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Key Covid-19 developments
- Serbia has been approved to produce the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, Serbia’s minister for innovations Nenad Popovic said in a statement on Friday.
- WHO director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has called the drop in confirmed Covid-19 cases across the globe encouraging, he cautions against relaxing the restrictions that have allowed us to reach this point.
- Mexico city’s Covid-19 threat level has officially been lowered after two months of strict lockdown measures.
- France reported 20,701 new confirmed cases on Friday. This is down from 21,063 on Thursday and 22,139 last Friday.
- As the Czech Republic continues to deal with a new, highly contagious coronavirus variant, the lower house of the Czech parliament has refused to extend a state of emergency.
- US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has announced that schools can restart in-school learning without the need for all teachers to receive a vaccine.
- Portugal will extend its Covid-19 border controls with Spain until March in an attempt to curb raging infections, AFP reports.
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Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune has returned to Algeria after a one month stay in Germany for surgery due to post-Covid-19 complications.
Australian state of Victoria begins first day of lockdown
Victorian residents are waking up to the first of five days of hard lockdown, the third time the Australian state has had to institute “stay at home orders”.
People can only leave their homes for four reasons – shopping for essentials, exercising within 5kms from home for a maximum of two hours a day, accessing healthcare and caregiving, or working if this can’t be done from home.
Schools and universities have been closed and all hospitality businesses can only provide takeaway and delivery options.
This comes after a small UK variant cluster, originating in a hotel quarantine facility, made its way into the broader community.
There are now 13 people associated with the outbreak, including a close contact of a hotel quarantine worker who worked an eight-hour shift at a popular Melbourne airport cafe while unknowingly infectious.
The Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, said the UK variant of the disease was spreading at “a velocity that has not been seen anywhere in our country”, and the current contact tracing was not equipped to deal with the new version of the virus.
The snap lockdown is intended to buy contact tracers time, and ensure all close contacts of the cafe worker can be isolated and tested.
Although it seems the majority of the community is supportive of the “hard and fast” approach to outbreak control, a small group marched from the CBD to the Australian Open precinct to protest. Some were carrying anti-vaccination signs and waving American flags.
Anti-lockdown protesters have gathered outside Melbourne Park. @3AW693 #AusOpen pic.twitter.com/5GmsDK5ayj
— Jordan Tunbridge (@JordanTunbridge) February 12, 2021
Health authorities believe the Melbourne hotel quarantine cluster began when an infectious returned international traveller guest used a nebuliser medical device which aerosolised the coronavirus particles, allowing it to spread into the hall and other rooms, infecting staff and other guests.
These machines are not technically allowed in quarantine, and Andrews said yesterday that the guest was asked to declare any devices multiple times, but said he did not want to lay blame as the man was now in a critical condition in hospital.
But, the Age newspaper spoke to this man from the hospital on Friday evening, and he disputes these claims, saying quarantine staff told him twice it was OK to use the nebuliser. He had not yet tested positive for Covid-19 when using the machine.
His name was not published in order to protect his family’s identity.
If I was told that I couldn’t use it, I never would have used it.
The way it has all come out in the news and through the government has made it sound like I was using it illegally or that I have snuck it in or something like that. It’s been very distressing.
You are left feeling like a criminal or that you’ve done the wrong thing. That has been the hardest thing in all this.
Criticism has also been levelled at the federal government for not having secured vaccine doses earlier and having immunised hotel quarantine workers by now.
Australia is falling well behind the rest of the world, yet to administer any vaccine.
The first shipment of Pfizer doses is set to arrive in the country early next week.
Updated
Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune has returned home after a one month stay in Germany for surgery due to post-Covid-19 complications.
The 75-year-old leader had been hospitalised in Germany after contracting the virus, which resulted in a two-month stay.
After returning to Algeria, he later went back to Germany on January 10 for a “successful” foot operation.
But, the president’s long absence, a total of three months abroad since late October, had raised some concerns in Algeria of a possible power vacuum, reports AFP.
As the president’s return to Algeria coincides with the second anniversary of the Hirak protests that continued even after the fall of the previous president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika.
Since the pandemic began, Algeria has recorded over 110,000 cases including over 2,900 deaths from Covid-19.
Updated
Portugal will extend its Covid-19 border controls with Spain until March in an attempt to curb raging infections, AFP reports.
The border control measures were first introduced in late January and included controls at different crossing points and a limit to cross-border traffic.
Portuguese nationals and those with the right to live in the country will be allowed to return from Spain and vise versa.
Except for goods, rail transport between the two countries remains suspended.
On Thursday, Prime Minister Antonio Costa said that despite daily figures beginning to decrease in recent days, Portugal will “very probably” remain under lockdown until the end of March.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has announced that schools can restart in-school learning without the need for all teachers to receive a vaccine.
The new CDC guidelines recommend universal mask-wearing and physical distancing as mitigation strategies crucial to the reopening of in-person learning.
The guidelines also include the need for facility and personal hygiene, and contact tracing, Reuters reports.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said: “We believe with the strategies we have put forward that there will be limited to no transmission in schools if followed.”
School reopenings have been a major focus for teaching unions and their school districts in America.
But earlier this week in Chicago, after months of negotiations between union and district officials, agreement was reached on a safety plan for the return to in-person learning.
Updated
As the Czech Republic continues to deal with a new, highly contagious coronavirus variant, the lower house of the Czech parliament has refused to extend a state of emergency.
The state of emergency measure would allow the Czech cabinet to impose strict nationwide restrictive measures and limit individual rights.
Ministers have warned that without the measures, the current situation will worsen – potentially causing the already struggling health system to collapse.
AP reports:
“The situation is serious,” Prime Minister Andrej Babis told reporters Friday evening after meeting President Milos Zeman. “It poses a threat to the health of our citizens.”
Opposition parties say the current lockdown isn’t working and accused Babis of not doing enough for businesses and others affected by restrictions.
They also complained that the government has been refusing to take seriously their proposals to deal with the pandemic and insisted schools should reopen.
The current state of emergency will expire on Sunday night after 132 days.
The government can use other legal options to reimpose some measures but not all of them.
“We will immediately apply all those remaining options we have,” Health Minister Jan Blatny said. “(But) they’re not as effective” as powers under the state of emergency.
As a result, bars, restaurants, and cafes can possibly reopen Monday while the night-time curfew and a ban on gatherings of more than two people will be canceled.
The end of the state of emergency might also limit the use of military medical personnel in civilian hospitals, and firefighters helping distribute protective gear and other equipment across the country.
Updated
France reported 20,701 new confirmed cases on Friday. This is down from 21,063 on Thursday and 22,139 last Friday.
The health ministry also reported 3,398 people in intensive care and 320 new deaths in the past 24 hours.
Since the start of the vaccination rollout campaign, 2.84 million vaccines have been administered.
Updated
Mexico city’s Covid-19 threat level has officially been lowered after two months of strict lockdown measures.
City officials have cited low hospitalisation rates as to why they lowered the threat level. However, Mexico’s city mayor, Claudia Sheinbaum, encourages residents to remain vigilant despite the relaxation, Reuters reports.
Sheinbaum said at a government briefing: “Don’t lower your guard. Resume activities but without taking risks.”
Mexico has registered 1,968,566 total cases and 171,234 deaths since the pandemic began.
Updated
While health experts support the decision by Victoria premier, Daniel Andrews, for a five-day “circuit breaker”, some are hesitant to back the claims that the UK variant of the virus is at the centre of the Melbourne, Australia outbreak.
On Friday the premier said that the decision to impose a lock was due to the speed of transmission and incubation. “Right now, we are reaching close contacts well within the 48-hour benchmark,” he said.
“But the time between exposure, incubation, symptoms, and testing positive is rapidly shortening. So much so, that even secondary close contacts are potentially infectious within that 48-hour window.”
Hassan Vally, an epidemiologist and associate professor in public health at La Trobe University, said that while he was not questioning the claim the UK variant had a shorter incubation period, he was “cautious” about “accepting it as fact”.
The Guardian’s Luke Henriques-Gomes has more on the Victorian “circuit breaker” and the epidemiologists response here:
Updated
While the WHO director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has called the drop in confirmed Covid-19 cases across the globe encouraging, he cautions against relaxing the restrictions that have allowed us to reach this point.
Tedros said that while the number of reported infections has declined for the fourth week in a row, globally, “now is not the time for any country to relax measures or for any individual to let down their guard.”
Adding: “Every life that is lost now is all the more tragic as vaccines are beginning to be rolled out.”
While figures for the week ending February 8 are still incomplete, the WHO has said that around 1.9 million newly confirmed cases were registered worldwide.
This is down by more than 3.2 million the previous week, AP reports.
Serbia has been approved to produce the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, Serbia’s minister for innovations Nenad Popovic said in a statement on Friday.
AFP reports:
“The first phase of the production of Russia’s vaccine Sputnik V on Serbia’s territory has been preliminarily approved,” Serbia’s minister for’ innovations Nenad Popovic said in a statement.
The announcement was made after a delegation of experts from Russia’s industry and commerce ministries, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) - which financed the vaccine - and the country’s state institute for drugs visited the Belgrade-based virology institute.
“They are satisfied with what they saw at the Torlak institute,” the minister said.
Another group of Russian experts should visit Serbia within the next 15 days to assess what technical and technological conditions would have to be met to allow full-scale production of the vaccine on Serbian territory, he added.
Hello, I’m Edna Mohamed and I’ll be taking over the blog for the next few hours from my colleague. As always, if you wanted to send me over any tips you can do so either through Twitter or by emailing me here: edna.mohamed.casual@theguardian.com
Here is a quick re-cap of some of the main events in the UK and from around the world:
- Europe’s medicines regulator is planning to speed up assessments of any Covid-19 vaccines that are modified to protect against variants of the virus.
- Greece has extended the full lockdown imposed on metropolitan Athens earlier this week to more regions of the country in an attempt to contain the spread of Covid infections.
- All hypotheses are still open in the World Health Organization’s search for the origins of the coronavirus, its director general has said.
- The French health authority Haute Autorite de Sante has recommended that only a single shot of Covid vaccine should be administered to people who had been previously infected.
- In the UK, the Covid-19 reproduction number, or R value, has fallen below 1 for the first time since July and is now estimated to be between 0.7 and 0.9, official figures indicate.
EU drugs regulator plans to fast track variant-modified Covid vaccines
Reuters reports:
Europe’s medicines regulator is planning to speed up assessments of any Covid-19 vaccines that are modified to protect against variants of the virus, the head of the agency’s Covid-19 task-force told Reuters on Friday.
Marco Cavaleri, chair of the vaccine evaluation team at the European Medicines Agency (EMA), said there should be no need for lengthy large-scale trials like those needed to evaluate the first Covid-19 vaccines, since tweaks for new variants can be tested on smaller groups.
“We are working on updated guidelines, assuming that we cannot ask for large Phase III trials. This will allow us to go faster,” said Cavaleri.
“We will ask for much smaller trials, with a few hundred participants, rather than 30,000 to 40,000,” he told Reuters. He said the EMA would focus primarily on immune response data.
The Spanish government has said more than 1m people have already received two Covid-19 vaccinations, according to Reuters.
In an initial phase aimed at protecting nursing home residents and workers and frontline medics, Spain has administered 2.4m doses.
Nearly all those vaccinations so far have been with the Pfizer/BioNTech shot, on a regime of two doses separated by about three weeks. Spain is also using the Moderna vaccine.
Authorities will soon deploy AstraZeneca’s vaccine, which is approved for 18-55 year olds, to a broader section of society, including domestic workers and physiotherapists.
Updated
Chinese authorities have refused to provide World Health Organization investigators with raw, personalised data on early Covid cases that could help them determine how and when the coronavirus first began to spread in China (see earlier post), the Wall Street Journal reported.
Updated
Greece extends lockdown to more regions to halt Covid spread
Greece has extended the full lockdown imposed on metropolitan Athens earlier this week to more regions of the country in a bid to contain the spread of Covid-19 infections, the deputy civil protection minister said.
Reuters reports:
Effective on Saturday, the region of Achaia in the northwest of the Peloponnese peninsula as well as Euboea, Greece’s second-largest island after Crete, will be in lockdown until 22 February at least, authorities said. This means schools, hair salons and non-essential retail shops will close.
“The epidemiological picture countrywide shows a steady deterioration,” Vana Papaevangelou, a member of the committee of infectious disease experts advising the government, told a news briefing.
She said the occupancy rate at Covid-19 intensive care units in Athens hospitals had risen to 83%.
On Tuesday, the government announced a full lockdown in metropolitan Athens to curb a resurgence in coronavirus cases and ease pressure on badly stretched health services.
Italy reported 316 Covid-related deaths on Friday against 391 the day before, the health ministry said, while the daily tally of new infections fell to 13,908 from 15,146 the previous day.
Some 305,619 tests for Covid-19 were carried out in the past day, compared with a previous 292,533, the health ministry added.
Gabon has restricted travel in and out of its capital city, and expanded curfew hours to limit travel and slow the spread of Covid infections, interior minister Lambert Noel Matha said on Friday.
Matha told a news conference that curfew hours have been extended by two hours, now starting at 6pm local time, according to Reuters.
He said travellers in and out of Libreville and neighbouring municipalities are now required to present a negative Covid-19 test because of the rising number of cases.
Covid cases in Gabon are at 73% of peak and rising, Reuters data shows, with 148 new infections reported on average each day.
The Central African nation has reported 12,171 infections and 71 coronavirus-related deaths since the pandemic began.
Updated
WHO: 'all hypotheses remain open' on virus origin
All hypotheses are still open in the World Health Organization’s search for the origins of Covid-19, its director general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has said. Reuters reports:
A WHO-led mission in China said this week that it was not looking further into the question of whether the virus escaped from a lab, which it considered highly unlikely. The United States has said it will review the mission’s findings.
‘Some questions have been raised as to whether some hypotheses have been discarded. Having spoken with some members of the team, I wish to confirm that all hypotheses remain open and require further analysis and study,’ Tedros said.
Updated
Nachod and Trutnov are among several regions in the Czech Republic that have reported a continuing spread of Covid-19, despite a national lockdown, Reuters reports.
A new, more infectious variant of the virus first detected in Britain is the likely reason – data from January showed between 45% and 60% of new patients were infected with the UK variant.
On Friday, the region of 550,000 reported just four free beds in Covid-19 wards, and eight in high dependency and intensive care units treating coronavirus patients.
Updated
Reuters reports:
The French government has no plans for now to order local lockdown measures in the eastern area of Moselle to rein in the spread of highly contagious Covid-19 variants, health minister Olivier Véran said on Friday.
Véran told reporters that a high number of cases of the South African Covid-19 variant had been found in the region.
Updated
The World Health Organization’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has discussed US support for Covax vaccines:
I so appreciated today’s call with @CDCDirector Dr. Rochelle Walensky on our organizations' enduring partnership. It was good to discuss 🇺🇸 ‘s support for @ACTAccelerator and COVAX, #VaccinEquity, prioritizing robust public health systems, and our partnership to #EndPolio. pic.twitter.com/LVba0R3aFq
— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) February 12, 2021
Updated
Germany will have difficulties using all the available Covid-19 vaccines it will have in April, chancellor Angela Merkel said in an interview with broadcaster ZDF on Friday.
Merkel defended the vaccination scheme used by Germany and the EU as criticism of the slow rollout continues. Asked whether the slowness had to do with the EU being outspent by countries including the US and the UK, Merkel said: “I don’t think we were stingy ... I think enough vaccine doses were ordered.”
She also said: “It is disappointing that we didn’t have more vaccines in January ... By the end of March and in April, we will have a hard time using up all the vaccine doses available. But in the first weeks [we were] a bit short and that is probably something people expected to be different.”
Once a seven-day coronavirus incidence of under 35 per 100,000 people is reached, further relaxations beyond the opening of shops may follow, she added.
Updated
Ukraine will receive €50m from the European Investment Bank to buy Covid-19 vaccines and modern refrigeration equipment in which to store them, prime minister Denys Shmygal said on Friday.
French authority recommends single Covid shot for those previously infected
The French health authority Haute Autorite de Sante has recommended that only a single shot of Covid vaccine should be administered to people who had been previously infected.
The HAS said in a statement that people previously infected retain an immune memory that calls for only a single dose, adding: “The single dose of vaccine will act as a reminder”.
Updated
R-value below 1 in the UK for first time since July
The Covid reproduction number, or R value, has fallen below 1 for the first time since July and is now estimated to be between 0.7 and 0.9 across the UK, according to the latest government figures.
R represents the average number of people each Covid-19 positive person goes on to infect.
When the figure is above 1, an outbreak can grow exponentially, but when it is below 1 it means the epidemic is shrinking.
Updated
Pakistan has approved China’s CanSinoBio Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use, health minister Faisal Sultan said on Friday.
Reuters reports:
“Yes, correct,” Sultan texted Reuters after being asked to confirm that the country’s Drug Regulation Authority had met and approved the vaccine.
CanSinoBIO last week released interim efficacy results of a multi-country trial, which included Pakistan, showing 65.7% efficacy in preventing symptomatic coronavirus cases and a 90.98% success rate in stopping severe infections.
Updated
Sweden, which has spurned a lockdown throughout the pandemic, registered 3,834 new coronavirus cases on Friday, Health Agency statistics showed.
The country of 10 million registered 58 new deaths, taking the total to 12,428, with the registered deaths having occurred over several days and weeks, Reuters reports.
Sweden’s death rate per capita is several times higher than that of its Nordic neighbours, but lower than several European countries that opted for lockdowns.
Updated
Bosnian health workers received their first Covid vaccine shots on Friday, as officials in the country’s autonomous Serb Republic announced a mass inoculation drive for later this month, Reuters reports.
Bosnia had not received any vaccines until last week, when its first batch of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine arrived, enabling it to start inoculating medical staff working in Covid hospitals and departments in its Serb-dominated region.
Bosnia, which also comprises the Bosniak-Croat Federation that has not received any vaccines yet, has ordered 1.2m vaccine doses under the Covax scheme and nearly 900,000 from the EU.
Officials hope the first doses will arrive later this month.
Updated
PA Media reports:
Around one in 80 people in private households in England had Covid-19 between 31 January and 6 February, according to estimates from the Office for National Statistics – the equivalent of 695,400 people.
This is down from around one in 65 people for the period January 24 to 30.
Updated
Germany’s armed forces will extend their pandemic medical aid for Portugal by six weeks, defence minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer was quoted as saying on Friday.
“The armed forces will support the fight against the coronavirus pandemic in Portugal for another six weeks,” Kramp-Karrenbauer told newspaper group Funke.
“We stand together in Europe and help where the need is greatest,” she added.
Updated
Here is an update from Reuters on the border closures in Germany (see earlier post).
Jens Spahn, the German health minister, said entry bans on travellers from the Czech Republic and Austria’s Tyrol region from 14 February were necessary to prevent the spread of new Covid variants.
“They are unavoidable for a certain period of time to prevent the spread of dangerous virus variants,” Spahn told a news conference.
Updated
The Victorian premier, battling an outbreak of the UK Covid variant, has flagged slashing the number of Australians able to return home, suggesting travellers could only be allowed to enter the country on “compassionate grounds”.
Read the full story here first:
Updated
A Japanese government health panel has approved Pfizer Inc’s Covid vaccine for use, NHK national television reported on Friday (see earlier post).
Prime minister Yoshihide Suga has said vaccinations would begin from the middle of next week, starting with 10,000 health workers.
The government hopes to secure enough supplies for the whole population by mid-year, Reuters reports.
Updated
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Pfizer and Moderna are testing vaccines on children aged 12 and older and hope to have results by the summer, the New York Times reports.
The companies could then test the vaccines in younger children, depending on findings in the older cohort.
Johnson & Johnson, Novavax and AstraZeneca are in the process of putting similar plans into operation but are not quite at such an advanced stage.
Updated
Europe’s drugs regulator has said it has launched a real-time review of CureVac’s Covid-19 vaccine to speed up potential approvals and bring more shots to the region reeling from a surge in infections.
The human medicines committee of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) will review data from ongoing trials of the German biopharmaceutical firm’s vaccine until there is enough clinical data for approval, the regulator said.
Having started mass testing of its vaccine candidate, which uses next-generation mRNA technology, in Europe and Latin America in December, CureVac expects an initial readout from the study in March or April.
The EMA said its decision to start the “rolling review” of the vaccine, CVnCoV, was based on its preliminary results from laboratory studies and early clinical studies in adults.
EMA has started a rolling review of CVnCoV, a #COVID19vaccine developed by CureVac AG:
— EU Medicines Agency (@EMA_News) February 12, 2021
👉https://t.co/risZxVYHuS pic.twitter.com/n0nofi1hcU
After briefly leading the world in Covid-19 infections last month Ireland has dramatically curbed the spread of the virus.
A lockdown that includes a 5km travel limit has reduced the 14-day incidence rate per 100,000 people to 326, around mid-way in Europe’s table, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
However authorities have signalled severe restrictions will continue at least until late April to drive down infections to around 100 a day, followed by a slow, cautious reopening of the economy.
Ireland has experienced a rollercoaster. In early December it had the EU’s lowest infection rate only to see cases explode after it relaxed restrictions in the run-up to Christmas, fuelled in part by the virus variant first identified in England.
The number of people in hospital for coronavirus has halved in recent weeks but the virus remains widespread, keeping pressure on the health system, Philip Nolan, the chair of Ireland’s Epidemiological Modelling Advisory Group, told RTE on Friday.
“Last week by every indicator we had more disease and more severe disease than any point in 2020. We still have 170 people in ICU. That is an extraordinarily high number.”
Lebanon is suffering from a brain drain of doctors and other medical workers, leaving hospitals there badly in need of intensive care staff, The National reports.
A demand across the region for medical staff is placing further strain on the state’s existing pool of healthcare workers, many of whom were already considering emigration.
Dr Youssef Bakhach, general secretary of the Lebanese Order of Physicians in Beirut, said one in five doctors had already left the country or was planning to do so.
He estimated that 16 to 20 per cent of Lebanese doctors have already left or are planning to leave.
Norway’s economy contracted 2.5 percent in 2020 as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, , a historic setback but a limited one compared to many other countries, official data showed this morning.
The country even saw growth in its gross domestic product (GDP) of 1.9 percent in the fourth quarter, according to Statistics Norway.
“Preliminary accounts show that the downturn in 2020 was somewhat lower than we feared when restrictions were at their peak in March and April,” Pal Sletten, head of National Accounts at Statistics Norway, said in a statement.
Shifting gender politics and the coronavirus have combined to spell the possible end of the Japanese Valentine’s Day custom of women giving chocolates to male colleagues.
Traditionally, women are expected to buy gift-wrapped chocolates for the men in their working lives – usually senior colleagues and others who have helped them during the course of the year – as part of a tradition called giri choco, literally obligation chocolates.
The custom is not a one-way street, however: men are supposed to reciprocate a month later on White Day – a marketing ploy dreamed up by chocolate makers in the early 1980s to boost sales.
Growing resistance to the practice – which can involve anything from expensive treats from a chocolatier to budget selections sold in convenience stores and supermarkets – has led to a decline in sales in recent years, as more women object to “forced giving”.
Updated
KPMG’s UK chairman, Bill Michael, has resigned after telling staff to “stop moaning” during a virtual meeting about the coronavirus pandemic and the impact of lockdown on people’s lives.
Michael, who has headed the company since 2017, was speaking at a virtual town hall meeting on Monday with members of the firm’s financial services consulting team when he made the comments.
The 52-year old Australian, who also said that staff should stop “playing the victim card” and described the concept of unconscious bias as being “complete and utter crap for years”, apologised and said on Friday the scandal over his comments had made his position at the accounting giant “untenable”.
The number of Covid-19 cases in eastern Europe surpassed 10 million on Friday, according to Reuters tally, as countries across the region aim to increase vaccine procurements from multiple suppliers to accelerate inoculation programmes.
Countries in eastern Europe have reported more than 10.02 million cases and 214,691 deaths since the pandemic started. However, daily average new cases in the region have declined by about 31% in past 30 days compared with the previous 30 days.
Russia has the most cases in the region and became the first European country to surpass 4 million on Monday. The country has also reported the most deaths in eastern Europe at about 79,194, according to a Reuters tally.
Updated
More than half of South Africans – 61% – want to be vaccinated against Covid-19 and the number of people saying yes to inoculation is gradually growing, the Mail and Guardian reports.
The newspaper picks up on findings from a survey by Ipsos and the World Economic Forum, conducted in 15 countries from 28 to 31 January.
A further 237 Covid-19 related deaths and 2488 new infections were announced by South African health authorities on Thursday night while President Cyril Ramaphosa said that the government would receive 80,000 doses of Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine next week.
A further 500,000 doses of the same vaccine are expected to arrive over the coming weeks.
The South African government is considering selling its doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine after a trial there indicated that it was ineffective against mild to moderate cases of the locally dominant variant of coronavirus.
Updated
Healthcare workers in Ireland who refuse to take the vaccine may be removed from their posts, the Irish Times reports this morning.
Paul Reid, chief executive of Ireland’s Health Service Executive, said at a briefing on Thursday that was “inexcusable” for any healthcare worker who works with patients not to take the vaccine.
Reid added that everyone had a right to refuse a vaccine, but Ireland’s Health and Safety Act allowed for workers to be removed if they were regarded as a threat to other people.
Allowing someone “a gulp of fresh air during a 10-day visit in the hotel” as part of the forthcoming quarantine strategy for incoming travellers to Britain is reasonable, according to a minister in the UK’s Home Office.
Victoria Atkins was responding to questions put to her on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme about why the strategy in Britain will be less stringent than in Australia, where those in the hotels have to remain inside and cannot open windows.
Atkins was speaking after an Australian epidemiologist said that the more relaxed regime – details of which were reported by the BBC – was very risky.
“I am certainly not claiming to be more expert than him but of course in terms of the policy development we will keep it all under review,” said Atkins. “We are confident that we have the measures in place, are ready to go and they will help protect out country from the new variants.”
Atkins was also asked why the UK was not insisting on compulsory Covid-19 tests for staff and security guards at the hotels.
“Again we keep these measures under review. There is a testing regime planned for hotel and security staff. Of course we want to keep them safe and they are critical part of this policy”
Updated
After it emerged that Britain’s hotel quarantine strategy will be less stringent than in Australia, where it was pioneered, there have been warnings this morning about the risks involved.
Allowing travellers quarantining in hotels to leave their rooms with guards is “very risky”, Australian epidemiologist Professor Michael Toole told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme.
Prof Toole, from the Burnet Institute in Melbourne, Victoria, said there had been coronavirus cases in the city where an infected guest opened their room door and “with the positive pressure this kind of fog of virus went out into the corridor, travelled down and infected hotel staff”.
Asked for his views on people being allowed to leave their rooms in UK quarantine hotels while accompanied by guards, Prof Toole said: “We’ve learnt that that is a very risky procedure.”
Victoria has entered a third lockdown after an outbreak of cases thought to be linked to a quarantine hotel.
Japan’s first batch of Covid-19 vaccine arrived on Friday morning, local media reported, with official approval for the Pfizer shots expected soon as the country races to control a third wave of infections ahead of the Olympic Games.
A government health panel is due to deliberate on the vaccine later on Friday. Kyodo News reported that approval would come on Sunday.
Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has said vaccinations would begin from the middle of next week, starting with some 10,000 health workers. The government hopes to secure enough supplies for the whole populace by mid-year.
About 400,000 doses arrived at Narita International Airport, near Tokyo, on Friday morning aboard a flight from Brussels, Kyodo reported.
There had been concern that the European Union could block exports of the shots, prompting Japan’s vaccine chief to warn against growing nationalism over supplies.
Everyone in the top four priority groups for vaccines in Wales will have received “invitations to come in” for a Covid-19 injection “at the very latest over the weekend,” the First Minister of the devolved administration in Wales has said.
Mark Drakeford told BBC Breakfast: “There are 740,000 people in Wales in those four groups, 689,000 of them had already been vaccinated by the end of Wednesday.
“We expect, when we have yesterday’s figure, to go well past the 700,000 barrier today. We know that all of those who are yet to be vaccinated will have had invitations to come in by the end of today or at the very latest over the weekend.”
After a two-week period last month in which Portugal was the world’s worst-hit country by size of population, anxiety over the recent pandemic peak has eased slightly.
The number of Covid-19 patients in hospital and in intensive care fell onThursday for the third straight day, according to fresh government data.
Portugal’s health ministry reported the fewest hospitalizations since 20 January and the fewest patients in Intensive Care Units for almost two weeks.
But Portugal’s seven-day average of daily deaths remained the world’s highest, at 2.05 per 100,000 people, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Experts reckon the surge peaked near the end of last month. But at Lisbon’s Curry Cabral Hospital, Dr. Nuno Germano isn’t expecting any immediate relief at the intensive care unit he heads, where 25 patients are in care.
“We’re still expecting cases to rise,” he said Thursday, at the end of a 24-hour shift. “There’s a time lag of about one or two weeks between the start of a drop in the number of cases and a reduction of patients in intensive care.”
Updated
Coronavirus infections have started to rise again in Hungary, probably due to the spread of the strain which was first identified in south east England, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has told state radio.
Orban said there was no need for further lockdown measures to curb the spread of infections, as a planned acceleration of vaccinations with Russian and Chinese vaccines could offset the rise in new Covid-19 cases in coming weeks.
Credit Suisse is offering free coronavirus tests to all of its staff who do not work from home, Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger reported.
Although the majority of bank’s employees are working from home, about 15% are still working at company premises.
These can now have voluntary and free saliva tests, as a precautionary measure, a bank spokesman told the newspaper.
Updated
UK government to set out lockdown easing on 22 February
Britain will set out its roadmap for easing lockdown restrictions on 22 February. according to a British government minister.
“We’re expecting to make the statement on Monday 22 February,” Sky News was told by Victoria Atkins, a minister at the Home Office.
Prime minister Boris Johnson’s spokesman said on Thursday that the roadmap will come in the week of 22 February.
Updated
British economy suffers historic hit - data
Britain’s economy shrank by the most in 300 years in 2020 amid the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic but has avoided a double-dip recession, according to official figures.
The Office for National Statistics said gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 9.9% in 2020 as no sector of the economy was left unscathed by lockdown and plummeting demand during the pandemic. It was the biggest fall in annual GDP since the Great Frost of 1709.
However, the latest figures showed the economy has narrowly avoided a double-dip recession, with growth of 1% in the final quarter of the year.
Looser Covid restrictions in the run-up to Christmas enabled GDP to grow by 1.2 in the month of December, following a 2.6% fall in November.
Updated
Good morning from London. This is Ben Quinn picking up the global liveblog and continuing to bring you coverage of global developments as well as news here in the UK.
With days before Britain’s hotel quarantine policy for incoming travellers come into force the scheme is coming under fires as travellers were left unable to book rooms.
In other moving developments, political representatives, healthcare unions and the general public have been taking time to consider and react to plans, set out on Thursday, for a wholesale reorganisation of the National Health Service (NHS) in England, which will centralise power in ministerial hands.
It’s also a day of grim economic news, as people in Britain wake up to the news that the UK has suffered its worst annual slump on record, with the economy contracting almost 10% last year amid the pandemic.
The Office for National Statistics reports that over the year 2020 as a whole, GDP contracted by 9.9%, “marking the largest annual fall in UK GDP on record.” My colleague Graeme Wearden is covering that in detail on his business live blog.
Scheduled events over the day ahead include (local times):
• 9.30am: weekly survey of social impacts of Covid-19 published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS_
• Noon: weekly Covid-19 UK infection survey from the ONS
• 1215pm: Welsh government press conference and Scottish government Covid briefing.
You can flag up any news stories which you think we should be covering by emailing me or contacting me on Twitter, where I’m @BenQuinn75
Updated
Ben Doherty in Sydney signing off. My day is done. I’m handing over this coverage now to my colleague in the UK, Ben Quinn. Dear readers, you are in good hands.
Thanks for your correspondence, comments, and occasional query today. Be well and look after each other.
Coronavirus infections have started to rise again in Hungary, likely due to the spread of the British strain of the virus, prime minister Viktor Orban told state radio on Friday.
Orban said there was no need for further lockdown measures to curb the spread of infections, as a planned acceleration of vaccinations with Russian and Chinese vaccines could offset the rise in new Covid-19 cases in coming weeks.
Summary
A recap for those following, and an update for those beginning their days, a summary of recent developments:
-
US President Joe Biden has confirmed the US has ordered 200m more doses of coronavirus vaccine. He said “my predecessor did not do his job” in scaling up the country’s vaccine rollout and urged Americans to “mask up”.
- The Brazilian Amazon variant of the coronavirus disease may be “three times” as contagious as other strains, the country’s health minister has said.
- Germany will ban travel from Czech border regions as well as Austria’s Tyrol over a troubling surge in infections of more contagious coronavirus variants.
- Donald Trump was reportedly much more ill with Covid-19 in October than the White House publicly admitted at the time, with some officials concerned that he would need to be put on a ventilator.
- Melbourne, Australia, will go into a five-day snap lockdown - a “circuit-breaker” to stem the spread of a new outbreak
- The director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, appears to have rejected comments made on Tuesday by the team of experts studying the origins of the Covid-19 virus after they said it was “extremely unlikely” that it leaked from a Wuhan virology laboratory and “isn’t a hypothesis we suggest implies further study”. Tedros said “I want to clarify that all hypotheses remain open and require further study”.
- Portugal has extended a lockdown until 1 March or perhaps later to tackle its worst surge of Covid-19 infections since the pandemic began.
- People in the US who have received a full course of Covid vaccine can skip the standard two week quarantine following exposure to someone whose infected as long as they remain asymptomatic, health officials have suggested.
- Ireland, which, according to the latest official figures, has recorded 3,794 Covid related deaths, is set to extend its lockdown until April, prime minister Micheal Martin has said.
- Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has defended her government’s decision to extend Germany’s lockdown into March by highlighting the “very real danger” of a third wave driven by Covid mutations.
- The Philippines is poised to receive 600,000 doses this month of Sinovac Biotech’s vaccine donated by China, a portion of which will be used to inoculate military personnel.
Updated
Boris Johnson is facing fresh questions about whether he acted too slowly in the run up to Christmas, after it emerged that almost a third of all the patients hospitalised with Covid in England to date were admitted in January.
NHS England statistics show there were 101,956 new Covid-19 admissions last month, accounting for 29% of all admissions between March 2020 and the end of January, underlining the severity of the latest wave of the virus.
The number of patients admitted to hospital increased by 79% between December and January.
Today’s UK front pages deal with a number of aspects of the pandemic: the NHS re-organisation under health secretary Matt Hancock (Guardian); millions left in ‘NHS limbo’ (Independent); social distancing until autumn (Times), and, in the Telegraph, General Sir Nick Carter warns the pandemic risks a repeat of 1930’s chaos.
I: Millions in NHS limbo #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/tzkSKbelwA
— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) February 11, 2021
TIMES: Atay apart until autumn under lockdown easing #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/KCUbqcOf3j
— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) February 11, 2021
TELEGRAPH: Pandemic risks repeat of 1930’s chaos, says forces chief #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/UvNn18cZOp
— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) February 11, 2021
Updated
More than 40% of staff at the UK’s biggest care home provider have still not received vaccinations, 10 days after the government’s deadline to have provided first jabs to all care home workers and residents.
HC-One, which provides 20,000 beds across 329 homes in the UK, told the Guardian its latest figures showed 64% of its staff had been offered the vaccine and 7% declined it.
It said the reasons staff had not been offered vaccines varied across the country and that “the continuing rollout is up to the organisers”.
More children could be pushed into joining armed groups in conflict zones as families face increasing poverty due to the Covid-19 pandemic, a top UN official warned on Friday.
The exact number of child soldiers is unknown, but in 2019 alone about 7,740 children - some as young as six - were recruited and used as fighters or in other roles by mostly non-state armed groups, according to United Nations data.
Speaking on International Day against the Use of Child Soldiers - or Red Hand Day - the UN Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict Virginia Gamba said that number was likely to rise as a result of coronavirus-related hardship.
“There is a real threat that as communities lack work, and are more and more isolated because of the socio-economic impact of Covid-19, we’re going to see an increase in the recruitment of children for a lack of options,” she said.
“More and more children will be either attracted or sometimes told by their parents to just go and join because someone’s got to feed them,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a video call.
Girls and boys are still forced to join armed groups, as fighters or in roles such as cooks or for sexual exploitation, in at least 14 countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and Somalia, the United Nations has said.
The United Nations called for a global ceasefire last year to help fight COVID-19, but armed groups have continued fighting and Gamba said the pandemic had also hampered efforts to protect children in conflict zones.
She said she was concerned about a surge in attacks by Islamist militants against children in the Sahel and Lake Chad region, including kidnappings, killings and forced displacement, noting that COVID-19 was changing armed groups’ tactics.
“As children are not in schools, therefore the target of attacking a school for abduction or recruitment of children ... is shifting to where the children are,” she said.
The pandemic has also delayed progress on implementing legislation in different countries to prohibit and criminalise the recruitment and use of children by armed forces and groups, Gamba said, calling for lawmakers to prioritise the issue.
“The issue of accountability is fundamental,” she said.
But despite some worrying trends, progress on combating the use of child soldiers is being made, Gamba said.
In South Sudan, the number of violations against children including their recruitment as fighters has significantly declined over the past five years, according to her office’s annual report.
And last week, the International Criminal Court (ICC) convicted Dominic Ongwen, a commander of Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army rebels and former child soldier, of dozens of crimes including child abductions and murder.
Ongwen’s conviction at the Hague-based court was applauded by the United Nations, but Gamba said a concerted effort at the national level was the best way to stop children becoming soldiers.
“In all our joint action plans with the government, and with the armed groups, we make it very, very clear we expect to see an oversight of the way their own officers, their own personnel are engaging in recruitment,” she said.
The Guardian’s Denis Campbell, Dan Sabbagh, and Jessica Murray report that London doctors are running out of priority patients to vaccinate, and fear lives will be lost unless they can immunise outside of the four priority cohorts.
Doctors at the Francis Crick Institute in London say they are providing first doses at a rate of 100 a day when they have capacity for 1,000.
Dr Sam Barrell, the chief operating officer at the institute, which opened as a mass vaccination centre on 18 January, said: “Every day lost, where you have vaccine supply and vaccinators, is lives lost and livelihoods lost.”
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Germany increased by 9,860 to 2,320,093, data from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for infectious diseases showed on Friday.
The reported death toll rose by 556 to 64,191, the tally showed.
To the UK:
Employers are putting workers at risk and increasing Covid infection rates in communities, unions have said, as research found that as many as one in five people have been going into their workplace unnecessarily.
The alarming findings came as the government’s outgoing employment adviser, Matthew Taylor, said employers breaking Covid rules should be named, shamed and fined.
Polling conducted by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) found that many people were coming under undue pressure from their employer to work from offices when they could work from home.
“No one should be forced into the office or another workplace if they can do their job from home. Bad bosses are needlessly putting workers at risk and increasing transmission in local communities,” said the TUC’s general secretary, Frances O’Grady.
As Japan gears up for a Covid-19 vaccination drive, a cheerful cartoon dog chatbot is doing its bit to reassure a notoriously vaccine-sceptical population and answer any questions they might have.
Trust in vaccines in Japan is among the lowest in the world, a study by the Lancet medical journal showed. Only half the population want to take a Covid-19 vaccine, a poll by national broadcaster NHK found last month.
It is among the last major economies to begin its Covid-19 vaccination campaign, which is seen as vital for preparations for the Olympic Games, due to open in fewer than 200 days, after being postponed in 2020 as the coronavirus spread.
The government is expected to approve Pfizer Inc’s Covid-19 vaccine this weekend, and begin shots almost immediately, prioritising front-line health workers.
While the anti-vaccine movement in the United States is relatively new and driven largely by fears of autism, vaccine hesitancy in Japan stems from vague safety concerns going back decades.
Unproven reports of side effects halted active inoculation campaigns for mumps in the early 1990s and HPV in 2013.
Officials are counting on a generally high degree of compliance with medical directives that carry the government’s stamp of approval.
But with waning support for Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s administration, partly over its handling of the pandemic, an enthusiastic take-up of the shots remains uncertain.
“In Japan, I would say that trust in the government can directly be associated with trust in vaccines,” said Yuji Yamada, a doctor at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.
“It can still go both ways at this point,” said Yamada, one of the 10 young Japanese physicians who helped create the dog chatbot to spread lessons learned from overseas vaccination efforts and to counter social media rumours.
Vaccine tsar Taro Kono, who has posted a video in which he talks frankly about possible side effects of coronavirus vaccines, promoted the cheerful dog chatbot on Twitter last week.
The dog, a Shiba-inu known as Corowa-kun - from the Japanese words for “coronavirus” and “vaccine” - wears a white doctor’s coat and the app named for him gives automated answers to medical questions.
For more detail on the Australian state requirements, here is a state-by-state breakdown
In Melbourne, the Australian city that is just about to go back into lockdown...
...the decision not to recommend the use of N95 masks in all settings in hotel quarantine has been defended by a member of the Australian government’s advisory group on infection control.
Updated
Venezuela, cash-strapped and sanctions, is having trouble paying for vaccines.
Reuters reports:
Venezuelan government officials and opposition leaders have met to discuss buying coronavirus vaccines through the Covax program using cash frozen in the United States by economic sanctions, two sources familiar with the matter said on Thursday.
Opposition leader Juan Guaido last week said that Venezuelan funds controlled by the US treasury department could be used to pay for vaccines.
The cash-strapped government of President Nicolas Maduro has signed up for Covax, co-led by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to provide vaccines globally, but has not made the associated payments.
The meeting marks a step forward in what will likely be a long process requiring that US authorities approve the use of the funds, as well as the completion of a vaccination roll-out plan for crisis-stricken Venezuela.
In a Thursday evening state television appearance, Maduro said the government was working on a $300 million deal for vaccine supplies, but did not provide details.
“We are looking for a practical, effective agreement to create a $300 million fund for Venezuela’s vaccines with the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO), with the WHO,” Maduro said.
The United States in 2019 froze $342 million held by Venezuela’s central bank in the United States as part of a sanctions program that was meant to force Maduro from power.
Moving the funds usually requires applying for license from the US Treasury’s office of foreign asset control.
The Pan American Health Organization’s Chief of Mission in Venezuela, Paolo Balladelli, in a tweet said there had been advances in obtaining vaccines for Venezuela, and that Unicef and the World Health Organization would be involved.
“Today, with the will of the political, technical and academic actors of Venezuela, the National Roundtable for Access to the Covax Strategy has advanced to guarantee access to vaccines against COVID-19,” he wrote.
The Pan American Health Organization did not respond to a request for comment seeking confirmation that his tweet referred to a meeting between the government and Guaido representatives.
One of the participants in the meeting was Julio Castro, a doctor and medical advisor to Guaido, said sources, who asked not to be identified.
Castro did not respond to messages seeking comment, but on Twitter also suggested there had been a meeting.
“Today the National Table for Access to the Covax Strategy was established,” he wrote.
“We welcome the beginning of the construction of a joint strategy among all.”
Balladelli last week said that between 1.4 million and 2.4 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine had been reserved for Venezuela. At $10 per dose, those vaccines would cost between $140 million and $240 million.
Trump much more ill with Covid-19 than reported
Donald Trump was reportedly much more ill with Covid-19 in October than the White House publicly admitted at the time, with some officials concerned that he would need to be put on a ventilator.
Trump experienced “extremely depressed blood oxygen levels” and a lung problem commonly associated with pneumonia caused by Covid-19, according to a report in the New York Times citing four people familiar with the former president’s condition.
Trump was admitted to Walter Reed national military medical centre for several days in early October after he tested positive for the virus, less than a month before the presidential election. At the time, a White House memo described the 74-year-old as “fatigued but in good spirits”.
Updated
Mexico’s health ministry on Thursday reported 1,474 new confirmed deaths from Covid-19, bringing its total to 171,234.
The government says the real number of infected people and the death toll in Mexico are both likely significantly higher than reported levels.
More Melbourne’s ‘circuit-breaker’ lockdown. From the premier of Victoria, Dan Andrews:
Schools will close but will remain available over those three days - Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday - for vulnerable children or for the children of those who are permitted to go to work, those who can’t work from home.
Childcare and early childhood centres will remain open. If this was a longer period, we would look at that decision, but we believe that it is better to keep those settings open ...
Higher education is closed.
In terms of special events, places of worship are closed other than for broadcasting of services. Religious gatherings and ceremonies are not permitted.
Funerals can involve no more than 10 people. And that applies indoor or outdoor.
Weddings are not permitted unless on compassionate grounds.
Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest city, has gone back into lockdown as a “circuit-breaker” to try to halt the spread of a hotel quarantine-linked outbreak. The city will go back into Stage 4 restrictions (Melbourne residents are only too familiar with these) for five days.
For more details, see the Australian coverage here:
More from Europe, and within the EU, significant tensions are emerging:
AFP reports:
Czech lawmakers on Thursday voted down a move by the populist minority government to extend a state of emergency aimed at stemming soaring coronavirus infections.
The move came as neighbouring Germany said it would ban travel from Czech border regions as well as Austria’s Tyrol over a troubling surge in infections of more contagious coronavirus variants.
Czech billionaire prime minister Andrej Babis told parliament he needed to extend the state of emergency past 14 February.
Imposed on 30 September, the state of emergency allows the government to deploy the army and firefighters to help fight the virus or to prolong the closure of most shops.
With only 48 of 106 lawmakers present voting in favour, Babis will now have to look for other legal avenues to introduce new measures or to keep existing ones in place.
“We will make history as a country that demobilised in the middle of a war,” vice-premier and interior minister Jan Hamacek told lawmakers.
Health minister Jan Blatny warned the epidemic situation would worsen within two weeks as a result and hit the country’s overburdened hospitals hard.
An EU member of 10.7 million people, the Czech Republic has registered some of the world’s highest coronavirus infection rates on a per capita basis in recent months.
It has seen over a million confirmed cases and almost 18,000 deaths as of Thursday.
Also on Thursday, the government decided to shut off three worst-hit districts, deploying almost 600 police officers to carry out random checks on their borders.
The government has struggled to curb infections as more and more citizens ignore restrictions that have been in place on and off since March 2020.
Defying government-imposed closures, some pubs and restaurants as well as ski resorts have opened up for business.
A poll published on Wednesday showed widespread public scepticism about the pandemic, with fewer than half of Czechs saying they would stay at home if they showed the symptoms of Covid-19.
Some 45% said they thought the pandemic was just a “media bubble” and only 18% of respondents in the poll commissioned by the World Health Organization and a Czech medical society said the virus posed a high risk.
Germany to close border to parts of Austria, Czech republic
Germany will ban travel from Czech border regions as well as Austria’s Tyrol over a troubling surge in infections of more contagious coronavirus variants, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said Thursday.
“The states of Bavaria and Saxony today asked the government to class Tyrol and the border regions of the Czech Republic as virus mutation areas, and to implement border controls,” Seehofer told the Sueddeutsche daily.
“That has been agreed with the (German) chancellor and the vice-chancellor,” he said, adding that the new curbs will begin on Sunday.
The interior ministry said on Twitter that checkpoints would be put in place, though certain exceptions were expected, including to maintain commercial links.
Germany in late January banned most travellers from countries classed as so-called mutation areas or places hardest hit by new, more contagious coronavirus variants.
Only a handful of exceptions are allowed to enter Germany from these countries, including returning Germans and essential workers such as doctors.
Europe’s biggest economy has halved its daily infections rate after more than two months of painful curbs shuttering most shops, schools and restaurants.
But fears are growing that the positive trend could be compromised by travellers from border regions which are reporting sky-high case rates.
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is in particular concerned by the South African variant circulating in Tyrol and the British variant in the Czech Republic.
Extending a partial shutdown into March, Merkel warned late Wednesday that “given that the experts say that the mutated virus can get the upper hand over the current virus, the timespan between now and mid-March is existential”.
She had also telephoned Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz to voice her worries over the situation in Tyrol, she revealed on Wednesday.
Austria has already ordered restrictions to stop people leaving the mountainous Tyrol region, which Kurz says has been hit by the biggest outbreak in Europe of the South African variant.
Anyone leaving the region must now show a negative coronavirus test, with fines of up to 1,450 euros (US$1,750) for anyone who fails to comply.
But Bavarian state premier Markus Soeder, whose region borders Tyrol, said he feared that “a second Ischgl” was in the making - referring to the Austrian ski region which became a coronavirus superspreader hotspot early on in the pandemic.
Tyrol “is not taking the development seriously,” he said.
Meanwhile Saxony state, which lies next to the Czech Republic, said it was imposing tougher checks from Saturday with restrictions to also affect cross-border workers.
Only workers in essential sectors - such as doctors or employees in elderly care homes - would be allowed to travel in.
But they would be required to take virus tests daily and commit to travel only between their homes and workplaces.
The Czech government meanwhile said Thursday that it would block off three hard-hit districts, including two on the German border, stopping people living in these zones from leaving and others from entering.
Czech public health officials want the measure to be in force for three weeks, although there are likely to be exceptions.
Updated
To Australia, where your correspondent sits...
NSW recorded no new locally acquired cases of #COVID19 in the 24 hours to 8pm last night.
— NSW Health (@NSWHealth) February 12, 2021
Two new cases were acquired overseas, bringing the total number of COVID-19 cases in NSW since the beginning of the pandemic to 4,945. There were 14,518 tests reported to 8pm last night. pic.twitter.com/pVhndjREHZ
Friday 12 February – coronavirus cases in Queensland:
— Annastacia Palaszczuk (@AnnastaciaMP) February 12, 2021
• 0 new cases
• 6 active cases
• 1,318 total cases
• 1,841,497 tests conducted
Sadly, six Queenslanders with COVID-19 have died. 1,299 patients have recovered.#covid19 pic.twitter.com/dLbY8A1ivN
But all eyes are on the state of Victoria, where an outbreak from hotel quarantine has now reached 13 and there are strong rumours of an impending snap lockdown. The state’s cabinet is still meeting...
Yesterday there were 5 new locally acquired cases reported. There are currently 19 active cases. 24,209 test results were received. Got symptoms? Get tested, #EveryTestHelps.
— VicGovDH (@VicGovDH) February 11, 2021
More later: https://t.co/lIUrl0ZEco#COVID19Vic #COVID19VicData pic.twitter.com/Tb6O9AqA6F
Hearing this - cabinet still
— Rafael Epstein (@Raf_Epstein) February 12, 2021
meeting so things can change BUT
5 day lockdown
Schools shut and retail too (some exceptions)
August settings
No crowds at the Tennis
Brunetti’s exposure had a massive role in public health’s thinking & concern
New Zealand’s first Covid-19 vaccines will arrive in the country ahead of schedule in a win for the government, which has been criticised for being too slow to procure them.
In a surprise announcement on Friday, the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, said hundreds of thousands of vials of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine would be arriving early, and vaccinations for border staff would begin next Saturday.
Originally the government had said the vaccines were expected to arrive at the end of March.
We reported earlier on Brazil reporting 54,742 additional confirmed Covid cases in the past 24 hours, along with 1,351 deaths. That brings the total number of cases in the country to 9.7 million, and the death toll to 236,000.
In further news, Reuters reports:
A coronavirus variant identified in the Brazilian Amazon may be three times more contagious but early analysis suggests vaccines are still effective against it, the country’s health minister said on Thursday, without providing evidence for the claims.
Under pressure as the variant hammers the jungle city of Manaus with a devastating second wave of infections, health minister Eduardo Pazuello sought to reassure lawmakers that the surge of recent months was unexpected but coming under control.
He also told a senate hearing that Brazil would vaccinate half its eligible population by June and the rest by the end of the year, an ambitious target as the country has barely guaranteed doses for half the population.
Brazil began immunizations with vaccines made by China’s Sinovac Biotech and Britain’s AstraZeneca about three weeks ago. Pazuello did not explain how their effectiveness against the Manaus variant was analyzed.
“Thank God, we had clear news from the analysis that the vaccines still have an effect against this variant,” Pazuello said. “But it is more contagious. By our analysis, it is three time more contagious.”
The Health Ministry, which has not provided information about any such analysis, did not immediately respond to a request for more information.
The Butantan institute in Sao Paulo, which has partnered with Sinovac to test and produce the Chinese vaccine, said in a statement that it had begun studies regarding the Manaus variant but would not have a conclusion for two weeks.
The Fiocruz biomedical center in Rio de Janeiro, which has partnered with AstraZeneca to fill and finish doses of its vaccine developed with Oxford University, said it is studying its efficacy against the Amazon variant, sent samples to Oxford and is awaiting results.
The US has finalised an order for 200m more vaccine doses – 100m doses each from Pfizer and Moderna – to be delivered by the end of July, Joe Biden confirmed on Monday.
Speaking at the National Institutes of Health on Thursday, the president touted his team’s early efforts to expand access to coronavirus vaccines, and criticised Donald Trump’s strategy for distributing vaccines, saying the last administration did not order enough doses or mobilise enough people to administer shots.
“My predecessor, to be very blunt about it, did not do his job,” Biden said.
Biden also celebrated that the US is on track to exceed his goal of 100m vaccine doses distributed over his first 100 days in office, but he emphasised Americans still had to take precautions to limit the spread of the virus.
“Mask up, America. Mask up,” Biden said.
Updated
To further troubling news of a different, potential epidemic. The Democratic Republic of Congo is trying to contain an Ebola outbreak.
AFP reports:
A second person has died of Ebola in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo following a resurgence of the disease, three months after authorities declared the end of the country’s latest outbreak, the WHO said on Thursday.
The second victim was a female 60-year-old farm worker who died on Wednesday, the World Health Organisation’s country office said.
The woman was linked to the first fatality in the Biena health zone of North Kivu province, it added.
That first case involved a woman, the wife of an Ebola survivor, who died on February 3.
The WHO’s Africa office said at the time that the first victim had died in an area that had previously been one of the epicentres of the latest outbreak, near the town of Butembo.
Since the West African Ebola crisis of 2013-16 - which left 11,300 dead across the region - the WHO has eyed each new outbreak with great concern, treating the most recent Congolese epidemic as an international health emergency.
DR Congo had on November 18 declared that the epidemic, which lasted nearly six months in the northwestern province of Equateur, was over. It was the country’s eleventh Ebola outbreak, claiming 55 lives out of 130 cases.
The last person declared recovered from Ebola in Equateur was on October 16.
The widespread use of vaccinations, which were administered to more than 40,000 people, helped curb the disease.
The return of the virus in the country’s northeast - a region plagued by violence between armed groups - comes as the vast African country is also fighting its own Covid-19 outbreak, with 681 deaths to date.
'All hypotheses remain open', says WHO after experts all but dismiss lab leak
I’d like to return to the comments from the director general of the WHO, because they are critical in our understanding of the global pandemic’s origins.
The director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, appears to have rejected comments made on Tuesday by the team of experts studying the origins of the Covid-19 virus after they said it was “extremely unlikely” that it leaked from a Wuhan virology laboratory and “isn’t a hypothesis we suggest implies further study”.
Tedros said the team was still working on its final report and wished to clarify that all hypotheses remained open and required further study.
He told WHO member states in a briefing on Thursday:
As you know, the independent expert team to study the origins of the Covid-19 virus has completed its trip to China. This was an international team comprising experts from Australia, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Qatar, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and Viet Nam.
The team also includes experts from WHO, FAO and OIE. I want to start by thanking all members of the international team for their work. This has been a very important scientific exercise in very difficult circumstances.
The expert team is still working on its final report and we look forward to receiving both the report and a full briefing. Some questions have been raised as to whether some hypotheses have been discarded. I want to clarify that all hypotheses remain open and require further study.
Summary
Good morning/afternoon/evening, Ben Doherty in Sydney, Australia with our continuing live coverage of the global coronavirus pandemic.
Thanks for your company today. Comments, correspondence and queries always welcome: you can reach me at ben.doherty@theguardian.com or on twitter @BenDohertyCorro.
To begin, a summary of recent developments from around the world:
- US President Joe Biden has confirmed the US has ordered 200m more doses of coronavirus vaccine. He said “my predecessor did not do his job” in scaling up the country’s vaccine rollout and urged Americans to “mask up”.
- The Brazilian Amazon variant of the coronavirus disease may be “three times” as contagious as other strains, the country’s health minister has said.
- The director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, appears to have rejected comments made on Tuesday by the team of experts studying the origins of the Covid-19 virus after they said it was “extremely unlikely” that it leaked from a Wuhan virology laboratory and “isn’t a hypothesis we suggest implies further study”. Tedros said “I want to clarify that all hypotheses remain open and require further study”.
- Portugal has extended a lockdown until 1 March or perhaps later to tackle its worst surge of Covid-19 infections since the pandemic began.
- People in the US who have received a full course of Covid vaccine can skip the standard two week quarantine following exposure to someone whose infected as long as they remain asymptomatic, health officials have suggested.
- Ireland, which, according to the latest official figures, has recorded 3,794 Covid related deaths, is set to extend its lockdown until April, prime minister Micheal Martin has said.
- Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has defended her government’s decision to extend Germany’s lockdown into March by highlighting the “very real danger” of a third wave driven by Covid mutations.
- The Philippines is poised to receive 600,000 doses this month of Sinovac Biotech’s vaccine donated by China, a portion of which will be used to inoculate military personnel.
Updated
