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The Tunisian prime minister, Hichem Mechichi, sacked the country’s health minister on Tuesday, the premier’s office said, as spiralling coronavirus cases weigh on Tunisia’s swamped health system.
AFP reports that Faouzi Mehdi’s sacking came days after the ministry’s spokeswoman said the health situation was overwhelming, with the pandemic causing more than 17,000 deaths in a population of around 12 million.
Mechichi’s office, which has overseen a fractious cabinet rocked by ministerial resignations and tensions with the president, Kais Saied, announced Mehdi’s sacking in a brief statement without giving a reason for the move.
It said the social affairs minister Mohamed Trabelsi would take over in a caretaker capacity.
Mehdi had initiated a temporary opening of vaccination stations to all Tunisians over 18 for Tuesday and Wednesday to mark the Eid al-Adha Muslim festival. But that led to stampedes at some of the 29 vaccination centres, where stocks quickly ran dry.
The ministry announced it would continue the campaign over the coming days but then backtracked and restricted jabs to those aged over 40 on Wednesday to avoid a new rush.
The country’s hospitals have faced oxygen shortages along with a lack of staff and ICU beds, pushing countries from Gulf states to former colonial power France and even cash-strapped Mauritania to send medical aid.
Tunisia has also struggled to get its coronavirus vaccination campaign off the ground. Fewer than a million people have been fully vaccinated, around eight percent of the population, and the caseload has surged to one of the highest in Africa.
Pediatrician Rafla Tej Dellagi, at a vaccination centre in central Tunis, called the campaign a “race against time” and said the country needed to more than double its inoculation rate to cut the chain of transmission.
On Sunday, Tunisia reported 117 new coronavirus deaths and 2,520 new cases, bringing total recorded cases to more than half a million.
In some hospitals, the bodies of Covid victims have been left lying in rooms next to other patients for up to 24 hours because there were not enough staff to organise their transfer to overstretched mortuaries.
The health ministry’s Facebook page said special field hospitals set up in recent months are no longer enough.
The government of neighbouring Libya in early July closed their shared border and suspended air links with Tunisia over the rocketing caseload.
Since 20 June, authorities have imposed a total lockdown on six regions and a partial lockdown in the capital.
Updated
Here is our story on the clashes today between Dr Anthony Fauci, the US’s top infectious diseases expert, and Republican senator Rand Paul.
Paul suggested that Fauci had lied before Congress in May when he denied that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded so-called “gain of function” research – the practice of enhancing a virus in a lab to study its potential impact in the real world – at a virology lab in Wuhan, China.
Fauci ended the sparring with: “If anybody is lying here, senator, it is you.”
Updated
A fully vaccinated White House official tested positive for Covid-19 off site and has mild symptoms but was not found to have had close contacts with White House principals or staff, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Tuesday.
The official remains off White House grounds pending additional testing for confirmation, she said.
She said the White House medical unit had conducted contact tracing and interviews, finding no close contact among staff and the president Joe Biden.
Psaki also said there had been other instances of vaccinated employees testing positive, though they were not commissioned officers and therefore were not reported by the administration.
“We committed that we would release information proactively if it is commissioned officers,” she said. Commissioned officers work for the president and not for another White House official.
Asked whether the administration fears that these breakthrough cases will spur more vaccine hesitancy among Americans, Psaki said she hasn’t seen any data to indicate this trend.
“We know that there will be breakthrough cases, but as this instance shows, cases in vaccinated individuals are typically mild,” she said. “This is another reminder of the efficacy of the vaccines against severe illness or hospitalisations,” she added.
The US State Department has lowered its Covid-related travel advisory for India to “Level 3 * Reconsider Travel,” the department said in a statement on Tuesday. The advisory for Pakistan was similarly eased to reconsider travel, it said.
The Covid advisories previously asked Americans not to travel to the two countries.
India’s daily coronavirus cases have fallen to four-month lows after a second wave that crippled the healthcare system. But experts have warned the authorities against swiftly reopening cities and voiced concerns about overcrowding at tourist sites.
The decision does not impact travel restrictions imposed in May that bar nearly all non-US citizens from entering the United States who have been in India within the last 14 days.
Similar travel restrictions are in place for South Africa, China, Iran, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Ireland and 26 countries in Europe that allow travel across open borders.
Permanent US residents and family members and some other non-US citizens, such as students, are exempted.
The White House is holding a new round of high level meetings this week about the travel restrictions, sources told Reuters, but given no indication it plans to quickly lift them.
“Any decisions about reopening travel will be guided by our public health and medical experts. We take this incredibly seriously,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said on Monday.
Nearly all travellers to the United States by air must show proof of a negative coronavirus test or recovery from Covid-19.
Updated
The vast majority of new Covid cases in Spain in the past five weeks were detected among non-vaccinated people, the health minister Carolina Darias said on Monday, as new infections rose by 27,286.
Just 5.5% of new cases within the period were detected among people who had been fully vaccinated, Darias said, adding 11.4% were partially vaccinated and 83.1% were unvaccinated.
“We must keep up the rhythm of vaccination we have reached,” the minister told a news conference. “This will give us an important level of protection to allow us to enjoy the summer.”
The number of new cases per day in Spain has been steadily rising since late June, with the 14-day incidence rate per 100,000 inhabitants rising to 622.4 on Tuesday.
The country of 46.9 million people has so far reported a total of just under 4.2 million cases and 81,148 deaths.
It is the third fastest country at vaccinating its population, according to database Our World In Data, lagging behind only Canada and the UK with 51.3% of Spaniards fully vaccinated and 62.1% at least partially vaccinated.
Turkey’s daily coronavirus cases rose to 8,780 on Tuesday, nearly double a low water mark touched earlier this month, while 46 new related deaths were logged, according to the government tally.
Infections remain well down from a wave in April-May when new cases peaked above 60,000. They fell to 4,418 on July 4 in the wake of a stringent lockdown that ended in mid-May. The government lifted most of the last restrictions this month.
Today so far...
- National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief Anthony Fauci’s faced serious controversy in a senate hearing today, in which senator Rand Paul accused him of lying about the role the National Institutes of Health (NIH) played in funding risky research in Wuhan, China. Fauci vociferously denied aspects of the claims but appeared to accept that a sub-award from the EcoHealth Alliance funded some of the research – but none that could have created Sars-CoV-2.
- A democracy campaigner and confidant of the deposed Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi died after contracting Covid-19 in prison, authorities said. Nyan Win, a veteran senior member and former spokesperson of the National League for Democracy (NLD) party – led by Suu Kyi – was 78. He had been arrested after the 1 February coup removed the NLD from power and was held in Yangon’s notorious Insein prison on charges of sedition.
- An Oxford University paper dubbed by the Daily Mail an “anti-lockdown” plan has emerged as the likely inspiration behind the UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s messages declaring “get Covid and live longer”. It comes after Johnson said he was not prepared to lock down the country to save people in their 80s. The UK today reported its worst daily death toll since March.
- New infections in France are increasing at an unprecedented rate due to the Delta variant, after 18,000 cases were reported for the previous 24 hours, according to the health minister Olivier Véran. The level of infections is the highest since mid-May, when the country was emerging from a third nationwide lockdown.
- The chief of the Tokyo 2020 organising committee did not rule out cancelling the Olympics if Covid-19 cases rise sharply, as more athletes tested positive for the virus and sponsors ditched plans to attend Friday’s opening ceremony. Asked at a news conference if the global sporting showpiece might still be cancelled, Toshiro Muto said he would keep an eye on infection numbers and liaise with other organisers if necessary.
- Fox News host Sean Hannity had a message for viewers of his primetime show last night: “Please take Covid seriously.” The influential host, a close ally of Donald Trump, also said: “I believe in science, I believe in the science of vaccination.” Nearly 609,000 people have died in the coronavirus pandemic in the US but vaccination rates have slowed amid resistance among conservative sections of the population, stoked by rightwing politicians and media.
- Scientists from a Milan cancer research centre reported that retesting of a small number of pre-pandemic blood samples has indicated the presence of antibodies normally found after Covid infection. “The results of this retesting suggest that what we previously reported in asymptomatic patients is a plausible signal of early circulation of the virus in Italy,” Giovanni Apolone, one of the researchers, told the Financial Times.
- A man in Perth, Australia, escaped mandatory quarantine in a hotel by scaling down a rope made of tied-together bedsheets from a fourth-floor window, police have said. After arriving in the west coast city on a flight from Brisbane, the man had his application for entry refused under the state’s Covid-19 border rules.
Nine airport workers in Nanjing, capital of China’s Jiangsu province, have tested positive for Covid-19, state media reported.
Positive results were found during the routine nucleic acid testing for airport workers carried out by local health authorities, the Xinhua news agency reported, adding that more samples were being tested, Reuters reports.
Alistair Brownlee has backed the International Olympic Committee’s decision to proceed with the rescheduled Games amid the Covid-19 pandemic, saying a stripped-back Games will be better than none at all.
Tokyo 2020 begins on Friday to an unprecedented backdrop with the host city currently in a state of emergency, meaning fans are barred from the majority of venues and athletes must respect a strict code of conduct. It means much of the traditional Olympic experience will be severely diluted but Brownlee, a gold medallist in the triathlon at both London 2012 and Rio 2016, believes cancelling the event would have been far less palatable to competitors.
“I think they should go ahead,” he said. “I think the timing is going to be difficult but I think it was always going to be difficult. ‘If not now, when?’ is the argument I put forward to that. It provides a great opportunity to show that these events can get back to some sort of normality.
“It’s obviously a shame that the Olympics is not going ahead as it would normally. It’s missing out so much of what the Olympics is about but I think, given the context we are in, it’s a fantastic triumph that it is happening. I think the Olympics in this form is much better than no Olympic Games for every single athlete.”
Fauci denies claims over US role in funding controversial Wuhan research in Senate hearing
Here’s a bit more on director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief Anthony Fauci’s appearance in a senate hearing today – in which senator Rand Paul accused him of lying about the role the National Institutes of Health (NIH) played in funding controversial research in Wuhan, China.
Amid some heated scenes, Paul said the NIH effectively funded gain of function research that had been banned under the Obama administration in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, aspects of which Fauci denied, the Hill reports.
“Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about quite frankly, and I want to say that officially,” Fauci said. “You do not know what you are talking about.”
Paul interjected: “They took animal viruses that only occur in viruses and they increased their transmissibility to humans. How can you say that’s not gain-of-function? It’s a dance and you’re dancing around this because you’re trying to obscure responsibility for 4m people dying around the world from a pandemic.”
Fauci replied: “If the point that you are making is that the grant that was funded as a sub-award from EcoHealth to Wuhan created Sars-CoV-2, that’s where you are getting ... ” before the senator interrupted.
“We don’t know ... but all the evidence is pointing that it came from the lab and there will be responsibility for those that funded the lab, including yourself,” Paul said.
Fauci rebutted: “I totally resent the lie that you are now propagating, senator, because if you look at the viruses that were used in the experiments that were given in the annual reports, that were published in the literature, it is molecularly impossible.”
But Paul said “nobody is saying” the viruses that were created in Wuhan caused the pandemic, however that the lab was still conducting gain-of-function research that was funded by NIH. “You can’t get away from it, you are obfuscating the truth.”
Fauci added: “If you look at those viruses ... Those viruses are molecularly impossible to result in Sars-Cov-2.”
“Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about.”
— The Recount (@therecount) July 20, 2021
— Dr. Fauci after Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) accuses him of lying to Congress about gain-of-function research in Wuhan lab. pic.twitter.com/aGhn3ua9r0
Updated
Europe’s drug regulator has started a real-time review of the Covid-19 vaccine developed by French drugmaker Sanofi and Britain’s GlaxoSmithKline, the fifth shot currently under such a review.
The decision to start the “rolling review” of the vaccine, Vidprevtyn, was based on preliminary results from lab studies and early stage clinical trials in adults, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) said.
Reuters reports that late-stage global trials for the protein-based coronavirus vaccine candidate began in May. Sanofi and GSK hope to get approvals by the end of 2021 after early-stage results showed the vaccine produces a robust immune response.
“EMA will assess the compliance of Vidprevtyn with the usual EU standards for effectiveness, safety and quality,” the regulator said, without giving details on data it had received so far and an expected timeline for approval.
EMA’s rolling reviews are aimed at speeding up the approval process by allowing researchers to submit findings in real time before final trial data is available.
Sanofi said other rolling reviews of its vaccine were also about to start in Britain, Canada and Singapore, as well as with the World Health Organization, Reuters reported.
Vidprevtyn uses the same technology as one of Sanofi’s seasonal influenza vaccines. It will be coupled with an adjuvant, a substance that acts as a booster to the shot, made by GSK.
Other COVID-19 vaccine candidates in EU’s rolling review are those from CureVac, Novavax, Sinovac and Russia’s Sputnik V.
French health minister Olivier Veran has said that new Covid-19 infections were increasing at an unprecedented rate due to the Delta variant, after 18,000 cases were reported for the previous 24 hours.
Referring to the latest figures while speaking in parliament, Veran said: “That means we have an increase in the spread of the virus of around 150 percent in the last week: we’ve never seen that, neither with Covid [the original form], nor the British variant, nor the South African or the Brazilian one.”
The level of infections is the highest since mid-May, when the country was emerging from a third nationwide lockdown, AFP reports. France, which is bracing for a fourth wave of infections because of the spread of the Delta variant, has been racing to get as many people vaccinated as possible.
Addressing vaccine sceptics, Veran said the new figures showed that “this is no time for doubts and hesitation” and that achieving herd immunity through a high degree of vaccine coverage is “the only way we have ...of getting rid of Covid once and for all,” although those double jabbed continue to contract the virus.
He was speaking as parliament was due to debate a set of controversial new rules aimed at pressuring millions of vaccine holdouts into getting a jab, since only 45% of the population is fully vaccinated, according to AFP.
Under a controversial bill which critics have called draconian, which will be put a vote in the coming days, people who want to eat in restaurants, go to the cinema or take a long-distance train will have to be vaccinated or produce a negative Covid test. From September on, vaccinations will become mandatory for healthcare and retirement home workers.
Over 100,000 people protested across the country on Saturday against what they called the country’s vaccine “dictatorship.”
The European Commission will not approve Hungary’s recovery plan until the country carries out judicial reform and guarantees that corruption cases are investigated, justice commissioner Didier Reynders has said.
There are systemic problems with the rule of law in Hungary, and the European Commission is ready to use all tools to protect democracy, including the suspension of EU funds, Reynders said on hvg.hu news site.
In a report published today, the European Commission listed serious concerns about the rule of law in Poland and Hungary, Reuters reports. The commission said Poland and Hungary were undermining media pluralism and court independence. They are the only two countries in the 27-member bloc under formal EU investigation for jeopardising the rule of law.
Hungarian Justice Minister Judit Varga said on Facebook the commission was “blackmailing” Hungary because of a child protection law which won’t allow “LGBTQ-activists and any sexual propaganda into Hungarian kindergartens and schools”.
Border officials are no longer required to make basic Covid checks on arrivals in England from green and amber list countries, according to leaked instructions that prompted claims the government is turning a blind eye to the risk of importing Covid cases.
A change which came into effect yesterday means Border Force officers no longer have to verify whether new arrivals have received a negative Covid test, have booked a test within coming days or have a passenger locator form showing an address where they will isolate if necessary.
The Delta variant of Covid-19 is the cause of more than 80% of the new cases in the US, but the vaccines are still more than 90% effective in preventing hospitalisations and deaths, said top US infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci during a senate hearing.
The highly contagious Delta variant was first found in India earlier this year. It has since become the dominant strain of Covid-19 in the US and has been detected in more than 90 countries worldwide.
Deaths from Covid-19 in the United States have averaged 239 per day over the past week, nearly 48% higher than the previous week, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said during the hearing, though the number as a percentage of excess deaths was not reported by Reuters.
Meanwhile, a fully vaccinated White House official tested positive for COVID-19 off site and has mild symptoms but was not found to have had close contacts with White House principals or staff, a White House official said. The official remains off White House grounds pending additional testing for confirmation, the official said.
Peru has signed a deal to purchase 20 million doses of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine, the health ministry has said.
Officials said the agreement, signed with the Russian Fund for Direct Investment, would ensure the arrival of the vaccines within “the next few months.”
Peru is among the most affected countries in Latin America by the pandemic, leaving its hospitals under serious strain as oxygen supplies were often left depleted.
The country in late May tripled its official death count from the virus and leads the world in deaths per 100,000 inhabitants from the disease.
The Andean nation, which has a population of 33.2 million, has thus far vaccinated 10.9 million people with at least one dose and 4.0 million with two doses of Pfizer, Sinopharm and AstraZeneca shots, according to official data.
Interim president Francisco Sagasti has said that there are agreements with different laboratories to buy 71.2 million doses this year. Sagasti has said he expects nearly 20 million of those shots to arrive in the country by the end of July, when president-elect Pedro Castillo takes office.
US TV host Stephen Colbert kicked off last night’s Late Show with concerning updates on the coronavirus, as cases rose in all 50 states over the last week. The increase is largely due to the more transmissible Delta variant, which “sounds like a frat house that’s a disease vector,” he said. “So … a frat house.”
The surge has led Los Angeles county to reinstate indoor mask requirements regardless of vaccination status. “Typical Los Angeles – even the virus is pitching a sequel.”
An Oxford University paper dubbed by the Daily Mail an “anti-lockdown” plan has emerged as the likely inspiration behind Boris Johnson’s messages declaring “get Covid and live longer”.
The WhatsApp messages revealed by his former chief aide, Dominic Cummings, showed the prime minister was holding out against lockdown measures as cases spiralled in October 2020 and appear to suggest he was unconcerned by the deaths of people in their 80s.
UK suffers worst death toll in months
The UK has reported its worst daily death toll since March, even as England lifts almost all Covid measures, the government in Westminster has said.
A further 96 people died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 as of Tuesday; the highest reported daily figure since 24 March. It brings the UK’s total to 128,823. As of 9am, there had been a further 46,558 lab-confirmed Covid-19 cases in the UK, offiial figures show.
Separate figures published by the Office for National Statistics show there have been 154,000 deaths registered in the UK where Covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate.
Government data up to 19 July shows that, of the 82,592,996 Covid jabs given in the UK, 46,349,709 were first doses, a rise of 35,670 on the previous day. Some 36,243,287 were second doses, an increase of 143,560.
Updated
Spread of infections in France increases by 150% in a week
New infections in France are increasing at an unprecedented rate due to the Delta variant, after 18,000 cases were reported for the previous 24 hours, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports, citing the health minister Olivier Véran.
Addressing the French parliament, he said:
That means we have an increase in the spread of the virus of around 150% in the last week: we’ve never seen that, neither with Covid [the original form], nor the British variant, nor the South African or the Brazilian one.
The level of infections is the highest since mid-May, when the country was emerging from a third nationwide lockdown. France, which is bracing for a fourth wave of infections because of the spread of the Delta variant, has been racing to get as many people vaccinated as possible.
AFP reports:
Addressing vaccine sceptics, Veran said the new figures showed that ‘this is no time for doubts and hesitation’ and that achieving herd immunity through a high degree of vaccine coverage is ‘the only way we have … of getting rid of Covid once and for all’.
He was speaking as parliament was due to debate a set of controversial new rules aimed at pressuring millions of vaccine holdouts into getting a jab, since only 45% of the population is fully vaccinated.
Under a bill to be put a vote in the coming days, people who want to eat in restaurants, go to the cinema or take a long-distance train will have to be vaccinated or produce a negative Covid test.
And, from September on, vaccinations will become mandatory for healthcare and retirement home workers.
Macron’s announcement of the measures this month sparked a scramble for vaccine shots in a country that was one of the most vaccine-shy in the world at the start of the pandemic.
Updated
Peru has signed a deal to purchase 20m doses of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine, Reuters reports, citing the country’s health ministry. The move will shore up the hard-hit Andean nation’s defences over fears of a potential third wave.
Officials said the agreement, signed with the Russian Fund for Direct Investment, would ensure the arrival of the vaccines within “the next few months”. Reuters reports:
Peru is among the most battered countries in Latin America by the pandemic; a predicament that has left its hospitals near collapse and often outstripped the availability of oxygen tanks. The country in late May tripled its official death count from the virus and leads the world in deaths per 100,000 inhabitants from the disease.
The Andean nation, which has a population of 33.2 million, has thus far vaccinated 10.9 million people with at least one dose and 4 million with two doses of Pfizer, Sinopharm and AstraZeneca shots, according to official data.
The interim president Francisco Sagasti has said that there are agreements with different laboratories to buy 71.2m doses this year. Sagasti has said he expects nearly 20m of those shots to arrive in the country by the end of July, when president-elect Pedro Castillo takes office.
An Oxford University paper dubbed by the Daily Mail an “anti-lockdown” plan has emerged as the likely inspiration behind the UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s messages declaring “get Covid and live longer”.
The WhatsApp messages revealed by his former chief aide, Dominic Cummings, showed the prime minister was holding out against lockdown measures as cases spiralled in October 2020 and appear to suggest he was unconcerned by the deaths of people in their 80s. According to the texts released by Cummings to the BBC, Johnson says:
I must say I have been slightly rocked by some of the data on Covid fatalities. The median age is 82 – 81 for men, 85 for women. That is above life expectancy. So get Covid and live longer. Hardly anyone under 60 goes into hospital (4%) and of those virtually all survive.
And I no longer buy all this NHS overwhelmed stuff. Folks, I think we may need to recalibrate.
Europe’s drug regulator has started a real-time review of the vaccine being developed by French drugmaker Sanofi and Britain’s GlaxoSmithKline, the bloc has said.
Reuters reports that the decision to start the “rolling review” of the vaccine, called Vidprevtyn, was based on early results from lab studies and early stage clinical studies in adults, the European Medicines Agency said, without giving further details.
Debate over Covid first signs in Europe back amid Italian blood samples - report
Scientists from a Milan cancer research centre have reported that retesting of a small number of pre-pandemic blood samples has indicated the presence of antibodies normally found after Covid infection.
“The results of this retesting suggest that what we previously reported in asymptomatic patients is a plausible signal of early circulation of the virus in Italy,” Giovanni Apolone, one of the researchers, told the Financial Times. “If this is confirmed, this would explain the explosion of symptomatic cases observed in Italy [in 2020]. Sars-Cov-2, or an earlier version, circulated silently, under the surface,
For the paper, which has been published as a pre-print and has not been peer-reviewed, the Italian researchers had screened 959 individuals for lung cancer before the pandemic. They tested the samples again looking for coronavirus-linked antibodies, and said they had found traces of infection in three samples after discovering a type of coronavirus-linked antibody, the FT reports.
Marion Koopmans, head of virology at Erasmus University in the Netherlands – which retested the samples along with a Siena laboratory at the request of the World Health Organization – said the new results were “interesting”.
But according to the university’s strict criteria, she said none of the samples provided conclusive proof of prior infection with Covid-19.
“We use a rather stringent threshold and cannot rule out that some of the observed reactivity is real,” she said. “However, for confirmation of earlier circulation we would recommend studies of patients with unexplained illness for virological confirmation. That does not mean it is impossible … Just that you would like to see other pieces of evidence.”
The first confirmed case of Covid was in Wuhan in December 2019, but other studies have placed the first cases in Europe as early as November 2019, including one in Milan.
Updated
Olympic organising chief takes pragmatic approach over potentially cancelling Games
The chief of the Tokyo 2020 organising committee has not ruled out cancelling the Olympics if Covid-19 cases rise sharply, as more athletes tested positive for the virus and sponsors ditched plans to attend Friday’s opening ceremony.
Asked at a news conference if the global sporting showpiece might still be cancelled, Toshiro Muto said he would keep an eye on infection numbers and liaise with other organisers if necessary.
“We will continue discussions if there is a spike in cases,” said Muto. “We have agreed that based on the coronavirus situation, we will convene five-party talks again. At this point, the coronavirus cases may rise or fall, so we will think about what we should do when the situation arises.”
A spokesman for Tokyo 2020 later said organisers were “concentrating 100% on delivering successful Games”.
Rising Covid-19 cases in Tokyo have cast a large shadow over an event that, having already been postponed last year because of the pandemic, will now take place without spectators. Japan this month decided that participants would compete in empty venues to minimise health risks, Reuters reports.
Updated
Jakarta 'cannot be trusted' with health of West Papuans, claims separatist leader
Benny Wanda, the West Papuan independence leader living in exile in the UK, has urged western governments to ensure a direct supply of vaccines to West Papua.
He claimed that escalating Covid cases represented “a further existential threat” to his compatriots and that Indonesia had caused a “double crisis” in West Papua by launching military operations after a military chief reportedly said, “destroy them first, we will discuss human rights matters later”.
Over 50,000 have been displaced in Nduga, Puncak and Intan Jaya over the past two and a half years. Their homes have been destroyed, their churches burned and their schools occupied by soldiers. They are left in internal displacement camps, where the virus will spread rapidly. Already in the cities, patients are being turned away or treated in cars outside the hospital.
Western countries and the WHO have an urgent moral obligation to give vaccine doses direct to the local Papuan government for distribution. As the 2018 Asmat health crisis showed, Jakarta cannot be trusted with the health of the West Papuan people. Over nearly 60 years of colonisation we have seen a chronic failure to develop health facilities in West Papua, leaving us dying on top of the natural riches Indonesia is extracting. If Jakarta is allowed to hold the reigns of vaccine development, my people will further suffer.
These events are part of the continued genocide against my people. Our forests have been torn down, our mountains decapitated, our way of life destroyed. Indonesia restricts healthcare and enforces a colonial education whilst killing anyone who speaks out for self-determination. Launching military operations in the middle of a pandemic is a policy designed to further wipe out our population. We need urgent international assistance, direct to the local Papuan government, not through the colonial occupier.
Updated
Authorities in Mexico say they have found fake doses of the Covid-19 drug remdesivir offered for sale on the internet and at a private hospital near the US border.
The federal medical safety commission said that the fake antiviral drug, which it called “a health risk”, was found at a hospital in the Gulf coast city of Tampico, in the border state of Tamaulipas, according to Reuters.
The commission said the doses had been purchased in an “irregular manner” on the internet, but did not say whether the medication had been used there.
The drug’s manufacturer, Gilead Sciences, confirmed the falsification. The appearance and lot numbers on the packaging did not match the original.
The US and Mexico have approved remdesivir as a treatment for Covid-19. In February, police in northern Mexico arrested six people in the border state of Nuevo León for allegedly trafficking in fake coronavirus vaccines, but did not say what kind of fake shots were involved. The suspects allegedly offered the vaccines for sale for the equivalent of around $2,000 per dose.
Analysts have long worried that criminal gangs in Mexico could seek to steal, hijack or counterfeit much-desired vaccines or medications during the pandemic. There have been hijackings or thefts of medicines and oxygen in Mexico.
Updated
Bhutan has begun a rollout of second vaccine-doses today following a swift first phase during which most of its eligible adult population were inoculated in two weeks.
The tiny Himalayan kingdom, which has a population of 770,000, was forced to wait more than three months to revive its mass vaccination drive after neighbouring India halted exports to meet local demand during a massive surge in infections.
Bhutan – which has reported 2,427 Covid-19 infections and one death – had pleaded for more shots after using up most of the 550,000 AstraZeneca doses donated by India when it inoculated 60% of the population with first doses in late March and early April, Reuters reports.
Last week, half a million Moderna doses donated by the US via Covax and another 250,000 AstraZeneca shots from Denmark arrived in Bhutan.
The inoculation drive, open to everyone aged above 18, will last until Monday. The health ministry added that vaccinations of children aged 12 to 17 would be announced later.
More than 400,000 AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Sinopharm shots are also expected to arrive from Croatia, Bulgaria, China and several other countries. The government has meanwhile bought 200,000 Pfizer doses that are expected to be delivered later this year.
During a trial rollout over the past week, recipients including prime minister Lotay Tshering were administered Moderna as their second dose.
“We all … must know that it’s only through vaccination that you can protect yourself and through you … the community,” Tshering, a qualified doctor who continues to practice on weekends, said in a video posted on Facebook by the health ministry Saturday.
Updated
Zimbabwe’s government has ordered that all its workers should receive a Covid-19 vaccine and only 10% of civil servants report for duty, with the rest working from home.
The head of the public commission, Jonathan Wutawunashe, said in a circular to government departments that all civil servants – about 250,000 – were considered frontline workers who should get Covid-19 shots, Reuters reports.
More than 1.1 million people have received a first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine. Zimbabwe has recorded 85,732 infections, a quarter of them since end of June and 2,697 deaths to date.
“All heads of ministries are directed to ensure that all civil servants under their jurisdiction should be vaccinated,” Wutawunashe said.
Wutawunashe said only health workers and those providing critical government services would be allowed access to their offices while Zimbabwe was under a lockdown that includes a dawn-to-dusk curfew, shorter working hours and a ban on inter-city travel.
Updated
Only fully vaccinated people will be allowed to attend public events during Pope Francis’s visit to Slovakia, officials said today, according to Slovak media reports.
“We have been informed that from a security point of view and in terms of technical possibilities, this is the only real way not to radically limit the number of participants,” Stanislav Zvolensky, archbishop of Bratislava, was quoted as saying.
Health minister Vladimir Lengvarsky said the aim was to “enable as many people … as possible to participate”, AFP reports. The pope has been vaccinated and has urged people to get the jab, calling opposition to vaccines “a suicidal denial”.
The pope has also called for vaccines to be shared with the poorest countries in the world, saying they were “an essential tool” in the fight against the pandemic.
Francis has said he will visit Slovakia from 12-15 September after a brief stop in Hungary to celebrate a mass in Budapest. Francis’s visit to Slovakia will include the cities of Bratislava, Presov, Kosice and Sastin, the Vatican has said.
Updated
More than 1 million children in England were out of school last week for Covid-19-related reasons with absence rates at a record level, government figures have revealed.
As state schools head towards the summer holiday, official figures released by the Department for Education (DfE) showed another “huge drop” in attendance with approximately one in seven pupils not in school (1.05 million), the highest rates of absence since schools fully reopened in March.
The statistics show that 14.3% of children were not in class last week because of Covid related issues, up from 11.2% the week before. Secondary schools are again worst hit, with 17.9% of pupils absent compared with 17.5% a week earlier.
Fox News host Sean Hannity had a message for viewers of his primetime show last night: “Please take Covid seriously.” The influential host, a close ally of Donald Trump, also said: “I believe in science, I believe in the science of vaccination.”
Nearly 609,000 people have died in the coronavirus pandemic in the US but vaccination rates have slowed amid resistance among conservative sections of the population, stoked by rightwing politicians and media.
As the infectious Delta variant causes cases to rise, federal officials have said more than 99% of deaths are among unvaccinated people. At the White House on Friday, Dr Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said: “This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
Hannity has voiced support for science and vaccines before but his message still made news. Fox News has been widely criticised for casting doubt on vaccines.
Updated
Global shares recover slightly after worst selloffs of 2021
After their worst sell-off this year yesterday, global shares staunched another sale of equal proportions – but US Treasury and German bond yields slipped to fresh five-month lows
“The reality is that this price action has become somewhat self-fulfilling as the myopic investor sentiment and positioning are forced to re-assess,” said James Athey, investment director at Aberdeen Standard Investments.
“I fear the equity selling isn’t over yet, and if I am right, Europe will be the worst place to be, given the index is value dominated, and thus very cyclical.”
Stocks on Wall Street fell as much as 2% yesterday, with the Dow posting its worst day in nine months, Reuters reports. In a separate gauge of investor risk appetite, bitcoin fell below $30,000 for the first time since 22 June.
“The market was too quick in January-March to remove COVID from the equation, to look at the very short term implications of reopening and think inflation would be explosive. They didn’t want to focus on the longer term implications,” said Ludovic Colin, senior portfolio manager at Vontobel Asset Management.
In a sign of lingering fears of the spread of the Delta variant, the Aussie dollar/Swiss franc cross, a favourite proxy in currency markets for economic recovery bets, fell to its lowest level since December 2020 at 0.6714 francs, according to Refinitiv data.
Against a basket of its rivals, the US dollar strengthened widely and was close to an early-April high, Reuters reports.
A man in Perth, Australia, escaped mandatory quarantine in a hotel by scaling down a rope made of tied-together bedsheets from a fourth-floor window, police have said.
After arriving in the west coast city on a flight from Brisbane, the man had his application for entry refused under the state’s Covid-19 border rules.
The man was told to leave the state within 48 hours and taken to a hotel for temporary quarantine, but just before 1.00am local time on Tuesday “he climbed out a window of the fourth floor room using a rope made of bed sheets and fled the area”, Western Australia Police said in a Facebook post.
The police posted photos of the makeshift rope hanging from a window on the brick building’s top floor down to the street.
Police arrested the man across town about eight hours later, and charged him with failing to comply with a direction and providing “false/misleading information”. They did not disclose the man’s identity except to say that he was aged 39 and tested negative for Covid, nor did they give a reason for his alleged actions.
Biden rows back on claim Facebook are 'killing people'
Joe Biden has tempered his assessment that social media platforms are “killing people” by hosting misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines.
Speaking at the White House, Biden insisted he meant “precisely what I said” when he said on Friday of the tech giants that “they’re killing people”. But he said the point of his rhetoric was to ramp up pressure on the companies to take action.
“My hope is that Facebook, instead of taking it personally that somehow I’m saying ‘Facebook is killing people,’ that they would do something about the misinformation,” Biden said.
.@PressSec: "We're flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation." pic.twitter.com/xTCvg3tyFQ
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) July 15, 2021
Biden’s remarks provoked a strong rebuttal from Facebook. “We will not be distracted by accusations which aren’t supported by facts,” it said. “The facts show that Facebook is helping save lives. Period.” It also released a blog post, called Moving Past the Finger Pointing, claiming that Facebook users are more likely to be vaccinated.
“The data shows that 85% of Facebook users in the US have been or want to be vaccinated against Covid-19. President Biden’s goal was for 70% of Americans to be vaccinated by July 4,” it wrote. “Facebook is not the reason this goal was missed.”
It comes amid serious concerns over who has the power to regulate what can and cannot be said on social media, particularly after a Facebook ban on stating that Covid originated in a lab was lifted as it became increasingly accepted that it was at least plausible.
Boris Johnson: median age of Covid fatalities above life expectancy, 'so get Covid and live longer'
UK prime minister Boris Johnson denied the NHS would be overwhelmed and said he was not prepared to lock down the country to save people in their 80s, texting his adviser “get Covid and live longer”, according to new WhatsApp messages released by Dominic Cummings.
In his first TV interview, the prime minister’s former chief adviser said Johnson held out on reimposing Covid restrictions because “the people who are dying are essentially all over 80”.
Cummings also told the BBC that Johnson had been determined to go to see the Queen in person, despite people in No 10 already falling ill with Covid in March 2020. Downing Street denies the account.
In WhatsApp messages, shared with the BBC, that were sent to aides in mid-October, Johnson appears to say:
I must say I have been slightly rocked by some of the data on Covid fatalities. The median age is 82 – 81 for men 85 for women. That is above life expectancy. So get Covid and live longer. Hardly anyone under 60 goes into hospital (4 per cent) and of those virtually all survive. And I no longer buy all this NHS overwhelmed stuff. Folks I think we may need to recalibrate.”
Updated
Daily new coronavirus cases in Iran have reached record heights, even as Tehran and its surroundings went into lockdown, a week-long measure imposed amid another surge in the pandemic.
AP reports that the country’s health ministry announced 27,444 new cases and 250 deaths over the past day, bringing the overall death toll to 87,624 from among more than 3.5 million confirmed cases in the pandemic.
Today, Iran embarked on another lockdown — the nation’s fifth so far — that is meant to last until next Monday. All bazaars, markets places and public offices closed, as well as movie theatres, gyms and restaurants, in both Tehran province and the neighbouring province of Alborz.
Yesterday, Tehran Province governor Anoushiravan Bandpay announced a code red, saying all hospitals in the province have reached their full capacity.
During an earlier surge in cases, in April, Iran reported the highest daily number of cases, 25,582. At the time, its daily death tolls surged to around 400, below the grim record of 486 reached last November.
Updated
Veteran Myanmar democracy campaigner dies in prison with Covid after arrest
A democracy campaigner and confidant of the deposed Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi died today after contracting Covid-19 in prison, authorities said.
Nyan Win, a veteran senior member and former spokesperson of the National League for Democracy (NLD) party – led by Suu Kyi – was 78. He had been arrested after the 1 February coup removed the NLD from power and was held in Yangon’s notorious Insein prison on charges of sedition.
“U Nyan Win was found with Covid symptoms on 11 July and transferred to Yangon General hospital … to get treatment,” said Zaw Min Tun, spokesman of the State Administration Council – as the junta calls itself. “He died this morning at 9am in the hospital.” Nyan Win had underlying conditions of hypertension and diabetes, he added.
A veteran politician who worked on human rights issues, Nyan Win was the sole person allowed to meet with Suu Kyi during the previous junta regime when she was held under intermittent house arrest for 15 years.
He served as a conduit for the Nobel laureate while she was imprisoned, passing on her messages from an isolated Burma – as Myanmar was formerly known as – to the outside world and her supporters.
“We have relied on him so much. I am so sad to have lost him,” lawyer Khin Maung Zaw, who is part of Suu Kyi’s legal team, told AFP. “But we will transform our sorrow into our strength to move forward.”
Amid a surge of Covid cases, Myanmar’s prisons are full, due to the junta’s crackdown on dissidents, activists and NLD politicians – raising concerns of a fatal outbreak behind bars.
Spokesman Zaw Min Tun said 375 people in prisons across the country have tested positive for Covid-19. About 200 of them are in hospitals, including senior NLD member Han Thar Myint who is currently in intensive care.
American journalist Danny Fenster is also being held at Insein after he was detained while trying to leave Myanmar in May.
Updated
The Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche has said Japan has become the first country to fully approve its Ronapreve antibody treatment for patients with mild to moderate Covid-19.
AFP reports that the approval was based on phase 3 trials finding that the antibody cocktail dramatically reduced the likelihood that mild or moderate Covid patients would develop into serious illness causing hospitalisation or death.
Ronapreve, developed in cooperation with the US biotech firm Regeneron, was approved by Japan’s ministry of health, labour and welfare, Roche said in a statement, confirming it was the “first country” to do so.
“Ronapreve has been shown to improve survival in high-risk, non-hospitalised Covid-19 patients by reducing the risk of hospitalisation and death,” Roche chief medical officer and product development chief Levi Garraway said in a statement.
“Its ability to retain activity against emerging variants, including the Delta variant, has been demonstrated in pre-clinical studies,” he said.
Roche said the phase 3 trials of Ronapreve had shown that high-risk non-hospitalised patients treated with the drug had a 70% reduction in subsequent hospitalisation and death.
Outside Japan, the antibody combination has been authorised for emergency or temporary pandemic use in a number of countries and regions, including the EU, US, India, Switzerland and Canada, Roche said.
Updated
Muslim pilgrims cast sanitised pebbles yesterday as they took part in the “stoning of the devil”, the last major ritual of this year’s hajj, which is again under tight coronavirus restrictions.
AFP has the story:
From first light, small groups of pilgrims made their way across the Valley of Mina near Mecca in western Saudi Arabia to symbolically “humiliate” the devil at the Jamrah al-Aqaba mosque.
Wearing masks and the ihram, the pilgrim’s seamless white garment, they each threw seven stones at a pillar symbolising Satan, taking them from sealed bags provided by the authorities.
“All my life I dreamed of going on the hajj, and I still can’t believe that the dream has come true,” 38-year-old Syrian pilgrim Lina told AFP, describing it as “the happiest day of my life”.
The stoning ritual has in past years led to deadly stampedes, as millions of participants converge on a tight space. But the pandemic has for a second year forced Saudi authorities to dramatically downsize the hajj and only 60,000 fully vaccinated citizens and residents of the kingdom are taking part – up from 10,000 last year.
“From the beginning, our priority has been the safety of pilgrims, and for this reason we decided to limit their numbers to 60,000 to ensure that the precautions are enforced and everyone is safe,” the Saudi health minister, Tawfiq Al Rabiah, told AFP. “We are monitoring the situation continuously,” he said late on Monday, adding that not a single case of coronavirus had been detected so far among pilgrims.
The hajj, one of the five pillars of Islam and a must for able-bodied Muslims who have the means at least once in their lifetime, is usually one of the world’s largest religious gatherings, with 2.5 million taking part in 2019. Barring overseas pilgrims has caused deep disappointment among Muslims worldwide, who typically save for years to take part.
Updated
A Kenyan government programme intended to help the capital’s poorest citizens during the pandemic was crippled by irregularities including cronyism and benefited just a fraction of those in need, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said.
Reuters reports:
President Uhuru Kenyatta announced the $92.51m cash transfer programme in May 2020, two months after the east African nation entered a strict lockdown.
A report by the US-based rights group found that officials in charge of enrolment frequently ignored eligibility criteria “and directed benefits to their relatives or friends, even in cases where they did not meet the criteria”. In other cases, the report found, the funds were only partially disbursed to those who were enrolled.
Nelson Marwa, principal secretary for social protection at the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection, denied the report’s findings. “It’s propaganda. That money was managed by a multi-agency team and disbursed by Safaricom. They have all the records,” he told Reuters.
Kenya has recorded 192,758 infections and 3,775 coronavirus-related deaths since the pandemic began. Its economy contracted 0.1% last year, the International Monetary Fund has said.
HRW said the programme, which ended in December, helped only a small fraction of those in the capital Nairobi, who faced hunger and eviction after losing their income due to the lockdown.
By October last year, of 600,000 households living in Nairobi’s eight informal settlements, just 29,000 – less than 5% – were enrolled in the cash transfer programme, the report said, citing a Kenyan government official.
Hello and greetings to everyone reading, wherever you are in the world. Mattha Busby here to take you through the next few hours of global Covid developments. Thanks to my colleague Martin Belam for covering the blog up until now. Please feel free to drop me a line on Twitter or message me via email (mattha.busby.freelance@guardian.co.uk) with any tips or thoughts on our coverage.
Updated
Today so far…
- A study by the US-based Center for Global Development has found that there were 4 million excess deaths in India from the start of the pandemic to 21 June. Although not all of the deaths can be directly attributed to Covid, the toll is nearly 10 times the official coronavirus death toll in the country
- World Health Organization head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has issued a message of support to the beleaguered Tokyo Olympics, urging them to be a “a source of hope & unity to achieve vaccine equity and end the pandemic.”
- First minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, will give a Covid update at 12.15pm.
- The UK government has contradicted statements by a junior minister in the media this morning that it wasn’t always necessary to self-isolate if the NHS Covid app told you to do so. Andrew Sparrow has more on our UK live blog.
- The US has raised the risk of traveling to the UK to its highest level, “very high”, and warned Americans not to travel there due to the pervasiveness of Delta.
- EasyJet is to ramp up the number of flights it operates to 60% of pre-pandemic levels during the summer holiday season, and has added new routes including Malta in response to rising customer demand.
- Russia reported 23,770 new Covid cases, including 3,188 in Moscow, pushing the total official number of cases confirmed during the pandemic to 6,006,536.
- Taiwan’s Medigen Vaccine Biologics Corp said on Tuesday it will start a late-stage clinical trial this year in Paraguay for its Covid vaccine candidate.
- South Korea’s prime minister and defence minister apologised as hundreds of Covid-infected sailors were flown to Seoul on Tuesday after a navy destroyer patrolling the waters off Africa was found to be riddled with the virus.
- The Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte, has warned tighter restrictions may be needed to prevent the spread of the Delta variant across the country, after the first local cases were detected last week.
- China on Tuesday reported the highest daily tally of new confirmed Covid cases since January, driven by a surge in imported infections in southwestern Yunnan province, which shares a border with Myanmar.
- Twitter says it has temporarily suspended Republican US Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene’s account for tweets which violated the social media’s misinformation policy on Covid.
Mattha Busby will be here presently to continue with live coronavirus news from around the globe. The UK headlines will be with Andrew Sparrow.
Tedros: may Olympics be 'a source of hope and unity to achieve vaccine equity'
World Health Organization head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has issued a message of support to the beleaguered Tokyo Olympics, tweeting:
Glad to be in #Japan to address the International Olympics Committee. I’ve come with a simple but urgent message: we can defeat Covid-19, but only if everyone plays their part. May these Tokyo 2020 Olympics be a source of hope & unity to achieve vaccine equity and end the pandemic.
Glad to be in #Japan to address the International @Olympics Committee. I've come with a simple but urgent message: we can defeat #COVID19, but only if everyone plays their part. May these #Tokyo2020 Olympics be a source of hope & unity to achieve #VaccinEquity & end the pandemic.
— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) July 20, 2021
Taiwan to hold late-stage trial of its Medigen vaccine candidate in Paraguay
Taiwan’s Medigen Vaccine Biologics Corp said on Tuesday it will start a late-stage clinical trial this year in Paraguay for its Covid vaccine, part of the island’s push to make its own shots against the coronavirus.
Taiwan’s government on Monday approved the emergency use and production of Medigen’s vaccine despite criticism from opposition parties the vaccine has yet to finish final clinical trials and with no efficacy data available.
Health authorities in Paraguay have allowed Medigen to run the Phase III trial involving 1,000 volunteers for the shot, MVC-COV1901, the Taiwan-based company said in a filing to the stock exchange.
Medigen said the trial is scheduled to complete in the third quarter and data would be available in the fourth quarter, adding the move will help expand the company’s footprint in Central and South America.
Paraguay is one of only 15 countries still to maintain formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan.
In Senegal, Covid cases have soared in the past week, threatening to overwhelm health services just as Senegalese prepare to gather in extended families for Eid al-Adha.
President Macky Sall threatened on Friday to close borders and impose a new state of emergency after the country broke its daily case record three times in a single week.
The day after Sall’s declaration, that record doubled to over 1,350. Supply shortages mean the virus could have ample room to run. Just over 600,000 doses of vaccine have been administered to a population of around 16 million people.
Not everyone in Dakar had heeded the warnings, report Reuters. Parking lots and street corners were lined yesterday with buses heading out of town, their roofs loaded with luggage and sacrificial sheep. Inside, few passengers wore masks.
Some people scoffed at the idea that the risk of Covid could trump a holy event. Others were more measured, yet steadfast in their desire to travel.
“After staying so long without seeing your family members, your mother or your children, even if the Covid situation is complicated, you close your eyes and go,” said Alhassane Sow
In contrast, Reuters spoek to Pape Gueye, who had made the difficult decision to spend the first Eid al-Adha of his life apart from his 88-year-old mother.
“I know a lot of people who had it,” said Gueye, 43, mixing a cup of green tea as he sat with masked friends in front of his flat in the capital, Dakar. “Some of them got through it, and some of them died,” he said. “After what I felt and the people around me who had it, I will stay at home.”
Russia passes total Covid caseload of 6 million
Russia reported 23,770 new Covid cases, including 3,188 in Moscow, pushing the total official number of cases confirmed during the pandemic to 6,006,536.
Reuters notes that the government also reported 784 coronavirus-related deaths, including 101 in Moscow.
Updated
Andrew Sparrow has launched our UK live blog, and he is leading with this shift in UK government messaging to stress that people “pinged” by the NHS Covid app can choose whether to self-isolate or not.
I’ll be continuing with the leading global coronavirus news here.
Alexandra Villarreal this morning has a series of interviews with young people about what they’ve lost with a year or more of Covid restrictions:
Covid-19’s uncontrollable arc has been a nightmare scenario for Liz Siegfried, a college student at the University of Vermont who knows she’s much better at taking care of others than she is herself.
Since March last year, she’s sacrificed a job at a local grocery store; worried about losing friends from a distance; and at times become a shut-in, too anxious or afraid to attend in-person events or classes.
“It was punch to the gut,” she says, talking about the pandemic. “My world was crashing down. It was fear of everything – fear of touching things, fear of seeing people. The thoughts spiraled.”
Although she wasn’t a germaphobe before, the health crisis made her one. At some point, she stopped touching doors and started dousing her phone in hand sanitizer. She wiped down her car often, and became concerned that surfaces as seemingly benign as a coin could carry disease.
Read more of Alexandra Villarreal’s interviews here: ‘I wanted more memories’: young people reflect on a year lost to Covid
Here’s the latest numbers from the UK government’s own Covid dashboard from 19 July by the way:
- There were 742 new patients admitted, taking the total number of people in hospital with Covid to 4,049, with 573 on ventilators. That’s a 39.5% week-on-week rise in hospitalisations.
- There were 39,950 new case on 19 July. That’s a 41.2% week-on-week rise.
- There were 19 deaths which takes us to a week-on-week rise of 48%.
There’s going to be an update later today from Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon.
📺 I will give a Covid update today at 12.15pm, covering latest figures, trends and advice. Please tune in if you can.
— Nicola Sturgeon (@NicolaSturgeon) July 20, 2021
Updated
The Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte, has warned tighter restrictions may be needed to prevent the spread of the Delta variant across the country, after the first local cases were detected last week. “This is more vicious. It’s more aggressive and fatal,” Duterte said during a television address, the Philippine Daily Inquirer reported.
In Metro Manila, the Philippines’ national capital region, mayors are calling for restrictions on the movement of children to be reintroduced, preventing them from going to many public places. Children aged five and over were previously banned from spaces such as outdoor dining establishments, tourist sites and playgrounds, though these rules were relaxed earlier in July. Two of 11 local Delta cases were detected in Metro Manila, it was announced on Friday.
The Philippines previously had one of the world’s toughest lockdowns, which was at times brutally enforced by the police, military and local officials. People were put in dog cages, forced to sit in the sun for hours, and placed in coffins as punishment for breaking curfew rules.
The Delta strain has caused recent surges in cases across south-east Asia, including Indonesia, where hospitals are overwhelmed and reporting shortages of oxygen. The Philippines has banned all arrivals from Indonesia, and is reportedly also considering stopping travel from Thailand and Malaysia, which are also facing rising cases.
Health undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire told local media the country has enough oxygen for now, but that the government was talking to manufacturers to increase supplies.
The Philippines experienced its worst outbreak around mid-April, when it recorded between 10,000 or 11,000 on average per day. On Monday, the country reported 5,651 cases and 72 fatalities.
Updated
Steve Swinford at the Times is claiming as an exclusive the news that the government has written to large employers telling them instructions to self-isolate from the NHS Covid app are just advisory, not mandatory.
Exclusive:
— Steven Swinford (@Steven_Swinford) July 20, 2021
Ministers have written to major manufacturers emphasising that staff are not legally obliged to isolate if pinged by app
Lord Grimstone, investment minister, told one large employer that app was only an ‘advisory tool’ and that people were not under any ‘legal duty’
That backs up what felt like a shift of tone and emphasis from small business minister Paul Scully earlier this morning [see 7.59am].
There was a bit of pushback on this approach in certain situations on the radio earlier from Prof Sir Jonathan Montgomery, who chaired the ethics advisory board for NHSx on its contact tracing app. PA Media reports he told Times Radio:
When we had no protection the risk was the same for everybody. If that risk is now reduced because someone is double vaccinated it feels as though we need more sophisticated advice.
If we are visiting an elderly relative or a cancer patient then take the ping seriously but, if you are doing something relatively Covid-friendly then maybe make a different decision.
The government needs to do more to help us make better decisions.
Updated
EasyJet is to ramp up the number of flights it operates to 60% of pre-pandemic levels during the summer holiday season, and has added new routes including Malta in response to rising customer demand.
The low cost airline will operate up to 1,400 flights a day between July and September. On Monday, it ran 1,000 flights.
EasyJet operated 17% flights compared with the same period in 2019 in the three months to 30 June (a total of 24,682), slightly less than planned, and carried 3 million passengers. It made revenues of £212m, up from £7.2m a year earlier when its fleet was fully grounded for all but two weeks of the quarter. Its loss before tax fell by 8.2% to £318m.
EasyJet said customers are booking much closer to departure, with 49% of its summer flights booked, compared with 65% in 2019. After the UK announced the waiving of the quarantine requirement for fully vaccinated passengers returning from amber list countries on 8 July, bookings surged by 400% on the previous week.
When Malta and Madeira were added to the UK’s green list of countries that do not require travellers to quarantine upon their return, easyJet put 60,000 additional seats on sale and launched two new routes, from Bristol and Luton to Malta.
Read more of Julia Kollewe’s report here: EasyJet increases flights to 60% of pre-Covid levels
Updated
India’s excess deaths during Covid ‘could be 10 times official toll’
Here’s our Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Delhi, who has just filed her latest despatch on the situation in India and that report of a huge number of uncounted Covid deaths:
State governments and local administrations across India have been accused of purposefully undercounting Covid-19 deaths, while the stigma attached to the virus also prevented many people getting tested, so many deaths also went unrecorded as Covid-19 fatalities. Following public pressure and calls for accountability, several Indian states have recently revised their Covid-19 mortality figures, leading to a sharp increase in the official death toll.
In order to draw together a more accurate picture than that reflected in official figures, the researchers used three data sources: data from the civil registration system that records births and deaths across seven states, blood tests showing the prevalence of the virus in India alongside global Covid-19 fatality rates, and an economic survey of nearly 900,000 people done three times a year.
“Knowing the true death toll of the pandemic is important for so many reasons,” Subramanian said. “How can we have a basic understanding of the impact of Covid without knowing how many people died and where they died? Accurate data is the only way we can prepare a fully fledged response to the pandemic in the future.”
Read more of Hannah Ellis-Petersen’s report here: India’s excess deaths during Covid ‘could be 10 times official toll’
Updated
South Korea’s prime minister and defence minister apologised as hundreds of Covid-infected sailors were flown to Seoul on Tuesday after a navy destroyer patrolling the waters off Africa was found to be riddled with the virus.
Almost 250 of the 301-strong unvaccinated crew aboard the destroyer Munmu the Great were infected, the country’s biggest cluster of military cases, sparking a public furore at the government’s failure to protect those serving abroad.
“I apologise for having failed to take better care of the health of our soldiers who devoted themselves to the country,” the prime minister, Kim Boo-kyum, told an intra-agency Covid meeting as he promised treatment and recovery support for the crew, which includes 12 in critical condition.
The defence minister, Suh Wook, apologised for not immunising the crew before they departed for the Gulf of Aden in early February on an eight-month counter-piracy mission, and said he would examine anti-virus policies for all overseas military units.
Updated
Labour: UK government plans for domestic vaccine passports 'chaos'
UK opposition Labour MP Pat McFadden has been on Sky News to give his reaction to last night’s domestic vaccine passport announcement by the government and he was pretty scathing:
What strikes me most of all over the last 24 hours is the panic and confusion that this shows on the part of the government. We’ve known about this reopening day, which they built up as freedom day for weeks and weeks – in fact, it was delayed for weeks. So they’ve had an awful lot of time to produce a proposal. Now we have one, and we don’t know its relationship with testing, when we’ve only got just over two thirds of the population vaccinated. We don’t if this is nightclubs, we don’t know if this is sports venues, so we’re going to have to look at the proposal. One word which strikes me over the last 24 hours is chaos. The chaos that the government has injected into its own day of reopening which they christened ‘freedom day’.
Kay Burley then spent some time trying to get McFadden to outline where or when Labour would apply vaccine passports, which seemed a rather fruitless line of questioning, as it hasn’t been a Labour policy. McFadden said vaccine passports might have a role to play in conjunction with testing in the future.
Updated
Travel restrictions have also featured in the UK media round this morning. Asked on Sky News whether Spain was going to be added to the amber watchlist of travel restrictions, business minister Paul Scully said the decisions were “taken at cabinet level”.
PA Media quotes him saying: “They’ll look at the data, and they’ll make sure that they can work out what is best to make sure that we keep transmission of the virus low, we keep the transmission of the variants low, because it’s the variants that are really key here to work out how they’re interacting with our vaccine programme.”
Asked whether rates being higher in Spain than in France, where those returning from the country are no longer exempt from quarantine, pointed to Spain being added to the amber list, Scully said: “It’s not just about … we try and give people as much data as we can but it’s not just about the pure numbers.
“It’s also about the variants, and the style of variants, the Beta variant, for example, that’s quite prevalent in France at the moment, we’re looking at how that interacts with the AstraZeneca vaccine.
“And so it’s … there’s a lot of factors that are involved in the decisions that are taken around travel.”
Updated
While it has always been true that the NHS Covid app telling you to self-isolate wasn’t legally mandatory, UK small business minister Paul Scully seems to have shifted government messaging slightly this morning, saying it is just a helpful suggestion to people.
Scully said that being “pinged” by the Covid app would “allow you to make informed decisions” but self-isolating was “up to individuals and employers”.
PA Media reports he told Times Radio:
Well, I think the exemption is being extended beyond the NHS to critical workers. So critical infrastructure and these kind of things. We’ve seen the Metropolitan line in London close, for example, because of a handful of really crucial signal workers having to self-isolate. So it’s those kind of things that we’re extending to.
It’s important to understand the rules. You have to legally isolate if you are on the … contacted by test and trace, or if you’re trying to claim isolation payments.
The app is there to give … to allow you to make informed decisions. And I think by backing out of mandating a lot of things, we’re encouraging people to really get the data in their own hands to be able to make decisions on what’s best for them, whether they’re employer or an employee.
Asked whether this meant people should or should not self-isolate if ‘pinged’, he said: “We want to encourage people to still use the app to be able to do the right thing, because we estimate it saves around 8,000 lives.”
Again it is quite conflicting advice, because, for example, if you are using your personal judgment as to whether it is safe to visit a business or not, it isn’t your personal judgment as to whether you will be served by staff who have been told to self-isolate and aren’t because they’ve made, in Scully’s words, “decisions on what’s best for them”.
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Twitter says it has temporarily suspended Republican US Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene’s account for tweets which violated the social media’s misinformation policy on Covid.
Greene posted that the coronavirus is not dangerous for non-obese people and those under 65, and that organizations should not force “non-FDA” approved vaccines or masks. These tweets have been labeled as “misleading” by the platform.
The US uses Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines under an Food and Drug Administration’s emergency use authorization. President Joe Biden has recently called on the social media companies to take action on vaccine misinformation.
Reuters remind us that in June she was forced to apologise after comparing Covid mask requirements and vaccinations to the Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews.
The number of new cases, hospitalizations and deaths in the US due to Covid-19 have been rising in recent days, largely driven by outbreaks in parts of the country with low vaccination rates.
Muslims across Indonesia marked a grim Eid al-Adha festival for a second year on Tuesday as the country struggles to cope with a devastating new wave of coronavirus cases.
Indonesia is now Asia’s Covid-19 hot spot with the most confirmed daily cases, as infections and deaths have surged over the past three weeks and India’s massive outbreak has waned. In the wake of the new wave the government had banned large gatherings and toughened travel restrictions.
Associated press report that most of Indonesia’s cases are on the densely populated island of Java, where more than half of the country’s 270 million people live. Authorities in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation have banned many of the crowd-attracting activities that are usually part of Eid al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice that marks the end of the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.
Authorities allowed prayers at local mosques in low-risk areas, but elsewhere houses of worship had no congregations, including Jakarta’s Istiqlal Grand Mosque, the largest in south-east Asia.
Officials also banned the huge crowds that usually fill the yards of mosques to participate in ritual animal slaughter for the festival. Religious leaders urged the faithful to pray inside their homes and children were told to not go out to meet friends.
Indonesia’s health ministry reported 34,257 new coronavirus cases and 1,338 deaths on Monday, making it the country’s deadliest day since the start of the pandemic.
Read more here: Muslims across Indonesia mark grim Eid al-Adha as Covid crisis deepens
I’ll just leave this here without comment…
Jonathan Sumption tells @amolrajan "The virus has not killed over 100,000 people."
— Paul Waugh (@paulwaugh) July 20, 2021
Says many older people who died would have died "within a year" of contracting Covid anyway
Rajan points out that a more of life is quite a precious thing.
Some choice quotes here from Politico’s London Playbook email summing up pretty much where last night’s announcement about domestic vaccine passports leaves the government right now:
Boris Johnson last night U-turned on another of his coronavirus policies as he ripped up his government’s opposition to mandatory domestic vaccine passports and ordered their use at nightclubs and other large events from September. The policy is already under pressure on two fronts: from government scientific advisers who were visibly uncomfortable at last night’s press conference that clubs are open at all, sparking speculation they could be closed within weeks, and from Tory MPs who fear Covid certification will creep into use in pubs, restaurants and other venues.
The government’s decision to open nightclubs on Monday while simultaneously encouraging people to behave cautiously and wear masks in crowded indoor spaces has always been a contradiction, to put it politely. Images of clubbers dancing in the early hours led to general bewilderment among Tory MPs — and probably much of the country — and at yesterday’s presser Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance warned they were “potential super-spreader events,” making as clear as he is ever publicly going to that he disagrees with the decision taken by ministers to reopen them. As it became obvious last night that few if any clubs had accepted the non-legally binding government advice to use the NHS COVID Pass app, Johnson ruled that vaccine passports should be compulsory from September.
If the government is so worried about nightclubs that it is ready to U-turn on vaccine passports, why is it waiting until September, leaving them open without restrictions for two months as cases approach their peak? Tory MPs who spoke to Playbook last night doubted whether that line would hold, speculating that Johnson could emulate his Dutch counterpart Mark Rutte, who reopened nightclubs and bars last month, saw a huge rise in COVID cases, then reimposed restrictions and apologized for the “error of judgment.”
UK minister on vaccine passports: 'I’m not comfortable that government is mandating anything'
UK small business minister Paul Scully has just endured a torrid time on Sky News, a taste, you suspect, of what his whole morning is going to be like. He was grilled on the details of the proposed domestic vaccine passports in the UK, and he didn’t really have any.
Firstly he couldn’t really specify which venues would be covered:
Anything that’s where large numbers of people come together that we are encouraging to use certification. We want people to do it voluntarily … We’re not saying crowded pubs at all. We’re not ruling anything out, but we’re not saying crowded bars. We’re saying nightclubs. And also larger ticketed events as well.
Then in a nutshell he explained the problem they will immediately run into with the policy
We’ve got to work on the definition. We’ve got to define it really carefully. I mean even nightclubs have very different types of venues. You get some big warehouse type venues, and you get some very small rooms with a lack of ventilation. Because it’s all about ventilation and that’s what we’re working on. But we’ll work on that over the over the next few weeks, alongside nightclub operators. It’s got to go through parliamentary scrutiny, so we’ve got to get it absolutely right, we’ve got to work with the sectors that are going to be affected. All we’re doing now is giving an advanced warning of what is coming down the line to make sure that the NHS doesn’t get swamped.
Presenter Kay Burley said, on the umpteenth occasion that Sully insisted the government needed time to work through the details, “you’ve had 18 months?”
Pressed about where it left the Conservative opposition to ID cards in the past in the UK, Scully was particularly uncomfortable and perhaps a little off-message, saying:
I’m not comfortable that the government is mandating anything, frankly. I’m a very libertarian conservative, I want to be able to back off … these are the challenges that we still have to do, so it’s incredibly frustrating, it’s incredibly complicated to work through the detail, but that’s the challenge we have.
So to sum up, he said domestic vaccine passports would apply to nightclubs and “larger ticketed events”, but then would not be drawn on whether that would or would not include large crowded pubs or sporting events. And that’s about all we learnt.
In Australia, the New South Wales premier says the state’s construction industry will “definitely” return by the end of July, but has suggested the state will not adopt Victoria’s model of capacity limits on work sites because they “cause confusion”.
The construction industry is urging the government to overturn its hastily announced shutdown of the construction industry amid warnings of a $2bn blow to the economy as builders across greater Sydney scramble to deal with fallout from the ban.
Brian Seidler, executive director of the Master Builders Association in NSW, said talks with the government had been ongoing since the industry was caught off-guard by an announcement on Saturday that the construction industry would face a shutdown in the wake of spiralling case numbers in Sydney.
“I was on the phone for seven hours on Sunday. We were advised maybe half an hour before the announcement of what was going to happen,” he said.
“It’s happened now and what we need to do is demonstrate to the government and to NSW Health that the building industry can do its business in a safe manner without exposing our workforce, clients and the public to Covid-19.”
The shutdown has also left some Sydney residents living in half-completed homes thanks to delays on renovations.
Read more of Michael McGowan’s report here: ‘It’s chaos’: shutdown of NSW construction industry causes havoc
Lockdowns do not harm health more than Covid, say researchers
Since early in the coronavirus pandemic, critics of unprecedented lockdown measures seen worldwide have argued that these interventions cause more harm than the disease itself. But an analysis of global health data suggests there is little evidence to support the idea that the cure is worse than the disease.
The analysis, published in the journal BMJ Global Health, considered claims that lockdowns cause more health harms than Covid-19 by examining their impacts on measures including death rates, routine health services and mental health.
Using an international dataset of all-cause mortality from 94 countries, the researchers found that countries such as New Zealand and Australia experienced no excess mortality last year. In contrast, places with few Covid restrictions such as Brazil, Sweden, Russia and at times parts of the US had large numbers of excess deaths over the course of the pandemic.
“It is … one of the most compelling pieces of evidence to support the notion that the cure was not worse than the disease,” said author Prof Gavin Yamey, from the Duke Global Health Institute at Duke University. “It does seem that countries that acted quickly and aggressively often had fewer deaths than in previous years. One study showed that lockdown may have reduced annual mortality by up to 6% from eliminating flu transmission alone.”
The excess-mortality data could not rule out harms caused by lockdown or conclude whether lockdowns have a net benefit, however, especially given very high excess mortality in many nations that did pursue such strategies such as the UK, the researchers wrote.
Another avenue of inquiry was healthcare services. Although data suggests a clear reduction in attendance for vital non-Covid health services during lockdowns, overwhelmed health services or a high perceived risk of infection at health facilities would also disincentivise people from accessing care, the researchers suggested. “With current evidence, it is simply not possible to support either causal assertion adequately,” they concluded.
The relationship between mental health and lockdowns is often highlighted but the link between large-scale Covid outbreaks and depression and anxiety is often overlooked, the researchers noted. “Missing school clearly affects children’s mental health, but so does losing a loved one to Covid-19.”
Read more of science correspondent Natalie Grover’s report here: Lockdowns do not harm health more than Covid, say researchers
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Good morning, it is Martin Belam here in London. You have to hand it to the UK government. Who knew that they could design a policy to infuriate every single stripe of divided Covid opinion in the country? But with “vaccine passports for nightclubs, but not until we’ve let unvaccinated people go clubbing for two months first” they seem to have managed it. It’s either a massive imposition on civil liberties, or completely irresponsible to allow clubs to open right now if that’s what you think they need to keep people safe. My colleague Peter Walker wrote this Q&A last night explaining what we know about the scheme. Paul Scully, UK minister for small businesses, is on the media round today, and I’ll have quotes from him shortly
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Mainland China records 65 new cases, highest since January
China on Tuesday reported the highest daily tally of new confirmed Covid cases since January, driven by a surge in imported infections in southwestern Yunnan province, which shares a border with Myanmar.
Reuters: Mainland China recorded 65 new confirmed cases for 19 July, compared with 31 a day earlier, the National Health Commission said in a statement. That was the most since 30 January, when 92 new cases were reported.
Imported infections accounted for most of the new cases reported for 19 July, with Yunnan reporting 41 new cases originating from abroad, all of whom were Chinese nationals who recently returned from Myanmar.
The current bout of cases in Yunnan started on 4 July, and has been concentrated in Ruili and Longchuan, two small cities on China’s border with Myanmar, which has been hit by a sharp rise in infections since June.
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Four million excess deaths in India, study suggests
A study by the US-based Center for Global Development has found that there were 4 million excess deaths in India from the start of the pandemic to 21 June, AP reports.
Although not all of the deaths can be directly attributed to Covid, the toll is nearly 10 times the official coronavirus death toll in the country, which stands at 414,108, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker.
The report released Tuesday estimated excess deaths – the gap between those recorded and those that would have been expected – to be between 3 million to 4.7 million between January 2020 and June 2021. It said an accurate figure may “prove elusive” but the true death toll “is likely to be an order of magnitude greater than the official count”.
It is difficult to determine the actual Covid death toll said Arvind Subramanian, India’s former chief economic adviser and one of the authors of the study, but, he added:
The true deaths are likely to be in several millions, not hundreds of thousands, making this arguably India’s worst human tragedy since the partition and independence.’
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Summary
Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic with me, Helen Sullivan.
A study by the US-based Center for Global Development has found that there were 4 million excess deaths in India from the start of the pandemic to 21 June, the Associated Press reports.
Although not all of the deaths can be directly attributed to Covid, the toll is nearly ten times the official coronavirus death toll in the country, which stands at 414,108, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker.
More on this story shortly. In the meantime, here are the other key recent developments:
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The US has raised the risk of traveling to the UK to its highest level, “very high”, and warned Americans not to travel there due to the pervasiveness of Delta.
- The UK reported 39,950 new Covid cases as weekly cases rise 41%. There were 39,950 new coronavirus cases today and 19 new deaths.
- Northern Ireland daily cases exceeded 1,700 for first time since January today. Case numbers have been growing rapidly in recent weeks as the Delta variant became dominant.
- Globally, women have been hardest hit by pandemic job losses and only men’s employment is likely to return to 2019 levels this year, the International Labour Organisation said today.
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Bangladesh reported a record 231 coronavirus deaths - the highest to date for one day.
- Tehran is to enter a new week-long lockdown as cases in Iran soar. From tomorrow all bazars, market places, public offices, cinemas, gyms and restaurants in the capital and neighbouring province Alborz will close.
- Tokyo Olympics organisers have warned participants not to visit restaurants that open after 8pm or that serve alcohol to avoid “grave reputational risk”.
- Cuba has the highest rate of contagion per capita in the whole of Latin America and more than any other country in the Americas for its size. The country, which has a population of 11 million, reported close to 4,000 confirmed cases per million residents last week - nine times higher than the world average.
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