Coronation Street producer Iain MacLeod has revealed that the coronavirus pandemic will be addressed in future episodes of the show once filming resumes.

The ITV soap was forced to halt filming in late March as the crisis escalated and will drop off air at some point next month unless production can restart at rapid pace.

Episodes recorded before the lockdown began have not featured any references to coronavirus or social distancing, but showrunner MacLeod confirmed that this will be incorporated into storylines in the future.

"The bottom line is we talked a lot about this, as you can well imagine, about whether Coronation Street would have a coronavirus presence in it or if we would exist in a parallel universe, everything proceeding in a pre-pandemic fashion," he told the Daily Star.

"So while the virus will exist in Coronation Street, we were also keen that it wouldn't dominate every single story and every single scene.

"It will be there, you'll be able to see evidence of it in the way people behave, hand-washing protocols and things like that, the way our businesses will be tweaked to more takeaways and the like, as food outlets are doing in the real world."

While the UK lockdown is expected to remain in some form or another for the foreseeable future, there have been suggestions that soap stars could return to work sooner than most if it is deemed safe to do so.