Andrea Albutt, president of the Prison Governors Association, said inmates were likely to die as the spread of coronavirus worsened in the UK.

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She said prison governors would "attempt to keep (family) visits going for as long as they can", while weighing up the public health risk to prisoners and managing staff shortages due to employees self-isolating or being off with illness.

Ms Albutt told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "We have approximately 85,000 people in our prisons and prisons are overcrowded, so when you have a lot of people in a small area, transmission of disease will obviously be easier.

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"Coupled with that, we have a significant ageing population - the vulnerable groups, the people the Government keeps telling us will be more susceptible and more ill with this virus.

"Listening to the Government's specialists yesterday, they are saying the mortality rate is below 1% but in the vulnerable groups it is higher.

"Well, in prisons we don't completely mirror society with our demographic of prisoners so we do have a higher number of people in the vulnerable groups, so they will be ill and there will be deaths."

Frontier IP, a UK-based specialist in commercialising university intellectual property, has revealed one its businesses has started working on a Covid-19 vaccine.

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The Vaccine Group, which was spun out from the University of Plymouth, said it is working in partnership with the Shanghai Veterinary Research Institute and Kansas State University.

The Vaccine Group said it plans to develop a vaccine designed to prevent Covid-19 in animals in an effort to stop future outbreaks and the re-emergence of the disease.

TVG founder and chief scientific officer, Associate Professor Dr Michael Jarvis, said: "As Covid-19 has shown, the spillover of disease from animals to humans can have a very high social, economic and commercial cost globally."