Portrait of the week: A Covid Budget, a Cotswold meteor and Angelina Jolie sells Churchill’s painting

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First-dose coronavirus vaccinations totalled more than 20 million. A study suggested that in the over-eighties, a single dose of either the Pfizer or Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was more than 80 per cent effective at preventing hospitalisation. Hospital admissions of 8,452 in the week ending 27 February were 22 per cent down on the week before that. At dawn on 28 February, total UK deaths (within 28 days of testing positive for coronavirus) had stood at 122,705, including 2,340 in the past week, down by 32.3 per cent on the week before that. Six people with the Brazilian variant of coronavirus were detected in Britain, but one could not be traced.

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Simon Cook

Pensioners have never had it so good

In the Budget, Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said borrowing would rise to a peak of 93 per cent of GDP. He said he wanted to be ‘honest’ about rebuilding the economy.