Thank you all for following tonight’s latest developments. You can keep up with the Guardian’s coverage of Covid-19 through our coronavirus keyword tag and our team in Australia but that’s it from me Nadeem Badshah.
Members of the armed forces will be drafted in to support coronavirus testing operations for thousands of school and college students in England, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has announced.
The MoD said 1,500 military personnel would be deployed to ensure that testing systems were up and running by the time pupils returned for the new term in January.
The majority of the personnel will form local response teams, providing support and phone advice to institutions needing guidance on the testing process and setup of the testing facilities.
Students will swab themselves in the vast majority of cases, under the supervision of a school staff member or volunteer who has been trained for the role, and teachers are not expected to take a role in the testing process.
The defence secretary, Ben Wallace, said: “The UK armed forces are stepping up once again this holiday.
“They’ll share considerable experience of testing across the country and the successful school pilots conducted this autumn.
“We are grateful for the professionalism and commitment they and our colleagues in teaching are showing to get students back into the classroom and on with their education.”
Updated
News of planned New Year’s Eve parties in Los Angeles is sparking outrage as the region faces a catastrophic Covid crisis, record deaths and a crushed healthcare system.
In the lead up to the new year, LA has become the new centr of America’s out-of-control pandemic, with one Covid death now happening every 10 minutes and hospitals faced with unthinkable choices as they run out of intensive care unit beds. But doctors’ warnings of “apocalyptic” scenes at hospitals have not stopped some businesses from planning in-person events to ring in 2021, drawing sharp criticism from health officials.
In upscale Beverly Hills, a fine-dining Italian restaurant called La Scala was caught advertising an indoor dinner for December 31, leaving invitations in take-out bags that said, “Welcome back to the 20’s Prohibition”. The note emphasised that it would host people indoors, adding, “Please keep this discreet, but tell all your friends.”
Updated
Cuba has announced it would allow fewer flights from the United States and several other countries beginning 1 January, due to a surge in coronavirus cases since opening its airports in November.
Cubans living abroad and returning to visit, or returning from shopping trips, have spread the virus to family members and beyond by breaking quarantine, the government said.
Mexico, Panama, the Bahamas, Haiti and the Dominican Republic are also on the list. The government did not say how many flights per day would be allowed.
The health ministry reported 3,782 Covid-19 cases from 1 November to 23 December, of which it said 71.5% were visitors or their direct contacts.
The government said in a separate announcement that the famous Varadero beach resort had received 69,000 foreign tourists during the same period without an outbreak of the disease.
Updated
Updated
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said it had administered 2,127,143 first doses of Covid-19 vaccines in the country as of Monday morning and had distributed 11,445,175 doses.
The tally of vaccine doses distributed and the number of people who received first dose are for both Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, Covid-19 vaccines as of 9am ET on Monday, the agency said.
According to the tally posted on 26 December, the agency had administered 1,944,585 first vaccine doses and distributed 9,547,925 doses.
The agency also reported 19,055,869 cases of coronavirus, an increase of 145,959 cases from its previous count, and said the number of deaths had risen by 1,345 to 332,246.
The CDC reported its tally of cases of the respiratory illness known as Covid-19, caused by a new coronavirus, as of 4pm ET on Sunday versus its previous report a day earlier.
The figures do not necessarily reflect cases reported by individual states.
Updated
The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, said a Covid-19 vaccine would be available in the country within five days of being approved by federal health regulator Anvisa.
The president told journalists the health ministry would only buy a vaccine with a strong recommendation from Anvisa and it would be distributed equally among Brazil’s states.
Bolsonaro, who was infected with Covid-19 in July, has sought to downplay the severity of the virus and said he will not agree to be vaccinated.
Updated
Everton football club in England has released a statement after its game tonight with Manchester City was postponed after the latter returned a number of positive cases, in addition to the four already reported on Christmas Day.
Everton Football Club regret the postponement of tonight’s match against Manchester City – not only for the 2,000 fans who would have been attending, but for supporters on Merseyside and across the world.
Our players were prepared for the game, as were both the team staff and everyone at Goodison. Matchday is the most important date in our calendar. And this was a big one.
Whilst Everton will always have public safety uppermost, we will be requesting full disclosure of all the information that Manchester City provided to the Premier League so the Club can be clear on why this decision was taken.”
Updated
Brazil records further 431 deaths
Brazil recorded 20,548 additional confirmed cases of coronavirus in the past 24 hours and 431 deaths from Covid-19, the health ministry said on Monday.
Brazil has registered more than 7.5 million cases of the virus since the pandemic began, while the official death toll has risen to 191,570, according to ministry data.
Updated
Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust in London said: “We declared an internal incident at Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) on Sunday 27 December as a precautionary step due to the high number of Covid-positive patients we are seeing at the hospital.”
Hundreds of British tourists have fled the Swiss ski resort of Verbier after being told they had to quarantine.
More than 400 UK holidaymakers are believed to have been booked into accommodation before Christmas.
Some reports say about half of those have left, while others state only about a dozen remain, after Swiss authorities ordered all people who had arrived in the country by plane from Britain since 14 December to quarantine for 10 days.
Switzerland was one of more than 40 countries to ban flights from the UK over concerns about the new coronavirus variant, but introduced an exemption on 23 December to enable residents of both countries to return home.
Health minister Alain Berset said the exodus of tourists was “obviously a problem”, adding: “There was an order to quarantine that has not been respected,” according to Sky News.
But director of Verbier Tourism, Simon Wiget, told the broadcaster “it was not a night escape” and that people had used “the possibility” of following the exemption to be able to return to Britain.
It is understood the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) has not received any requests for help from British nationals in Verbier.
The FCDO website states: “On December 20, Switzerland announced a general entry ban for all travellers from the UK, and suspended all flights between the UK and Switzerland.
“On December 23, the Swiss Government introduced an exemption to allow passenger flights to/from the UK from December 24 for the purpose of enabling residents of UK and Switzerland to return in both directions.”
Hundreds of Britons headed to Swiss ski resorts, where many of the slopes remain open, unlike many of the country’s neighbours.
Updated
A summary of today's developments
-
Russia said its coronavirus death toll was more than three times higher than it had previously reported, making it the country with the third-largest number of fatalities.
- The UK reported its worst daily figure for new infections since the pandemic began. Health authorities said there were 41,385 new positive tests. The previous highest number was 39,237, reported on 23 December.
-
South Africa has tightened restrictions. The president Cyril Ramaphosa banned alcohol sales and extended a nationwide curfew, as infections passed the one million mark owing to a faster-spreading variant of the disease discovered in the country.
- The French health ministry reported 2,960 new infections; down from 8,822 on Sunday and from Saturday’s 3,093. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, planned to review the situation on Wednesday amid fears of a third lockdown.
- The new variant of the virus was detected in Finland. The country imposed travel restrictions earlier this month on passengers from the UK amid concerns over the new variant, which is thought to be more contagious than previous ones.
-
A former Japanese minister died of Covid-19, his party said. Yuichiro Hata, who was transport minister in 2012 and is the son of the former prime minister Tsutomu Hatawho, became the first incumbent lawmaker to succumb to the disease in a nation scrambling to shut its doors to foreign travellers.
- The Catalan regional government stopped short of threats to introduce more severe restrictions. That came despite 973 new cases and 26 deaths in the past 24 hours and a growing risk of a fresh outbreak.
-
Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said he is not opposed to private companies buying coronavirus vaccines to distribute to patients who want to pay for the doses.
Russia said its coronavirus death toll was more than three times higher than it had previously reported, making it the country with the third-largest number of fatalities.
For months, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has boasted about Russia’s low fatality rate from the virus, saying earlier this month that it had done a better job at managing the pandemic than western countries.
But since early in the pandemic, some Russian experts have said the government was playing down the country’s outbreak.
Updated
Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said he is not opposed to private companies buying coronavirus vaccines to distribute to patients who want to pay for the doses.
But he noted there is not much existing supply and warned companies not to try to buy vaccines already promised to the Mexican government.
“We are not opposed to commercialising the vaccine, to companies importing it and selling it to those who can pay,” López Obrador said.
“The catch is the supply of vaccines in the world markets, because there still isn’t enough production.
“We would be opposed if the ones we have under contract were to be given to a private company, that we would not permit and we would file a complaint,” he said.
Mexico’s medical safety commission must grant approval for any vaccine.
López Obrador has been criticised by some for centralising vaccine purchases and distribution, and for putting the effort – like many programmes in his administration – in the hands of the military.
The president has promised that vaccines will be free and available to everyone in Mexico, but so far the country has only received around 50,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine. To vaccinate 1.4 million healthcare workers — the first in line to get the shots — Mexico would need 2.8 million doses.
The government is placing hopes on three vaccines now in or entering phase 3 trials in Mexico; it announced Novavax Inc will be conducting part of its testing in Mexico. China’s CanSino and Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen Pharmaceutical business have also been conducting trials in Mexico.
Updated
A manager at a pork plant in the US who was among seven people fired for betting on how many workers would contract Covid-19 said the office pool was spontaneous fun and intended to boost morale.
Don Merschbrock, former night manager at the Tyson plant in Waterloo, Iowa, told The Associated Press: “We really want to clear our names.
“We actually worked very hard and took care of our team members well.”
Tyson announced the terminations of the Waterloo managers on 16 December, weeks after the betting allegation surfaced in wrongful death lawsuits filed by the families of four workers who died of Covid-19.
Tyson said an investigation led by former US Attorney General Eric Holder found sufficient evidence to terminate those involved, saying their actions violated the company’s values of respect and integrity.
Merschbrock said managers were given the “impossible task” of maintaining production while implementing virus safety precautions. They had been working 12-hour days, six or seven days per week, he said.
The office pool involved roughly $50 cash, which went to the winner who picked the correct percentage of workers testing positive for the virus, Merschbrock said.
He added that those involved didn’t believe the pool violated company policy and thought the plant’s positivity rate would be lower than the community rate due to their mitigation efforts.
“It was a group of exhausted supervisors that had worked so hard and so smart to solve many unsolvable problems,” Merschbrock said.
“It was simply something fun, kind of a morale boost for having put forth an incredible effort. There was never any malicious intent. It was never meant to disparage anyone.”
A Tyson spokesman declined to comment on Merschbrock’s comments.
Updated
Here is the full story on Covid-19 cases recorded in a single day rising above 40,000 for the first time in England.
The government said that, as of 9am on Monday, there had been a further 41,385 lab-confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK, while a further 357 people have died within 28 days of testing positive.
Dr Yvonne Doyle, medical director at Public Health England, said: “This very high level of infection is of growing concern at a time when our hospitals are at their most vulnerable, with new admissions rising in many regions.”
Updated
Summary
Here’s a summary of the most recent developments:
- The UK reported its worst daily figure for new infections since the pandemic began. Health authorities said there were 41,385 new positive tests. The previous highest number was 39,237, reported on 23 December.
-
South Africa has tightened restrictions. The president Cyril Ramaphosa banned alcohol sales and extended a nationwide curfew, as infections passed the one million mark owing to a faster-spreading variant of the disease discovered in the country.
- The French health ministry reported 2,960 new infections; down from 8,822 on Sunday and from Saturday’s 3,093. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, planned to review the situation on Wednesday amid fears of a third lockdown.
- The new variant of the virus was detected in Finland. The country imposed travel restrictions earlier this month on passengers from the UK amid concerns over the new variant, which is thought to be more contagious than previous ones.
-
A former Japanese minister died of Covid-19, his party said. Yuichiro Hata, who was transport minister in 2012 and is the son of the former prime minister Tsutomu Hatawho, became the first incumbent lawmaker to succumb to the disease in a nation scrambling to shut its doors to foreign travellers.
- The Catalan regional government stopped short of threats to introduce more severe restrictions. That came despite 973 new cases and 26 deaths in the past 24 hours and a growing risk of a fresh outbreak.
Updated
The nationwide curfew would move to 9pm-6am local time, Ramaphosa said. Public parks, beaches, dams, rivers and public swimming pools in hot spot areas will closed.
The president said several districts and municipalities had been added to the hotspot list. These areas could be subject to further restrictions, he said.
We now have to flatten the curve to protect the capacity of our healthcare system to enable it to respond effectively to this new wave of infections. These restrictions may be reviewed in the next few weeks if we see a sustained decline in infections.
Commercial centre Gauteng, tourist favourite Western Cape and coastal Eastern Cape are the worst-hit provinces and accounted for most of areas now considered hot spots. Areas in the northern Limpopo province were also added to the list.
Ramaphosa extends South African curfew
South Africa has tightened restrictions, banning alcohol sales and extending a nationwide curfew, as infections passed the one million mark owing to a faster-spreading variant of the disease discovered in the country.
The president Cyril Ramaphosa said in a televised address that cabinet had decided to move the country to level 3 restrictions from level 1. This would include the total banning of alcohol sales, widespread cancelling of events, and making the wearing of masks in public a legal requirement. Ramaphosa said:
We now have to flatten the curve to protect the capacity of our healthcare system to enable it to respond effectively to this new wave of infections.
Spain’s death toll surpassed 50,000, while the number of infections per 100,000 people fell for the first time in nearly three weeks, health ministry data showed.
A total of 24,462 new cases were logged since Thursday, bringing the total to nearly 1.88m. The death toll rose by 298 to 50,122, showed the first set of nationwide data released since Sunday’s start of vaccination against the virus.
The incidence of the virus measured over the past 14 days slipped to 246 cases per 100,000 people from 263 cases on Thursday after climbing steadily from a low of 189 cases on 10 December. The health emergency chief Fernando Simón told a news conference the figures showed a “stabilisation” in the level of contagion and a reduction in the number of deaths.
Still, he warned the data could be revised in the coming days, as the Christmas holidays likely caused some disruption to the statistics submitted by regional authorities.
The French health ministry reported 2,960 new coronavirus infections over the past 24 hours on Monday, down from 8,822 on Sunday and from Saturday’s 3,093. Case numbers generally dip on Mondays as there are fewer tests conducted on Sundays.
As we reported earlier, the president Emmanuel Macron and some senior cabinet ministers are to review the situation on Wednesday. The number of people in France who have died rose by 363 to 63,109; up from 175 on Sunday. The cumulative number of cases in France now totals 2,562,646, the fifth highest in the world.
Germany is facing a growing threat of attacks by right-wing militants who deny the existence of the pandemic and its health risks, a senior security official has said. Burkhard Freier, the head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in North Rhine-Westphalian state, told the Tagesspiegel newspaper:
The apocalyptic thinking of conspiracy myth supporters is mixing with right-wing extremism.
This means that coronavirus deniers could also opt for “terror as a consequence”, Freier said. In October, suspected coronavirus deniers attacked the Robert Koch Institute for disease control in Berlin with incendiary bottles and detonated an explosive device near the Leibniz Association, which connects nearly 100 independent research institutions in Germany.
The biggest militant threat in Germany still comes from right-wing perpetrators acting alone, such as attacker who went on a rampage in Hanau in February, killing nine people from immigrant families, himself and his mother, Freier said.
In the UK, the Conservative MP Robert Halfon, the chairman of the Commons education committee, has urged the government to do everything possible to keep schools in England open.
Shortly before local health authorities announced the greatest number of confirmed new cases in a day since the pandemic began, he said ministers should ramp up testing while making those in schools a priority for the new vaccines. Halfon told the BBC Radio 4 PM programme:
We have to be very careful about what we are doing to our young children. Of course we care about the coronavirus but we don’t want an epidemic of educational poverty at the same time.
What needs to happen is volunteers – perhaps the armed forces, perhaps mobile units outside schools or in school playgrounds – making sure pupils and teaching staff are tested and also rolling out vaccinations as a priority for all those in schools.
It must be our priority to keep our children in schools to keep our children learning.
Updated
Richard Breeze reels off a list of the ways his hospital will adapt in coming weeks to cope with the growing number of coronavirus patients flooding through their doors. Staff will be redeployed, wards will be emptied to make more space and critical care capacity – which has already gone from 10 beds to 28 – will move up to treating 30-odd extremely unwell people.
Speaking over the phone while on a ward round, with a whirl of hospital activity going on behind him, Breeze – who is the clinical director of critical care at Lewisham and Greenwich NHS trust – says they are reaching the levels of the first wave but this time around they have fewer staff.
It’s bad. And it’s getting worse. We are swamped and expanding our footprint but we are stretched thinly, having to make our unit bigger to fit people in.
We have fewer staff this wave than last, as more people are ill and have been tested for coronavirus and told to quarantine. We have less provision in terms of staff.
Today is exactly one year since China informed the World Health Organization that cases of “pneumonia with an unknown cause” had been reported in Wuhan, the WHO director general has told a press briefing.
Giving a brief history of the pandemic so far, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus hailed “the extraordinary cooperation between the private and public sector in this pandemic” which led to the fast circulation of diagnostic tests and, later, the development of several vaccine candidates in record time.
He went on:
There will be setbacks and new challenges in the year ahead. For example, new variants of Covid-19 and helping people who are tired of the pandemic continue to combat it.
You can read Tedros’s full comments in this Twitter thread:
"This week marks the one-year anniversary since WHO learned of cases of ‘pneumonia with unknown cause’ via a bulletin issued by the health authorities in Wuhan and ProMed.
— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) December 28, 2020
We immediately set up an incident management structure to follow this development"-@DrTedros #COVID19
Updated
Italy has reported 445 new coronavirus related deaths, and a further 8,585 infections, Reuters reports.
The country, which was the first in Europe to suffer a major outbreak of Covid-19, has so far reported an official total of 72,370 deaths from the disease, the highest toll in Europe and the fifth highest in the world.
It has also reported 2.056m cases to date.
Patients in hospital with Covid-19 stood at 23,932 on Monday, up by 361 from the day before, according to data from the health ministry. There were 167 new admissions to intensive care units, compared with 148 on Sunday.
The current number of intensive care patients decreased by 15 to 2,565, reflecting those who died or were discharged after recovery.
When Italy’s second wave of the epidemic was accelerating fast in the first half of November, hospital admissions were rising by about 1,000 per day, while intensive care occupancy was increasing by about 100 per day.
Updated
UK breaks new record for positive coronavirus tests
Health authorities in the UK have reported 41,385 new positive coronavirus tests, the highest number yet recorded in a single day since the start of the pandemic.
The previous highest number was 39,237, reported on 23 December. It comes as hospitals have been ordered to free up every possible bed for the growing number of Covid patients, amid fears of a high death toll from the disease in January.
Monday’s increase brings the total number of cases in the UK to 2,329,730.
Responding to the latest figure, Dr Yvonne Doyle, medical director at Public Health England (PHE), said:
This very high level of infection is of growing concern at a time when our hospitals are at their most vulnerable, with new admissions rising in many regions.
We have all made huge sacrifices this year but we must all continue to play our part in stopping the spread of the virus which is still replicating fast. The basics remain very important: wash your hands, wear a mask, keep your distance from others and abide by the restrictions in place.
Despite unprecedented levels of infection, there is hope on the horizon. We can tackle this virus by working together as the vaccine continues to reach the most vulnerable first, and then many more over the weeks and months ahead.”
Updated
Hullo! This is Damien Gayle jumping on to the blog to keep things ticking over while Kevin has well-earned break. You can reach me at damien.gayle@theguardian.com, or via Twitter DM to @damiengayle.
Turkey will receive the first shipment of Sinovac’s Covid-19 vaccine from China before Thursday this week, the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said on Monday, after the shipment was postponed for a couple of days.
Turkey has agreed to purchase 50m doses of Sinovac’s CoronaVac and had expected the first delivery of 3m doses on Monday. It will also procure 4.5m doses of the vaccine developed by BioNTech and Pfizer, with an option to get 30m more doses later, Reuters has reported.
Updated
Germany’s vaccination campaign has been overshadowed by a mishap in the north of the country, where eight workers in a care home received an overdose.
Vorpommern-Ruegen district authorities said the workers in Stralsund city received five times the recommended dose of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine on Sunday. Four went to hospital for observation after developing flu-like symptoms. The district chief Stefan Kerth said:
I deeply regret the incident. This individual case is due to individual errors. I hope that all those affected do not experience any serious side-effects.
The incident came after some German districts declined to use vaccines received over the weekend on suspicion that cold conditions were interrupted during delivery.
Vorpommern-Ruegen authorities pointed to previous statements by BioNTech saying larger doses were tested in the phase 1 study without serious consequences. There was no immediate comment from the pharmaceutical companies.
Updated
Hundreds more die in England and Wales
A further 333 people have died in England and Wales, taking the cumulative totals in the two constituent nations of the UK to 52,243, local authorities have said.
Public Health Wales reported 2,273 additional cases, taking the total number confirmed to 141,915.
The patients who died in England were aged between 38 and 100. All except 13, aged between 64 and 92, had known underlying health conditions. Their deaths occurred between 13 and 27 December. There were 12 other deaths reported with no positive Covid-19 test result, Public Health England said.
Updated
Catalan regional government keeps restrictions at current levels
Despite 973 new cases and 26 deaths in the past 24 hours and a growing risk of a fresh outbreak, the Catalan regional government has stopped short of threats to introduce more severe restrictions, including a 10pm curfew on New Year’s Eve.
Instead, it is to concentrate its efforts on track and trace. The current restrictions, which include a 10pm to 6am curfew, limited mobility at weekends and restricted opening hours for bars and restaurants, will remain in place at least until 11 January. The New Year’s Eve curfew will remain at 1am.
In the Spanish capital, Madrid, the government has added four more restricted movement zones where infection rates are above 400 per 100,000 inhabitants, bringing the total to 10. In the Balearic Islands, with cases rising to 621 per 100,000 inhabitants, new restrictions have been introduced, with bars forced to close at 6pm and all shops at 8pm.
Five cases of the new strain of the virus seen in the UK have been detected in the southern region of Andalucía, but no new restrictions have been brought in yet. Four cases of the virus were detected in Madrid on Sunday.
Data on the impact of the Christmas break is not yet available but health authorities are braced for further outbreaks as, in addition to new year, the Christmas season continues until Epiphany on 6 January, the day when children open their presents. To date, 49,824 people have died of Covid-19 in Spain, 24,739 of them in care homes.
Updated
The Brazilian vice-president, Hamilton Mourão, is taking the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine as part of an unproven treatment after contracting the virus, his office has said.
In a statement, Mourão’s office said the vice-president’s health was “good” and he was continuing to self-isolate at his official residence in Brasília after testing positive for the virus on Sunday.
The president, Jair Bolsonaro, has repeatedly downplayed the severity of Covid, while advocating for hydroxychloroquine as a treatment despite a lack of scientific evidence. He took the antimalarial himself when he caught the virus in July.
Bolsonaro has come under fire for his handling of the pandemic in Brazil, which has confirmed nearly 7.5m cases and lost more than 190,000 lives to Covid-19; behind only the US.
Asked by reporters on Saturday about rising criticism that Brazil’s vaccine rollout had been slow and poorly explained, Bolsonaro said: “Nobody pressures me for anything, I don’t give a damn about it.”
Updated
Russia has recorded 20.5% more deaths since the pandemic began in the country in April, data from the Rosstat state statistics service, tallied by Reuters, has shown.
The total figure, at 241,193 more deaths in April-November 2020 than during the same period the previous year, is significantly higher than the preliminary pandemic death toll of 55,265 so far, reported on a cumulative daily basis by the government’s coronavirus crisis centre. This figure includes deaths recorded in December.
Though death tolls fluctuate year-to-year, tallies of what are referred to as excess deaths can illustrate the impact of the pandemic by including cases where the virus was not a confirmed cause of death, as well as deaths from other causes that could be linked to the fact that national medical systems are overstretched.
Rosstat data, tallied by Reuters, showed that less than half the total number of such excess deaths – at 116,030 since the start of the pandemic in Russia in April – can be attributed directly to the pandemic.
This is still more than double the preliminary death toll figure from the government coronavirus crisis centre, which is overseen by the health ministry and the consumer safety watchdog Rospotrebnadzor.
Rosstat shared new data on Monday about the total number of deaths reported in Russia in November.
The data showed the number of deaths was 55.6% higher than in the same month last year, 219,872 more deaths in total. Of these, the statistics service said, 35,645 deaths were directly related to the pandemic.
Earlier this month, the service reported the number of deaths in October, which indicated deaths were up 30.3% on the same month the previous year.
Updated
The drug developer Novavax has begun a large late-stage study of its experimental vaccine in the US, it has said, after delaying the trial twice due to issues in scaling up the manufacturing process.
It will enrol up to 30,000 volunteers across about 115 sites in the US and Mexico, with two-thirds of them receiving the shot 21 days apart and the rest getting placebo, the company said.
Novavax lags behind other drugmakers in the global race for a vaccine, with shots from Pfizer and Moderna authorised for emergency use in the US.
But experts have said more than one vaccine would be needed to end the pandemic that has killed more than 1.7 million people globally.
Novavax has signed supply agreements with several countries and is set to provide 60m doses to the UK, where a late-stage study is under way. The interim data from the trial is expected in the first quarter of 2021.
It is also preparing to deliver 100m doses to the US by January after it was awarded $1.6bn for developing and testing its potential vaccine.
Novavax is also running a fully enrolled phase 2b trial in South Africa and a phase 1/2 continuation in the US and Australia. Efficacy data from the trials could be available early next year.
Updated
Belgium has begun to deploy the vaccine, inoculating residents at three retirement homes as the first step in a national campaign. The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is the first approved for use in the European Union and is produced in a plant in Puurs, in Belgian Flanders.
The country has suffered one of the worst per capita death rates in the world during the epidemic, and its nursing homes have been particularly hard hit.
The first doses of the vaccine that scientists hope will turn back the tide went to homes in Puurs, the French-speaking town of Mons and a Brussels suburb.
A much larger campaign will begin in early January but Belgium wanted symbolic first vaccinations to start alongside those in other EU states.
In Puurs, 96-year-old Jos Hermans received his injection under the gaze of news photographers and cameramen, shielded behind a glass screen.
In Woluwe-Lambert, part of the Brussels capital region, the regional health minister Alain Maron watched as 101-year-old Josepha Delmotte was vaccinated.
In the Notre-Dame de Stockel home, he said, 90% of residents had agreed to get the vaccine, the first of several candidate drugs to be approved.
After the holiday we’ll start to vaccinate all the residents in retirement homes in Brussels. Around 10,000 people by mid-January.
According to a survey by the Sciensano public health institute conducted between 3 and 11 December, 60% of Belgians are ready to be vaccinated.
The country is currently in partial economic and social lockdown as it battles a second wave of infections. A total of 19,200 people have died.
The national health spokesman Yves Van Laethem said virus deaths, hospitalisations and new infections had been falling since 25 December.
Updated
Russia will begin trials of an antibody treatment for next year, the head of the Moscow institute that developed the country’s first vaccine against the new disease, Sputnik V, has said.
Alexander Gintsburg, the director of the Gamaleya Institute, was cited by the RIA news agency as saying that he hoped trials for the new antibody-based drug would begin in the autumn of 2021.
I hope clinical trials will begin in autumn. We need to develop this drug using several technologies at the same time, which is something that is being done right now.
Russia has been asking patients to donate blood plasma, which is rich in antibodies, for research. Earlier this year, the US president, Donald Trump, was treated with an experimental antibody cocktail produced by drugmaker Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.
Updated
Lebanon has secured about 2m doses of Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine, which will cover 20% of the country’s nationals, the health minister has said. Hamad Hassan had told Reuters two weeks ago the country was about to sign a deal for supplies and that the first batch would arrive eight weeks later.
Lebanon’s hospitals are under pressure as infections surge. Doctors say ICU beds are filling up fast.
The medical system has also been battered by the country’s financial crisis, which caused supply shortages, and August’s port explosion, which damaged major Beirut hospitals.
The outbreak has killed nearly 1,400 people in Lebanon, which has an estimated population of 6 million including more than a million Syrian refugees.
Lebanon had also detected its first case of a new more transmissible variant of the coronavirus on a flight arriving from London, Hassan said last week.
Updated
Former Japanese minister dies from coronavirus
A 53-year-old former Japanese minister has died of Covid-19, his party has said, becoming the first incumbent lawmaker to succumb to the disease in a nation scrambling to shut its doors to foreign travellers.
Yuichiro Hata, who was transport minister in 2012 and is the son of the former prime minister Tsutomu Hatawho, died on Sunday, the Constitutional Democratic party of Japan said.
The country has started banning non-resident foreign nationals from entering following the detection of a new, highly infectious coronavirus variant linked to a rapid rise in infections in the UK.
The prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, urged calm ahead of the new year holidays, when hospitals tend to become understaffed, and instructed ministers to remain alert. Suga told a meeting of the government’s taskforce on coronavirus responses:
They say that no evidence is showing the vaccines that are already being administered overseas are not effective against this variant, and anti-infection steps for it are unchanged from those for the conventional virus.
The virus recognises no year-end or new year holidays. I ask each minister to raise the level of their sense of urgency and thoroughly carry out counter measures.
Japan is facing a third wave of infections, with daily cases hitting a record 3,881 on Saturday, according to public broadcaster NHK.
A Japanese business traveller at Tokyo’s Haneda airport, where people were sparse, said the government should do more. Arriving from India, where he works for a construction-related company, 56-year-old Seiji Oohira said:
Even though Japan is doing things to counter the variant, there are still reports of cases in Japan. So I think it’s better to tighten the restrictions even a little bit further.
Updated
Finland detects UK and South African variants
The new variant of the virus circulating in the UK has been detected in Finland in two people, while a separate variant spreading in South Africa has been detected in one other person, local health officials have said.
Finland imposed travel restrictions earlier this month on passengers from the UK amid concerns over the new variant, which is thought to be more contagious than previous ones.
Updated
Ukraine’s biggest ski resort, Bukovel in the Carpathian mountains, is fully booked until the end of year as Ukrainians have sped to it instead of other foreign resorts that have been shut due to coronavirus-linked restrictions across Europe.
Bukovel’s management said the resort had already been booked at 80% capacity through January. Bukovel, which sits 920 metres above sea level and covers five mountains in western Ukraine, attracts 2 million visitors each year. A tourist from Kyiv, Anton Luzhnyh, told Reuters he used to go to France to ski.
Why am I here? Because foreign ski resorts are closed. It is lockdown there. Maybe they will be reopened in February, then we will go there.
Hotels and ski slopes in neighbouring Poland will also remain closed at least from 28 December to 17 January.
Unlike some European countries, Ukraine did not tighten restrictions on the movement of its residents within the country over the Christmas and New Year season.
Instead, strict lockdown measures, which include the closure of schools, cafes, restaurants, gyms and entertainment centres and a ban on mass gatherings, will be in force from 8 to 24 January.
That has come as a relief to Ukraine’s tourism industry, where services are in high demand over the holiday season. For example, much of the population in the village of Polianytsia, the closest to the Bukovel resort, relies on tourism jobs.
Updated
The UK’s rising number of patients in hospital is “extremely worrying”, Dr Nick Scriven, the immediate past president of the Society for Acute Medicine, has said.
With the numbers approaching the peaks from April, systems will again be stretched to the limit. It is not just the case of using the Nightingale hospital as there are simply no staff for them to run as they were originally intended.
They could play a role perhaps if used as rehabilitation units for those recovering but, again, where do we find the specialist staff? The NHS simply does not have the capacity to spare anyone.
Using surge capacity, as NHS England suggests, will mean mobilising any usable bed area and stretching staff to look after patients there – often outside the normal comfort zone of staff, eg unwell medical patients on surgical wards or, even less safely, opening up mothballed areas and spreading staff more thinly than usually considered optimal or even safe.
This will, of course, mean cancelling elective care again. With ICU capacity there will be a need to utilise every ICU bed in a region and the nursing operating theatre areas like in the spring, again hitting elective surgical lists.
Updated
France to review Covid restrictions on Wednesday
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, and some senior cabinet ministers will review the Covid situation on Wednesday, the Elysée has said, amid another surge in cases that has spurred fears of a third lockdown in France.
The European Union rolled out a massive vaccination drive on Sunday to try to rein in a pandemic that has crippled economies worldwide and claimed more than 1.7 million lives worldwide. France reported 8,822 new infections on Sunday up sharply from Saturday’s 3,093.
Updated
Russia’s first big international shipment of its vaccine – 300,000 doses sent to Argentina last week – consisted only of the first dose of the two-shot vaccine, which is easier to make than the second dose, sources have told Reuters.
Unlike most others, which are given as two shots of the same product, the Russian Sputnik V vaccine relies on two doses delivered using different inactive viruses, known as vectors. The Gamaleya Institute that developed the vaccine says it is more than 91% effective after the two-dose course.
But some Russian manufacturers are finding the second dose, which is administered 21 days after the first, to be less stable, two sources said, revealing a new challenge for the country’s ambitious national inoculation programme.
The decision to send doses of the vaccine to Argentina caused an outcry at home, where the lifesaving drug is still mostly unavailable to the general public outside the capital Moscow.
Russia has not said exactly how many people have received it. The Gamaleya Institute said last week 650,000 doses had been released for Russia’s domestic vaccination programme so far.
Argentina is the first foreign country apart from Belarus to approve Sputnik V, a win for Moscow’s drive to secure international blessing for its vaccine. Argentinian officials have said they expect to start administering the vaccine in the days ahead.
However, a source close to the manufacturing process, and another in the government, said the shipment was made up only of surplus doses of the first component, which had been produced in greater quantities than the second.
Updated
We reported earlier that the UK’s cabinet office minister Michael Gove had indicated the government’s plan for a staggered return of England’s secondary school pupils after the Christmas holidays could yet change because of Covid transmission rates.
Now, the Labour opposition’s shadow education secretary, Kate Green, has accused ministers of “failing to be honest with parents and pupils”. She has said:
Parents, pupils and staff will be increasingly worried by the drip-feed of media reports saying scientists have advised the closure of schools in January, yet the prime minister has failed to be clear about the advice he has received.
Labour has been clear that keeping pupils learning should be a national priority, but a litany of government failures – from a lack of funding for safety measures through to the delayed and chaotic announcement of mass testing – is putting young people’s education at risk.
It is time for the prime minister to get a grip on the situation and show some leadership.
The country needs to hear from him today, alongside the chief medical officer and the chief scientific adviser, about the evidence on the spread of the virus, how he plans to minimise disruption to education and a clear strategy for schools and colleges that commands the support of parents, pupils and staff.
Here’s a little more detail on that news from Kazakhstan, where authorities have signed a preliminary agreement for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. The country’s deputy health minister, Marat Shoranov, has said:
Today we signed a non-disclosure agreement with Pfizer, and we are ready to deal with the supplies of these vaccines on the territory of Kazakhstan by issuing special permits.
Everything will depend on the production capacity and the company’s ability to supply the drug to our country.
Kazakhstan has started producing Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine, Russia’s RDIF sovereign wealth fund said last week. Since the start of the pandemic, the Central Asian country of more than 18 million people has reported 152,460 infections and 2,196 deaths.
Updated
The distribution of an initial 200m doses of the vaccine developed by Pfizer/BioNTech will be completed for the European Union by September, a spokesman for the European commission has said.
He added that talks were under way to agree the delivery of a further 100m doses, which are optional under the contract.
Updated
EU leaders back post-Brexit deal
EU ambassadors have unanimously approved the provisional application of the EU-UK trade and cooperation agreement, a spokesman for the German European council presidency has said.
Hello, I’m taking over from Molly Blackall and I’ll be with you for the next few hours. If you’d like to draw my attention to anything, your best bet’s probably Twitter, where I’m KevinJRawlinson.
Summary of recent events
I’m going to be handing over to my colleague Kevin Rawlinson shortly, but before I go, here is a brief summary of some of the key developments in the coronavirus pandemic so far this Monday:
- Donald Trump has signed a $900bn coronavirus relief package to help the US economy recover from the pandemic, after threatening to reject the bill last week.
- It is likely to be summer before herd immunity is reached through a coronavirus vaccine programme in the UK, respiratory disease expert Prof Calum Semple has said. Semple said between 70% and 80% of the population needed to be vaccinated before herd immunity could be achieved.
- GCSE and A-Level exams will “absolutely” go ahead next year in England, cabinet minister Michael Gove has said, despite other UK nations either reducing or cancelling exams. England is still planning a staggered return for secondary school pupils after the Christmas holidays, but this may change following the spread of a new variant of coronavirus in England.
- Indonesia is set to ban international visitors for two weeks, beginning on 1 January, amid a spread of new strains of coronavirus elsewhere in the world.
- China has jailed a citizen journalist who reported on the early spread of coronavirus in Wuhan, where it broke out. A Chinese court handed a four-year jail term to Zhang Zhan on grounds of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” her lawyer said. She is the first such person known to have been tried on this account, Reuters said.
- Ireland is likely to retain maximum Covid-19 restrictions for months until the most vulnerable population groups are vaccinated.
- The current Covid restrictions in Wales will need to be in place for at least three weeks to halt the exponential growth of the virus, Public Health Wales has said.
Updated
Kazakhstan has signed a preliminary agreement with Pfizer to potentially buy its vaccine against Covid-19, the Interfax news agency reported.
I’ll bring you more information as I get it...
The current Covid restrictions in Wales will need to be in place for at least three weeks to halt the exponential growth of the virus, Public Health Wales has said.
Dr Giri Shankar, incident director for the Covid outbreak response at PHW, said the alert level 4 would need to remain even longer than that to bring cases back to “reasonably manageable levels”.
Speaking on BBC Radio Wales, he said: “We do have to brace ourselves for an incredibly challenging couple of months in January and February.”
Shankar said the picture in Wales’ hospitals remained “incredibly concerning” with large numbers of patients suffering from Covid and other conditions – plus a “significant proportion” of staff off sick.
Ireland is likely to retain maximum Covid-19 restrictions for months until the most vulnerable population groups are vaccinated.
Leo Varadkar, the deputy prime minister, signalled on Monday that the current level five restrictions, the highest tier, may continue until spring.
“With the vaccine now being available, I think there would be a case of saying to the Irish people that we should keep these restrictions in place until such a time that we have protected our healthcare workers and most vulnerable,” he told RTE.
The restrictions are to be reviewed on 12 January but Varadkar said he did not envisage relaxations because infections levels were not expected to start falling until mid January. Ireland’s first vaccinations are to start on Tuesday in acute hospital settings, then expand to nursing homes on 4 January.
Northern Ireland last week started a six-week lockdown. The health minister, Robin Swann, urged people to stay home and shun new year’s eve parties which he said could be “super-spreader” events.
Ministers in both jurisdictions were to hold separate meetings on Monday to discuss the Brexit deal’s impact on trade across the Irish Sea.
China jails journalist over pandemic reporting
China has jailed a citizen journalist who reported on the spread of coronavirus in Wuhan, where it broke out.
A Chinese court handed a four-year jail term on Monday to Zhang Zhan on grounds of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” her lawyer said. She is the first such person known to have been tried on this account, Reuters said.
Her reports from Wuhan relayed first hand accounts of crowded hospitals and empty streets, painting a bleaker picture than the official narrative from the Chinese government.
“We will probably appeal,” the lawyer, Ren Quanniu, told Reuters. “Ms Zhang believes she is being persecuted for exercising her freedom of speech,” he had said before the trial.
Laurie Chen, news agency AFP’s China and Mongolia correspondent, said the case was a “litmus test for China’s freedom of speech.”
This case is really a litmus test for China’s freedom of speech. Zhang was one of the very few brave enough to enter Wuhan during lockdown, with a desire to expose cover-ups by local officials and find out the truth behind the state media spin, to the best of her limited ability.
— Laurie Chen (@lauriechenwords) December 28, 2020
Updated
Thailand recorded 3,065 foreign tourists in November, its second month of receiving long-stay visitors after a ban was imposed in April to reduce the spread of coronavirus.
The figure is a fraction of the 3.39 million arrivals in the same period last year. In October, there were 1,201 foreign visitors.
In the January-November period, the number of foreign visitors slumped by 81% from a year earlier.
Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove has not ruled out the whole of England being moved into Tier 4 restrictions.
“We review which tiers parts of the country should be in on the basis of scientific evidence.
“The Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC) will be making a recommendation to ministers, but I can’t pre-empt that because it obviously has to be a judgment based on the medical situation,” he said. “As you quite rightly point out, the NHS is under pressure and these are difficult months ahead.”
However, he said that the UK should be able to lift some coronavirus restrictions when the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is rolled out.
Gove said that the independent regulator had to assess the vaccine, but if it was approved there would be a “significant increase” in vaccine available. Britain is already rolling out a vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech.
“If we do get the authorization for that vaccine, and the rollout goes according to plan, then we will be able to progressively lift some of the restrictions, which have made life so difficult for so many,” he told Sky News.
Indonesia to ban foreign travellers for two weeks
Indonesia is set to ban international visitors for two weeks, beginning on 1 January.
Foreign minister Retno Marsudi announced the ban, citing concerns around the new strains of coronavirus. So far, the two most alarming strains are currently spreading in England and South Africa.
The new regulation applies to all foreign visitors with the exception of high-level government officials, Marsudi said.
The announcement comes days after Indonesia banned travellers from the Britain and tightened rules for those arriving from Europe and Australia to limit the spread of the new strain. Indonesia banned all tourists earlier this year, but some exemptions have been made for business travellers.
Updated
England is still planning a staggered return for secondary school pupils after the Christmas holidays, but this may change following the spread of a new variant of coronavirus in England, cabinet minister Michael Gove has said.
The current plan is for students taking GCSEs and A-levels this year, alongside the children of key workers, to return to school next week, with other secondary school students returning the week after. However, Gove suggested this could be changed.
“We do keep things under review, and we’ll be talking to head teachers and teachers in the next 24, 48 hours just to make sure that our plans... are really robust,” he told Times Radio.
Updated
The president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine in the UK has said hospitals were “wall to wall” with Covid-19 patients on Christmas Day.
“We see patients who are coming in who have Covid symptoms and then we have other people coming in with other symptoms who turn out to be Covid positive,” Dr Katherine Henderson told BBC Breakfast. “Between that, there’s a great deal of difficulty getting those patients through into the wards.”
Henderson said she thought that the NHS would be able to cope with the increased pressure, but that it would come at a “cost” - “the cost is not ...being able to keep non-Covid activities going”.
Henderson said that the health service was experiencing staff shortages, with many off sick or isolating, but insisted the NHS would “stretch staff” with measures including double shifts and bringing people to work during their annual leave.
She also said there would be a “big” delay before the impact of tier 4 restrictions would be felt in the NHS.
“All the people we are seeing at the moment were infected two weeks ago,” she said.
Henderson also implored people not to “take a chance” on New Year, saying “it’s incredibly important that we don’t get another surge”.
Updated
The president of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow has warned that there will be a “cost” for allowing household mixing on Christmas Day in Scotland.
“When there is increased mixing we know there is likely to be increased transmission, (Scotland’s) levels have never fallen to the kind of levels that we would have wished, so we are starting from a higher base,” Prof Jackie Taylor said on BBC Breakfast. “In addition, the new variant strain we are seeing does appear to be significantly more transmissible and that does give us great cause for concern, when we add that to the usual winter pressures we are really very anxious for the potential of a further huge surge of cases.”
However, Taylor did not condemn the Scottish government’s decision to relax the rules for a day during the festive season, saying that it was important to remember “how important it is for some people to have had the ability to be with family even for a short time”.
She also warned that non-urgent treatment in the NHS Scotland would have to delayed due to the pandemic.
“As healthcare professionals, we want to be able to treat everyone, we want to ensure everyone gets the best of care, but unless we get a grip of Covid and really get on top of this then we won’t be able to open up the other services again,” she said. “We have to focus on getting on top of the acute problems we have at the moment.”
Taylor urged people to avoid mixing with members of other households over new year, and to continue handwashing, social distancing and mask wearing.
Updated
The Japanese prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, has told his ministers to stay ready to implement further coronavirus restrictions, after the number of daily cases hit record highs in recent days.
“The virus recognises no year-end or new year holidays. I ask each minister to raise the level of their sense of urgency and thoroughly carry out counter measures,” Suga told a meeting of the government’s taskforce on coronavirus on Monday.
Updated
GCSE and A-Level exams will “absolutely” go ahead next year in England, UK cabinet minister Michael Gove has said.
Gove said the exams were “critically important in making sure students have a chance to show what they’ve learnt and what their skills are” and gave them “robust, independently verified qualifications” which were a “passport to a better future”.
This differs dramatically from the rest of the UK:
In Scotland, higher and advanced higher exams will not go ahead, and will be replaced with teacher assessed grades based on evidence of the student’s attainment.
In Wales, there will be no end of year exams for those taking GCSE, AS level and A level qualifications approved by Qualifications Wales and delivered by WJEC in summer 2021.
Northern Ireland is set to reduce their exams, but not cancel them entirely.
Updated
It is likely to be summer before herd immunity is reached through a coronavirus vaccine programme in the UK, respiratory disease expert Prof Calum Semple has said.
Semple said between 70% and 80% of the population needed to be vaccinated before herd immunity could be achieved.
Speaking to BBC Breakfast, Prof Semple said: “Obviously there is an urgency about this and we know that it is difficult to vaccinate lots of people at the same time - we’ve got a population of just under 70 million people and we’re going to move through them in an orderly fashion vaccinating people most at risk.”
“The people that have been vaccinated will be protected within a matter of weeks and that’s very important,” he added. “On an individual basis these vaccines are so good that they will protect individuals, so we don’t have to wait for this nonsense about herd immunity developing through natural infection, we can start to protect the individuals.
“To get the wider community herd immunity from vaccination rather than through natural infection will take probably 70% to 80% of the population to be vaccinated, and that, I’m afraid, is going to take us right into the summer I expect.”
Updated
Trump signs $900bn coronavirus relief package
Donald Trump has signed a $900bn coronavirus relief package to help the US economy recover from the pandemic, after threatening to reject the bill last week.
The aid package was agreed by Democrats and Republicans in Congress late last Sunday, after months of negotiations. But Trump unexpectedly demanded that the package, which had already been passed by the House and Senate and was believed to have Trump’s support, be revised to include larger relief checks and scaled-back spending on foreign aid.
What does the bill offer?
The aid package includes $286bn in direct economic relief, with more than half going on payments of $600 to individuals.
The US government will also restart pandemic unemployment benefits at $300 a week, which will last until 14 March. However, this is a drop in the amount offered from the $600 payments that expired in July.
It includes funding for businesses, the arts, and foreign aid.
You can read more about what it offers here:
Updated
Hello everyone, I’m Molly Blackall. I’ll be bringing you the latest updates in the coronavirus pandemic in the UK and around the world over the next few hours.
If you spot something you think we should be reporting on in this blog, you can drop me a message on Twitter. Tips and pointers are always much appreciated, so thanks in advance!
