A summary of today's developments
- The World Health Organization has announced it is setting up a new group to trace Covid’s origins, seeking to end what it called “political point-scoring” that had hampered investigations. It comes as Danish scientist Peter Ben Embarek, who led the original international mission to Wuhan, unexpectedly suggested in a documentary released yesterday that Covid’s patient zero could be a lab employee infected while collecting bat coronavirus samples.
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Ben Embarek said the Chinese had blocked their investigation, though at the time he expressed few serious complaints publicly. “We did not get to look at laboratory books or documents directly from the laboratory. We got a presentation, and then we talked about and asked the questions we wanted to ask, but we did not get to look at any documentation at all,” he said.
- Many more people around the world will die of Covid if western political leaders “reject their responsibility to the rest of humanity” by prioritising booster shots for their own populations instead of sharing doses, the head of the Oxford vaccine group warned, adding that that the scientific and public health case for large-scale boosting has not been made and could have far-reaching consequences in other countries.
- Brazil registered 966 Covid-19 deaths on Friday and 33,933 additional cases, according to data released by the country’s health ministry. The South American country has now registered a total of 567,862 coronavirus deaths and 20,319,000 total cases, Reuters reports.
- Canada said it will soon require all federal public servants and many other workers to be vaccinated against coronavirus, Reuters reported.
- The US agency that regulates workplace safety issued guidance urging employers to require many fully vaccinated workers to wear masks to protect unvaccinated colleagues and customers, amid a surge in Covid-19 cases.
- Mexico reported 22,758 more confirmed coronavirus cases on Friday and 603 additional fatalities, according to health ministry data. It brings the total number of cases to 3,068,329 and the overall death toll to 247,414.
- Thai police again fired teargas canisters and rubber bullets at hundreds of demonstrators who defied a ban on gatherings to rally in central Bangkok, where they sought to march on the prime minister’s residence. At least three protesters were injured, after demonstrators attempted to pass obstacles set to block their path and threw rocks and launched fireworks towards police.
- The estimated range for England’s Covid-19 reproduction R number has narrowed further and could be below 1, Public Health England said, suggesting cases may no longer be growing exponentially. Meanwhile, the Office for National Statistics said that although the percentage of people testing positive for coronavirus in England “continued to be high”, estimates suggest “an overall decreasing trend over the past two weeks”.
- Masks will no longer be required on Danish public transport, as the Scandinavian country lifted the last of its compulsory face-covering regulations and a minister heralded a return to a more normal everyday life – though people were pictured on trains not wearing them.
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Drugmakers Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna are expected to make billions of dollars from Covid-19 booster shots in a market that could rival the $6bn in annual sales for flu vaccines for years to come, analysts and healthcare investors said.
- Hundreds more Australian military personnel will be deployed next week to Sydney to help enforce the city’s lockdown, despite concerns that it could be alienating the community and fuelling vaccine hesitancy, particularly in suburbs where many Indigenous Australians and migrants and refugees live.
- Republican senator Rand Paul faced questions as it emerged that his wife had purchased $15,000 worth of shares of a drug company the day after the first US clinical trial began for its Covid treatment, following a White House Covid briefing to the Senate health committee, of which Paul is a member.
Mexico reported 22,758 more confirmed coronavirus cases on Friday and 603 additional fatalities, according to health ministry data.
It brings the total number of cases to 3,068,329 and the overall death toll to 247,414.
International Business Machines Corp said it would allow only fully vaccinated U.S. employees to return to offices, which are set to open from September 7th.
The resurgence of cases in the US and the new guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that requires fully vaccinated individuals to wear masks have led companies to change their plans on return to office, vaccinations and masking.
On Thursday, Facebook Inc has pushed back its office return date for all U.S. and some international employees until January 2022, while AT&T Inc said it will require management employees to be vaccinated before entering a work location.
For the latest Covid situation in Australia, you can follow our dedicated blog here -
The US administered 354,777,950 doses of Covid-19 vaccines in the country as of Friday morning and distributed 414,376,925 doses, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said.
Those figures are up from the 353,859,894 vaccine doses the CDC said had gone into arms by August 12th out of 411,253,925 doses delivered.
The agency said 197,081,471 people had received at least one dose while 167,699,170 people are fully vaccinated as of Friday.
Brazil's daily death toll rises by 966
Brazil registered 966 Covid-19 deaths on Friday and 33,933 additional cases, according to data released by the country’s health ministry.
The South American country has now registered a total of 567,862 coronavirus deaths and 20,319,000 total cases, Reuters reports.
The cost of travel tests from NHS Test and Trace for people who arrive from abroad into the UK is to be cut, the health department said.
It is to go down from 88 to 68 for UK travellers who have come from green list countries, or those who have arrived from amber list countries and have been fully vaccinated.
The cost for people arriving from amber list countries who are not fully vaccinated is to go down from 170 to 136 for two tests.
Health secretary Sajid Javid also said there will be a 10-day internal review starting this weekend of the pricing and standards of service from providers of the tests that are to be taken by those who have returned to England on days two and eight of their arrival from abroad.
Javid said that the cost of PCR testing can be “a barrier” to people who were looking forward to taking a summer holiday.
Consumers and families need to be protected from “exploitative practices”, according to Javid, who said he wants to ensure that high quality tests are available at a reasonable price.
Updated
In Canada, a spokesman for Trudeau’s chief rival, Conservative leader Erin O’Toole, called vaccines the “most important tool in the fight against Covid-19,” but suggested the vaccine mandate was a step too far.
“Conservatives support Canadians* right to determine their own health choices,” said spokesman Mathew Clancy.
“Canadians expect reasonable measures, such as rapid testing for those who are not vaccinated.”
That would be more in line with the US, where the White House is requiring all U.S. federal workers be vaccinated or face regular testing and mask mandates.
A number of other countries have mandated vaccines for healthcare and care-home workers, and some require proof of vaccination to access public spaces like bars and restaurants.
Canada is planning a vaccine passport for international travel.
A summary of today's developments
- The World Health Organization has announced it is setting up a new group to trace Covid’s origins, seeking to end what it called “political point-scoring” that had hampered investigations. It comes as Danish scientist Peter Ben Embarek, who led the original international mission to Wuhan, unexpectedly suggested in a documentary released yesterday that Covid’s patient zero could be a lab employee infected while collecting bat coronavirus samples.
-
Ben Embarek said the Chinese had blocked their investigation, though at the time he expressed few serious complaints publicly. “We did not get to look at laboratory books or documents directly from the laboratory. We got a presentation, and then we talked about and asked the questions we wanted to ask, but we did not get to look at any documentation at all,” he said.
- Many more people around the world will die of Covid if western political leaders “reject their responsibility to the rest of humanity” by prioritising booster shots for their own populations instead of sharing doses, the head of the Oxford vaccine group warned, adding that that the scientific and public health case for large-scale boosting has not been made and could have far-reaching consequences in other countries.
- Canada said it will soon require all federal public servants and many other workers to be vaccinated against coronavirus, Reuters reported.
- The US agency that regulates workplace safety issued guidance urging employers to require many fully vaccinated workers to wear masks to protect unvaccinated colleagues and customers, amid a surge in Covid-19 cases.
- Thai police again fired teargas canisters and rubber bullets at hundreds of demonstrators who defied a ban on gatherings to rally in central Bangkok, where they sought to march on the prime minister’s residence. At least three protesters were injured, after demonstrators attempted to pass obstacles set to block their path and threw rocks and launched fireworks towards police.
- The estimated range for England’s Covid-19 reproduction R number has narrowed further and could be below 1, Public Health England said, suggesting cases may no longer be growing exponentially. Meanwhile, the Office for National Statistics said that although the percentage of people testing positive for coronavirus in England “continued to be high”, estimates suggest “an overall decreasing trend over the past two weeks”.
- Masks will no longer be required on Danish public transport, as the Scandinavian country lifted the last of its compulsory face-covering regulations and a minister heralded a return to a more normal everyday life – though people were pictured on trains not wearing them.
-
Drugmakers Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna are expected to make billions of dollars from Covid-19 booster shots in a market that could rival the $6bn in annual sales for flu vaccines for years to come, analysts and healthcare investors said.
- Hundreds more Australian military personnel will be deployed next week to Sydney to help enforce the city’s lockdown, despite concerns that it could be alienating the community and fuelling vaccine hesitancy, particularly in suburbs where many Indigenous Australians and migrants and refugees live.
- Republican senator Rand Paul faced questions as it emerged that his wife had purchased $15,000 worth of shares of a drug company the day after the first US clinical trial began for its Covid treatment, following a White House Covid briefing to the Senate health committee, of which Paul is a member.
Updated
The US Department of Homeland Security, in a new terrorism warning bulletin, said violent extremists could view the reimposition of Covid-19-related restrictions following the spread of coronavirus variants as a rationale to conduct attacks.
The new DHS bulletin warned of the risk of “targeted violence” around the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington and around religious holidays, Reuters reports.
Updated
The US agency that regulates workplace safety issued guidance urging employers to require many fully vaccinated workers to wear masks to protect unvaccinated colleagues and customers, amid a surge in Covid-19 cases.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recommended that workers wear masks “in areas of substantial or high community transmission,” such as manufacturing plants, meat processing facilities and retail establishments, unless they have medical conditions that make it difficult to wear a face covering.
Employers should also consider staggering the times workers clock in and out of work and take breaks to prevent large groups of people from congregating, OSHA said, Reuters reports.
High-volume retail businesses should ask customers to wear masks and consider requiring them.
Updated
Updated
Canada said it will soon require all federal public servants and many other workers to be vaccinated against coronavirus, Reuters reports.
The vaccine mandate, which will also include air, train and cruise ship travelers, comes just two days ahead of an expected election call by Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and could prove to be a wedge issue in the campaign. Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs Dominic LeBlanc said that the vaccine requirement for public servants will be in place by the end of October and that he expects state-owned corporations and other federally regulated employers to follow suit. He added that testing and other measures will be put in place for those who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons.
Pollutants in smoke billowing from huge wildfires in the west of America have probably caused an increase in Covid-19 infections and deaths across several US states, new research has found.
Last year more than 10m acres of land were torched by wildfires, with five out of the six largest fires ever documented in California occurring within just a few months. The burning trees, shrubs and buildings gave off enormous plumes of smoke containing small particles of soot.
The spread of these tiny particles, known as PM2.5, probably caused a spike in Covid cases and deaths in parts of the US west, the new paper has discovered. The smoke helped raise the coronavirus infection rate by nearly 20% in certain counties, with half of all Covid deaths in some places attributable to the pollution, according to the study.
An advisory panel to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted in favor of allowing people with compromised immune systems to receive extra doses of Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer Inc and Moderna, Reuters reports.
Today so far...
- The World Health Organization has announced it is setting up a new group to trace Covid’s origins, seeking to end what it called “political point scoring” that had hampered investigations. It comes as Danish scientist Peter Ben Embarek, who led the original international mission to Wuhan, unexpectedly suggested in a documentary released yesterday that Covid’s patient zero could be a lab employee infected while collecting bat coronavirus samples.
-
Ben Embarek said that Chinese had blocked their investigation, though at the time he expressed few serious complaints publicly. “We did not get to look at laboratory books or documents directly from the laboratory. We got a presentation, and then we talked about and asked the questions we wanted to ask, but we did not get to look at any documentation at all,” he said.
- Many more people around the world will die of Covid if western political leaders “reject their responsibility to the rest of humanity” by prioritising booster shots for their own populations instead of sharing doses, the head of the Oxford vaccine group warned, adding that that the scientific and public health case for large-scale boosting has not been made and could have far-reaching consequences in other countries.
- Thai police again fired teargas canisters and rubber bullets at hundreds of demonstrators who defied a ban on gatherings to rally in central Bangkok, where they sought to march on the prime minister’s residence. At least three protesters were injured, after demonstrators attempted to pass obstacles set to block their path and threw rocks and launched fireworks towards police.
- The estimated range for England’s Covid-19 reproduction “R” number has narrowed further and could be below 1, Public Health England said, suggesting cases may no longer be growing exponentially. Meanwhile, the Office for National Statistics said that although the percentage of people testing positive for coronavirus in England “continued to be high”, estimates suggest “an overall decreasing trend over the past two weeks”.
- Masks will no longer be required on Danish public transport, as the Scandinavian country lifted the last of its compulsory face-covering regulations and a minister heralded a return to a more normal everyday life – though people were pictured on trains not wearing them.
-
Drugmakers Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna are expected to make billions of dollars from Covid-19 booster shots in a market that could rival the $6bn in annual sales for flu vaccines for years to come, analysts and healthcare investors said.
- Hundreds more Australian military personnel will deploy next week to Sydney to help enforce the city’s lockdown, despite concerns it could be alienating the community and fuelling vaccine hesitancy, particularly in suburbs where many Indigenous Australians and migrants and refugees live.
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Republican senator Rand Paul faces questions as it emerges his wife purchased $15,000 worth of shares of a drug company one day after the first US clinical trial began for its Covid treatment, following a White House Covid briefing to the Senate health committee, which Paul is a member of.
Some reaction to the developments.
WHO being hit from all sides- now Chinese govt unhappy. Dr Tedros right to push for an investigation into origins of COVID. We need to know where virus came from so we can learn & try to stop spillover events. https://t.co/O8YQavbTX4
— Prof. Devi Sridhar (@devisridhar) August 13, 2021
.@Peterfoodsafety, who put his own professional reputation & the credibility of the @WHO & int’l process on the line asserting in the Feb Wuhan presser that a #COVID19 lab incident origin was “extremely unlikely” was actually lying. Game-changer. https://t.co/SPggpkn4H0
— Jamie Metzl (@JamieMetzl) August 13, 2021
2/ This is recent Chinese propaganda (which is also anti-semitic) showing @drtedros doing @SecBlinken's bidding on tracing the origins of covid-19 🦇
— Natasha Loder (@natashaloder) August 12, 2021
I was talking to @MMKavanagh about China, the US and @WHO recently for a piece I'm working on. pic.twitter.com/VSXXn4m5JT
The Wall Street Journal reports that Ben Embarek’s remarks represent the most significant departure by a member of the WHO’s team from the conclusions expressed in their initial report (some of which he said to camera as linked to below in comments that may well now cause him some embarrassment).
In the interview with Danish TV for “the Virus Mystery” documentary, Ben Embarek said that a lab run by the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention – not the Wuhan Institute of Virology which has hitherto been the focus – relocated on 2 December 2019.
“We know that when you move a lab, it disturbs everything … That entire procedure is always a disruptive element in the daily work routine of a lab,” he said.
However, the WHO’s original joint report said: “The Wuhan CDC lab which moved on 2nd December 2019 reported no disruptions or incidents caused by the move. They also reported no storage nor laboratory activities on CoVs [coronaviruses] or other bat viruses preceding the outbreak.”
The WSJ reports that the lab is classified at a lower safety level where air ventilation controls are not stringent, and researchers do not necessarily wear masks.
The WHO-led report said the Wuhan CDC lab tested all of its staff for Covid-19 antibodies, it told the organisation in February. One tested positive “due to family cluster transmission.” All others tested negative.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that Ben Embarek’s cooperation with the documentary filmmakers was extensive, even filming his trip to China on his phone to provide a behind-the-scenes view of the tightly-guarded visit.
“The politics was always in the room with us on the other side of the table,” he told Science Magazine during an interview published in February.
Updated
Take a listen to what Peter Ben Embarek has to say after the visit in #Wuhan to probe the origins of #COVID19 this March...
— Serena Dong (@theserenadong) August 13, 2021
"I'm PROUD of this report, despite all the interests and pressures..." pic.twitter.com/drcLON6e36
These startling developments come after the US earlier this year said it would resume funding for the World Health Organization after the Trump administration pulled back from the organisation.
“I am honoured to announce that the US will remain a member of the WHO,” Dr Anthony Fauci said in January. The Associated Press reports that it was the first public statement by a member of the incoming Biden administration to an international audience.
Just hours after Biden’s inauguration, Fauci wrote a letter to UN secretary-general Antonio Gutteres saying the US had reversed the planned pullout from the WHO that was expected to take effect in July.
AP reports that the US, long its biggest donor, had halted funding for the UN health agency — stripping it of cash, pulling back staff and sitting out from the vaccine sharing plan Covax as the WHO faced perhaps its biggest ever challenge.
Danish health minister Magnus Heunicke wrote on Facebook: “This is going to have a huge impact on the world’s ability to fight the pandemic. It is decisive that the US is involved as a driving force and not a country that is looking for the exit when a global catastrophe rages.”
While vowing US support, Fauci in January pointed to some key challenges facing the WHO. He said the US was committed to “transparency, including those events surrounding the early days of the pandemic.”
One of the Trump administration’s biggest criticisms was that the WHO reacted too slowly to the outbreak in Wuhan, China, and was too accepting of and too effusive about the Chinese government’s response to it, the AP reports.
WHO announces new Covid origins group after expert suggests patient zero could be Wuhan lab employee
The World Health Organization has announced it is setting up a new group to trace Covid’s origins, seeking to end what it called “political point scoring” that had hampered investigations.
Reuters reports that the inability of the WHO to say where and how the virus began spreading has fuelled tensions among its members, particularly between China, where Covid-19 cases were first identified in Wuhan in late 2019, and the US.
It comes as Danish scientist Peter Ben Embarek, who led the original international mission to Wuhan, unexpectedly said in a documentary released yesterday that a lab employee infected while collecting bat coronavirus samples was a likely hypothesis as to how the virus passed from bats to humans.
He said according to Danish media, translated by Google:
An employee who was infected in the field by taking samples falls under one of the probable hypotheses. This is where the virus jumps directly from a bat to a human. In that case, it would then be a laboratory worker instead of a random villager or other person who has regular contact with bats. So it is actually in the probable category.
Until 48 hours before we finished the whole mission, we still had no agreement that we would talk about the laboratory part of the report, so it was until the very end that it was discussed whether it should be included or not.
We did not get to look at laboratory books or documents directly from the laboratory. We got a presentation, and then we talked about and asked the questions we wanted to ask, but we did not get to look at any documentation at all.
Their last publication about working with bats was from 2013, but that does not mean that they have not worked with bats since. As far as we understand, they work mostly with parasites, and not so much with viruses, so they have worked with parasites from bats.
I said: “Listen now. We must have this with us, otherwise we have no report. It will not be approved or accepted as a sensible, credible report”, and [a Chinese official] could see that, but he told me also that for them it is difficult to accept that discussion about a laboratory.
On the resistance encountered, he added: “It’s probably because it means that there is a human error behind such an incident, and they are not very happy to admit it. There is partly the traditional Asian feeling that you should not lose face, and then the whole system also focuses a lot on the fact that you are infallible and that everything must be perfect. It could also be that someone wants to hide something. Who knows?”
The WHO has now called for all governments to cooperate to accelerate studies into the origins of the pandemic and “to depoliticise the situation”. It specified that a new advisory group called the International Scientific Advisory Group for Origins of Novel Pathogens would support “the rapid undertaking” of further studies.
“We should work all together. You, me, everyone wants to know the origin of worst pandemic in a century,” WHO spokesperson Fadela Chaib said.
Washington welcomed the WHO plan, noting the “emphasis on scientific-based studies and data driven efforts to find the origins of this pandemic so that we can better detect, prevent and respond to future disease outbreaks.”
We reported earlier that China again rejected the WHO’s calls for a renewed probe into the origins of Covid-19 with a greater focus on the controversial Wuhan laboratory.
A WHO official said that its statement on advancing the virus origins study bore no relation to Ben Embarek’s remarks, noting that the interview was filmed months ago.
Updated
Florida alone accounts for nearly one in five US Covid cases, but the surge “doesn’t seem to concern” Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, according to TV host Stephen Colbert, writes my colleague Adrian Horton.
Instead, he seems more intent on diverting blame onto those crossing the southern border into the US.
DeSantis is who Trump pretended to be.
— Cernovich (@Cernovich) August 4, 2021
pic.twitter.com/d9jN4J83us
Updated
Over 50,000 children aged 12 to 15 have been registered to receive the coronavirus vaccine in Ireland on the first day the programme has been extended to that age bracket.
RTE reported:
HSE Chief Executive Paul Reid has said many will have already received appointments for this weekend.
Parents and guardians can now register for a Covid-19 vaccination for their children with vaccination provided at a HSE vaccination centre, or through participating pharmacies or GPs.
The consent of parents or guardians will be needed either when registering online, or at the vaccination centre.
Updated
US residents with a compromised immune system who received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine are not currently authorised to receive an extra Covid-19 vaccine dose, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Reuters reported the CDC as saying this is because data on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was insufficient.
Italy reported 45 coronavirus-related deaths on Friday against 30 the day before, while the daily tally of new infections rose to 7,409 from 7,270.
Reuters reported that Italy has registered 128,379 deaths linked to Covid-19 since February last year, the second-highest toll in Europe after Britain. Patients in hospital with Covid-19 - not including those in intensive care - stood at 3,033 on Friday, up from 2,975 a day earlier.
There were 35 new admissions to intensive care units, down from 37 on Thursday. The total number of intensive care patients increased to 369 from a previous 352.
The UK recorded 32,700 new cases of Covid-19 on Friday and 100 deaths within 28 days of a positive test for the virus, according to daily government data.
That compares with 33,074 new cases and 94 deaths on Thursday.
The data also showed that 47.2 million people have had a first dose of a vaccine and 40.2 million have had two.
Rachel Hall here on the liveblog - do send over any tips to rachel.hall@theguardian.com.
Updated
We reported earlier that Thai police again fired teargas canisters and rubber bullets at hundreds of demonstrators today who defied a ban on gatherings to rally in central Bangkok, where they sought to march on the prime minister’s residence.
AFP now reports that two protesters including youth activist Thanat “Nat” Thanakitamnuay were injured in the police attack, after demonstrators had attempted to pass barbed wire and rows of shipping containers which had been set to block their path. They also reportedly threw rocks and molotov cocktails, and launched fireworks towards police positions.
Meanwhile, a young protester who blew his own hand off while throwing a firework during yesterday’s rally has tested positive for coronavirus, local media reported.
Norway will lift the majority of its remaining Covid restrictions once all adults have been offered a vaccine, which is expected to be around 6 September, the government has said.
The final step in the lifting of domestic restrictions, already postponed from the start of July, “will be implemented three weeks after everyone over the age of 18 has been offered the first dose of vaccine”, the health ministry said.
AFP reports that some of Norway’s strict border controls will remain in force, however. So far, 87.2% of the Scandinavian country’s adult population has received at least a first dose of the coronavirus vaccine.
With the start of the new school year just days away, the government announced an end to distance-learning requirements for students.
“This means that students can finally meet face-to-face in classrooms and sit shoulder-to-shoulder in lecture halls after a year and a half,” higher education minister Henrik Asheim said.
The Scandinavian country, with a population of 5.4m, has succeeded in keeping the Covid-19 outbreak largely under control throughout the pandemic.
Indonesia’s capital reopened its retail malls this week, but solely for shoppers vaccinated against coronavirus.
With restrictions still in place in much of Indonesia, Jakarta’s malls are allowed to operate at 25% capacity, but customers must prove via a smartphone application that they have received at least one jab.
Reuters reports that it puts them in an exclusive group, with just one in five Indonesians given a shot so far under a mass-immunisation programme that started in January – underlining how two-tier societies continue to emerge across the world even despite at times unequal access to jabs.
“This is a positive measure for the shopping mall. So that visitors can be assured that everyone who enters the mall has been scanned and considered safe and healthy,” said Eka Dewanto, the general manager of Pondok Indah Mall in north Jakarta.
Student Salsabilla, 23, said the app was good, but she was uncomfortable that her whereabouts were being recorded. “I did wonder why my location needs to be tracked,” she said.
A British judge has sentenced a fraudster to three and a half years in jail after he tricked an elderly woman into paying him for a fake coronavirus vaccine jab.
Crown court judge Hannah Finch described 33-year-old David Chambers’s actions as “shameful and despicable”. He knocked on the victim’s door in Surbiton, west London, on 30 December claiming to work for the NHS, according to police.
The woman let him into her home, where he jabbed her in the arm with a “dart-like implement” before asking her to pay £140, which he said would be refunded by the NHS. He later returned and demanded £100 more, AFP reports.
Following a public appeal, the conman went on the run but was arrested in January. The victim, who is now 93, said Chambers had worn fake NHS identification.
“I have never been subjected to such a deceitful and horrific crime,” Kathleen Martin said in a statement released by police.
Maryam Arnott of the Crown Prosecution Service said after the ruling that Chambers had a “criminal history of exploiting elderly people” and took the opportunity to “cynically extract funds”.
A Serbian hermit who got vaccinated against Covid despite having lived for 20 years in a tiny mountain cave to avoid society has called on others to get the jab.
“It [the virus] does not pick. It will come here, to my cave, too”, the 70-year-old told AFP in his cave on the forested Stara Planina mountain in southern Serbia.
Petrovic, who does visit the local town, Pirot, on occasion, added: “I want to get all three doses, including the extra one. I urge every citizen to get vaccinated, every single one of them.”
Serbia has administered at least 5.6m doses of Covid vaccines so far, Reuters reports. Assuming every person needs two doses, that’s enough to have vaccinated about 40.4% of the country’s almost 7m population.
There have been 729,150 infections and 7,152 coronavirus-related deaths reported in the country since the pandemic began.
Petrovic previously worked relatively nearby as a labourer on the black market, as he did abroad for some time. He remarried on multiple occasions, a life he called “hectic”. Always a nature lover, he gradually found out that isolating from society brings him freedom he never tasted before.
“I was not free in the city. There is always someone in your way - you either argue with your wife, neighbours, or the police”, Petrovic told AFP. “Here, nobody is hassling me.”
Before isolating, Petrovic donated all the money he had made abroad to the community by funding the construction of three small bridges in the town: “Money is cursed, it spoils people. I think nothing can corrupt a human like money.”
Updated
Police in France are investigating a series of Covid-19 vaccine certificate scams after several doctors reported having their health service accounts hacked.
In the latest incident, one of several forgery rackets under investigation, fraudsters gained access to the online account of a GP near Bordeaux and obtained 55 false documents. Another doctor in Marseilles reported being similarly hacked, and others have told the authorities that there had been attempts to access their accounts.
France’s health authority has reported a growing number of forged certificates, with 46 incidents under police investigation since May. The forgers are also producing fake negative Covid-19 tests.
Several hackers have been put under investigation in recent weeks in Paris, Grenoble and Bordeaux. At the end of last month, a vaccine centre contract worker was jailed after he was found to have generated 200 false QR codes.
Children born during the coronavirus pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor and overall cognitive performance compared with children born before, a US study suggests.
The first few years of a child’s life are critical to their cognitive development. But with Covid-19 triggering the closure of businesses, nurseries, schools and playgrounds, life for infants changed considerably, with parents stressed and stretched as they tried to balance work and childcare.
With limited stimulation at home and less interaction with the world outside, pandemic-era children appear to have scored shockingly low on tests designed to assess cognitive development, said lead study author Sean Deoni, associate professor of paediatrics (research) at Brown University.
More than one in 10 patients in the UK were infected with Covid-19 during the first wave of the pandemic while being treated in hospital in for another reason, research suggests.
Residential community care hospitals and mental health hospitals were found to have higher levels of hospital-acquired infections - at 61.9% and 67.5% respectively - compared with hospitals providing acute and general care (9.7%) between March and August 2020.
The researchers said the reasons for variations between settings need to be urgently looked at so measures can be put in place to implement best practices to reduce infection.
It comes after NHS data last month reportedly suggested that more than half of recorded Covid hospitalisations in England represented those who tested positive after admission and “may have had Covid in such a mild form that it was not the cause of their hospitalisation”.
Calum Semple, professor in child health and outbreak medicine at the University of Liverpool and one of the authors of the research published in the Lancet, said:
The reasons for the variation between settings that provide the same type of care requires urgent investigation to identify and promote best infection control practice. Research has now been commissioned to find out what was done well and what lessons need to be learned to improve patient safety.”
But Prof Semple added that the rates of hospital-acquired infections are now “at much lower levels”, sitting “somewhere between 2% and 5% ... That to me shows that the NHS has learned the lessons.”
The researchers examined records of more than 72,000 patients across 314 hospitals in the UK. They found that at least 11.1% of patients were infected with Covid-19 after being admitted to hospital.
No evidence yet that booster shots are necessary, say top experts
The scientific and public health case for large-scale boosting is incomplete and not clear, write Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group at the University of Oxford and Seth Berkley, the chief executive of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.
A growing list of governments, including Chile, the UK, Germany and Israel, have decided to offer booster doses to some groups with weak immune systems, without any parallel measures, such as anti-obesity campaigns, to improve long-term public health.
Drugmakers Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna are expected to make billions of dollars from Covid-19 booster shots in a market that could rival the $6bn in annual sales for flu vaccines for years to come, analysts and healthcare investors said earlier.
People experience a fall in antibody levels over time after vaccination, and we know from several studies that a booster will reverse this decline. If really high levels of antibodies are better at preventing minor infection, perhaps there is a case for boosters after all.
But the focus of vaccination policy cannot be on sustaining very high levels of antibodies to prevent mild infection. If we focus on antibody levels alone, we could end up vaccinating everyone repeatedly to cope with a virus that keeps mutating. The point of vaccination isn’t to prevent people from getting mild infections; it’s to prevent hospitalisation and death.
Updated
The estimated range for England’s Covid-19 reproduction “R” number has narrowed further and could be below 1, Public Health England has said, suggesting cases may no longer be growing exponentially.
The estimated R value range was 0.8 to 1.0, compared with 0.8 to 1.1 in last week’s data. R represents the average number of people each Covid-19 positive person goes on to infect. That means that for every 10 people infected, they will on average infect between eight and 10 other people.
When the figure is above 1, an outbreak can grow exponentially but when it is below 1, it means the epidemic is shrinking. There are 5,000 hospital patients in the UK who have tested positive for Covid, following a winter peak in January of almost 40,000.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) meanwhile said that although the percentage of people testing positive for coronavirus in England “continued to be high”, estimates suggest “an overall decreasing trend over the past two weeks”.
Recorded prevalence is highest in Northern Ireland, where around one in 55 people are estimated to have had Covid-19 last week – unchanged on the previous week and the highest level since late January. This is followed by England, where the number is around one in 75 people, also unchanged from the previous week.
In Wales, where about one in 220 people are estimated to have had the virus last week, the trend is described by the ONS as “uncertain”. It is broadly unchanged on one in 230 in the previous week.
Scotland was the only area to see a fall, with ONS estimates suggesting around one in 190 people had Covid-19 in the week to 7 August, down from one in 120 in the previous week.
Updated
Covid booster shot market could rival $6bn annual flu jab sales
Drugmakers Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna are expected to make billions of dollars from Covid-19 booster shots in a market that could rival the $6bn in annual sales for flu vaccines for years to come, analysts and healthcare investors have said.
For several months, the companies have said they expect that fully inoculated people will need an extra dose of their vaccines to maintain protection over time, though the evidence base is slim and it comes after previous proclamations about their jabs’ effectiveness.
A growing list of governments, including Chile, the UK, Germany and Israel, have decided to offer booster doses to some groups with weak immune systems, without any parallel measures to improve long-term public health.
The US Food and Drug Administration yesterday a booster dose of vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna for people with compromised immune systems, despite initial opposition when Pfizer – which has since raised the price – first raised the prospect of a third jab.
Pfizer, along with its German partner BioNTech, and Moderna have together locked up over $60bn in sales of the shots just in 2021 and 2022. The agreements include supply of the initial two doses of their vaccines as well as billions of dollars in potential boosters for wealthy nations.
Going forward, analysts have forecast revenue of over $6.6bn for the Pfizer/BioNTech shot and $7.6bn for Moderna in 2023, mostly from booster sales. They eventually see the annual market settling at around $5bn or higher, with additional drugmakers competing for those sales.
The World Health Organization has asked governments to hold off on booster shots until more people worldwide receive their initial doses amid a vastly unequal rollout.
Republican senator Rand Paul, who has led criticism against Dr Fauci over the role played by US public health officials in funding research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, faces questions as it emerges his wife purchased shares of the drug company Gilead Sciences in early 2020.
CNBC reports that the $15,000 investment came one day after the first US clinical trial began for Gilead’s remdesivir as a treatment for Covid-19 on 25 February 2020. The Kentucky senator disclosed the shares, which have lost value, yesterday – 16 months after the legal deadline for reporting it had passed.
Paul is on the Senate health committee, which was briefed by White House officials in January 2020 on the threat of the coronavirus. But Paul’s office said he did not attend any Covid committee briefings.
Paul has since 2012 disclosed 187 transactions involving mutual funds, investment funds, trusts and government bonds in his annual reports, but this is the first for an individual stock, CNBC reports.
His office said he filled out a disclosure form about the purchase on time in 2020, but it was not passed to the Senate records office due to an oversight. It is not uncommon for US senators and their spouses to buy stocks.
A prominent Washington ethics lawyer told CNBC, “If the [Securities and Exchange Commission] were conducting an insider trading investigation of this transaction they would see the sudden purchase of individual stocks when the subject of the investigation had not purchased individual stocks before and had recently had access to market-moving information as a huge red flag.”
Earlier this week, a video of Paul disputing the effectiveness of wearing masks was removed from YouTube and he was banned from the platform for a week.
Updated
China again rejects WHO calls for fresh Covid origins probe with greater lab focus
China has again rejected the World Health Organization’s calls for a renewed probe into the origins of Covid-19 with a greater focus on the controversial Wuhan laboratory.
A delayed and heavily politicised visit by a WHO team of international experts went to Wuhan in January 2021 to produce a first phase report, which was written in conjunction with their Chinese counterparts, AFP reports. It failed to conclude how the virus began and devoted just 440-words to the lab leak theory in a lengthy report.
Yesterday, the WHO urged China to share raw data from the earliest Covid-19 cases to revive its probe into the origins of the disease. But China today repeated its position that the initial investigation was sufficient and that calls for further data were motivated by politics instead of scientific inquiry.
“We oppose political tracing ... and abandoning the joint report” issued after the WHO expert team’s Wuhan visit in January, vice foreign minister Ma Zhaoxu said.
We support scientific tracing ... The conclusions and recommendations of WHO and China joint report were recognised by the international community and the scientific community. Future global traceability work should and can only be further carried out on the basis of this report, rather than starting a new one.
China is continuing to conduct “follow-up and supplementary” research into the origins of the virus, he added.
AFP reports that in the face of China’s reluctance to open up to outside investigators, experts are increasingly open to considering the theory that the virus might have leaked out of a lab – once widely dismissed as a conspiracy and prohibited from being mentioned on Facebook – though it remains considered more likely it had a zoonotic origin.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said that the initial probe into Wuhan’s virology labs did not go far enough, while president Joe Biden in May ordered a separate investigation into the virus origins from the US intelligence community.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology “has many bat samples not yet worked out or results published,” according to emails of Ohio State University virologist Shan-Lu Liu, which were this week obtained by US transparency group Right to Know.
Meanwhile, US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief Anthony Fauci’s has been under pressure and accused of lying about the role the National Institutes of Health played in funding controversial research at the Wuhan facility to make viruses more transmissible.
It comes as Danish scientist Peter Ben Embarek, who led the international mission to Wuhan, said a lab employee infected while taking samples in the field falls under one of the likely hypotheses as to how the virus passed from bats to humans.
He told the Danish public channel TV2 that the suspect bats were not from the Wuhan region and the only people likely to have approached them were workers from the Wuhan labs.
As we reported earlier, he also said he was worried that the Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention was handling coronaviruses “without potentially having the same level of expertise or safety or who knows.”
Updated
Hundreds more Australian military personnel will deploy next week to Sydney to help enforce the city’s lockdown.
It comes as authorities reported the biggest daily rise in Covid-19 cases from the outbreak which is spreading beyond Australia’s largest city,
“Unfortunately, this trend [in cases] will continue for at least the next few days,” New South Wales (NSW) state premier Gladys Berejiklian said. It has been reported that it is unlikely the city would end its nine-week lockdown on 28 August as originally planned.
Community groups and residents have warned that the deployment of troops to enforce Sydney’s lockdown could alienate the community and fuel vaccine hesitancy, particularly in the hard-hit western suburbs where many Indigenous Australians and migrants and refugees live.
The defence department said it had received a request for extra personnel to help support police to enforce home-quarantine orders in the worst-affected suburbs in Sydney.
“Defence is preparing to deploy an additional 200 personnel commencing Monday ... to assist NSW police force,” a defence department spokesperson told Reuters.
More than 500 unarmed army personnel are already helping police in Sydney, including monitoring compliance activities at hotels and airports.
Despite a nearly seven-week lockdown in Sydney, NSW state reported 390 new locally acquired cases, most of the cases in the city, eclipsing the previous daily high of 356 set on Tuesday. Two new Covid-related deaths have been recorded, taking the total number of deaths in the latest outbreak in the state to 38.
Thai police violently attempt to disperse third day of protests in Bangkok
Thai police have again fired teargas canisters and rubber bullets at hundreds of demonstrators who defied a ban on gatherings to rally in central Bangkok, where they sought to march on the prime minister’s residence.
Reuters reports that police attacked demonstrators from an elevated highway with the gas and rubber bullets after they tried to pull down containers that were being used as roadblocks, in a third day of confrontation this week.
“Prayuth, get out!” chanted protesters from the youth-led Thalufah group as they began their march from Bangkok’s Victory Monument in the afternoon. They blame prime minister Prayuth Chan-ocha for presiding over a corrupt regime and mismanaging the Covid-19 crisis that today reported a record number of cases.
“The failed management of Covid-19 by the government has caused people to die. Today we are out here to get rid of Prayuth,” said activist Songpon “Yajai” Sonthirak at the start of the rally.
Authorities warned any form of protest breaches Covid-19 regulations and said that they were pressing charges in 300 cases against people involved in recent demonstrations.
“The police aim is to maintain peace,” Bangkok police chief Pakapong Pongpetra claimed. “Those joining protests are at risk of infection and also breaching other laws as well.”
Thailand’s youth-led protest movement, which drew broad support during months of large and frequent rallies last year, is regaining momentum, coinciding with country’s worst coronavirus outbreak yet. But several core leaders controversially remain in detention awaiting trial on charges of sedition and causing unrest, among other offences.
Updated
Than Shwe, the former head of a junta that ruled Myanmar for nearly two decades, has reportedly been hospitalised in the capital Naypyitaw and is in a stable condition after testing positive for Covid.
The 88-year-old and his wife were admitted to a military-owned medical facility several days ago in Thaik Chaung in the capital as a precaution, The Irrawaddy newspaper reported, citing an unnamed senior military official.
The Associated Press cited a hospital employee as saying the pair had tested positive for the virus and were expected to remain hospitalised for two weeks.
A government official in the capital who asked not to named said Than Shwe was in a stable condition in hospital, but did not confirm whether he was suffering from Covid-19.
The military, under Than Shwe’s protege, overthrew the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi on 1 February, triggering almost daily protests that have violently and fatally been put down, amid fighting between the army and hastily formed militias.
Updated
Anita Anand, Canada’s public services and procurement minister, has said the mounting frustration that the country was being left behind in the global vaccine race did not make her lose focus.
“I knew that supply was coming. I knew Canada’s position was strong,” she told the Guardian in an interview. “And I continued to say to my team, ‘It is not how you start the race. It is how you finish the race that matters.’ We need to stay focused, and we need to stay determined.”
Today, Canada has the highest vaccination rate – of single and double doses – anywhere in the world. Almost 82% of the eligible population age 12 and older have received at least one dose – and 70.3% are fully vaccinated.
Denmark 'returning to normal' as it removes last of its mandatory mask rules
Masks will no longer be required on Danish public transport, the government has said, as the Scandinavian country lifted the last of its compulsory face-covering regulations.
“We are now in a situation... where a large part of the population has been vaccinated and we are returning to a more normal everyday life,” transport minister Benny Engelbrecht said. “[From Saturday] we can say goodbye to masks on buses, trains and the metro.”
The change was originally scheduled for 1 September. On Wednesday, health authorities loosened social-distancing regulations in the country of 5.8m people, which has seen about 1,000 new infections a day.
Over 60% of the population has received a full course of a vaccine. There have been 2,555 Covid-related deaths in Denmark throughout the pandemic.
“We now have good control of the infection across society,” Helene Bilsted Probst, deputy director of the national health agency said. “Therefore, we can adapt the prevention recommendations in such a way that people can maintain a normal daily life while respecting the principle of prevention.”
Masks will remain obligatory on planes and in the country’s airports, where international air-transport rules apply.
China: 'relatively little risk' of nationwide Covid outbreak after clusters
Chinese health officials have said there is “relatively little risk” that somewhat small case clusters in the country could cause a nationwide outbreak, after new infections hit a seven-month high earlier this week.
Multiple cluster outbreaks of the highly contagious Delta variant have spread to 48 cities in 18 provinces nationwide, infecting more than 1,282 people, officials said. However AFP reports there has been no new infections in many hotspots in recent days owing to stringent virus control measures, they added.
“Of these 48 cities, 36 have not reported any new infections in the past five consecutive days,” Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention official He Qinghua said. “In these circumstances, the risk of a nationwide outbreak is generally controllable and there is relatively little risk of a large-scale outbreak occurring on the national scale.”
State media has described the current outbreak - which has sparked local lockdowns, mass testing and travel restrictions - as the most severe since the virus first emerged in the central city of Wuhan.
More than half of China’s population, 777m people, have been fully inoculated so far, with over 1.83bn doses administered nationwide, a National Health Commission spokesman said.
China has also strengthened anti-virus controls for international flights and cargo shipments in response to the latest outbreak. “According to the results of genetic sequencing, the sources of infection are all from overseas,” said He.
One terminal of Ningbo-Zhoushan port, the world’s third-biggest by cargo volume, suspended operations Wednesday after a worker tested positive, AFP reports.
China reported 99 new cases today, 47 of which were local transmissions - down from a seven-month high of 108 local infections announced Tuesday.
Hello and greetings to everyone reading, wherever you are in the world. Mattha Busby here to take you through the next few hours of global Covid developments. Thanks to my colleague Miranda Bryant for covering the blog up until now. Please feel free to drop me a line on Twitter or message me via email (mattha.busby.freelance@guardian.co.uk) with any tips or thoughts on our coverage.
The reopening of theme parks and 12 million new subscribers to Disney+ fuelled a post-pandemic recovery at the world’s biggest entertainment company, which beat Wall Street expectations in the quarter to 3 July.
Disney+ reached a global user base of 116 million in the quarter, ahead of analyst estimates of 115 million, dispelling fears that growth was slowing after the company missed targets in the second quarter.
The reopening of theme parks in the US, France and China helped Disney’s parks and consumer products division return to profit for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic hit. The division made $356m in operating income during the quarter on $4.3bn in revenue.
Disney’s share price jumped more than 5% in after-hours trading as investors and analysts reacted to the post-pandemic recovery of the world’s biggest entertainment company.
Victoria has paid out its $450 Covid-19 test isolation payment more than 500,000 times since July last year, including a massive spike during last month’s lockdown, as calls grow for New South Wales to adopt a similar scheme.
While test numbers have been sky-high in New South Wales during the current lockdown, experts have warned some of the people most at risk of contracting the virus face barriers to getting tested.
The concern from some epidemiologists and unions is that casual workers may resist getting tested because they are worried about the financial hit of losing work while they are waiting for their test result. Another worry is job security for turning down work.
Summary of the latest developments
- Thailand projects that coronavirus cases in the country could double by early next month to 45,000 per day – despite lockdown measures. The country, which recorded a record 23,418 new cases today and 184 new deaths, is struggling to contain its worst outbreak to date.
- Russia has reported another day of record deaths after 815 people died with coronavirus. The country’s daily infection numbers are slowly declining from their July peak with Friday’s daily figures standing at 22,277 nationwide and 2,529 in Moscow.
- Gatwick airport has blamed the UK government’s coronavirus restrictions for pushing it to a multimillion- pound loss as it said it is in talks with banks to avoid defaulting on its loans.
- A UK competition watchdog is assessing whether there are “immediate actions” the government can take to address concerns about the high cost of PCR tests needed for international travel. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) previously said it would look into testing issues in response to a request from health secretary Sajid Javid and that it would come back with recommendations within a month.
- A UK government scientific adviser has said he “passionately believes” health and social care workers should be contractually required to be vaccinated. Prof Calum Semple, a professor in child health and outbreak medicine at the University of Liverpool, who sits on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies ( SAGE ) committee, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I do passionately believe that people working in health and social care should be vaccinated as part of their contract of employment.”
- Health experts in Japan have said the country is confronting a coronavirus “disaster” and urged the government to take immediate action to stem a surge in infections. The warning came as local media reported that spectators will be banned from almost all events at the Paralympics, which are due to open on 24 August.
- In the US, the Food and Drug Administration has announced that transplant recipients and those with severely weakened immune systems can get an extra dose of either the Pfizer or Moderna coronavirus vaccines. The announcement, late last night, means that several million Americans are now entitled to get a third dose.
- People in England and Wales who are “pinged” by the NHS app are four times more likely to have coronavirus than someone who hasn’t, research has found. A survey of more than 750,0000 people by the Zoe Covid symptom study found that just 2.4% of those fully vaccinated who were pinged and did not have symptoms tested positive.
That’s it from me for today. Thanks for reading! Handing over now to my colleague Mattha.
Updated
Thailand projects daily Covid cases to double by next month to 45,000
Thailand projects that coronavirus cases in the country could double by early next month to 45,000 a day – despite lockdown measures.
The country, which recorded a record 23,418 new cases today and 184 new deaths (see 05:58), is struggling to contain its worst outbreak to date.
Thailand’s Covid-19 taskforce said lockdown restrictions had yet to make an impact and warned that cases are expected to rise significantly.
Spokesman Taweesin Wisanuyothin said: “The lockdown has been 20% effective but the infections continue to rise, projected to reach about 45,000 cases per day by the start of or mid September.”
Overall, Thailand has recorded 863,189 cases and 7,126 deaths.
Updated
The latest results of the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) opinions and lifestyle survey show the number indoor meetings between people from different households is gradually increasing:
Slightly more adults reported meeting with someone not in their household indoors (64%) than outdoors (60%) for the first time this year.
— Office for National Statistics (ONS) (@ONS) August 13, 2021
Meeting indoors has gradually increased since the removal of legal restrictions in England on 19 July
➡️https://t.co/KZoec5Al6n pic.twitter.com/UwU9IQnpqQ
But that a high proportion of adults still see taking precautions such as social distancing and wearing face masks as important:
A high proportion of adults felt that measures to slow the spread of #COVID19 were either very important or important.
— Office for National Statistics (ONS) (@ONS) August 13, 2021
Such measures included:
▪️ wearing a face covering while shopping (88%)
▪️ socially distancing (86%)
➡️https://t.co/jTjEhz9wmR
Meanwhile, 90% of adults said they continue to wear a face mask when they’re out. The figure is slightly down from last week when 92% said they did.
Russia reports another record death toll as 815 people die with coronavirus in one day
Russia has reported another day of record deaths after 815 people died with coronavirus.
The country’s daily infection numbers are slowly declining from their July peak with Friday’s daily figures standing at 22,277 nationwide and 2,529 in Moscow.
It comes as Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said Covid hospitalisations have halved in the capital over the last six weeks and that 30% of staff would no longer be required to work from home but that it would still be encouraged.
To date, 6,557,068 coronavirus cases have been recorded in Russia and 168,864 deaths.
Updated
Gatwick airport CEO hits out at UK government, blaming it for multi-million pound loss
Gatwick airport has blamed the UK government’s coronavirus restrictions for pushing it to a multimillion pound loss as it said it is in talks with banks to avoid defaulting on its loans.
The international airport in West Sussex has been remained open this year but it said the collapse in passenger demand has dramatically hit the business, which reported a pre-tax loss of £204m.
Last year, the airport made more than 40% of employees redundant.
Chief executive Stewart Wingate called on the government to act immediately by removing “unnecessary and costly” PCR test requirements:
In the UK we are all emerging to enjoy more freedoms due to our world class vaccination programme – however. we are in danger of squandering the advantage that vaccination programme has afforded us for international travel.
Our government needs to act now and remove unnecessary and costly PCR testing requirements for passengers, particularly for those double vaccinated.
UK travel recovery should not be allowed to lag behind the US and Europe.
Passengers need the travel rules simplified so they can choose to travel more freely and enjoy much-needed breaks and reunions with family and friends which are currently much more attainable for those in Europe and the US.
Updated
More than one in five adults said they experienced a complete breakdown in a relationship at home or at work in the past year, the UK’s largest study of social ties during the pandemic has revealed.
Younger people were more likely to have their relationships affected, with experts saying it showed the disproportionate effect of the pandemic on this age group. They added that job losses and anxiety over finances could have played a role, as well as the inability to see people outside their household during the lockdown.
A quarter of people reported worsening relationships with their spouse or partner and a quarter reported difficulties with colleagues or co-workers, according to University College London’s Covid-19 Social Study. More than one-fifth (22%) of adults experienced a complete breakdown of a relationship with either family, friends, colleagues or neighbours.
Launched in the week before the first lockdown started, the ongoing study showed that adults aged 18-29 were most likely to report a relationship breakdown – 35% compared with 12% of adults aged 60 and over.
However, it was not all bad news, as nearly half (46%) of young adults said the quality of their relationships with their spouse or partner had been better than usual over the past year. This is a higher proportion than in adults aged 30-59 and those aged 60 and over, with 27% and 21% of these age groups reporting a better relationship with their spouse or partner respectively.
The Philippines has reported 13,177 new coronavirus cases – the second-highest daily increase since the pandemic started.
The country also recorded a further 299 deaths – the highest in four months.
The health ministry said the total number of confirmed infections has risen to 1.71m and the death toll has reached 29,838.
Earlier today, the government extended a ban on travellers from 10 countries, including India, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia, to the end of August due to concerns over Delta.
Meanwhile, some hospitals are nearing capacity and a strict lockdown on the Manila capital region, home to 16 cities and 13m people, remains in place.
About 11% of the country’s 110m population is fully vaccinated.
Updated
South Korea has signed a deal to buy 30m doses of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine for next year.
Earlier today, South Korean prime minister Kim Boo-kyum urged people to minimise holiday travel and asked companies to show flexibility in letting people work from home amid a vaccine shortage and worsening fourth wave (see 05:48).
So far, 42.8% of its 52 million population have had at least one vaccine dose and 17.4% have had two.
Updated
The chair of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, which represents hundreds of fee-paying schools in the UK and Ireland, says that the pandemic has shown that all children need access to technology and that it needs improving in the state sector.
Sally-Anne Huang, head of St Paul’s School in London, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:
The pandemic has proven that all children need access to technology and that is something also that has to be looked at in the state sector in terms of providing those laptops, providing the software, providing the training.
Updated
UK competition watchdog considering immediate action on expensive travel PCR tests
A UK competition watchdog is assessing whether there are “immediate actions” the government can take to address concerns about the high cost of PCR tests needed for international travel.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) previously said it would look into testing issues in response to a request from health secretary Sajid Javid and that it would come back with recommendations within a month.
But now the watchdog said it is reviewing what action could be “considered in the interim” in the face of what it called a “particularly pressing issue”.
The CMA said it is looking at:
- Whether PCR providers are breaching their obligations under consumer law and should face enforcement action.
- Any structural problems in the PCR test market that impact pricing or reliability
- Whether there are any immediate actions the government can take in the meantime.
PCR tests can cost as much as £200 or even more.
The Conservative MP Henry Smith, who is chairman of the future of aviation all-party parliamentary group, said private tests should be capped at £40 to help put aviation “back on a sustainable path to recovery”.
George Lusty, the CMA’s senior director for consumer protection, said:
It is essential that people paying for PCR tests are treated fairly, get what they pay for and that their rights are respected when things go wrong. We will not hesitate to take enforcement action if we find evidence that PCR providers are breaching consumer law.
He added:
This is a particularly pressing issue just now for families hoping to enjoy a well-earned holiday after such a difficult year, and for those reuniting with friends and relatives overseas.
That is why we are also providing ongoing support to DHSC (Department of Health and Social Care), including on steps that could be considered in the interim, before the rest of our work on the PCR testing market is concluded.
UK government adviser 'passionately believes' health workers should be contractually required to be vaccinated
A UK government scientific adviser has said he “passionately believes” health and social care workers should be contractually required to be vaccinated.
Prof Calum Semple, a professor in child health and outbreak medicine at the University of Liverpool, who sits on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies ( SAGE ) committee, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I do passionately believe that people working in health and social care should be vaccinated as part of their contract of employment.”
It comes after the ISARIC Coronovirus Clinical Characterisation Consortium study found that about one in 10 patients were infected with coronavirus while in hospital during the first wave of the pandemic in the UK.
Semple, who worked on the study, said the average figure was one in nine and that shortly after the peak of the outbreak it was one in six.
But, he said, things are “much better now”, with the hospital-acquired proportion 2-5% in most UK hospitals.
Updated
Japan facing Covid 'disaster' as spectators banned from Paralympics
Health experts in Japan have said the country is confronting a coronavirus “disaster” and urged the government to take immediate action to stem a surge in infections.
The warning came as local media reported that spectators will be banned from almost all events at the Paralympics, which are due to open on 24 August.
The government and organisers of the Games will make an official decision next week, Kyodo cited unnamed officials as saying. Media reports said sports fans would be denied admission to venues in Tokyo and Saitama prefectures, although a limited number could attend events in Shizuoka prefecture, which does not border Tokyo. Organisers are reportedly considering inviting schoolchildren to venues.
Japan is in the midst of an explosion of infections caused by the highly transmissible Delta variant. It reported more than 18,000 cases on Thursday, exceeding the previous record of 15,812 logged a day earlier, according to the Kyodo news agency.
Tokyo, which is under a state of emergency targeting the capital’s night-time economy, recorded 4,989 cases on Thursday, the second-highest figure since the start of the pandemic. The western prefecture of Osaka reported a record 1,654 infections the same day.
More on booster shots: Israel has lowered the minimum age of eligibility for third vaccine doses from 60 to 50 and they will also be offered to health workers and prisoners.
The health ministry said it would be offering a third Pfizer dose to “people over 50, health care workers, people with severe risk factors for the coronavirus, prisoners and wardens”.
Updated
US permits immunocompromised to get third vaccine dose
In the US, the Food and Drug Administration has announced that transplant recipients and those with severely weakened immune systems can get an extra dose of either the Pfizer or Moderna coronavirus vaccines.
The announcement, late last night, means that several million Americans are now entitled to get a third dose.
France and Israel are among the countries who have already made similar recommendations.
Dr Janet Woodcock, the FDA’s acting commissioner, said: “Today’s action allows doctors to boost immunity in certain immunocompromised individuals who need extra protection from Covid-19.”
It comes amid a surge of cases across much of the US following the spread of the Delta variant, leading to a new wave of deaths and hospitalisations.
Here, Sara Sneath reports from New Orleans on how overwhelmed Louisiana hospitals are sending ambulances to Texas as the state struggles with low vaccination rates and crowded housing following last year’s hurricane season:
Updated
People 'pinged' by NHS app four times more likely to have coronavirus
People in England and Wales who are “pinged” by the NHS app are four times more likely to have coronavirus than someone who hasn’t, new research has found.
A survey of more than 750,0000 people by the Zoe Covid symptom study found that just 2.4% of those fully vaccinated who were pinged and did not have symptoms tested positive. But of that group, those who had one or more symptoms were 11.7 times more likely to test positive.
Overall, those who were told to self-isolate by the app had from 3.7 to 4 relative risk of having Covid.
In Scotland, those who were pinged by the Protect Scotland app were 10 times more likely to have Covid then someone who wasn’t.
The research suggests that a “large number” of uninfected people are being asked to self isolate by the apps.
But Prof Tim Spector, lead scientist of Zoe Covid Study app, warned that cases are still “very high” and that whatever a person’s vaccination status, if they have symptoms they should self-isolate and get tested. He also called on the government to expand the Covid-19 symptom list.
On Thursday the health secretary announced fully jabbed Covid contacts won’t need to self-isolate from August 16.
While I welcome efforts to address the ‘pingdemic’, cases are still very high and our research shows that whatever your vaccination status, if you have one of possible 20-plus Covid symptoms recognised by Zoe - not just the classic three - you should be cautious, self isolate and get a test.
Which makes it even more important for the government to expand the symptom list to help people understand all the symptoms of Covid-19.
Hi, I’m looking after the blog for the next few hours. Please get in touch with any tips or suggestions: miranda.bryant@guardian.co.uk
Updated
When a World Health Organization-led team travelled to China earlier this year to investigate the origins of the pandemic, a top official said he was worried about safety standards at a laboratory close to the seafood market where the first human cases were detected, according to a documentary released Thursday by Danish television channel TV2.
Via AP:
The Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention was handling coronaviruses “without potentially having the same level of expertise or safety or who knows,” Peter Ben Embarek said during a conference call in January, according to footage shown by TV2. Ben Embarek is a WHO expert on disease transmission from animals to humans and one of the team’s leaders.
But months later, when WHO released its dense report on its mission to Wuhan, the UN health agency concluded that a leak of the virus from the lab was “extremely unlikely” to have caused Covid-19.
In recent weeks, however, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has acknowledged it was “premature“ to rule out a possible lab leak as the source of Covid-19, saying last month that he was asking China to be more transparent about the early days of the pandemic.
The Danish documentary featured Ben Embarek expressing his worries in January about the Wuhan branch of the Chinese CDC, concerns that have never been publicly disclosed by WHO.
“What is more concerning to me is the other lab,” Ben Embarek said. “The one that is next to the market,” he explained, referring to the Wuhan branch of the Chinese CDC, located just 500 metres (547 yards) away from the Huanan market.
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Thailand sees record cases for second day
Thailand reported 23,418 new coronavirus infections on Friday, a record increase for a second day in a row, bringing the total accumulated cases to 863,189, as the country deals with its biggest outbreak to date.
The country also suffered 184 new deaths, taking total fatalities to 7,126.
South Koreans urged to work from home
South Korean prime minister Kim Boo-kyum urged people on Friday to minimise holiday travel and asked companies to show flexibility in letting people work from home amid a worsening fourth wave of Infections and a shortage of vaccines in the country.
The spread of the virus has accelerated as the highly transmissible Delta variant has become the dominant strain in the country, and authorities’ contact tracing has been unable to keep track of transmissions over peak summer season for domestic travel.
The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency reported 1,990 new infections for Thursday, having reported its highest daily count of 2,223 on Wednesday. From early July, daily cases for the first time rose above 1,100, and have kept rising. The government has said the current wave of infections has not peaked yet.
Total cases stand at 220,182, with 2,144 deaths.
Kim called on the public to minimise travels and gatherings in the next three days and urged those returning from holiday destinations to get tested, especially before clocking in for work.
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Summary
Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.
Thailand reported 23,418 new coronavirus infections on Friday, a record increase for a second day in a row, bringing the total accumulated cases to 863,189, as the country deals with its biggest outbreak to date.
Meanwhile, South Korean prime minister Kim Boo-kyum urged people to minimise holiday travel and asked companies to show flexibility in letting people work from home amid a worsening fourth wave of and a shortage of vaccines in the country.
We’ll have more on these stories shortly. In the meantime here are the other key recent developments:
- US regulators are reportedly set to recommend a third shot for people with certain immune-compromising conditions, following pressure from Pfizer. Dr Anthony Fauci said for other vaccinated groups, such as elderly people, data is being collected to determine if or when their protection goes “below a critical level” and “that’s when you’re going to be hearing about the implementation of boosters” for others.
- The Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, is planning a snap election for 20 September ostensibly to seek voter approval for the government’s costly plans to respond to the pandemic, according to sources cited by Reuters. The Liberals plan to inject an extra C$100bn – between 3% and 4% of GDP – into the economy over the next three years.
- Israel is to require Covid tests from next week for children as young as three to enter schools, swimming pools, hotels or gyms as infections rise despite extensive adult vaccinations.
- French police were urged to step up security around Covid vaccination and testing centres after a spate of attacks and vandalism.
- A 99% emergency tax on the startling levels of profit made by billionaires during the pandemic could pay for everyone to get vaccinated and provide a £14,000 cash grant to all unemployed workers, according to a new analysis.
- Air passengers to the UK have spent at least £500m on PCR Covid-19 tests from private companies since mid-May, only for the NHS to be saddled with extra costs when firms fail to deliver them.
- The England and Wales Cricket Board warned that the integrity of the upcoming Ashes series was at stake unless the Australian authorities softened the nation’s hard-line stance over its strict quarantine rules, with around 38,000 Australian nationals remaining stranded abroad and unable to return home.
- Jacinda Ardern said that New Zealand would continue to pursue its ambitious Covid-19 elimination strategy indefinitely, even though a leading expert said this week that reaching herd immunity is “not a possibility” since the vaccines do not stop the spread of Covid.
- Symptoms of depression and anxiety symptoms among children and adolescents during the pandemic may have doubled compared with pre-2020 estimates.
- A McDonald’s franchise in California settled with a group of workers who sued after they were allegedly provided dog nappies to wear as masks, before a Covid outbreak among staff and subsequently their families.
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