of the virus, the extent of variants and the capacity for genome sequencing

Mike Tildesley said the emergence of new Covid variants was not surprising, but that action to combat local clusters as they appear may be necessary.

“It’s not surprising that new variants emerge. They’re emerging all the time,” he told BBC News.

“But as we get more information, if we do get evidence that they are evading the vaccine and they are more transmissible, what we need to do is take action to really suppress those.

“It may be that surge testing is needed to stamp down on local clusters of infection if we do get evidence that this is a real variant of concern.”

Dr Tildesley said it was likely in future that vaccines would be adjusted to address mutations, much like flu vaccines are changed most years.

“Every time you have a (flu) vaccine… it’s not the same one you have every year. It will be tweaked to combat whatever happens to be circulating at the time,” he said.

“We’re not quite there yet of course with Covid vaccines that can be tweaked to protect against new variants, but my understanding is the vaccine companies are working on this, and in the longer term we should be able to provide boosters to people to protect against whatever new variants are circulating.”

A leading epidemiologist says it is crucial that British scientists urgently learn as much as they can about the Indian Covid-19 variant to assess what action needs to be taken to restrict its transmission.

Mike Tildesley, a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (Spi-M) group which provides infectious disease modelling evidence on coronavirus to the government’s Sage committee, says it is not surprising the new variant has emerged but that it needs to be thoroughly investigated as soon as possible.

“I would always say when these new variants do emerge it is a concern and it’s really important that we get as much information as we can as quickly as possible,” Dr Tildesley, from the University of Warwick, told BBC News.

“What’s concerning about the Indian variant is there appear to be two mutations which… may make the vaccines less effective, and may make the virus more transmissible.

“The key thing here is ‘may’. We are still trying to gather evidence about this.”

Thousands of fans are returning to Wembley Stadium on Sunday as part of a lockdown easing test.

FA Cup semi-final spectators will be part of a large research project looking at how fans and audiences can safely attend events again, with music events to follow in the coming weeks.

Along with the World Snooker Championship, which started on Saturday, the pilots will be part of the UK government’s science-led Events Research Programme (ERP).

The FA Cup semi-final between Leicester City and Southampton on Sunday will host an audience of 4,000. While the snooker at the indoor Sheffield Crucible Theatre will operate at the socially distanced capacity of about 325 for the first few days.

Before attending any of the events, spectators will have to test negative for coronavirus in a lateral flow test (LFT) – supervised where possible – taken in the previous 36 hours.

And after attending the occasion, they will be asked to conduct a PCR coronavirus swab test.

Good morning and welcome to the latest coronavirus updates fromThe Independent.