And that’s it from me, Edna Mohamed. We’re now closing this liveblog. To follow the latest Guardian coverage on coronavirus, head here for all the latest developments across the globe.
Updated
Key developments
- Italian police are investigating fake Covid-19 drugs and vaccines after interviewing a Veneto regional official reported to have received an offer to buy 27m doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine outside of the EU procurement system.
- Greece has extended lockdown restrictions to more areas of the country to stem the spread of infections, Reuters reports. But it has also lifted lockdown in others where infections receded.
- US land borders with Canada and Mexico will remain closed to non-essential travel until at least 21 March to address Covid-19 concerns, the US government has said, according to Reuters.
- The gap between vaccinating people in wealthy and developing countries could narrow to half a year, the billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates said on Friday.
- Around 200,000 doses of China’s Sinovac vaccine are on their way to Mexico, the country’s foreign minister said on Friday, as part of a global scramble to secure tight supplies.
- The Philippines recorded 157 new deaths from Covid on Friday, the highest daily death toll in five months.
- In Toronto, Canada’s largest city, lockdown and stay at home orders are being extended until at least 8 March despite schools only just starting up again and shops scheduled to reopen on 22 February.
- Serbian state television has reported that the singer Djordje Balasevic, 67, has died after contracting Covid-19.
- Denmark has announced the closure of some border crossings from Germany following a cluster outbreak in a German town close to the border. Thirteen crossings will be closed outright and nine others will receive increased security.
- France reports 328 deaths, up from yesterday’s figure of 271 and Wednesday’s 310, in the past 24 hours, raising the death toll to 83,964, according to data published by its health ministry.
- The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned that pulse oximeters, devices that measure oxygen levels in blood, should not be used to diagnose Covid-19 in particular circumstances.
- The Irish Department of Health has reported three cases of the Brazilian variant of Covid-19. The cases have been identified as having been directly related to recent travel from Brazil.
- On Friday night, Dutch senators approved hastily drawn up legislation underpinning the country’s coronavirus curfew, ensuring it will remain in force until at least early March.
- After demonstrations in Gabon’s two major cities, the president has said two people have died as protests against new Covid-19 restrictions degenerated into a street standoff.
- Argentina’s health minister has been asked to resign after a well-known local journalist said he had been given the vaccine preferentially after requesting one from the minister.
Updated
Argentina’s health minister has been asked to resign after a well-known local journalist said he had been given the vaccine preferentially after requesting one from the minister.
A government official said that the Argentinian president, Alberto Fernandez, “instructed his chief of staff to request the resignation of the health minister”.
Gines Gonzalez Garcia, the health minister who is also in charge of the government’s Covid-19 strategy, has not spoken out about the request to resign from his post.
AP reports:
The scandal erupted when journalist Horacio Verbitsky, whose stories and columns on a website and on the radio are seen as pro-government, said he called the minister to request a vaccination, and Gonzalez Garcia summoned him to the health ministry where he received a Sputnik V vaccine shot Thursday.
“I decided to get vaccinated. I started to find out where to do it. I called my old friend Gines Gonzalez Garcia, whom I have known long before he was a minister,” Verbitsky told a local radio station.
“I went to the ministry, and the team of vaccinators was there.”
The case is not isolated in Argentina, where in recent days reports have emerged of mayors, legislators, activists and people close to political power receiving the vaccine despite not being in the priority group of doctors, health personnel and the elderly authorized to receive shots.
Fernandez’s government has been harshly criticized for Argentina’s slow vaccination operation. So far, the South American country has received about 1.5 million doses, mostly Sputnik V but also AstraZeneca, insufficient to immunize a population of 40 million.
Argentina has had 2 million people infected by the coronavirus and 50,857 deaths from Covid-19.
Updated
After demonstrations in Gabon’s two major cities, the president has said two people have died as the protest degenerated into a street standoff, Reuters reports.
Security forces fired teargas and stun grenades in neighbourhoods in Libreville and Port Gentil that had put up barricades, banged pots and burned tyres.
Prime Minister Rose Christine Ossouka Raponda said in a statement: “Yesterday evening, two of our compatriots died during protests against these protective measures.”
Last week, Gabon restricted travel in and out of the capital city. It expanded curfew hours from 6 pm to 6 am, much to the dismay of its residents.
Reuters reports:
The new 6 pm measure is harsh and thoughtless,” law student Sarah Lewoubi said on Friday.
She added that most Gabonese workers and students, who don’t have cars, struggle to get home before the curfew hour.
“Work ends at 4 pm, and it is impossible to reach our homes for the most part before 8 pm because of traffic jams and other hassles. So the government must review this matter,” Lewoubi said.
Gabon has reported 13,107 coronavirus infections and 75 Covid-19 deaths since the pandemic began. The central African nation is experiencing a second wave of infections, reporting 133 new cases on average each day.
Restrictions will be eased when new infections fall below 50 a day, which should be achieved by March, Raponda said.
“All these measures were enacted, not for the pleasure of disrupting our everyday life, but to protect our health and our lives,” she said.
Updated
Due to the extreme weather hitting the United States, the White House said about 6m vaccines have been temporarily delayed due to the frigid weather.
The drop in temperatures has affected Texas the worst as about 165,000 households in the state remain without power.
The Guardian’s Alexandra Villareal has more on the delays caused by America’s cold snap:
Updated
Dutch senators have approved hastily drawn up legislation on Friday underpinning the country’s coronavirus curfew, ensuring it will remain in force until at least early March.
Several opposition parties joined government senators in approving the legislation by a 45-13 vote.
The vote was a victory for the government which has been battling to ensure the measures stay in place amid fears that more transmissible Covid-19 variants will reverse the decline in infections.
The coronavirus curfews was first met with rioting when lawmakers introduced the 9pm to 4.30 am stay at home order. Still, it remains a rule that is broadly supported and followed.
However, earlier this week, a lower court sided with the anti-lockdown group Virus Waarheid or Virus Truth that the curfew lacked a legal basis and ordered that it be abandoned.
An appeal ruling is due to be issued in The Hague next Friday on that case.
Updated
The Irish Department of Health reports three cases of the Brazilian variant
The Irish Department of Health has reported three cases of the Brazilian variant of Covid-19.
The cases have been identified as having been directly related to recent travel from Brazil.
Public health teams are following up on all cases, and enhanced public health measures have been put in place, in line with existing guidance, PA reports.
The deputy chief medical officer, Dr Ronan Glynn, said: “Anyone who has recently travelled from Brazil, or any of the other 19 countries recently designated by the Minister for Health as ‘Category 2’, is required by law to quarantine at home for 14 days.”
Updated
New York City congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has joined the growing calls to investigate New York’s governor Andrew Cuomo’s handling of nursing homes during the pandemic.
The calls came after it was revealed last week that an aide to the governor told the city’s legislators the actual number of nursing home deaths in fear that it would be used against the governor during an investigation launched by the former president’s justice department.
Ocasio-Cortez said: “Thousands of vulnerable New Yorkers lost their lives in nursing homes throughout the pandemic.
“Their loved ones and the public deserve answers and transparency from their elected leadership, and the secretary to the governor’s remarks warrant a full investigation.”
My colleague Martin Pengelly has more on the story here:
Updated
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned that pulse oximeters, devices that measure oxygen levels in blood, should not be used to diagnose in particular circumstances, Reuters reports.
Despite the World Health Organization including the pulse oximeter to identify people who may need hospital treatment due to Covid-19, the FDA recommended that people pay attention to other low oxygen indicators, such as raising pulse or blueness in the face.
While the FDA said that it might be useful, multiple factors such as skin pigmentation, skin temperature, tobacco use and nail polish can affect the accuracy of the oximeter.
The health agency’s warnings came nearly two months after a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that the device was three times more likely to give misleading readings among African-American patients.
Updated
France has reported 328 deaths, up from yesterday’s figure of 271 and Wednesday’s 310, in the past 24 hours, raising the death toll to 83,964, according to data published by its health ministry.
The country has also reported 24,116 new Covid cases, up from yesterday’s figures of 22,501.
Updated
As early as next month, elderly Australians and those with a disability are expected to receive a dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine, however, it’s unlikely that patients will be able to get it from their local doctors.
The Guardian’s Francine Crimmins has more on the national Covid-19 vaccine rollout with AstraZeneca here:
Updated
Italian police are investigating fake Covid-19 drugs and vaccines after interviewing a Veneto regional official reported to have received an offer to buy 27m doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine outside of the EU procurement system.
Luca Zaia, Veneto’s regional governor from the rightwing League party, said he received offers by unnamed intermediaries to sell him vaccines – including the Pfizer, Russian and Chinese products – after publicly voicing his frustration over delayed deliveries in the country.
Italy centralised its vaccine procurement to avoid regions or the private sector going their own way.
So far, the country has administered 3.37m doses, prioritising healthcare workers and residents of nursing homes.
AP reports:
On Friday, Zaia said his healthcare chief dealing with the offers, Dr Luciano Flor, was questioned by the carabinieri’s health care squad. The squad confirmed it was searching Veneto regional offices “to look into the presumed providers of vaccines outside agreements with central authorities”.
The carabinieri squad has been issuing near-daily updates of its efforts to crack down on fraudulent Covid-19 drugs, vaccines, protective equipment and e-commerce sites selling them.
On Friday, it announced it had obscured another four e-commerce websites, bringing to some 250 the number of portals it has blocked.
Police are also investigating a Sicilian man who claimed to be a representative of pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca and had offered to sell vaccines to Umbrian authorities.
In response, AstraZeneca’s Italy unit said there was currently no private distribution of its shots and that if “someone is offering vaccines via the private sector, they’re probably counterfeit vaccines and should be reported to the competent authorities”.
Zaia revealed details of the purported offers he had received this week, telling a late-night talkshow that he had received two contractual proposals for 12m and 15m doses of Pfizer shots at market prices.
He said he asked Italy’s virus tsar and the national pharmaceutical agency on 3 February how to proceed, and on 12 February informed police “because we realise the issue of vaccines is delicate”.
He insisted he had done nothing wrong and that it was up to Italy’s pharmaceutical agency to verify if the offers and vaccines were legitimate.
Updated
Denmark has announced the closure of some border crossings from Germany following a cluster outbreak in a German town close to the border, AFP reports.
A statement published on the Danish justice ministry’s website cited the rise in cases in the town of Flensburg as the reason for introducing stricter border checks and implementing the closure of some border crossings.
Thirteen crossings will be closed outright and nine others will receive increased security.
Since Christmas, Denmark has been in a partial lockdown and reopened primary schools in the last weeks following the drop of new coronavirus cases reported.
AFP reports that the mayor of Flensburg, Simone Lange, said on Friday that 80 cases of the UK variant of the virus had been detected in the town in recent days.
Updated
Serbian state television has reported that the singer Djordje Balasevic, 67, has died after contracting Covid-19.
The Serbian signer launched his career in the late 1970s and early 1980s and remained a popular figure throughout the Balkans for his opposition to nationalism as the former Yugoslavia broke apart.
He was well known across the Balkan region for his on-stage comments about various topics.
AP reports:
Media in Croatia and Bosnia promptly carried the news of Balasevic’s death, which also was widely shared on social networks.
Bosnia’s Klix news portal described Balasevic as a legendary performer whose songs could “inspire deepest emotion in an audience”.
Croatia’s state HRT television evoked Balasevic’s “utterly antiwar and pacifist position that is present in many songs, concert speeches and interviews”.
Balasevic is survived by his wife and three children. Funeral arrangements were not immediately known.
Updated
In Toronto, Canada’s largest city, lockdown and stay at home orders are being extended until at least 8 March despite schools only just starting up again and shops scheduled to reopen on 22 February, AP reports.
The lockdown has been in place since 23 November after a second wave of Covid infections hit the Ontario province.
Toronto’s medical officer of health, Dr Eileen de Villa, asked the provincial government this week to extend lockdown measures after saying that she had never been more concerned about the future as new coronavirus variants were discovered.
Scientists have said that the variant discovered in the UK and found in Ontario spreads more easily amongst people, but that the current vaccines remain effective.
Hi, I’m Edna Mohamed, I’ll be taking over the blog for the next few hours from my colleague. As always for any tips, you can tweet me or email me here: edna.mohamed.casual@theguardian.com
Updated
Philippines records highest death toll in 5 months
The Philippines recorded 157 new deaths from Covid on Friday, the highest daily death toll in five months.
CNN Philippines reports:
On Septemper 14 , the [Department of Health] announced 259 deaths, the highest daily casualty count on record.
The agency’s latest case bulletin also stated that the number of infections is now at 557,058 with 1,901 new cases. Of this number, 5.8% or 32,440 are active cases or currently ill patients. At least 86% of the active cases have mild symptoms, 8.5% have no symptoms, 2.4% are in critical condition, 2.4% are in severe condition, and 0.72% are moderate infections.
The death toll has jumped to 11,829 or 2.12% of the case tally. However, the department clarified 120 of the new deaths were mistakenly recorded as recoveries in the last report. It also removed six duplicates, including three survivors and one death.
Meanwhile, 537 more cases got better, raising the recovery count to 512,789 or 92.1% of the Covid-19 total.
I’m now handing over to my colleague Edna Mohamed.
Updated
The Italian fashion company Valentino was sued on Friday for $207.1 million by the landlord of its former American flagship on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, which said the company had no right to break its lease and leave the store in disrepair.
Reuters reports:
The complaint followed a judge’s January 27 dismissal of Valentino’s own lawsuit seeking to void its 16-year lease because the coronavirus pandemic had made operating the store, two blocks south of Trump Tower, impossible.
According to the landlord, 693 Fifth Owner LLC, Valentino owes all rent due through the lease’s July 2029 expiration despite abandoning the store in December.
Valentino must also pay $12.9 million to repair store damage, including to Venetian Terrazzo marble panels now defaced with paint and holes, the landlord said.
Neither Valentino nor its lawyers immediately responded to requests for comment.
[...] In seeking to end its lease, Valentino said the pandemic left it unable to operate the store “consistent with the luxury, prestigious, high-quality reputation” of its neighborhood.
But in dismissing Valentino’s lawsuit, Justice Andrew Borrok of the Manhattan court said the lease gave the landlord broad protections from nonpayment of rent.
“The fact that the Covid 19 pandemic was not specifically enumerated by the parties does not change the result,” he wrote.Valentino is appealing Borrok’s decision.
Manhattan retailers have struggled during the pandemic with reduced traffic from tourists and office workers, and early forced store closures.
Last month, the Real Estate Board of New York said rents sought for Manhattan retail space fell throughout the borough, including an 8% drop in the stretch including Valentino’s store.
“The building owner tried to work with Valentino during the pandemic with the understanding that these are difficult times,” the landlord’s lawyer Robert Cyruli said. “We look forward to presenting our case for damages in court.”
Extreme winter weather is dealing the first major setback to the Biden administration’s planned swift rollout of coronavirus vaccines across the US just as the national vaccination campaign was hitting its stride.
The Associated Press reports:
The disruptions caused by frigid temperatures, snow and ice left the White House scrambling to work with states to make up “lost ground” even as president Joe Biden was set to visit a Pfizer vaccine manufacturing plant near Kalamazoo, Michigan.
The president’s trip itself had been pushed back a day to Friday due to wintry weather in the nation’s capital.
The president was set to meet with workers at the plant who are producing one of the two federally-approved Covid-19 shots. According to the CDC, the two-dose Pfizer vaccine has been administered about 30 million times since it received emergency use authorisation from the Food and Drug Administration on December 11.
From Texas to New England, bad weather has forced many injection sites to close and held up shipments of needed doses.
White House coronavirus adviser Andy Slavitt said Friday that the weather has led to a three-day delay in shipping vaccine, or about 6 million doses. Slavitt says the vaccine won’t spoil and is “safe and sound” in warehouses.
About 200,000 doses of China’s Sinovac Covid-19 vaccine are on their way to Mexico, the country’s foreign minister said on Friday, part of a global scramble to secure tight supplies.
The shipment left Hong Kong and is expected to arrive in the Mexican capital early on Saturday morning, the foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, wrote in a post on Twitter.
He added that an additional 10m doses of the vaccine were expected to arrive in the next few weeks.
Updated
Updated
Italian police are investigating the offer of Covid-19 vaccines by unnamed intermediaries to authorities in the Veneto region, indicating a possible attempt to create a black market parallel to the national and EU level procurement process, two sources with knowledge of the matter said on Friday.
Reuters reports:
Veneto governor Luca Zaia and regional health director Luciano Flor said this week they were evaluating two offers they received for a total of 27 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, without naming who had approached them.
Flor has said that the two offers were shortlisted from a total of around 20 proposals the Veneto region had received from various intermediaries in recent days, including some involving AstraZeneca’s vaccine and Russia’s Sputnik one.
The approaches are unusual because the drugmakers that manufacture the vaccines have struck deals with national governments and, in the case of the European Union, with the EU Commission, which has negotiated a procurement programme on behalf of its members.
The Italian investigation is trying to establish whether a parallel market had emerged, a source with direct knowledge of the probe said. The source said it was not clear whether drugmakers could legally sell their vaccines to non-governmental entities in Europe.
“The regulatory framework is not clear at all,” the source told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity because the probe is confidential and ongoing.
Andrew Widger, a spokesman for Pfizer, which has produced its vaccine with German partner BioNTech, said “currently, we are prioritising our available doses for supply through established agreements with governments and supra-government organisations”.
“In the European Union, doses are supplied directly to governments under the terms of the supply agreement with the European Commission. No Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is available through intermediaries at this time,” he added.
BioNTech did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A spokesman for AstraZeneca said the British-Swedish drugmaker has not authorised any shipments of its vaccine outside of its existing supply deal with the European Union. There should not be any private-sector supply of the shots for sale or distribution in Europe, he said.
The Russian Direct Investment Fund, Russia’s sovereign wealth fund which is responsible for marketing the Sputnik V vaccine abroad, did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
The politically sensitive gap between vaccinating people in wealthy and developing countries could narrow to half a year, the billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates said on Friday.
As manufacturers increasingly join forces to boost production and governments step up donations to fund more equitable distribution of Covid-19 jabs, the “still quite dramatic” inequity in rollouts will decline, Gates told a virtual session at the Munich Security Conference.
He said:
If we do this well we’ll have about a six-to-eight-month delta of the vaccination levels of the rich countries to the developing countries, [which is] still longer than we’d like.
We have a chance to get that gap to be only six months.
Gates, who stepped down as chairman of Microsoft Corp in 2014, has committed at least $1.75 billion, via his his philanthropic Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to the global response to the pandemic.
Reuters reports:
The World Health Organization on Thursday urged nations producing Covid-19 vaccines not to distribute them unilaterally but to donate them to the global Covax scheme to ensure fairness.
Countries participating in the Covax coronavirus vaccine distribution mechanism will soon receive confirmation of their first shipments but should expect them to be small due to limited global supplies, the director of the Pan American Health Organization said on Wednesday.
AstraZeneca’s vaccine makes up the lion’s share of doses in the COVAX initiative, with more than 330m doses due to roll out to poorer countries from the end of February. Britain, for example, started vaccinations on 8 December.
Updated
US land borders with Canada and Mexico will remain closed to non-essential travel until at least 21 March to address Covid-19 concerns, the US government has said, according to Reuters.
The new 30-day extension is the first announced under President Joe Biden and comes as the White House has been holding meetings about potentially tightening requirements for crossing at US land borders in North America, officials said.
Updated
Greece has extended lockdown restrictions to more areas of the country to stem the spread of infections, Reuters reports.
But it has also lifted lockdown in others where infections receded.
From Saturday the islands of Kalymnos, Cephalonia and Thassos, the city of Heraklion in Crete, Corinth, Nemea and Argos in the Peloponnese and the municipality of Evosmos in the north will be in lockdown until 1 March, authorities said.
This means schools, hair salons and non-essential retail shops will close.
“The epidemiological load in the community remains stable. The British variant shows wide dispersion with more than 760 infections,” said Vana Papaevangelou, a member of the committee of infectious disease experts advising the government.
She said health authorities were quite concerned with the spread of the South African variant of the virus in Evosmos, a suburb of the Thessaloniki urban area in northern Greece.
But the picture in other areas of the country had improved with infections receding and authorities lifted lockdown restrictions in the islands of Santorini and Zakynthos, in Sparta and the town of Agios Nikolaos in Crete.
On Friday, health authorities reported 1,460 new coronavirus cases and 28 deaths, bringing total infections to 177,494 and Covid-related deaths to 6,249.
The EU has agreed to pay about €870m (£754m) for its supply of 300m doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, Reuters reports, citing a contract published by Italy’s RAI television.
The publication of the contract, signed on 27 August, unveils confidential details about the price and the timetable for deliveries agreed by AstraZeneca.
The Anglo-Swedish company revised down the timetable last month because of production issues, leading to a bitter fight with the EU over delayed supplies.
Under the confidential contract, only parts of which had previously been disclosed, the EU has agreed to pay approximately €2.90 (£2.51) per dose.
The document, published by a team of RAI investigative journalists, shows that AstraZeneca had committed to delivering between 80m and 120m doses by the end of March and the remaining 180m shots by the end of June under an estimated delivery schedule.
AstraZeneca, which developed the vaccine with Oxford University, declined to comment.
The company last month cut its planned deliveries in the first quarter of the year to 31m, and later lifted it to 40m after intense pressure from the EU.
An estimated delivery schedule in the contract shows that 30m doses were due in December and 40m in January, with “final delivery subject to agreement of delivery schedule and regulatory approval”.
Under the timetable the company had committed to delivering 50m doses in February and March.
In another section of the contract, the company committed to use its “best reasonable efforts” to produce and deliver after authorisation approximately 30m to 40m doses in 2020 and 80m to 100m in the first three months of this year.
The contract shows that the vaccine should be produced for the EU at four factories: one in Belgium, one in the Netherlands and at Oxford Biomedica and Cobra Biologics plants in Britain.
Updated
Police in France have urged people to avoid the temptation to meet up with friends to enjoy spring-like weather this weekend, warning that officers would be stepping up their Covid social distancing patrols.
Temperatures are forecast to flirt with 20C (70F) across much of the country after a recent cold snap, which authorities worry could draw curfew-weary crowds to parks and riverbanks.
Already on Friday, TV reports showed flocks of people enjoying maskless drinks outside restaurants in Paris, reminiscent of the huge crowds that flouted the ban on groups of more than six in warm months last year.
Paris police warned that 700 officers would fan out to issue fines of €135 euros to anyone caught outside after the nationwide curfew begins at 6pm.
It added that around 4,000 officers would be mobilised over the weekend to enforce distancing rules, including breaking up outdoor gatherings.
“This is not the time to relax our collective guard,” it said on Twitter.
In the southeastern city of Lyon, authorities issued an outright ban on outdoor drinking of alcohol in much of the city centre, a popular district with scores of cafes and restaurants.
In contrast to some neighbours like Britain, France has so far avoided a third coronavirus lockdown, while keeping in place a nighttime curfew.
Infections remain high, with over 22,500 new cases recorded on Thursday, but are relatively stable and the government appears at ease with its current strategy for the moment.
It has resisted calls to consider lifting the curfew or other restrictions, including bar, restaurant, cinema and museum closures.
The UK reported a further 533 deaths within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 as of Friday, bringing the UK total to 119,920.
Separate figures published by the UK’s statistics agencies for deaths where Covid-19 has been mentioned on the death certificate, together with additional data on deaths that have occurred in recent days, show there have now been 139,000 deaths involving Covid-19 in the UK.
The government also said that, as of 9am on Friday, there had been a further 12,027 lab-confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK. It brings the total in the UK to 4,095,269.
Wales has become the first UK nation to administer the first dose of the Covid-19 vaccination to the equivalent of a third of its adult population.
PA reports:
On Friday, Public Health Wales said 839,065 people had received their first dose of either the Oxford/AstraZeneca or Pfizer/BioNTech jab - equating to 33.3% of adults in the country.
The figure was 32.1% in England and 31.3% in Scotland on Friday, with Thursday’s figures for Northern Ireland at 29.4%.
First minister Mark Drakeford praised the “enormous efforts” of those involved with the country’s vaccination programme during a press conference on Friday.
He said:
We’re making really good progress with our vaccination programme thanks to the enormous efforts of all of those involved across Wales.
The very latest figures show that almost 840,000 people in Wales have already had their first dose and that’s equivalent to a full third of the adult population of Wales.
This week we started offering people appointments for the second dose and more than 25,000 people have already had theirs.
We are on track to reach the next milestone, to offer vaccination to everybody in priority groups five to nine by the end of April, provided that vaccine supplies also remain on course.
Germany and other wealthy countries may need to give some of their own stock of vaccines to developing countries in addition to money, since only vaccinating the whole world will end the coronavirus pandemic, chancellor Angela Merkel said on Friday.
Speaking after a video conference of leaders of the G7 group of large developed economies, Merkel said they had not discussed specific percentages of their vaccine stocks that should be given to poorer countries.
But she told reporters: “I stressed in my intervention that the pandemic is not over until all people in the world have been vaccinated.”
Three-month gap between AstraZeneca jabs makes shot more effective than six-week gap, study says
A three-month gap between doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine results in higher vaccine efficacy than a six-week gap, a new study suggests.
The research indicates that with three months between the first and second dose there was an overall efficacy of 81%, compared to 55% for a six-week interval, PA reports.
The first dose offered 76% protection in the three months between doses, according to the University of Oxford research published in The Lancet.
Updated
Italy reported 15,479 new infections on Friday, and a further 348 deaths.
The country reported 13,762 new cases on Thursday, and 13,893 on Friday last week.
Thursday’s death toll was 347, and last Friday’s was 316.
Italy is still operating a traffic light regional lockdown system, with the Emilia-Romagna, Campania and Molise regions becoming the latest to turn orange, the second strictest code, La Repubblica reports.
The R value in Emilia-Romagna is at 1.05, above the threshold where a region passes from yellow to orange.
Updated
Healthcare workers in Mexico, which has registered more than 2m infections and 178,000 deaths, are increasingly grappling with the fatigue, stress and frustration of their daily jobs.
Reuters reports:
“Many times I cry at night,” said medical assistant Teresa Chew, 35, who monitors the lungs of seriously ill Covid-19 patients. “People keep coming and they keep dying.”
Adding to the strain, Chew said it was crushing to see people shrug off prevention measures such as masks. At least 3,000 healthcare workers in Mexico have died from the virus, one of the worst death tolls for the medical profession worldwide.
While the pandemic has exacerbated anxiety and depression for many, medical workers have been especially hard hit, according to a recent report on suicide prevention from the Pan American Health Organization.
At funeral homes and cemeteries, employees are contending with a seemingly endless flow of lost lives. According to a study from the University of Washington, Mexico’s overall death toll from the pandemic could exceed 200,000 in June.
Updated
Germany will contribute an additional €1.5bn to support global Covid-19 vaccination efforts and other programmes to fight the pandemic, increasing its overall pledge to €2.1bn, the finance minister, Olaf Scholz, said on Friday.
Reuters reports:
“We can only get out of the pandemic with vaccinations. We need to make progress on this, at home and abroad,” Scholz said, adding that the additional money was meant to support the Covax program, the Word Health Organization (WHO) and other international efforts.
“With today’s announcement we make clear: We’re standing side by side with the poorest countries,” Scholz said.
The German contribution would increase international funds for vaccines, drugs and tests by over 30%, he added. “We’ll only be safe if there is immunisation through vaccination all over the world,” Scholz said.
Joe Biden, was expected to use his first meeting as US president with leaders of the Group of Seven advanced economies on Friday to announce an immediate $2bn donation to the Covax programme co-led by the WHO. Covax aims to ensure a fair supply of coronavirus vaccines around the world.
The US will provide an additional $2bn over the next two years as other nations fulfil and make their own pledges, US officials said.
Updated
UK teaching unions have rejected Boris Johnson’s plan to reopen schools in England on 8 March.
This from the Sunday Times’ Sian Griffiths:
BREAKING Unions reject expected call from PM for all schools to return on March 8. "We are increasingly concerned that the government is minded to order a full return of all pupils on 8 March... This would seem a reckless course of action." @NEUnion @NAHTnews @ASCL_UK @NASUWT
— Sian Griffiths (@SianGriffiths6) February 19, 2021
PA reports:
The prime minister should opt for a “phased return” of school and college pupils to classrooms in England or risk another spike in Covid-19 infections, a coalition of education unions has warned.
Unions representing school and college staff and headteachers are “increasingly concerned” that the government could go ahead with a full return of all pupils in England on 8 March.
A joint statement says: “This would seem a reckless course of action. It could trigger another spike in Covid infections, prolong the disruption of education and risk throwing away the hard-won progress made in suppressing the virus over the course of the latest lockdown.
“The science around the role that schools play in the overall rate of transmission is uncertain. What we do know is that the full reopening of schools will bring nearly 10 million pupils and staff into circulation in England - close to one-fifth of the population. This is not a small easing of lockdown restrictions. It is a massive step.
“These factors necessitate a cautious approach with wider school and college opening phased over a period of time.”
Updated
A longer-range Canadian forecast shows new variants of Covid-19 will increase the threat of a spring resurgence unless enhanced public health measures are maintained, health officials said on Friday.
The officials said new modeling showed the domestic death toll could be between 21,510 and 22,420 by 28 February, with total cases ranging from 841,650 to 878,850.
“We’re not going to vaccinate our way to getting Covid off the face of the earth,” warned Dr Zain Chagla, an infectious disease specialist and professor at McMaster University in Hamilton.
“The virus has been circulating in people for too long for us to eradicate it with a vaccine,” said Alyson Kelvin, a vaccinologist with VIDO-InterVac in Saskatoon, CBC reports.
Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Science and Security in Washington, DC, told the outlet: “I think that we’ve been very short-sighted in how we’ve thought about vaccination as a control strategy on a national scale rather than a global one.”
Updated
South African virus variant confirmed in Poland
The South African variant of coronavirus is now present in Poland, the country’s health minister, Adam Niedzielski, said on Friday, as Poland braces for a third wave of the pandemic.
“In addition to the British variant, the South African variant has appeared,” he told a news conference.
A health ministry spokesman said earlier on Friday that there was a 20% week-to-week growth trend.
Poland on Friday reported 8,777 new coronavirus infections and 241 more deaths, bringing its total number of cases to 1,623,218 and the total official death toll to 41,823. On Thursday Poland confirmed 9,073 new infections and further 273 deaths.
Of the new cases confirmed on Friday, 1,427 were in the central region of Mazowieckie, which includes the national capital, Warsaw, Polskie Radio reports.
Updated
Turkey aims to procure 105m doses of Covid-19 vaccines by the end of April, its health minister said on Friday, adding that Ankara would also receive about 800,000 doses of the shots developed by Pfizer and BioNTech this month.
Citizens would be able to choose between the China’s Coronavac jab and the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine once the latter had been delivered, the country’s health minister said.
Reuters reports:
Ankara started a nationwide vaccination programme last month that has so far administered a first dose to some 5.5 million people. More than a million people have received the second dose of the vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech Ltd, according to health ministry data.
Speaking to the Sabah newspaper, health minister Fahrettin Koca said Turkey planned to procure a further 105 million doses by the end of April, but did not specify which vaccines would be obtained. He said Turks would be given the option to choose between the Sinovac and BioNTech shots once both are available.
“By the end of April, a procurement of 105m vaccine doses is being planned,” Koca said. “It is expected that around 800,000 doses of [BioNTech] vaccines will arrive this month,” he was quoted as saying.
Koca said Turkey was preparing to administer 35m shots in March.
“Citizens whose vaccination turn arrives will be presented this option. Their confirmations will be received. This vaccine will also especially be offered to the group of 60 year-olds and younger,” he said, referring to BioNTech’s shots.
Turkey has ordered 50m doses of Sinovac’s Coronavac and has been in talks to buy shots developed by other companies.
Ankara has so far received 13m doses of Coronavac, but no BioNTech shots.
Turkey has reported more than 2.6m cases and nearly 28,000 deaths from Covid-19 since March. In December, it imposed weekend lockdowns, nightly curfews and other curbs in the face of rising cases.
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said on Wednesday that Turkey wiould begin a gradual return to “normal life” in March on a province-by-province basis.
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Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have received 1,000 doses of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, Haaretz reports, though it may take at least a few more months for their campaigns to reach enough members of the population.
The West Bank has recorded 1,617 Covid-19 deaths to date, while 538 people have died in Gaza.
5,509 Israelis have died of the virus. Israel just emerged from its third nationwide lockdown, but inbound and outbound flights remain suspended until at least 6 March, with few exemptions.
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Spain has given a full two-shot course of coronavirus vaccines to almost all its elderly nursing home residents, the FED care home association said on Friday.
Prime minister Pedro Sanchez said the country, which has administered 2.8m doses and fully inoculated 1.14 million people, was on track to vaccinate 20 million people in the first half of 2021 out of a population of 47 million.
Reuters reports:
Nearly 43,000 care home residents died of Covid-19 or suspected infection in the devastating March-May first wave of contagion, and prosecutors are investigating more than 200 cases of potential criminal negligence at such homes.
But more than 97% of residents have now been vaccinated across Spain’s 17 regions, according to the FED, putting nursing homes among the country’s safest places.
“They are very positive data that allow us to be optimistic about the future,” said FED’s president, Ignacio Fernández-Cid. “Immunity will allow us to gradually return to the longed-for lost normality.”
Health emergency chief Fernando Simón said earlier this week that for the first time since the start of the pandemic, people over 65 who live in care homes have a lower rate of infection than those who live outside, supporting the thesis, if indirectly, that the vaccines are having an effect.
Frontline medics and care workers are the only people under 65 to receive a vaccine so far.
Spain will now give shots made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna to people over 80, while AstraZeneca’s drug will go to key workers under 55.
With a third wave quickly receding, Spain’s two-week infection rate hit 321 cases per 100,000 people on Thursday, from almost 900 cases at the end of January, prompting several regions to relax measures.
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The number of new Covid-19 infections in the UK is shrinking by 3% to 6% each day, faster than last week, the government said on Friday, adding that the closely-watched reproduction (R) number might be slightly lower, too.
The daily growth rate in infections was estimated at between -6% and -3%, down from a range of -5% and -2% last week.
The R number was estimated at between 0.6 and 0.9, meaning that that, on average, every 10 people infected will infect between 6 and 9 other people.
Last week the estimated range was between 0.7 and 0.9.
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British government broke law in opaque billion pound PPE procurement deals, court rules
The British government broke the law by failing to publish details of billions of pounds of spending on personal protective equipment (PPE) during the coronavirus pandemic, a London court ruled on Friday.
Reuters reports:
As Covid-19 swept across the world last year, Britain scrambled to secure protective gear for medics and nurses on the front line.
The Good Law Project, a campaign group, and three opposition politicians brought a judicial review seeking details of undisclosed deals with firms that had no medical procurement expertise and, in some cases, delivered defective protective equipment.
A judge at a London High Court said the Secretary of State for Health, Matt Hancock, failed to comply with a public procurement law that requires the government to publish contract awards within 30 days.
“The Secretary of State spent vast quantities of public money on pandemic-related procurements during 2020,” the judge said. “The public were entitled to see who this money was going to, what it was being spent on and how the relevant contracts were awarded.”
The health ministry said it had needed to move within very short timescales and against unparalleled global demand.
“This has often meant having to award contracts at speed to secure the vital supplies required to protect NHS (National Health Service) workers and the public,” a spokesman said.
“We fully recognise the importance of transparency in the award of public contracts and continue to publish information about contracts awarded as soon as possible.”
The National Audit Office said last year there had been a lack of transparency and a failure to explain why certain suppliers were chosen, or how any conflict of interest was dealt with, in procurement deals between March and the end of July worth about 18 billion pounds.
Opposition politicians have accused the government of running a “chumocracy” with contracts, including for the purchase of what turned out to be unusable PPE, and appointments made to those with family or business links to those in power.
One of the South African government’s top advisers on Covid-19 vaccines said on Friday that the Pfizer-BioNTech shot was “still a very good vaccine,” despite a study showing the dominant local virus variant may reduce protective antibodies elicited by it.
Barry Schoub, the chairman of the ministerial advisory committee on vaccines, told Reuters that the two-thirds reduction in protective antibodies mentioned in the study “means there is quite a significant remnant neutralising potency”.
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Sweden registered 4,144 new infections on Friday, as well as 51 further deaths from Covid-19.
On Thursday, the country recorded 4,920 cases, and 3,834 new cases a week ago.
Between the first and second week of February, the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus rose by 24.1 percent in the Stockholm region, healthcare director Björn Eriksson said on Wednesday.
“This is very worrying and could be a sign that we are entering a third wave [...] We are getting signals that residents are no longer following the Public Health Agency’s recommendations to the same extent,” Eriksson warned.
The UK variant, B.1.1.7, is also increasing in all of Sweden’s regions, the Public Health Agency said during Thursday’s briefing, the Local reports.
Nationwide, ten percent of tests for coronavirus gave a positive result last week, and 411 cases were confirmed per 100,000 residents over the past two weeks, an increase from last week.
Here a little more detail on the Czech government’s decision to drop plans to reopen all retail shops from next week due to rising infections.
Reuters reports:
The country of 10.7 million has Europe’s highest infection rate with 968 new cases per 100,000 people on a two-week basis, according to data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).
Health Minister Jan Blatny said the Covid-19 situation had “significantly worsened”.
“Because of that, the government agreed that the original idea for opening some shops won’t happen on Monday (as planned),” he told a televised press conference.
[...]
Blatny said people would be required from Monday to wear higher quality respiratory masks known as FFP2-grade in shops, public transport and hospitals. Only shops selling food and other goods deemed essential are currently open.
The government is also bracing itself for a crisis in hospitals, as the country’s number of available hospital beds is rapidly dwindling.
Czech Radio reports:
The government is preparing a crisis scenario for hospitals which are no longer able to take in patients or are nearing their capacity limit.
Health Minister Jan Blatny said on Friday that lighter cases that still need medical care could –in the event of need – be treated in makeshift health facilities set up in gyms.
Earlier the minister also spoke of using spas for this purpose. Should the spread of the infection get worse the government may also order specialists in outpatient clinics and medical students to help out in hospitals.
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Johnson & Johnson said on Friday it had submitted for emergency use listing of its Covid-19 vaccine to the World Health Organization (WHO).
The company said the process was a prerequisite to supply vaccines to the Covax vaccine program co-led by WHO, which aims to deliver doses to poor and middle-income countries.
J&J entered into an agreement in December in support of the Covax programme, Reuters reports.
The company and Gavi, which also co-leads Covax, expect to enter into an advance purchase agreement that would provide up to 500m doses of the single-dose vaccine to Covax through 2022, J&J said.
Updated
The half-dozen charities distributing food in Paris say the number of students seeking help has jumped since the government put France back under lockdown and then a nightly curfew late last year, Reuters reports.
Tens of thousands of food parcels are handed out each week in the greater Paris region alone and it is a similar situation elsewhere, they say.
The government has extended a publicly-funded scheme providing one-euro meals to those on grants and made it available to all students.
Three in every four French students felt alone some or all of the time, one opinion poll showed last month.
Students have protested against a government they say has abandoned them.
Government spokesman Gabriel Attal this week said the poorest students had received emergency grants, money had been released for psychological counselling and the president wanted all students to be able to attend lectures in person one day a week.
Pfizer vaccine greatly reduces Covid transmission, Israeli studies find
Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine greatly reduces virus transmission, two Israeli studies have found, shedding light on one of the biggest questions of the global effort to quash the pandemic.
Reuters reports:
Data analysis in a study by the Israeli Health Ministry and Pfizer Inc found the Pfizer vaccine developed with Germany’s BioNTech reduces infection, including in asymptomatic cases, by 89.4% and in syptomatic cases by 93.7%.
Findings of the pre-published study, not yet peer-reviewed, but based on a national database that is one of the world’s most advanced, were first reported by the Israeli news site Ynet late on Thursday and were obtained by Reuters on Friday.
Pfizer declined to comment and the Israeli Health Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
A separate study by Israel’s Sheba Medical Center published on Friday in The Lancet medical journal found that among 7,214 hospital staff who received their first dose in January, there was an 85% reduction in symptomatic Covid-19 within 15 to 28 days with an overall reduction of infections, including asymptomatic cases detected by testing, of 75%.
More research is needed to draw a definitive conclusion, but the studies are among the first to suggest a vaccine may stop the spread of the novel coronavirus and not just prevent people getting ill.
Michal Linial, a professor of molecular biology and bioinformatics at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, said the findings were a big step towards answering one of the most important questions in combating the pandemic.
“Whether it is 75 or 90 percent reduction doesn’t matter - it is a big drop in transmission,” Linial said. “It means that not only is the individual vaccinated protected, the inoculation also provides protection to his or her surroundings.”
Pfizer Inc and partner BioNTech SE said on Friday they have submitted new data to the US health regulator showing the stability of their Covid-19 vaccine at temperatures commonly found in pharmaceutical freezers and refrigerators.
Reuters reports:
Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine, along with Moderna Inc’s two-dose vaccine, won the US emergency use authorisation (EUA) and is being widely distributed as part of the country’s mass vaccination efforts.
If approved, the less onerous storage requirements would provide a big logistical relief because the vaccine for now has to be stored at minus 70 degrees Celsius for longer periods, a challenge particularly in lower-income countries that don’t have the ultra-cold-storage infrastructure.
Pfizer/BioNTech’s current label requires the vaccine to be stored in an ultra-cold freezer at temperatures between -80ºC and -60ºC (-112ºF to -76ºF), calling for it to be shipped in specially designed containers.
The companies said the new data has been submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration to support a proposed update to the current EUA label, which would allow for vaccine vials to be stored at -25°C to -15°C (-13°F to 5°F) for a total of two weeks as an alternative for storage in an ultra-low temperature freezer.
Ghana is expecting a first delivery of a little over 350,000 AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine shots by the end of next week, according to a plan presented by health officials on Friday.
It plans to spend around $3 for every two shots of vaccine and aims to inoculate around 20 million people against the virus, according to the plan, Reuters reports.
Workers at the Environmental Health Unit of the Cape Coast Metropolitan Assembly have threatened to boycott the burial of people who have died of Covid-19 if incentive packages for frontline workers are not extended to them, Graphic News reports.
The unit has so far buried 25 Covid-19 casualties from health facilities in the Cape Coast metropolis.
The government had announced tax exemption for all health workers, an insurance cover and salary top up of 50% for all frontline health workers during the pandemic.
Updated
Infection rates continued to decrease across the UK but remained high in the week ending 12 February, the country’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) said on Friday.
An estimated one in 115 people in England had the virus that week, according to ONS, with the numbers for Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland were one in 125, one in 105 and one in 180, respectively.
In the previous week, ending 6 February, the ONS had estimated that one in 80 people in England had Covid-19.
Infection rates decreased in all regions of England in the second week of February, and cases compatible with the new UK variant decreased in all regions in England also.
Prime minister Boris Johnson is expected to set out his roadmap out of England’s third national lockdown on Monday.
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Dutch government fights legal challenges against night curfew
The Dutch government was fighting on two fronts on Friday to maintain a night-time curfew it says is vital to slow a third wave of coronavirus cases less than a month before a national election.
Reuters reports:
The Senate was debating a bill rushed through parliament by prime minister Mark Rutte’s government that would explicitly give the cabinet the power to keep the 9 p.m. to 4:30 a.m. curfew in place after a court found it lacked legal justification.
Meanwhile, an appeals court was hearing more arguments about whether it had ever been legal to introduce the curfew, which triggered street protests when it was brought in last month.
[...]Protesters and political opponents say the curfew, the first seen in the Netherlands since World War Two, is a unnecessary restriction on freedoms.
The director of the country’s National Institute for Health (RIVM) says a third wave of cases due to the British variant of the disease, which is now causing more than two-thirds of Dutch infections, will be softened by the curfew.
The Hague appeals court was hearing government attempts to overturn a lower court ruling that sided with group “Viruswaarheid” or “Virus Truth”. The lower court found the emergency powers act the government used as legal basis for the curfew was intended for use during emergencies, not to ward off potential threats.
Police have issued 26,000 fines since the curfew was introduced on January 23 – to protesters and those flouting the time limit – that may have to be reversed if the ruling is upheld.
Opinion polls show opposition to lockdown measures increasing, but Rutte and his conservative VVD Party are favoured to win at the March 15-17 elections.
Updated
British PM proposes cutting length of vaccine development to 100 days
British prime minister Boris Johnson will call on world leaders to back efforts to speed up the development of new vaccines, treatments and tests at a G7 meeting, a statement from No 10 Downing Street said on Friday.
The statement said Johnson would set out “his ambition today to cut the time to develop new vaccines by two-thirds to 100 days”, and empasised that “ [s]lashing the time to develop vaccines for new diseases to 100 days will save countless lives in future health crises”.
The statemnt further added:
UK confirms it will send the majority of any future surplus vaccines to the COVAX scheme to support developing countries.
[...]
The development of a coronavirus vaccine in approximately 300 days was a huge and unprecedented global achievement.
By reducing the time to develop new vaccines for emerging diseases even further, we may be able to prevent the catastrophic health, economic and social repercussions seen in this crisis.
The health minister Matt Hancock tweeted his support of the announcement.
The PM is right - we should try to cut the time to develop new vaccines by 2/3 to 100 days.
— Matt Hancock (@MattHancock) February 19, 2021
We’ll be sending the majority of any future surplus COVID vaccines to the COVAX scheme to support developing countries.https://t.co/5uutz7WZ6m
It’s unclear what the words “any future surplus” mean exactly, given that the UK already has placed orders amounting to a vast surplus of coronavirus vaccines, but is anticipating a dip in its coronavirus vaccine supply in the coming weeks, with potential to disrupt inoculation targets, the FT reported.
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The number of Ukrainians who died in December jumped 42.9% to 67,663 people compared to the same period in 2019, the State Statistics Service said in data released late on Thursday that was consistent with a spike in Covid-19 fatalities.
Reuters reports:
Overall in 2020, Ukraine, a country of 41 million, reported 6.1% more fatalities - or 616,835 people - than in the previous year.
As of Friday, Ukraine had officially registered 24,972 deaths from Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic nearly a year ago.
The figure marks a lower per capita death rate than seen in many European countries, a fact the government attributes to its tough lockdown measures.
However, Lotta Sylwander, UNICEF’s representative in Ukraine, for UNICEF, told Reuters in a recent interview that the lower death toll could be partly due to less widespread testing.
Ukraine, which hasn’t received a single shot of coronavirus vaccine to date, is currently investigating its botched procurement process.
The Kyiv Post reports:
Bureaucracy, political infighting, and suspected corruption have delayed Ukraine’s coronavirus immunization campaign.
As the result, some 40 percent of Ukrainians who are willing to get vaccinated will not be able to get the shot soon. The government’s plan to vaccinate half the population may stretch into 2022.
Furthermore, a new criminal investigation into the Covid‑19 vaccines contract may stall the procurement even more.
The secrecy that pharmaceutical companies impose on vaccine contracts fosters corruption, which is especially rife in Ukraine’s medical procurement bureaucracy.
Critics point fingers at Health Minister Maksym Stepanov for failing to procure the vaccines swiftly. An official investigation is looking to see whether he rigged the procurement process in favor of a Ukrainian intermediary.
Portugal will refocus its Covid-19 inoculation campaign towards vulnerable age groups and away from key state workers such as the police and firefighters due to scarce vaccine supplies, the head of its vaccination taskforce was quoted as saying.
Reuters reports:
Portugal, like many European Union countries, has been slow to get its vaccination programme started. It had hoped to receive 4.4m doses by the end of March but supply shortages mean that only 2.5m will arrive by then.
“This is an example of adapting our strategy to the circumstances... focusing on saving lives, now that the highest priority health professionals have been seen to,” Henrique Gouveia e Melo told the Expresso newspaper.
Portugal had initially focused on vaccinating frontline health and care home workers, expanding the list of top priority groups last week to include the military, firefighters, security services, and a handful of key political figures including cabinet ministers, public prosecutors and some lawmakers.
But Gouveia e Melo said 90% of doses would now go to people aged over 80 or to over-50s with pre-existing health conditions.
Officials at the vaccination taskforce were not immediately available to confirm his comments.
Portugal has only fully vaccinated 2% of its 10 million people so far, government data show. Of the close to 700,000 doses which have arrived in Portugal, nearly 580,000 have been administered.
The government has said it aims to have 70% of people fully vaccinated by the end of the summer.
Firefighters had pushed to be among the first groups to be vaccinated, given that their role in transporting patients to hospitals exposes them to a high risk of contracting the virus.
Updated
The EU’s executive commission plans to double its contribution to the World Health Organization’s Covax programme, bringing the 27-nation bloc’s commitment to the initiative to deliver vaccines to poor nations to €1bn ($1.2bn).
The Associated Press reports:
According to an EU official who spoke anonymously, the European commission president, Ursula Von der Leyen, will make the announcement later Friday during a meeting of the leaders of the Group of Seven economic powers.
The official was not authorised to speak publicly because details have not been made public.
Von der Leyen will also announce an additional €100m ($121.4m) to support vaccination campaigns in Africa in partnership with the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The EU is one of the leading donors to the Covax programme, which aims to ensure equitable access to Covid-19 shots for low-and middle-income countries. Covax hopes to deploy some 336m doses by the end of June, and around 2bn doses by the end of the year.
But the programme has already missed the goal of starting vaccination in poor countries at the same time that doses were rolled out in rich countries.
This week, the UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, sharply criticised the “wildly uneven and unfair” distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, saying 10 countries had administered 75% of the vaccinations given worldwide so far and demanding a global effort to get all people in every nation vaccinated as soon as possible.
Amnesty International said a failure to ensure global access to vaccines represented “an abject moral failure that will ultimately harm rich countries”.
Updated
Hong Kong’s top health official said on Friday the government had not politicised any coronavirus vaccine and said people could receive the jab of their choice, as she sought to reassure residents worried about China’s Sinovac, due to be rolled out in the global financial hub from next week.
Reuters reports:
Health secretary Sophia Chan told Reuters that standards had not been lowered to accept the Sinovac vaccine and there was no pressure from Beijing to get it approved in the Chinese-ruled city.
“The government has not politicised any vaccine. In fact, we really think that one should not politicise any of the vaccination process, because really the Covid-19 vaccine is our hope,” she said in an interview at her office.
Hong Kong formally approved Sinovac for emergency use on Thursday with the public rollout starting on February 26.
One million doses of the vaccine arrived from Beijing in the former British colony on Friday afternoon.
Hong Kong’s 7.5 million residents will be able to get vaccinated at 29 centres across the city with 5 offering Sinovac and 24 offering Pfizer/Biontech vaccines, due to arrive before the end of February, Chan said.
“If people have worries, then they can choose the vaccine of their choice,” she said.
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Poland faces third wave of infections
Poland is recording the beginning of a third wave of coronavirus infections, a health ministry spokesman said on Friday, as the country posted a large week-on-week increase in daily cases.
Reuters reports:
Poland has loosened some restrictions, recently opening ski slopes as well as cinemas, hotels and theatres at up to 50% capacity, but authorities have warned that these measures may have to be rolled back depending on the pandemic situation.
“We are at the beginning of the third wave, it is not as dynamic as in Slovakia or the Czech Republic ... but unfortunately we are observing this upward trend,” Wojciech Andrusiewicz told reporters.
“Week to week we unfortunately see a 20% growth trend.”
He added that around 10% of Covid-19 cases in Poland were now the British variant.
On Friday, Poland reported 8,777 new cases of the coronavirus and 241 deaths.
In total, it has reported 1,623,218 cases of the coronavirus and 41,823 deaths.
I’m Jedidajah Otte and will be taking over for the next few hours. Feel free to get in touch with updates or tips, you can reach me on Twitter @JedySays or via email.
Updated
Malaysia has reported 2,936 new cases on Friday, raising the total number of recorded infections to 277,811. The health ministry also reported 13 new deaths, taking total fatalities from the pandemic to 1,043, Reuters reports.
Two Florida women aged 34 and 44 dressed up as “grannies” – wearing bonnets and gloves – to pass as old enough to be eligible for a vaccine shot, according to local media reports.
WFTV, an ABC-affiliated TV station in Orlando, reports that the pair had valid vaccine cards from their first shot, but were denied their second ones, citing a news conference held by local health officials on Thursday. It quoted Orange County health officer Dr Raul Pino as saying:
I don’t know how they escaped for the first time, but they came with the gloves, the glasses, the whole thing, and they are probably in their 20s.
Their real ages emerged later, a WFTV reporter said. According to the station, the two women were turned over to police, though officers said they were only asked to issue trespass warnings and no other action was taken.
Orange County Health Officer Dr. Raul Pino told us they've increased security at the @OCCC vaccination site over this and others who've tried different approaches to get the shot. He says the two girls had valid cards from their first shots, but got held up over their IDs. @WFTV
— Lauren Seabrook (@LSeabrookWFTV) February 18, 2021
Updated
The African Union’s vaccine procurement scheme says Russia has offered 300m doses of its Sputnik V vaccine and that the offer included a financing package for member states wanting to secure the shot.
It said the Sputnik V vaccine would be available for a period of 12 months starting May 2021, adding that member states had taken up all of the 270m doses previously secured from AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson in “the first allocation phase”, according to Reuters.
The French government will send more medical staff to Réunion island in the Indian Ocean as part of efforts to rein in variants spreading in the overseas territory. The government also said it would extend curfew measures to other parts of the island, Reuters reports.
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Germany’s infection numbers appear to be stagnating at a level that is still too high, a top public health official has said, warning a downward trend in recent weeks could reverse. Reuters quotes Lother Wieler, the president of the Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases, as saying:
We are standing possibly at a turning point again. The national case number appear to be stagnating.
However, the agency says the health minister Jens Spahn has raised the prospect of lifting lockdown measures, alongside falling infections and a steady rise in vaccinations. But he reportedly urged caution given that a more infectious variant had been identified.
There are rising demands to end the lockdown and this is possible but we need to be careful in order not to jeopardise our achievements.
Here’s a little more detail on that news that Vietnam will receive 60m more vaccine doses.
Reuters reports that the country has been one of the world’s virus-mitigation success stories, thanks to targeted mass testing and strict quarantining. Its total number of cases stands at 2,347, including imported cases, with 35 deaths.
But the new outbreak of the more contagious variant first detected in the UK, which was found in the northern province of Hai Duong last month, is Vietnam’s biggest pandemic challenge yet, the agency quotes the health minister Nguyen Thanh Long as having told a taskforce meeting.
This wave’s virus variant is 70% more transmissible. If we can’t keep up with testing amid this spike in cases, we can’t contain the outbreak. Testing is the key to fight the virus.
The Reuters report adds:
Vietnam has recorded 755 infections since the beginning of the current outbreak, accounting for a third of the country’s total cases since the start of the pandemic.
Long said Vietnam’s current battle was not likely to end in the first six months of this year, and could continue throughout 2021.
The government previously said Vietnam would only receive between 4.89m and 8.25m doses under the Covax scheme.
In January, Vietnam said it had agreed to separately buy 30m doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. The government said the first batch of 204,000 doses would arrive on 28 February, while a home-grown vaccine would likely be available for domestic inoculation by May.
Long said areas currently suffering from outbreaks would be prioritised for inoculation, and urged private companies to support health ministry efforts to bring the vaccine to Vietnam.
The Czech government has decided against opening non-essential retail shops amid an unfavourable pandemic situation, Reuters quotes the country’s industry minister Karel Havlicek as saying.
The pandemic situation is not good, the UK variant is still spreading. That’s why we decided at the government not to open closed shops for now.
Vietnam will receive 60m vaccine doses this year, including 30m under the Covax scheme, Reuters reports. The nation’s health minister said the rest would be purchased from AstraZeneca, as it seeks to inoculate its population of nearly 100 million. Nguyen Thanh Long said:
The Ministry of Health is also in active talks with other producers such as Pfizer and Moderna to ensure sufficient vaccine for the entire population.
According to Reuters, Long said most of the vaccines under Covax, which is co-led by the World Health Organization, would be used in the second half of the year.
Russia has reported 13,433 new cases in the last 24 hours, including 1,972 in Moscow, taking the national tally to 4,139,031. Reuters reports that Russian authorities also recorded another 470 deaths, raising the official toll to 82,396.
African nations have collectively surpassed 100,000 confirmed deaths, as the continent praised for its early response to the pandemic now struggles with a dangerous resurgence and medical oxygen often runs desperately short, the Associated Press reports.
The 54-nation continent of some 1.3 billion people has barely seen the arrival of large-scale supplies of vaccines, and a variant of the virus dominant in South Africa is already posing a challenge to vaccination efforts.
Health officials who breathed a sigh of relief last year when African countries did not see a huge number of deaths are now reporting a jump in fatalities.
Reuters reports that India has recorded its largest one-day increase in new infections in three weeks, with 13,193 cases, while thousands of marshals fanned out to enforce mask wearing across the financial capital of Mumbai, which is battling a recent spurt.
The tally of confirmed infections is 10.96m, the second highest in the world after the United States, while India has suffered more than 156,000 deaths. But actual infections could range as high as 300m, a government serological survey showed this month.
In recent days, 75% of India’s new cases have been reported from the southern state of Kerala and Maharashtra, home to Mumbai, a densely populated city of 20 million people. The two states already had the highest number of reported infections.
Health experts suggest the reopening of educational institutes in Kerala and resumption of suburban train services in Mumbai could be key factors.
After a gap of 11 months, Mumbai resumed on 1 February full suburban train services, which before the pandemic carried a daily average of 8 million people.
The city has begun hiring marshals to enforce mask wearing. Out of nearly 5,000 marshals, around 300 would be deployed on the rail network, city authorities said.
Indians have largely given up on masks and social distancing.
“Coronavirus ... has not yet left the country,” the health ministry said on Twitter. “We still need to follow Covid-appropriate behaviour. No carelessness till there is a cure.”
Despite the recent rise infections, India’s daily tally of new cases remains well below a mid-September peak of nearly 100,000. Testing numbers have also fallen to about 800,000 a day from more than 1m.
Since starting its vaccine campaign in mid-January, India has administered nearly 10m doses, aiming to cover 300 million people by August.
Businesses will be able to require customers and visitors to prove they have been vaccinated as a condition for entry, according to guidance by Australia’s work health and safety regulator.
The guidance, published by Safe Work Australia on Friday, comes as the New South Wales premier, Gladys Berejiklian, doubled down on her suggestion that “incentives” to get a Covid vaccine could include the ability to go on a commercial flight or enter hospitality businesses.
Hello, I’ll be taking over from Helen Sullivan for the next few hours. If you’d like to draw my attention to anything, your best bet’s probably Twitter, where I’m KevinJRawlinson.
Some of the world’s wealthiest countries are promising to share coronavirus vaccines with the poorest, but details of when and how many remain scarce as leaders of the Group of Seven economic powers hold their first meeting of 2021 on Friday, AP reports.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, which holds the G-7 presidency this year, is meeting virtually with the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan and the United States. The leaders, joined by top European Union officials, will discuss international challenges – chief among them the pandemic that has killed almost 2.5 million people around the world.
Johnson, whose country has had almost 120,000 coronavirus deaths, will hail the speed with which vaccines have been developed against Covid-19 in less than a year, and announce a push to cut the time needed to create new ones to 100 days.
The British government said Johnson will ask UK Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance to work with the World Health Organization and others on “speeding up the process for developing vaccines, treatments and tests for common pathogens.”
“The development of viable coronavirus vaccines offers the tantalising prospect of a return to normality, but we must not rest on our laurels,” Johnson said in comments released by his 10 Downing Street office.
That’s it from me, Helen Sullivan, for today.
But before I go – how about a spot of Komodo dragon: the best lizard around:
Summary
Here are the key developments from the last few hours:
- Africa’s death toll passed 100,000. Africa’s reported Covid death toll surpassed 100,000 on Friday, a fraction of those reported on other continents but rising fast as a second wave of infections overwhelms hospitals. The continent’s reported deaths, at 100,354, compare favourably with North America, which has registered more than half a million, and Europe, which is approaching 900,000, a Reuters tally shows.
- Japan finds new variant, immigration centre reports infections. Japan confirmed a new variant of Covid, and an infection cluster emerged at a Tokyo immigration facility, presenting new challenges as the country tries to overcome a third wave of the pandemic. The new variant appears to have originated overseas but is different from other types that have been found sporadically in Japan, according to the National Institute of Infectious Diseases.
- Rich nations stockpiling a billion more shots than needed. Rich countries are on course to have over a billion more doses of Covid vaccines than they need, leaving poorer nations scrambling for leftover supplies as the world seeks to curb the coronavirus pandemic, a report by anti-poverty campaigners found on Friday.
- Weekly Covid infections worldwide fell to their lowest figure since October Reported daily coronavirus infections have been falling across the world for a month and on Tuesday hit their lowest since mid-October, figures that suggest the seasonality of the virus show.Reuters: But optimism over a way out of the crisis has been tempered by new variants of the virus, raising fears about the efficacy of vaccines.
- Hong Kong to start vaccinations next week. Hong Kong will start its public free vaccination program next week, after authorising emergency use of the Chinese vaccine, Sinovac. Online reservation for the voluntary vaccinations will open on 23 February, with vaccination starting from 26 February.
- New Zealand confirmed one new local case. New Zealand confirmed one new locally transmitted case of coronavirus on Friday, which was linked to the existing cluster in its biggest city Auckland. The new case was a household contact of some of the previously reported cases, the Ministry of Health said in a statement. It also said there were three new cases in managed isolation facilities at the border.
- An Australian family tested positive to Covid a day after state emerges from lockdown. Three members of a family from the Australian state of Victoria, two of whom quarantined at the Melbourne airport Holiday Inn, have tested positive to coronavirus a day after the state’s five-day lockdown was lifted.
- Fauci said he hopes for return to normal by Christmas. TopUS infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci on Thursday said that a post-pandemic return to “normal” could come by the end of the year, aligning his forecast with a Christmas target US President Joe Biden set earlier this week. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), had guided Americans to the long-sought return to something approaching normal life in the early Autumn.
- China donated 200,000 Covid jabs to Algeria. Beijing will gift Algeria 200,000 Sinopharm coronavirus vaccines, the Chinese ambassador to Algiers said Thursday, boosting supplies in the North African nation, AFP reports.Ambassador Li Lianhe told the official APS news agency that Beijing will “continue to provide the support and necessary backing” Algeria needs.
- Israel extended its coronavirus border closure to 6 March. Israel said Thursday it will extend the closure of its airports and land borders for 14 more days in a bid to stem the coronavirus pandemic. A joint statement from the prime minister’s office and the health minister said the country’s borders will remain closed until March 6, except for urgent reasons. Israel had suspended international flights on January 24, before also closing the border crossings with Jordan and Egypt.
- An Israeli study found the Pfizer vaccine 85% effective after first shot. The first dose of Pfizer Inc’s Covid-19 vaccine is 85% effective, a study of healthcare workers at an Israeli hospital has found, potentially fuelling a debate over the recommended two-dose schedule as governments try to stretch out supplies, Reuters reports.
- Fifth of Australians say they are unlikely to get vaccine. More than one in five Australians say they will “probably” or “definitely” not be vaccinated against coronavirus, with the spike in vaccine hesitancy potentially spelling trouble for the rollout.
Updated
Japan will receive its second shipment of coronavirus vaccines on Sunday, vaccine programme chief Taro Kono said, according to news agency Jiji Press.
Japan launched its inoculation drive on Wednesday, giving medical personnel the Pfizer-BionTech vaccine. It is the last of the Group of Seven grouping of industrialised nations to begin vaccinations.
Japan finds new variant, immigration centre reports infections
Japan confirmed a new variant of Covid, and an infection cluster emerged at a Tokyo immigration facility, presenting new challenges as the country tries to overcome a third wave of the pandemic.
The new variant appears to have originated overseas but is different from other types that have been found sporadically in Japan, according to the National Institute of Infectious Diseases. It has the E484K mutation on the spike protein of the virus that has been found in other variants, which may undermine the effectiveness of vaccines.
Updated
Rich nations stockpiling one billion more shots than needed
Rich countries are on course to have over a billion more doses of Covid vaccines than they need, leaving poorer nations scrambling for leftover supplies as the world seeks to curb the coronavirus pandemic, a report by anti-poverty campaigners found on Friday.
Reuters: The report looked specifically at contracts with the five leading vaccine makers - Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Oxford-AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax. It found that to date, the United States, the European Union, Britain, Australia, Canada and Japan have already secured more than 3 billion doses - over a billion more than the 2.06 billion needed to give their entire populations two doses.
Updated
US President Joe Biden heads to Kalamazoo, Michigan, on Friday to visit the Pfizer Inc manufacturing plant that is churning out Covid vaccines, as state and local governments across the country clamour for more, Reuters reports.
Biden is due to tour Pfizer’s largest manufacturing site and its only facility in the United States making the Covid vaccine at a time when less than 15% of the U.S. population is vaccinated.
The United States has rolled out ambitious vaccination programs in recent weeks that include large sites capable of putting shots into thousands of arms daily, as well as hospitals and pharmacies. But officials are begging for more doses.
The Biden administration has been working to increase the number of doses it sends out to states, cities and pharmacies every week, but Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden’s top medical adviser, said on Tuesday that demand far outpaced supply at the moment.
The White House said earlier this month it was using the Defense Production Act to help Pfizer get additional equipment fast so that it could keep ramping up production. Biden is expected to discuss that initiative - which officials say is starting to pay dividends - with Pfizer executives during his tour.
Pfizer has not yet delivered to the European Union about 10 million vaccine doses that were due in December, EU officials told Reuters.
Jeff Williams, mayor of Arlington, Texas, who met with Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in recent weeks, said his city of 400,000 was ready to vaccinate 40,000 people a day but only had enough supply to administer 3,000 doses.
Komodo dragon break time:
I wrote about Komodo dragons: the best lizard of them all https://t.co/k69hkuyIRG pic.twitter.com/LiEF2ZBDpy
— Helen Sullivan (@helenrsullivan) February 18, 2021
As the race to administer Covid-19 inoculations has ramped up this year, so have efforts to use the vaccines as instruments of influence. India entered the fray in February by giving away millions of doses to its neighbours in south Asia, where it has been competing for diplomatic sway with China.
Beijing has announced a flurry of free doses over recent weeks to 13 countries, and say it plans to provide vaccines to 38 more. Moscow has capitalised on delays in the EU’s programme to sell its own vaccine to Hungary – even though the Russian formulation still awaits the bloc’s regulatory approval:
Thailand on Friday reported 130 new coronavirus cases, taking its total infections to 25,241.
One additional death was confirmed, taking fatalities to 83 overall, the country’s Covid taskforce said at a briefing.
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Germany increased by 9,113 to 2,369,719, data from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for infectious diseases showed on Friday.
The reported death toll rose by 508 to 67,206, the tally showed.
Time for a schadenfreude break from pandemic news:
Hong Kong to start vaccinations next week
Hong Kong will start its public free vaccination program next week, after authorising emergency use of the Chinese vaccine, Sinovac. Online reservation for the voluntary vaccinations will open on 23 February, with vaccination starting from 26 February.
Prioritised groups include people aged 60 or above, people who live or work at care facilities. and people with chronic medical problems aged between 16 and 59 years old.
The first million doses of Sinovac are expected to arrive in Hong Kong today, the Hong Kong secretary for food and health said on Thursday.
Hong Kong already gave the nod last month to the emergency use of an mRNA Covid-19 vaccine developed by Fosun Pharma and BioNTech, and the first one million doses are expected to arrive in late February.
Oh Thursday the chief executive of Hong Kong, Carrie Lam, said on Facebook she would receive the Covid-19 vaccine produced by Sinovac Biotech.
After more than two months of tight restrictions amid one of the city’s worst outbreaks of the pandemic, Hong Kong has lately relaxed its social distancing rules. Residents can dine in the restaurant and go to cinemas again. But Lam pleaded with public on Facebook: “please do not relax your vigilance against the epidemic, and take adequate personal protective measures.”
Africa's death toll passes 100,000
Africa’s reported Covid death toll surpassed 100,000 on Friday, a fraction of those reported on other continents but rising fast as a second wave of infections overwhelms hospitals.
The continent’s reported deaths, at 100,354, compare favourably with North America, which has registered more than half a million, and Europe, which is approaching 900,000, a Reuters tally shows.
But deaths are rising sharply across Africa, driven by its southern region, especially economic powerhouse South Africa, which accounts for nearly half. South Africa was ravaged by a second wave caused by a more contagious variant that has jammed up casualty wards.
“The increased number (of infections) has led to many severe cases and some of the countries really found it quite difficult to cope,” Richard Mihigo, coordinator of the immunisation programme at the World Health Organization’s Africa office, told Reuters.
Israeli study finds Pfizer vaccine 85% effective after first shot
The first dose of Pfizer Inc’s Covid-19 vaccine is 85% effective, a study of healthcare workers at an Israeli hospital has found, potentially fuelling a debate over the recommended two-dose schedule as governments try to stretch out supplies, Reuters reports.
The Sheba Medical Center’s findings compare with overall efficacy of around 95% in a two dose regimen 21 days apart for the shot developed with Germany’s BioNTech.
The Sheba study, to be published in The Lancet medical journal, comes a day after Canadian researchers suggested that the second Pfizer dose be delayed given the high level of protection from the first shot in order to increase the number of people getting vaccinated.
Their research showed efficacy of 92.6% after the first dose, based on an analysis of the documents submitted by the drugmaker from its late-stage human trials to the US Food and Drug Administration in December.
The FDA said in December data from those trials showed that the vaccine began conferring some protection to recipients before they received the second shot, but more data would be needed to assess the potential of a single-dose shot.
Pfizer has said alternative dosing regimens of the vaccine have not been evaluated yet and that the decision resided with the health authorities.
Australian family tests positive to Covid a day after state emerges from lockdown
Three members of a family from the Australian state of Victoria, two of whom quarantined at the Melbourne airport Holiday Inn, have tested positive to coronavirus a day after the state’s five-day lockdown was lifted.
Health authorities were confident the new cases, which came after two days of zero cases in Victoria, will not spark further infections as they were isolating at home during their infectious period.
Health minister Martin Foley said the cases involved two parents and a child, two of whom were classified as primary close contacts because they had been in quarantine on the third floor of the quarantine hotel at Tullamarine. The other family member was deemed a secondary contact:
New Zealand confirms one new local case
New Zealand confirmed one new locally transmitted case of coronavirus on Friday, which was linked to the existing cluster in its biggest city Auckland, Reuters reports.
The new case was a household contact of some of the previously reported cases, the Ministry of Health said in a statement.
It also said there were three new cases in managed isolation facilities at the border.
Fauci hopes for return to normal by Christmas
TopUS infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci on Thursday said that a post-pandemic return to “normal” could come by the end of the year, aligning his forecast with a Christmas target U.S. President Joe Biden set earlier this week.
Reuters: Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), had guided Americans to the long-sought return to something approaching normal life in the early Autumn.
Speaking to MSNBC, Fauci said there are many factors - including the emergence of variants of the coronavirus that are more contagious - that will influence when Americans can return to activities that have been stopped by the pandemic.
Americans might be able to get back to below capacity theaters and indoor dining “somewhere between the fall and the end of the year” while something much closer to life before the pandemic would likely be “as the president said, by the end of the year, by Christmas,” Fauci said.
“Maybe you’re going to still have to wear masks,” he noted.
During a CNN town hall on Tuesday, Biden set Christmas as a time for a possible return to normal life.
Highly contagious virus variants could increase cases and interfere with the timeline, Fauci said, but added that he still hoped for a return to normal for the fall or winter.
China donates 200,000 Covid jabs to Algeria
Beijing will gift Algeria 200,000 Sinopharm coronavirus vaccines, the Chinese ambassador to Algiers said Thursday, boosting supplies in the North African nation, AFP reports.
Ambassador Li Lianhe told the official APS news agency that Beijing will “continue to provide the support and necessary backing” Algeria needs.
The vaccines will arrive later in February, Health Minister Abderrahmane Benbouzid said, adding to as many as 800,000 expected through the international Covax programme.
Algeria and China are close allies, and when the pandemic started Beijing sent medical teams to help.
China has been forging strong ties across Africa through its vaccine donations, including to Equatorial Guinea and Zimbabwe.
Algeria launched its vaccination campaign in January with a first shipment of 50,000 doses of the Russian Sputnik V, and has since received 50,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Algerian authorities have said that talks are underway with their Russian allies to produce the Sputnik vaccine in Algeria.
Algeria, with a population of some 44 million, has recorded nearly 3,000 deaths from Covid-19 as well as around 111,500 infections since the pandemic began.
Among those infected was President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, who was hospitalised in Germany.
Earth had its quietest period in decades during 2020 as the Covid pandemic significantly reduced human activity and its impact on the planet’s crust, according to scientists working on a global study.
Reuters: An international group of seismologists from 33 countries measured a drop of up to 50% in so-called ambient noise generated by humans travelling and factories humming after lockdowns came into force around the world.
The team, which included experts from the Swiss Seismological Service at ETH Zurich, a university, measured lower noise levels at 185 of the 268 seismic stations analysed around the world.
Urban ambient noise fell by up to 50% at some measuring stations during the tightest lockdown weeks, as buses and train services were reduced, aircraft grounded and factories shuttered.
This made it much quieter than Christmas, traditionally the quietest time of the year.
Children with special educational needs and disabilities (Send) in England have had their education “pushed to one side” during the course of the pandemic “for the convenience of the majority,” according to a survey of parents.
The poll of more than 1,000 parents uncovered “widespread failure” to restore special educational needs provision when children returned to school in September 2020, with a “sizeable” number of Send children unable to return to school at all.
Although children with education, health and care plans (EHCPs) – legally binding documents that entitle them to additional vital support – are among those eligible to attend school during lockdown, fewer than two in five were in school last week:
For a quick break from pandemic news, might I suggest the Komodo dragon:
I wrote about Komodo dragons: the best lizard of them all https://t.co/k69hkuyIRG pic.twitter.com/LiEF2ZBDpy
— Helen Sullivan (@helenrsullivan) February 18, 2021
Israel extends coronavirus border closure to 6 March
Israel said Thursday it will extend the closure of its airports and land borders for 14 more days in a bid to stem the coronavirus pandemic, AFP reports.
A joint statement from the prime minister’s office and the health minister said the country’s borders will remain closed until March 6, except for urgent reasons.
Israel had suspended international flights on January 24, before also closing the border crossings with Jordan and Egypt.
However, the immigration ministry said Thursday that six special flights were still authorised to land, carrying some 900 immigrants from Ethiopia, France, Russia, Ukraine and South America.
The new arrivals will be subject to quarantine upon arrival, the ministry said in a statement.
Despite what has been termed the world’s fastest vaccination campaign per capita, Israel has been registering a daily average of 4,000 new Covid-19 cases, down from around 8,000 in mid-January, official figures show.
A strict nationwide lockdown was imposed on December 27 and extended four times to combat the infection rate.
On February 5, Israel had announced a gradual easing of lockdown measures, with airports and land borders set to reopen on February 21.
According to latest figures from the health ministry, Israel, with a population of nine million, has registered more than 741,000 cases of Covid-19, including 5,501 deaths.
Fifth of Australians say they are unlikely to get vaccine
More than one in five Australians say they will “probably” or “definitely” not be vaccinated against coronavirus, with the spike in vaccine hesitancy potentially spelling trouble for the rollout.
A longitudinal study of almost 4,000 people conducted by the Australian National University found a “significant and substantial” increase in hesitancy since the same people were asked about getting the jab in August 2020.
Covid infections worldwide fall to lowest point since mid-October
Reported daily coronavirus infections have been falling across the world for a month and on Tuesday hit their lowest since mid-October, figures that suggest the seasonality of the virus show.
Reuters: But optimism over a way out of the crisis has been tempered by new variants of the virus, raising fears about the efficacy of vaccines, Reuters reports.
“Now is not the time to let your guard down,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s technical lead on Covid-19, told a briefing in Geneva. “We cannot let ourselves get into a situation where we have cases rise again.”
There were 351,335 new infections reported worldwide on Tuesday on a seven-day average, the figure falling from 863,737 on 7 January. There were 17,649 deaths on 26 January, falling to 10,957 on 16 February.
Covid infections are decreasing in the US, with 77,883 new infections reported on average each day. That’s 31% of the highest daily average reported on 8 January.
So far, 85 countries have begun vaccinating people for the coronavirus and have administered at least 187,892,000 doses, according to the Reuters figures.
Summary
Hello and welcome to today’s blow-by-blow of the coronavirus pandemic with me, Helen Sullivan.
There’s a fair bit of good news around today (but the WHO has warned us not to let down our guard): The weekly average coronavirus infections have fallen to the lowest level since October, according to Johns Hopkins University figures, and Joe Biden has pledged US$4bn to the Covax scheme, which is meant to ensure access to coronavirus vaccines for people in poor countries.
As always, it would be great to hear from you – scream back from the void on Twitter @helenrsullivan.
Here are the other key developments from the last few hours:
- Doctors and public health officials have pleaded with Germans to take up AstraZeneca Covid vaccines. AFP reports that officials in Italy, Austria and Bulgaria were also starting to signal some public resistance to the British vaccine, and France’s health minister, Olivier Véran, got the jab live on television to drum up support, amid similar reports in Sweden.
- A night-time curfew to limit coronavirus transmissions looks set to remain in place in the Netherlands as most parties in parliament voiced support for an emergency government bill which would circumvent a court order that the measure be dropped.
- A laboratory study suggests that the South African variant of the coronavirus may reduce antibody protection from the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine by two-thirds, and it is not clear if the shot will be effective against the mutation, the companies have said.
- The Vatican moved to clarify a decree that implied employees could lose their jobs if they refuse to get a Covid vaccination without legitimate health reasons, following criticism.
- The World Health Organization urged nations producing Covid vaccines not to distribute them unilaterally but to donate them to the global Covax scheme to ensure fairness.
- Protesters in Spain flouted coronavirus restrictions for a second consecutive night to demonstrate against the imprisonment of a rapper who had posted tweets insulting police and the Spanish monarchy, with more than 50 people arrested and dozens injured following clashes with officers.
- Reported daily coronavirus infections have been falling across the world for a month and on Tuesday hit their lowest since mid-October, figures that suggest the seasonality of the virus show.
