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Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, has fired a health ministry official who reportedly asked for a bribe in a vaccine deal, the latest graft accusation to rock the government amid investigations of its pandemic response.
With over half a million Covid-19 deaths and more new cases daily than any other country, anger is mounting in Brazil over missed opportunities to buy coronavirus vaccines, Reuters reports.
Accusations of corruption undercutting efforts have poured fuel on the fire, triggering new calls for Bolsonaro’s impeachment.
On Tuesday, Brazil suspended a contract worth 1.6bn reais ($321m) for a vaccine from India’s Bharat Biotech, following allegations of undue pressure within the ministry. Bharat and the government have denied wrongdoing.
A former employee at the health ministry recently told the prosecutor’s office that he told the president that he was pressured to sign a contract that would increase the average price of doses by 1,000%.
Bolsonaro, whose popularity has faded as Brazil’s Covid-19 death toll climbed past 500,000, has denied any wrongdoing, saying on Monday he was not aware of any irregularities.
On Wednesday Bolsonaro’s chief of staff announced that the ministry’s logistics chief, Roberto Ferreira Dias, had been dismissed.
Newspaper Folha de S Paulo reported late on Tuesday that Dias had suggested a bribe of one dollar a dose during a dinner to discuss a different order of 400m vaccines, citing a representative from a medical supply company.
The health ministry said the dismissal of Dias had been decided on Tuesday morning, without addressing the allegations.
Dias could not be reached immediately for comment.
Read more here:
Pressure is mounting on ministers to reassure the public about the safety of hosting the final stages of Euro 2020 and other major events after almost 1,300 Scotland fans tested positive for Covid after travelling to London for a match.
Data published by Public Health Scotland on Wednesday showed that 1,991 people who later tested positive had attended one or more Euro 2020 events during their infection period, a time when they “may have unknowingly transmitted their infection to others”.
Nearly two-thirds of cases reported travelling to London for a Euro 2020 event, including 397 people who were at Wembley for the England v Scotland fixture on 18 June – 15% of the 2,600 Scotland fans given tickets for the match, which ended in a goalless draw.
The news came as 26,068 positive test results were reported across the UK on Wednesday, with 3,887 in Scotland – the highest daily total north of the border since the start of the pandemic.
Downing Street stressed that case numbers were only one of the metrics the government was monitoring, however, as the vaccination programme continues to weaken the link with hospitalisations and deaths.
But given strict 10-day self-isolation rules, the sharp increase in cases across the UK is already playing havoc with businesses and schools, as groups of staff and bubbles of pupils are forced out of workplaces and classrooms after coming into contact with a single coronavirus case.
Read the full story from my colleagues Heather Stewart, Libby Brooks and Linda Geddes here:
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Cases of Covid-19 may be declining in North America but in most of Latin America and the Caribbean the end to the coronavirus pandemic “remains a distant future”, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) said on Wednesday.
While infections in the United States, Canada and Mexico are falling, in Latin America and the Caribbean cases are rising and vaccination is lagging badly, Reuters reports.
Only one in ten people have been fully vaccinated, which PAHO director Carissa Etienne called “an unacceptable situation.”
She said:
While we are seeing some reprieve from the virus in countries in the Northern Hemisphere, for most countries in our region, the end remains a distant future.
The regional health agency discouraged summer holiday travel in the Americas now that movement restrictions are being lifted as more people are vaccinated in the Northern Hemisphere and travel destinations, such as the Caribbean, reopen for tourists.
Even people who have been vaccinated can become sick and spread Covid, Etienne said in a weekly briefing.
She said:
Given the significant gaps in vaccine coverage and the still imminent risk of infection, now may not be the ideal time for travel * especially in places with active outbreaks or where hospital capacity may be limited.
Noting that the hurricane season in the Caribbean is arriving at a time when outbreaks are worsening, Etienne urged countries to outfit hospitals and expand shelters to reduce the potential for transmission. Social distancing and proper ventilation become difficult during storms, she said.
The highly transmissible Delta variant has already been detected in a dozen countries in the Americas, but so far community transmission has been limited, said PAHO viral disease advisor Jairo Mendez.
However, it has been found in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Peru, the United States and Mexico, where it has spread in Mexico City, according to PAHO.
Given the presence of such variants, countries in the region should step up vigilance and consider the need to limit travel or even close borders, PAHO health emergencies director Ciro Ugarte said.
According to a Reuters tally, there have been at least 37,441,000 reported infections and 1,272,000 confirmed deaths caused by Covid-19 in Latin America and the Caribbean so far, one third more than in Asia and Africa combined.
In case you missed it, Vladimir Putin has for the first time said that he was inoculated with Russia’s own Sputnik V vaccine as he gave a careful endorsement of the country’s floundering campaign while distancing himself from tough new measures designed to pressure more Russians into taking the jabs.
Putin has cut a mercurial figure during the pandemic, intrepidly donning a medical suit to visit a coronavirus hospital last March and then shunning public events for months, prompting ridicule that he was sheltering in a “bunker”.
He also declined to release photos or videos of his own vaccination, or give details of the vaccine, which the Kremlin reported took place in March. Journalists and others meeting Putin have still been required to quarantine for several weeks, fuelling speculation that he may not have received a jab.
During a nationally televised Q&A on Wednesday, the Russian leader denied that he had faked his own vaccination. “I hope that most of this country’s citizens understand that if I say I got the vaccine, then that’s how it is,” Putin said, adding that he and top military commanders of Russia’s military had been given Sputnik V but had not said so initially in order to avoid giving it a competitive advantage in Russia.
He also targeted widespread vaccine hesitancy by telling Russians that Sputnik V and other domestically made Russian vaccines were safe and that inoculation was the only way to end the coronavirus pandemic.
Yet Putin also said he opposed mandatory vaccinations, said that the use of western vaccines like AstraZeneca and Pfizer had led to “tragic cases,” and supported callers who said they had medical excuses not to be vaccinated.
The remarks, part of a yearly show where Putin listens to Russians’ questions and appeals, showed how the Kremlin leader is caught between Covid’s resurgence in Russia and public opposition to vaccinations.
Read the full story here:
Foreign tourists visiting France will have to pay for Covid-19 tests starting from 7 July, government spokesman Gabriel Attal told Les Echos newspaper.
“We have decided foreign tourists should pay for those tests, €49 for PCR tests and €29 for antigenic tests. This is about reciprocity as French people traveling abroad have to pay for those tests in most countries”, Attal said.
Regarding French citizens who prefer to be tested when needed - for travel or social outings - instead of being vaccinated, Attal said the government would consider making them pay for those tests once the summer vacation is over, Reuters reports.
Just 5,000 Australians in disability care, less than one in five people, have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19 more than four months into the rollout, new data shows.
The disability care industry has also warned some providers are again being forced to source their own vaccinations, rather than wait for commonwealth in-reach teams to turn up.
The federal government placed disability care residents in the highest priority cohort for its vaccine program, but faced criticism when, without consultation, it pivoted all resources to vaccinating aged care.
The World Bank is to make another $8bn in loans available for countries to finance the purchase of Covid vaccines, raising the total to $20bn, amid growing demand from developing countries, the institution’s president David Malpass has said.
The global development bank has seen a sharp increase in overall financing demand from developing countries – not just health-related expenditure – during the pandemic, the bank’s managing director for operations, Axel van Trostenburg, said.
He told reporters the World Bank had made nearly $100 billion in lending commitments since the outbreak of the crisis in early 2020, well above the normal level of just under $60 billion. High demand for financing was expected to continue well into 2022, he said. However, Reuters did not immediately report the terms of the loans.
The World Bank also said it had already provided more than $4 billion for the purchase and deployment of Covid vaccines to 51 developing countries, half of which are in Africa, where vaccination rates are among the world’s lowest.
In a statement, the global development bank urged countries anticipating excess vaccine supplies in coming months to release surplus doses and options to developing countries with adequate distribution plans in place.
The World Bank’s vaccine financing package can be used by countries to buy vaccine doses through Covax, the new African vaccine acquisition task team or other sources.
Updated
Today so far...
- India’s version of AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine is not authorised in the EU due to the possibility of “differences” with the original, Europe’s drug regulator said after the African Union yesterday criticised as “inequitable” a decision not to include Covishield, the Indian-made vaccine used by the global Covax programme, on a list of approved vaccines for a digital certificate for travellers in the bloc.
- The prime minister of Portugal, Antonio Costa, went into isolation despite being fully vaccinated, after one of his aides tested positive amid a high in a new wave of infections blamed on the Delta variant.
- India’s disaster management agency was ordered by the country’s supreme court to establish guidelines for paying compensation to bereaved relatives of those who have died from Covid.
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Bangladesh will deploy soldiers tomorrow to enforce a strict lockdown amid a record spike in coronavirus cases driven by the Delta variant first detected in India, the government said.
- The Australian home affairs minister rejected calls to reduce caps on international arrivals amid outbreaks of the Delta variant, saying “we need to learn to live” with Covid.
- France ended most capacity limits imposed in April on restaurants, cinemas, stores and other public venues, although the measures were extended in parts of the southwest over the spread of the Delta variant as the doctor who heads president Emmanuel Macron’s coronavirus advisory panel said a “fourth wave” of cases was likely this autumn.
- Vladimir Putin said for the first time that he was inoculated with Russia’s own Sputnik V vaccine as he gave a careful endorsement of the country’s floundering campaign while distancing himself from tough new measures designed to pressure more Russians into taking the jabs.
- Switzerland is to give 4m doses of AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine that it has reserved to the vaccine-sharing programme Covax, the government has said with the country’s medical regulator, Swissmedic, yet to approve the shot, on grounds it has not received all necessary data from clinical trials.
- Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, fired a health ministry official who reportedly asked for a bribe in a vaccine deal, the latest graft accusation to rock the government amid investigations of its pandemic response.
- Dozens of Italian prison guards beat unarmed inmates with truncheons and fists in the aftermath of a coronavirus-related protest last year, video footage captured on surveillance shows, with fifty-two people working in the prison network facing arrest or legal action in the case this week
- A UK vaccine advisor made a significant intervention to the debate over whether to inoculate children against Covid, saying “it is not immoral to think that they may be better protected by natural immunity generated through infection than by asking them to take the possible risk of a vaccine.”
- Cases of Covid-19 are declining in North America, but in most of Latin America and the Caribbean an end to the pandemic “remains a distant future”, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) director Carissa Etienne said.
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Members of the US military who were vaccinated against Covid showed higher-than-expected rates of heart inflammation, although the condition was still extremely rare, according to a new study.
Germany plans to buy some 204 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine for 2022, far more than the two each needed for its 84 million population, in order to have a comfortable buffer in case of mutations or a need for booster shots.
A health ministry paper seen by Reuters said that the contract the European Union signed with Biontech and Pfizer for their mRNA-type vaccine covered Germany’s needs next year in the best case, but the extra would provide added security.
The paper said at least one other mRNA-type vaccine should be procured, as well as a vaccine using another technology, to help guard against production bottlenecks, Reuters reports.
A UK vaccine advisor has made a significant intervention to the debate over whether to inoculate children, saying “it is not immoral to think that they may be better protected by natural immunity generated through infection than by asking them to take the possible risk of a vaccine.”
In comments which hold relevance around the world, Prof Robert Dingwall, a sociologist on the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, said in a string of tweets that since teenagers were at an extremely low risk of Covid, “vaccines must be exceptionally safe” for there to be a significant benefit.
The Times reports that the committee is set to produce recommendations on vaccinating children within the coming weeks but has continually delayed a decision, seeking further safety data. However, the paper said it understands it may be leaning towards recommending against jabs for teenagers.
But Dingwall’s comments are likely to ignite heated conversations. He said that “medicine cannot deliver immortality” and that it was “profoundly damaging to society to imply that it can”.
The critic of tough pandemic restrictions also suggested that there can be unintended and unforeseen consequences when humans rush to reshape ecosystems; with humans, viruses and bacteria forming an environment which has evolved over millennia.
The risk/benefit for teenagers must be firmly established. The UK programme has already been modified because the risk/benefit of AZ was not clear for 20 and 30 somethings. Teenagers are at intrinsically low risk from Covid. Vaccines must be exceptionally safe to beat this (2/8)
— Robert Dingwall 🏴 🇪🇺 Reunite (@rwjdingwall) June 30, 2021
It is well past time to panic about infection rates and to publish them obsessively. Even hospitalization rates are increasingly misleading as better therapy reduces length of stay. Covid is now a long way from being an important cause of mortality (5/8)
— Robert Dingwall 🏴 🇪🇺 Reunite (@rwjdingwall) June 30, 2021
However, Stephen Griffin, associate professor of medicine at the University of Leeds told the Times that “it is immoral” to let infections “run riot” in children.
Even that small proportion of kids who get severe disease is going to increase. That is a problem. We don’t know the longer term consequences of this virus in children and that could be quite concerning. Long Covid for a child is incredibly damaging.
If we have a partially vaccinated population and allow widespread circulation of the virus that is the recipe for variants that will start to evade our vaccines.
Here’s the full story on Vladimir Putin saying for the first time that he was inoculated with Russia’s own Sputnik V vaccine as he gave a careful endorsement of the country’s floundering campaign while distancing himself from tough new measures designed to pressure more Russians into taking the jabs.
Updated
In related news, shares elsewhere around the world have today retreated from recent highs, as Asian markets grew jittery about a resurgence of Covid-19 cases and Western markets awaited Friday’s US jobs report and what it might mean for monetary policy.
Reuters reports that asset markets have been significantly buoyed over the past year by trillions of dollars of monetary and fiscal stimulus by central banks and governments around the world to mitigate their responses to the pandemic.
Vaccination rollouts in some places have fuelled an economic recovery, and consumer confidence this month surged to 21-year-highs in Europe.
While the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.39%, and the S&P 500 gained 0.07%; the Nasdaq Composite dropped or 0.09%, the pan-European STOXX 600 index lost 0.77% and the German DAX fell 1.02%, along with London’s FTSE 100 0.71% fall.
London’s FTSE 100 fell slightly today amid concerns that a recent jump in coronavirus infections could hinder the pace of economic growth, but it has nonetheless seen the fifth straight monthly gain.
The FTSE 100 eased 0.7%, but reported its best monthly winning streak since 2016, according to Reuters. The index has gained 8.9% so far this year to stand just under 12% away from its record high.
However, it has significantly underperformed against its European peers with the STOXX 600 hovering near its all-time high, as inflation concerns and rising Covid-19 infections hinder the recovery process.
“There is a sense of general unease at the moment as we’re seeing a rise in the number of Delta variant cases, while we’re just under three weeks away from what is supposed to be ‘Freedom Day’ for the UK,” said Danni Hewson, analyst at AJ Bell.
“Investors are just taking a look at the support mechanisms winding down,” Hewson said, referring to business rates support and the furlough scheme. “Then wondering whether or not the economy really is going to open up and then trying to balance that with rising prices.”
Dixons Carphone jumped 5.9% after the electricals retailer reported a 34% rise in annual profit. Opioid addiction treatment maker Indivior Plc rose 6.4% to the top of the FTSE 250 index after it said its 2021 revenue and profit would be significantly above its previous outlook.
EU responds to 'inequitable' treatment of African citizens claims amid WHO pressure
India’s version of AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine is not authorised in the EU due to the possibility of “differences” with the original, Europe’s drug regulator has said.
The African Union yesterday criticised as “inequitable” an EU decision not to include Covishield, the Indian-made vaccine used by the global Covax programme, on a list of approved vaccines for a digital certificate for travellers in the bloc.
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) said in a statement to AFP:
Even though it may use an analogous production technology to Vaxzevria [AstraZeneca’s vaccine], Covishield as such is not currently approved under EU rules.
This is because vaccines are biological products. Even tiny differences in the manufacturing conditions can result in differences in the final product, and EU law therefore requires the manufacturing sites and production process to be assessed and approved as part of the authorisation process.
Should we receive a marketing authorisation application for Covishield or should any change to the approved manufacturing sites for Vaxzevria be approved, we would communicate about it.
The World Health Organization has however approved Covishield and lamented the fact that some countries were rejecting Covishield’s use on vaccination passes.
“This is a great pity because AstraZeneca-Covishield is exactly the same vaccine as AstraZeneca-Vaxzevria, which is accepted as proof of vaccination,” said Richard Mihigo of the WHO Regional Office for Africa yesterday.
“It is only that AstraZeneca-Covishield is manufactured and distributed in other parts of the world other than Europe.” He urged EU countries to recognise Covishield on vaccine passes.
The EMA statement said it was “not responsible for any decision regarding travelling into the EU”, which is the responsibility of the European Commission and EU member states.
People in some African nations have also complained about the lack of recognition for any of the widely used Chinese vaccines.
Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, has fired a health ministry official who reportedly asked for a bribe in a vaccine deal, the latest graft accusation to rock the government amid investigations of its pandemic response.
With over half a million Covid-19 deaths and more new cases daily than any other country, anger is mounting in Brazil over missed opportunities to buy coronavirus vaccines. Accusations of corruption undercutting efforts have poured fuel on the fire, triggering new calls for Bolsonaro’s impeachment.
Yesterday, Brazil suspended a contract worth 1.6bn reais ($321m) for a vaccine from India’s Bharat Biotech, following allegations of undue pressure within the ministry. Bharat and the government have denied wrongdoing.
Updated
UK records 26,068 new cases – highest total for five months – and 14 more deaths
The UK has recorded a further 26,068 cases of Covid-19, the highest daily figure since 29 January, and 14 further deaths, official data shows.
Daily cases have been rising for more than a month, but fatalities have remained low, with scientists saying the rapid vaccine rollout has weakened the link between infections and deaths. The UK recorded 20,479 cases the day before. The data showed that 84.9% of adults have had a first vaccine while 62.4% have had both.
Updated
Warning that end to pandemic is 'a distant future' in Latin America
Cases of Covid-19 are declining in North America, but in most of Latin America and the Caribbean an end to the pandemic “remains a distant future”, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) director Carissa Etienne has said.
While infections in the United States, Canada and Mexico are falling, in Latin America and the Caribbean just one in ten people have been fully vaccinated against Covd-19, “an unacceptable situation,” she said in a briefing.
Etienne warned that the hurricane season in the Caribbean is arriving at a time when outbreaks are worsening and she urged countries to outfit hospitals and expand shelters to reduce the potential for transmission, Reuters reports.
Updated
Fully vaccinated Portuguese PM isolates after aide gets Covid
The prime minister of Portugal, Antonio Costa, has gone into isolation despite being fully vaccinated, after one of his aides tested positive.
It comes as authorities in the country reported more than 2,000 new cases of coronavirus in 24 hours, a high in a new wave of infections blamed on the Delta variant.
There were 2,362 reported cases in the country of 10 million people, the highest level since mid-February. More than half were in the Lisbon region, official figures showed, with the numbers of hospitalised people also rising, AFP reports.
Latest figures also show that the Delta variant, which was first detected in India, has become the dominant strain in Portugal. Hoping to halt the spread, the government has reimposed infection control measures including reducted opening hours for bars and restaurants in the worst-hit towns.
There are weekend restrictions on travel between the Lisbon region and the rest of the country.
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Interesting piece here by Bloomberg columnist Andreas Kluth (paywall), a classical liberal “who treasures individual freedom” and sees three intertwined routes – the moral, the legal and the practical – in the complicated debate on whether vaccination against Covid should be mandatory. He himself got the jab as soon as possible.
For our familiar vaccines, such as the measles, mumps and rubella jab children get in many countries, that case is easily made. A few of the new Covid vaccines, such as the mRNA shots of BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna, should also clear the hurdle, although their youth still means that regulators like the US Food and Drug Administration have so far only given “emergency use authorization.” Others, such as the AstraZeneca shot, have left people and regulators confused. Others yet, including the jabs hawked by Russia and China, are in my opinion simply too opaque about risk to justify coercion.
Beyond the risk of a given vaccine, we also need to know whether it prevents the recipient only from getting sick or also from transmitting the virus. If the answer is the first, remember, we can’t invoke the harm principle or the public good.
There’s also human nature to consider. New research based on surveys in Germany suggests that a vaccine mandate might send psychological signals that actually hinder overall compliance. People resent being manipulated, with either carrots or sticks, an effect known as “control aversion.” Coercion also tends to cause “moral disengagement,” making people who might have gotten jabbed for altruistic reasons tune out.
The complexities of the debate mean that the choices facing policymakers won’t get easier any time soon. Even lovers of freedom, like me, can agree that sometimes coercion is necessary to prevent harm. But what’s permissible needn’t always be wise. Our best shot for now is still to keep rooting for science, to stay ruthlessly transparent with the data, and to hope that people bare their arms because they want to. For my part, I got my jabs as soon as they became available.
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India’s disaster management agency has been ordered by the country’s supreme court to establish guidelines for paying compensation to bereaved relatives of those who have died from Covid.
A public interest litigation had sought Rs400,000 ($5,380) in relief payments to every family that has lost a family member to the virus, the Financial Times reports.
A bench of three judges gave the National Disaster Management Authority six weeks to prescribe “minimum standards for relief”, while accusing the body of failures. It said “the national authority has failed to perform its statutory duty,” according to Bloomberg.
However, the federal government has opposed the compensation demand, claiming it cannot afford it. But the court reportedly said the disaster management body would be able to decide the amount of money after considering the economic situation and government priorities.
Updated
The cancelling of San Francisco’s Pride parade is a move that has been replicated in other cities across the world. There will be no parade in Britain’s unofficial gay capital, Brighton, or in New York. In many cities, celebrations of the LGBTQ+ community will be toned down, often online, and, for the second year in a row, considerably less visible than usual.
Pride organisers have made these decisions amid a pandemic that has placed LGBTQ+ people and communities under unprecedented pressure, be that socio-economic, psychological or political.
In May 2020, a report by OutRight Action International, at the height of the first wave of Covid-19, warned that the LGBTQ+ community was likely to be disproportionately affected, particularly those living in countries where “stigma, discrimination, and criminalisation of same-sex relations or transgender identities prevail”.
Portugal is the latest country to require travellers to be double vaccinated in order to avoid quarantining for two weeks on arrival. Some have expressed concern that young people will be unable to travel to countries that older people who have been double jabbed will be able to.
My colleague on the community team would like to hear form young people over the age 18 about their thoughts on double vaccinations and travelling abroad. Are you still waiting to receive your second jab? How do you feel about not being able to travel if you have not been fully vaccinated?
The global economy is recovering from the pandemic at an uneven pace due to unequal access to vaccinations, the IMF’s chief economist has warned.
Well over a year on from the start of the pandemic, many countries are still battling the virus, particularly the increasingly dominant and highly infectious Delta variant.
“Right now what we are seeing is highly unequal access to vaccinations, including therapeutics and diagnostics. Therefore, what we’re seeing is a diverging recovery,” International Monetary Fund chief economist Gita Gopinath said during a webinar at the annual meeting of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
“The number one issue is how do we get to a point where we have good coverage of populations in terms of vaccination rates everywhere in the world.”
Referencing surges in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, Gopinath said there were countries that will not have the required testing, personal protective equipment or oxygen to “survive this surge.”
The cost to the global economy of the tourism freeze caused by Covid-19 could reach $4tn (£2.9tn) by the end of this year, a UN body has said, with the varying pace of vaccine rollouts expected to cost developing nations and tourist centres particularly dear.
Nations including Turkey and Ecuador will be among the hardest hit by the severe disruption to international tourism, with holiday favourites such as Spain, Greece and Portugal also badly affected. Pandemic-related losses have reached up to $2.4tn this year alone, according to a report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad).
The potential lost tourism-related income in 2021 alone is equivalent to the effect of switching off 85% of the UK economy, while projected losses over 2020 and 2021 could equate to removing Germany from the global economy for two years.
There could soon be “two Americas”, one where most people are vaccinated and another where there are low vaccination rates, top US health official Dr Anthony Fauci has warned.
The US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief and the top medical advisor to the president told CNN he is “very concerned” about a disparity between places with low and high vaccination rates
When you have such a low level of vaccination superimposed upon a variant that has a high degree of efficiency of spread, what you are going to see among under-vaccinated regions – be that states, cities or counties – you’re going to see these individual types of blips ... It’s almost like it’s going to be two Americas.
If you are vaccinated, you diminish dramatically your risk of getting infected and even more dramatically your risk of getting seriously ill. If you are not vaccinated, you are at considerable risk.
CNN reports that 29.7% of the population is fully vaccinated in Mississippi, and that unvaccinated people have accounted for more than 90% of Covid-19 cases and deaths in the past month, according to Dr. Thomas Dobbs, the state health officer for the Mississippi Department of Public Health.
Mississippi joins Alabama, Arkansas, Wyoming, and Louisiana in having less than 35% of residents fully vaccinated, with entrenched scepticism over vaccines in some communities and concerns that the jabs have not received full approval appearing to lead to significant resistance.
Members of the US military who were vaccinated against Covid showed higher-than-expected rates of heart inflammation, although the condition was still extremely rare, according to a new study.
Reuters reports that the study found that 23 previously healthy males with an average age of 25 complained of chest pain within four days of receiving a Covid-19 shot. The incident rate was higher than some previous estimates would have anticipated, it said.
All the patients, who at the time of the study’s publication had recovered or were recovering from myocarditis – an inflammation of the heart muscle – had received shots made by either Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna.
US health regulators last week added a warning to the literature that accompanies those mRNA vaccines to flag the rare risk of heart inflammation seen primarily in young males. But they said the benefit of the shots in preventing Covid-19 clearly continues to outweigh the risk.
The study, which was published in the JAMA Cardiology medical journal, said 19 of the patients were current military members who had received their second vaccine dose. The others had either received one dose or were retired from the military.
General population estimates would have predicted eight or fewer cases of myocarditis from the 436,000 male military members who received two Covid-19 shots, the study said.
Dozens of Italian prison guards beat unarmed inmates with truncheons and fists in the aftermath of a coronavirus-related protest last year, video footage captured on surveillance shows.
The video of the 6 April 2020 incident at the Santa Maria Capua Vetere prison north of Naples was published by Italian daily Domani today, prompting outrage.
Prosecutors launched an investigation last year following complaints by prisoners of retaliatory beatings carried out over four hours the day after an inmate protest prompted by news that an inmate had tested positive for Covid-19, AFP reports.
Fifty-two people working in the prison network faced arrest or legal action in the case this week, accused variously of torture, violence and abuse of office, with a total of over 110 people under investigation.
In the more than six minutes of footage compiled by Domani, dozens of prison guards, many of them in helmets and carrying shields, can be seen setting upon inmates.
Prisoners are seen covering their heads as they hurry through a human corridor of guards, receiving slaps on the head, kicks and beatings with truncheons as they pass. In other images, prisoners - some of them limping and in visible pain - can be seen climbing a stairway where guards on a landing slap them or beat them with their batons.
The images also show an inmate in a wheelchair being hit on the back, and at least three men who have fallen to the ground being beaten and kicked, according to AFP.
At least 150 inmates barricaded themselves inside their cells during the prison protest last year, according to news reports, nearly a month after a wave of riots in Italian prisons spurred by demands for Covid-19 tests and anger at the banning of family visits during the coronavirus lockdown.
Text messages between guards revealed that the operation, which involved over 280 penitentiary police, was planned and retaliatory in nature, prosecutors said.
The Australian home affairs minister has rejected calls to reduce caps on international arrivals amid outbreaks of the Delta variant, saying “we need to learn to live” with Covid.
Leaders in Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia are calling on prime minister Scott Morrison to reduce passenger caps – of about 1,000 passengers entering Queensland and 3,000 coming to New South Wales, AAP reports.
Home affairs minster Karen Andrews said the caps were not large and that Australia should resist more draconian measures. “We need to learn to live and to work in the Covid environment in which we find ourselves,” she said. “The first response should not be to close down our borders.”
Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox said further limiting international arrivals would ignore critical skill shortages. “This would be take us in precisely the wrong direction,” he said, according to AAP.
Outbreaks of the contagious Delta variant have led authorities to put more than 12 million Australians into lockdown.
WA premier Mark McGowan meanwhile believes the vast majority of people granted exemptions to travel overseas for work and study should not have been allowed to leave. “They should stay home while there is a pandemic running wild around the world,” he said, calling for a tougher approach to granting permission to leave
Between 25 March last year and 31 May this year, 156,507 Australian citizens and permanent residents were granted exemptions to leave Australia with 84,031 requests denied.
Earlier this month, an Australian court rejected a challenge to the federal government’s draconian power to prevent most citizens from leaving the country so that they don’t bring Covid-19 home.
Australia is alone among developed democracies in preventing its citizens and permanent residents from leaving the country except in “exceptional circumstances” where they can demonstrate a “compelling reason”. This has left most Australians stranded in their island nation since March 2020.
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The head of the UN’s World Food Programme has warned there could be “unprecedented famine of biblical proportions” in dozens of countries without further action to address food shortages.
Speaking at a G20 event on humanitarian aid in Brindisi, Italy, WFP chief David Beasley said world leaders had stepped up last year with funds to help those already struggling when the coronavirus pandemic hit - but must now do so again.
“We thought Covid would be in our rearview mirror by the end of 2020, only to see it recycled, with Delta and other variants taking place, devastating particularly and especially low-income and developing nations around the world who have been catastrophically smited by this perfect storm,” he said.
“These are not just numbers, these are not just statistics, these are people with real names, real lives, fragile and literally on the brink of starvation. If we don’t address their needs, over the next six to nine months you could have unprecedented famine of biblical proportions, destabilisation of nations and mass migration. The simple solution is we need more support.”
Aid agencies say food shortages driven by conflict, climate change and economic shocks has been exacerbated by the crisis of the pandemic, AFP reports.
Switzerland donates 4m AstraZeneca doses to Covax, with shot unapproved by regulator
Switzerland is to give 4m doses of AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine that it has reserved to the vaccine-sharing programme Covax, the government has said.
Switzerland originally reserved 5.4m doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, but the country’s medical regulator, Swissmedic, has yet to approve the shot, on grounds it has not received all necessary data from clinical trials, Reuters reports.
It is the latest example in a seemingly emerging trend of some countries seeking to offload jabs from the British-Swedish pharma giant.
“Through the unequal distribution of vaccines we can expect that the pandemic will continue for a long time to come,” the government said in a statement, seeking to play a small part in remedying the issue.
Switzerland has ordered significantly more mRNA vaccines from Moderna and from Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech. “The Swiss federal government is concentrating on mRNA vaccines,” it said. “These have proven themselves to be highly effective and tolerable.”
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Thailand is to import nearly 4m doses of Moderna’s mRNA coronavirus vaccine towards the end of this year and a further million in early 2022, for use by private hospitals.
Reuters reports that Thailand’s vaccinations strategy so far has relied heavily on the viral vector vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca and Sinovac Biotech’s inactivated Covid-19 vaccine.
The government pharmaceutical organization in a statement said 3.9m doses of the Moderna vaccine would be delivered in the fourth quarter and 1.1m doses in the first quarter of 2022.
The announcement comes as the Infectious Disease Association of Thailand (IDAT) urged prime minister Prayuth Chan-ocha to secure more mRNA vaccines to better contain the outbreak.
“The vaccine procurement plan of 150m doses has a high proportion of Sinovac,” the association said in a letter to Prayuth, citing that mRNA vaccines had a higher efficacy rate than that of Sinovac.
Thailand has also ordered five million doses of Johnson & Johnson vaccines and 20m doses of the mRNA vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech. The south-east Asian country today reported a new daily record of 53 coronavirus deaths, and 4,786 new infections.
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In related news, AFP reports that the wearable gadgets market has been booming as the pandemic led to greater interest in health monitoring amid working from home.
While worldwide sales of smartphones slumped last year, a record 527 million wearables were sold in 2020, up from 384 million in 2019, according to research firm Strategy Analytics.
It was the first time that global wearable sales topped half a billion and analysts expect the trend to continue, with the firm forecasting the devices will overtake smartphone sales by the end of the decade.
Ear-worn devices such as earbuds, which can be used to make calls and listen to music, accounted for nearly two-thirds of global wearable sales last year as people working from home upgraded their headphones for video calling.
Wristwear such as fitness trackers and smartwatches, which can monitor steps, the heart rate and even oxygen levels, accounted for 36% of worldwide wearable sales, as people paid more attention to their health during the pandemic and exercise moved outdoors since gyms were closed in many places.
“Everybody is becoming much more health focused and wearables are a good device to assist with that,” said Neil Mawston, an executive director at Strategy Analytics.
British households built up their savings to the second highest level on record at the start of the year as the Covid-19 lockdown limited opportunities to spend, according to official figures.
France has today ended most capacity limits imposed in April on restaurants, cinemas, stores and other public venues, although the measures were extended in parts of the southwest over the spread of the coronavirus Delta variant.
The move came as the doctor who heads president Emmanuel Macron’s coronavirus advisory panel said a “fourth wave” of cases was likely this autumn.
In the southwestern Landes department, officials said the capacity limits would be extended to 6 July because of “weak collective immunity” in the area.
Around 45% of new cases are being caused by the Delta variant, which was first detected in India and has been blamed for an increase in daily Covid deaths in Britain, AFP reports.
Seven virus clusters have been discovered in businesses or retirement homes, Didier Couteaud of the regional health service in western France said during a video press conference.
Elsewhere across France, events will no longer be limited to 1,000 people, whether indoors or outdoors, though participants will have to show proof of their Covid inoculation, a negative test or a recent infection.
Professional sporting matches will no longer be limited to 5,000 people, though capacity limits may still be applied to the summer music festivals that traditionally attract huge crowds. The next stage in the lifting of restrictions will see nightclubs reopen on 9 July. Face masks remain required in public indoor spaces and in crowds outdoors.
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Bangladesh will deploy soldiers tomorrow to enforce a strict lockdown amid a record spike in coronavirus cases driven by the Delta variant first detected in India, the government has said.
Most restrictions imposed as part of a strict lockdown introduced in April have since been lifted, but a record spike in cases this week of the highly contagious Delta variant has prompted the government to order a week of tight controls, Reuters reports.
“No one will be allowed go out except in case of an emergency during this period,” the government said in a statement, adding army troops alongside law-enforcement agencies would be deployed to enforce the lockdown.
All offices and transportation will be shut during this period while factories, including the country’s prime garment export sector, will be allowed to remain open if they follow health protocols, it said.
Police have vowed to arrest if anyone comes out of their home without a valid reason. Tens of thousands of migrant workers left the capital, Dhaka, over the weekend amid a looming strict lockdown.
Bangladesh sealed its border with India in April as a precaution against infection, although trade continues. Bangladesh has seen a record surge in cases this week, with 7,666 new cases reported on Tuesday as well as 112 fatalities.
There have been 904,436 infections and 14,388 deaths reported in the country since the pandemic began.
Bangladesh’s vaccination drive suffered a blow after India stopped exports of the AstraZeneca shot in response to a record surge in domestic infections, with only three percent of its population of 170 million getting two doses.
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Three members of Singapore’s Covid task force have laid out a proposed framework for a return to life as normal – scrapping lockdowns, mass contact tracing, and Covid case counting, while resuming large gatherings.
In what would be a radical departure from the zero transmission model also seen elsewhere, stringent measures would be abandoned. The task force members say such policies are not sustainable in the long term.
“The bad news is that Covid-19 may never go away. The good news is that it is possible to live normally with it in our midst,” said Singapore’s trade minister Gan Kim Yong, finance minister Lawrence Wong and health minister Ong Ye Kung, in a piece in the Straits Times last week.
“We can turn the pandemic into something much less threatening, like influenza, hand, foot and mouth disease, or chickenpox, and get on with our lives.”
Titled “Living normally, with Covid-19”, the piece said that with “vaccination, testing, treatment and social responsibility, it may mean that in the near future, when someone gets Covid-19, our response can be very different from now.”
CNN reports that Singapore is on track for two-thirds of its population to have received their first vaccine dose by early July, and aims to fully vaccinate that figure by 9 August.
It said that Singapore is considered a success story in terms of controlling Covid, with strict border controls, enforced quarantines, effective contact tracing, and rules on social gatherings and mask wearing.
The city-state of 5.7 million people averaged about 18 cases a day in the past month and has recorded just 36 deaths throughout the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Brazil saw a fall in life expectancy by 1.3 years last year amid the pandemic, returning to 2014 levels, with that figure continuing to widen slightly, according to a new report in the journal Nature Medicine.
The New York Times reports that Brazil has reported more than 514,000 deaths from Covid-19, a reported death toll surpassed only by that in the US which has lost more than 604,000 people.
The study said that between 1945 and 2020, life expectancy in Brazil increased from 45.5 years to 76.7 years, an average of about five months per year, but the setbacks have reverted the country to the levels of seven years ago.
Marcia Castro, chair of the Department of Global Health and Population at Harvard, the lead author of the study, estimated along with her fellow researchers that the resulting decline in life expectancy for this year, based on the death toll recorded in the first four months of 2021, would be about 1.78 years.
When intense shocks like a pandemic or war occur, life expectancy drops, but it often rebounds quickly. This was the case with the 1918 influenza pandemic in the US, when [life expectancy at birth] in 1919 was higher than in 1917, likely due, in part, to selective mortality of individuals with tuberculosis. We argue that, in the case of COVID-19 in Brazil, the rebound will not happen in 2021, and the pre-pandemic trajectory of annual gains in [life expectancy at birth] will likely slow down.
States in the Amazon region, including Amazonas, Rondônia, Roraima and Mato Grosso, experienced the steepest declines in life expectancy last year.
The Associated Press has this dispatch from a prison in Florida, reporting that there are few suggestions that US correctional institutions have made significant reforms and changes to better deal with future waves of Covid infection after an estimated half a million people in prisons contracted the virus and 3,000 died.
Derrick Johnson had a makeshift mask. He had the spray bottle of bleach and extra soap that corrections officers provided. But he still spent every day crammed in a unit with 63 other men in a Florida prison, crowding into hallways on their way to meals and sleeping feet from one another at night.
As the coronavirus ravaged the Everglades Correctional Institution, Johnson was surrounded by the sounds of coughing and requests for Tylenol. And while he thought a lot of the prison’s policies were ineffective at protecting prisoners, he also wondered if that was the best the facility could do.
“Prison is not built to compete with a pandemic,” said Johnson, who was released in December. “The pandemic’s gonna win every time.” With crowded conditions, notoriously substandard medical care and constantly shifting populations, prisons were ill-equipped to handle the highly contagious virus, which killed nearly 3,000 prisoners and staff.
Corrections systems responded with inconsistent policies, struggling to contain the virus amid understaffing and overcrowding. At its peak in mid-December, more than 25,000 prisoners tested positive in a single week. But in recent months, infections behind bars nationwide have slowed to a few hundred new cases each week, and many prisons have eased what restrictions they had in place, including mask-wearing, visitors and other movement in and out, going back to business as usual.
It’s a critical moment, with new coronavirus cases low but the threat of infection looming as new variants spread around the world, said Dr David Sears, an infectious-disease specialist and correctional health consultant. “The medical community, prison leadership and society at large have learned so much about Covid in a short period of time,” Sears said. “We need to take these lessons and make sure that the things we’ve learned after a lot of real human suffering are not in vain.”
According to the data collected by The Marshall Project and the AP, about three in 10 people in state and federal prisons were infected with the virus. But correctional health experts widely agree that this number is an undercount. “A great many of the people who ever had Covid, they were never tested,” said Dr Homer Venters, a former chief medical officer of the New York City jail system who has inspected health conditions in prisons around the country over the last year. “In most prisons it ran through these places like wildfire. People were never tested.”
Even when facilities did conduct tests, they still allowed prisoners who tested positive to come in contact with others. But many prisons simply lack the space needed to adequately isolate sick prisoners. There are structural and logistical changes prisons could make, such as upgrading ventilation systems and creating surge capacity for staff and health care workers. But the most effective approach, Sears said, is to drastically reduce prison populations.
Hello and greetings to everyone reading, wherever you are the in the world. Mattha Busby here to take you through the next few hours of global Covid developments. Thanks to my colleagues 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.
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Vladimir Putin – who received the Russian Sputnik vaccine earlier this year (see entry at 10.39) – has said he is opposed to mandatory vaccinations in Russia despite a surge in coronavirus infections in the country.
“I do not support mandatory vaccinations,” Putin said on a phone-in broadcast on television, according to the AFP news agency.
Russia reported 669 coronavirus deaths over the past 24 hours, a record number of fatalities for the second day in a row.
One of the pandemic hotspots is the city of St Petersburg, which is due to host a Euro 2020 quarter-final on Friday in front of thousands of fans, many of them flying in from abroad for the match.
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Cambodia has reported record daily rises in coronavirus deaths and cases, reaching what its government called the “red line” in its biggest outbreak so far. Reuters reports that the country reported 27 deaths from Covid-19 and 1,130 cases on Wednesday.
Cambodia successfully contained its outbreaks through last year and had among the world’s smallest caseloads, but it has been battling to control the spread since its detection of a highly transmissible variant late in February.
“We are now at the red line for Covid-19 virus transmission in the country. Everyone must act responsibly together in order to suppress virus transmission now,” Or Vandine, secretary of state and health ministry spokeswoman said in a tweet.
“We do not want to pass the red line which will require lockdown again,” she said.
The record numbers took the overall cases to 50,385 and deaths total to 602.
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Today so far…
- The North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, has sacked several senior party officials over a “grave” coronavirus incident that had threatened public safety, fuelling speculation that the coronavirus has breached the country’s defences.
- The state-run KCNA news agency quoted Kim as telling a meeting of the ruling party’s politburo that: “In neglecting important decisions by the party that called for organisational, material and science and technological measures to support prolonged anti-epidemic work in face of a global health crisis, the officials in charge have caused a grave incident that created a huge crisis for the safety of the country and its people.”
- Thailand reported a record 53 Covid-19 fatalities on Wednesday and 4,786 infections, as the country struggles to contain its most severe outbreak since the start of the pandemic. The government has stopped short of imposing a full lockdown, but introduced new restrictions this week.
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Russia reported 669 coronavirus-related deaths nationwide, the most confirmed in a single day since the pandemic began, amid a surge in cases that authorities blame on the Delta variant. The government coronavirus taskforce also confirmed 21,042 new Covid-19 cases in the last 24 hours.
- Vladimir Putin said this morning that he had received Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine earlier this year. He had previously declined to disclose which vaccine he had taken.
- Japan is considering an extension of its coronavirus prevention measures in Tokyo and other areas by two weeks to a month, Japanese media said, with less than a month to go until the Tokyo Summer Olympics are set to open.
- South Korea’s capital, Seoul, and its neighbouring regions will delay by a week the relaxation of social distancing rules due to a sudden increase in Covid cases.
- England fans are being warned against trying to travel to Rome for the Euro 2020 quarter final match with Ukraine. Current restrictions require visitors from the UK to quarantine for five days upon arrival.
- Malta, the Balearic islands and parts of the Caribbean were moved on to England’s “green list” from 4am this morning.
- The outsourcing company Serco predicts its profits will jump 50% during the first half of the year because of its continued work on Covid-19 contracts for various governments, including the UK’s test-and-trace service.
- France is likely to have a fourth wave of the virus, due to a resurgence of cases caused by the Delta variant, said Prof Jean-François Delfraissy, the French government’s leading scientific adviser.
- Tunisia has extended curfew hours to try and stop the rapid spread of coronavirus as it recorded a daily record number of cases.
- Malaysia says it will receive 1m AstraZeneca vaccines donated by Japan tomorrow, and 1m Pfizer doses on Friday donated by the US.
- China’s Clover Biopharmaceuticals has announced an advance purchase agreement to supply up to 414m doses of its Covid-19 vaccine candidate through the global vaccine sharing scheme Covax.
- Brazil is to suspend its $324m Indian vaccine contract that has mired President Jair Bolsonaro in accusations of irregularities.
- Romania is to sell 1.7m excess doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to Denmark because it was unable to use them within its own population due to vaccine hesitancy.
- In Australia, a number of state governments have directly criticised the commonwealth’s new position on the AstraZeneca vaccine, with Queensland saying that it does “not want under-40s to get AstraZeneca” and Victoria accusing Scott Morrison of creating unnecessary confusion.
- The Australian state of Queensland has just eight days of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine left. The state’s health minister, Dr Yvette D’ath, said the federal government had denied Queensland’s request for more doses of the Pfizer vaccine.
- Also in Australia, Aboriginal organisations have expressed frustration at the Northern Territory government’s “flawed” pandemic response, demanding it do more to accommodate hundreds of Aboriginal people sleeping rough around town centres they say are at risk of Covid-19.
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Head of Indonesia’s paediatric society warns over rise in infant Covid deaths
Although still quite low, the number of Indonesian children contracting the coronavirus has almost tripled since May, with infant deaths from Covid rising sharply as the country suffers its most severe wave of infections so far, a senior paediatrician has said.
Indonesia has been hit by a surge in cases this month, with new records on six days since 21 June including a daily high of over 21,807 today, putting pressure on the government to impose tighter measures.
Dr Aman Pulungan, head of Indonesia’s paediatric society, said weekly child deaths from Covid rose to 24 last week from 13 in the previous week, many under five years old.
That was a larger rate of increase than the overall rise in Covid deaths from 1,783 to 2,476 fatalities nationwide over the same period. Aman said infections among minors were rising fast.
Kate Lamb reports for Reuters that the percentage of overall cases that were under 18 years of age has risen to 12.6% in June compared with 5% in July last year, according to official data, although Aman noted children were now being tested more.
President Joko Widodo this week announced that authorities had given a green light for children age 12 to 17 to be inoculated with the Sinovac vaccine.
Aman said paediatricians were already seeing cases of “long Covid” – debilitating and lingering symptoms months after infection – among Indonesian children.
He believed the rising infections among children was more likely pandemic fatigue and lack of knowledge than the impact of more transmissible variants.
“It’s not the Delta variant, but the system,” he said. “Less testing, less tracing. And people still don’t think that children can suffer and die from Covid. Awareness is still low.”
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The outsourcing company Serco predicts its profits will jump 50% during the first half of the year because of its continued work on Covid-19 contracts for various governments, including the UK’s test-and-trace service.
Serco runs large parts of the UK’s largely privatised test-and-trace service, which is labelled NHS test and trace. The firm runs a quarter of Covid-19 testing sites and half the tier 3 contact tracers, who are mostly required to phone the contacts of people who have tested positive.
Serco’s appointment to run parts of the UK’s test-and-trace system has proved controversial and the firm has drawn criticism for the decision to pay £17m in dividends to investors, partly funded by its pandemic profits.
Read more of Joanna Partridge’s report here: Serco expects 50% jump in profits on back of Covid contracts
Kremlin reveals that Vladimir Putin received the Russian Sputnik V vaccine
President Vladimir Putin said this morning that he had received Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine against Covid earlier this year. Reuters report that he had previously declined to disclose which vaccine he had taken.
Putin, 68, received two vaccine shots against Covid in March and April, the Kremlin has said. Authorities did not publish video footage of him being inoculated.
China’s Clover Biopharmaceuticals has announced an advance purchase agreement to supply up to 414m doses of its Covid-19 vaccine candidate through the global vaccine sharing scheme Covax.
The firm said it will supply an initial 64m, pending an emergency use listing from the World Health Organization (WHO) of its vaccine candidate.
Reuters report that the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (Gavi), which leads the Covax scheme alongside the WHO, has options for an additional 350m doses in 2022, Clover said.
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Seoul to delay relaxing of restrictions due to rise in local cases
South Korea’s capital, Seoul, and its neighbouring regions will delay by a week the relaxation of social distancing rules due to a sudden increase in Covid cases, authorities said today.
Sangmi Cha reports for Reuters from Seoul that the government had said it would relax social distancing and allow private gatherings of up to six people in the greater Seoul area, from the current four, starting 1 July as the country’s inoculation drive has been picking up speed.
While the number of daily new infections have remained below 700 since early this month, South Korea reported 794 new coronavirus cases on Tuesday, according to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA).
Of the 759 new locally transmitted cases, 631 or 83% were from the greater Seoul area, Yoon Tae-ho, a senior health ministry official, told a briefing. The cases, including the more transmissible Delta variants, were found in universities, workplaces and restaurants in the metropolitan area, Yoon said.
Application of the revised social distancing in the current situation of “severe and critical crisis” may lead to further confusion and more transmission, Seoul city said in a statement.
Experts said the announced relaxing of restrictions, including longer operation hours for pubs and easing of the private gatherings ban, may have sent the wrong signal to the public and health authorities called on the public for caution.
South Korea has inoculated close to 30% of its 52 million population with at least one dose of Covid vaccine, putting it on track to meet a target of 70% by September.
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Russian Covid daily deaths at highest level since pandemic began
Russia reported 669 coronavirus-related deaths nationwide on Wednesday, the most confirmed in a single day since the pandemic began, amid a surge in cases that authorities blame on the Delta variant.
Reuters notes that the government coronavirus taskforce also confirmed 21,042 new Covid-19 cases in the last 24 hours, including 5,823 in Moscow
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Andrew Sparrow has the UK live blog for the day, which will be covering major UK Covid lines as well. I’ll be carrying on here with international coronavirus news.
A little bit more on the context of North Korea and Covid here from AFP, who point out that Pyongyang’s coronavirus defence has come at a high price. Ever since the pandemic began, North Korean state media have highlighted anti-coronavirus measures and officials have exhorted citizens to remain vigilant.
At a military parade in October, Kim Jong-un himself tearfully thanked his people for their efforts and said North Korea had not seen a single case of the “evil virus”, although analysts have long doubted the assertion.
Its self-imposed and strictly enforced blockade has left it more isolated than ever: trade with Beijing – its economic lifeline – slowed to a trickle while all international aid workers have left.
Several UN relief groups confirmed to AFP that the Needs and Priorities document – a key report that summarises the humanitarian situation in the country and forms the basis of UN appeals – will not be published this year.
And this month, Pyongyang admitted it was tackling a food crisis, sounding the alarm in a nation with a moribund agricultural sector that has long struggled to feed itself. Earlier, Kim warned his people to prepare for the “worst-ever situation”.
Pyongyang has been looking to shore up loyalty to the authorities, with state television last week showing a resident of the capital expressing concern and saying everyone was “heartbroken” over the “emaciated” condition of Kim, who has lost significant weight recently.
Analysts say Pyongyang is using Kim’s appearance as a way to glorify him by portraying him as a “devoted, hardworking” leader as the country struggles to tackle its food crisis and other challenges.
Justin Murray’s report for us can be read in full here: North Korea Covid-19 outbreak fears after Kim Jong-un warns of ‘huge crisis’ in ‘antivirus fight’
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I’ve got to be honest with you, at this time of day I’m normally bringing you lots of quotes from government ministers in the UK about Covid from the morning media round, but pretty much every TV station or radio channel I’ve switched on has been talking wall-to-wall about England-Germany. It’s relentless.
PA Media, though, is carrying some quotes from the domestic science community, and this morning they are highly critical of the UK government.
On Times Radio, Prof Stephen Reicher, from the University of St Andrews and a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) subcommittee on behavioural science, has warned the country was in danger of repeating last summer’s mistakes.
My fear is that we’re on line to repeat the mistakes of last summer – if you remember, the prime minister told us it was our patriotic duty to go to the pub, that people should go to work or they might lose their jobs, we had eat out to help out.
The consequence was we never got infections low enough to be able to deal with the disease and so when conditions changed in the autumn, when schools went back and people went back to work and universities went back and the weather got worse and we went inside, so infections spiked.
And I think this time round, we should learn from that and we should get infections low to a point where we’re in a much better place in the autumn, where we don’t have to reimpose restrictions. So I think the real question is how can we do that without inconveniencing people too much?
It seems to me that if we got right the basic public health moves to suppress infection, we wouldn’t be talking about a high reservoir of infection which can then spike very quickly when conditions change.
Deenan Pillay, professor of virology at University College London, who is also a member of Sage, has been on LBC radio, and called into question changes in travel rules that will allow business executives from large companies to skip quarantine. He said:
Scientifically, of course, the virus does not distinguish between chief executive and anyone else in terms of transmission. Behaviourally, this just adds to the variation and people feeling why should they stick to the rules?
There’s a social fairness issue as well – I know many colleagues who are healthcare workers who have been working for more than a year flat out, desperate to go away on holiday, but cannot do so because they have to quarantine on coming back. So on all those bases, it does not make sense to me whilst we’ve got the regulations that apply to everyone.
The Government has made it very clear that they expect to open up the economy and reduce all of the constraints on 19 July, but we just need to think back a few months to the delay in putting in limits to travel from India … and that delay for political reasons did lead to this import of the Delta variant, which, as we all know has led to mayhem within the UK – children being off school and increasing infection rates.
Updated
In Australia, Aboriginal organisations have expressed frustration at the Northern Territory government’s “flawed” pandemic response, demanding it do more to accommodate hundreds of Aboriginal people sleeping rough around town centres they say are at risk of Covid-19.
Both Darwin and Alice Springs were in lockdown amid concerns about the significant risk posed to Aboriginal communities.
The CEO of the Danila Dilba Aboriginal health service, Olga Havnen, said the lack of support for homeless people created a “ridiculous situation”.
She said a senior doctor at the clinic spent four hours unsuccessfully trying to find emergency accommodation for a patient who had just had a Covid test.
“The pandemic response plan doesn’t include any provision for housing people who may be homeless or visitors to town,” Havnen said. “Here we are on day four of a lockdown, and they’re only just sorting out the arrangements that might be made available for Aboriginal people, particularly visitors and rough sleepers who might need a Covid test, and who will need to self-isolate.
“Who else in the community gets so studiously ignored under these sorts of circumstances? It’s either gross incompetence, maladministration or straight out racism. Or probably, a combination of all three,” Havnen said.
Read more of Lorena Allam’s report here: Northern Territory urged to accommodate homeless Aboriginal people during Covid lockdown
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French government scientific adviser: 'we will have a fourth wave'
France is likely to have a fourth wave of the virus, due to a resurgence of cases caused by the Delta variant, said the French government’s leading scientific adviser, Prof Jean-François Delfraissy, this morning.
Nevertheless, Delfraissy added that the rollout of vaccines would help mitigate the effect of this new wave of the virus, which many medical experts think could hit France by September or October.
“I think we will have a fourth wave, but it will be much more moderate than the previous three waves because the level of vaccinations is different compared to before,” Delfraissy told France Info radio.
Reuters report that the French epidemiologist Arnaud Fontanet, who also advises the government on scientific matters, told a television programme that he too expected France’s Covid infection numbers to rise again in September or October.
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“It was a dangerous, false sense of security. Now a tragedy is unfolding,” – that’s Dr Johannes Marisa, president of the Medical and Dental Private Practitioners of Zimbabwe Association in Harare, who spoke to Associated Press as part of a report into Covid’s rising impact across Africa.
AP reports that the delta variant has now been detected in at least 14 African countries including Congo, Mozambique, Namibia, Uganda, South Africa and Zimbabwe, and not just in the cities. Early in the pandemic many rural inhabitants had dismissed Covid as an urban problem.
In Zimbabwe, three of the four districts under strict lockdown and declared as centres of the outbreak are in the predominantly rural Mashonaland West province, which recorded over half of the 801 cases reported last weekend. Other hot spots also are largely rural, a first for this country.
“We are going to see a lot of deaths, especially arising from rural areas. Covid is now coming from the rural areas,” said Marisa, attributing the spike to “a high degree of complacency”, a lack of information and few vaccinations, with urban areas prioritised.
The virus can also spread at funerals when city dwellers return to visit rural relatives. “I was at a funeral in a rural area recently and people were surprised to see me wearing a mask,” he said.
Rural areas are ill-equipped to deal with the surge, and urban health care facilities are under strain in treating an increasing number of people from the countryside. Zimbabwe’s major referral hospital, Parirenyatwa in Harare, is prioritising beds for Covid patients.
Rural residents are finding it difficult to get vaccinated because of weak public health systems and vaccine distribution problems. Only 1% of Africa’s 1.3 billion people have been vaccinated, according to the WHO and the Africa Centers for Disease Control.
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AstraZeneca rift between Australian states and Morrison government grows
In Australia, a number of state governments have directly criticised the commonwealth’s new position on the AstraZeneca vaccine, with Queensland saying that it does “not want under-40s to get AstraZeneca” and Victoria accusing Scott Morrison of creating unnecessary confusion.
In a series of press conferences on Wednesday, Queensland, Victoria, New South Wales and Western Australia all distanced themselves from the prime minister’s suggestion that people aged under 40 should approach GPs for the AstraZeneca dose.
Queensland and Victoria were more strident in their comments, explicitly criticising the commonwealth’s new approach, while NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian said simply that the health advice remained that Pfizer was preferred for under-60s.
In an explosive press conference in Brisbane, Queensland chief health officer Dr Jeannette Young said the state would stick with the expert advice from Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (Atagi) that Pfizer was preferred for those under 60.
“I do not want under-40s to get AstraZeneca,” she said. “I don’t want an 18-year-old in Queensland dying from a clotting illness who, if they got Covid, probably wouldn’t die. We’ve had very few deaths due to Covid-19 in Australia in people under the age of 50, and wouldn’t it be terrible that our first 18-year-old in Queensland who dies related to this pandemic died because of the vaccine?”
The federal health minister, Greg Hunt, insisted there had been “no change” to the medical advice, which he described as “clear”, and suggested the government’s new position was in line with the Atagi position.
Read more of Christopher Knaus’ report here: Rift between states and Morrison government over AstraZeneca vaccine for under-40s grows
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Malaysia to receive 2m vaccines from Japan and US this week
A quick Reuters snap that Malaysia says it will receive 1m AstraZeneca vaccines donated by Japan tomorrow.
Science minister Khairy Jamaluddin confirmed the move to reporters this morning, and also said that Malaysia country will receive another 1m doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine donated by the US on Friday.
Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the UK’s minister for climate change, has been doing the media round in the UK this morning. She’s been asked on Sky News whether the government should consider stopping publishing daily coronavirus case numbers once there is a “return to normal” on 19 July – for England at least. She said:
I think for as long as there is that intense testing regime that we will need to continue to be able to manage our day-to-day lives and make sure that we are looking after each other, there will be that substantial data set to share. Whether it’s published on the front page of a newspaper everyday, or whether it’s something that those who are monitoring and making sure that they’re looking after us have at their fingertips will no doubt be set out by the Department of Health in due course.
#KayBurley: 'Should we continue to publish daily #COVID19 figures?'
— Sky News (@SkyNews) June 30, 2021
"As long as there is an intense testing regime" says Climate Change Minister @AnnieTrev, adding when the UK returns “back to normal”, the @DHSCgovuk and Number 10 will make a decision.https://t.co/BL4hYEW3Ef pic.twitter.com/ZVDvRZAG39
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A lot of England football fans will have woken up this morning wondering if they’ll be able to get a ticket for England–Ukraine at Euro 2020 in Rome on Saturday. The answer is that you probably can’t get to Rome anyway – well, not legally.
Tess de la Mare for PA media sets out the rules for travel, noting that you have to have proof of a negative coronavirus test taken in the 48 hours before you travel. UK passengers must fill in one of the European Union’s passenger locator forms, and then spend five days in isolation.
So even if you’d had a test a couple of days ago and get a flight this morning, the earliest you would be out would be Sunday - subject to a second Covid-19 test - meaning you will probably be watching the game from a hotel room anyway.
The exception is if you are a member of transport crew, or can prove that you are in Italy for “work, health or emergency”, or of course, if you happen to be an England supporter who lives in Italy already.
None of these restrictions would have applied to fans heading from Germany to Rome if the Germans had won the match – as part of the EU digital Covid-19 certificate scheme they would not have had to do the quarantine.
There’s some response in India to the news that Brazil is suspending a vaccine contract. The deal to buy 20m doses of Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin shot has become a headache for Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro after whistleblowers went public with concerns over irregularities. One health ministry official said he personally alerted the president about his concerns.
Reuters are now carrying the news that India’s Bharat Biotech has said it followed a “step-by-step” approach for the regulatory approval and supply contract of its Covid-19 vaccine in Brazil, and that it has not received advance payments from the Brazilian health ministry.
Malta, Balearic and Caribbean islands added to UK 'green list' from today
Good morning, it is Martin Belam here in London. If you arrived in England today from Malta, the Balearic islands and parts of the Caribbean, and your flight landed after 4am, then the new “green list” applies to you and you don’t have to self-isolate for 10 days.
That doesn’t mean your trip is hurdle free. The “green list” rules state that:
Before you travel to England you must, take a Covid test, book and pay for a day 2 Covid test in advance, and complete a passenger locator form. On arrival in England you must take that Covid test on or before day 2 after you arrive. Children aged 4 and under do not need to take this test and you do not need to quarantine unless the test result is positive.
And an additional word of caution for those planning trips. Aside from Malta, the countries are all also on the “green watch list”, which means that they are, according to the government, “at risk of moving from green to amber”.
Tokyo may extend coronavirus restrictions into Olympics period
Japan is considering an extension of its coronavirus prevention measures in Tokyo and other areas by two weeks to a month, Japanese media said, with less than a month to go until the Tokyo Summer Olympics are set to open.
Reuters: the Japanese capital and other areas are currently under a ‘quasi’ state of emergency set to be lifted on July 12, but a recent uptick in coronavirus cases has officials concerned and could affect the number of spectators allowed in to Olympics venues.
According to the Mainichi Shimbun daily, the government is considering extending the measures by two to four weeks, a period that would overlap with the Olympics, already delayed a year, that open on 23 July.
Australian state of Queensland says Pfizer vaccine supply will run out in days
The Australian state of Queensland has just eight days of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine left, authorities warned on Wednesday, as confusion over who should receive the AstraZeneca jab continued and outbreaks across the country grew.
The state’s health minister, Dr Yvette D’ath, said the federal government had denied Queensland’s request for more doses of the Pfizer vaccine, despite having given another state, Victoria, 100,000 doses three weeks ago.
“So we are getting to that point that we’ll have to start prioritising only second doses if the commonwealth do not have any vaccine left,” she said. “And they need to tell us. Is what they gave Victoria the end of it? Have we only got what is allocate and no contingency stock left until that big delivery in October? Because we all need to know.”
Large parts of Queensland have begun a snap three-day lockdown, triggered by an unvaccinated Covid-positive hospital worker who travelled between Brisbane and north Queensland:
Thailand suffers record deaths
Thailand reported a record 53 Covid-19 fatalities on Wednesday and 4,786 infections, as the country struggles to contain its most severe outbreak since the start of the pandemic.
Thailand’s third wave began in April, when cases were linked to bars and clubs in Bangkok. Since then, the virus has spread rapidly inside prisons, construction sites, factories and crowded areas of the capital.
The government has stopped short of imposing a full lockdown, but introduced new restrictions this week.
On Monday, hundreds of construction sites in Bangkok and surrounding provinces were sealed off, with workers forced to stay inside for 30 days. Rights groups have warned that people are being trapped in squalid conditions, without sufficient food or access to medical care.
Some were reportedly dumped on the side of the road by employers, while trucks were also seen ferrying workers away from sites before the movement restrictions were imposed. It’s feared this exodus could spread the virus more widely across the country.
Other restrictions have also been introduced, including a ban on dining in restaurants and on gatherings of more than 20 people in the capital and other high risk areas. The recent wave is placing immense pressure on hospitals in Bangkok, which have reported shortages of beds for severely ill patients.
Thailand’s vaccination rollout has been slow, and hindered by supply shortages. So far, less than 4% are fully vaccinated, while less than 10% have had at least one dose.
North Korea Covid outbreak fears after Kim Jong-un warns of ‘huge crisis’ in ‘antivirus fight’
The North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, has sacked several senior party officials over a “grave” coronavirus incident that had threatened public safety, fuelling speculation that the coronavirus has breached the country’s defences.
“In neglecting important decisions by the party that called for organisational, material and science and technological measures to support prolonged anti-epidemic work in face of a global health crisis, the officials in charge have caused a grave incident that created a huge crisis for the safety of the country and its people,” the state-run KCNA news agency quoted Kim as telling a meeting of the ruling party’s politburo.
KCNA did not explain the nature of the transgressions, but analysts believe Kim’s outburst indicate North Korea is no longer free of Covid-19:
Summary
Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.
Thailand reported on Wednesday 53 new deaths from the coronavirus, bringing the total number of fatalities to 2,023 since the pandemic started last year. The country’s Covid taskforce also reported 4,786 new coronavirus cases, taking the total number of infections to 259,301.
Meanwhile North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has said failures in anti-epidemic work have led to an unspecified “grave incident” that has put the safety of the country and people at risk, state media reported.
Here are the key developments from the last few hours:
- Tunisia has extended curfew hours to try and stop the rapid spread of coronavirus as it recorded a daily record number of cases.
- Maree Todd, Scotland’s minister for public health, has tested positive for coronavirus. Announcing the news on Twitter tonight, the SNP MSP for Caithness, Sutherland and Ross said she is self-isolating after testing positive today but has not had any symptoms.
- Brazil is to suspend its $324m Indian vaccine contract that has mired President Jair Bolsonaro in accusations of irregularities.
- Romania is to sell 1.7m excess doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to Denmark because it was unable to use them within its own population due to vaccine hesitancy.
- Guatemala has demanded its money back from Russia after it failed to deliver paid-for vaccines. Guatemalan health minister Amelia Flores has said the government has not received its promised Sputnik V vaccines.
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