This blog is closing down now. Thanks for reading and here are some of the main developments in the pandemic in the past 24 hours. You can also keep up to date with all our coverage here:
- UK prime minister Boris Johnson has come under fire for delaying until spring 2022 the newly-announced public inquiry into his government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
- UK researchers have found that the Indian variant of Covid-19 may be spreading more quickly than the Kent variant that led to the UK’s second lockdown last year and spread around the world.
- The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said it has found more cases of potentially life-threatening blood clotting among people who received the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine and sees a “plausible causal association”.
- Covid was preventable and need not have led to such huge loss of life, according to an WHO-commissioned report.
- Norway will not resume the use of AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine and has delayed a decision on whether to start using jabs made by Johnson & Johnson, following a press conference led by the country’s prime minister Erna Solberg. It comes after a government-appointed commission recommended that both vaccines should be excluded from Norway’s vaccination programme due to a risk of rare but harmful side-effects.
- United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres has highlighted the need to double the capacity of Covid-19 vaccine production and for fairer redistribution of the shots in the developing world.
- Mexico’s health ministry on Wednesday reported 3,090 new confirmed coronavirus cases and 267 more deaths, Reuters reports. It brings the total number of cases in the country to 2,371,483 and fatalities to 219,590.
- Vaccines using mRNA technology such as Pfizer BioNTech and Moderna appear able to “neutralise” the variant of Covid-19 behind India’s outbreak, the EU’s drug watchdog said.
- Malaysia’s ministry of health said that the country has yet to see the worst of a current surge in coronavirus cases, as it reported its highest daily death count to date. It recorded 39 deaths among the 4,765 new cases on Wednesday, pushing its total caseload past 450,000 with 1,761 fatalities – the third highest rate in south-east Asia behind Indonesia and the Philippines.
Employment for frontline healthcare workers should be “conditional” on Covid-19 vaccination, according to an article in a medical journal.
The piece published in the Journal of Medical Ethics suggests that unless staff have a valid medical reason not to get the jab, it should be a condition of employment.
Those who refuse should be redeployed, or potentially suspended, according to the ethicists, PA reports.
They argue that the ramifications of not getting vaccinated would justify the move.
The UK’s government has already launched a consultation on whether people working in care homes with older adults should be required to have a Covid-19 vaccine.
Administering one dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine followed by one of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine (or vice versa) induces a higher frequency of mild to moderate side-effects compared with standard two doses of either vaccine, initial data from a key UK trial suggests.
The Oxford-led Com-Cov study is exploring the safety and efficacy of mixed-dose schedules given that they are being considered in several countries – including the UK – to fortify vaccine rollout programmes that are dependent on unstable vaccine supplies.
The trial involves 830 participants aged 50 and over, some of whom have underlying conditions. It is testing four combinations: Oxford/AstraZeneca + Oxford/AstraZeneca; Oxford/AstraZeneca + Pfizer/BioNTech; Pfizer/BioNTech + Pfizer/BioNTech; and Pfizer/BioNTech + Oxford/AstraZeneca.
Delaying the second dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccines as the UK has done can save lives, according to a modelling study from the US, which suggests other countries struggling to immunise their populations could adopt the strategy.
Second shots of both vaccines and also the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab are designed by the manufacturers to be given within three to four weeks of the first dose. The UK, in a bid to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible, opted for a 12-week delay between doses.
Immunological evidence has shown high protection from one dose – up to around 80% with both Pfizer and Moderna, which are both mRNA vaccines so made in a similar way. In the UK, there is also evidence from the immunisation programme that people given a single dose of the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines are unlikely to be hospitalised with Covid.
The US study, from scientists at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, models the effect of delaying second doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines – the two used in the US – in populations where the vaccine roll-out is slow because of global shortages.
They found that getting a single dose to more people by delaying the second shot would save lives. In people under-65, where the vaccine efficacy is 80% and only 0.1% to 0.3% of the population is vaccinated per day, between 47 and 26 deaths per 100,000 people could be averted, they say in their paper in the BMJ. [Link will go live when the embargo lifts]
Dr Peter English, retired consultant in communicable disease control, said the study demonstrates that delaying the second dose worldwide will most quickly control the disease and prevent emerging variants from affecting every country.
Good news: Adolescents 12 and up can now get the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Hear more from Dr. Walensky about how the COVID-19 vaccine protects kids and their families: pic.twitter.com/PkRMxpBbBc
— President Biden (@POTUS) May 12, 2021
Brazil recorded 76,692 further confirmed cases of coronavirus in the past 24 hours along with 2,494 deaths, the country’s health ministry said on Wednesday.
Brazil has registered more than 15.3 million cases since the pandemic began, while the official death toll has risen to 428,034, according to ministry data, Reuters reports.
Authorities in Brazil’s most populous state said they have mobilised to try to convince the Chinese government to authorise the export of raw material to make millions of Covid-19 vaccines needed amid a sudden shortage.
The South American nation is highly dependent on a shot made by pharmaceutical company Sinovac for its immunisation efforts, and in recent weeks several Brazilian cities have either suspended or delayed vaccinations due to faltering supplies, Associated Press reports.
The factory that produces the vaccine locally, at Sao Paulo’s state-run Butantan Institute, has slowed production due to lack of raw material, and Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro and his economy minister, Paulo Guedes, made statements critical of China this month.
Sao Paulo’s governor João Doria — an adversary of Bolsonaro’s — implied their comments may have created the bottleneck.
Hours after speaking to China’s ambassador to Brazil, Doria said in a press conference that Bolsonaro and Guedes should apologise to the Asian nation for their recent comments so China can resume exports.
“He (Chinese ambassador Yang Wanming) told me he will talk to China’s ministry of foreign affairs tomorrow to renew his appeal to release the raw material that is ready at the Sinovac laboratory,” Doria said.
“That raw material is ready and available in refrigerated containers, just waiting for the authorisation of the Chinese government.”
Doria added there was risk of a halt in immunisation efforts if about 10,000 liters of raw material stuck in China — enough to bottle 18 million shots — does not arrive soon.
One of Britain’s leading imams has urged Muslims not to “drop the ball” and to continue to refrain from mixing households and hugging friends and family as Eid celebrations begin.
Qari Asim, chairman of the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board (Minab), told the PA news agency it will be “excruciatingly painful” to celebrate Eid without gathering in numbers and embracing loved ones, especially as the major relaxation of Covid-19 restrictions is just a few days away.
But he urged everyone to “take that one extra step”.
He said: “This Eid will be very different in the sense that we will not be able to greet each other in the traditional way of embracing each other, hugging and handshaking with each other.
“But I’m really hopeful that next Eid we will be able to be with each other and embrace each other and share a meal with our extended family and friends.
“We just have to take that one extra step to get us through this pandemic and make sure that we do not drop the ball before the restrictions are completely eased.”
Australians will have another vaccine option after the pharmaceutical company Moderna announced it has signed a deal with the federal government to provide 25m doses of its mRNA-based vaccine to the nation.
The announcement was made overnight in a press release and has not yet been formally endorsed by the federal government. It is also subject to regulatory approval by the Therapeutic Goods Administration, but Moderna says it will lodge a submission shortly.
The company says 10m doses could arrive in Australia by the end of the year and a further 15m would arrive in 2022.
US President Joe Biden has urged parents to get their children vaccinated after a government advisory panel authorised the Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine for children aged 12 to 15.
“Now that vaccine is authorised for ages 12 and up, and I encourage their parents to make sure they get the shot,” Biden said.
“This is one more giant step on our fight against the pandemic.”
A US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advisory panel backed use of the vaccine for younger adolescents in a unanimous vote, Reuters reports.
Updated
US trade representative Katherine Tai has said she is pushing for a waiver of Covid-19 vaccine intellectual property rights because the United States and drug makers have “an obligation to help save the world right now.”
Tai, speaking at a US Senate finance committee hearing, said she viewed the World Trade Organization talks as a way to remove the intellectual property issue as an obstacle to vaccine production. She backed the WTO negotiations last week.
She praised the work of US companies in quickly developing and producing safe and effective vaccines, adding that on intellectual property, “The message that I want to give to them is, ‘You can be a hero here.’”
Updated
California governor Gavin Newsom said the state would stop requiring people to wear masks in almost all circumstances on June 15, describing a world he said will look “a lot like the world we entered into before the pandemic.”
“We’re not wearing face coverings. We’re not restricted in any way, shape or form from doing the old things that we used to do, save for huge, large-scale indoor convention events like that, where we use our common sense,” Newsom said in an interview with Fox 11’s Elex Michaelson.
California has required people to wear masks in public places since June 18. The guidance requires people to wear a mask when gathering indoors with people who are not vaccinated.
Fully vaccinated people can meet indoors without wearing a mask. They can also not wear a mask outdoors, except when attending large gatherings such as sporting events, festivals and concerts.
A summary of today's developments
- The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said it has found more cases of potentially life-threatening blood clotting among people who received the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine and sees a “plausible causal association”.
- Norway will not resume the use of AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine and has delayed a decision on whether to start using jabs made by Johnson & Johnson, following a press conference led by the country’s prime minister Erna Solberg. It comes after a government-appointed commission recommended that both vaccines should be excluded from Norway’s vaccination programme due to a risk of rare but harmful side-effects.
- Boris Johnson has come under fire from experts and bereaved families for delaying until spring 2022 the newly-announced public inquiry into the UK’s government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
- United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres has highlighted the need to double the capacity of Covid-19 vaccine production and for fairer redistribution of the shots in the developing world.
- Mexico’s health ministry on Wednesday reported 3,090 new confirmed coronavirus cases and 267 more deaths, Reuters reports. It brings the total number of cases in the country to 2,371,483 and fatalities to 219,590.
- Coronavirus vaccines using mRNA technology like Pfizer BioNTech and Moderna appear able to “neutralise” the variant of Covid-19 behind India’s outbreak, the EU’s drug watchdog said.
- Malaysia’s ministry of health said that the country has yet to see the worst of a current surge in coronavirus cases, as it reported its highest daily death count to date. It recorded 39 deaths among the 4,765 new cases on Wednesday, pushing its total caseload past 450,000 with 1,761 fatalities – the third highest rate in Southeast Asia behind Indonesia and the Philippines.
- One investigator behind a damning report highlighting serious mistakes within pandemic responses has called for urgent reform to the World Health Organisation, giving it greater powers, so that the world may be able to better withstand future pandemic threats.
Mexico’s health ministry on Wednesday reported 3,090 new confirmed coronavirus cases and 267 more deaths, Reuters reports.
It brings the total number of cases in the country to 2,371,483 and fatalities to 219,590.
Separate government data published in March suggested the real death toll may be at least 60% above the confirmed figure.
The US has administered 264,680,844 doses of Covid-19 vaccines in the country as of Wednesday morning and distributed 337,089,765 doses, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
Those figures are up from the 263,132,561 vaccine doses the CDC said had gone into arms by May 11 out of 334,081,065 doses delivered.
The agency said 153,986,312 people had received at least one dose, while 117,647,439 people are fully vaccinated as of Wednesday, Reuters reports.
Boris Johnson has come under fire from experts and bereaved families for delaying until spring 2022 the newly-announced public inquiry into the UK’s government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
Work will now begin to appoint a chair and other potential panellists, and draw up terms of reference, with some hopeful that the inquiry will be led by a judge. The probe is likely to start in a year’s time, Johnson told the House of Commons.
Experts said it could take three to six months to establish so could be up and running much sooner than spring 2022 if desired. Lord Falconer, who passed the Inquiries Act as lord chancellor, said the government would be confident the pandemic inquiry will not conclude before the next general election, expected in 2023.
Here is more from United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres on his call to double the capacity of Covid-19 vaccine production and for fairer redistribution of the shots in the developing world.
“It is totally unacceptable to live in the world, in which developed countries can vaccinate most of its population, while many developing countries have not access to one single dose,” Guterres told a briefing after meeting Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow.
He mentioned the risks of coronavirus mutations and new variants as the virus spreads “like wildfire” in different parts of the developing world.
“So, that’s in interest of everybody that everybody is vaccinated everywhere. We believe that we need two things: to double the world’s capacity of production of vaccines and at the same time to have a more equitable distribution of vaccines.”
Updated
Boris Johnson has said an independent public inquiry with wide-ranging statutory powers will begin hearing evidence in spring 2022 into the UK government’s handling of Covid-19.
Although the terms of reference have yet to be agreed, the inquiry is expected to focus on identifying lessons from the pandemic, which has claimed the lives of more than 127,500 people, Europe’s highest death toll.
Here are some areas that could be under scrutiny:
Preparedness
As recently as 2018, the authors of the UK’s biological security strategy felt confident enough to boast that the UK was “globally renowned for the quality of our preparedness planning, and we have world-leading capabilities to address significant biological risks”.
Surge testing has been deployed in parts of the UK after “multiple” cases of the South African variant of coronavirus were discovered, PA reports.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said those with confirmed cases in Redditch and Worcestershire, have since self-isolated and their contacts have been identified.
NHS Test and Trace and Redditch Borough Council are providing additional testing and genomic sequencing in the affected areas and urged anyone who lived and worked there to take a PCR test “whether they were showing symptoms or not”.
The DHSC has not confirmed which areas of Redditch are affected but said residents could check by entering their postcodes on the Worcestershire County Council website.
PCR tests are taken at a test site or at home, with results processed by a lab.
People with symptoms can book a free test online or by phone so they can be tested at a testing site or have a testing kit sent to them at home.
Updated
The European Union’s executive has called on countries of the bloc to temporarily halt non-essential travel from India to limit the spread of the Covid-19 variant.
The European Commission said its proposal followed the World Health Organisation’s proposal on Monday to reclassify the B.1.617.2 strain found in India as a “variant of concern”, raising the alert from a “variant of interest”.
EU countries should apply an “emergency brake” on non-essential travel from India, it said in a statement.
“It is important to limit to the strict minimum the categories of travellers that can travel from India for essential reasons and to subject those who may still travel from India to strict testing and quarantine arrangements,” the Commission added.
Updated
A UK holiday firm has temporarily stopped selling trips abroad for the summer in response to the government’s “traffic light” system for quarantine-free travel, PA reports.
On the Beach’s chief executive Simon Cooper said the system provides no clarity beyond a three-week window about which destinations people can travel to without isolating.
He said his firm had “no interest in selling holidays that are unlikely to happen” and would suspend sales for trips in June, July and August.
Under the so-called traffic light system, which has been adopted by England and Scotland, countries are divided into three categories - green, amber and red.
Travellers who visit a country on the green list when international travel resumes from May 17 will not have to quarantine upon their return.
United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres has highlighted the need to double the capacity of Covid-19 vaccine production, Reuters reports.
Speaking at a briefing with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov after talks in Moscow, he also said Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine is able to address the pandemic challenges.
'Plausible causal association' between J&J jab and potentially life-threatening blood clotting
Here’s more on the snippet we posted earlier. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said it has found more cases of potentially life-threatening blood clotting among people who received the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine and sees a “plausible causal association”.
Reuters has the story:
The CDC said in a presentation the agency has now identified 28 cases of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) among the more than 8.7 million people who had received the J&J vaccine. TTS involves blood clots accompanied by a low level of platelets - the cells in the blood that help it to clot.
So far, three of the 28 have died. Previously, as of 25 April, the CDC had reported 17 cases of clotting among nearly 8 million people given vaccines.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices or ACIP, which advises the CDC, recommended on 23 April that the US lift a 10-day pause on the J&J vaccinations imposed to review safety data on the clotting issue. The panel will review the new data later today.
The CDC said the events appear similar to what is being observed following administration of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine in Europe.
Both vaccines are based on a new technology using adenoviruses, which cause the common cold and have been modified to essentially render them harmless. The viruses are used to carry instructions into the body to make specific coronavirus proteins, priming the immune system to make antibodies that fight off the actual virus.
Scientists are working to find the potential mechanism that would explain the blood clots. A leading hypothesis appears to be that the vaccines are triggering a rare immune response that could be related to these viral vectors.
The syndrome does not appear to be associated with either of the vaccines produced by Pfizer and BioNTec, or Moderna.
And this just in ... The US should begin vaccinating adolescents with Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 jab, advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were told today, ahead of a vote awaited by states ready to start inoculating younger people.
Reuters reports:
The US Food and Drug Administration on Monday authorised the vaccine for children aged 12 to 15, offering relief to parents eager to get their children back to schools and summer camps.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) provides recommendations to the CDC that many states will consider as they begin administering the two-shot vaccine to adolescents this week.
A working group concluded that benefits of the vaccine clearly outweigh risks and recommended the vaccine in a presentation to the meeting.
No one in the age group who received the vaccine in a clinical study got Covid-19, and there were no cases of Bell’s Palsy or severe allergic reactions, according to the working group presentation, which confirmed previous data.
Pfizer is running a separate trial testing the vaccine in children as young as 6-months-old, and has said it expects data on its use in 2- to 11-year-olds in September. The 2,260 participants in the 12-to-15 age group - half of whom were given placebo - were tested as an expansion of Pfizer’s more than 46,000-person trial.
Georgia yesterday became the latest US state, along with Delaware and Arkansas, to make Covid-19 vaccinations available to children as young as 12.
Reuters has the story:
Providers in these states are already offering Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine to those aged 12 to 15 – just a day after US regulators authorised it for emergency use in that age group.
A spokeswoman for Georgia’s public health agency said it chose to give shots right away to avoid turning young people away and risking them not coming back for the first jab of the two-shot regimen. Delaware also started early to meet demand for shots from young people and their parents, a spokeswoman said.
More than a dozen states surveyed by Reuters - including Texas, Idaho, Arizona, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois and Minnesota - said they would wait for the go-ahead from an advisory committee of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) before they start administering the vaccine to children under 16.
On Monday, US president Joe Biden hailed the expanded FDA authorization as “a promising development in our fight against the virus.”
Most children with Covid-19 only develop mild symptoms or no symptoms at all, but can still spread the virus to vulnerable people. Parents may question the risks versus benefits, given the unknowns about the long-term effect of the vaccines on children’s development and their likelihood of being spared severe illness.
Australia has earmarked 25 million Covid vaccine doses from Moderna as it tries to speed up vaccinations of people under 50 after deciding against AstraZeneca, whose jab has been linked to rare blood clots.
Reuters reports:
The country had last month doubled its order for Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine to 40 million shots, preferring it over AstraZeneca for its nearly 12 million people in that age group.
Moderna said it will supply 10 million shots against the original strain of the virus this year and 15 million doses of its updated variant booster candidate in 2022.
Australia’s isolation strategy has helped it so far prevent a large pandemic impact, but its rollout of authorized vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and AstraZeneca has been slow. It has already walked back on its goal to vaccinate nearly all of its 26 million population by year end.
The prospect of Australia not achieving the objective until 2022 gained ground yesterday as its annual budget showed an expectation that its borders would not reopen until mid-2022, building pressure on Prime Minister Scott Morrison who faces an election in a year.
Australia’s supply deal with Moderna is subject to regulatory nod for the booster shot as well as its original vaccine candidate, which is authorised for emergency use in individuals above 18 years of age in the US.
Updated
More clinical and real-world data is needed on how well and for how long Covid vaccines are protective before any decisions should be made on offering third or booster doses, Europe’s drug regulators have said.
Reuters reports:
The European Medicines Agency’s head of biological health threats and vaccines strategy Marco Cavaleri cautioned against making “premature” moves to deploy booster Covid-19 shots.
“We need to look into real-world evidence... to give us the data we need to know when would be the right time to give a third dose,” he said. “We need to have data that show in the field, either real-world evidence or clinical trials, that show what is the level of protection that is retained by the vaccines that we currently have.”
However, the EUn has already begun ordering Covid-19 booster vaccines and Britain and the United States have also begun preparing plans to offer third doses before the winter.
Asked about evidence so far on COVID-19 vaccine performance against a new variant that emerged in India, Cavaleri said EMA was monitoring the situation “very closely” and that data was “rather reassuring” for vaccines in use in the EU.
Spain is aiming to welcome British tourists back without the need for a negative Covid test from 20 May, the country’s tourism minister has confirmed, as she urged overseas visitors to come and “enjoy a perfect holiday after the worst year of our lives”.
The minister, María Reyes, said two safety systems were in place to guarantee visitors’ health: the EU green digital certificate, which from June will show if the holder has been vaccinated, tested or recently recovered from Covid, and the forthcoming updating of EU recommendations on non-essential travel from countries outside the bloc.
The recommendations will be reviewed in the [EU] foreign affairs council on 20 May, and that will allow us to provide certainty to markets outside the European Union when it comes to the restarting of travel – especially travel from the UK, which is our largest market.
If all goes well, from 20 May – although there’s always a bit of the unknown over the evolution of the pandemic in the countries we’re focusing on with the campaign, though the numbers from the UK look good on both vaccination and accumulated incidence – Britons will be able to come to Spain. What’s more, they won’t be asked for a PCR test when they arrive in the country. I think it’s really good news.
At least 90 more bodies of suspected Covid-19 victims have washed up in rivers in India, as the virus continues to spread into poor rural areas and the country recorded its highest daily death toll so far.
More than 70 corpses were discovered floating in the Ganges River in the Buxar district of the state of Bihar and dozens more bodies were found upstream in the Ghazipur and Ballia districts in the neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh.
It came as India recorded another surge in deaths nationwide, with 4,205 recorded yesterday, the highest of the pandemic so far.
Greece is to lift its internal travel restrictions on 14 May, the day it’s tourism season opens, officials have said, whilst retaining health safeguards for the country’s more vulnerable islands.
AFP reports:
For the first time since a second Covid-19 lockdown was imposed in November, Greeks will no longer be required to notify authorities by SMS when leaving their homes. However, anyone travelling to Greek islands by sea or air must show a vaccination certificate or a negative test result, minister Akis Skertsos told reporters.
Officials aim to fully vaccinate at least 35% of island populations by the end of June. Greece is keen to attract crowds of holidaymakers back to its idyllic islands, which are some of its most popular travel destinations, with tourism bringing in as much as a quarter of Greece’s annual income
Between July and late November last year, fewer than 2,700 people among 5 million arrivals in Greece tested positive for coronavirus, according to government data. Most islands have less extensive health facilities than the mainland, and an initiative to vaccinate local populations is underway.
Greece is recording more than 2,000 Covid-19 infections daily, mostly in Athens, along with dozens of deaths. But the government has since early April been gradually reopening non-essential shops and café terraces to prepare for the travel season. Museums are reopening Friday.
Norway drops AstraZeneca jab and leaves on hold J&J's over harmful side-effects
We now have confirmation that Norway will not resume the use of AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine and has delayed a decision on whether to start using jabs made by Johnson & Johnson, following a press conference led by the country’s prime minister Erna Solberg.
It comes after a government-appointed commission recommended that both vaccines should be excluded from Norway’s vaccination programme due to a risk of rare but harmful side-effects.
Earlier we reported that on 11 March, authorities suspended the AstraZeneca rollout after a small number of younger inoculated people were hospitalised for a combination of blood clots, bleeding and a low count of platelets, some of whom later died.
A study in Denmark and Norway found slightly increased rates of vein blood clots among people who have had a first dose of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, including clots in the brain, compared with expected rates in the general population.
Updated
Nearly 40% of all global deaths related to Covid-19 reported last week happened in the Americas, and nearly 80% of the region’s intensive care units are filled with Covid-19 patients, the Pan American Health Organization has said.
Reuters has the story:
“This is a clear sign that transmission is far from being controlled in our region, even as countries like the United States and Brazil are reporting reductions in cases,” PAHO director Carissa Etienne told a webcast news conference.
India’s B.1.617 predominant coronavirus variant has been detected in six countries of the Americas and PAHO is worried that it is highly transmissible, incident manager Sylvain Aldighieri said.
More than 140 million people have been fully vaccinated against Covid in the Americas, Etienne said. The World Health Organization’s recent approval of China’s Sinopharm vaccine will offer fresh hope of expanding access to vaccines in Latin American countries, PAHO said.
“But until we have enough vaccines to protect everyone, our health systems and the patients that rely on them remain in danger,” Etienne warned.
Across the PAHO region, nearly 80% of our intensive care units are filled with Covid patients, and the numbers are even more dire in some places, it said.
Cuba continues to drive most new infections in the Caribbean, PAHO said, while Canada is seeing higher rates of infections in the east and across the northern territory, home to a majority indigenous population.
Covid-related deaths in the US have fallen to an average of around 600 per day — the lowest level in 10 months — with the number of lives lost dropping to single digits in well over half the states and hitting zero on some days.
AP reports:
Confirmed infections, meanwhile, have fallen to about 38,000 day on average, their lowest mark since mid-September. While that is still cause for concern, they have plummeted 85% from a peak of more than a quarter-million cases per day in early January.
The last time deaths were this low was early July, nearly a year ago. Covid deaths in the U.S. topped out in mid-January at an average of more than 3,400 a day, just a month into the biggest vaccination drive in the nation’s history.
Kansas reported no new deaths from Friday through until Monday. In Massachusetts, the Boston Herald put a huge zero on Wednesday’s front page under the headline “First time in nearly a year state has no new coronavirus deaths.”
Dr Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins University, said that vaccinations have been crucial even as the nation struggles to reach herd immunity.
Nearly 45% of the nation’s adults are fully vaccinated, and over 58% have received at least one dose, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This week, Pfizer’s vaccine won authorisation for use in 12- to 15-year-olds, in a move that could make it easier to reopen the nation’s schools. The overall US death toll stands at about 583,000.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said it has identified 28 cases of serious blood clotting among the more than 8.7 million people who had received the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine.
The CDC said in a presentation that the highest rates of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome – blood clotting combined with a low platelet count – were among women aged 30 to 49. Only six of the clotting events identified were in men.
Italy will launch a new equity fund financed with an initial €3 billion to help its coronavirus-hit companies raise capital, two government officials told Reuters.
The new fund, dubbed “Patrimonio Rilancio”, will be financed mainly through dedicated debt issues and operate as a special purpose vehicle managed by state lender and equity investor Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP).
The 170-year-old CDP, which the treasury controls with an 83% holding, is playing an increasingly active role in Italy Inc to keep strategic assets in national hands and mitigate the economic damage caused by the pandemic.
Italy’s public debt, proportionally the highest in the euro zone after Greece, reached a record 155.6% of GDP at the end of 2020 and the DEF forecasts it will climb to 159.8% this year, the highest level in Italy’s post-war history.
Taking advantage of the EU’s more flexible approach to state aid in the face of recession, the fund targets non-financial businesses in acute difficulties with revenues of more than 50 million euros.
Updated
Germany will let travellers who have been vaccinated against Covid or recovered from infection avoid testing and quarantine when entering the country, unless they come from areas where variants of concern are prevalent.
AP has the story:
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Cabinet today approved a change to existing rules that will also allow non-vaccinated people to end their quarantine early if they test negative.
German media have reported that doctors in the country are coming under growing pressure from people hoping to go on summer vacation to give them vaccines even though they aren’t entitled to them yet.
Health minister Jens Spahn said the country expects to roll out its digital immunity certificate by the end of June, making it easier to prove a person has been fully vaccinated.
The certificate can be stored in an app that can be used instead of the yellow World Health Organization vaccine booklet. The goal is for it to be compatible with a vaccine certification system being developed by the European Union.
Slovakia is set to keep AstraZeneca in the group of jabs used in its vaccination campaign, despite yesterday suspending general use of the shots after a recipient died in circumstances deemed likely related to the jab.
AP reports:
Slovakia yesterday halted use of the two-shot AstraZeneca vaccine after its State Institute for Drug Control concluded last week that the death of a 47-year-old woman who received the AstraZeneca was “likely” linked to the vaccine.
AstraZeneca is still being administered, however, to those who have already gotten the first dose and are awaiting a second shot. It’s currently being given to people between the ages of 18 and 44.
Health minister Vladimir Lengvarsky said the cause of woman’s death was still under investigation. He said another, and the main reason, for the suspension was that Slovakia does not have enough AstraZeneca shots to continue their administration.
Slovakia, like other members of the European Union, have seen a drop in deliveries from the company.
“We still count on AstraZeneca in our vaccination plan,” Lengvarsky said. Lengvarsky said his ministry was working to allow people to have a free choice beginning in June among the available vaccines, “including the unregistered ones.”
The US track and field team has cancelled its pre-Olympics training camp in Japan out of concerns for safety amid the pandemic, local authorities have announced, raising more questions about the holding of the Games.
Reuters reports:
The team was set to train in Chiba, the prefecture neighbouring Tokyo, leading up to the summer Games, but cancelled “out of concerns for their athletes’ safety”, according to a statement from the Chiba administration.
There was no immediate comment from USA Track and Field. “It is a shame they have decided to cancel, but I believe they made the best decision possible in the current situation,” Chiba governor Toshihito Kumagai said in the statement.
With less than three months to go before the Games begin on July 23, Japan is battling a surge in coronavirus infections, and a majority of the population wants them cancelled or postponed for a second time.
To forestall a virus outbreak during the event, Japan is preparing to offer vaccinations to about 2,500 Olympic and Paralympic athletes and support staff, using donated shots.
However, just 2.6% of the population has been vaccinated, and reports last month of priority for athletes spurred criticism on social media amid public anger over the slow pace of the inoculation campaign.
Vaccine tourism has rightly been denounced throughout the pandemic as a means of the more privileged protecting themselves, likely at the expense of others, but now whole countries are getting in on the act.
San Marino, an independent micro-state in northern Italy, has announced it is to offer the Russian Sputnik Covid-19 vaccine to tourists for €50 euros.
AFP reports:
The fee covers both doses of the vaccine, Health Minister Roberto Ciavatta told a press conference. The jab will be made available to anyone who books a hotel for at least three nights and returns within three or four weeks for the second injection.
The scheme, valid from 17 May, will give San Marino “a real possibility to attract a kind of tourism that none of us would have ever before thought possible to attract,” Foreign Minister Luca Beccari said.
The Russian vaccine has not been authorised by European Union authorities, but San Marino is not a member of the bloc and has been dispensing it since early March.
The tiny hilltop republic has around 34,000 citizens and since starting the vaccination campaign has administered 36,000 doses and fully vaccinated some 22,000 people.
In a statement this week, health authorities said San Marino had reported no new infections in the previous 24 hours. Beccari said that the republic was close to being “Covid free”.
The Maldives has banned travellers from across South Asia in a bid to contain surging Covid-19 infections despite having one of the world’s most successful vaccination roll-outs.
AFP reports:
Sri Lanka and other countries in the region have also imposed travel restrictions as they battle a new wave of the virus that has hit India and its neighbours. The Maldives, whose economy relies on tourists visiting its pristine atolls, has suffered a more than 15-fold increase in daily infections in the past week.
The Indian Ocean nation, which halted international flights for more than three months last year, saw a record single-day rise of 1,500 cases on Tuesday - compared with less than 100 just one month ago.
Authorities said tourist arrivals from the key Indian market and other South Asian countries would stop from Thursday. They have already banned the entry of foreign labourers from around South Asia except health workers.
“These restrictions apply to travellers originating from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka,” Maldives Immigration said in a statement. Anyone who has only transited through South Asia would also be included, it added.
Indians have been the largest single group of visitors to the Maldives this year. Bollywood stars such as Alia Bhatt and her partner Ranbir Kapoor are among celebrities to have been pictured using the country as an escape from the pandemic.
MRNA vaccines like Pfizer and Modern appear to 'neutralise' Indian variant - EMA
Coronavirus vaccines using mRNA technology like Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna appear able to “neutralise” the variant of Covid-19 behind India’s outbreak, the EU’s drug watchdog said Wednesday.
AFP has the story:
There is “promising evidence” that such jabs could counter the B.1.617 variant of Covid-19, first found in India in October and now in dozens of countries around the world, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) said.
“The data seems to be rather reassuring on the fact that at least the messenger RNA vaccines will be able to neutralise this variant, at least to an extent that will guarantee sufficient protection,” Marco Cavaleri, the EMA’s head of vaccine strategy, told a news conference.
The Amsterdam-based regulator was “monitoring very closely” the data emerging about the Indian variant, he added.
Cavaleri said the EMA also believed rival vaccines using viral vector technology would be effective but they were waiting for “real world data” from the use of a version of AstraZeneca’s vaccine in India.
Updated
China has delivered half a million Sinopharm Covid-19 vaccine doses to Bangladesh, in Beijing’s latest move to fill the gap left by India as it reels from the pandemic.
AFP reports:
After cases surged in March, India froze exports of coronavirus vaccines to dozens of countries - including those in south Asia where New Delhi has held sway.
Although Dhaka had signed an agreement with India to buy 30m doses only 7m arrived – plus another 3.3m as a gift – before New Delhi called a halt to exports.
Meanwhile, Senegal is due to receive 300,000 doses of the Chinese-made coronavirus vaccine Sinopharm this week, the governments of the west African country and China said.
In a tweet on Tuesday, the Senegalese president, Macky Sall, said that China was going to deliver 300,000 vaccine doses, as well as 308,000 syringes. “I appreciate this gesture of solitary from China,” he said.
As with other African states, Senegal’s infection rate is far below levels reached in the west, having recorded more than 40,000 Covid-19 infections since March 2020 and 1,121 deaths.
Senegal received some 300,000 AstraZeneca doses this year as part of the global Covax programme aimed at boosting immunisation in poorer nations. But the government also bought 200,000 doses of Sinopharm for its vaccination campaign.
Updated
The economy of the EU will bounce back more quickly than expected, owing in part to the quickening pace of its vaccination programme after a “slow start”, the European Commission has forecast.
The brighter outlook from Brussels also takes into account payouts from the EU’s €800bn (£686bn) recovery package and a sharper than predicted rebound in global trade and activity, largely driven by the performances of the US and China.
Here’s our health editor Sarah Boseley’s write up of the panel’s report on the global response to the pandemic, which we reported on earlier.
The Covid pandemic was a preventable disaster that need not have cost millions of lives if the world had reacted more quickly, according to an independent high-level panel, which castigates global leaders and calls for major changes to bring it to an end and ensure it cannot happen again.
The report of the panel, chaired by the former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a former president of Liberia, found “weak links at every point in the chain”.
It said preparation was inconsistent and underfunded, the alert system too slow and too meek, while the World Health Organization was underpowered. It concluded the response had exacerbated inequalities. “Global political leadership was absent,” the report said.
In an opinion piece for the Guardian, Clark and Sirleaf lament how some countries are still experiencing wave after wave of infections despite knowing how to prevent them.
The leading vaccine-producing countries and manufacturers should agree on voluntary licensing and technology transfers within the next three months. The World Trade Organization (WTO) and World Health Organization (WHO) should convene the major actors as soon as they can, and if they can’t agree, a waiver of intellectual property rights under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (Trips) should come into force.
Simultaneously, every national government must implement proven public health measures to stop the spread of the virus. The rollercoaster of patchy controls and premature lifting of restrictions is not working.
Four people have been charged after being arrested at a protest on Tuesday at AstraZeneca’s UK headquarters calling on the company to waive its coronavirus vaccine patent.
Ahead of the “People’s Vaccine” protest, activists had blockaded the doors of the UK headquarters in Cambridge while others climbed above its entrance to hang a banner reading: “People’s vaccine not profit vaccine.”
Towards the end of a small, rain-punctuated rally, addressed by the Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal and others, a struggle began between protesters and police when officers moved in to make arrests.
Ruth Wood, 49, of Cambridge, was charged with obstructing a constable; Tabitha Dunthorne, 20, of Epping, and Mahoney Goodman, 22, of Cambridge, were charged with criminal damage; and a 17-year-old boy was charged with assaulting an emergency worker.
Wood, Dunthorne and Goodman will appear at Cambridge magistrates’ court on 9 June and the teenager will appear there on 27 July, according to Cambridgeshire constabulary.
Local arrestee support networks would help them, activists at Tuesday’s protest said. The protest was led by the youth network of Global Justice now and supported by Global Justice Bloc and Movement Against Racism, and the Cambridge chapters of Keep our NHS Public, Stop The War Coalition, People’s Assembly and Extinction Rebellion.
Protesters have blockaded @AstraZeneca’s cambridge hq to call for the company to waive the patent for its #coronavirus vaccine #PeoplesVaccine pic.twitter.com/Nd26h51CCB
— Damien Gayle (@damiengayle) May 11, 2021
Updated
Sweden will delay plans to ease Covid-19 restrictions on some public gatherings, such as football matches, until 1 June, the prime minister Stefan Lofven has said.
Reuters reports:
The government had said at the end of last month it hoped to ease restrictions and allow more spectators for some sporting and cultural events from 17 May, but Lofven said the situation in the health system remained strained.
“We see a certain light at the end of the tunnel, but we are not there yet,” Lofven told reporters. “If we are careless now, we will pay later.”
Later on Wednesday, the Public Health Agency will present a plan to the government about how other restrictions can be eased, when the situation with the pandemic allows.
If the number of infections falls, the vaccination programme moves forward as planned and the situation in the healthcare system eases, many of the restrictions could be eased later in the summer, Health Agency head Johan Carlson said.
Carlson said that the agency had also told the government that restaurants should be allowed to stay open longer from 1 June.
Binding rules include curbs on restaurant opening hours, limiting the number of people in shops and malls and effectively closing museums, public pools and amusement parks.
Sweden’s confirmed cases per capita have been among the highest in Europe in recent weeks, but Carlson said that the situation was showing signs of stabilising.
The country reported 6,330 new cases on Wednesday and 50 deaths.
Despite the absence of lockdowns, Sweden had lower excess mortality than most European countries in 2020, but higher than that of its Nordic neighbours.
Updated
Malaysia records highest daily tally coronavirus related deaths
Malaysia’s ministry of health said that the country has yet to see the worst of a current surge in coronavirus cases, as it reported its highest daily death count to date.
Malaysia recorded 39 deaths among the 4,765 new cases on Wednesday, pushing its total caseload past 450,000 with 1,761 fatalities – the third highest rate in Southeast Asia behind Indonesia and the Philippines.
Reuters reports:
The government on Monday declared a nationwide lockdown, just days before the Eid al-Fitr celebration, as the country grapples with a jump in cases that health authorities say could be linked to new and highly-infection variants.
“The communal spread of Covid-19 in the country is increasingly worrying,” health ministry director general Noor Hisham Abdullah said in a statement.
“The public need to make efforts to avoid being infected by this dangerous Covid-19 virus.”
The ministry earlier warned in a tweet that new daily cases could hit 5,000 by mid-May, a number not seen since late January during an earlier spike.
Health authorities said more infections involving new variants have been detected and nearly 80% of confirmed cases were asymptomatic.
All but one of the four Covid-19 variants of global concern have been detected in Malaysia, most recently the highly contagious B.1.617 variant first identified in India, although that case was contained, authorities said.
Just over 1.17 million people in Malaysia have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine as of Tuesday, a rollout critics say is too slow. The government is aiming to inoculate 80% of the 32 million population by December.
Updated
The British prime minister has announced an inquiry next year into the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, that is likely to focus on why the UK suffered Europe’s worst death toll and was slow initially to impose a lockdown.
Boris Johnson and his ministers said there are lessons to be learned from the worst public health crisis in decades, but point to the United Kingdom’s swift vaccine rollout as evidence that there were also successes.
“This process will place the state’s actions under the microscope,” Johnson told parliament.
You can read the full story here:
Reuters reports:
The public inquiry and its final report could define Johnson’s political legacy and, depending on when the findings are published, influence voters ahead of a national election currently due some time before 2024.
It will delve into the decision-making at the heart of the British state when ministers mulled the imposition of unprecedented peacetime restrictions and scrambled to buy billions of pounds worth of drugs and equipment.
The UK’s official death toll is 127,629 - Europe’s worst figure and the world’s fifth worst, after the United States, Brazil, India and Mexico, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Johnson has been accused by opponents of reacting too slowly to the crisis, especially at the onset, failing to supply sufficient protective equipment and bungling the testing system.
So far 35.6 million people in the United Kingdom, more than two thirds of the adult population, have had a first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.
Updated
Poland will bring forward the reopening of cinemas and start vaccinating 16- and 17-year-olds, the prime minister has said, as Covid-19 cases decline.
Reuters reports:
The country reported 4,255 new cases on Wednesday, part of a marked decrease since the peak of the third wave in May, when there were as many as 35,253 daily cases. This has given authorities the confidence to ease restrictions faster than originally planned.
“We are accelerating the opening of cinemas, theatres, concert halls and cultural institutions by one week, or exactly eight days, to May 21, so that … these sections of social and socio-economic life can start earlier,” Mateusz Morawiecki told a news conference.
He also said gyms and fitness centres would open one day earlier than planned on 28 May, and that the country would start vaccinating 16- and 17-year-olds.
On Thursday, France said it would extend its vaccine rollout to people aged 16-17 who could be at high risk of major illness from the virus.
Poland, a country of 38 million, has reported 2,842,339 cases of the coronavirus and 70,679 deaths. It has fully vaccinated more than 3.8 million people.
Updated
My colleague Vincent Ni reports that a report published by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), a Brussels-based umbrella of media unions, suggests that the pandemic has become an opportunity for China to boost its image in global media coverage.
The report found that international news reporting of the country throughout last year has become more positive, it says. In some countries, China was seen as the source of the most accurate information about the coronavirus.
Updated
Tobi Thomas here, taking over while my colleague has a break. If you’d like to get in touch please do email tobi.thomas@theguardian.com. Thanks!
'WHO alert system in disrepair' as it requires permission from relevant government, says panel member
One investigator behind a damning report highlighting serious mistakes within pandemic responses has called for urgent reform to the World Health Organisation, giving it greater powers, so that the world may be able to better withstand future pandemic threats.
A Covid-19 pandemic review panel issued its report today saying that a new transparent global system should be set up for probing disease outbreaks, empowering the WHO to deploy investigators at short notice and reveal findings.
The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response found that bad decisions, dithering and poor coordination created a “toxic cocktail”.
Panel member Michel Kazatchkine, a French diplomat and former director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, in an interview with AFP called for immediate action to ensure the world must never again face a “catastrophe” like the Covid-19 crisis.
From the start, we agreed that this report should be very concrete and audacious... [with the aim] that no infection cluster with pandemic potential will become a pandemic, and no pandemic, if one were to happen, will ever again become a socioeconomic catastrophe of the kind we are living through.
WHO’s alert system is in a bit of disrepair... WHO can publish nothing without permission from the government in question. We propose that WHO be permitted to publish in real time all the information it has without waiting for permission from governments.
The 194 UN member states must also allow WHO to go carry out investigations in countries where there are clusters of infection. In the future, there should be a political structure, a sort of permanent Security Council for big health crises. A crisis like this one teaches us that health is not just a health issue. It is also a social, economic and political issue.
The panel’s second recommendation urges richer nations not to hoard vaccine supplies, and for there to be greater technology sharing amid growing criticism of the use of patents by pharmaceutical companies for their jabs, Kazatchkine said.
Rich countries have so far pre-bought 4.3 billion doses, even though they represent just 1.16 billion people... We are asking that, as soon as they have provided reasonable vaccine coverage to their population, they organise to donate a billion vaccine doses to poorer countries by September 2021.
“Finally, we are asking the WTO (World Trade Organization) and the WHO to bring together all the vaccine-producing countries and companies to decide together on a global mechanism for voluntary licensing and technology transfer. If there is resistance to voluntary licensing, then we ask WTO to impose a patent waiver.”
Reuters also reports that the head of the WHO head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysus said that the agency would discuss with its member states the findings and recommendations of the panel.
“We look forward to working with our member states to discuss the recommendations of this panel and the other committees to build a stronger WHO and a healthier, safer, fairer future for all of us,” Ghebreysus told an event to launch the report.
Updated
Hungary has submitted to Brussels a national plan for accessing the EU’s post-pandemic recovery fund, which it had previously threatened to veto over proposals to link some payments to rule of law conditions, the European Commission has said.
AFP reports:
The €750bn rescue package of grants and loans comprises funds contributed by the EU’s 27 member states to help the bloc’s economies hard hit by the coronavirus.
Budapest and Warsaw threatened to veto the fund last year, along with the entire EU budget, over proposals to link some fund payments to rule of law conditions, describing it as “political blackmail”.
Hungary has requested €7.2bn in grants to support its “green transition, healthcare, research, digital, cohesion and public administration” until 2026, the European Commission said.
Updated
Every person living in Germany will have developed immunity against Covid-19 within the next one and a half years, the country’s leading coronavirus expert has predicted, arguing that those who decide not to get vaccinated are certain to eventually catch a virus that will continue to circulate around the population.
Christian Drosten, the director of the Charité hospital’s Institute of Virology in Berlin, said in an interview podcast with broadcaster NDR that debates around herd immunity might be important for political planning but were largely “irrelevant” from a patient’s point of view.
“Everyone will gain immunity, 100%, not 70 or 80,” Drosten said. “Either through vaccination or natural infection, because this virus will become endemic.”
The scientist said he expected the virus to continue to silently circulate through the population as social distancing restrictions were lifted, for example via the throats of people who have been vaccinated or children under the age of 12.
“Those who actively choose not to be vaccinated have to know that they are actively opting for a natural infection instead”, Drosten warned. “There’s nothing that can be done about it.”
A third of Germany’s population has received at least one shot of a vaccine, with 35.7m doses administered by yesterday afternoon. Almost 10% have received two doses of a vaccine.
Updated
Peru’s health ministry has said it is investigating a number of nurses accused of trying to inoculate patients with empty syringes during the country’s coronavirus vaccination campaign.
AP has the story:
The ministry said the three known cases were reported in the capital during the campaign that began in March to provide more than 2m shots.
“These three cases are fully identified, both the people and the places,” said health ministry spokesman Arturo Granados. He declined to identify the nurses involved and said the results of an investigation would be released tomorrow.
Authorities haven’t provided a motive for the allegedly flawed vaccinations, though president Francisco Sagasti said Tuesday that it “is something very worrisome and could even be criminal in some cases”.
The empty syringes cases follow another scandal in Peru that erupted after it emerged that almost 500 privileged people were secretly vaccinated, including then president Martín Vizcarra, his wife and the diplomatic representative of Pope Francis in Peru, Nicola Girasoli.
Updated
Spain expects foreign tourist arrivals to reach up to 45 million this year, tourism minister Reyes Maroto has said at a presentation of Spain’s promotional campaign to entice visitors back this summer.
Foreign tourism to Spain plunged 80% last year from 83.5 million visitors in 2019 as pandemic restrictions caused unprecedented disruption to leisure travel. The country’s government has previously said it expects tourism to reach half its pre-pandemic levels this year.
Another leader from Thailand’s anti-government protest movement contracted Covid, but was said to be asymptomatic, after spending eight weeks in jail pending trial on charges of insulting the country’s king.
Reuters has the story:
Panusaya “Rung” Sithijirawattanakul, who was released on bail last week from pre-trial detention, said on her Twitter account on Wednesday that she was being treated in a hospital after testing positive for the virus following her release.
Two others detainees from the protest movement, including human rights lawyer Arnon Nampa and Chukiat “Justin” Saengowng, have also tested positive for Covid-19. They are also charged with insulting the monarchy.
The corrections department said on Wednesday that it found 2,835 Covid-19 infections at two detention facilities where the protest leaders were held, after conducting a total of 17,000 tests, which included all inmates and staff.
Panusaya said she had no symptoms and had tested negative while in prison on 22 April. After her release, she stayed home for three days before getting tested.
Updated
Norway will not resume use of AstraZeneca vaccine – reports
Norway will not resume its use of the Covid-19 vaccine made by AstraZeneca due to a risk of rare but harmful side-effects, newspaper VG has reported.
Prime minister Erna Solberg is expected to announce the decision at a 1600 GMT press conference addressing the AstraZeneca shot, as well as the government’s decision on Johnson & Johnson’s inoculation.
Reuters note that on 10 May, a public panel of medical, legal and other experts said the two vaccines should not be offered as part of the national inoculation scheme, although volunteers should be allowed to take them.
A couple of months earlier on 11 March, authorities suspended the AstraZeneca rollout after a small number of younger inoculated people were hospitalised for a combination of blood clots, bleeding and a low count of platelets, some of whom later died.
A study in Denmark and Norway found slightly increased rates of vein blood clots among people who have had a first dose of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, including clots in the brain, compared with expected rates in the general population.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said today it was reviewing a proposal by an unidentified vaccine manufacturer in Vietnam to become an mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccine technology hub in the country.
Kidong Park, the WHO representative in Vietnam, told Reuters that a “vaccine manufacturer in Vietnam has already expressed its interest to become a mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccine technology transfer hub”.
Reuters reports:
The proposal was being reviewed by the WHO, said Park, who added that the organisation expects Vietnam to also apply for “large scale manufacturing” of an mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccine.
Park did not say which vaccine manufacturer had expressed interest in the plans.
On Tuesday, Vietnamese state media said the country was seeking the transfer of the technology to domestically manufacture Covid-19 vaccines, as officials warned of supply issues until the end of the year.
The WHO in April said it was seeking to expand the capacity of low and middle-income countries to produce and scale up the manufacturing of vaccines to help bring the pandemic under control.
Updated
In the US, advisors to the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will meet today to discuss recommendations for the use of the Pfizer vaccine in children aged 12 to 15.
Reuters reports:
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) provides recommendations to the CDC that many states will consider as they begin administering the two-shot vaccine to adolescents this week.
About one in three Americans have been fully vaccinated according to the CDC data. But the pace of vaccination has slowed in the recent weeks.
“I think we should be in full school, full in-person school, in the fall,” CDC director Rochelle Walensky said at a CNBC health summit on Tuesday.
Children have been considered by health officials as being at a lower risk for severe Covid-19, but they can still spread the virus.
Pfizer is running a separate trial testing the vaccine in children as young as six months old, and has said it expects data on its use in two- to 11-year-olds in September. The 12-to-15 age group were tested as an expansion of Pfizer’s more than 46,000-person trial.
The committee will hear from Pfizer about the vaccine’s safety and efficacy in adolescents and will consider the views of a handful of CDC officials on its implementation.
Updated
Today so far…
- Coronavirus cases are exploding in Asia and the Pacific with over 5.9 million new confirmed infections in the past two weeks, more than in all other regions combined, the International Federation of the Red Cross has said.
- India recorded 348,421 new Covid cases in the past 24 hours, which is down on the 400,000-plus figures it was racking up earlier this month. However, India posted a record rise in deaths from Covid-19 in the 24 hours to Wednesday morning local time, pushing its total fatalities past the 250,000 mark.
- The head of the main Indian health agency responding to the coronavirus has said districts reporting a high number of infections should remain locked down for another six to eight weeks to control the spread of the rampaging disease.
- Taiwan’s health authorities have reported 16 new locally transmitted cases – the highest daily number in Taiwan during this pandemic.
- French health minister Olivier Véran has warned his compatriots that they will have to adapt their summer holidays to fit around when they need their second vaccine.
- France’s parliament, meanwhile, has overnight backed president Emmanuel Macron’s plan to introduce a Covid “health pass”, after deputies pushed back against the move, arguing it was discriminatory for those not yet vaccinated.
- Spain’s Balearic and Canary islands and Greece are expected to be the preferred destinations for Europeans booking long-awaited summer holidays when the travel industry reopens, according to the travel group Tui.
- President Nicolas Maduro has said the single-dose Russian Sputnik Light vaccine will soon arrive in Venezuela.
- Pope Francis expressed his pleasure at being once again among his flock as he delivered his weekly general audience in public for the first time in six months at the Vatican.
- A rapid rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine across the UK’s four nations lifted GDP by 2.1% in March, helping prevent a steep fall during the first three months of the year, according to official figures. However, the dramatic rise in UK cases of the variant first discovered in India could undermine the country’s roadmap for reopening, scientists are warning.
- The UK should give 20% of its vaccines to other countries in urgent need of more doses as early as next month, according to Unicef.
- Brazil is buying an additional 100m doses of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine, doubling the number of shots from the company. They will be delivered between September and December.
- An analysis of Indonesian healthcare workers inoculated with a Covid-19 vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech showed it was 98% effective at preventing death and 96% effective at preventing hospitalisation.
That’s your lot from me, Martin Belam, today. Andrew Sparrow has our UK politics live blog, which will also carry domestic UK Covid news. Mattha Busby will be along shortly to take you through the rest of the day’s global coronavirus news.
Updated
Red Cross warns that Covid cases are 'exploding' in Asia and the Pacific
Coronavirus cases are exploding in Asia and the Pacific with over 5.9 million new confirmed infections in the past two weeks, more than in all other regions combined, the International Federation of the Red Cross has said. It warned that the surge is pushing hospitals and health systems to the brink of collapse.
Seven out of 10 countries globally that are doubling their infection numbers the fastest are in Asia and the Pacific, it said. Laos took just 12 days to see its cases double, and the number of confirmed infections in India has doubled in under two months to more than 23 million, the Red Cross said in a statement.
It said Oxford University’s Our World in Data reported more than 5.9 million new Covid-19 infections in Asia and the Pacific during the two weeks. Official figures for much of the region are widely believed to be undercounts.
“Covid-19 is exploding across much of Asia, overwhelming hospitals and healthcare. More people have been diagnosed with the disease in Asia over the past two weeks than in the Americas, Europe, and Africa combined,” Red Cross Asia Pacific director Alexander Matheou said.
“Right now, we need global solidarity for regional support with more medical equipment, support for prevention and urgent access to vaccines,” he said.
While vaccination campaigns are underway in the region, the Red Cross said they are hampered by shortages, hesitancy and the costly logistics of reaching many areas across the region, report Reuters.
“To bring this pandemic under control, we need greater global cooperation so that lifesaving resources, medical equipment, vaccines and money get where they are needed to help people most at risk. We’re only safe when everyone is safe,” it said.
Pope Francis resumes audiences with public at Vatican
Pope Francis expressed his pleasure today at being once again among his flock as he delivered his weekly general audience in public for the first time in six months, report Agence France-Presse.
He greeted a baby, signed a book, donned a hat someone gave him and chatted with children who had painted him pictures as the faithful - all in masks, unlike the vaccinated pontiff - lined up to greet him.
“I am happy to resume this face to face because I tell you one thing - it is not nice to talk in front of nothing, in front of a camera,” Francis told them as they sat on socially-distanced chairs to listen to his audience in the San Damaso Courtyard at the Vatican.
The pope abandoned his Wednesday public audiences when coronavirus swept across Italy early last year, instead delivering them via video link from the Apostolic Library.
They resumed in September and October – not in St Peter’s Square but in the courtyard with a limited crowd of 500 – only to stop once again due to a fresh wave of infections.
A member of the Swiss Guard stands by at San Damaso courtyard in the Vatican. Photograph: Tiziana Fabi/AFP/Getty Images
The courtyard was not full Wednesday, but the 300 or so people who came expressed their joy at seeing the pope up close.
There was a cheer when he arrived inside the courtyard in a blue Ford. “Pope Francis, we’re with you!” they shouted, standing on chairs to get a better view as he passed by.
“It was lovely, to see him so close - he wasn’t in a hurry, he took his time,” said a nun from Rome who gave her name as Helene. “He was happy to be with the people.”
French health minister Olivier Véran has warned his compatriots that they will have to adapt their summer holidays to fit around when they need their second vaccine.
The long summer break is sacrosanct in France. Schools close for eight weeks and every year - even before lockdowns - main homes are locked up, many pets are dumped by the roadside, and everyone goes away either for July (“juilletistes”) or for August (“aoûtiens”), and some for both.
Except this year, those booked in for their second vaccine must be somewhere near their GP or the vaccine centre where they had the first dose, and the government refuses to budge on the 42 days between Pfizer and Moderna doses - these are likely to be the main vaccines over the next few months - and 12 weeks between AstraZeneca and Janssen vaccines.
The government has warned that if people en masse just don’t turn up or try to get their second inoculation somewhere else this will throw a very large spanner in the vaccine works.
“People must adapt their holiday planning,” Véran said. “The rule is that the second dose is given in the centre or wherever the first dose was given...the possibility of having a second dose somewhere else or where one is spending the holidays...must be the exception,” he added.
Otherwise Véran warned the country risked great vaccine “disorganisation”.
Updated
UK urged to repatriate family with Covid from camp on Syria-Iraq border
Pleas are being made for the repatriation of a British family who have contracted Covid-19 in a detention camp on the Syria-Iraq border. They include a toddler with respiratory problems and an adult with asthma, according to campaigners, who say members of the family were trafficked into Isis-held territory.
The charity Reprieve said the family were unable to access adequate care and faced a “real risk of life-threatening illness, and possibly death”.
The family have reported serious symptoms including fever, difficulty breathing, coughing, weakness and vision problems, according to a letter by Reprieve, which quoted medical experts including a paediatrician expressing grave concerns.
“This is a family which is very likely to include victims of trafficking and they have been in this camp for a few years now,” said Maya Foa, the executive director of Reprieve. “They all have roots in the UK. They are British and I have spent time with them in the camp. As well as the imperative to bring them back to receive treatment, surely the British government should also now be looking to investigate trafficking, and they would be happy to speak to the authorities.”
A cross-party group of MPs are preparing to convene an inquiry as part of attempts to pressure the government into helping Britons detained in camps after fleeing Isis-held territory.
Read more of Ben Quinn’s report here: UK urged to repatriate family with Covid from camp on Syria-Iraq border
Germany to ease quarantine for fully-vaccinated people - reports
Germany’s cabinet approved plans this morning to allow people who have been fully-vaccinated against Covid-19, recovered or had a negative test to enter Germany without having to go into quarantine, a government source has told Reuters.
The changes do not apply to anyone coming from a high-risk or an area with a mutation of the virus. The easing applies only to people who have had a vaccine approved in the European Union, which so far are BioNTech/Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.
Spain’s Balearic and Canary islands and Greece are expected to be the preferred destinations for Europeans booking long-awaited summer holidays when the travel industry reopens, according to the travel group Tui, although it will only operate three-quarters of its summer 2019 capacity.
Europe’s largest travel company said low rates of Covid infections in key locations, combined with an accelerating vaccination programme in Europe, had improved the prospects for tourism this summer.
About 2.6 million people have booked to travel with Tui over the summer, which is slightly lower than the number reported in March.
However, the company said bookings, including those from customers who had rebooked previously cancelled trips using vouchers, were more than two-thirds (69%) lower than levels in summer 2019, as a result of ongoing uncertainty about Covid travel restrictions.
Tui’s chief executive, Fritz Joussen, said he was optimistic about the prospects for summer travel, adding that the continued vaccination of its customers, combined with Covid testing and hygiene measures in resorts, would enable the safe return of holidays.
Read more of Joanna Partridge’s report here: Spanish islands and Greece expected to be summer travel hotspots, says Tui
Dr Sakthi Karunanithi, Lancashire director of public health, has been out and about in the media this morning, and said there needs to be a focus stopping coronavirus variants being imported to the UK from amber-listed countries.
Asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme about variants being brought into the UK from other countries such as India, PA report he said: “Particularly amber-listed countries, which we anticipate the volume of traffic is going to be higher, is where I think we need to focus. Now it is India but the situation across the world is very fragile and dynamic so it could be any other country.”
Asked if opening up further could cause problems in areas with already high case rates, he said: “We are all expecting there will be another surge in the cases, but we also know that we have protected the most vulnerable.
“So, unless the new variants are going to escape vaccines or are they going to cause more severe disease, that causes problems with the NHS for instance, I think what we will see is the cases going up again, but hopefully that will be it.
“But there’s a real uncertainty in terms of the variants and how severe they are going to be.”
Asked about the worst-case scenario, he said: “The most likely worst-case scenario will be there’s a surge in the younger population that is not vaccinated and they are going to be affected with much more symptoms and we will be catching up very fast with the vaccination.”
A rapid rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine across the UK’s four nations lifted GDP by 2.1% in March, helping prevent a steep fall during the first three months of the year, according to official figures.
The economy retreated by a better than expected 1.5% during the first quarter of 2021 as the successful vaccine programme allowed the government to begin easing restrictions while businesses adapted to the constraints at a quicker pace than expected.
City economists had expected a 1.7% contraction – earlier in the year there were fears that the second wave of the virus in 2020 and a third lockdown would hit the economy harder and plunge the UK into a full-blown recession.
School closures and a large fall in retail sales were blamed by the Office for National Statistics for much of the economy’s contraction. Growth returned to all the main sectors of the economy in March as Covid restrictions eased, at a speed not seen since August 2020.
The services sector, which accounts for about three-quarters of activity, fell by 2%, mostly because of the closure of the hotel and leisure sector.
Julia Kollewe has the latest on our business live blog…
Indian health agency chief calls for 6-8 week lockdown
The head of the main Indian health agency responding to the coronavirus has said districts reporting a high number of infections should remain locked down for another six to eight weeks to control the spread of the rampaging disease.
Dr Balram Bhargava, head of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), said in an interview that lockdown restrictions should remain in place in all districts where the rate of infection is above 10% of those tested, report Reuters.
Currently, three-fourths of India’s 718 districts have what is known as a test-positivity rate above 10%, including major cities like New Delhi, Mumbai and the tech hub of Bengaluru.
Bhargava’s comments are the first time a senior government official has outlined how long lockdowns, which already encompass large parts of country, need to continue to rein in the crisis in India.
Several states have introduced varying levels of curbs on economic activity and public movement to stop the spread of the virus, which are mostly being reviewed and extended on a weekly or fortnightly basis.
“The high positivity districts should remain (shut). If they come to 5% from 10% (positivity rate) we can open them, but that has to happen. That won’t happen in six-eight weeks, clearly,” Bhargava said in an interview at the New Delhi headquarters of the ICMR, the country’s top medical research body.
Referring to the capital, one of India’s hardest hit cities where the positivity rate reached around 35% but has now fallen to about 17%, Bhargava said: “If Delhi is opened tomorrow, it will be a disaster.”
Bhargava did not criticise the Modi government directly but conceded there had been a delay in responding to the crisis.
A quick snap from Reuters in Jakarta here that an analysis of Indonesian healthcare workers inoculated with a Covid-19 vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech showed it was 98% effective at preventing death and 96% effective at preventing hospitalisation, a health ministry official said.
The preliminary study was done from data on healthcare workers in the Indonesian capital Jakarta who had received the CoronaVac vaccine between January and March this year, lead researcher and health official Pandji Dhewantara said today.
French parliament backs plans for a Covid 'health pass'
France’s parliament has backed president Emmanuel Macron’s plan to introduce a Covid “health pass”, after deputies pushed back against the move, arguing it was discriminatory for those not yet vaccinated.
Macron wants the pass to help speed up the lifting of coronavirus restrictions as his Covid vaccination programme gathers pace. It will be used to travel outside France for people showing proof of coronavirus vaccination, a recent negative test or recovery from a Covid-19 infection.
Opposition parties have criticised the bill for posing a discrimination risk, not least because millions of people have yet to be inoculated.
Even some deputies usually loyal to Macron balked at what they said was a lack of details on how the pass would be used, saying the government was basically asking for a blank cheque, report Agence France-Presse.
They pressed for a firm number on how many passholders would be allowed at large gatherings, but the government insisted on a need to remain flexible. The disagreement led to an initial defeat of the bill by 108 votes to 103 in the lower-house National Assembly, with a high number of abstentions.
But in the early hours of Wednesday morning it finally passed 208 to 85.
The bill was modified so that a transition period during which the government can still impose restrictions was shortened, from 2 June to the end of September, rather the end of October.
The health pass, which will take a digital or paper form, is to let people attend sporting events and other large gatherings, but would not be used to enter restaurants, cinemas or stores. It would dovetail with the “green certificate” the EU hopes to have in place next month to ease travel during the summer holidays.
“The health pass will allow us to reopen places welcoming the public, festivals and gatherings,” digital affairs minister Cedric O had said. “Without this health pass, we would have to wait much longer,” he added.
Updated
Emma Thomasson has this despatch for Reuters where she says that doctors have said that Germans desperate to be vaccinated against the coronavirus are becoming increasingly aggressive, as frustration mounts after six months of lockdowns.
“The pressure on vaccination centres and doctors’ practices is growing. People pushing for vaccination are becoming more demanding,” Anke Richter-Scheer, the deputy head of the German association of family doctors, told the Funke media group.
As Germany extends priority for vaccines to more groups, it is becoming less comprehensible to many people why they should have to wait behind others, Richter-Scheer said.
People are showing up at doctors’ practices and trying to get vaccines even though it is not their turn, with the mood getting more aggressive, she said.
Some people are also demanding their second shot early so they can go on holiday or profit from advantages such as shopping without needing a Covid-19 test.
Some older patients who have been assigned AstraZeneca are also demanding a different vaccine.
The UK media round has been quite quiet on the coronavirus front with plenty of domestic politics in play, but environment secretary George Eustice has made two comments of note, as reported by PA.
Firstly, he addressed pop star Dua Lipa’s call for an NHS pay rise which she gave at the Brit Awards last night.
Eustice said on BBC Breakfast: “There’s been a pay rise, it was announced. There’s been a pay freeze for most of the public sector and it’s also important to recognise that in recent years that there have been some pay rises as well, particularly for nurses and the lower paid.
“We know that it is a difficult public finance environment as well, so we can’t always go as far as you’d like, but it’s also the case that there’s a pay review that’s going on into the NHS.”
Secondly, he has also addressed the UK’s Covid inquiry plans, which British prime minister Boris Johnson yesterday said would start “within this session” of parliament – a rather vague timetable.
Asked about it on Sky News, Eustace said “There will be a time and a place for an inquiry of that sort, I’m not aware that anything is being announced on it today. For now, we’re not out of this yet, we’ve still got a huge amount to do.
“For now we’ve still got to focus on getting ourselves out of this situation, we’ve made some great progress with the vaccine programme but we’ve got to keep our focus on that.”
Taiwan’s health authorities have just reported 16 new locally transmitted cases - the highest daily number in Taiwan during this pandemic. One has no known source and is under investigation, while another three “need clarification”.
The island is currently on level two alert (on a one-to-four system) after two clusters of locally transmitted cases emerged, with no apparent link between the first and second. We reported on this earlier.
Under the system, the alert will rise to level three if there are three community clusters reported within a week, or 10 locally transmitted cases from an unknown source in one day.
At least three of today’s cases are in Yilan county, and two in Taipei City’s Wanhua district, which brings a third county into the mix but is perhaps not yet considered a cluster to trigger a change to the alert level.
Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen has told people not to panic, but there is clearly concern - Taiwan has been largely unscathed by the global pandemic but has seen what’s happened around the world.
Local media reported the official CDC stream of the press conference crashed after tens of thousands logged on to watch, and there are early anecdotal reports of people embarking on that inexplicable activity which has become a sign of the Covid times - buying large amounts of toilet paper.
The outbreak has also sparked major stock market activity, with the Taiex index falling 10% earlier today.
President Nicolas Maduro has said the single-dose Russian Sputnik Light vaccine will soon arrive in Venezuela as the country struggles with rising cases of coronavirus.
“In May vaccination will accelerate and have widespread growth and June, July and August will be the months of a vaccination offensive,” Maduro said in a live broadcast on state television, reports Sarah Kinosian for Reuters from Caracas.
Venezuela is aiming for 70% of its population to be vaccinated by August, he said. The country, with a population of about 30 million, has received 1.4 million vaccines from Russia and China, according to the health ministry. Russia has authorized the use of the Sputnik Light version of its Covid-19 vaccine, a move that could help vaccine supplies go further in countries with high infection rates.
The Maduro government made a first payment of $64 million dollars to enter the Covax programme which provides vaccines to poorer nations. It has rejected doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, citing side effects.
The president of Venezuela’s Congress and former minister Jorge Rodriguez recently told Reuters that Venezuela is interested in acquiring the Johnson & Johnson vaccine under the Covax scheme, but they were waiting for more information about its side effects.
The South American nation has registered 209,162 cases of the coronavirus and 2,304 deaths in the pandemic, although critics argue the real figures are likely higher due to lack of testing and transparency.
CNN reports this morning on some of the youngest people yet in the US to be vaccinated as the FDA approved emergency use of the shots on adolescents – but there’s a catch. They report:
Jacob Laney, 14, was in line at a Decatur, Georgia, vaccine site early Tuesday in hopes of getting the vaccine. “My friend got Covid and it looked really bad, and I just did not want to get it,” he told CNN. Once he gets both doses of Pfizer’s two-dose vaccine, “I think I’ll be less scared of getting it and less scared of having issues with Covid-19,” he said.
Cameron Carrion, a 14-year-old whose mother watched CNN’s interview with Jacob and then drove to the same vaccine site, said he felt good about getting the shot.
“I feel like it’s better that I got it because I can go out more instead of just staying home and doing nothing,” he said.
The shots are somewhat premature, as doctors are technically not supposed to start administering the vaccine to this age group until the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends they do so.
The CDC’s adviser, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), is scheduled to hold an emergency meeting Wednesday to discuss it and then vote on the question in the early afternoon. That advice then goes to CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who is very likely to give the go-ahead within hours.
Read more here: CNN – Americans as young as 12 begin to get vaccinated against Covid-19 after FDA’s authorization
Japan's vaccine booking system hampered by technical problems
Technical problems derailed Japan’s coronavirus vaccination booking system, compounding frustration in the country over the government’s handling of new outbreaks of infections and an inoculation drive that critics say has been woefully slow.
The online system to book a vaccine crashed in many places because of a global problem with US cloud computing vendor Salesforce, public broadcaster NHK reported.
Salesforce chief technology officer Parker Harris said on Twitter that the company was experiencing a “major disruption”, later updating to say services had been mostly restored.
The ministry has faced numerous technical problems throughout the pandemic, from a contact tracing application that failed to pass on vital information to a cumbersome database that health workers were reluctant to use.
Japan has only inoculated 2.8% of its population, the lowest rate among wealthy countries, despite an ambitious government target of giving shots to its 36 million elderly people by July, when the Olympics Games are due to open in Tokyo. A recent poll showed that 60% of Japanese people want the Olympics cancelled.
The campaign was initially slow because of tight supplies of imported doses of Pfizer’s vaccine but has since been plagued by a shortage of manpower and other logistical snags.
Good morning, it is Martin Belam here in London, and I’ll be with you for the next few hours. Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s technical lead for Covid-19 has said of the variant first detected in India that “we need much more information about this virus variant. We need more sequencing, targeted sequencing to be done and to be shared in India and elsewhere so that we know how much of this virus is circulating.”
However, Aniruddha Ghosal and Krutika Pathi report for Associated Press that Indian scientists say their work has been hindered by bureaucratic obstacles and the government’s reluctance to share vital data. India is sequencing about 1% of its total cases, and not all of the results are uploaded to the global database of coronavirus genomes.
When there isn’t enough sequencing, there will be blind spots and more worrisome mutations could go undetected until they’re widespread, said Alina Chan, a postdoctoral researcher at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard who is tracking global sequencing efforts.
D Gagandeep Kang, who studies microorganisms at Christian Medical College at Vellore in southern India, said researchers need to figure out if the variant is capable of infecting those who previously had Covid-19 and, if so, whether it could result in severe disease. “I don’t get why people don’t see this as important,” she said.
Late last year, Indian government institutions were ordered to buy domestic raw materials wherever possible, in keeping with prime minister Narendra Modi’s goal of turning India “self-reliant”. This proved impossible, since all materials for sequencing were imported, resulting in more paperwork, said Anurag Agarwal, the director of the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology. The obstacles were most pronounced between September and December, he said, but his lab was able to find workarounds and continued sequencing.
Other labs didn’t, and scientists said that should have been when India ramped up its sequencing, because cases were declining at the time.
Updated
India recorded 348,421 new Covid cases in the past 24 hours, which is down on the 400,000-plus figures it was racking up earlier this month.
But while the infection curve may be showing a little bit, the decline in the number of new infections is likely to be slow, said Shahid Jameel, a top Indian virologist.
He told the Indian Express newspaper:
It is still too early to say whether we have reached the peak. There is some indication of the cases plateauing. But we must not forget that this is a very high plateau. We seem to be plateauing around 400,000 cases a day.
India, with a population of 1.4 billion people, currently accounts for one in three of the reported deaths from coronavirus around the world, overwhelming hospital and medical staff, as well as mortuaries and crematoriums. Drugs and medical oxygen are in short supply.
The UK should give 20% of its vaccines to other countries in urgent need of more doses as early as next month, according to Unicef.
The UN body says the UK will still have enough to vaccinate every adult by the end of July.
It comes as Britain prepares to host the G7 summit next month and France announced it would donate up to 5% of its vaccine stocks to Covax.
Here’s the full story:
Brazil is buying an additional 100 million doses of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine, doubling the number of shots from the company. They will be delivered between September and December, the health ministry said in a statement on Tuesday night local time.
Brazil has recorded the second-deadliest outbreak of coronavirus in the world and continues to average more than 2,000 deaths per day. More than 425,000 people have died from COVID-19 since the pandemic began, according to the ministry.
About 15% of Brazil’s population has received at least one dose of vaccine, according to the ministry, far less than most European and North American
India variant poses threat to UK reopening, say scientists
The dramatic rise in UK cases of the India variant could undermine the country’s roadmap for reopening, scientists are warning today.
Prof Christina Pagel, director of the clinical operational research unit at University College London and a member of the Independent Sage group of experts, said the rise in cases was worrying enough to delay the next stage of social reopening due this coming Monday, 17 May:
We’ve done this so many times – waited until things got really bad before we realised we should have acted several weeks ago. So why don’t we actually act several weeks ago – which is now!
The variant, called B.1.617.2, is one of three closely related variants that were initially detected in India. Public Health England designated it a “variant of concern” on Friday, acknowledging it appears to be at least as transmissible as the dominant so-called Kent variant in the UK. It is unclear if and to what extent B.1.617.2 can reduce vaccine effectiveness.
Overall it accounts for about 6% of new cases, according to genomic sequencing. But the figure rises to more than 50% in some areas such as Blackburn and Bolton.
It comes as the WHO said Britain had the most cases of the variant outside India.
You can read the full story on the scientists’ concerns here:
Concerns about the Taiwan outbreak is among the reasons why the Taiwan stock exchange fell 8% on Wednesday in what could be its worst day for 26 years.,
After heavy losses on Tuesday, the Taiex index has fallen 10% from its April high, according to Bloomberg reporters.
Errrrr pic.twitter.com/jsfSyrdzmL
— Mike Bird (@Birdyword) May 12, 2021
According to the outlet, chip manufacturing giant, TSMC was among the biggest losses, because of worries about the continued worldwide shortage of semiconductors.
But markets around the world are also suffering losses this week because investorts are worried inflation is rising too quickly in the US.
Taiwan may tighten curbs amid rare outbreak
From our correspondent in Taipei, Helen Davidson:
Taiwan authorities have flagged raising its Covid alert level, putting limits on gatherings above 10 and restricting some people to their neighbourhoods, after the detection of untraced community transmission case.
Taiwan has been one of the world’s success stories in avoiding large outbreaks. To date it has recorded just 1,210 cases, the vast majority in new arrivals held in hotel quarantine. In 2020 it went 253 days without a single local infection.
But in response to two new clusters of community transmitted cases, local media has reported the government could soon raise the alert to a level three, just one day after it was lifted to two. Level three requires mask use in all public places, and limits of five people in private gatherings and 10 in public. Tighter restrictions - including school closures and limiting people to their own neighbourhoods - would apply to areas with community transmission, CNA reported.
Health and welfare minister, Chen Shih-chung, said at a legislative session earlier today.
Taiwan currently has more than two chains of transmission for which we have yet to identify their sources. We are in critical condition now, and this is not a joke.
Under level two, Taiwan is currently subject to restrictions including capped indoor gatherings to 100 and outdoor gatherings to 500 until 8 June, and a ban on the sale of standing tickets on the island’s high speed rail network.
Six cases were detected in the north east city of Yilan this week, from an unknown source. Five of them are linked to an arcade hall, while another - a retiree with a busy social schedule - has no known link to any other cases. It is the second cluster to develop in recent weeks, with at least 36 people linked to China Airlines staff and a Taoyuan airport hotel. The airline cases include 13 pilots and one flight attendant at the airline, and mandatory quarantine of dozens of other staff members has caused cutbacks in cargo services.
Taiwan’s premier Su Tseng-chang said people were getting “more relaxed or careless as time goes by” after having been largely unaffected by the global pandemic.
New record number of deaths in India
India posted a record rise in deaths from Covid-19 in the 24 hours to Wednesday morning local time, pushing its total fatalities past the 250,000 mark.
Deaths swelled by 4,205, while daily cases rose by 348,421, with India’s overall caseload now surging past 23 million, according to health ministry data.
There were also more reports on Wednesday of bodies being washed up on the Ganges river – the suspected result of a shortage of cremation sites.
India variant found in 44 countries – WHO
The World Health Organization said on Wednesday that a variant of Covid-19 behind the explosion of cases in India has been found in dozens of countries all over the world.
The UN health agency said the B.1.617 variant of Covid-19, first found in India in October, had been detected in more than 4,500 samples uploaded to an open-access database “from 44 countries in all six WHO regions”. Its weekly epidemiological update on the pandemic said it had received reports of detections from five additional countries.
Outside of India, it said that Britain had reported the largest number of Covid cases caused by the variant.
Updated
Good morning/afternoon/evening. I’m Martin Farrer and welcome to our rolling overage of the coronavirus pandemic.
Here are some of the main developments to get you up to speed:
- The India variant Covid-19 has been found in dozens of countries all over the world, according to the World Health Organization’s weekly update on the pandemic. The UN health agency said the B.1.617 strain had been found in “44 countries in all six WHO regions”.
- Deaths from Covid in India rose by another record amount in the last 24 hours. Fatalities were up by 4,205, the health ministry said, while daily coronavirus cases rose by 348,421.
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Taiwan may be forced to raise its Covid-19 alert level in “coming days”, the health minister said on Wednesday. It could mean the closure of shops dealing in non-essential items after a cluster of six cases was discovered – a high number on the island which has kept infections very low throughout the pandemic.
- Major US airlines have weighed in alongside UK carriers to urge the reopening of transatlantic travel, calling on governments in Washington and London to arrange a summit as soon as possible.
- Pfizer has asked the UK medical regulator for permission to use its Covid-19 vaccine for 12- to 15-year-olds in Britain, the Telegraph reported on Wednesday.
- Americans will be offered free taxis to vaccination centres in order to convince them to have a dose of the treatment. Joe Biden announced the scheme with Uber and Lyft on Tuesday.
- A fresh outbreak in Australia has been blamed on a man who had completed hotel quarantine in South Australia. Officials in neighbouring Victoria said on Wednesday that the man tested positive after returning home to Melbourne.
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The virus has cost Australia A$311bn (£171bn), according to Tuesday’s federal budget, thnaks to the massive cost of health and job support schemes.
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Brazil has signed a deal for Pfizer to deliver an additional 100m doses of its Covid-19 vaccine, doubling the number of shots from the company. The health ministry recorded 72,715 additional confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the past 24 hours, along with 2,311 deaths.
- The Canadian provinces of Alberta and Ontario said on Tuesday they would stop offering first doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, with Ontario citing evidence that the risk of rare blood clots is somewhat higher than previously estimated.
