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A former army barracks in Kent, England being used to house asylum seekers has been locked down – preventing its 400 residents from leaving – after scores of people tested positive for coronavirus.
The private contractors who manage the site at Napier barracks near Folkestone on behalf of the Home Office have advised its residents the entire camp has been placed into isolation, with police officers enforcing the move.
Asylum seekers on the site said they had been keeping a tally of the number of positive cases of coronavirus and claimed about 100 had been returned. The Home Office would not comment on the numbers.
My colleague Jamie Grierson reports:
Germany might have to close borders, Merkel warns
German chancellor Angela Merkel warned that Germany may need to consider border crossing curbs if other European countries do not act to halt the spread of coronavirus and its new variants.
Reuters reports:
“We can do anything we like, but we will not succeed if others are not working in parallel,” Merkel told journalists on Tuesday, two days ahead of a videoconference of European leaders. “We need to make sure that everyone around us is doing the same. Otherwise we have to look at measures such as entry restrictions.”
Her comments came after she and leaders of Germany’s 16 states agreed to extend for another two weeks a lockdown for most shops and schools until Feb. 14.
New infections have been falling in recent days and pressure on intensive care units has eased slightly, but virologists, pointing to the situation in Britain, with Europe’s highest Covid-19 death toll, warn the mutants could undo all progress.
Germany shares borders with nine countries, and there are growing concerns about infection rates in some of them, including Czech Republic, where commuter traffic is heavy.
Most schools will remain closed, despite opposition, given evidence that some new variants are more transmissible among children, Merkel said.
“If we had a situation like London, then we wouldn’t be talking about schools anymore but about ambulances and overflowing hospitals,” she said.
Brazil registered 62,094 new infections on Tuesday, a steep rise compared with the 23,671 new cases reported on Monday and Sunday’s 33,040 cases, though Brazil’s daily infection numbers have varied dramatically for months.
The health ministry reported 1,192 new Covid-19 deaths, taking Brazil’s overall death toll to 211,491.
Only the US has more fatalities than Brazil globally, and Brazil has the world’s third highest number of infections after the US and India, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Updated
Coronavirus cases in the Philippines reached 504,084 on Tuesday, with the country reporting 1,357 new infections, while the death toll edged closer to 10,000, CNN Philippines reported.
The Department of Health reported 69 new fatalities, raising the death toll to 9,978.
Active cases are at 27,857, or 5.5% percent of the overall number of infections.
For the third consecutive day, Davao City led the areas with the highest number of new cases with 130. Rizal came next with 71, followed by Quezon City with 66, Pampanga with 54, and Benguet with 52.
The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said on Tuesday that more people should work from home to help further reduce contacts that could spread coronavirus.
The number of people currently working in the home office is well below the number of people doing so during the country’s first lockdown in March, Merkel said, according to Reuters.
As we reported earlier, Germany decided to extend its national lockdown until 14 February today, with new rules making it mandatory to wear medical masks in shops and on public transport.
Merkel said one of the reasons for the lockdown extension was that there are serious indications that new mutations of the virus are spreading more widely among children and adolescents than is the case with the previously known virus, Deutschlandfunk reports.
On Saturday, German MPs questioned Merkel on a number of policies, among other things on whether it was a good idea to hand out masks in pharmacies - and thus risk older people queueing up to collect them, Tagesschau reported.
“We have now decided in favor of this offer because it was what is feasible. And if so many people now want to take advantage of this offer, then maybe it was not that wrong,” Merkel said.
Updated
Health workers in northern Spain have deployed a mobile vaccination trailer that goes from village to village delivering shots to the elderly, in a bid to widen its vaccination programme and reach people beyond nursing homes.
Reuters reports:
Once the white box the size of a shipping container is lowered from a truck, it takes a team of four people, medics included, to quickly unfold it to six times its original size.
As they worked in the village of Oronoz-Mugaire in the northern Basque region on Tuesday a small queue of locals formed outside for the shot.
“The purpose is to bring vaccination to the citizens and make things easier,” said Diego Reyero, head of regional medical transport, which helped 15 local people with mobility problems in the village receive the vaccine.
“It is the simplest solution to administer their shots so they don’t have to go far and don’t fill medical centres,” he added.
Faced with record infection rates in the wake of the Christmas holidays, Spain began giving second shots of coronavirus vaccines to elderly nursing home residents earlier this week.
The US has reported at least 400,000 deaths from Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University as of Tuesday afternoon.
CNN reports:
That’s more than the number of Americans who died in World War I, Vietnam War and the Korean War combined, and nearly as many Americans who died in World War II. It’s far higher than any other country’s Covid-19 death toll.
The pandemic’s death toll has risen sharply in increments of 100,000 since the first coronavirus death in the United States was reported February 29 in Washington state. (Later in the spring, two earlier deaths in California were posthumously confirmed to be from Covid-19.)
- 84 days after the first recorded death, the US surpassed 100,000 deaths on May 23, 2020.
- 121 days later, the US surpassed 200,000 deaths on September 21, 2020.
- 84 days later, the US surpassed 300,000 deaths on December 14, 2020.
- 36 days later, on January 19, 2021, the US topped 400,000 deaths.
Israel will extend its third national lockdown until at least 31 January, after the cabinet approved prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to leave the lockdown in place for another 10 days on Tuesday.
The cabinet also approved regulations that will require anyone entering Israel to present a negative coronavirus test, conducted 72 hours prior to arrival, Haaretz reports.
The country currently has 82,652 active cases, and has recorded 4,080 deaths.
Cases in the West Bank stand at 5,230, and the death toll at 1,406. In Gaza there are 6,170 active cases and 493 people have died so far.
Israel began its third lockdown in late December and tightened it in the second week of January, with officials saying at the time it would be lifted after two weeks if the daily caseload decreased sufficiently, AFP reports.
Since the rollout of vaccinations one month ago, Israel has vaccinated more than 2.2 million of its nine million inhabitants, health minister Yuli Edelstein said Tuesday.
Updated
The singer-songwriter Van Morrison will challenge the Northern Irish government in court over its “blanket ban” on live music in licensed venues arising from coronavirus restrictions, his lawyer said Tuesday.
Solicitor Joe Rice told AFP the Northern Irish musician, who has released several protest songs against Covid-19 rules in recent months, will ask the High Court in Belfast to review the policy.
“We will be seeking leave for judicial review to challenge the blanket ban on live music in licensed premises in Northern Ireland...,” Rice said.
“We’re not aware of any credible scientific or medical evidence to justify this particular blanket ban... and we’re going to challenge this in the High Court.”
The UK, is currently struggling with its third and deadliest wave, blamed on a new strain believed to be highly infectious.
While part of the UK - the worst-affected country in Europe - health policy is a devloved matter for governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, all of which have imposed strict lockdown measures at various stages of the pandemic.
AFP reports:
The Northern Irish executive in Belfast has introduced regulations that prohibit live music in indoor licensed venues in Northern Ireland.
All hospitality and entertainment venues are currently closed as part of a six-week lockdown, but Morrison is eager to challenge the rules for when they reopen.
Rice noted that the “Brown Eyed Girl” singer had been able to perform in England several times late last year before the British government tightened rules there.
He said he expected the case to be heard at the High Court within “weeks”.
Morrison was taking the action “on behalf of the thousands of musicians, artists, venues and those involved in the live music industry, said Rice.
The singer, known as “Van the Man” to his fans, has stirred controversy during the pandemic, last August reportedly urging people to “fight the pseudoscience” around Covid-19.
A month later he released at two-week intervals a trio of new tracks - named “Born To Be Free”, “As I Walked Out”, and “No More Lockdown” - containing controversial lyrics.
China’s Sinopharm Group and Pfizer Inc have requested approval for use of their Covid-19 vaccines in Peru as the Andean country grapples with a second wave of the coronavirus, Reuters reports.
Carmen Ponce, general director of state drug regulator Digemid, said that authorisation requests from other vaccine makers, such as AstraZeneca Plc and Russia’s Gamaleya, are expected in the next few days.
Coronavirus infections in Peru have climbed since the start of the year, to which the government responded by tightening restrictions and extending a nighttime curfew.
The Peruvian government recently announced it made agreements with Sinopharm to secure 38 million doses of its vaccine and with AstraZeneca for 14 million doses.
The arrival of a first batch of Sinopharm vaccine is expected by the end of January or early February, the government said.
Peru reported 3,893 new cases on Monday, taking its total to 1,068,802. The overall official death toll stands at 38,931.
The Peruvian health minister, Pilar Mazzetti, has warned, amid rising infections, that the second wave could overwhelm Peru.
Canada will not receive any Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine doses during the week of 25 January, due to delivery delays that have hit countries around the world.
“We are now seeing that our entire expected shipment is deferred for next week, and then the numbers start to pick back up in the first weeks of February,” Major-General Dany Fortin, who is in charge of the country’s vaccine rollout, said on Tuesday, Global News reports.
All European countries are also to be temporarily affected by delivery delays, as Pfizer is ramping up its production capacity at one of its plants, a process that is affecting delivery, the company said last week.
France reported 23,608 new confirmed coronavirus cases on Tuesday, up from 3,736 on Monday and Sunday’s 16,642 new recorded infections.
A further 656 people were reported to have died from the virus in hospitals, compared with Monday’s 403 new fatalities.
Hospitalisations in intensive care units were also on the rise, with the number of people in intensive care rising by 26 to 2,839 while the total number of patients hospitalised for the disease was down 52 over 24 hours at 25,567, Reuters reports.
In December, France introduced a night curfew between 8pm and 6am, which was further tightened last week and now mandates that everyone must be at home from 6pm. Shops and businesses must also close by then.
Schools remain open amid extra testing for staff and pupils.
Ireland reports record daily death toll
Ireland has reported 93 Covid-19 fatalities on Tuesday, also the highest number of daily deaths since the start of pandemic.
The first peak in daily deaths was reached on 20 April last year, when Ireland recorded 77 deaths in a single day.
The Irish health ministry said of the deaths reported on Tuesday, three occurred in December and 89 in January. There is one death where the date of death is still under investigation, it said.
The median age of those who died was 82 years and the age range was 41-99 years.
The ministry tweeted:
#StayHome
— Department of Health (@roinnslainte) January 19, 2021
While we are starting to see the early results of our collective efforts to minimise the transmission of the virus, we are very sadly reporting an additional 93 deaths today. We cannot afford to drop our guard."@CMOIreland #COVID19 #HoldFirm pic.twitter.com/VwzCJH8rJd
Reuters reports:
The daily death toll published by the National Public Health Emergency Team can include fatalities that took place weeks ago but were just confirmed to authorities on the day in question.
The high death rate follows a sharp increase in infections in the first 10 days of the year following a relaxation of public-health measures over the Christmas season.
The infection rate has since fallen sharply with the 2,001 cases reported on Tuesday bringing the five-day average down to 2,758 from 5,596 on the same day the previous week.
Ireland’s health service is potentially facing the most challenging week in its history as the number of Covid-19 patients in need of intensive care treatment has risen dramatically since the end of December.
Updated
UK records highest daily death toll since beginning of pandemic
The UK has reported the highest number of daily deaths since the pandemic started, as new data showed one in eight people are likely to have had the virus in England.
The PA reports:
Public Health England (PHE) said a further 1,610 people have died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 - the highest number of UK deaths reported on a single day since the outbreak began.
The new record brings the UK total for those who have died after contracting coronavirus to 91,470.
However, the true number of those who have lost their lives to the virus has already reached the 108,000 mark, once cases where Covid-19 has been mentioned on the death certificate is taken into account.A total of 3,424 hospital admissions of people with Covid-19 in England were reported for January 17, NHS England also said.
This is down 4% on the equivalent figure a week ago on January 10.
During the first wave of the virus, admissions peaked at 3,099 on April 1 2020.
All regions have recorded a week-on-week decrease in daily admissions apart from the Midlands (up 12%), south-west England (up 1%) and north-east England/Yorkshire (no change).
My name is Jedidajah Otte and I’ll be bringing you the latest developments on the pandemic over the next few hours. As ever, do feel free to flag pertinent updates or share tips with me, you can contact me on Twitter @JedySays or via email.
I won’t always have time to respond individually, but everything is read and tips and pointers are much appreciated.
Evening summary
- The Covid pandemic has exposed how underfunded and powerless the World Health Organization is to carry out the tasks the world expects of it, an independent expert panel has said (see 5.43pm).
- Germany is extending its national lockdown until 14 February, with new rules making it mandatory to wear medical masks in shops and on public transport (see 2.39pm).
-
The eastern Spanish region of Valencia is to shut down all bars and restaurants “for a limited time” in a bid to slow the third wave of the coronavirus (see 2.14pm).
- The EU’s member states will agree by the end of the month on the form of a common vaccination certificate but there are no plans to give travel rights to holders of such documents, the European commission has said (see 3.57pm).
- However, Emirates and Etihad, two of the middle east’s biggest airlines, said they would be among the first companies to test an application that allows pre-travel verification of coronavirus tests and vaccinations. The United Arab Emirates carriers have partnered with the International Air Transport Association (IATA) to be among “the first airlines” worldwide to trial the IATA Travel Pass, both airlines said in separate statements (see 3.31pm).
- The embattled Dutch government has said it needs to strengthen lockdown measures “as soon as possible” to rein in the spread of the coronavirus amid fears about more transmissible variants. Health minister Hugo de Jonge said in a letter to parliament that the government would announce extra measures tomorrow afternoon (see 4.29pm).
- Denmark has announced it would include homeless people among those given priority for Covid-19 vaccines. According to social services, Denmark has about 6,500 homeless people, and the decision follows calls from charities and officials who have pointed to an increased risk of transmission among the homeless (see 5.18pm). It also announced it would extend lockdown measures.
- The Amazonian city of Manaus in Brazil has begun administering Covid vaccines as the rainforest’s biggest city’s health system struggles desperately amid an increase in infections and dwindling oxygen supplies (see 4.46pm).
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Thai prime minister Prayuth Chan-ocha warned that his government would prosecute anyone who shares false information about coronavirus vaccines in social or mass media (see 1.55pm). It came after the government was accused of acting too slowly to inoculate the country’s population (see 11:59am) and criticised the country’s coronavirus vaccine strategy as being too reliant on a company owned by the Thai king.
I’ll now hand over to my wonderful colleague Jedidajah Otte to see you through the next few hours. Thanks for reading, and all the best.
Israel’s coronavirus tsar has warned that a single dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine may be providing less protection than originally hoped, as the country reported a record 10,000 new Covid infections on Monday.
In remarks reported by Army Radio, Nachman Ash said a single dose appeared “less effective than we had thought”, and also lower than Pfizer had suggested.
By contrast, those who had received their second dose of the Pfizer vaccine had a six- to 12-fold increase in antibodies, according to data released by Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer on Monday.
The issue of some vaccines being less effective after a single dose rather than two is well known, as well as the fact that protection is not immediate. While the first dose can take several weeks to promote an effective antibody response, the second dose can trigger different responses, supercharging the protection.
Pfizer itself says a single dose of its vaccine is about 52% effective. Some countries such as the UK have delayed administering their second doses to try to maximise the number of people given a first dose.
Updated
Moderna, the pharmaceutical company, has said it has received a report from the California health department that several people at a center in San Diego were treated for possible allergic reactions after vaccination from one lot of its Covid vaccine.
The vaccine maker said it was unaware of comparable cases of adverse events from other vaccination centres which may have administered vaccines from the same lot or from other lots of its vaccine, Reuters reports.
Vaccinated people mistakenly believe they are “good to go” and socialise with other people despite a continuing threat of the coronavirus, the head of the government’s behavioural unit has said.
Prof David Halpern, the chair of the Behavioural Insights Team, has said that surveys showed that those who had received a jab were preparing to meet family and friends, which could result in another spike of the virus.
“We definitely do worry that people feel that, the second they have got that vaccination, they are good to go,” he told MPs in the UK.
The vaccine offers the best protection 12 to 14 days after the second jab, and doctors are still unsure whether it will stop the recipient from passing on the virus.
Outcry in Italy after regional health chief says richer areas should get more vaccine
The idea that richer areas should get a bigger share of coronavirus vaccines has sparked an outcry in Italy, one of the countries worst hit by the pandemic.
AFP reports:
The proposal came from Letizia Moratti, the aristocrat wife of a late oil baron, who this month was appointed health chief of the northern Lombardy region, which includes Milan. Writing to the government coronavirus crisis commissioner, she said vaccines should be allocated to regions based not only on population density, but also on gross domestic product (GDP), local impact of the pandemic and levels of mobility.
“It is not about giving more vaccines to richer regions... but in helping Lombardy’s recovery you would automatically help the recovery of the whole country,” she said in the letter, parts of which media published, according to AFP.
Lombardy – which already has received the largest share of doses on account of being the most populous region – would tick all Moratti’s boxes. It is has the highest regional GDP and the worst coronavirus record, accounting for almost a third of the Italy’s more than 82,500 virus dead.
Health minister Roberto Speranza was quick to dismiss Moratti’s idea. “Everybody has a right to be vaccinated, regardless of the wealth of the place where they live,” he said, stressing that health was a constitutionally-guaranteed public good and “not a privilege for those who have more”. Vincenzo De Luca, leader of the southern – and poorer – Campania region, which includes Naples, called Moratti’s proposal “one step away from barbarity”, and urged her to retract her “ill-thought remarks”.
Italy has so far administered more than 1.15 million doses of the vaccine, more than other European Union nation.
Updated
The Covid pandemic has exposed how underfunded and powerless the World Health Organization is to carry out the tasks the world expects of it, an independent expert panel has said.
The heads of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response presented a report to the WHO’s executive board which said that the UN health body could have acted faster and more decisively at the start of the pandemic to avert catastrophe.
But they stressed that the delays and failures could largely be attributed to the weak position of the UN agency, and said more funding and reforms were desperately needed.
“The world is more reliant on an effective WHO than ever before,” said former Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who co-chairs the panel with former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark.
But, she told reporters, the same countries that have turned to the WHO for leadership during the crisis “have kept it underpowered and under-resourced to do the job expected of it.”
Covid-19 was first detected in the central city of Wuhan in late 2019 before seeping beyond China’s borders to wreak global havoc, costing more than two million lives and eviscerating economies.
The WHO has faced claims it moved too slowly to declare an international crisis, to acknowledge the virus was spreading through the air, and to recommend face masks.
It has also faced criticism for not pressing China harder to provide accurate information on the initial cases and for allowing more than a year to pass before an international team of experts could enter China to help search for the origins of the virus.
But while the panel report also suggested the WHO should have acted quicker at the start, Johnson Sirleaf stressed that “the bottom line is the WHO has no powers to enforce anything or investigate... within a country”.
“When it comes to a potential new disease threat, all the WHO can do is ask and hope to be invited in,” she said.
Clark also pointed to the agency’s low level of funding and the dangers of relying so heavily on volatile voluntary contributions.
Such contributions can suddenly disappear, as seen last year when the US, traditionally the WHO’s biggest donor, halted its backing.
“The funding of the WHO is woeful,” Clark said, pointing to comparisons showing the agency receives less than a single hospital in New York. “This is our global health organisation. We want it to do well, we need it to do well ... But it has been kept on pretty short rations.”
The panel also found that the international alert system for health emergencies needed an overhaul.
It complained that it took a full month for the WHO’s emergency committee to declare the highest alert level, a Public Health Emergency of International Concern or PHEIC, and that many countries did not appear to appreciate the seriousness of the situation.
“Pathogens can travel in minutes and hours, not in days and weeks,” Clark said. “The international system for alert and response has the trappings of an analog system in the digital age.”
Denmark has announced it would include homeless people among those given priority for Covid-19 vaccines.
According to social services, Denmark has about 6,500 homeless people, and the decision follows calls from charities and officials who have pointed to an increased risk of transmission among the homeless.
The Scandinavian country started vaccinations on 27 December and is currently among the quickest to roll out the vaccine in the EU in terms of jabs per capita.
The Danish strategy has been split into 12 priority groups, of which the first five are currently offered the vaccine, although this also depends on the region they live in.
“Homeless and socially vulnerable people who are particularly at risk are vaccinated in category 5,” the Ministry of Social Affairs said in a statement. Those in the group but not deemed to be particularly at risk will still be “given priority before the general population”, it added.
“There is an urgent need to prioritise our most vulnerable, the people living in the streets, those with the largest and most complex need for help. Vaccines + aid packages - now!” the legal aid group Gadejuristen (The Street Lawyers) saidon Facebook.
Nearly three percent of the Danish population has received the first dose of the Covid vaccine already and 0.5 percent have also had the second dose, making Denmark one of the leading countries in the EU.
Portugal is living “one of the saddest moments”, the country’s prime minister has said, as doctors warned of a healthcare system nearing collapse and the daily death toll from Covid reached a new record high.
The country of 10 million people recorded 218 new Covid fatalities, up from 167 yesterday and pushing the total death toll since the start of the pandemic to 9,246, health authority DGS said.
“We are certainly living one of the saddest moments, of greatest pain and suffering,” prime minister Antonio Costa told parliament. “It is a very tough marathon.”
Portugal, which last week announced a new lockdown to curb the surge in infections and help relieve pressure on struggling hospitals, also reported 10,455 new Covid cases, bringing the cumulative total to 566,958, Reuters reports.
“If [the number of infections] continues at this rate it will be very difficult to get to the end of the week without [the health system] collapsing,” said Joao Gouveia, head of the association representing Portuguese intensive care workers.
Of 672 intensive care unit (ICU) beds allocated to Covid patients in public hospitals, 670 are now occupied, while the country only has in total just over 1,000 such beds for all patients, regardless of illness, health authorities said.
“In hospitals the situation is absolutely dramatic,” said Ricardo Mexia, president of the National Association of Public Health Doctors. “Public health units don’t have the capacity to cope with the volume of new infections we are seeing every day.”
In the city of Portalegre, a hospital launched an inquiry on Tuesday into the death of an elderly man after he waited three hours inside an ambulance because the COVID-19 unit was full.
The International Health Regulations remain a cornerstone of public health security and need improving in some areas, but do not require major changes, the chair of a World Health Organization (WHO) panel reviewing the 2005 rules has said.
Lothar Wieler, chair of the independent panel, told the WHO’s Executive Board: “There is a growing belief in the Committee that most improvements can be achieved through a more effective implementation of the existing mechanism of IHR and do not require at this point changes to the IHR.”
The rules, which went into force in 2007, require WHO’s 194 member states to advise WHO within 24 hours about health emergencies. They lay down provisions for taking measures on international travel and trade if justified on health grounds.
“Countries may be reluctant to report on events if they perceive consequences, mainly related to travel and trade, deriving from early notification. The current IHR requirements for notification and verification, as well as information sharing by WHO, need further examination,” the panel said in an interim report.
Austria’s envoy, speaking on behalf of the European Union – which has called for WHO reforms – told the board that the bloc attached “great importance” to the regulations but that the world had not been prepared for the pandemic.
“We need to rethink prevention, control and response to global health crisis,” said Elisabeth Tichy-Fisslberger, Austrian ambassador to the UN in Geneva. “That is why the EU and its member states stand ready to explore ways to reinforce IHR implementation, including an effective system of compliance evaluation.”
The Amazonian city of Manaus in Brazil has begun administering Covid vaccines as the rainforest’s biggest city’s health system struggles desperately amid an increase in infections and dwindling oxygen supplies.
State governor Wilson Lima led a ceremony to kick off the vaccination campaign last night. Vanda Ortega, 33, a member of the Witoto ethnicity and a nurse technician, soon received the first dose of CoronaVac, a vaccine developed by Beijing-based biopharmaceutical company Sinovac.
“I want to thank God and our ancestors,” said Ortega, who is also a volunteer nurse in her Indigenous community.
It came as Brazil began rolling out its national immunisation program with 6 million doses of CoronaVac in almost a dozen states. It hopes to receive 46 million doses up to April to distribute among states. Amazonas received 256,000 doses.
The priority in the first vaccination phase in the rainforest region will be health workers, elderly people above 80 years old, and Indigenous people in about 265 villages.
Amazonas, a state with a population estimated below 4 million, has recorded at least 232,000 cases of the virus since the start of the pandemic, according to official figures, with 6,302 deaths. Hospitals in Manaus have admitted few new Covid patients, causing many to suffer from the disease at home and some to die.
The embattled Dutch government has said it needs to beef up lockdown measures “as soon as possible” to rein in the spread of the coronavirus amid fears about more transmissible variants.
Health minister Hugo de Jonge said in a letter to parliament that the government would announce extra measures tomorrow afternoon.
The Netherlands has been in a tough lockdown for a month and will remain that way at least until at least 9 February, but the slow decrease in the number of new infections and the threat posed by new variants have prompted the government to consider a tightening that is expected to include a curfew for the first time since the pandemic began.
The Dutch public health institute announced today that new infections decreased by 21.5% over the past week to 38,776, in what it called a “moderately positive picture” of the effects of the lockdown, the Associated Press reported.
However, it added that the decrease was “overshadowed” by a rise in the percentage of people who have a new, more transmissible variant of the virus that led to a sharp spike in infections in the UK and Ireland.
Some 10% of new infections are with the new variant and the institute said it expects that to rise to at least 50% by mid-February.
The institute said in a statement that there are now “two separate corona epidemics. An epidemic with the old’ variant in which infections are falling, and an epidemic with the British variant in which the number of infections is rising.”
Dutch efforts to tackle the virus have been complicated by the government’s resignation on Friday over a scandal involving thousands of parents wrongly being labelled fraudsters by the country’s tax office.
Prime minister Mark Rutte’s four-party coalition remains in office in caretaker mode until a new government is formed after elections on 17 March and would have to seek backing from lawmakers for any new measures.
It remains unclear if Rutte can find a majority in parliament to support a curfew. One of the parties that make up his coalition is opposed to such a move, meaning Rutte will likely have to cobble together support from opposition parties.
EU common vaccination certificate will not come with travel rights
The EU’s member states will agree by the end of the month on the form of a common vaccination certificate but there are no plans to give travel rights to holders of such documents, the European commission has said.
The paperwork will instead be used to ensure pan-European recognition of citizens’ vaccination records although other possible uses will be debated by the bloc’s leaders at a virtual summit on Thursday.
The commission’s vice-president, Margaritis Schinas, said the use of the certificates as a passport was “imaginable” but only once sufficient people had been covered and an agreement was found between all the capitals on the conditions of use.
While countries reliant on tourism such as Greece and Spain are keen on pushing vaccination passports as a means to encourage travel, others, including Germany and France, are sceptical that it would be appropriate to discriminate between travellers on the basis of medical records.
The EU will seek, however, for such certificates to be recognised beyond the bloc’s borders, Schinas said, raising the prospect of UK travellers being included should Downing Street U-turn on its current rejection of the concept.
The commission’s plan was announced alongside a proposed timetable for vaccinations across the bloc’s 27 member states. At least 80% of those aged over 80 will be given a jab by March 2021, as will 80% of health and social care professionals. By the end of the summer, the commission has said the member states should have vaccinated 70% of the entire adult population.
In a thinly veiled reference to the UK’s vaccination programme, Schinas said the pace of rolling out jabs should increase but that it was “not a race between countries but a race against time”.
“In Europe, we have opted for safety first,” he said.
The commission also called on the capitals to increase their genome sequencing to at least 5% and preferably 10% of positive test results as part of an effort to identify the new variants of the virus. The commission said many member states were currently testing under 1% of samples.
Updated
Emirates and Etihad, two of the middle east’s biggest airlines, said Tuesday they would be among the first companies to test an application that allows pre-travel verification of coronavirus tests and vaccinations.
The United Arab Emirates carriers have partnered with the International Air Transport Association (IATA) to be among “the first airlines” worldwide to trial the IATA Travel Pass, both airlines said in separate statements.
The IATA said the mobile app would enable passengers to “create a ‘digital passport’ to verify their pre-travel test or vaccination meets the requirements of the destination”.
“They will also be able to share the test and vaccination certificates with authorities and airlines to facilitate travel,” it said in a statement.
In November, the association warned that “the Covid-19 crisis threatens the survival of the air transport industry”, with 2020 likely to go down in history as its “worst” year ever.
Serbia launched on Tuesday a mass Covid-19 vaccination campaign and became the first European country to use the Chinese-made Sinopharm jab.
“It is the only way to return to normal life,” said health minister Zlatibor Lončar, the first who received the vaccine.
“These are all very safe vaccines,” Lončar said as the state-run RTS television carried his vaccination live at the virology institute in Belgrade. There is no reason for concern regarding their safety, he stressed.
Serbia received on Saturday 1m doses of the Sinopharm vaccine.
It is the third coronavirus jab used by the Balkan nation, after Pfizer/BioNTech and Russia’s Sputnik V.
Updated
The Amazonian city of Manaus in Brazil began administering vaccines against the coronavirus, providing a ray of hope for the rainforest’s biggest city whose health system is collapsing amid an increase in infections and dwindling oxygen supplies.
Amazonas state governor Wilson Lima led a ceremony that kicked off the vaccination campaign Monday night in Manaus, an isolated riverside city of 2.2 million people.
Vanda Ortega, 33, a member of the Witoto ethnicity and a nurse technician, received the first dose of CoronaVac, a vaccine developed by Beijing-based biopharmaceutical company Sinovac.
“I want to thank God and our ancestors,” said Ortega, who is also a volunteer nurse in her Indigenous community.
Brazil on Monday began rolling out its national immunization program with 6 million doses of CoronaVac in almost a dozen states and hopes to receive 46 million doses up to April to distribute among states. Amazonas received 256,000 doses.
The state government on Tuesday started distributing the doses to municipalities. The priority in the first vaccination phase will be health workers, elderly people above 80 years old, and Indigenous people in about 265 villages.
The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed how underfunded and powerless the World Health Organization is to carry out the tasks the world expects of it, an independent expert panel said Tuesday.
The heads of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response presented a report to the WHO’s executive board which said that the UN health body could have acted faster and more decisively at the start of the pandemic to avert catastrophe.
But they stressed that the delays and failures could largely be attributed to the weak position of the UN agency, and said more funding and reforms were desperately needed.
“The world is more reliant on an effective WHO than ever before,” said former Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who co-chairs the panel with former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark.
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Germany extending national lockdown until 14 February
Germany is extending its national lockdown until 14 February, with new rules making it mandatory to wear medical masks in shops and on public transport.
In a digital summit this afternoon, Angela Merkel and the heads of Germany’s 16 federal states agreed to carry over current restrictions on social gatherings and closures of nurseries, schools, restaurants and non-essential shops into the middle of next month.
A new rule will ban people from wearing homemade cloth masks or scarves as face-coverings in shops and on trains and busses, instead mandating the use of “clinical masks”. This includes single-use surgical masks as well as filtering facepiece respirators, known as FFP2 masks in Europe or N95 respirators in the US.
The southern German state of Bavaria and Austria introduced mandatory FFP2 rules this week, though several virologists warn that respirator masks need to be professionally fitted to guarantee effective protection.
Merkel and the federal heads of state also agreed to aim to further reduce contacts on public transport, though without a complete halt to inner-city bus and metro traffic, as previously mooted.
Instead, public transport companies could offer additional carriages or buses to rush-hour crushes, and companies will be further encouraged to let their employees work from home.
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New York governor Andrew Cuomo has asked Pfizer chief executive Albert Bourla if the state could buy Covid vaccine doses directly from the US drugmaker, a move that prompted the US health department to raise ethical questions.
Pfizer told Reuters that such a proposal would first require approval by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). A HHS spokesman said that Cuomo was trying to circumvent the system in which the federal government, which has paid Pfizer for the US’s allotment of vaccines already, allocates doses to each state.
New York is asking to “cut to the front of the line at the expense of fellow jurisdictions,” the spokesman said via email.
“After myself and seven other governors called on the Trump Administration to release more doses, HHS Secretary Alex Azar said that relief was on the way. To date, however, the federal government has not acted on that promise,” Cuomo wrote.
Cuomo said he was appealing to Pfizer directly as the company was “not bound by commitments” that Moderna made as part of Operation Warp Speed, the US government’s programme to distribute vaccines.
No state has purchased vaccines directly from the producer and Cuomo’s letter did not state how many doses he was seeking or how he would pay for it.
Pfizer said it was open to collaborating with the US HSS in a way that would ensure quick vaccine distribution to as many Americans as possible, Reuters reports.
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The eastern Spanish region of Valencia is to shut down all bars and restaurants “for a limited time” in a bid to slow the third wave of the coronavirus.
Like the rest of Spain, Valencia has been under a state of emergency since the end of October and subject to an overnight curfew. But a surge in new Covid cases – and the fact that 52.8% of the region’s intensive care unit beds are currently occupied by coronavirus patients – has prompted the regional government to take tougher action.
The regional president, Ximo Puig, is due to outline the measures later this afternoon. Although the central government declared the national state of emergency, regional governments are responsible for responding to the virus in their own territories.
Last week, Galicia banned all non-essential travel in the seven largest cities, ordered bars and restaurants to close at 4pm, and brought forward a curfew to 10pm, while La Rioja closed non-essential businesses at 5pm and limited group meetings to four people. Shops in Cantabria were banned from opening at weekends.
Spain recorded a record rise in new infections over the weekend, logging 84,300 new infections and bringing the country’s total caseload to 2,336,451. The number of new cases over the past 14 days rose to 689 per 100,000 people on Monday, up from 575 last Friday.
As of Monday, 1,143,300 doses of the vaccine had been distributed by the central government, of which 897,942 administered to Spain’s population of almost 47 million people.
The response to the virus has been complicated in Madrid and many other areas by Stom Filomena, which brought the heaviest snows in decades.
On Tuesday, the central government declared Madrid and seven other affected areas disaster zones, making them eligible for emergency funds and support.
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Thai prime minister Prayuth Chan-ocha has warned that his government would prosecute anyone who shares false information about coronavirus vaccines in social or mass media.
The government already has the power to impose punishments under a state of emergency that was declared last March to deal with the pandemic. Prayuth’s warning was an apparent reaction to charges that his government has done too little to acquire adequate supplies of vaccines, the Associated Press reports.
Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, former leader of the banned Future Forward Party who has already been disqualified as an MP amid criticism of the state, last night accused the government of acting too slowly to inoculate the country’s population (see 11:59am) and criticised the country’s coronavirus vaccine strategy as being too reliant on a company owned by the Thai king.
“Do not blame me for threatening legal action,” Prayuth said. “I need to keep people’s confidence and trust in government.”
Health officials at a news conference today defended the effort to procure vaccines.
Supakit Sirilak, director general of the Medical Science Department, said the health ministry has been working to obtain vaccine supplies since last February, but has taken time to evaluate which are appropriate.
A first batch of 200,000 doses of Sinovac vaccine from China is scheduled to arrive next month. After that, 26 million doses of a vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca, a British-Swedish pharmaceutical company, to be manufactured in Thailand will start being distributed in May.
Thailand has suffered less than most countries its size from the pandemic, but a second wave of infections began in December. It has had 12,594 cases and 70 deaths.
A candidate Covid vaccine known as EpiVacCorona, Russia’s second to be registered, proved “100% effective” in early-stage Phase I and II trials, Russian consumer health watchdog Rospotrebnadzor has told local media.
“The effectiveness of the vaccine is made up of its immunological effectiveness and preventative effectiveness,” the TASS news agency reported, citing Rospotrebnadzor. “According to results of the first and second phases of clinical trials, the immunological effectiveness of the EpiVacCorona vaccine is 100%.”
Russia began testing EpiVacCorona, which is being developed by Siberia’s Vector Institute, in November. Earlier that month, Moscow said its other approved vaccine, Sputnik V, was 92% effective at protecting people from Covid based on interim results, Reuters reports.
Russia has said it can inoculate 60% of its population against Covid this year, but although the Sputnik V vaccine has been readily available in Moscow, the rollout across the country has been slow. Russian president Vladimir Putin has ordered mass vaccinations to start this week.
EpiVacCorona will be used in mass vaccinations from March, deputy prime minister Tatiana Golikova told the Interfax news agency.
Russia, a country of 144 million people, has reported 3,612,800 coronavirus cases, the world’s fourth-highest total. Its death toll from the virus stands at 66,623.
Sweden, whose unorthodox pandemic strategy has placed it in the global spotlight, registered 268 new Covid-linked deaths since Friday, taking the total to 10,591, health agency statistics showed on Tuesday.
The country of 10 million inhabitants also registered 9,779 new coronavirus cases, a significant fall compared to 17,395 cases during the corresponding period last week.
“It has started to come down in all age groups, although primarily among younger people,” chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell told a news conference. “We will see if it lasts.”
The deaths registered have occurred over several days and weeks with many from the Christmas period being registered with a significant delay.
Sweden’s death rate per capita is several times higher than that of its Nordic neighbours’ but lower than in several European countries that opted for lockdowns, Reuters reports.
Some 340 patients were being treated in intensive care on Tuesday, a decline of around 20 from last week, as hospitals continued to battle a second wave of the virus that has been of much the same magnitude as the deadly outbreak during spring.
The Health Agency also said 147,000 doses of vaccine had been used as of the end of last week, equal to one dose for around 1.5% of the population.
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Denmark may extend its current lockdown measures beyond early February despite a fall in Covid infections because a more contagious variant first identified in the UK is still spreading, prime minister Mette Frederiksen has said.
Last week, Denmark extended its lockdown for three more weeks in a bid to curtail the spread of the new, more contagious variant, which authorities expect to be the dominant one by mid-February.
“The infection [rate] is decreasing, but the threat is clear. If we don’t contain the pressure, we may risk an exponential increase in infections,” Frederiksen told parliament.
Some restrictions may need to be extended, possibly as early as Tuesday, she added, without elaborating.
Under current lockdown measures, restaurants, bars and non-essential shops are closed and public gatherings are limited to five people. A two-metre distancing rule is in force in public areas, including shops.
Denmark’s reproduction rate, which indicates how many people one person infected with Covid on average transmits the virus to, has fallen to 0.6 from about 1.0 a month ago, health minister Magnus Heunicke said in a tweet yesterday, with hospitalisations falling.
The reproduction number specific to the new variant is estimated to be around 1.16, meaning those infections are rising, the State Serum Institute said.
Tackling the existential risk posed by the climate crisis will be made harder by the growing gap between rich and poor triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic, the World Economic Forum has said.
The body that organises the annual gathering of the global elite in the Swiss town of Davos said warning signs of the threat posed by infectious disease had been ignored for the past 15 years, with disastrous results.
Despite the loss of almost 2 million lives to Covid-19, the WEF’s global risks report found that environmental issues were considered to pose the biggest danger in the coming years, both in terms of impact and likelihood.
Klaus Schwab, the executive chairman of the WEF, said: “In 2020, the risk of a global pandemic became reality. As governments, businesses and societies survey the damage inflicted over the last year, strengthening strategic foresight is now more important than ever.”
Schwab added: “Growing societal fragmentation – manifested through persistent and emerging risks to human health, rising unemployment, widening digital divides, and youth disillusionment – can have severe consequences in an era of compounded economic, environmental, geopolitical and technological risks.”
The WEF report said the Covid-19 pandemic had widened longstanding health, economic and digital disparities, making it harder to secure the international cooperation needed to combat challenges such as environmental degradation.
Clark thanks Tedros Adhanom, WHO secretary general, for “enabling” her independent panel’s work to produce an impartial review of the international health response to Covid after appointing her and Sirleaf.
She calls on states to act more decisively to stem the pandemic and to reset preparedness and response systems to ensure that this can’t happen again.
Nurses across the world are burnt out and considering quitting when the main impact of the pandemic is over, Clark says, despite the world needing another estimated 6 million nurses by 2030.
“An exodus now exacerbates those pressures, and that’s just one of so many spill over impacts of the pandemic,” she adds.
“Our panel strongly recommends that all countries immediately and consistently adopt and implement those public health measures that will reduce the spread and impact of Covid-19. We must do all we can to stop the pandemic now.”
An independent panel reviewing the global handling of the pandemic, led by former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark and former Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, is to brief the media on their second progress report.
Yesterday, they said that Chinese officials could have applied public health measures more forcefully in January 2020 to curb the initial Covid-19 outbreak, and criticised the World Health Organization for not declaring an international emergency until 30 January (see 11:49pm).
“What is clear to the panel is that public health measures could have been applied more forcefully by local and national health authorities in China in January,” the report said, referring to the initial outbreak of the disease in the central city of Wuhan, in Hubei province.
As evidence emerged of human-to-human transmission, “in far too many countries, this signal was ignored”, it added.
You can follow the briefing here, and we’ll bring you the key information as it comes.
Updated
India, one of the world’s biggest drugmakers, will start exports of Covid vaccines as early as Wednesday, government sources told Reuters, paving the way for other countries to secure supplies of the easy-to-store Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine.
The first batch of exports will be shipped to the tiny nation of Bhutan, said the officials, who asked not to be named as no formal announcement has yet been made in India.
Two million doses of the Covishield vaccine, developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University and manufactured by Serum Institute of India (SII), will also be despatched to Bangladesh on Thursday, officials said.
Bangladesh’s foreign ministry confirmed the plan, saying a special flight from India carrying the first consignment will land in Dhaka on Thursday. “Bangladesh will receive 2 million doses of Oxford-Astrazenca Covid-19 vaccines from India as a gift on 21 January,” it said in a statement.
India has received requests from dozens of nations, including urgent appeals from Brazil, to begin exports of the vaccine from the SII centre in the western city of Pune.
Prime minister Narendra Modi’s government, however, wanted to roll out the vaccination drive at home before launching exports, one of the sources said.
India began giving shots of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, as well as another developed by Bharat Biotech – which faces controversy today (see 11:37am) – to health workers on Saturday.
Sri Lanka, Nepal, Myanmar and the Maldives have all made requests for early delivery of vaccines.
Tanzania’s president John Magufuli urged farmers in the country to increase food production as he predicted global shortages later this year due to pandemic lockdowns, especially in some of the largest food-producing states.
“This year there is a possibility of a severe famine in the world because many people are in lockdown because of corona, but this should not discourage us because even if they are imprisoned they still need to eat. We will grow crops that we will sell to them,” he said.
Magufuli’s idiosyncratic handling of Covid in Tanzania, which like many other African countries is not known to have been significantly impacted, put him into the spotlight last year as he declared victory over the virus and downplayed fears.
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Japan’s southernmost region, Okinawa, has declared a state of emergency due to the pandemic, as the country grapples with a surge in infections six months before it is set to host the summer Olympics.
Okinawa governor Denny Tamaki said emergency measures include asking restaurants and bars to close by 8pm and residents to also refrain from non-urgent outings after that time – until 7 February.
The national government had already issued a state of emergency for Tokyo and other areas but the southern island, which hosts the bulk of US military forces in Japan, went ahead and declared an emergency of its own after a spike in cases.
The prefecture confirmed 113 cases on Tuesday, its third-highest daily tally on record, public broadcaster NHK reported.
Shizuoka prefecture, home to Mount Fuji, has also declared “an emergency alert” of its own after it found cases of a more contagious coronavirus variant, Kyodo News reported.
It comes as medical experts warned that hospitals in Covid-hit regions of Japan are on the brink of collapse as the country battles a third wave of infections that has caused record numbers of people to fall seriously ill (see 11:15am).
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Thailand’s government has defended its coronavirus vaccine strategy against criticism that it is too reliant on a company owned by the country’s King.
The attack by opposition politician Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit came as Thailand battles its biggest rise in infections and after months of youth-led protests that brought a rare challenge to the monarchy.
Criticising the royal family is illegal. The outspoken Juangroongruangkit has already been disqualified as an MP and had his party banned amid claims that the judiciary is pro-government.
“These baseless and inaccurate accusations shouldn*t be linked to the work of the institution we revere and love,” said Nakorn Premsri, director of the National Vaccine Institute, referring to the monarchy.
He said that royally owned Siam Bioscience had been the most obvious choice of many companies considered for technology transfer from pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca to make 200m vaccine doses each year for Thailand and other nations, Reuters reports.
Siam Bioscience is wholly owned by a subsidiary of the Crown Property Bureau, which manages tens of billions of dollars in investments under king Maha Vajiralongkorn’s personal control.
Thanathorn made his comments on Facebook Live on Monday at an event titled “Royal Vaccine: Who Benefits and Who Doesn’t?”
He made no accusations of impropriety against AstraZeneca but said Siam Bioscience lacked vaccine-making experience and the government was relying on it too heavily.
Siam Bioscience’s managing director, Songpon Deechongkit, declined to comment on the criticism. “We want to focus on our responsibility to produce the vaccine in time, with quality, with the appropriate amount,” Songpon told Reuters.
Asked about Thanathorn’s criticism, prime minister Prayuth Chan-ocha told reporters: “It*s all distorted and not factual at all. I will order prosecution for anything false that gets published, whether in media or social media.”
Thailand has suffered less than most countries its size from the pandemic, but a second wave of infections began in December. It has had 12,594 cases and 70 deaths.
Updated
Spain will sell 30,000 doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer coronavirus vaccine to microstate Andorra, as part of its plan to redistribute excess vaccines, the country’s health ministry has announced.
With fewer than 80,000 inhabitants, Andorra, a small country wedged between France and Spain, has reported 9,145 infections and 92 deaths since the Covid-19 pandemic started, official data shows.
As part of EU purchase agreements, Spain will receive 140m of doses of the different vaccines that were developed, enough to immunise more people than its population of 47 million, Reuters reports.
Some EU countries were made responsible for getting medicines to the states of Andorra, Monaco, San Marino and the Vatican City, which depend on bigger neighbours for access.
“This is an exercise in responsibility and solidarity, as small countries are unable to sign contracts with pharmaceutical companies,” Spain’s health minister Salvador Illa tweeted.
Spanish authorities said they will sell the vaccines at the same price they paid. The price has not been disclosed.
Updated
Bharat Biotech, the Indian company that has developed a coronavirus vaccine being rolled out across the south Asian country, has warned people with weak immunity and other medical conditions including allergies, fever or a bleeding disorder to consult a doctor before getting the shot – and if possible avoid the vaccine.
The company said those receiving vaccinations should disclose their medical condition, medicines they are taking and any history of allergies. It said severe allergic reactions among vaccine recipients may include difficulty breathing, swelling of the face and throat, rapid heartbeat, body rashes, dizziness and weakness.
The vaccine ran into controversy after the Indian government allowed its use without concrete data showing its effectiveness in preventing Covid, the Associated Press reports. Tens of thousands of people have been given the shot in the past three days after India started inoculating health care workers last weekend in what is likely the world’s largest coronavirus vaccination campaign.
India vaccinated 148,266 people on Monday, taking its total to 381,305, the health ministry said. Indian authorities hope to give vaccines to 300 million people. The recipients are to include 30 million doctors, nurses and other front-line workers, to be followed by 270 million people who either are over 50 or have illnesses that make them vulnerable to the virus. The AstraZeneca vaccine is also being used.
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Almost a quarter of Lesotho’s population will require food aid between January and March as a result of Covid-19 restrictions, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has warned.
More than 580,000 people out of a population of 2.2 million are estimated to be food insecure, despite predictions of normal to above average rains this year and the potential for above average cereal production.
The FAO said Covid-19 had reduced household incomes, harming people’s ability to buy fertiliser or to hire workers, which was “likely to limit the potential increases in yields”.
The situation in Lesotho has been exacerbated by extended lockdowns in neighbouring South Africa to curb the spread of the virus, which the agency said would prolong high levels of unemployment and loss of income.
The number of people requiring food assistance this year is about 35% higher than the number between October 2019 and March 2020, said the FAO.
Hospitals in Covid-hit regions of Japan are on the brink of collapse, medical experts have warned, as the country battles a third wave of infections that has caused record numbers of people to fall seriously ill.
Japan reported more than 4,900 coronavirus infections on Monday, with serious cases rising to a record high of 973, local media reported.
Although Japan has avoided the huge caseloads and death tolls seen in some other countries, infections have doubled over the past six weeks to about 338,000, according to the public broadcaster NHK, with 4,623 deaths.
The increase, coupled with the discovery of the first recorded community transmissions of a fast-spreading strain of Covid-19 initially identified in Britain, is adding to pressure on the prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, to move quickly to protect stretched medical services.
Good morning, good afternoon and good evening everyone. I’m taking over the blog from Amelia Hill now.
You can contact me on Twitter or via email on mattha.busby.freelance@guardian.co.uk with any thoughts and tips.
Updated
And that’s goodbye from me. My colleague Mattha Busby will take you through the latest coronavirus news for the next few hours.
Updated
Daily case counts of Covid have nearly tripled in Dubai in the past month but in the face of a growing economic crisis, the city won’t lock down, Reuters is reporting.
“Dubai’s economy is a house of cards,” said Matthew Page, a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Its competitive advantage is being a place where rules don’t apply.”
While most countries banned tourists from the UK over fears of the fast-spreading virus variant found there, Dubai – home to some 240,000 British expats – kept its doors open: Emirates flew five daily flights to London’s Heathrow airport during the Christmas holidays and within days, the new virus strain had arrived in the emirates.
“People have had enough of this pandemic already,” said Iris Sabellano from Dubai’s Al Arabi Travel Agency. “With vaccines coming out, they feel it’s not the end of the world, they’re not going to die.”
But there are signs that the stampede is slowing. Israeli tourists have vanished due to new quarantine rules. Britain slammed shut its travel corridor with Dubai last week.
The UAE does not make public information about disease clusters or hospitalisations but the country has reported more than 256,000 cases and 751 deaths. Analysts speculate the UAE’s unique demographics – 90% expatriate, comprising mostly healthy, young labourers – have prevented well-staffed hospitals from becoming overwhelmed and kept the death rate low, at 0.3%.
But that hasn’t assuaged Abu Dhabi, Dubai’s more conservative neighbour and the country’s capital. Without explanation, Abu Dhabi has kept its border with Dubai shut, despite promises to reopen by Christmas. Anyone crossing into Abu Dhabi must present a negative coronavirus test.
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Europe has been inoculating its people since December – but African health authorities say it could still be months, until they get their first vaccines, Reuters is reporting.
African states have accused richer regions of cornering most of the supplies. The head of the World Health Organization – Ethiopia’s Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus – said last week the world was on the brink of “catastrophic moral failure” when it came to sharing out shots.
Daily tallies of confirmed cases hit record levels across Africa this month, and the second wave is infecting twice as many people per day as the height of last year’s first, according to the African Union’s Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Nigeria has reported 110,387 confirmed cases, and 1,435 deaths, though African officials have warned that low testing could mask more cases.
Privately, some doctors say they worry that when vaccines arrive in Nigeria, they will go first to the rich and powerful. Dr Ndaeyo Iwot, acting executive secretary of primary health care in Abuja, said the government would track doses to clamp down on any corruption. “It will go through the system,” he said.
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The quarantine controversy over tennis’s Australian Open has raised questions about whether large-scale international sporting events can take place in the middle of a pandemic and could offer a preview of the difficulties facing this summer’s Tokyo Olympics, CNN is reporting.
Players arriving in the Australian state of Victoria have been placed into a 14-day quarantine ahead with most allotted five hours each day to go out and train in strict bio-secure bubbles. But 72 players have been unable to leave their hotel rooms and cannot practice after passengers on their flights tested positive for Covid-19.
Some players have expressed anger and frustration at being kept cooped up ahead of the first grand slam of the tennis season. They include record eight-time Australian Open men’s singles winner Novak Djokovic, who put forward a list of proposals that would loosen the restrictions on the quarantining stars, including moving players to houses with courts, better food, and reducing the number of days in isolation.
In response, Victoria State Premier Daniel Andrews said: “People area free to provide lists of demands, but the answer is no.”
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North Korea’s trade with China plunged more than 80% last year, Chinese customs data has shown, as the isolated country’s strict coronavirus lockdown encumbers an economy already burdened by international sanctions.
China is North Korea’s top ally and accounts for some 90% of its trade volumes. Two-way trade plummeted nearly 80.7% to $539m last year from 2019, Chinese customs data released on Monday showed, according to Reuters.
North Korea’s exports to China totalled $48m, down about 77.7%, while its imports fell 80.9% to $491m.
No reason for the lower trade was given but the new data underscored the extent that North Korea has become isolated since it sealed its border last January to ward off the coronavirus that had been detected in neighbouring China just a few weeks earlier.
North Korea has not confirmed any cases of Covid-19 but all points of entry have been closed, public transport and inter-state movement rigidly restricted and gatherings of more than five people banned, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said recently.
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Rwanda has reintroduced tough lockdown measures in its capital, Kigali, after a surge in coronavirus cases.
The government has also banned movement into and out of the city, except for essential services and for tourists, it said, citing a jump in the number of cases found in a given sample of tests, known as the positivity rate.
“All employees, public and private, shall work from home, except for those providing essential services,” the government said in a statement.
Rwanda, which has 11,259 cases of the disease caused by the coronavirus and 146 deaths, said the number of tests returning positive results for Covid-19 has tripled to 7.7% from 2.6% at the start of this month.
African nations are grappling with a second wave of coronavirus, infections rising to at least 3.3 million and 79,500 deaths so far, a Reuters tally showed.
Of every 100 infections reported around the world, about five are from African nations, up from 3.4 in October, the data showed.
Businesses in Kigali will shut down, the government said, except for those dealing with essential services like food, medicine and fuel. “Citizens are urged to significantly reduce social interactions and limit movements,” it said.
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Taiwan has cancelled a major festival during the upcoming lunar new year holiday as the country reported four locally transmitted cases of Covid-19, the biggest daily rise in local infections in nearly 11 months.
Taiwan, which has kept the pandemic well under control thanks to early and effective prevention methods, has been unnerved by new domestic transmissions, first in December and now in a hospital in the northern city of Taoyuan.
It has reported 868 cases, the majority of which were imported, including seven deaths, with 102 in hospital being treated.
The Taiwan Lantern Festival, an annual celebration to mark the end of the upcoming lunar new year in mid-February, will be cancelled this year because of Covid-19, the ministry of transportation and communications said, citing the recent local infection cases.
“This is a tough decision, but pandemic-prevention is our top priority,” transportation minister Lin Chia-lung told reporters.
The festival, which features oversized lanterns and fireworks displays, attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors every year and has become a major selling point for the government to attract tourists from overseas.
Lin Chih-Chien, mayor of the northern city of Hsinchu, where the festival was to be held, said several technology companies there had asked the government to cancel the event, citing concerns of a local outbreak curtailing production at a technology hub that hosts firms including the world’s largest chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd.
The announcement came shortly after Taiwan reported four locally transmitted cases of Covid-19, the most since 29 February.
All four cases are related to the Taoyuan hospital outbreak and Taiwan’s health ministry is planning to move more than 200 patients out of the hospital into isolation wards.
“We strongly recommend that large-scale events be cancelled,” said the health minister Chen Shih-chung. “The situation is under our control at the moment because the cases can be clearly traced.”
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German govt proposes to extend lockdown to 15 February
The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, wants to extend coronavirus restrictions until 15 February and make medical masks obligatory on public transport and in shops, according to a draft resolution by the federal government seen by Reuters on Tuesday.
The draft proposed keeping schools closed until mid-February and improving aid for companies affected by the lockdown extension. It also proposed creating a working group to work out how to exit restrictions safely and equitably.
Merkel is due to meet on Tuesday with regional leaders to discuss measures to rein in the coronavirus pandemic. They will decide on extending a lockdown that has closed most shops and schools and introducing new restrictions, and are likely to agree stricter requirements for working from home with regional leaders today as they try to curb the spread of the virus.
New infections have been decreasing in recent days and pressure on intensive care units has eased slightly, but virologists are worried about the possible spread of more infectious variants of the virus, Reuters is reporting.
“The infection numbers have been going down for several weeks or stagnating and that’s good. Now we are facing a very aggressive mutation that we have to respond to,” the Berlin mayor, Michael Mueller, told German television.
Mueller said curfews, already in place in states including southern Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemberg, would be under discussion but were unlikely to be imposed everywhere.
Also up for discussion is a compulsory wearing of heavy duty masks in shops and on public transport which offer more protection than cloth coverings, said Mueller.
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases had risen by 11,369 to 2.05m, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for infectious diseases showed on Tuesday. The death toll was up 989 at 47,622.
“We will have to step it up a notch to bring the current early successes to the finish line,” the economy minister Peter Altmaier told broadcaster RTL/n-tv.
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Russia has reported 21,734 new coronavirus cases in the last 24 hours, including 3,281 in Moscow, pushing the national tally to 3,612,800.
Authorities said 586 people had died overnight, taking the official death toll to 66,623, Reuters is reporting.
The Palestinian Authority could receive Russia’s main Covid-19 vaccine, known as Sputnik V, within days, according to a PA official.
The PA health ministry last week issued ”emergency approval” for administering Sputnik in areas of the occupied West Bank where the Palestinians exercise limited self-rule.
An Israeli official said earlier that a first batch of 5,000 units of the vaccine could arrive in the West Bank on Tuesday.
Hussein Al-Sheikh, PA minister for civil affairs, told Reuters the delivery would not take place on Tuesday, but added he expected it to happen “within days”.
Updated
French health minister Olivier Véran said on Tuesday that coronavirus was still circulating at a “worrying” level in France, but stopped short of recommending a third national lockdown.
“We already took a tough decision last week to impose a 6pm curfew on the country as a whole,” Véran told France Inter radio. “I cannot say we will impose a confinement but the circulation of the virus remains worrying.”
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Britain’s government is still aiming to review Covid-19 lockdown restrictions in mid-February, Northern Ireland minister Brandon Lewis said on Tuesday.
“When we put these current restrictions in place we said we would do a review in mid-February … and that’s still the case,” Lewis told Sky News
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A representative of Chinese company Sinovac has denied claims that its vaccine – dubbed CoronaVac – is among the most expensive in the world.
The Philippine Star is reporting prices of Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac Biotech’s CoronaVac in different countries ranging from $5 (P240), to $14 (~P672), up to $38 (~P1,826).
On Sunday, Senator Panfilo Lacson tweeted saying, “The difference in prices of Sinovac vaccine at $5, $14 and $38 reminds me of an old story about how corruption is committed in three Southeast Asian countries—UNDER the table, ON the table, and INCLUDING the table.”
“Here, it may cost $38.50 (P1,847.25) per dose but is covered by a confidentiality disclosure agreement,” he added.
Sinovac Biotech’s general manager Helen Yang has denied claims its vaccine is among the most expensive. Last week, varying prices of the different vaccines have been circulating online, which shows that Sinovac is priced at P1,443 to P3,629.50.
In an interview with Pinky Webb on CNN Philippines on 18 January, Yang said it was “definitely not on the (most) expensive”, adding: “It is the mission of Sinovac to provide the vaccine at an affordable price.”
While Yang declined to disclose the amount per dose, she did however say that it is “reasonable”.
Updated
China builds massive Covid-19 quarantine centre
China is building a massive Covid-19 quarantine centre on the outskirts of Shijiazhuang city, AFP is reporting, to curb the city’s growing Covid-19 outbreaks.
The facility, which will be ready in a matter of days, will be large enough to move entire villages into if there are any localised resurgences of the virus.
China has largely brought the virus under control but still experiences spates of small, localised outbreaks. The scenes outside Shijiazhuang, northern China, are reminiscent of Beijing’s efforts early last year to build makeshift field hospitals in Wuhan – the central city where Covid-19 cases first emerged – within days of the virus’s appearance.
The quarantine buildings in Shijiazhuang are equipped with bathrooms, wifi and air conditioning and will house close contacts of confirmed virus patients.
State broadcaster CCTV showed workers in hi-vis vests and hard hats assembling the cabin-like structures in the dark, while flags bearing the names of construction teams and Communist party units fluttered from the completed buildings.
The facility is expected to have enough rooms to hold more than 4,000 people once it is completed, CCTV said on Tuesday.
Updated
The Times is reporting on a British Airways pilot who has returned home after a record 243 days in hospital with Covid-19.
Nicholas Synnott, 59, was admitted to hospital in Texas in March and released just before Christmas to go home to Betchworth, Surrey. He is recuperating with his wife, Nicola, 54, who spent every day at his bedside in the hospital and has been credited with aiding his recovery.
The father-of-two told ABC 30 News after leaving UT Health and Memorial Hermann hospital: “I went through a dark phrase where psychologically there were issues I had to deal with.”
Doctors said he had gone into respiratory failure, been placed on a ventilator and then on a heart and lung machine before he began to recover.
Dr Biswajit Kar, a cardiologist who treated Synnott, said: “Every organ of his body was affected by Covid-19. But yet, because his health was so good as a pilot prior to the illness, he could sustain all this and survive something as serious as this.”
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Staunch your tears and stay your sorrows – Helen might have departed this ‘ere blog but I, Amelia Hill, am here to walk beside for the next few hours – more like a wise guide, I like to think, than that mad pontificator the Ancient Mariner. But I guess we need to see what the next few hours bring …
Updated
That’s it from me, Helen Sullivan, for today.
Has anyone seen this missing raven?
Summary
Here are the key developments from the last few hours:
- Coronavirus deaths are rising in nearly two-thirds of US states as a winter surge pushes the overall toll toward 400,000 amid warnings that a new, highly contagious variant is taking hold.
- California has become the first US state to record more than 3 million known infections, as it grapples with an unprecedented surge of cases that has left hospitals overwhelmed.
- Germany mulls tighter shutdown as virus variants fuel fears. Chancellor Angela Merkel and leaders of Germany’s 16 states are expected Tuesday to extend and tighten a partial lockdown beyond January, as fears grow over virus variant strains believed to be more contagious.
- China reported more than 100 new Covid-19 cases for a seventh day on Tuesday in the worst domestic outbreak since March last year, with one north-eastern province seeing a record daily increase. Mainland China posted 118 new cases on 18 January, up from 109 a day earlier, the national health authority said in a statement.
- China and WHO made mistakes in containing Covid outbreak, says panel. An independent panel has said that Chinese officials could have applied public health measures more forcefully in January 2020 to curb the initial Covid-19 outbreak, and criticised the World Health Organization (WHO) for not declaring an international emergency until 30 January.
- In Hong Kong, chief executive Carrie Lam has telegraphed an extension of Covid-19 social distancing measures which were due to expire on Thursday. At a regular press briefing on Tuesday, Lam said she would leave the announcement of details to the secretary of health but “in light of the latest Covid-19 pandemic situation it is quite obvious there is no room yet for us to relax to social distancing measures put in place.”
- The US called on China to grant greater access to the WHO team of investigators in China. The United States said China should allow the WHO team to interview “care givers, former patients and lab workers” in the central city of Wuhan. The team of WHO-led independent experts is holding teleconferences with Chinese counterparts during a two-week quarantine before starting work on the ground.
- A political row is brewing after Donald Trump announced he would rescind Covid travel bans bans on most non-US citizens arriving from Brazil and much of Europe, including the UK, effective 26 January. A spokesperson for Joe Biden, who will be inaugurated as the new US president on Wednesday, said the new administration “does not intend to lift these restrictions on 1/26”. “In fact,” wrote Jen Psaki on Twitter, “we plan to strengthen public health measures around international travel in order to further mitigate the spread of Covid-19.”
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New Zealand has imposed a blanket testing regime for all flights arriving internationally, with passengers now required to return a negative Covid test result before departure.
- One in four UK young people have felt ‘unable to cope’ in pandemic. Young people are in danger of giving up on their futures and on themselves, with a quarter saying they feel unable to cope with life, one of the UK’s leading charities has said. The Prince’s Trust’s long-running annual survey of young people’s happiness and confidence returned the worst findings in its 12-year history.
- Colombia’s capital, Bogota, will impose nightly curfews for almost two weeks, Mayor Claudia Lopez said on Monday, while the whole city will enter yet another full quarantine this weekend. Nightly curfews first started last week and continued until Sunday. However, they will begin again from Tuesday and will run until 28 January. During this time citizens must remain in their homes from 8pm until 4am, Lopez said.
- Kazakhstan plans to vaccinate about 6 million people, or almost a third of its population, against the coronavirus this year, healthcare minister Alexei Tsoy said on Tuesday. Vaccinations will begin on 1 February, with the Russian Sputnik V vaccine being offered to medical workers, he told a government meeting. Kazakhstan also aims to produce Sputnik V at home.
Updated
While the UK is under lockdown, travel for work and other exemptions is still allowed. We take a look at how to stay safer when cooped up together, whether in a taxi or a private car:
Holiday companies have reported an increase in bookings as the UK’s coronavirus vaccine rollout gives people hope that they will soon be able to travel overseas again.
Despite a series of negative travel announcements in recent days, including the closure of air corridors and words of caution from ministers over foreign holidays, there are signs that those among the first in line for the vaccinations are starting to plan trips, and that consumers are hopeful about taking a break later this year.
The travel association Abta said it was hearing from members that the over-50s represented a much higher proportion of early bookers than normal:
California is first US state to pass 3m Covid cases
California has become the first state to record more than 3 million known coronavirus infections, as the embattled state grapples with an unprecedented surge of cases that has left hospitals overwhelmed.
That remarkable figure, which comes from Johns Hopkins University, was not entirely unexpected for the nation’s most populous state – but the speed at which it arrived has been stunning.
The first coronavirus case in California, home to 40 million people, was confirmed on 25 January 2020. It took 292 days to get to 1 million infections, on 11 November, and then just 44 days to hit 2 million, a milestone reached on 24 December. The state hit 3 million just weeks later:
First minister Nicola Sturgeon said she was “hopeful” that all adults in Scotland would have been given their first dose of coronavirus vaccine by September.
Wales has faced criticism in the past week for vaccinating fewer people in proportion to its population than the other home nations.
As of Saturday, 4% of the population in Wales had been vaccinated, compared with 4.1% in Scotland, 5.9% in England and 7.4% in Northern Ireland.
First minister Mark Drakeford dismissed the statistics as “very marginal differences” and insisted Wales was “on track” to vaccinate the top four priority groups by the middle of February, with almost 152,000 having received their first injection.
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The UK government says it is on track to vaccinate around 15 million high-priority people across the UK by February 15, including frontline health and social care staff, the over 70s and people in care homes.
Once those vaccines have taken effect, around two to three weeks later ministers will consider whether lockdown measures can be eased in England.
Despite pressure from Tory MPs to move as quickly as possible, Boris Johnson has warned there will be no “open sesame” moment when restrictions will all be lifted together.
Speaking during visit to a manufacturing facility for the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine on Monday, the Prime Minister said the UK was still in a “pretty precarious” position and that any loosening would be gradual.
With more than half of the over 80s and half of elderly care home residents having received the jab, ministers have given the go ahead to begin vaccinating the next priority groups - the over 70s and the clinically extremely vulnerable.
Mr Hancock acknowledged that some areas of the country had made better progress than others but said they were putting more supplies of the vaccine into those that were falling behind.
“What we’re doing now is making sure that whilst they, of course, will be able to move onto the next group, we’re prioritising the supply of the vaccine into those parts of the country that need to complete the over-80s,” he said.
“But we don’t want to stop the areas that have effectively done that job already, we want them to carry on, but the priority of the vaccine is according to the JCVI (Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation) prioritisation list.
“The critical thing is to make sure that everybody can get it, that we’re putting more supply into the areas that have got more to do.”
As the number of first doses delivered in the UK passed four million, ministers and officials said it was still too soon to rely on the jab “coming to our rescue”.
PA Media: The warning came as the latest official figures showed there was a record 37,475 people in hospital with the disease across the UK.
As the pressure continues to mount, the NHS Confederation has said the health service could reach its limit for critical care beds this week.
Northern Ireland’s health minister Robin Swann said “real intense pressure” is expected on inpatient and intensive care units in the next seven days.
Meanwhile scientists advising the Government have warned there is a danger that people could start relaxing their guard as the vaccine started to become available.
The latest minutes of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), released last week, called for close monitoring of the situation with a system of “rapid alerts” if adherence to the rules begins to fall off.
“There is a risk that changes in behaviour could offset the benefits of vaccination, particularly in the early months of vaccine rollout,” it said.
At a No 10 news conference on Monday, Health Secretary Matt Hancock issued a direct appeal to the public, saying: “Don’t blow it now.”
NHS England’s medical director Professor Stephen Powis said that with around 15,000 hospital admissions with coronavirus since Christmas Eve, the pressures on the service would continue for some time to come.
“It is absolutely critical that we continue to stick to those social distancing rules that are in place. That we don’t rely yet on vaccines coming to our rescue,” he said.
“It will be some time before the effects of the vaccination programme are seen through into reducing pressure on hospitals. We all have a role to play in reducing the risk of transmission.”
Podcast: how do you tweak a vaccine?
The emergence of more infectious variants of Sars-CoV-2 has raised questions about just how long our vaccines will remain effective for. Although there is little evidence that the current vaccines won’t work against the new variants, as the virus continues to mutate scientists are preparing themselves for having to make changes to the vaccines in response. Speaking to Dr Katrina Pollock, science correspondent Linda Geddes asks how we can tweak the vaccines against new variants, and how likely it is we’ll end up in a game of cat and mouse with the virus:
Germany mulls tighter shutdown as virus variants fuel fears
Chancellor Angela Merkel and leaders of Germany’s 16 states are expected Tuesday to extend and tighten a partial lockdown beyond January, as fears grow over virus variant strains believed to be more contagious, AFP reports.
Germany shuttered restaurants, leisure and sporting facilities in November, then expanded the shutdown in mid-December to include schools and most shops to halt runaway growth in new coronavirus infections.
The measures ordered until the end of January have brought about a “flattening of the infections curve”, said Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert, noting also that the number of patients in intensive care had also fallen slightly.
“This trend is cautiously positive and a success of the restrictions of the last weeks,” he said.
“But it only brings us to the point where we still have a long way to go before we can say we have the infections under control,” he added.
Virus variants first seen in Britain and South Africa also posed major risks to whether the falling infections trend could be sustained, added Seibert.
The crisis talks between Merkel and state premiers were brought forward by a week because of the virus variants.
“It is a risk that responsible politicians must take into account - sooner rather than later,” he added.
Kazakhstan to vaccinate 6 million people this year
Kazakhstan plans to vaccinate about 6 million people, or almost a third of its population, against the coronavirus this year, healthcare minister Alexei Tsoy said on Tuesday.
Vaccinations will begin on 1 February, with the Russian Sputnik V vaccine being offered to medical workers, he told a government meeting. Kazakhstan also aims to produce Sputnik V at home.
The central Asian nation bordering China and Russia has confirmed about 217,000 cases of Covid-19 and pneumonia probably caused by the virus, with 2,965 deaths.
Australian Open tennis players under the strictest quarantine conditions may have their restrictions eased after the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, said the positive Covid-19 test results that sparked the hard lockdown may be reclassified as cases of viral shedding.
All passengers, including 47 players on two planes which arrived in Melbourne from Los Angeles and Abu Dhabi on the weekend, were deemed close contacts of four positive cases on the flights. It meant unlike other players who are quarantining, the players on those two flights are not allowed to leave their hotels for five hours a day to train, sparking complaints of unfair treatment.
But they may be allowed out to train sooner than expected, after Andrews said on Tuesday: “I can foreshadow that a number of cases that are linked to the Australian Open … have been reclassified as shedding rather than being actively infected.
“If you’ve got say 30 people who are deemed a close contact because they’ve been on a plane with a case, and the case is no longer an active case, but a case of historic shedding, that would release those people from that hard lockdown,” he said.
Andrews said more detail on those cases and any reclassification would be announced in the chief health officer’s update on Tuesday afternoon:
China marks seventh day with over 100 daily cases
China reported more than 100 new Covid-19 cases for a seventh day on Tuesday in the worst domestic outbreak since March last year, with one northeastern province seeing a record daily increase.
Reuters: Mainland China posted 118 new cases on Jan. 18, up from 109 a day earlier, the national health authority said in a statement.
Of those, 106 were local infections, with 43 reported in Jilin, a new daily record for the northeastern province, and 35 in Hebei province, which surrounds Beijing, the National Health Commission said.
The Chinese capital itself reported one new case, while Heilongjiang in the north reported 27 new infections.
Millions of people have been under lockdown in recent days as some northern cities undergo mass testing for the novel coronavirus amid worries that undetected infections could spread quickly during the Lunar New Year holiday, which is just weeks away.
Hundreds of millions of people travel during the holiday, due to kick off in mid-February this year, as migrant workers return home to see family.
Authorities have appealed to people to avoid travel in the run-up to the holiday and stay away from mass gatherings such as weddings.
The current outbreak in Jilin was caused by an infected salesman travelling to and from the neighbouring province of Heilongjiang, the site of a previous cluster of infections.
The overall number of new asymptomatic cases, which China does not classify as confirmed infections, fell to 91 from 115 a day earlier.
The total number of confirmed Covid-19 cases in mainland China is 89,454, while the death toll remained unchanged at 4,635.
Colombia's capital Bogota extends nightly curfew to curb coronavirus
Colombia’s capital Bogota will impose nightly curfews for almost two weeks, Mayor Claudia Lopez said on Monday, while the whole city will enter yet another full quarantine this weekend.
Reuters: Nightly curfews first started last week and continued until Sunday. However, they will begin again from Tuesday and will run until 28 January. During this time citizens must remain in their homes from 8pm until 4am, Lopez said.
Additionally, from 8 p.m. this Friday Bogota will enter a general quarantine with total restriction on movement in the city until Monday, 25 January at 4am, she added.
“I understand that young people are tired, that they are tired of using face masks, that it seems fun to meet up with their friends and then see their families,” Lopez said in a press conference.
“The risk is that they end up infecting their parents, or grandparents, or the parents and grandparents of others,” she said.
Colombia’s capital has imposed city-wide quarantines the past two weekends, during which people are largely confined to their homes, non-essential shops and businesses are closed, and with one person per household allowed to buy food or medicine.
Many of the city’s neighbourhoods have endured or are following strict two-week quarantines, which adhere to the same restrictions. During the city-wide and two-week neighbourhood quarantines, sales of alcohol are also prohibited.
Outside of general quarantines, restrictions on who can shop based on the number of people’s national identity cards will remain in place, Lopez said.
Colombia has reported more than 1.9 million coronavirus cases, as well as over 49,000 deaths.
In Bogota, which counts for more than 560,000 of the country’s cases, occupancy of intensive care units for coronavirus patients stands at 93.2%, according to local government figures.
Updated
Hong Kong chief executive signals extension of social distancing measures
In Hong Kong, chief executive Carrie Lam has telegraphed an extension of Covid-19 social distancing measures which were due to expire on Thursday.
The city is fighting the pandemic with a “suppress and lift” strategy, which has resulting in fluctuating rules over the past year, including no more than two people gathering in a public place, a ban on dine-in services at eateries after 6pm, the closure of all pubs and clubs, and mandatory mask wearing on public transport and in public areas (except outdoor parks).
At a regular press briefing on Tuesday, Lam said she would leave the announcement of details to the secretary of health but “in light of the latest Covid-19 pandemic situation it is quite obvious there is no room yet for us to relax to social distancing measures put in place.”
Health authorities reported 107 new cases on Monday, the highest daily total in a month, as they battled a persistent outbreak in the city. There is a concentration of cases in some of the city’s most densely populated areas , where people in select buildings have been ordered to get tested.Health authorities have come under fire after selectively commenting on the South Asian community in Hong Kong, and suggesting their social and living arrangements increase the spread of the disease.
Updated
Coronavirus deaths rising in 30 US states
Coronavirus deaths are rising in nearly two-thirds of American states as a winter surge pushes the overall toll toward 400,000 amid warnings that a new, highly contagious variant is taking hold.
AP: As Americans observed a national holiday Monday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo pleaded with federal authorities to curtail travel from countries where new variants are spreading.
Referring to new versions detected in Britain, South Africa and Brazil, Cuomo said: “Stop those people from coming here.... Why are you allowing people to fly into this country and then it’s too late?”
The US government has already curbed travel from some of the places where the new variants are spreading — such as Britain and Brazil — and recently it announced that it would require proof of a negative Covid-19 test for anyone flying into the country.
But the new variant seen in Britain is already spreading in the US., and the Centers for Disease Control and Protection has warned that it will probably become the dominant version in the country by March. The CDC said the variant is about 50% more contagious than the virus that is causing the bulk of cases in the US.
While the variant does not cause more severe illness, it can cause more hospitalisations and deaths simply because it spreads more easily. In Britain, it has aggravated a severe outbreak that has swamped hospitals, and it has been blamed for sharp leaps in cases in some other European countries.
As things stand, many US. states are already under tremendous strain. The seven-day rolling average of daily deaths is rising in 30 states and the District of Columbia, and on Monday the U.S. death toll surpassed 398,000, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University — by far the highest recorded death toll of any country in the world.
US urges greater access for WHO investigators in Wuhan
The United States called on China on Monday to allow the WHO’s expert team of investigators, who are in China to study the origins of the pandemic, to interview “care givers, former patients and lab workers” in the central city of Wuhan.
The team of WHO-led independent experts is holding teleconferences with Chinese counterparts during a two-week quarantine before starting work on the ground.
Garrett Grigsby of the Department of Health and Human Services, who heads the US delegation, said China should share all scientific studies of animal, human and environmental samples taken from a market in Wuhan, where the SARS-CoV-2 virus is believed to have emerged in late 2019.
Comparative analysis of such genetic data would help to “look for overlap and potential sources” of the outbreak that sparked the pandemic, he told the WHO’s executive board. “We have a solemn duty to ensure that this critical investigation is credible and is conducted objectively and transparently,” said Grigsby, who also referred to virus variants found in Britain, South Africa and Brazil:
University entrance exam invigilators in Japan have demonstrated a zero-tolerance policy on incorrect mask wearing, as the country battles a surgein coronavirus infections.
A student was disqualified for repeatedly ignoring requests to cover his or her nose with a mask while sitting the annual exams over the weekend, according to local media.
The reports, which did not give the student’s gender or age, said the examinee ignored six requests to pull their mask over their nose in line with anti-coronavirus rules set by the National Centre for University Entrance Examinations.
Some reports said the offender holed up inside the bathroom after being approached a seventh time to be told they had been disqualified and had to be escorted from the building by police.
“We made our decision because the test-taker, who was not even coughing, continued not to leave their nose uncovered,” a centre official told the Asahi Shimbun.
“It is not misconduct for participants to occasionally uncover their noses when they have difficulty breathing. [But] the test-taker was disqualified for repeatedly refusing to follow the instructions.”
Students with certain medical conditions are not required to wear masks, but must inform examiners a day in advance so that arrangements can be made for them to sit the test in a separate room.
The examinee had not alerted officials to a health issue and the reason for their refusal to position their mask properly remains a mystery.
The episode was one of four disqualifications for misconduct during the two days of exams, which can go a long way towards determining students’ academic and professional futures. More than 530,000 candidates sat the tests at 681 venues, according to the centre.
Mask wearing was one of several anti-virus measures in place at exam halls, along with social distancing, hand washing and ventilation. Examinees were required to eat lunch alone.
Updated
Australian Open director, Craig Tiley, has rejected a proposal to shorten the men’s tournament matches to best of three sets to offset the disadvantage to players in hard quarantine.
Frustration and confusion continues unabated in the build-up to the season’s first major, starting on 8 February, with some 72 players and staffers in lockdown in Melbourne following six positive Covid-19 cases among the entourages arriving to Australia on 17 charter flights in recent days.
While many players have transformed their hotel rooms into makeshift training centres, the overall sentiment has been one of disquiet and apprehension about potential injury and form ramifications of two weeks with no court practice.
Spain’s world No 13 Roberto Bautista Agut was the latest to voice concern on Tuesday, describing quarantine as like being “in a jail”:
One in four UK young people have felt 'unable to cope' in pandemic
Young people are in danger of giving up on their futures and on themselves, with a quarter saying they feel unable to cope with life, one of the UK’s leading charities has said.
The Prince’s Trust long-running annual survey of young people’s happiness and confidence returned the worst findings in its 12-year history.
“The pandemic has taken a devastating toll on young people’s mental health and wellbeing,” said Jonathan Townsend, the trust’s UK chief executive. “Many believe they are missing out on being young, and sadly we know that the impact of the pandemic on their employment prospects and overall wellbeing could continue far into their futures.”
Half of the young people interviewed by YouGov for the trust’s 2020 Youth Index, carried out in partnership with Tesco, said current political and economic events had affected their mental health. More than half said they always or often felt anxious, rising to 64% among those not in work, education or training:
The UK’s leading employers’ organisation has warned Rishi Sunak that businesses running short of cash and resilience cannot afford to wait six weeks for the budget to secure more financial help from the government.
Tony Danker, the director-general of the CBI, called on the chancellor to extend the furlough scheme, defer VAT payments and resist the temptation to raise business taxes as a way of plugging the UK’s record peacetime budget deficit.
In its budget submission to the chancellor, the CBI called for an immediate £7.6bn injection from the Treasury as part of a £17.9bn package designed to see the economy through lockdown, stimulate investment over the coming year and prepare the UK for the challenges of the coming decade.
“The budget comes at a crucial time for the UK. The government’s support from the very start of this crisis has protected many jobs and livelihoods, and progress on the vaccine rollout brings real cause for optimism,” Danker said.
“But almost a year of disrupted demand and extensive restrictions to company operations is taking its toll. Staff morale has taken a hit. And business resilience has hit a sobering new low.”
International arrivals to New Zealand must return negative Covid test before flight
New Zealand has imposed a blanket testing regime for all flights arriving internationally, with passengers now required to return a negative Covid test result before departure.
The Covid-19 response minister, Chris Hipkins, said while New Zealand already had tight border controls in place, the rising number of cases around the globe meant further protections were called for.
Australia, Antarctica and most Pacific Islands will be exempt from the new requirement:
Updated
Urgent action is needed to tackle an “unprecedented backlog” of court cases built up during the pandemic that has “severe implications” for victims, the UK’s four justice chief inspectors have warned.
The plight of prisoners locked up for most of the day because of Covid-19 and disruption to services for young offenders were also highlighted in a report by the inspectors of probation, police, prisons and the Crown Prosecution Service.
They expressed “grave concern” in particular about the situation in courts – already struggling with a “chronic backlog” of cases – which they said constituted the greatest threat to the proper operation of the criminal justice system:
Biden team" does not intend" to lift travel restrictions
A development on Trump’s decision to life travel restrictions for the UK, much of Europe and Brazil – Biden’s spokesperson says that there is no intention for the Biden administration to lofe the restrictions.
“In fact, we plan to strengthen public health measures around international travel,” Jen Psaki wrote on Twitter.
BREAKING: Biden spokeswoman says new administration will not lift restrictions on EU, UK, Brazil travel on Jan. 26 (It would appear that Biden will issue new 212f order) https://t.co/51eBlC7v9d
— davidshepardson (@davidshepardson) January 19, 2021
More than a third of shoppers have been blocked from paying with cash since the start of the Covid crisis, prompting calls for urgent action to protect the millions who rely on the UK’s “critically endangered” cash network.
The consumer group Which? said mixed messages about the safety of cash was partly to blame. The Bank of England has since clarified that “any risk from handling cash should be low”, especially when compared with touching shopping baskets, self-checkout screens or products in stores.
About 34% of shoppers surveyed by Which? said they had been turned away on at least one occasion when they tried to pay with cash since the first Covid lockdown. Shoppers were most likely to be refused cash payments when they bought groceries, which accounted for 28% of incidents, though pubs and restaurants accounted for 24% of cases. About 21% of cases were linked to consumers trying to buy cleaning products, which have become even more essential since the outbreak:
In non-coronavirus news:
If confirmed, Merlina’s death would bring the number of ravens at the tower to just seven. According to legend if two more were to die the tower and the kingdom would fall: https://t.co/AN7uLepU80
— Helen Sullivan (@helenrsullivan) January 18, 2021
The Pacific archipelago of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands is rapidly rolling out Covid-19 vaccines across its islands.
The US territory has a population of a little more than 50,000 people: 3,389 have received a first dose vaccine, and more than 300 have had a second dose.
The Northern Mariana Islands have received more than 18,000 vaccine doses, from Pfizer and BioNTech, and from Moderna.
Pacific countries freely associated with the US - the Marshall Islands, Palau, and the Federated States of Micronesia have also started widespread community vaccinations, and are likely to be among the first countries in the world to largely inoculate their populations.
Elsewhere across the Pacific, PNG’s confirmed case numbers rose by 10 to 833. The real number is likely to be significantly higher, with limited testing outside of the capital Port Moresby.
In French Polynesia, the second wave is ebbing, with daily new infections now below 50 a day. Since August, more than 17,000 cases have been formally recorded, and 126 people have died.
The French territory had just 62 cases to July, and transmission of the virus had been eliminated, when it re-opened its borders and abandoned quarantine requirements, in order to reignite a stalled tourism-dependent economy.
China and WHO made mistakes in containing Covid outbreak, says panel
An independent panel has said that Chinese officials could have applied public health measures more forcefully in January 2020 to curb the initial Covid-19 outbreak, and criticised the World Health Organization (WHO) for not declaring an international emergency until 30 January.
The experts reviewing the global handling of the pandemic, led by former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark and former Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, called for reforms to the Geneva-based UN agency.
Their interim report was published hours after the WHO’s top emergency expert, Mike Ryan, said that global deaths from Covid were expected to top 100,000 per week “very soon”.
“What is clear to the panel is that public health measures could have been applied more forcefully by local and national health authorities in China in January,” the report said, referring to the initial outbreak of the disease in the central city of Wuhan, in Hubei province.
As evidence emerged of human-to-human transmission, “in far too many countries, this signal was ignored”, it added:
Trump lifting Covid travel restrictions on UK, much of Europe and Brazil
Donald Trump, the US president, has rescinded entry bans imposed because of coronavirus on most non-US citizens arriving from Brazil and much of Europe, including the UK, effective 26 January, two officials briefed on the matter told Reuters.
The restrictions are set to end on the same day that new Covid-19 test requirements take effect for all international visitors. Joe Biden, the president-elect, once in office could opt to reimpose the restrictions.
Summary
Hello and welcome to today’s live global coronavirus coverage.
My name is Helen Sullivan and I’ll be bringing you the latest developments for the next few hours. As always, you can get in touch on Twitter here.
An independent panel reviewing the global handling of the pandemic said on Monday that Chinese officials could have applied public health measures more forcefully in January and criticised the World Health Organization for not declaring an international emergency until 30 January.
Meanwhile the US is on the brink of the heartbreaking milestone of 400,000 deaths – the highest toll of any country worldwide and one in five global deaths.
Here are the other key developments:
- Morocco’s health ministry has confirmed its first imported case of the more contagious variant of coronavirus first discovered in the UK. The variant was detected in the northern port of Tangier in a Moroccan national returning from Ireland via Marseille, the ministry said in a statement.
- The UK had the highest Covid death toll in the world in the week to 17 January, with 16.5 deaths per 1 million people on average, according to Our World in Data.
- Brazil on Monday reported 23,671 new cases of coronavirus, bringing the new total to 8,511,770, the country’s health ministry said.Deaths rose by 452 to 210,299 in Brazil, which has the world’s highest death toll from the pandemic outside the US.
- Spain reported a record rise in coronavirus infections over the weekend and the number of new cases measured over the past fortnight spiked to 689 per 100,000 people on Monday from 575 on Friday, health ministry data showed.
- The Czech Republic has confirmed the detection of the new, more transmissible variant of coronavirus first found in Britain.
- Scientists have found new biological evidence that a South African Covid variant of binds more readily to human cells, making it more infectious, according to one of the world’s leading infectious disease experts.
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Portugal’s daily Covid death toll reached a record high of 167 on Monday, bringing the total to 9,028 deaths since the start of the pandemic. Stricter lockdown rules are now being enacted there.
- Steffen Seibert, Germany’s government spokesman, said on Monday that the number of Covid infections in the country is too high amid rising fears about new variants of the virus.
- Japan has detected a variant of the new coronavirus first discovered in Britain in three people who had not travelled there.
- The Welsh first minister, Mark Drakeford, has defended the slower rollout of the inoculation programme in Wales, saying the Pfizer vaccine could not be used all at once as supplies had to last until the start of February.
