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Evening summary
Here’s a roundup of the key moments this evening:
- The United Nations led calls for a coordinated global effort to vaccinate against Covid-19, warning that gaping inequities in initial efforts put the whole planet at risk. Foreign ministers met virtually for a first-ever UN Security Council session on vaccinations called by current chair Britain, which said the world had a “moral duty” to act together against the pandemic that has killed more than 2.4 million people, AFP reports.
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The pandemic has added $24tn to the global debt mountain over the last year a new study has shown, leaving it at a record $281tn and the worldwide debt-to-GDP ratio at over 355%.
- Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Wednesday the country would enter a gradual normalisation period, province by province, in March. Weekend lockdowns, which have been in place since December, would be lifted gradually on a provincial basis subject to low infection numbers, he said.
- Spain will administer AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine to people aged 45 to 55 in the next phase of its national inoculation plan, as new figures showed the third wave of infection receding further.
- Cyprus plans to reopen its airports with the help of a colour-coded health risk assessment from 1 March, applicable to travellers from its main tourism markets and the EU, authorities said on Wednesday.
- One in five diabetes patients admitted to hospital with Covid-19 die within 28 days, research suggests. Results from an ongoing study by the University of Nantes in France also showed that one in eight diabetes patients admitted to hospital with coronavirus were still in hospital 28 days after they first arrived.
- Central European countries asked the European council president, Charles Michel, to help ease tighter controls imposed by Germany on the Czech and Austrian borders to free up the flow of goods and industrial components, the Czech prime minister, Andrej Babis, said on Wednesday.
I’m signing off now. Thanks so much for joining me this evening. We’ll be launching a new blog shortly, which will be manned by my colleagues in Australia.
21% of Covid patients with diabetes die within 28 days of hospital admission
One in five diabetes patients admitted to hospital with Covid-19 die within 28 days, research suggests.
Results from an ongoing study by the University of Nantes in France also showed that one in eight diabetes patients admitted to hospital with coronavirus were still in hospital 28 days after they first arrived, PA Media reports.
Diabetes UK said understanding which people with the condition are at a higher risk if they are admitted to hospital with Covid-19 will help to improve care and save lives.
The findings, published in the Diabetologia journal, show that within 28 days of being in hospital 577 of the 2,796 patients studied (21%) had died, while almost 50% (1,404) had been discharged from hospital, with a typical stay of nine days.
About 12% remained in hospital at day 28, while 17% had been transferred to a different facility to their initial hospital.
In May last year, earlier results from the study, based on smaller sample of people, suggested that 10% of Covid patients with diabetes died within seven days of a hospital admission.
Dr Faye Riley, senior research communications officer at Diabetes UK, said the study supports previous research which showed certain risk factors, such as older age and a history of diabetes complications, “put people with diabetes at higher risk of harm if they catch coronavirus”.
Riley said:
It also provides fresh insight into factors that are linked with a quicker recovery from the virus.
Understanding which people with diabetes are at a higher risk if they’re admitted to hospital with coronavirus will help to improve care and save lives.
But it’s also important to remember the overall risk of dying for people with diabetes remains low, and has reduced over the past year.
Since the data in the study was captured, our understanding of how to treat coronavirus has grown, and new drugs shown to reduce risk of death are now in routine use.
The best way people living with diabetes can lower their risk of becoming seriously ill from coronavirus is to avoid contact with the virus and take a vaccine.
In the UK, people with diabetes are now being invited for vaccination, with those at highest risk being prioritised and invited to shield, and we strongly encourage you to get the vaccine when you’re offered it.
Updated
UN urges global Covid vaccine plan, warning of dangerous inequity
The United Nations led calls for a coordinated global effort to vaccinate against Covid-19, warning that gaping inequities in initial efforts put the whole planet at risk.
Foreign ministers met virtually for a first-ever UN Security Council session on vaccinations called by current chair Britain, which said the world had a “moral duty” to act together against the pandemic that has killed more than 2.4 million people, AFP reports.
Secretary-General António Guterres voiced alarm that just 10 nations have administered 75 % of doses so far - and 130 countries have had none at all.
“The world urgently needs a global vaccination plan to bring together all those with the required power, scientific expertise and production and financial capacities,” Guterres said.
He said the group of 20 major economies was in the best position to set up a taskforce on financing and implementation of global vaccinations and offered full support of the United Nations.
Guterres said:
If the virus is allowed to spread like wildfire in the global south, it will mutate again and again. New variants could become more transmissible, more deadly and, potentially, threaten the effectiveness of current vaccines and diagnostics.
This can prolong the pandemic significantly, enabling the virus to come back to plague the global north.
Henrietta Fore, head of the UN children’s agency UNICEF, said: “The only way out of this pandemic for any of us is to ensure vaccinations are available for all of us.”
Updated
Cyprus plans to reopen its airports with the help of a colour-coded health risk assessment from 1 March, applicable to travellers from its main tourism markets and the EU, authorities said on Wednesday.
Reuters reports:
The Mediterranean island has adopted a traffic light system for EU member states and third countries such as Britain, Russia and Israel, among its main feeder markets.
The transport ministry said it was extending until 31 March the mandatory seven-day quarantine of arrivals from the United Kingdom at a facility under the supervision of health authorities. That practice has been in place for British arrivals since December.
Adopting a phased-in approach, authorities said all arrivals from 1–31 March from “green” countries would require a free PCR test upon arrival, with the requirement lifted from 1 April.
Individuals arriving from “amber” countries need a PCR test 72 hours prior to travel, and those in the red will need a double PCR test, before and upon arrival to the island.
Country coding would be reviewed on a weekly basis. Tourism earnings represent about 13% of Cyprus’s economic output.
I’m now going to hand over to my colleague Nicola Slawson.
Updated
The state of New York is suing Amazon, claiming the company failed to provide workers with a safe environment at two warehouses in the state as Covid-19 infections surged nationwide.
The Associated Press reports:
The suit from Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, landed just days after Amazon pre-emptively sued to block the suit over its coronavirus safety protocols and the firing of one of its employees who objected to working conditions.
In the suit filed late on Tuesday, New York claims Amazon showed a “flagrant disregard for health and safety requirements” and retaliated illegally against employees who raised alarms.
Full story here:
As we reported earlier, Spain will administer AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine to people aged 45 to 55 in the next phase of its national inoculation plan, as new figures showed the third wave of infection receding further.
The shot, which in Spain is approved for those between 18 and 55, is now being given to people in that age bracket with a high risk of contracting the virus, such as daycare workers and physiotherapists, as well as police, firefighters and teachers, Reuters reports.
Most of Spain’s highest-priority nursing-home residents and staff have already received two shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines, which are now being rolled out to over 80-year-olds and medics.
Those shots will be given next to those over 70 and then over 60, the ministry said, while people under 60 with a high risk of serious Covid-19 infection will be next.
In total so far, 2.7m doses have been given, and 1.1 million people have received two doses.
Spain has been hard hit by the pandemic, recording more than 65,000 deaths from nearly 3m cases so far.
Reuters reports:
After a post-Christmas surge, which saw daily infections exceed 40,000, Spain’s third wave is receding, with the two-week incidence falling to 350 cases per 100,000 people on Wednesday from 900 at the end of January.
The infection tally rose by 10,829 to 3.1m on Wednesday, while the death toll increased by 337 to 66,316.
Several regions have relaxed limits on business opening hours and the hospitality sector, though curfews remain in force across the country.
Madrid, which has Spain’s loosest restrictions and has allowed customers to continue gathering inside bars and restaurants since last spring, has the country’s second-highest infection rate of 490 cases per 100,000 people.
Data from the regional government on Tuesday showed social gatherings were the lead cause of infection clusters since last June.
Updated
France reported 25,018 new confirmed coronavirus infections on Wednesday, a rise from 19,590 on Tuesday but down from the 25,387 new cases recorded on Wednesday a week ago.
In France in particular, there is a clear pattern across the week in terms of recorded levels of coronavirus cases, with fewer cases being reported at the beginning of the week. The French health ministry reported 310 new Covid-19 deaths against 586 on Tuesday, taking the total to 83,122.
This compares to 296 deaths last Wednesday, and 586 deaths yesterday.
The total number of cases now stands at 3,514,147.
Updated
This from Agence France-Presse:
Turkish doctor Sergan Saracoglu faces the twin hurdles of a snowstorm in the mountains and local fears of vaccines as he chases after alarmed villagers with a metal case full of needles.
“She had a positive attitude,” the doctor says after finally tracking down a 101-year-old grandmother on his list of the elderly due a coronavirus shot in the south-eastern Turkish hamlet of Imamli.
“But we also have some people who refuse to be vaccinated.”
Turkey’s 83 million people are fanned out across the vast country – split between Europe and Asia – and inhabit some seemingly impregnable terrain.
The vaccination effort with China’s CoronaVac jab kicked off with a bang in mid-January when Turkey inoculated more than half a million people in the first few days.
But it slowed down considerably when doctors left the big cities and tried to reach remote places such as Imamli and Ozbeyli – two ethnically Kurdish hamlets of a few hundred herders and farmers each.
Saracoglu and his team had to spend an hour wheeling their all-terrain vehicle up dirt roads hugging snow-peaked mountains just to reach a man and two women on their list of those over the age of 65 and due their first shot in Ozbeyli.
They never found the man while the two women flatly refused and ran off.
Ozbeyli’s hamlet guard Mahmut Seker, 32, employed to protect against Kurdish militias in the restive region, said he was not surprised the good doctor was having such bad luck.
“Thank God we don’t have this virus here – it’s a clean place with clean air,” said Seker. “That’s why people don’t want to be vaccinated. Also, they are a little bit afraid.”
Updated
Johnson & Johnson has only a few million doses of its experimental Covid-19 vaccine in its inventory even as likely US regulatory authorisation is only a few weeks away, White House officials said on Wednesday.
Reuters reports:
J&J remains committed to providing 100m doses by June but deliveries are likely to be “back-end loaded” as J&J works with the US government to boost supply, said Jeffrey Zients, the White House’s Covid-19 response coordinator, on a press call.
“Across the last few weeks we’ve learned that there is not a big inventory of Johnson & Johnson. There’s a few million doses that we’ll start with,” Zients said.
The US has been struggling to hasten its vaccine rollout because of a limited supply of doses. Pfizer and Moderna have promised to deliver 200m doses of their two-dose vaccines by the end of March but so far fewer than 72m doses have been shipped around the US and around 55m shots have been given.
J&J’s experimental shot involves a single dose and can be stored in refrigerators as opposed to freezers, which could help speed up vaccinations.
Zients said the vaccine could be authorised in a couple of weeks.
Updated
A senior Tanzanian politician died of Covid-19 on Wednesday, his party said, adding to concern about a hidden epidemic running rampant in a country that insists it has no local transmission of the disease.
Reuters reports:
The president of Tanzania’s semi-autonomous Zanzibar archipelago, Hussein Ali Mwinyi, announced the death of Zanzibar’s first vice president, Seif Sharif Hamad, on television, without saying the cause.
But Janeth Rite, deputy secretary for ideology and publicity of Hamad’s opposition ACT-Wazalendo party, told Reuters: “He has died of Covid-19.”
A day earlier, the party’s leader, Zitto Kabwe, had tweeted: “Denying the truth about the spread of the coronavirus in Tanzania, and therefore not urging the public to take precautions to protect themselves, has led to a lot of people getting sick, hospitals becoming overwhelmed and the elderly and others losing their lives.
“A lot of deaths are being caused by the government.”
The government spokesman, Hassan Abbasi, did not return calls and messages seeking comment. On 31 January, ACT-Wazalendo said that Hamad, his wife and several aides had tested positive for Covid-19, cases that did not show up in official statistics.
The Tanzanian president, John Magufuli, has earned a reputation as one of the world leaders most sceptical of efforts to combat the Covid-19 pandemic. Western countries and neighbours have increasingly expressed concern that official denials mask a rampant outbreak that could turn the country of 58 million people into a reservoir of infection.
The government stopped reporting statistics for new cases and deaths in May last year at a time when it had registered 509 cases and 21 deaths.
Magufuli dismisses masks and social distancing, and has refused to order any vaccines for his country, saying last month that they “are not good. If they were, then the white man would have brought vaccines for HIV/Aids.”
On Friday, Abbasi told Reuters that, while Tanzania was not entirely coronavirus-free, it had “controlled” it.
Updated
Turkey to gradually loosen restrictions from March
Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Wednesday the country would enter a gradual normalisation period, province by province, in March.
Weekend lockdowns, which have been in place since December, would be lifted gradually on a provincial basis subject to low infection numbers, he said.
Erdoğan said:
The roadmap for the opening of restaurants and cafes will be revealed next week.
[The] short-term employment allowance is extended for the last time until the end of March.
The president added that the authorities will divide provinces into four categories based on infection rates and vaccination, Daily Sabah reports.
Turkey has so far recorded 27,652 deaths from the virus.
Updated
The pandemic has added $24tn to the global debt mountain over the last year a new study has shown, leaving it at a record $281tn and the worldwide debt-to-GDP ratio at over 355%.
Reuters reports:
The Institute of International Finance’s global debt monitor estimated government support programmes had accounted for half of the rise, while global firms, banks and households added $5.4tn, $3.9tn and $2.6tn respectively.
It has meant that debt as a ratio of world economic output known as gross domestic product surged by 35 percentage points to more than 355% of GDP.
That upswing is well beyond the rise seen during the global financial crisis, when 2008 and 2009 saw 10 percentage points and 15 percentage points respective debt-to-GDP jumps.
There is also little sign of a near-term stabilisation. Borrowing levels are expected to run well above pre-Covid levels in many countries and sectors again this year, supported by still low interest rates, although a reopening of economies should help on the GDP side of the equation.
“We expect global government debt to increase by another $10tn this year and surpass $92tn,” the IIF report said, adding that winding down support could also prove even more challenging than it was after the financial crisis.
“Political and social pressure could limit governments’ efforts to reduce deficits and debt, jeopardising their ability to cope with future crises.
“This could also constrain policy responses to mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change and natural capital loss,” it added.
Updated
Countries participating in the Covax vaccine mechanism will receive confirmation in the next days and weeks of the timeline and number of doses for the first vaccine shipments, the director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) said on Wednesday.
Countries should expect that the first vaccine deployments will be small due to limited global supplies, the PAHO director, Carissa Etienne, said in a virtual briefing, adding that 160m doses would be distributed in the first semester.
Updated
An Israeli healthcare provider said on Wednesday that Pfizer Inc’s Covid-19 vaccine was 95% effective in a trial of 602,000 people, reinforcing the drugmaker’s efficacy findings.
Reuters reports:
Israeli HMO Maccabi, which covers over a quarter of all Israelis, said in a statement that only 608 people had tested positive for Covid-19 more than a week after receiving the second of two required Pfizer doses.
The comparison was against a group of 528,000 Israelis with similar backgrounds who did not receive the vaccine, Maccabi said. Of those, 20,621 tested positive.
“By comparing the proportion of new cases between the vaccinated and yet-to-be vaccinated groups, efficacy of the vaccine in Israel is currently estimated at 95%, seven or more days after receiving the second dose,” Maccabi said.
Most of the 608 infected vaccinees reported only mild symptoms, such as a headache or cough, Maccabi said. Some 21 required hospitalisation, seven of whom had severe symptoms, it added.
The data by Maccabi reinforces efficacy findings by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, which following a late-stage trial also found their vaccine to be 95% effective.
Nearly 44% of Israel’s 9.1 million citizens have received at least one shot of the Pfizer vaccine, making the country the largest real-world study of its efficacy.
On Wednesday, Clalit, Israel’s largest healthcare provider, reported a 94% drop in symptomatic Covid-19 cases among 600,000 people who had received both Pfizer doses.
The UK reported 738 further Covid-19 deaths on Wednesday, compared with yesterday’s 799 and 1,001 deaths recorded 7 days ago.
12,718 new infections were also recorded, up from Tuesday’s 10,625 but slightly down from 13,013 new cases a week earlier.
Nearly 16 million people in the UK have so far received a vaccine, while 558,577 have had a second dose.
Updated
Greek public health authorities have announced a further 755 coronavirus cases over the past 24 hours bringing the total number of infections in the country to 174,659. More than half were men.
The death toll also rose to 6,194 after 13 Covid-19 patients succumbed to the disease, said the national public health organisation, EODY, in its early evening briefing on Wednesday. An overwhelming 95.6% had underlying conditions.
About 313 people are currently intubated in intensive care wards with an additional 211 men and women being admitted to hospital since yesterday. Greece has been under prolonged lockdown but despite the restrictions first enforced in November epidemiologists have struggled to reduce periodic surges.
Hospital admissions in the greater Athens region of Attica have placed particular strain on the health system. Media outlets reported today that of the 217 beds available for Covid-19 patients in the area only 19 are not occupied with officials now being asked to expand capacity.
The government was forced to halt the nation’s vaccination programme on Tuesday after Greece was hit by the worst snowstorm is more than 40 years.
Updated
A further 522 people who tested positive for coronavirus have died in hospital in England, bringing the total number of confirmed deaths reported in hospitals to 80,115, NHS England said on Wednesday.
Patients were aged between 24 and 103. All except 20, aged between 33 and 91, had known underlying health conditions.
Updated
Italy reported 369 further deaths on Wednesday, as well as 12,074 new infections, the health ministry said.
The latest figures compare with Tuesday’s 336 deaths and 336 deaths recorded seven days ago.
On Tuesday, 10,386 infections were recorded, and 12,947 new cases on 10 February.
Updated
Doctors and medical staff received North Macedonia’s first Covid-19 vaccinations on Wednesday as the small Balkan country launched its immunisation campaign following weeks of uncertainty.
The country of 2 million received its first batch of more than 4,500 Pfizer/BioNTech doses over the weekend in a donation from neighbouring Serbia.
Reuters reports:
The infectious disease specialist Dobrinka Naunova-Jovanovska was the first to receive an injection in Skopje. “I got the vaccine and I feel great,” she said afterwards.
The country’s minister of health, Venko Filipče, said the rest of the doses would cover medical staff in Covid-19 centres in Skopje followed by hospitals in other towns around the country.
The health ministry is planning to include citizens over the age of 70 in the first priority group.
Serbia has promised to send several thousand more doses, but mass immunisation will have to wait until about 200,000 vaccines ordered from the Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinopharm arrive in late February.
The country also hopes to receive its first shipment of Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines in March through the Covax mechanism, a pooling initiative set up to help distribute jabs to low-income countries.
At least 3,000 people have been killed by the virus in North Macedonia, which has one of the world’s highest mortality rates in relation to its population.
Updated
The Scottish government was not adequately prepared for the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a report by the country’s public spending watchdog.
The Audit Scotland report found that, despite three preparedness exercises since 2011, ministers had failed to follow up on recommendations to improve availability of PPE and the capability of social care.
The watchdog found that the government had acted quickly to prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed, but warned that there was now a “substantial backlog” of patients waiting to be treated for other conditions. It also raised the disproportionate effect of the virus on those from minority ethnic backgrounds and on lower incomes.
Stephen Boyle, auditor general for Scotland, praised the “extraordinary commitment” of NHS staff but said the pandemic had “highlighted the need to deal with longstanding health inequalities”.
My colleague Libby Brooks reports.
Updated
Central European countries asked the European council president, Charles Michel, to help ease tighter controls imposed by Germany on the Czech and Austrian borders to free up the flow of goods and industrial components, the Czech prime minister, Andrej Babis, said on Wednesday.
Reuters reports:
Germany installed frontier checks on Sunday, drawing concerns about supply-chain disruptions.
The restrictions along the normally open borders were prompted by alarm over outbreaks in the Czech Republic and Austria’s Tyrol region of strains of the coronavirus that spread faster and cause more illness.
Long lines of trucks formed on the Czech-German border daily since Monday as German authorities only allowed in drivers and some commuters with negative coronavirus tests.
“What is happening on German borders is of course against the internal market and a great problem for us all,” Babis told a news conference after leaders of the Visegrad Group of the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia met Michel in the Polish city of Krakow.
The region’s industries are tightly integrated with Germany. Large volumes of goods from Hungary and Slovakia and further southeast also pass to Germany through the affected Czech and Austrian borders.
“We informed Charles Michel about it and asked for help,” Babis told the televised news conference. “The conditions for our drivers are extremely strict. I understand Germany but when the [border] situation was reversed in the first wave [of the pandemic], we were very flexible. We cannot cripple international freight, manufacturing and other production.”
The Czech Republic reported 12,486 new cases of infection for Tuesday, the highest since 8 January, and the country’s health minister warned hospitals across the country may overflow in two to three weeks unless the trend changes.
Updated
Concern in Germany over public reluctance to have Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine
Germany’s health minister, Jens Spahn, has made a point of saying he would be happy to be injected with the “safe and effective” AstraZeneca vaccine, as authorities in the country voiced their growing concern about the German public’s reluctance to be immunised against Covid-19 with the British-Swedish pharmaceutical company’s vaccine.
According to German government agencies’ own monitoring, only 87,533 out of 736,800 delivered doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine had been administered by Tuesday 16 February.
In Berlin, where the senate has promised the public the freedom to choose between different available vaccines, local media reported that out of 30,000 doses of the vaccine delivered last week, only 990 had been administered so far.
The British-Swedish own shaky data from its early trials, as well as some misleading reporting in German media, have created a prominent debate around the AstraZeneca vaccine’s comparatively lower efficacy in Germany, where medical authorities have initially permitted the vaccine for use only among the under 65s.
The health minister of the state of Saarland, Monika Bachmann, this week criticised the reluctant uptake of the vaccine among medical staff, after more than half of those scheduled to be vaccinated failed to turn up to their appointment at a special session for 200 people working in medical care.
Scientists such as the influential virologist Christian Drosten say the scepticism about the AstraZeneca vaccine is misplaced. “We have to do everything we can now to vaccinate as quickly as possible across the board,” the Charité hospital scientist said on his podcast on Tuesday. There’s always a hair in the soup somewhere, and some people are looking at it with a magnifying glass.”
Spahn on Wednesday described the vaccine as “safe and effective”, telling the broadcaster RTL: “I would let myself be vaccinated when I get an appointment – and that expressly includes the AstraZeneca vaccine.”
Updated
Head nurse Veronica Luz Machado, who for months has worked on the frontline of the coronavirus pandemic in an intensive care unit in the northern Colombian city of Sincelejo, became the first person in the Andean country to receive the Covid-19 vaccine on Wednesday.
Reuters reports:
Beginning with Machado, 46, Colombia will kick off its plan to immunise 35.2 million people with vaccines acquired through a raft of bilateral deals as well as the World Health Organization-backed Covax mechanism.
[...] For Machado, the vaccine brings hope after almost a year of coronavirus cases in Colombia, which has reported more than 2.2m infections and 57,949 deaths. The country has a population of about 50 million people.
[...] The first phase of Colombia’s vaccinations will benefit healthcare personnel and those aged 80 and over.
The government plans to immunise 1 million people during the first month of inoculations, which it has described as the greatest public health challenge in the country’s history.
The first 50,000 Pfizer doses arrived in Colombia on Monday, while a second batch of 192,000 doses from China’s Sinovac Biotech are expected to arrive this weekend.
Updated
Croatia is discussing with Moscow the possibility of importing Russia’s Covid-19 vaccine and the government has asked its drugs regulator to consider approving the shot without waiting for the EU’s approval, the health minister, Vili Beros, said on Wednesday.
Reuters reports:
EU countries have so far lagged far behind the United States and the former EU member Britain in distributing vaccines against the coronavirus pandemic, creating political pressure on governments to speed up a lifesaving programme.
Croatia’s neighbour Hungary, often at odds with EU headquarters in Brussels, has been the only member country so far to start using Russian and Chinese vaccines without waiting for approval from the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
In an interview with state radio, Beros said he had discussed buying Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine with the Russian ambassador in Zagreb. Russia is planning to seek EMA approval for the vaccine but Croatia would not necessarily wait, he said.
“We are thinking about securing that vaccine earlier for us. Now it is up to (our) experts to acquire information on the efficiency and safety of the vaccine and on necessary regulatory requirements,” Beros said.
“We already required the Croatian drugs agency to do it and we expect their response within days. Each government must take care of the health of its citizens. It is not illegitimate to seek solutions also outside the European Union, especially if there is a delay in deliveries within the EU framework.”
Croatia, along with Slovenia, are former Yugoslav republics now in the EU. Nearby Serbia, which has close relations with Russia, was sharing some of its Sputnik V supplies with neighbouring fellow ex-members of old Yugoslavia.
Updated
Silence Charumbira in Maseru
Lesotho prison authorities are on high alert after the first cases of Covid-19 were recorded in three of its 10 jails. More than 70% of prisoners in one of the country’s 10 facilities tested positive for Covid-19 last month.
Lesotho, the last African country to record Covid-19 cases last year, this week surpassed 10,000 infections. According to the latest statistics from the National Covid-19 Secretariat, the tiny mountain kingdom has so far recorded 10,350 cases and 254 deaths. The number of cases is just under 10% of the 57,078 tests conducted so far.
Lesotho correctional service spokesperson, Asst Supt Pheko Ntobane, said authorities were on top of the situation in the prisons. “Some of the patients have recovered while others are stable and on their way to full recovery,” he said, adding that staff had stepped up measures to prevent the virus from spreading, through increased cleaning and adherence to strict social distancing protocols. Family visits have been banned in all prisons.
Ntobane said no cases had been recorded at Maseru maximum security prison, which has 600 prisoners and cells that are shared by up to 20 men.
Many prisoners in Lesotho’s jails are HIV-positive or have tuberculosis.
Updated
Covid-19 infection rates for three of the four UK nations have dropped to their lowest level since early autumn 2020, suggesting lockdown restrictions across the country have succeeded in helping to drive down the spread of the virus, PA reports.
Both Wales and Northern Ireland are currently recording rates last seen at the end of September, while the overall rate for England has fallen to its lowest level since the start of October.
London and south-east England are also recording regional rates that are the lowest since October.
There has never been a Covid-19 outbreak linked to a beach, British MPs were told on Wednesday.
PA reports:
Images of crowded beaches across the UK drew outrage as people headed to Britain’s beaches last summer.
Police were forced to step in and ask people to stay away from some popular spots with pictures of packed beaches, traffic jams and full car parks being widely shared on social media.
Prof Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, told the science and technology committee: “Over the summer we were treated to all this on the television news and pictures of crowded beaches and there was an outcry about this.
“There were no outbreaks linked to crowded beaches. There’s never been a Covid-19 outbreak linked to a beach ever anywhere in the world to the best of my knowledge.”
Woolhouse, who is a member of the SPI-M modelling subgroup of the [UK government’s] scientific advisory group Sage, told MPs that mass gatherings – such as a horse racing event – are an exception because they do not involve social distancing and there are “pinch points” like travel and refreshment facilities.
“I think we do have to understand where the risks are so that we can do as much as possible safely,” he added.
Woolhouse said the government was slow to reopen schools and outdoor activities in the first lockdown. “I think we probably could have considered reopening schools much sooner in the first lockdown,” he said.
Updated
Switzerland to start easing lockdown in March
Switzerland plans its first “cautious steps” to reopen the country next month after much of society was shut down, the government said on Wednesday, as spending to tackle the pandemic pushed the country to its largest-ever budget deficit.
Reuters reports:
The country has been brought to a near standstill as shops and offices closed in recent weeks to tackle the emergence of new variants of the virus.
But the pace of new infections has eased recently, allowing the government to reconsider its stance. The government has been caught in the crossfire between health experts who want stricter limits and businesses calling for a reopening.
The government “proposes a cautious, gradual opening in order to give more space to social and economic life again”, it said.
In the first step, shops, museums and libraries will be allowed to reopen from 1 March. Zoos, gardens and sports facilities will also be reopened.
Private events with up to 15 people will also be allowed, said the government, up from the current limit of five. The government will make a final decision after consulting local authorities on 24 February.
Meanwhile, Switzerland expects its largest-ever deficit, with a 15.8bn Swiss franc shortfall caused by higher spending to cushion the economic impact of the pandemic.
Updated
Catholics in the Philippines observed Ash Wednesday in unconventional ways for a second successive year, with devotees metres apart and wearing mandatory masks and face shields to mark the start of the Christian season of Lent.
Reuters reports:
Churchgoers observed social distancing as much as Roman Catholic traditions in Manila, with priests and nuns modifying a few practices to try to maintain a sense of normalcy while the highly contagious coronavirus still rages.
[...] Instead of dabbing ash in the sign of a cross directly on to foreheads, nuns sprinkled ash on the tops of people’s heads to minimise physical contact with those entering churches in a country where about 80% of the 108 million population are Catholic.
People queued in orderly lines, each standing on evenly spaced markers, while those attending services sat on pews with big gaps in between them.
Updated
Sweden registered 4,223 new Covid-19 infections and 82 deaths on Wednesday, taking the overall death toll to 12,569.
This compares to 4,070 new cases a week ago and 4,702 cases recorded four weeks earlier, on 20 January.
The Swedish government, which has avoided full lockdowns so far, has announced five new coronavirus measures giving it the power to shut down large parts of Swedish society if necessary, as well as a more detailed framework for public gatherings to differentiate between outdoor, seated and indoor events, the Local reports.
The health and social affairs minister, Lena Hallengren, warned on Wednesday:
It is worrying that the number of cases has risen, we are observing the development with concern [...] there is a tangible risk of a third wave of infection.
It may be the case that parts of the Swedish society are shut down.
The new measures include the possible closure of all non-essential retail shops, hairdressers and beauty salons, sport facilities, restaurants and private event venues.
Updated
Three out of four people in nursing homes for the elderly in France have received a Covid-19 vaccination shot, the French government spokesman, Gabriel Attal, said on Wednesday.
Attal was speaking at news conference after a cabinet meeting. People in retirement homes were the number one priority in the government’s vaccination drive.
The European commission is taking action to curb growing cases of Covid-19 vaccine fraud and bring people responsible for it to justice, the president of the EU’s executive said on Wednesday.
The commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said:
In a crisis like this you will always have people who attempt to profit from the problems of others. And we see a growing number of fraud and fraud attempts related to the vaccines. We are fighting this trend.
Von der Leyen added that the bloc’s anti-fraud office, Olaf, is investigating and giving EU member states advice on how to identify fraud.
She said that it can be extremely risky to take vaccines offered by black market traders because there is no guarantee that the cooling chain process for its travel from factory to syringe has been respected.
Updated
England has set up a new Covid-secure “super courtroom” to host large trials with multiple defendants, as part of a wider scheme to speed up justice after the pandemic caused severe delays.
Reuters reports:
The super courtroom will be set up at Manchester crown court to deal with cases such as gang murder trials, because existing courts do not have space to comply with current Covid-19 rules.
In addition, 14 new temporary courtrooms in office buildings and conference venues will be added in other English cities such as London and Birmingham. A Hilton hotel in Manchester will host two hearing spaces.
Britain’s lockdown in spring last year paused jury trials for almost two months before they resumed in England and Wales in May.
“We have achieved an immense amount in our battle to keep justice moving during the pandemic ... These new courts are the latest step in that effort,” said the justice minister, Robert Buckland, in a statement on Wednesday.
Updated
Ukraine will prolong a lockdown until the end of April but will allow regions with fewer Covid-19 cases to ease restrictions, the prime minister, Denys Shmygal ,said on Wednesday.
Regions will be put into green, yellow, orange and red zones depending on the scale of new infections, he told a televised cabinet meeting.
Ukraine has so far recorded 26,017 deaths from the virus, according to Johns Hopkins University, faring better than neighbouring Poland and Romania.
Updated
Spain will administer AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine to people aged 45 to 55 in the next phase of the national inoculation plan, the health ministry said on Wednesday.
People under 60 with a high risk of serious Covid-19 infection will receive shots produced by Pfizer and BioNTech and by Moderna, once those over 60 have been immunised, the ministry said.
The country, which has recorded 65,979 fatalities so far – the world’s 10th highest death toll – has only just begun rolling out vaccines to people over 80, after people in care homes and healthcare workers were among the first to receive the jab.
El Pais reports:
At least seven Spanish regions are this week beginning to vaccinate people over 80 years of age against Covid-19, while other parts of the country are still inoculating previous target groups.
Andalusia, Aragón, Murcia, the Canary Islands, Cantabria, Catalonia and the Valencia region have announced that they are ready to start vaccinating Spain’s most senior population, even as they continue to administer doses to people in the first priority group. This latter category includes residents and workers of care homes, healthcare workers and people in need of daily assistance who do not live in care facilities.
Updated
Hospitals in Czech Republic could become overwhelmed in weeks
Hospitals across the Czech Republic may be overwhelmed with coronavirus patients in two or three weeks, forcing the country to seek help abroad and hospitals to select which patients will get treatment, the health minister, Jan Blatny, said on Wednesday.
Reuters reports:
It was the starkest warning yet from the government, which has faced criticism from the opposition and citizens groups for chaotic management and unpredictability, but also growing demands to ease restrictions.
Blatny said the government was considering reopening retail stores from Monday, hoping that would not lead to an escalation of infections, and allowing more students to attend schools from 1 March.
The country of 10.7 million had the most cases per capita in Europe except Portugal on a two-week basis, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control’s data showed. Deaths have reached 18,596, the second-worst death rate behind the United Kingdom, according to ourworldindata.org.
In two western districts on the German border and a north-eastern district on the border with Poland, hospitals have been forced repeatedly to seek to transfer patients elsewhere.
“If we together don’t prevent further spread at this level, then within two or three weeks the whole country will be likely in the same situation,” Blatny said. “We are preparing hospitals for launching the system of shortage of resources, prioritising among patients like in the case of a disaster.”
The country had 1,196 Covid patients at intensive and high-dependency care units as of Wednesday morning, just below the peak of 1,200 reported in November. Hospitals reported 14% available intensive care capacity, for all diagnoses, including 155 beds for coronavirus cases.
Blatny said the country would ask Germany to take in a limited number of patients when the intensive-care bed capacity drops to single digits.
Updated
UK hospitality sector could partially reopen in May
British pubs, bars and restaurants are set to reopen in some capacity in May, as Boris Johnson attempts to pull off a staged exit from lockdown that would see the UK’s $3tn economy aim to be among the first major western economies to return to some normality.
The Daily Mail newspaper reports that while most office workers will be asked to continue working from home for the foreseeable future, holiday lets and larger hotels will reopen in April.
Outdoor leisure facilities such as theme parks and zoos as well as golf, open-air gyms and tennis could also reopen in April, although a full pub reopening could have to wait until early June.
The Mail said leisure businesses may not return to “broadly normal” until July.
Updated
South Africa has enough Covid-19 vaccine doses in the pipeline for 40 million people and is “not at all anxious” that it will run into problems with its immunisation programme, the health minister, Zweli Mkhize, said on Wednesday.
The government plans to vaccinate 40 million people, or two-thirds of the population, to achieve some level of herd immunity.
Mkhize added that the country had a long discussion with AstraZeneca’s leadership about possibly conducting another study in the country to reduce levels of uncertainty over the efficacy of its vaccine.
Updated
AstraZeneca vaccine production in Belgium has 'drastically' increased, EU says
The EU industry commissioner, Thierry Breton, said on Wednesday the Covid-19 vaccine production capacity of a factory in Belgium that produces shots for AstraZeneca had “drastically” increased.
The factory, now owned by the US firm Thermo Fisher, had been seen as the main cause of a large cut in supplies by the Anglo-Swedish firm to the EU in the first quarter of this year. A delay in AstraZeneca’s vaccine deliveries to the bloc prompted an intense row between the company and the EU, with France and Germany threatening legal action.
The news comes as the European commission pledged on Wednesday to provide more funds to step up the EU’s capabilities to identify and tackle variants of the new coronavirus.
This from Reuters:
More contagious mutations are spreading fast across the world, and experts believe a British variant is likely to become prevalent on the European continent.
However, most European Union states have so far done little or nothing to spot new variants, as they lack the capabilities to sequence the genome of the virus on a large scale.
The EU will invest at least €75m ($90m) to develop specialised tests to identify variants, and it will provide another €150m to boost research in variants, the EU executive said in a statement.
Brussels also pledged to accelerate regulatory approvals of upgraded vaccines that work against variants and to help ramp up vaccine production.
It is also adding anti-variant clauses in its new supply deals to make sure companies develop shots that work against new variants, EU sources said.
Updated
India could have seen the worst of the pandemic, some experts believe, as rates of infection are falling and surveys suggesting nearly 300 million people may already have antibodies, despite a recent uptick in two hard-hit states.
Reuters reports:
“There is a human barricade for the virus,” said Bhramar Mukherjee, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, who with a team of researchers, has been modeling the trajectory of the outbreak in India.
“By the end of March, we should see a very slow, steady decline [in cases],” she added.
Cases that were rising by nearly 100,000 a day in September are now growing at just 10,000 a day. And India’s official number of total infections, which was projected to surpass that of the United States in late 2020, now stands at 11 million, well behind the U.S. tally of about 28 million.
Total deaths so far in India are just under 156,000, the world’s fourth highest number of fatalities.
EU still short of 10m Pfizer doses expected by now
The EU is still waiting for about 10m Covid-19 vaccine doses from Pfizer that were due in December, officials said, leaving it about one-third short of the supplies it had expected by now from the US company.
Reuters reports:
The delay is another blow to the EU, which has also been hit by delays in deliveries from the Anglo-Swedish drugmaker AstraZeneca and the US company Moderna, and had also faced earlier delays on the Pfizer vaccine.
It also raises questions about the rationale of an EU vaccine export control scheme which was set up in late January to ensure timely deliveries but has not yet been activated, despite the supply shortfalls.
By the middle of last week, Pfizer had delivered to the EU 23m doses of the Covid-19 vaccine it developed with the German firm BioNTech, said an EU official who is directly involved in talks with the US company.
That was about 10m doses less than Pfizer had promised to supply by mid-February, said a second official who is also involved in the talks.
Pfizer declined to comment, saying schedules of its deliveries were confidential. The European commission did not respond to a request for comment on delivery shortfalls.
EU officials have said Pfizer committed to delivering 3.5m doses a week from the start of January, for a total of 21m shots by mid-February.
[...] [On 22 December] BioNTech said the companies would ship to the EU 12.5m doses by the end of the month. Only about 2m of those doses due in December have been delivered, according to Reuters calculations.
The shortfall would amount to about 30% of the total supplies pledged for the period from December until mid-February. One EU official said the company had committed to delivering the missing doses by the end of March.
Updated
Uzbekistan has certified Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine against Covid-19 for domestic use, becoming the 27th country to do so to date aside from Russia itself, Reuters reports.
The Central Asian nation of 33.5 million people said earlier on Wednesday that it planned to purchase 1 million doses of the Russian-developed vaccine.
The country has so far only registered 622 deaths from the virus and 79,461 infections, according to Johns Hopkins University.
The Dutch government raced on Wednesday to prepare legislation to keep a nighttime curfew in place after a court ordered it to scrap the controversial Covid-19 measure which has become the focus of campaigning a month before a general election.
Reuters reports:
The stakes are high politically as Prime Minister Mark Rutte and the country’s top health officials argue the measure is essential to soften a third wave of infections they say is about to arrive due to variants of the coronavirus.
Tuesday’s court ruling found the government’s current justifications lacked sufficient legal basis, sending authorities scrambling to draft a bill and enact it swiftly into law.
Rutte is aiming to get the new law through both houses of parliament before an appeals hearing set for Friday morning, to ensure the curfew, the first in the Netherlands since World War Two, stays in place regardless of the outcome.
The measure sparked several days of rioting by anti-lockdown protesters when it was introduced on 23 January, and has been heavily criticised by Rutte’s opponents in parliament in the run up to the March 17 elections.
The curfew between 9 p.m. and 4:30 a.m. local time is part of broad lockdown measures in the Netherlands, including bans on both public gatherings and on receiving more than one visitor at home at a time.The measures are disliked by many voters, weary of the lockdown as non-essential shops, bars, restaurants and secondary schools have been closed for months, but a majority support government policy.
The British prime minister, Boris Johnson, said he would outline a “cautious and prudent” route out of lockdown on Monday, and until then he urged people not to pay too much attention to speculation.
Johnson told broadcasters:
We’ll be setting out what we can on Monday 22nd about the way ahead and it’ll be based firmly on a cautious and prudent approach to coming out of lockdown in such a way as to be irreversible.
People are coming up with theories about what we’re going to do and what we’re going to say and about rates of infection and so on. I would just advise everybody just wait, we will try to say as much as we can on Monday.
Updated
The number of daily Covid-19 cases in Poland could rise to a weekly average of 8,000-10,000 - in an optimistic scenario - the health minister said on Wednesday, adding that the return to a rise in infections looked to be a lasting trend.
Adam Niedzielski told a news conference:
At the moment in an optimistic scenario we estimate that the weekly average number of infections will rise to a range of 8-10,000.
If we look at the short-term, the next month, the models indicate that we will be dealing with an increase in infections.
Since Tuesday, Poland recorded a further 8,694 new cases, the Ministry of Health said on Wednesday.
Another 279 people have died, bringing the death toll to 41,308.
2,230,117 Poles have already been vaccinated against Covid-19.
The government started a national vaccination programme on 27 December, with health-service workers amongst those with vaccine priority, First News reports.
In late January, Poland started vaccinating senior citizens over 80 years of age.
Poland entered a national lockdown on 28 December that was extended until 14 February.
Updated
Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at the Univerity of Oxford, said coronavirus mutations evolving in response to vaccines should be expected this year.
Bell told the Commons science and technology committee:
Most of the variants we have seen so far represent that kind of adaptation to a new species – it’s a bit like moving into a new apartment, you are shuffling the sofa around and making sure the TV is in the right place.
That’s what the virus is doing with most of these mutations. What we will see between now and the end of the year is a number of variants which are driven by immunological selection, largely by the vaccines, and that will add another layer of complexity.
[...]
We need to be conscious of the new variants, we need to be ready to make new vaccines if we need them, but I am pretty clear our existing vaccines are going to work to some extent.
Updated
Senegal is expecting its first delivery of Covid-19 vaccines on Wednesday after paying for 200,000 doses from China’s Sinopharm.
Reuters reports:
Like other African countries that have struggled to procure vaccines, Senegal is still waiting for disbursements through African Union and World Health Organization-backed (WHO) programmes.
In the meantime, some have turned to purchases or donations from China. Despite a relatively late start compared to western producers, China is ramping up efforts to distribute its vaccines in Africa and elsewhere, some as direct aid.
It was not clear how many doses would be in the first shipment or when vaccinations might start.
As a lower-middle income country, Senegal is eligible for around 1.3 million doses for free in the first wave of disbursement from the WHO’s Covax programme. But shipments are not expected to start until late February and most will arrive in March, the WHO said on Tuesday.
Last week Senegal said it had paid a little over 2bn CFA francs ($3.71m) for the Sinopharm doses to kickstart its vaccination campaign this month.
It aims to inoculate around 90% of a targeted 3.5 million people, including health workers and high-risk individuals between the ages of 19 and 60 years old, by the end of 2021.
It has so far recorded over 31,000 cases and 769 deaths from Covid-19.
Updated
Spain’s Pharma Mar said on Wednesday that it has obtained regulatory approval in the UK for a late-stage clinical trial of its Aplidin drug to treat patients who have been hospitalised with a moderate Covid-19 infection.
Reuters reports:
Britain’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is the first regulator to authorise the Neptuno trial, which aims to compare the efficacy of Aplidin against standard treatments for moderate cases of the disease.
Pharma Mar said it hopes to enrol some 600 patients across 12 countries for the Phase III trial.
Pharma Mar shares were trading 0.78% higher at 1102 GMT recovering from a 6.7% slump before the announcement.
Hungary’s surgeon general on Wednesday said the time has not yet come to lift restrictions to contain the coronavirus pandemic, adding the central European country was “very far” from herd immunity.
Wastewater samples, which indicate the likely trajectory of coronavirus infections, show the British variant of the virus was spreading in the country, she added.
The country reported 1,548 new infections on Wednesday, compared to 1,279 a week ago.
The death toll has risen to 13,931, while 299,989 people are considered to have made a recovery.
Most infections have been registered in the capital Budapest (72,796) and Pest County (49,040) so far, Daily News Hungary reports.
The government will keep coronavirus-related restrictions in place until 1 March, and secondary school pupils will continue to be taught remotely.
Shops must close at 7pm, except pharmacies and petrol stations.
Family and private events including birthday celebrations can be held with a maximum of ten people attending, with children not counting.
A new rule stipulates that face masks must be worn in public spaces in localities with more than 10,000 residents, though it is up to local mayors to decide which spaces the rule applies to.
Restaurants are only allowed to sell takeaways, and hotels are not allowed to cater to tourists.
Indonesia will be targeting the high-density hustle and bustle of traditional markets in the second phase of its inoculation programme that launched on Wednesday and also covers essential workers and public servants.
Reuters reports:
The rollout in the south-east Asian nation worst hit by the pandemic began last month, with nearly 1.5 million medical workers set to receive their shots of CoronaVac, produced by China’s Sinovac Biotech by the end of this month.
The new phase, which started at the sprawling, multi-level Tanah Abang market in Jakarta, saw hundreds of market vendors inoculated on Wednesday, some posing thumbs up next to an “I’ve been vaccinated” banner after receiving their shot.
Health minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin said nearly 10,000 workers at the market complex would be vaccinated on Wednesday.
Touring the market during the launch, President Joko Widodo said he hoped public workers such as security forces, as well as journalists, athletes and those in the retail sector could soon be inoculated.
With more than 1.2 million confirmed cases and over 33,000 deaths across the country, in the past year traditional markets have emerged as Covid-19 cluster points in Indonesia.
Data from the Indonesian Traditional Market Traders Association shows 1,825 cases have been detected in markets as of 12 February.
Indonesia aims to vaccinate nearly 181.5 million people, or roughly 67% of its 270 million population, within a year to help revive its ailing economy, which last year plunged into its first recession in over two decades.
I’m Jedidajah Otte and will be taking over for the next few hours. As ever, feel free to get in touch with updates, tips and pointers, I’m on Twitter @JedySays or you can email me.
Updated
Germany expects to receive 10m doses of coronavirus vaccines by the end of next week, meaning the pace of vaccination is set to pick up significantly, Reuters reports citing the health minister, Jens Spahn.
Spahn said that it was important to remain cautious about loosening lockdown rules, since while case numbers continued to decline, more infectious mutants continued to gain ground in Germany, with the British variant now making up more than 20% of cases.
While vaccination was entirely voluntary, Spahn urged the public to take up on the offer of a jab.
“If you wait, you risk serious illness,” he said.
.@jensspahn: „Inzw. macht die britische Virusvariante über 20% der vom @rki_de untersuchten Proben aus. Der Anteil der Infektionen mit dieser Variante verdoppelt sich ca. jede Woche. Wir müssen damit rechnen, dass sie bald auch bei uns die dominierende Variante werden könnte.“
— BMG (@BMG_Bund) February 17, 2021
Updated
Summary
Here’s a roundup of the latest developments:
- Israel has permitted Palestinian officials to send the first shipment of 1,000 coronavirus vaccines to the blockaded Gaza Strip. The move came after the Palestinian Authority accused Israel of holding up vital shipments intended for frontline medical workers.
- Taiwan has suggested China is to blame after a deal for 5m Covid vaccine doses was put on hold. Taiwan’s health minister, Chen Shih-chung, said officials were on the verge of announcing the deal in December when BioNTech pulled the plug. He blamed “outside forces intervening”.
- Japan has begun vaccinating healthcare workers against the coronavirus at the start of a cautious inoculation programme. Tokyo Medical Centre director Kazuhiro Araki became the first person in Japan to receive the vaccine outside of clinical trials.
- South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has suggested he will receive the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to demonstrate his government’s confidence in the jab.
- The number of new cases of Covid-19 reported worldwide fell by 16% last week to 2.7 million, the World Health Organization said. The number of new deaths reported also fell 10% week-on-week, to 81,000, the WHO said late on Tuesday in its weekly epidemiological update, using figures up to Sunday.
-
The New Zealand government is ending Auckland’s three-day lockdown at midnight on Wednesday despite reporting three new community Covid-19 cases.
Two new cases were found on Wednesday after mass testing of students at Papatoetoe high school. A third fresh community case, a family member of one of those students, was announced by the director general of health, Ashley Bloomfield, later on Wednesday. -
South Africa said on Tuesday it would offer its doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine to the African Union after scrapping their use due to efficacy concerns. The country suspended its vaccine rollout – meant to begin with the AstraZeneca shots earlier this month – after a study found the jab failed to prevent mild and moderate illness caused by a variant found in South Africa.
- A South Korean MP claimed that North Korea attempted to steal information about coronavirus vaccines and treatments. Ha Tae-keung said he had been told during a closed-door briefing by the National Intelligence Service this week that “North Korea tried to obtain technology involving the Covid vaccine and treatment by using cyberwarfare to hack into Pfizer”.
-
Brazil’s environment minister tests positive for Covid. Ricardo Salles is, at least, the 15th member of the Bolsonaro administration to be diagnosed with the illness so far.
Updated
Sweden, known for its softer approach to the pandemic, is preparing to use new legislation to close gyms, restaurants and hair salons ahead of a feared third wave of virus infections, AFP reports.
Last month, Sweden adopted a pandemic law giving the government new powers to curb the spread of the virus.
The country has never imposed the type of lockdown seen elsewhere in Europe, controversially relying on mostly non-coercive measures.
It has however gradually tightened measures since November, including a ban on alcohol sales after 8pm and on public gatherings of more than eight people.
Sweden has also introduced limits on the number of people allowed in sports centres, swimming pools and shopping centres and a recommendation to wear face masks on public transport during rush hour.
The government has previously made preparations under the pandemic law to shut shopping malls if necessary, but is now expanding that to include all commercial and service centres, such as gyms, pools, sports centres, hair salons, cafes and restaurants.
“In the event that the infection rate deteriorates drastically, the government will need to close some businesses,” the government said in a statement.
“We have no announcement regarding closures today, but we are preparing to use that part of the pandemic law as well,” Health Minister Lena Hallengren told reporters.
“Currently we don’t believe it’s necessary but we are of course not going to wait until it’s too late,” she said.
The country of 10.3 million people has been hit much harder than its Nordic neighbours, and on Tuesday reported a total of 617,869 cases of Covid-19 and 12,487 related deaths.
Cases have been in decline since mid-December, but the fall has tapered off lately and health officials are concerned that a third wave could be just around the corner.
Bahrain has become one of the first countries in the world to launch a digital Covid vaccine passport.
In a statement Bahrain said its BeAware app will enable individuals to show their immunity status two weeks after receiving both doses of the jab.
Authorities will be able verify its validity by scanning a QR code linking to the national vaccine register.
To access the digital certificate, users must have received two doses of the vaccine, with 21 days between each.
Other countries developing similar programmes include Denmark and Sweden, with both nations planning to launch the service in the coming weeks.
Malaysia has announced a further 2,998 Covid cases and 22 new deaths from the virus.
The average number of new cases has been coming down since the end of January when daily cases almost hit 6,000.
Pecahan kes baharu (2,998) pic.twitter.com/iNzsMIb5yY
— KKMalaysia🇲🇾 (@KKMPutrajaya) February 17, 2021
Updated
Italy’s new prime minister, Mario Draghi, has promised sweeping reforms to help rebuild Italy following the coronavirus pandemic, as he set out his priorities ahead of a mandatory confidence vote in his government of national unity.
In his maiden speech to parliament, Draghi said his main duty was to “fight the pandemic by all means and to safeguard the lives of our fellow citizens”.
However, he said his government would also look to the future with a series of reforms aimed at fostering long-term growth in the eurozone’s third largest economy, which is mired in its worst recession since the second world war.
#BREAKING Italy must rebuild after pandemic as part of more integrated EU: Draghi pic.twitter.com/Nz3W3q8H8q
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) February 17, 2021
Updated
There is more here on Israel’s decision to allow the first shipment of vaccines to Gaza:
The UK has became the first country in the world to allow volunteers to be exposed to the virus to advance medical research into the pandemic.
The trial, which will begin within a month, will see up to 90 healthy volunteers aged 18-30 exposed to Covid in a safe and controlled environment to increase understanding of how the virus affects people, the government said.
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said the study will give doctors greater understanding of Covid-19 and help support the pandemic response by aiding vaccine and treatment development.
Ramaphosa to get Johnson & Johnson jab
South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has announced that he will receive the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to demonstrate his government’s confidence in the jab.
To demonstrate our confidence in this vaccine and help allay any fears that people may have, the Minister of Health and I will join the first health care workers to receive the vaccine in Khayelitsha.
— Cyril Ramaphosa 🇿🇦 #StaySafe (@CyrilRamaphosa) February 17, 2021
In a statement he said:
To demonstrate our confidence in this vaccine and help allay any fears that people may have, the minister of health and I will join the first health care workers to receive the vaccine in Khayelitsha.
We have called on leaders in various sectors and parts of the country to lead by example and get inoculated publicly. We will therefore witness some premiers, MECs and leaders from civil society, religious formations and traditional leadership being vaccinated in all provinces.
Through this vaccination programme, government aims to achieve population immunity to save lives and protect livelihoods.
South Africa has offered its stock of Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccines to the African Union as the country pivots to using shots developed by Johnson & Johnson instead (see earlier).
Ramaphosa will get the Johnson & Johnson shot at Khayelitsha District hospital in Cape Town.
South Africa paused the rollout of AstraZeneca doses this month, after preliminary trial data showed they offered minimal protection against mild to moderate illness from the country’s dominant coronavirus variant.
Updated
Our Jerusalem correspondent, Oliver Holmes, has confirmation of the first delivery of vaccines to Gaza (see earlier).
Israel has permitted the first shipment of 1,000 coronavirus vaccines into the blockaded Gaza Strip, after Palestinian officials accused it of holding up vital shipments intended for frontline medical workers.
An Israeli security official said.
This morning, an amount of 1,000 Sputnik vaccines donated by Russia, is being transferred from the Palestinian Authority to the Gaza Strip, in accordance with the Palestinian Authority’s request and the approval of the political echelon.
The delivery of the vaccines is on its way to the Gaza Strip.
Pete Evans, an Australian celebrity chef and conspiracy theorist, has been permanently booted off Instagram for sharing misinformation about coronavirus and vaccines.
Facebook confirmed on Wednesday it had deleted Evans’ account on the popular picture-sharing platform. The account had hundreds of thousands of followers.
“We removed Pete Evans’ account for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” the company said in a statement.
First vaccine delivery to Gaza
The first delivery of vaccines to Gaza is taken place, according to reports in the Israeli media.
BREAKING: The first shipment of vaccines from the Palestinian Authority will be brought into Gaza Strip today with the approval of Israel pic.twitter.com/xvmuEOOo0X
— Elior Levy • אליאור לוי (@eliorlevy) February 17, 2021
A delivery of 1,000 of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccines is being transferred from the Palestinian Authority to the Gaza Strip, with Israel’s permission, according to the Jerusalem Post.
The reports come a day after Palestinian officials accused Israel of preventing a vital first shipment of 2,000 coronavirus vaccines intended for frontline health workers from entering the blockaded Gaza Strip.
South Korea’s prime minister Chung Sye-kyun has warned against loosening enforcement of social distancing rules after the number of new coronavirus cases hit the highest levels in nearly 40 days, Reuters reports.
The government relaxed distancing curbs starting this week, after getting on top of a third wave of outbreaks that peaked at about 1,200 daily cases in late December.
But the numbers shot back up in just three days, topping 600 for the first time in 39 days on Tuesday, after a ban on nighttime entertainment facilities was lifted and a restaurant curfew extended by one hour to 10 pm.
Chung said there were signs of lax discipline, singling out nightclubs opening at 5 am and people partying at a hotel after the curfew.
He said:
We’ve eased distancing to help small business owners maintain their livelihoods, not to keep a slack rein on the virus. The third wave is not over ... now is never the time to loosen up.
South Korea’s drug safety ministry granted final approval on Wednesday for a shipment of 1.57 million doses of AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine, as authorities gear up to begin vaccinating healthcare workers on 26 February.
The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency reported 621 cases as of Tuesday midnight, up from around 400 in the previous few days as testing increased after last week’s Lunar New Year holidays.
South Korea’s total infections grew to 84,946 cases, with 1,538 deaths.
Ukraine’s health minister has claimed that Kyiv’s coronavirus vaccine purchases were being hampered by “dirty information attacks” that have triggered a corruption investigation against his ministry.
Reuters reports that Maksym Stepanov denied wrongdoing after the anti-corruption agency Nabu launched an inquiry this month into the procurement of China’s Sinovac vaccines through an intermediary importer, Lekhim.
Ukraine lags behind most European countries in securing vaccines and has yet to start mass vaccinations.
Stepanov said the accusations of corruption were costing the country dear.
“Due to dirty information attacks, we have already started seeing reluctance on the part of prospective vaccine companies regarding future cooperation,” he told a morning briefing.
The disinformation aimed to disrupt Ukraine’s vaccination campaign and force it to turn to Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine, Stepanov added.
Kyiv has dismissed the idea of buying the Sputnik vaccine because of enduring anger over Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its support for pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine.
However, the anti-graft agency said its investigation could not harm state procurement. In a statement it said:
So far, detectives have not carried out any investigative actions that could be regarded as hindering the procurement of vaccines.
Nabu will continue to investigate facts of probable abuse in all socially significant spheres of public life.
Last week, Reuters reported that shipments of the Sinovac vaccine to Ukraine could be delayed until April.
Updated
Japan starts vaccinations
Japan has begun vaccinating healthcare workers against the coronavirus, at the start of a cautious inoculation programme, AFP reports.
Japan has so far approved only the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, and started administering the first shots at a Tokyo hospital on Wednesday morning.
Tokyo Medical Centre director Kazuhiro Araki became the first person in Japan to receive the vaccine outside of clinical trials.
Speaking to reporters he said:
The vaccine plays an important role in anti-coronavirus measures. So I thought as a director I should take the lead and get the shot.
I don’t like getting shots very much. But it wasn’t painful, so it was good. I was relieved.
Twelve staff at the facility are being vaccinated on Wednesday, in front of the media, with a total of 800 in line to receive shots - including administrative personnel.
Japan is planning to initially vaccinate 40,000 healthcare workers across the country, and will study the effects of the two-dose vaccine on 20,000 of them.
Doses will be administered three weeks apart, with the people in the study group asked to keep daily records of any side effects or reactions, local media said.
The country then hopes to vaccinate around 3.7 million health workers from March - with jabs for around 36 million people aged 65 or older starting from April.
Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said he takes “seriously the fact that it has taken time” for Japan to start vaccinations compared to some other countries.
“But today we start, and it is the government’s responsibility to prepare the environment so that many Japanese people are vaccinated.”
Japan’s minister overseeing vaccinations Taro Kono told media on Tuesday there was no timeline yet for vaccinating the broader population.
He also acknowledged he had “no idea” how much of the population will be vaccinated by this summer’s postponed Olympics.
Japan’s approval process has been slower than in some other countries because it has required additional domestic trials.
But the country has also seen a much more limited outbreak compared with hard-hit countries such as Britain or the United States.
Updated
A deal for Taiwan to buy 5m doses of a Covid-19 vaccine developed by Germany’s BioNTech is on hold, the island’s health minister said, citing potential pressure from China for the delay.
Taiwan’s health minister, Chen Shih-chung, said officials were on the verge of announcing the deal in December when BioNTech pulled the plug.
While he did not directly say China was to blame, Chen implied there was a political dimension to the decision and that he had been worried about “outside forces intervening”, hence his caution in discussing the planned deal publicly.
China hopes ‘vaccine diplomacy’ will restore its image and boost its influenceRead more
“Certain people don’t want Taiwan to be too happy,” he added, without elaborating, in a radio interview.
(This is Matthew Weaver taking over the blog for next few hours.)
Updated
A British man undergoing treatment for stage four cancer says he is trapped abroad because it would be medically unsafe for him to return to a quarantine hotel.
“I couldn’t do the hotel. I think I’d leave on a stretcher,” said Michael Thomas, who is stuck in Madeira with his wife and 14-year-old daughter.
Thomas, 68, is undergoing treatment for stage four incurable cancer, so had been shielding since the start of the pandemic. He flew out to the Portuguese archipelago for a family holiday in December, but said he has been advised by his GP and oncologist that it would be dangerous for him to return and stay in a quarantine hotel for 10 days, leaving him effectively stranded.
As of Monday, Madeira has been listed on the government’s red list of locations from which arrivals to the UK must quarantine in a hotel at their own expense. There are no exemptions for people with medical conditions:
That’s it from me, Helen Sullivan, for today – and here is some good news:
Summary
Here are the key developments from the last few hours:
- The number of new cases of Covid-19 reported worldwide fell by 16% last week to 2.7 million, the World Health Organization said.The WHO reported that:. The number of new deaths reported also fell 10% week-on-week, to 81,000, the WHO said late Tuesday in its weekly epidemiological update, using figures up to Sunday.
- The WHO expects the first Covax deliveries late February. The Covax facility, the global Covid-19 vaccine procurement and distribution effort which aims to ensure poorer countries are also able to access doses, said its final shipment list for the first deliveries would be issued next week, following the WHO giving the green light to the AstraZeneca jabs.
- Joe Biden laid out his plans for fighting the next stage of the coronavirus pandemic in a primetime town hall on Tuesday, pledging to make 600m doses of the Covid-19 vaccine available by the end of July, saying teachers should be moved “up the hierarchy” of the vaccine queue, and predicting most elementary schools would reopen by the end of his first 100 days in office.
-
The New Zealand government is ending Auckland’s three-day lockdown at midnight on Wednesday despite reporting three new community COVID-19 cases.
Two new cases were found on Wednesday after mass testing of students at Papatoetoe High School. A third fresh community case, a family member of one of those students, was announced by Director General of Health Ashley Bloomfield later on Wednesday. -
South Africa said Tuesday it would offer its doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine to the African Union after scrapping their use due to efficacy concerns. The country suspended its vaccine rollout - meant to begin with the AstraZeneca shots earlier this month - after a study found the jab failed to prevent mild and moderate illness caused by a variant found in South Africa.
-
A South Korean MP claimed that North Korea attempted to steal information about coronavirus vaccines and treatments. Ha Tae-keung said he had been told during a closed-door briefing by the National Intelligence Service this week that “North Korea tried to obtain technology involving the Covid vaccine and treatment by using cyberwarfare to hack into Pfizer”.
- Authorities fail to explain ‘worrying’ new Covid variant detected in Australia. Australian health departments have failed to publicly explain the presence of a “worrying” variant of Covid-19 in Australia identified by UK researchers from a global genomic database of samples.
- The Australian state of Victoria is set to ease virus curbs. Australia’s Victoria state will ease Covid restrictions from midnight on Wednesday, Premier Daniel Andrews said, after reporting no new cases on the final day of a five-day snap lockdown put in place to contain a fresh virus cluster.
- US airline traffic fell to lowest level since 1984 last year. US passenger airline traffic fell 60% in 2020 to the lowest number since 1984, the US transportation department said. In total, there were 368 million passengers in 2020, down from 922.6 million in 2019. The previous yearly low was 351.6 million in 1984, the department said.
- As nowstorm halted the Greek vaccination drive. A snowstorm of rare vigour and durability has forced the Greek government to delay the country’s Covid-19 vaccination drive after citizens were advised to remain at home.Inoculation centres, including mega facilities capable of vaccinating up to 20,000 people a day, were ordered to close as the unusually cold front swept across Greece.
- Brazil’s environment minister tests positive for Covid. Brazil’s environment minister has tested positive for Covid-19, the ministry announced in a statement.Ricardo Salles is, at least, the 15th member of the Bolsonaro administration to be diagnosed with the illness so far.
Biden vows to make 600m vaccine doses available by end of July
Joe Biden laid out his plans for fighting the next stage of the coronavirus pandemic in a primetime town hall on Tuesday, pledging to make 600m doses of the Covid-19 vaccine available by the end of July, saying teachers should be moved “up the hierarchy” of the vaccine queue, and predicting most elementary schools would reopen by the end of his first 100 days in office:
The head of a prefecture in Japan has said the area is considering pulling out of the Olympic torch relay, as the nation became the latest major economy to begin its vaccine rollout.
Tatsuya Maruyama, the governor of Shimane prefecture, said on Wednesday that it could withdraw from the key Olympic event and has called for the Tokyo 2020 Games to be cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Updated
More now on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine being trialled on South African healthcare workers, via AFP:
Tulio de Oliveira, a South Africa-based professor of virology who helped identify the new variant, was optimistic the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine would prove a success in the country.
“It doesn’t need the high levels of refrigeration, so a little bit easier to administer,” he told AFP.
Those vaccines will be supplemented by 20 million doses of the Pfizer formula as South Africa embarks on an ambitious aim to inoculate around 40 million people - 67 percent of the population - by the end of the year.
More doses will be secured through the World Health Organization-backed Covax facility and the AU.
The country has recently emerged from its second wave of infections, seeing the number of daily cases drop from highs of 20,000 in early January to just over 1,000 on Monday.
It has counted close to 1.5 million infections of which more than 48,000 have been fatal.
South Africa offers AstraZeneca jabs to AU
South Africa said Tuesday it would offer its doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine to the African Union after scrapping their use due to efficacy concerns, AFP reports.
The country suspended its vaccine rollout - meant to begin with the AstraZeneca shots earlier this month - after a study found the jab failed to prevent mild and moderate illness caused by a variant found in South Africa.
“The doses we purchased have been offered to the African Union to distribute to those countries who have already expressed interest in acquiring the stock,” Health Minister Zweli Mkhize told parliament.
“There will be no wasteful and fruitless expenditure.”
The continent’s hardest-hit country by the pandemic had acquired a million doses of Covishield, a copy of the AstraZeneca vaccine made by the Serum Institute of India, and was set to receive an additional 500,000.
The African Union (AU), through its African Vaccine Acquisition Task Team, has secured some 270 million doses of anti-Covid vaccines for the continent and last week said it would not “walk away” from the AstraZeneca formula.
It recommended countries where the more contagious South African variant has not been detected should proceed with the rollout.
Malawi has already said it will forge ahead with its purchase of the jabs, although the delivery dates have not yet been confirmed.
More on the new variant detected in Australia now:
State and federal health authorities so far contacted by Guardian Australia say they have no record of B1525 being detected in their testing, and most have only recorded the South African and English variants.
Health services in Western Australian, South Australia, Victoria and the Northern Territory say they have not detected the variant. Other states and territories are yet to respond officially.
Prof Peter Collignon, an infectious diseases physician with Australian National University, said authorities may have picked up the new variant in their regular testing but not recognised it if they hadn’t known to look for it until now.
This is due to the way genomic sequencing works. Where a particular virus has been sequenced, it appears as raw data that is uploaded to an Australian website. That information is then shared globally for other researchers to conduct further investigations.
For it to have meaning, health authorities need to know to look for a particular variant and then interpret a sequence against other epidemiological information that has been collected.
“I’m not the most expert on the genomics of Covid-19 but it is entirely possible that they may have picked it up in their testing and did not know they picked it up,” Collignon said. “It happens with other viruses and bacteria where people sequence a genome, upload it, then other people do a search, find it and say, ‘hey, this is what we’ve got!’
“That’s the point of having these genomic banks, that’s the point of uploading this information to these databases so other people can investigate.”
In a statement, federal health authorities said they were aware of the variant but not where it has been recorded:
Authorities fail to explain 'worrying' new Covid variant detected in Australia
Australian health departments have failed to publicly explain the presence of a “worrying” variant of Covid-19 in Australia identified by UK researchers from a global genomic database of samples.
The variant, known as B1525, was picked up by researchers from the University of Edinburgh who were examining samples taken from GISAID, a global genomics database, in order to look for potential mutations in strains of Covid-19 that should be targeted in future testing.
B1525 differs from the B117 virus found in England and the B1351 strain that originated in South Africa thanks to a set of mutations that include E484K – a mutation to the spike protein on the outside of the virus that plays a role in helping it to enter cells.
The E484K mutation is suspected to have contributed to making the South African and Brazilian variants of the virus more resistant to antibodies seeking to eliminate it – a development that may prove problematic for vaccine rollouts.
While the study turned up 35 samples of B1515 from Denmark and 33 from the UK, two instances were found in Australia with the earliest being recorded on 17 January 2021.
The exact point of origin of these samples within Australia remains unclear, but they are likely to have been introduced by travellers returning through the hotel quarantine program:
The first batch of Johnson & Johnson vaccines have arrived in South Africa:
Our first batch of 80 000 J&J #CovidVaccines is here. Here's how many will go where: https://t.co/m9ra5kRbge https://t.co/68bfC9EAUM
— Mia Malan (@miamalan) February 17, 2021
South Africa is preparing to give shots of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine still being tested to health care workers this week as part of a large scale trial, the health minister has said.
The first batch of 80,000 doses of the single dose vaccine, which has not been authorised for general use in South Africa or anywhere else in the world, will be administered to health care professionals across the country.
Updated
The Dominican Republic started inoculating medical staff against Covid on Tuesday as it launched its vaccination campaign following the arrival of the first 20,000 doses of the Oxford University-AstraZeneca vaccine, Reuters reports.
Speaking at the Air Force hospital where the campaign started, President Luis Abinader said his government had acquired 110,000 doses of the vaccine from the Serum Institute of India (SII) due to delays by other vaccine makers.
The SII, the world’s biggest vaccine maker, has licensed the vaccine from AstraZeneca and Oxford University and markets it as Covidshield for low-and middle-income countries.
The Dominican Republic is the Caribbean country worst hit by the pandemic, registering 2,975 deaths and around 231,950 infections to date.
Abinader’s government plans to vaccinate the country’s 7.8 million adults in three phases by the end of the year. By the end of July it hopes to have vaccinated the 2.7 million people who are over 50 years old, as well as all healthcare staff, teachers and the military.
In addition to the 110,000 doses from the SII, the country has signed up for 10 million shots directly from AstraZeneca, 8 million from Pfizer, 768,000 from Sinopharm and 542,000 from the global vaccine sharing scheme Covax.
Updated
Still in New Zealand: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says she stands by returning Auckland to level 3 as the outbreak was of the more transmissible UK variety and her team took a cautious approach to the evolving situation.
Bloomfield said the wastewater testing which found no trace of covid in the area was “reassuring” there was not a widespread outbreak in the community.
“I wanted enough time at a cautious level to give us reassurance,” Ardern said.
“Much better to have 72 hours in [lockdown] and make the wrong decision, than have 72 hours of unchecked spread.”
Mask-wearing on all public transport will now be mandatory nationwide, Ardern said.
Mandatory QR scan-coding will be discussed by cabinet soon, the PM said, though enforcement “would be tricky”.
Auckland dropping to alert level 2
Jacinda Ardern says that of midnight tonight Auckland will drop down to alert level 2, ending the 3-day lockdown.
The remainder of New Zealand will move to Level 1.
The restrictions will be reviewed on Monday.
“We don’t have a widespread outbreak,” said Ardern, but a “contained traceable transmission”
Updated
New Zealand confirms third new case
Updates from the press conference in New Zealand now: A family member of the two positive cases announced this afternoon has tested positive for Covid-19.
The two Wednesday cases are both students at Papatoetoe but were not at school while symptomatic.
The high school will remain closed this week, as it is now the source of three confirmed cases.
Every single student is now being tested, director-general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said.
More than 20,000 tests have been done in Auckland since Sunday’s cluster was announced and the prime minister ordered a city-wide lockdown.
Prime minister Jacinda Ardern is currently announcing whether alert levels will change, after meeting with her cabinet this afternoon.
Updated
Australia’s strict 14-day hotel quarantine system, and simultaneous stifling of its citizens’ ability to travel freely overseas, are widely acknowledged as a major factor in the nation’s successful containment of Covid-19, low death rate and ability to resume a semblance of pre-pandemic life.
However the nation’s quarantine regime has been progressively tightened in response to instances of the virus leaking out of hotels since the mandatory order was introduced for international arrivals from all countries in March last year.
After the country’s initial lockdown largely suppressed the virus and new community cases dwindled, instances of new hotel quarantine breaches were noticeable, and often had the full attention of local health authorities.
Daniel Andrews vows to build standalone quarantine facility at Melbourne or Avalon airportRead more
Importantly, Australia’s hotel quarantine program is also supported by a politically unpopular cap on weekly quarantine spots that has left tens of thousands of Australians stranded overseas.
While the specifics differ slightly between various states and territories, Australia’s current hotel quarantine program has been shaped by breaches, and the key infection control lessons authorities have learned:
To developments in the Pacific:
The President of Kiribati has said his government will keep the borders of the archipelago nation shut indefinitely, as the count
One of the few countries on earth still without a single recorded case of Covid, president Taneti Maamau told Radio Kiribati his government would follow the World Health Organisation’s Covid-19 travel restriction guidelines to protect the i-Kiribati population.
PNG has recorded 10 new cases, in West Sepik, Madang, East New Britain provinces as well as the capital Port Moresby, where the majority of the country’s 955 confirmed cases have been detected.
Across the Pacific, there have been 27,215 confirmed cases, and 279 deaths. The actual number of infections and deaths is likely higher because of a lack of testing facilities in many parts of the Pacific.
The vast majority of the Pacific’s cases - more than 18,000 - have been recorded in French Polynesia, which re-opened its borders to tourists in August and saw a resultant spike in cases.
WHO expects first Covax deliveries late February
The Covax facility, the global Covid-19 vaccine procurement and distribution effort which aims to ensure poorer countries are also able to access doses, said its final shipment list for the first deliveries would be issued next week, following the WHO giving the green light to the AstraZeneca jabs, AFP reports.
On Monday, the WHO gave the seal of approval to the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine being manufactured in plants in India and South Korea, meaning it can now be shipped out via Covax, giving many countries their first Covid-19 shots.
“Covax anticipates the bulk of the first round of deliveries taking place in March, with some early shipments... occurring in late February,” the WHO co-led facility said in a statement.
The interim distribution list issued on February 3 broke down the programme’s initial 337.2 million doses - of which all barring 1.2 million Pfizer-BioNTech doses, are from AstraZeneca. Both WHO-approved vaccines require two injected doses.
Some 145 economies participating in Covax are set to receive enough doses to immunise 3.3% of their collective population by mid-2021.
“Deliveries for this first round of allocation will take place on a rolling basis and in tranches,” Covax said.
Updated
WHO says new Covid-19 cases down 16% last week
The number of new cases of Covid-19 reported worldwide fell by 16% last week to 2.7 million, the World Health Organization said.
The WHO reported that:
- The number of new deaths reported also fell 10% week-on-week, to 81,000, the WHO said late Tuesday in its weekly epidemiological update, using figures up to Sunday.
- Five of the six WHO regions of the world reported a double-digit percentage decline in new cases, with only the Eastern Mediterranean showing a rise, of 7%.
- New case numbers dropped 20% last week in Africa and in the Western Pacific, 18% in Europe, 16% in the Americas and 13% in southeast Asia.
AFP: WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Monday that the number of new cases had declined for a fifth consecutive week, dropping by almost half, from more than five million cases in the week of 4 January.
“This shows that simple public health measures work, even in the presence of variants,” Tedros said.
“What matters now is how we respond to this trend. The fire is not out, but we have reduced its size. If we stop fighting it on any front, it will come roaring back.”
The coronavirus variant of concern first detected in Britain was reported in 94 countries in the week to Monday, the epidemiological update said, an increase of eight.
Local transmission of the variant, as opposed to imported cases, has been reported in at least 47 countries.
The variant first spotted in South Africa was recorded in 46 countries, up two, with local transmission in at least 12 of those nations.
The so-called Brazilian variant was detected in 21 countries, up six, with local transmission in at least two countries.
Updated
Here is the full story on most restrictions lifting in the Australian state of Victoria:
Here is the latest on a South Korean MP claiming that North Korea attempted to steal information about coronavirus vaccines and treatments:
Ha Tae-keung said he had been told during a closed-door briefing by the National Intelligence Service this week that “North Korea tried to obtain technology involving the Covid vaccine and treatment by using cyberwarfare to hack into Pfizer”.
The intelligence service later denied naming Pfizer, whose Covid-19 vaccine was the first in the world to win regulatory approval late last year, as the target of state-sponsored attempts to hack into vaccine technology.
But Ha, a member of the South Korean parliament’s intelligence committee, stood by his claims, saying he had been shown documents stating that “North Korea stole Pfizer (vaccine information) and attempted to steal (technology) from South Korean vaccine and pharmaceutical firms”.
North Korea closed its borders soon after reports of the first cases of Covid-19 emerged in late 2019 and continues to insist that it has not recorded a single case of the virus - a claim some experts have dismissed as unrealistic.
Securing vaccines will be critical to the North’s ability to end lockdowns and revive its troubled economy, which has been hit by the pandemic, natural disasters and international sanctions imposed in response to the regime’s nuclear weapons programme.
North Korea could receive almost 2 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine manufactured in India during the first half of this year via Covax, the World Health Organisation’s vaccine-sharing initiative.
Ha’s claims came after North Korean hackers were accused of attempting to break into the systems of at least nine healthcare firms, such as Johnson & Johnson, Novavax and AstraZeneca.
Intelligence officials in Seoul said in November they had foiled attempts by the North to disrupt South Korean attempts to develop a Covid-19 vaccine.
In sports news, Pep Guardiola believes football will experience a rise in Covid cases again as a result of next month’s international break but has indicated he will not prevent any Manchester City players from travelling.
At the start of this month Fifa announced that clubs were not obliged to release players for internationals in countries that require a quarantine of five or more days on return. For elite sportspeople in the UK a 10-day quarantine applies after visiting red list countries such as Portugal and all of South America.
This means City could order Bernardo Silva, João Cancelo, Rúben Dias, Gabriel Jesus and Sergio Agüero to remain at home but Guardiola said City were not currently minded to do so even though those players would then miss the game at Leicester on 3 April. “The players are going to the national team,” the manager said:
Australian state of Victoria set to ease virus curbs
Australia’s Victoria state will ease Covid restrictions from midnight on Wednesday, Premier Daniel Andrews said, after reporting no new cases on the final day of a five-day snap lockdown put in place to contain a fresh virus cluster.
Nearly all mobility restrictions will be lifted but masks will be required indoors and outdoors if social distance rules could not be followed, Andrews said.
Here is the latest on the confirmed cases in New Zealand:
US president Joe Biden, eager to move beyond his predecessor’s impeachment trial, is taking his case for his $1.9tn coronavirus aid package directly to the American people with a primetime town hall designed in part to put pressure on Republican lawmakers, the AP reports.
The CNN town hall Tuesday night in Milwaukee comes as White House officials say the bill already has broad public support. The House is expected to vote on the measure next week.
“The vast majority of the American people like what they see in this package,” said Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, as she previewed Biden’s sales effort. She added that the support in opinion polls “should be noted by members of Congress as they consider whether they’re going to vote for it or not”.
Biden landed on a slick, snow-covered tarmac in below-freezing weather about 90 minutes before the 9pm ET program. He was to take questions from a small audience of Democrats, Republicans and independents invited for a small, socially distant gathering at the historic Pabst Theater:
North Korean hackers tried to break into Pfizer systems to look for vaccine information
In case you missed this last night:
North Korean hackers tried to break into Pfizer’s computer systems looking for information on the coronavirus vaccine, despite the country’s leader claiming it has no coronavirus cases, AFP reports.
The impoverished, nuclear-armed North has been under self-imposed isolation since closing its borders in January last year to try to protect itself from the virus that first emerged in neighbouring China and has gone on to sweep the world, killing more than two million people.
Leader Kim Jong Un has repeatedly insisted that the country has had no coronavirus cases, although outside experts doubt those assertions.
And the closure has added to the pressure on its tottering economy from international sanctions imposed over its banned weapons systems, increasing the urgency for Pyongyang to find a way to deal with the disease.
Seoul’s National Intelligence Service “briefed us that North Korea tried to obtain technology involving the Covid vaccine and treatment by using cyberwarfare to hack into Pfizer”, MP Ha Tae-keung told reporters after a hearing behind closed doors.
In the US, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has opened up its first Covid-19 mass vaccination sites, part of the Biden administration’s efforts to speed up immunizations and to reach communities of color that have been disproportionately harmed by the pandemic.
Fema’s first mass vaccination sites opened on Tuesday morning in Los Angeles and Oakland, California.
In the early morning in Los Angeles, several dozen cars were already lined up with people sitting inside, reading newspapers and passing the time, a half-hour before the 9am start.
Troops in camouflage fatigues stood around the sprawling parking lot at California State University, Los Angeles, where about 40 white tents were erected and dozens of orange cones put in place to guide traffic.
The site, set up in heavily Latino East LA as part of an effort to reach communities that have suffered disproportionately during the crisis, aims to vaccinate up to 6,000 people a day. Another such site opened at the Oakland Coliseum, near working-class Black and Latino neighborhoods in the northern California city:
Dominic Raab, the UK foreign secretary, is to ask for ceasefires to be implemented in conflict zones so local populations can be vaccinated against coronavirus, arguing that the world has “a moral duty to act”.
The British minister is to chair a meeting of the UN’s security council in an effort to persuade members to agree a resolution calling for locally negotiated ceasefires in areas such as Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen.
“Global vaccination coverage is essential to beating coronavirus,” Raab will say at the meeting, reflecting concerns that wherever the disease is unchecked it could increase the likelihood of vaccine-resistant strains emerging.
But while charities welcomed the UK’s initiative, they called on wealthy countries to consider going further. Sam Nadel, Oxfam’s head of policy and advocacy, warned that the poorest countries enduring conflict risked not getting any vaccines without “a massive increase” in global production:
Tennis fans will be allowed back into Melbourne Park for the remainder of the Australian Open after the Victorian government announced the state’s lockdown will be lifted by Thursday.
With the five-day snap restrictions to end at midnight on Wednesday, crowds will be back in the stands for the men’s and women’s singles semi-finals, starting on Thursday, and the finals over the weekend.
But the exact number allowed back on site is unclear and may be further reduced from the pre-lockdown guidelines, when 30,000 were allowed per day – around 50% of the usual attendance figure.
“They were already reduced but may have to be reduced further,” Victorian premier Dan Andrews said on Wednesday morning. “That matter will be resolved in the next few hours.”
World No 1 Ash Barty will have to play her quarter-final on Wednesday morning without the usual vocal support afforded to home players, but can expect a boost from the stands should she progress against Karolina Muchová:
The syringe Emoji icon is being updated to remove the blood – in order to make it “more versatile when used to describe Covid-19 vaccination,” the Emojipedia blog has announced, explaining:
💉 Syringe isn’t a new emoji, but it does have one change in the forthcoming update from Apple: the blood is removed. This makes the emoji more versatile when used to describe COVID-19 vaccination.
A detailed history of the syringe Emoji – and what has caused other emoji changes – can be found here.
US airline traffic fell to lowest level since 1984 last year
US passenger airline traffic fell 60% in 2020 to the lowest number since 1984, the US transportation department said. In total, there were 368 million passengers in 2020, down from 922.6 million in 2019. The previous yearly low was 351.6 million in 1984, the department said.
For all of 2020, US domestic air travel fell by 58.7%, while international travel fell 70.4% as many countries imposed significant travel restrictions. US airlines say air travel demand remains down more than 60% through early February, Reuters reports.
Airlines for America, an industry trade group representing American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, Southwest Airlines and others, said the nine largest U.S. airlines lost $46 billion before taxes in 2020 and said that passenger volumes are unlikely to return to pre-Covid-19 levels before 2023 or 2024.
US citizens are still barred from travel to much of Europe and other countries, and business travel remains severely depressed. The number of flights operated by US carriers remains down about 45%.
A $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill making its way through Congress would allocate another $14 billion to extend payroll assistance to US airlines to keep thousands of workers on the job through 30 September. Congress has previously approved $40 billion in payroll assistance for US airlines and $25 billion in low-interest loans.
Snowstorm halts Greek vaccination drive
A snowstorm of rare vigour and durability has forced the Greek government to delay the country’s Covid-19 vaccination drive after citizens were advised to remain at home.
Inoculation centres, including mega facilities capable of vaccinating up to 20,000 people a day, were ordered to close as the unusually cold front swept across Greece.
Brazil's environment minister tests positive for Covid
Brazil’s environment minister has tested positive for Covid-19, the ministry announced in a statement.Ricardo Salles is, at least, the 15th member of the Bolsonaro administration to be diagnosed with the illness so far.
Salles had mild symptoms but was otherwise well and self-isolating at the direction of doctors, the ministry said. Bolsonaro, who has sought to downplay the severity of the pandemic, also tested positive for the coronavirus last year.
South Africa to give health workers unapproved Johnson & Johnson vaccine in trial
South Africa is preparing to give its first Covid-19 vaccinations, shots of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine still being tested, to health care workers this week as part of a large scale trial, the health minister has said.AP reports that the first batch of 80,000 doses of the single dose vaccine, which has not been authorised for general use in South Africa or anywhere else in the world, is expected to arrive in the country imminently and will be administered to health care professionals across the country, Zweli Mkhize told parliament.
The vaccines are to be administered as an observational study, in which no placebo shots will be given and the health and future infections of all participants will be tracked.Tests so far suggest the vaccine is safe and effective at preventing severe illness or death from Covid. Another 500,000 doses are expected to be flown to South Africa within four weeks for the vaccination campaign.The first phase of South Africa’s campaign is to vaccinate the country’s 1.25 million health care workers. More than 380,000 health care workers have already registered for vaccination, Mkhize said, encouraging all front-line health workers to register on the government’s internet site.
We salute the health care workers who have chosen vaccination for their own protection and the protection of their colleagues, families and community members.
As more doses arrive the service will be ramped up accordingly to ensure that we maintain a good rate of daily vaccines.
Early results from the trials showed the vaccine has 57% efficacy against moderate to severe cases of Covid-19 caused by the variant in South Africa.South Africa does not have plans to administer the AstraZeneca vaccine which a small, preliminary test shows offers minimal protection against mild to moderate disease caused by the variant here, said Mkhize, following an abrupt halt to the plans after the study.It comes after South Africa announced it planned to share 1m unwanted doses of the vaccine with other countries via the African Union.
Updated
New Zealand confirms two new community cases
The minister of Covid-19 response, Chris Hipkins has confirmed that two students of Papatoetoe high school in south Auckland have tested positive for Covid-19.
This comes after two full days of no new community cases, following the detection of a family of 3 testing positive on Sunday, and the whole of Auckland placed into a three-day lockdown, with the rest of the country placed at Level 2.
Prime minister Jacinda Ardern is meeting with her cabinet this afternoon to discuss the situation and whether alert levels will go up, down or remain the same. She will hold a press conference at 4.30 pm.
The two new cases are siblings at the high school and knew the student who tested positive on Sunday.
Of the 31 close contacts in Papatoetoe High School, 29 have been tested and 28 are negative, while one is positive, the minister said.
Summary
Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.
My name is Helen Sullivan and I’ll be bringing you the latest. As always, you can find me on Twitter @helenrsullivan.
South Africa is preparing to give its first Covid-19 vaccinations, shots of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine still being tested, to health care workers this week as part of a large scale trial, the health minister has said.
Here are the other key recent developments:
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Mexican foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard has said that his government is to present a complaint at the United Nations security council tomorrow about the unequal access to Covid vaccines globally, Reuters reports.
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France has registered 586 new coronavirus deaths in the past 24 hours, a sharp fall from 724 last Tuesday while the seven-day moving average of deaths fell to 381, the first time the average was below 400 since late January.
- Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are three times more likely to die with Covid-19 than the population as a whole, Reuters reports.
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Nicola Sturgeon has confirmed that a phased return to school for younger pupils in Scotland will start from Monday. This will include children aged four to seven and secondary school pupils required to carry out practical assignments.
- The EU is adding clauses to contracts with vaccine makers to allow the bloc to gain access to possible upgraded shots that may offer better protection against variants of the virus, sources have told Reuters.
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The Norwegian government will lift all the extra restrictions imposed on the capital region to stop the spread of a more contagious variant of the coronavirus on Thursday, the government has said.
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Germany is to offer free Covid-19 antigen tests for all from March, the health minister, Jens Spahn, has said, as the country cautiously began allowing some children to return to schools.
- The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, has called on the country to respect a night-time curfew, saying it was still needed to fight the pandemic despite a court ruling earlier today that the measure lacked a legal basis.
- Morocco has received a second batch of 500,000 doses of China’s Sinopharm coronavirus vaccine, health ministry sources have told Reuters.
