We are closing this live blog now but you can stay up to date on all the breaking news with our new blog below:
Updated
In New Zealand, the minister of Covid-19 response Chris Hipkins said there are no new cases of the virus in the community today, and this “does provide reassurance” for the upcoming long weekend and Waitangi next week.
“There is no reason people’s travel plans should change,” the minister said.
This week there have been three positive tests of Covid-19 in the community, all of the South African variant and thought to have been contracted in managed isolation at the Pullman Hotel in Auckland.
More detail on the Novavax announcement can be found in the company’s statement here.
The Guardian’s reportage is here.
A little more on Germany’s decision to not recommend the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine for over-65s. AFP reports.
Germany’s vaccine commission said Thursday it could not recommend the use of AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine for older people, the latest twist in a row over the jab that has put Britain and the EU on a collision course.
The panel of scientific experts, called STIKO, said the vaccine should only be given to people aged 18 to 65 years old as “there is currently insufficient data to assess the efficacy of the vaccine for persons aged 65 years and older”.
AstraZeneca and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson immediately defended the jabs, which have already been widely used in Britain on older people.
A spokesperson for the British-Swedish company said the latest clinical trial data for its vaccine, developed with Oxford University, “support efficacy in the over 65 years age group”.
Johnson told reporters the UK’s own regulator had established “that they think the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is very good and efficacious, gives a high degree of protection”.
AstraZeneca’s vaccine has not been granted approval yet for general use in the European Union.
But the bloc’s medicines regulator EMA is poised to authorise it on Friday.
The latest doubt over the vaccine came as AstraZeneca was already locked in an increasingly bitter spat with the EU over delivery problems.
Citing issues with its European factories, the company has informed the EU that it could only supply a quarter of the doses it had promised for the first quarter of 2021.
The huge delivery delay adds a further stumbling block to the EU’s already sluggish rollout of the vaccine compared to Britain or the United States.
With tempers flaring, Chancellor Angela Merkel called a high-level meeting for February 1 with her cabinet, Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers and leaders of Germany’s 16 states.
- ‘Best efforts’ -
Countries around the world are scrambling to get hold of the life-saving jabs to inoculate their populations against the virus that has claimed more than 2.1 million lives and infected more than 100 million people.
The emergence of more contagious variants first seen in Britain, South Africa and Brazil is putting further pressure on governments to speed up their immunisation programmes.
The EU-AstraZeneca dispute escalated Tuesday when the company’s chief executive Pascal Soriot said in an interview that it was prioritising supplies to Britain, which signed its contract three months before Brussels.
He argued that his company was only required to make a “best effort” to supply the bloc.
The European Commission erupted in fury, demanding on Wednesday that AstraZeneca make up for the delays by supplying doses from its UK factories.
But Britain insists it must receive all of the vaccines it ordered - and there are simply not enough to go round.
The EU said it would now require companies to declare any export of vaccines made in the bloc, a sign of growing distrust in AstraZeneca.
“The EU needs to take robust action to secure its supply of vaccines and demonstrate concretely that the protection of its citizens remains our absolute priority,” said European Council President Charles Michel.
- ‘Limited information’ -
Germany’s STIKO did not detail the data from clinical trials on the vaccine on older people.
However, prominent German media outlets Handelsblatt economic newspaper and Bild had reported that the efficacy on over-65s was below 10 percent - claims rejected by Germany’s health ministry and AstraZeneca.
A ministry spokesman said Wednesday: “A false claim does not become true just because it is repeated.”
He said however that AstraZeneca trials involved fewer older people than other manufacturers.
Around eight percent of the volunteers in AstraZeneca’s studies were around 56 and 69 years old and three to four percent were above 70, according to the ministry.
But “that the efficacy is only eight percent is incomprehensible and in our view, wrong,” the spokesman added.
In comparison, 41 percent of participants in BioNTech-Pfizer’s vaccine trials have been aged 56-85.
Britain’s MHRA regulator said in its consideration of the vaccine that “there is limited information available on efficacy in participants aged 65 or over, although there is nothing to suggest lack of protection”.
Mary Ramsay, head of immunisations at government agency Public Health England, also backed the AstraZeneca vaccine for older recipients.
“There were too few cases in older people in the AstraZeneca trials to observe precise levels of protection in this group, but data on immune responses were very reassuring.
“The risk of severe disease and death increase exponentially with age - the priority is to vaccinate as many vulnerable people as possible with either vaccine, to protect more people and save more lives.”
Good morning/afternoon/evening, wherever these words might find you. This is Ben Doherty in an uncharacteristically wet Sydney taking over our rolling coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. My thanks to my colleagues for their earlier stewardship.
To begin, a summary of the most recent developments.
-
Novavax Inc said on Thursday its coronavirus vaccine was 89.3% effective in preventing Covid-19 in a trial conducted in the United Kingdom, and was nearly as effective in protecting against the more highly contagious variant first discovered in the UK, according to a preliminary analysis.
A mid-stage trial of the vaccine in South Africa, where a troubling new variant of the virus is common, showed 60% effectiveness among people who did not have HIV. - France’s health ministry has announced supplies of the Moderna vaccine expected during February will be reduced by 25%. Elsewhere, a shortage of vaccines has forced Paris and two other regions – that together account for a third of the French population – to postpone giving out some first doses, a source familiar with the discussion and health officials said on Thursday. The public health agency for Paris and the surrounding region, an area of 12.1 million people, told regional hospitals on a conference call on Wednesday that from 2 February, all deliveries of first doses of the Covid-19 vaccine to medical establishments would be suspended, the source said.
- French health authorities reported 23,770 new coronavirus infections over the previous 24 hours on Thursday, down from 26,916 on Wednesday. The country’s Covid-19 death toll rose by 344 to 74,800, the world’s seventh-highest, after an increase of 350 on Wednesday.
- Brazil president, Jair Bolsonaro, who says he won’t take any Covid vaccine, has vowed to quickly inoculate all Brazilians, tempering his tone after his support fell due to a patchy vaccine rollout and a brutal second wave of infections, Reuters reports.
- The coronavirus crisis cost the global tourism sector $1.3tn in lost revenue in 2020 as the number of people travelling plunged, the United Nations has said, calling it “the worst year in tourism history”.
- A man has died of his wounds in Lebanon after clashes last night between security forces and protesters angered by the combined impact of a severe economic crisis and a coronavirus lockdown. There were fresh protests today.
- Denmark will extend its current coronavirus restrictions by three weeks to curb the spread of a more contagious coronavirus variant first registered in the UK, its prime minister said on Thursday.
- The US has detected its first cases of a coronavirus variant first detected in South Africa, health officials in South Carolina said.
- German authorities have blocked the use of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine on people aged over 65, the Financial Times has reported.
- Spain has insisted it supported the European Union’s handling of a shortfall in Covid-19 vaccines after a leaked document suggested the health ministry was blaming Brussels, Reuters reports.
Russia delivered the first batch of its Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine to Bolivia on Thursday along with a larger shipment for neighbouring Argentina, as Moscow looks to play a key role in the region’s vaccine rollout despite delivery delays.
A plane carrying 240,000 doses of the vaccine arrived in Argentina, of which 20,000 doses went on to Bolivia, where President Luis Arce was waiting to greet the delivery in La Paz. Bolivia will be the second Latin American country to roll out the Russian vaccine, Reuters reports.
“Starting tomorrow, the distribution begins. There are 20,000 vaccines and two doses for each person,” presidential spokesman Jorge Richter told reporters.
“They will be for the sectors that are most exposed and at the front line of contagion.”
A vaccine from Novavax, of which the UK has secured 60m doses, has been shown to be 89% effective in preventing Covid-19.
Prof Peter Openshaw, from Imperial College London, said the findings showed the jab “gives high levels of protection”.
However, he said the 60% finding for the South African variant was a “concern” due to suggestions that prior infection with earlier variants of Covid-19 may not completely protect against subsequent infection by this variant.
Updated
Setback turned to success for six people stranded on a snowy roadway in the US when a Covid-19 vaccine team returning from a clinic with unused doses gave them roadside jabs.
Stuck in a snowstorm slamming Highway 199 in southwestern Oregon, the healthcare team that ran a mass vaccination event at a local high school on Tuesday quickly realized that six leftover inoculations would spoil before they could get to the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, to administer them as planned, according to the Josephine County Public Health Facebook page.
Instead, the JCPH staff and volunteers walked car to car, offering stranded motorists a chance to get vaccinated.
One of the recipients was a Josephine county sheriff’s office employee who had arrived too late for the school clinic, but ended up in the team’s roadside care amid the snowstorm.
“It was one of the coolest operations,” said JCPH director Mike Weber, according to the team’s Facebook page.
Updated
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, commenting on the Novavax vaccine showing 89% efficacy in UK trials, said: “Fantastic news about the Novavax vaccine.
“This is one more step towards getting Britain vaccinated. Thank you to everyone involved in this national effort.”
The UK’s vaccines minister, Nadhim Zahawi, said: “Having taken part in Novavax’s vaccine trial myself, I am particularly thrilled to see such positive results. I want to thank the thousands of trial volunteers, without whom these results would not have been possible.
It will now be for the regulator to do its crucial work in assessing the efficacy and safety of this vaccine, but if approved it will be a further boost to our vaccination programme.”
Updated
Kate Bingham, former chair of the UK government’s vaccine taskforce, said the results from Novavax’s coronavirus vaccine trials were “fantastic”.
Bingham told BBC News: “It’s a fantastic result because it shows that the Novavax vaccine is effective against the UK variant as well as the South African variant and has shown phenomenal efficacy, and it’s made in Teeside.
“So not only have we trialled the vaccine to show it is safe and effective, but we are also making it too.
“So we will be able to save lives in the UK.”
Updated
South Africa’s mid-stage trial of US-based biotech company Novavax Inc’s Covid-19 vaccine has shown it to be 60% effective for non-HIV individuals, the principal investigator of the study said.
Shabir Madhi, a professor of vaccinology at the University of the Witwatersrand, who is leading the clinical study for the Novavax Covid-19 vaccine in South Africa, said the results were good and showed the vaccine is highly effective toward immunisation against the coronavirus.
The results are far superior than any other vaccine against the new variant,” Madhi said.
Updated
John Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, said the Novavax UK data is essentially the same as results for the vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.
“It’s not statistically different. The vaccine basically works well in the predominant strain circulating in the UK, which means it’s likely to be equally effective in the United States,” he said.
Dr Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said the results were in line with hopes and he was concerned that people would focus too much on the weaker effectiveness shown in South Africa.
“We’ve gotten spoiled because we’ve seen the Moderna and Pfizer numbers. I know people are going to be alarmed, but 60% efficacy against the new variant is acceptable,” he said, noting that the US Food and Drug Administration initially said it would approve a vaccine that was at least 50% effective.
The South African variant has been shown to evade antibody protection in lab studies by Moderna and Pfizer and BioNTech.
“The 60% reduced risk against Covid-19 illness in vaccinated individuals in South Africans underscores the value of this vaccine to prevent illness from the highly worrisome variant currently circulating in South Africa, and which is spreading globally,” said Profr Shabir Madhi, lead investigator of the Novavax vaccine trial in South Africa.
Novavax said it started making new versions of its vaccine to protect against emerging virus variants in early January and expects to select ideal candidates for a booster in the coming days. The company said it plans to initiate clinical testing of these new vaccines in the second quarter of this year.
Novavax is also running a 30,000-person trial in the US and Mexico that began in December, after at least two delays it said were due to manufacturing scaling issues that prevented clearance by the FDA.
The company has received $1.6bn from the US government in funding for the vaccine trial and for 100m doses.
Updated
Researchers in southern Brazil said they have discovered patients infected with two different strains of the new coronavirus simultaneously, reflecting concerns about the growing number of variants in the country.
The researchers said their study would be the first in the world to confirm co-infection with two strains of the coronavirus. The study has yet to be published in a scientific journal and has not been peer reviewed.
The patients, both in their 30s, were infected in late November with the P.2 variant of coronavirus identified in Rio, also known as the B.1.1.28 lineage, and simultaneously tested positive for a second variant of the virus.
Their symptoms were reportedly mild, with a dry cough in one case and coughing, sore throat and headache in the second. They did not require hospitalisation.
The cases underscore how many variants could already be circulating in Brazil and raise concerns among scientists that the coexistence of two strains in the same body could speed up mutations of new variants of coronavirus.
The study’s lead researcher, Fernando Spilki, a virologist at Feevale University in Rio Grande do Sul state, said:
These co-infections can generate combinations and generate new variants even more quickly than has been happening.”
“It would be another evolutionary pathway for the virus,” Spilki added.
Updated
Brazilian health regulator Anvisa said data on the Covid-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca Plc and Oxford University so far shows that it is safe for elderly patients, after Germany recommended it be given only to those aged under 65.
Anvisa added in a statement, however, that it is not possible to determine the efficacy of the vaccine, called Covidshield, for a population over the age of 65 because the participation of elderly people in the studies conducted so far was not statistically relevant.
Updated
Turkey will receive the remaining portion of a second consignment of 10m doses of the Covid-19 vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech by Friday morning, health minister Fahrettin Koca said, Reuters reports.
Turkey received 6.5m doses of the second consignment on Monday, following an initial consignment of 3m doses nearly a month ago. It has so far vaccinated nearly 1.7 million people, mostly health workers and elderly people, according to health ministry data.
Koca said on Twitter:
The first portion of the 10 million dose second consignment of inactive vaccine had arrived at the weekend. As of this morning (Friday), the second portion will have arrived in our country. Vaccines consignments will continue in accordance with the procurement programme.”
Updated
The UK’s prime minister has given his reaction to the Novavax vaccine trial.
Good news that the @Novavax vaccine has proved effective in UK trials. Thank you to all the volunteers who made these results possible.
— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) January 28, 2021
Our medicines regulator will now assess the vaccine, which will be made in Teesside. If approved, we have 60m doses on order.
Brazil records further 1,386 deaths
Brazil has had 61,811 new confirmed cases of coronavirus reported in the past 24 hours, and 1,386 deaths, the health ministry said on Thursday.
The South American country has now registered 9,058,687 cases since the pandemic began, while the official death toll has risen to 221,547, according to ministry data.
Updated
The UK’s health secretary, Matt Hancock, said the NHS stands ready to roll out the Novavax vaccine if it is approved by the medicines regulator.
Hancock said: “This is positive news and, if approved by the medicines regulator, the Novavax vaccine will be a significant boost to our vaccination programme and another weapon in our arsenal to beat this awful virus.
“I’m proud the UK is at the forefront of another medical breakthrough and I want to thank the brilliant scientists and researchers, as well as the tens of thousands of selfless volunteers who took park in clinical trials.
The NHS stands ready to roll this vaccine out as quickly as possible to those most at risk if it is authorised.”
Updated
Novavax Inc said its coronavirus vaccine was 89.3% effective in preventing Covid-19 in a trial conducted in the UK, and was nearly as effective in protecting against the more highly contagious variant first discovered in the UK, according to a preliminary analysis.
Novavax said the findings from the trial, which enrolled 15,000 people aged 18 to 84, are expected to be used to apply for regulatory review in Britain, the European Union and other countries. Some 27% of people in the trial were over 65, Reuters reports.
The study took place as the more easily transmissible UK variant was circulating, and the preliminary analysis suggests the vaccine was 85.6% effective against this particular mutation, the US company announced in a news release. It did not provide the study data.
In August, the UK added a further 60m doses of Novavax’s vaccine to its stockpile.
Updated
A summary of today's developments
- France’s health ministry has announced supplies of the Moderna vaccine expected during February will be reduced by 25%, Reuters reports. Elsewhere, a shortage of vaccines has forced Paris and two other regions – that together account for a third of the French population – to postpone giving out some first doses, a source familiar with the discussion and health officials said on Thursday. The public health agency for Paris and the surrounding region, an area of 12.1 million people, told regional hospitals on a conference call on Wednesday that from 2 February, all deliveries of first doses of the Covid-19 vaccine to medical establishments would be suspended, the source said.
- French health authorities reported 23,770 new coronavirus infections over the previous 24 hours on Thursday, down from 26,916 on Wednesday. The country’s Covid-19 death toll rose by 344 to 74,800, the world’s seventh-highest, after an increase of 350 on Wednesday.
- Brazil president, Jair Bolsonaro, who says he won’t take any Covid vaccine, has vowed to quickly inoculate all Brazilians, tempering his tone after his support fell due to a patchy vaccine rollout and a brutal second wave of infections, Reuters reports.
- The coronavirus crisis cost the global tourism sector $1.3tn in lost revenue in 2020 as the number of people travelling plunged, the UN has said, calling it “the worst year in tourism history”, AFP reports.
- A man has died of his wounds in Lebanon after clashes last night between security forces and protesters angered by the combined impact of a severe economic crisis and a coronavirus lockdown, AFP reports. There were fresh protests today.
- Denmark will extend its current coronavirus restrictions by three weeks to curb the spread of a more contagious coronavirus variant first registered in the UK, its prime minister said on Thursday.
- The US has detected its first cases of a coronavirus variant first detected in South Africa, health officials in South Carolina said – Reuters reports.
- German authorities have blocked the use of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine on people aged over 65, the Financial Times has reported.
- Spain has insisted it supported the European Union’s handling of a shortfall in Covid-19 vaccines after a leaked document suggested the health ministry was blaming Brussels, Reuters reports.
Spain has insisted it supported the European Union’s handling of a shortfall in Covid-19 vaccines after a leaked document suggested the health ministry was blaming Brussels, Reuters reports.
In a draft agenda for a summit of regional health chiefs after cases ballooned due to holiday gatherings, the central government was critical of the EU, El Mundo reported earlier in the day, quoting the leaked document.
“It is the European Union that negotiates and signs the contracts, that is in charge of tracking them and making sure they are correctly fulfilled,” it quoted the government as saying in the document.
However, Foreign Minister Arancha Gonzalez Laya later told reporters: “Spain fully trusts that the European Commission will know how to defend the interests of all member states, in terms of both vaccine acquisition and handling of contracts with pharmaceutical (companies).”
Millions of doses of coronavirus vaccine could be blocked from entering Britain from the EU within days after Brussels said it had to respond to shortages emerging in member states.
France hit by vaccine supply problems
France’s health ministry has announced supplies of the Moderna vaccine expected during February will be reduced by 25%, Reuters reports.
Elsewhere, a shortage of vaccines has forced Paris and two other regions – that together account for a third of the French population – to postpone giving out some first doses, a source familiar with the discussion and health officials said on Thursday.
The public health agency for Paris and the surrounding region, an area of 12.1 million people, told regional hospitals on a conference call on Wednesday that from 2 February, all deliveries of first doses of the Covid-19 vaccine to medical establishments would be suspended, the source said.
The agency said injections of the second, follow-up dose would continue, according to the source. There was no indication during the call when first doses would resume.
The agency cited as the reason the “extremely tight vaccine supplies and the need to guarantee the second injection for people already vaccinated”, the source said.
The Paris region public health agency, in a statement sent to Reuters, said it was aiming to give people injections of first doses next week, but this was subject to changes in the volumes of vaccine deliveries that were initially promised by the manufacturers.
The French health ministry said that nationwide 600,000 existing appointments already made for first doses in the first half of February would be honoured. But it said new appointments for first doses would only be available starting from 15 February.
It said the reason was a reduction in supplies of vaccines from manufacturers.
It emerged last week that the UK is among several countries facing delays in delivery of the Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine due to upgrades in its production capacity.
The US pharmaceutical firm is increasing production at its plant in Puurs, Belgium, in an effort to produce more doses than originally planned for 2021, temporarily reducing deliveries to all European countries.
Updated
Canadian provinces protested on Thursday about a likely shortfall in deliveries of Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine but the federal government insisted the US drugmaker would live up to its commitments.
The exchanges underscore growing tensions over the slow rollout of Canada’s vaccination program caused in part by Pfizer cutting its promised deliveries for January and February, Reuters reports.
Ottawa, which had initially said Pfizer would deliver 4m doses by the end of March, told the provinces on Thursday it would now be 3.5m doses.
The federal government is failing Canadians. This is a grim situation that seems to be getting worse every week,” said Tyler Shandro, Alberta’s health minister.
Ontario premier, Doug Ford, said Pfizer “has let us down tremendously” and called for “a loud voice to make sure we get our fair share of vaccines”.
Updated
France records nearly 24,000 more Covid-19 cases
French health authorities reported 23,770 new coronavirus infections over the previous 24 hours on Thursday, down from 26,916 on Wednesday.
The French health minister, Olivier Véran, said earlier new variants of the coronavirus were circulating more widely every week and that the tighter curfew put in place almost two weeks ago had not managed to curb the spread of the virus.
France’s cumulative total of cases now stands at 3,130,629 – the sixth-highest in the world.
The country’s Covid-19 death toll rose by 344 to 74,800, the world’s seventh-highest, after an increase of 350 on Wednesday.
Updated
The Brazilian agency that provides healthcare for Indigenous communities has sent a team to the Yanomami people’s territory in the remote Amazon rainforest to investigate a report that nine children died with Covid-19 symptoms, officials said.
Júnior Hekurari Yanomami, a member of the Indigenous group who is president of the local health council, alerted the Sesai agency this week that five children had died in one village and four children in another, all with symptoms of the disease that can be caused by the coronavirus.
Hekurari told the Associated Press that the nine people died in January and had not been tested for the coronavirus.
He also said that neither of the two villages near the border with Venezuela – Kataroa and Waphuta – had received visits from government health workers in more than 60 days, nor had he heard of any Sesai team headed there as of Thursday afternoon.
Since the onset of the pandemic, there has been widespread concern that Yanomami communal living practices, their distance from modern health facilities and the influx of illegal gold miners into their lands could render them more vulnerable to the virus.
So far, the worst of those fears haven’t materialised, with Sesai data saying that of the 541 indigenous people who have died in Brazil from Covid -19, 10 were Yanomami.
Sesai, which is part of Brazil’s health ministry, said it investigated all suspected Covid-19 deaths in Indigenous lands.
Updated
The US has detected its first cases of a coronavirus variant first detected in South Africa, health officials in South Carolina said – Reuters reports.
Viruses mutate frequently, and several mutated viruses have been identified.
The presence of the South African variant in the US is especially concerning because several laboratory studies have shown it reduces vaccine effectiveness.
Another concern is that the South African variant could require larger doses of antibody for treatment.
“The thing that’s troublesome now that we really need to keep our eye on are these variants,” Anthony Fauci, the leading US infectious disease specialist, said in an interview on MSNBC.
The one that is of greater concern and that really could be problematic is the mutant that is now dominant in South Africa.”
Updated
Morocco’s King Mohammed VI received a coronavirus jab to officially kick off his country’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign, which initially will target healthcare workers, security forces and people over the age of 75, Associated Press reports.
The monarch took the shot at the royal palace in the city of Fez, Morocco’s official MAP news agency reported.
The king, who normally appears in public wearing a robe, was pictured in a dark T-shirt and with a surgical mask on his face as he got jabbed in the arm.
Morocco has one of Africa’s most advanced vaccination programs, though the continent remains well behind richer countries such as the US or Britain in inoculating its citizens against the still-spreading virus.
The North African kingdom received its first shipments of vaccine doses in recent days from China’s Sinopharm and Anglo-Swedish AstraZeneca.
The government did not disclose how many doses it had received, but the royal palace said the country has sufficient quantities to start inoculations “in the best conditions”.
Vaccinations will be free of charge, and the health ministry said patients would receive two doses over 21 days.
Morocco says it will get 66m vaccine doses, covering about 80% of its 35-million population.
Updated
The US economy contracted at its deepest pace since the second world war last year as the Covid-19 pandemic depressed consumer spending and business investment, pushing millions of Americans out of work and into poverty, Reuters reports.
Though a recovery is underway, momentum slowed significantly as the year wound down amid a resurgence in coronavirus infections and exhaustion of nearly $3tn (£2.1tn) in relief money from the government. The moderation is likely to persist at least through the first three months of 2021.
The economy’s prospects hinge on the distribution of vaccines to fight the virus. President Joe Biden has unveiled a recovery plan worth $1.9tn, but some lawmakers have balked at the price tag soon after the government provided nearly $900bn in additional stimulus in late December.
White House economic advisor Brian Deese said the report from the Commerce Department on Thursday underscored the urgency for Congress to pass Biden’s plan, warning that the cost of doing nothing was too high. “Without swift action, we risk a continued economic crisis that will make it harder for Americans to return to work and get back on their feet,” said Deese.
Gross domestic product decreased 3.5% in 2020, the biggest drop since 1946. That followed 2.2% growth in 2019 and was the first annual decline in GDP since the 2007-09 Great Recession.
Updated
Brazil president Jair Bolsonaro vows quick rollout of vaccine after criticism
Brazil president, Jair Bolsonaro, who says he won’t take any Covid vaccine, has vowed to quickly inoculate all Brazilians, tempering his tone after his support fell due to a patchy vaccine rollout and a brutal second wave of infections, Reuters reports.
Bolsonaro has been widely criticised for his handling of the pandemic. Critics say the slow vaccine rollout is the latest in a long line of fumblings that have blighted Brazil with the second-highest coronavirus death toll in the world after the United States. But today, the president sought to defend his government’s vaccine procurement.
“Europe and some countries in South America don’t have vaccines. And we know that the demand is high. We have signed deals, contracts, from last September, with various companies, and the vaccines are starting to arrive,” he said at an event. “They will arrive and will vaccinate the whole population in a short space of time.”
Bolsonaro’s comments reflect a change of tone in recent weeks, as many have been angered by the president’s failure to quickly vaccinate Brazil’s 210 million people. His personal pledge not to take any shot has stoked growing anti-vaccine sentiment.
The end of a Covid-19 welfare scheme, and a sharp rise in new infections, have also dented his popularity. Brazil is predominantly reliant on a Chinese shot, developed by Sinovac Biotech, but is awaiting a shipment of active ingredient from China needed to domestically producer an AstraZeneca vaccine. In the meantime, the country has received 2m ready-to-use AstraZeneca shots until the active ingredient arrives.
Updated
Denmark will extend its current coronavirus restrictions by three weeks to curb the spread of a more contagious coronavirus variant first registered in the UK, its prime minister said on Thursday.
The Nordic country has seen a decline in new coronavirus infections and hospitalisations this month, after a drastic increase in December. However, the number of people infected with the B117 variant, which has spread from Britain across Europe, is still on the rise in Denmark.
“The new mutation is spreading even with the current widespread restrictions,” the prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said.
The new British variant last week accounted for 13.5% of total new cases, up from 2% a month ago, official data showed. Authorities expect the new variant to be dominating in Denmark in February.
Current restrictions in Denmark, now in effect until 28 February, include a five-person limit on public gatherings and the closure of bars, restaurants, schools and shops. Grocery stores and pharmacies remain open. The government has also advised against any travel abroad and restricted incoming travel – curbs that were also extended today.
Updated
Algeria will receive its first shipment of Russia’s Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine tomorrow and plans to start its vaccination campaign the following day, the communication minister, Ammar Belhimer, said.
The vaccine will be given first to healthcare workers, the elderly and people with chronic diseases, state media cited him as saying, without giving details on the number of doses.
“More shipments will arrive from China, India and other countries,” he said. The North African country of 43 million people has 106,610 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and 2,881 deaths.
Updated
Portugal’s government has announced it would reintroduce controls along its 750-mile border with Spain as authorities respond to a surge in coronavirus infections and deaths.
The cabinet affairs minister, Mariana Vieira da Silva, said Portuguese nationals would be banned from travelling to other countries by air, land or sea over the next 15 days, confirming an earlier announcement by the interior minister.
Updated
As we reported earlier, German authorities have advised that the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab should not be given to those aged 65 or above. My colleague Nicola Davis takes a look at why, and what experts make of it.
Oregon health workers in the US who got stuck in a snowstorm on their way back from a Covid-19 vaccination event went from car to car on foot injecting stranded drivers before several of the doses expired.
The Josephine county public health department said on Facebook that the “impromptu vaccine clinic” took place after about 20 employees were stopped in traffic on a highway.
Six of the vaccines were getting close to expiring so the workers decided to offer them to other stranded drivers. The shots were meant for other people, but “the snow meant those doses wouldn’t make it to them before they expired”, the health department said.
Not wanting to waste them, staff walked from vehicle to vehicle, offering people a chance to receive the vaccine. A county ambulance was on hand for safety.
Updated
A restaurant owner who flouted France’s Covid restrictions by serving lunch to dozens of people has been released from custody.
Christophe Wilson, 50, opened his brasserie, Poppies, in the Mediterranean city of Nice on Wednesday amid growing frustration over cafe and restaurant closures in place since 30 October. About 100 people dropped their face masks to enjoy a Provencal stew and other specialities, with some dancing while a band played on the terrace.
“When I see Carrefour or Prima and all these multinationals where hundreds of people are massed together, I can no longer accept it,” he told journalists during the opening, referring to major French shopping chains which are largely operating as normal. “I have to pay my employees, support my family and welcome my clients.”
He issued a call to arms for fellow restaurant owners on the brink of failure since they were forced to close on 30 October as Covid-19 cases soared. “Someone needs to get everyone fired up, and if I have to be the one who takes that risk, so be it,” Wilson said.
The Nice-Matin newspaper reported that Wilson was released today but would later be ordered to appear for a formal reprimand, a light punishment that does not go on a person’s police record.
The government has said they will have to remain closed until at least mid-February in a bid to avert social gatherings that could worsen the pandemic. But several chefs and thousands of people have already backed a call by Stephane Turillon, a chef in eastern France, for restaurants to open across France on 1 February.
Updated
Travellers from the United Arab Emirates, Burundi and Rwanda will be denied entry to the UK, aside from British and Irish people and UK residents from other countries, who must self-isolate for 10 days at home, the UK transport secretary, Grant Shapps, has said.
From tomorrow (Friday 29 Jan at 1pm), we’re extending our travel ban with the United Arab Emirates, Burundi and Rwanda all added to the UK's red list. 1/3
— Rt Hon Grant Shapps MP (@grantshapps) January 28, 2021
Updated
A millionaire Canadian couple who secretly travelled to a remote community to receive a coronavirus vaccine meant for vulnerable and elderly Indigenous residents may now face jail sentences for breaking public health rules.
The casino executive Rodney Baker and his wife, Ekaterina Baker, an actor, were widely condemned after it emerged that they had chartered a plane to a remote community in the Yukon territory, where they posed as local motel employees to receive the vaccine.
They were fined C$2,300 for violating Yukon’s Civil Emergency Measures Act, but community leaders argued that the penalty would be insignificant for the wealthy couple. Baker resigned from his position as a casino executive on Sunday but records show he made a C$45.9m profit on stock options over the past 13 months.
Amid growing outrage, Yukon community services minister announced on Wednesday that the couple’s tickets had been stayed and they had been served with a notice to appear in court. If convicted, they could serve up to six months in jail.
Updated
India’s health minister, Harsh Vardhan, has claimed it has “successfully contained the pandemic” and “flattened its Covid-19 graph” as the country of 1.34 billion people reported just 12,000 new cases in the past 24 hours – in stark contrast to the 90,000 cases per day being reported in September.
With more than 10.7m cases, India still ranks the second highest in the world for coronavirus cases but over the past two months it has seen a steady and steep decline in new cases, despite little in the way of restrictions to prevent the spread of infection.
Restaurants, bars, shops and markets have been open across the country, people are working in offices and factories, religious festivals have taken place and internal movement has been allowed without restriction. Schools have remained closed, however, and international borders are closed for all but business travel.
Dr Nirmalya Mohapatra, a senior resident doctor at Ram Manohar Lohia hospital in Delhi, said they did not have a single Covid-19 patient. “Cases have fallen very rapidly,” he said. “There was a surge two months ago but now we are not seeing any patients admitted to the Covid ward. There is not a single Covid patient in our hospital right now. It has not been this low since April.”
Updated
Tourism industry lost $1.3tn in revenue last year – UN
The coronavirus crisis cost the global tourism sector $1.3tn in lost revenue in 2020 as the number of people travelling plunged, the UN has said, calling it “the worst year in tourism history”, AFP reports.
Revenue lost last year amounted to “more than 11 times the loss recorded during the 2009 global economic crisis,” the Madrid-based World Tourism Organization said in a statement, warning that between 100m and 120m direct tourism jobs were at risk.
International tourist arrivals fell by 1bn, or 74%, in 2020 with Asia, the first region to feel the impact of Covid-19, seeing the steepest decline, it added. “While much has been made in making safe international travel a possibility, we are aware that the crisis is far from over,” the head of WTO, Zurab Pololikashvili, said in the statement.
The Asia and Pacific region recorded an 84% drop in arrivals. It was followed by Africa and the Middle East with a 75% drop, Europe with 70% fewer visitors “despite a small and short-lived revival in the summer” and the Americas where arrivals fell by 69%.
International tourism arrivals rose by 4% in 2019 to 1.5bn, with France the world’s most visited country, followed by Spain and the United States. The last time international tourist arrivals posted an annual decline was in 2009 when the global economic crisis led to a 4% drop. The WTO said most experts do not see a return to pre-pandemic levels of tourism activity before 2023.
Updated
Prosecutors from northern Italy travelled to Rome today to question the health minister and others as part of their broadening investigation into whether to lay any criminal blame for Italy’s horrific coronavirus toll, and whether a lack of preparedness contributed to it, AP reports.
Back in June, Bergamo prosecutors questioned the prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, the health minister, Roberto Speranza, and other top officials about the delayed lockdown in two towns near Bergamo, where infections were reported in the early days of the outbreak.
Bergamo went on to become Italy’s Covid-19 centre, the first in the west, registering a 571% increase in excess deaths in March compared with the previous five-year average. The Bergamo probe, though, has now expanded beyond the lockdown issue to look into Italy’s preparedness going into the pandemic, investigators say.
A scandal over a spiked World Health Organization report into Italy’s response has revealed that the country’s influenza pandemic preparedness plan had not been updated since 2006. But Bergamo investigators are also looking into suggestions that the 2006 plan was never implemented once the outbreak hit, contributing to what the WHO called Italy’s “improvised, chaotic and creative” response to the thousands of sick who quickly overwhelmed Lombardy’s hospitals.
“What is emerging is that they never implemented what they had, which is more serious than the fact that it wasn’t updated,” a Bergamo investigator told AP.
Lombardy officials have defended their handling of the outbreak, while those responsible for updating the pandemic plan have said that the 2006 document was a set of guidelines for an influenza pandemic, not a coronavirus one.
Investigators, however, say there was plenty of crossover that could have been applied, such that the WHO recommended on 5 January that member states adopted guidance plans for influenza or virus pandemics in order to be prepared for what was then believed to be a still-contained outbreak in Wuhan, China.
Updated
Germany is planning a near-total ban on travellers from Britain, Portugal, Brazil and South Africa as European governments increasingly move to bar entry from countries where more contagious Covid-19 variants are rampant.
Berlin’s initiative came as EU interior ministers met to discuss a more coordinated approach to international travel restrictions. Last week Belgium barred all non-essential travel by land, sea and air into and out of the country, and the Netherlands announced a ban on incoming flights from the UK, South Africa and South America.
“To protect our population, there should be no entry from regions where these variants of the virus are rampant,” the German interior minister, Horst Seehofer, said on Thursday, adding the measures were “under discussion” in Berlin.
Seehofer said Germany aimed to push forward with its plans even if the EU27 did not agree similar measures across the bloc. “We cannot expect a European solution that meets our expectations any time soon, so are preparing national measures,” he said.
Irritated by the sweeping use of executive orders during the Covid crisis, state lawmakers around the US are moving to curb the authority of governors and top health officials to impose emergency restrictions such as mask rules and business shutdowns, AP reports.
The push is underway in such states as Arizona, Michigan, Ohio, Maryland, Kentucky, Indiana and Pennsylvania, where legislators are seeking a constitutional amendment to strip the governor of many of their emergency powers.
Pennsylvania Republican Senator Wayne Langerholc Jr said the amendment would “make it unequivocally clear that our general assembly is a co-equal branch ... that we are not a monarchy and that our voices matter”.
Democratic governor Tom Wolf and some of his counterparts around the country have argued they need authority to act quickly and decisively against the fast-changing threat.
Kentucky’s Republican-led legislature could consider as soon as next week whether to override Democratic governor Andy Beshear’s vetoes of several bills that would rein in his emergency powers.
Wisconsin’s GOP-controlled assembly was expected to vote today on a measure repealing Democratic governor Tony Evers’ statewide mask mandate.
Updated
Sharing UK Covid vaccines with countries in Europe and beyond is in the UK’s best interests, scientists have said, as the row over supplies intensifies.
A dispute has sprung up between the UK and EU over the supply of Covid vaccines, after the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca told the EU it would not be able to deliver all of the doses ordered by the end of March, due to production problems at plants on the continent.
AstraZeneca said its contract with the UK meant doses could only be shipped from UK plants to Europe once the UK had received the 100m doses it had ordered.
The European health commissioner, Stella Kyriakides, hit back yesterday, rejecting the idea that the UK should have priority because it signed a contract with AstraZeneca before the EU.
But speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Thursday, the Cabinet Office minister, Michael Gove, reiterated that the UK would not be sharing doses with the EU.
Updated
My colleague Tom Phillips, the Guardian’s Latin America correspondent, looks at the surge of infections in the Brazilian state of Amazonas that has left many hospitals without the most basic supplies and has prompted yet more protests against Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro.
Protester in Lebanon dies after clashes with security forces amid anger over lockdown
A man has died of his wounds in Lebanon after clashes last night between security forces and protesters angered by the combined impact of a severe economic crisis and a coronavirus lockdown, AFP reports. There are fresh protests today.
Omar Tayba sustained a bullet wound late on Wednesday when protests in the northern city of Tripoli turned violent for the third night running, his brother Ahmad told AFP. “My brother was in Tripoli watching the protests when he was hit,” he said. “He was transferred to hospital and died this morning.”
The 29-year-old man, who was employed in a bakery, became the first fatality of the protests that erupted earlier this week in Tripoli. According to the National News Agency, 226 people received treatment on Wednesday night.
Tripoli was already one of Lebanon’s poorest areas before the coronavirus pandemic piled new misery onto a chronic economic crisis. Many of its residents have been left without an income since Lebanon imposed a full lockdown earlier this month in an attempt to stem a surge in Covid-19 cases and prevent its hospitals from being overwhelmed.
A round-the-clock curfew is in force nationwide and grocery shopping is restricted to home deliveries – a service that is often unavailable in poorer areas. Authorities have extended the lockdown by two weeks to 8 February.
Reuters has more:
The caretaker minister of social affairs and tourism, Ramzi Musharrafieh, told local media this week that 75% of Lebanese were in need of financial aid. He said the government gives 230,000 families a monthly stipend of 400,000 Lebanese pounds, less than $50 at the current market rate. Lebanon has a population of about 6 million.
The caretaker prime minister, Hassan Diab, said while the aid was not enough to cover needs, it helped “reduce the burdens”.
“You want to close the country? Provide people with what they need. It is not acceptable to lock people in their houses and leave them hungry,” Mehieddine Antar, a 45-year-old Imam of a mosque told Reuters while taking part in a protest against lockdown in Sidon this week.
“I went down [to protest] to fight those in power,” said Mohamed Fcheich, a demonstrator in Tripoli, who said he supports seven children. “When I go to the grocery shop to buy dinner for my children, I need to take a big bag of money – that is if there is money.”
Prime minister-designate, Saad al-Hariri, tweeted: “Nothing can justify the attack on private property, markets and public institutions.”
Updated
The Greek government has said it would throw the country’s main carrier Aegean Airlines a lifeline of up to €120m (£105m) in return for a stake in the company, AFP reports.
Aegean Airlines “will receive state financial support ... up to the loss it sustained as a direct result of the Covid-19 pandemic,” the government spokesman Christos Tarantilis said after a cabinet meeting.
In return, the carrier will give the Greek state stock warrants worth 11.5% of its shares after a capital increase of at least €60m, for a period of two to five years, Tarantilis said. He said the move had already been approved by the European commission.
In November, Aegean Airlines said it had sustained a net loss of more than €187m during the first nine months of 2020 as Greece’s vital tourism industry was severely impacted by global travel restrictions.
Updated
Iceland may relax its coronavirus restrictions earlier than planned after just 11 new domestic cases were reported over the last week, all of which were in quarantine by the time they were diagnosed, according to local media.
Iceland Review reports that the country’s chief epidemiologist Þórólfur Guðnason told a news briefing today that it could loosen restrictions before 17 February, if cases remained so low. Total infections have been falling, with just 47 at present. The Scandinavian country of 350,000 people has had 60 Covid deaths.
Guðnason said its border regime, which has seen all incoming travellers tested since June, has played a key role in containing the pandemic in the country, according to Iceland Review. Iceland has been hailed for its scientific approach to containing the pandemic.
Updated
Chile has received a first shipment of almost 2m doses of the coronavirus vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac and plans to roll it out across the country from the middle of next week, Reuters reports.
The batch of 1,919,800 doses of the two-dose vaccine arrived at the capital Santiago’s international airport early in the morning. A second, similarly-sized shipment will arrive on Sunday, said the Chilean president, Sebastián Piñera, who was there to receive the drugs.
The Sinovac vaccine was approved by Chile’s health regulator for emergency use on 20 January, with the caveat it not be used for people over the age of 60.
But the health ministry said yesterday that the age limit could be ignored after a clinical trial that started in November at Chile’s Catholic University indicated no difference in safety or efficacy among younger and older participants.
Chile began vaccinating health workers using the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine on Christmas Eve, and aims to vaccinate its at-risk population of approximately 5 million people between February and March, and its target population of about 15 million people within the first six months of the year.
Updated
The head of Russia’s consumer safety watchdog said on Thursday that around 20-25% of Russians have Covid-19 antibodies, TASS news agency reported.
Russia’s coronavirus task force has reported 19,138 new Covid19 cases over the past 24 hours, including 2,897 in Moscow, taking the total national tally to 3,793,810 since the pandemic began.
Paris hospitals told to suspend vaccinations in a week because of limited supplies
The French public health agency for the Paris region has told regional hospitals they must suspend injections of the first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine from 2 February because of limited supplies, a person familiar with the discussions has told Reuters.
The agency told the hospitals that injections of the second, follow-up dose would continue and that vaccines would be supplied for that purpose, the source said, but no first doses would be delivered to Paris region hospitals for now.
The ARS health agency for the Île-de-France region told hospitals in a briefing that no first injections would be administered in hospitals from Tuesday because of “extremely tight vaccine supplies and the need to guarantee the second injection for people already vaccinated”, the source said.
The ARS health agency for the Hauts-de-France region in northern France said earlier that it was pushing back to the first week of March the injection of the first Covid-19 vaccine doses that had been planned for early February because of tight supplies of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.
The move was aimed at ensuring that people who received the first dose of the vaccine in January would be able to receive the second dose.
Residents of care homes are unlikely to be affected by the change because most have already received the first dose, but the change is likely to affect people over 75 and healthcare workers who are currently due to receive their first dose.
The health ministry said on Wednesday that by 26 January a total of 1.13m first doses and 6,153 second doses had been administered.
Updated
Europe’s drugs regulator has recommended that countries do not delay the second dose of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine by more than three weeks after the first, Reuters reports.
Lots of countries are delaying the second dose in a bid to vaccinate a greater proportion of the population.
Updated
Public Health England said that AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine provides reassuring immune responses in elderly people even if data on the precise level of protection is patchy, Reuters reports.
AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine should only be given to people aged between 18 and 64, Germany’s vaccine committee said in a draft recommendation, a day ahead of a decision by European regulators on whether to approve the drugmaker’s shot.
“Both the AstraZeneca and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines are safe and provide high levels of protection against Covid-19, particularly against severe disease,” Mary Ramsay, head of immunisations at PHE, said in a statement. “There were too few cases in older people in the AstraZeneca trials to observe precise levels of protection in this group, but data on immune responses were very reassuring.”
Updated
The first phase of Portugal’s vaccination plan against Covid-19 will be extended by about two months into April following delivery delays, Reuters reports.
Portugal, where infections and deaths have spiked to record levels after Christmas, initially hoped to receive close to 3m vaccine doses in the first quarter, but this figure has fallen to just 1.5m due to delivery delays, the vaccination taskforce head, Francisco Ramos, said.
He had said in December the original plan envisaged 950,000 people – health professionals, key workers, people over 50 with pre-existing conditions and key political figures – being fully vaccinated in January and February.
Updated
Coronavirus cost global tourism $1.3tn (£950bn) in 2020 according to the UN, AFP reports.
The coronavirus crisis cost the global tourism sector $1.3tn (£950bn) in lost revenue in 2020 as the number of people travelling plunged, the UN said on Tuesday, calling it “the worst year in tourism history”.
Revenue lost last year amounted to “more than 11 times the loss recorded during the 2009 global economic crisis,” the Madrid-based World Tourism Organization said in a statement, warning that between 100m and 120m direct tourism jobs were at risk.
International tourist arrivals fell by 1bn, or 74%, in 2020 with Asia, the first region to feel the impact of Covid-19, recording the steepest decline, it added.
Updated
Global debt is thought to have reached 98% of economic output at the end of 2020, the International Monetary Fund said on Thursday, as it urges that fiscal support stay in place until recovery is firmly underway, Reuters reports.
The Fiscal Monitor projected global government gross debt as a share of GDP would reach 99.5% in 2021, compared with 83.5% for 2019. For G20 countries, gross debt is set to reach 109% in 2021, while debt in advanced economies is set to reach 124.9%.
The IMF projected 2021 fiscal deficits at 8.5% for the world, 9.4% for G20 countries and 8.8% for advanced economies.
Updated
The European Union has warned drug companies such as AstraZeneca that it would use all legal means or even block exports unless they agreed to deliver shots as promised, Reuters reports.
The EU, whose member states are far behind Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States in rolling out vaccines, is scrambling to get supplies just as the west’s biggest drugmakers slow deliveries to the bloc due to production problems.
As vaccination centres in Germany, France and Spain cancelled or delayed appointments, the EU publicly rebuked the Anglo-Swedish drugmaker AstraZeneca for failing to deliver and even asked if it could divert supplies from Britain.
Sharing UK Covid vaccines with countries in Europe and beyond is in the UK’s best interests, scientists have said, as the row over supplies intensifies, Nicola Davis reports.
Updated
The World Health Organization has projected that one third of Africa will be vaccinated this year, AFP reports.
Africa can expect to see at least 30% of its population immunised against coronavirus by the end of 2021, the World Health Organization said Thursday, as vaccines begin trickling into the continent.
It is estimated Africa will need 1.5bn vaccine doses to immunise 60% of its 1.3 billion inhabitants, the threshold for herd immunity against Covid-19.
But the continent has fallen behind in the global vaccine scramble, as wealthier nations have been accused of bulk-buying excess doses directly from manufacturers.
Updated
British police detained a man on Thursday after a suspicious package was sent to Wockhardt UK, one of AstraZeneca’s supply partners involved in manufacturing its Covid-19 vaccine, Reuters reports.
A 53-year-old man from Chatham has been arrested on suspicion of sending the package and remains in custody as enquiries continue,” Kent police said after the package was found on Wednesday at the factory in North Wales.
“There is no evidence to suggest there is an ongoing threat.”
This is Rachel Hall taking over from Mattha Busby, you can email me any thoughts and tips at rachel.hall@theguardian.com.
Updated
Denmark is mulling extending the current coronavirus restrictions by three weeks to 28 February to curb the spread of the more contagious British coronavirus variant, Reuters reports.
Updated
An interesting couple of tweets here from Oliver Moody at the Times, following the news (see 1.16pm) that German authorities have blocked the use of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine on people aged over 65.
This means Handelsblatt wasn't entirely wrong - the estimated efficacy in over-65s is *6.3 per cent*. But what the story missed is that this figure is completely useless. They just don't have enough data to say anything meaningful. https://t.co/oinzhHTLVG
— Oliver Moody (@olivernmoody) January 28, 2021
More on Germany's AstraZeneca vaccine announcement - it seems to suggest the EMA will authorise the vaccine for use in *all adults*. So it would be down to each member state whether to administer it to over-65s. pic.twitter.com/6mfrJTTo1z
— Oliver Moody (@olivernmoody) January 28, 2021
It looks pretty black and white that Germany is saying the vaccine has been approved in the EU - although it wasn't supposed to be announced until tomorrow. This guidance was drawn up on Tuesday. https://t.co/PUrPBBvVYT pic.twitter.com/omSvrKtqkK
— Oliver Moody (@olivernmoody) January 28, 2021
This all comes after an explosive report in German business daily Handelsblatt earlier this week reported that the German government was expecting the European Medicines Agency’s (EMA) assessment to show the AstraZeneca vaccine to be only 8% effective among the over-65s, describing it a “setback for Berlin’s vaccination strategy”.
AstraZeneca instantly dismissed the reports, saying the 8% figure was “completely incorrect”. The German health minister, Jens Spahn, described the report as “speculation” and declined to comment while EMA’s analysis of AstraZeneca’s trial data was ongoing.
Updated
Officials are investigating claims Paris police broke Covid-19 and curfew rules by staging a leaving party for a colleague at which they danced the Macarena inside a police station.
Videos of the event appear to show police officers and other station staff celebrating and dancing until 3am. None was wearing a mask, there was little social distancing and the party broke the 6pm to 6am nationwide curfew.
Officers are seen singing and dancing the Macarena inside the police station at Aubervilliers in the Seine-Saint-Denis suburb. The regional police authority has launched an investigation.
A statement tweeted by the Prefecture de Police read:
A leaving party was organised at the Aubervilliers commissariat when there was a curfew in force and without any respect for the social-distancing measures. An administrative inquiry is being conducted and administrative sanctions will be taken against the participants.
The video was released by the website Loopsider, which also published film of three French police officers beating and allegedly racially abusing a music producer in his Paris studio in November.
Updated
The Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is doing “very well” and is in the process of “full recovery” from Covid-19, a few days after he tested positive for the virus, the interior minister, Olga Sánchez, said on Thursday. Speaking at a regular news conference, Sánchez said the president’s symptoms were light.
Updated
AstraZeneca jab should not be used on over-65's, says Germany
German authorities have blocked the use of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine on people aged over 65, the Financial Times has reported.
A statement by the Standing Vaccine Commission at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Germany’s main public health agency, said in a draft recommendation there were “insufficient data currently available to ascertain how effective the vaccination is above 65 years”.
Thus, it was recommended only that it be used for people aged between 18 and 64. It comes after the European Medicines Agency said on Tuesday that the vaccine may be authorised only for younger people in Europe, due to the insufficient data. It is expected to make a decision tomorrow.
That followed reports of a lower-than-expected efficacy rate of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine for older people, which the German government challenged while reiterating concerns about the British-Swedish pharmaceutical giant’s data reporting.
The RKI said that the two vaccines from BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna, which have both been approved by the EU authorities, were judged to be “equivalent in terms of safety and efficacy”.
The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine was approved for use in the UK at the end of December, in a move that raised some eyebrows as the country was the first to do so. The Oxford vaccine is easier to store and distribute than the Pfizer/BioNTech jab, which must be kept at -70C.
An 82-year-old man in Oxford was the first person in the world to receive the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, with many since receiving the jab.
Yesterday, the chief executive of AstraZeneca dismissed suggestions that the UK is being unfairly prioritised for Covid-19 vaccine doses, saying “glitches” have constrained production in Europe.
Updated
A World Health Organization team has emerged from quarantine in the Chinese city of Wuhan to start field work in a fact-finding mission on the origins of the virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic, AP reports.
The researchers, who were required to isolate for 14 days after arriving in China, left their quarantine hotel with their luggage – including at least four yoga mats – in the mid-afternoon and headed to another hotel. The mission has become politically charged, as China seeks to avoid blame for alleged missteps in its early response to the outbreak. A major question is where the Chinese side will allow the researchers to go and whom they will be able to talk to.
Yellow barriers blocked the entrance to the hotel, keeping the media at a distance. Before the researchers boarded their bus, workers wearing protective outfits and face shields could be seen loading their luggage, including two musical instruments and a dumbbell. Hotel staff waved goodbye to the researchers, who were wearing face masks. The bus driver wore a full-body white protective suit. They drove about 30 minutes to a lakeside Hilton resort-like hotel.
The former WHO official Keiji Fukuda, who is not part of the team in Wuhan, has cautioned against expecting any breakthroughs, saying it may take years before any firm conclusions can be made about the virus’s origin.
Updated
Israel: of 163,000 people given two shots of Pfizer vaccine only 31 got Covid, says healthcare firm
Encouraging data is coming out of Israel, which has given vaccines to more than a third of its population and is assessing the results.
One domestic healthcare provider, Maccabi, said today that out of 163,000 Israeli given both shots of the Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine, only 31 were infected with the coronavirus. That was compared with nearly 6,450 infections among a control group of unvaccinated people.
Of the vaccinated people who were infected, none were hospitalised and only suffered mild effects, such as headaches. Maccabi said the data suggested the vaccine was 92% effective, close to the 95% that Pfizer claims.
Israel is injecting up to 200,000 people a day, and this week made the jab available to anyone over 35. Secondary school students aged 16 to 18 are also included to allow them to sit exams.
Dr Anat Ekka Zohar, vice-president of Maccabi health services, said the new data was “very, very good news”.
“It is the first study in the world that looks at such a large number of fully vaccinated patients,” she told the Times of Israel.
Updated
Belgian regulators have launched an investigation into AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine production site near Brussels on the request of the European commission, in an escalation of the row over shortages within the EU.
A first visit by officials from the Belgian federal medicines agency was completed on Wednesday at the site in Seneffe, Hainaut, the health ministry in Belgium said. Samples and records were taken from the plant and a further inspection of the facility is expected in the coming days.
The investigation was requested by the EU’s executive branch due to doubts over AstraZeneca’s explanation of an expected shortfall in vaccine deliveries to the EU.
The Anglo-Swedish company has said it will be able to deliver to EU member states only about 25% of the 100m doses expected by the end of March due to a production problem at the Belgian site owned by the French life-sciences company Novasep. The vaccine is expected to be authorised by the European Medicines Agency on Friday.
Updated
Another 400m doses of Covid-19 vaccines have been secured for the African continent through the Serum Institute of India, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said, AP reports.
With the new doses, on top of the 270m doses announced earlier this month from Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, “I think we’re beginning to make very good progress,” the Africa CDC director, Dr John Nkengasong, told reporters. He said the new doses were announced in a meeting hosted by South Africa’s president on Wednesday.
An Africa CDC spokesman said the 400m doses are of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. As with many vaccine deals, there were no immediate details on cost or how much people might pay per dose.
The continent of 1.3 billion people has more than 3.4 million confirmed virus cases, including more than 87,000 deaths.
It is racing to obtain enough vaccines for the goal of vaccinating 60% of its population to achieve herd immunity, and officials have repeatedly urged rich countries that have stockpiled vaccine doses to take an equitable approach and share.
Africa also is expected to receive some 600m doses via the global Covax initiative aimed at helping low-income countries.
Updated
The World Health Organization (WHO) is to launch a plan later today to combat 20 diseases that affect the world’s poorest people, in an effort to prevent recent progress being erased by the impact of Covid-19 on healthcare systems, Reuters reports.
Many of the 20 neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), which range from leprosy to rabies, have been eradicated in the developed world, but together they affect more than 1.7 billion people in poorer countries.
Governments officially endorsed the 10-year road map for tackling NTDs in November, committing to sustain efforts that have seen at least one such disease eradicated in 42 countries over the last decade.
But the plan comes as efforts to alleviate diseases such as leprosy, elephantiasis, intestinal worms and rabies are being hampered by a worldwide pandemic pushing already strained healthcare systems to their breaking point.
“The one thing they (Covid-19 and NTDs) have in common is that they disproportionately affect the poorest and most vulnerable communities in the world,” said the director of the WHO’s Department of Control of Neglected Tropical Diseases, Mwele Malecela.
“Their impact is felt more often than not by the very people who are least equipped to bear the burden of suffering and disability, not to mention the profound social and economic burdens of disease.”
Updated
Bahrain has received its first delivery of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine produced by the Serum Institute of India (SII), according to state media, Reuters reports.
The vaccine will be free to citizens and residents of the Gulf Arab state, which on 25 January approved the Anglo-Swedish drugmaker’s vaccine for emergency use, state media said, without providing the number of doses.
Bahrain’s crown prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, who is also prime minister, thanked Indian prime minister Narendra Modi “and our friends in India for working with us to secure the delivery of” the vaccine, his court said in a Twitter post.
On Monday, SII chief executive Adar Poonawalla told Reuters the firm, the world’s biggest vaccine manufacturer, would supply Saudi Arabia with 3 million AstraZeneca vaccine doses priced at $5.25 each in about a week.
Bahrain is one of the most successful countries in rolling out Covid-19 vaccines to its people, ranking fourth per head of population. It is already providing the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and one manufactured by Chinese state-backed pharmaceutical giant Sinopharm free of charge.
Updated
The World Health Organization’s Europe director has said vaccine manufacturers are working hard to make up shortfalls in supplies and called on countries waiting for jabs not to compete.
Hans Kluge said governments and vaccine manufacturers should work together to resolve “teething problems” in the roll-out.
The reality is there is a shortage of vaccines... [But] we don’t doubt manufacturers and producers are working 24-7 to bridge the gaps and we’re confident the delays we are seeing now are going to be made up by extra production in the future.
Kluge said solidarity “does not necessarily mean that each country in the world starts vaccinating at exactly the same moment ... The good understanding is that no one is safe before everyone is safe.”
He said EU countries, which are trailing behind the UK, US and Israel in administering doses, “must be patient”. He said 35 European countries had begun vaccinations, delivering 25 million shots. “This will release pressure on our health systems and undoubtedly save lives,” he said.
Continued high rates of transmission and emerging variants of the virus made it urgent to vaccinate priority groups, and “the increasing expectation of science and vaccine development, production, and equitable distribution, is not being met as fast as we would all like”.
He said the resulting paradox, where communities “sense an end is in sight with the vaccine but, at the same time, are called to adhere to restrictive measures in the face of a new threat, is causing tension, angst, fatigue, and confusion”.
Kluge said 33 European countries had reported cases of the variant initially identified in the UK and 16 had reported the one first identified in South Africa. Lockdowns, however, were working, he said: 30 countries across the region had seen “a significant decrease in 14-day cumulative incidence”.
Updated
Vietnam, which has been widely praised for its success in controlling Covid-19, is preparing for tens of thousands of new infections after local transmission was detected in northern provinces for the first time in almost two months.
Coronavirus taskforce chief Vu Duc Dam warned authorities should be ready for as many as 30,000 new infections, according to reports by state media. Hours earlier, officials had reported 83 cases, the biggest daily number seen in the country.
Vietnam has managed to avoid the very high case numbers seen in many countries around the world, due to its early and effective use of contact tracing. The country has also imposed restrictions on entry, and introduced a strict quarantine policy. Since the start of the pandemic, it has recorded just under 1,600 cases, and 35 related deaths.
The country had gone 55 days without any local cases before infections were identified in the northern provinces of Hai Duong, where a factory worker tested positive, and Quang Ninh, where an airport worker was also found to have the virus. One of these cases has been linked to the more infectious strain of the virus found in the UK.
One village in Hai Duong has been placed under lockdown and about 2,340 factory workers have been put in quarantine while contact tracing is carried out.
Social distancing measures have also been introduced in Quang Ninh province, where all schools and educational institutions, including kindergartens and universities, have been shut until at least the end of the week. Large gatherings should also be minimised, and meetings avoided where possible, officials in the province said.
There are now proposals to stop all international flights and ban all large gatherings ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday, which is just two weeks away.
The eurozone’s big banks have successfully weathered the coronavirus crisis so far but could now be exposed to major losses on their loan portfolios, the European Central Bank has said, AFP reports.
The ECB said that “deteriorating economic conditions” due to the coronavirus outbreak “slowed the pace of the ongoing reduction in non-performing loans”. In addition, there was “also an embedded level of distress in loan books that is not yet fully evident”.
Combined with “the phasing-out of several support measures in 2021”, this exposure increases the “risk of cliff effects” and the ECB advised banks to follow guidance on precautionary steps. The ECB said that compared to the global financial crisis of 2008-09, euro area banks began 2020 with “significantly higher capital levels and far greater resilience to economic deterioration”.
It said that in the face of greater risk of default, it was encouraging “appropriately prudent approaches” with “a considerably higher number of recommendations to banks”.
ECB chief Christine Lagarde warned last week that the pandemic still poses “serious risks” to the eurozone economy as concerns grow about new virus variants and sluggish vaccination campaigns.
Under Lagarde, the ECB took unprecedented steps last year to cushion the eurozone economy from the impact of Covid-19. Its biggest weapon is a pandemic emergency bond-buying scheme, known as PEPP, that was in December topped up by 500 billion euros ($606 billion) to reach a total envelope of 1.85 trillion euros. The scheme was also extended to March 2022.
Updated
The fitness industry and online influencers are ignoring the needs of disabled people during lockdown, according to one leading Paralympian who says the lack of visibility for one of the most vulnerable groups in society “blows my mind”.
Thanks Caroline - this is Mattha Busby, good morning, good afternoon and good evening. I’ll bringing you coronavirus-related news for the next few hours. Do drop me a line on Twitter or via email on mattha.busby.freelance@guardian.co.uk with any tips and thoughts.
Updated
That’s all from me, Caroline Davies. Thank you for your time.
The World Health Organization has urged Tanzania to follow science, after its president said Covid-19 vaccines were dangerous and unnecessary if people trusted God and used alternative remedies such as inhaling steam.
President John Magufuli’s contradiction of the global medical consensus and his government’s failure to publish national coronavirus data since mid-2020 has exasperated health expert.
“Urging Tanzania to ramp up public health measures such as wearing masks to fight COVID19,” tweeted Matshidiso Moeti, Africa director for the WHO.
Urging #Tanzania to ramp up public health measures such as wearing masks to fight #COVID19. Science shows that #VaccinesWork and I encourage the government to prepare for a COVID vaccination campaign. @WHO is here to support the government and people of Tanzania.
— Dr Matshidiso Moeti (@MoetiTshidi) January 28, 2021
“Science shows that VaccinesWork and I encourage the government to prepare for a Covid vaccination campaign.”
On Wednesday, Magufuli said, without evidence, that vaccines may be part of a foreign plot to spread illness and steal Africa’s wealth, Reuters reported.
“We in Tanzania managed to stay for a year without corona. Even here, no one has put on a mask. Our God is beyond Satan and Satan will always fail using different diseases,” he said in a speech in his western home area, according to Reuters.
Previously, Magufuli has also scoffed at imported testing kits, saying they returned positive results on a goat and fruit.
Tanzania has not published nationwide figures since 8 May, when it had 509 cases and 21 deaths.
“Data-sharing by Tanzania is also key, with cases surfacing among travellers and visitors over the months,” said the WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, in a tweet echoing Moeti’s remarks.
I join @MoetiTshidi’s call for strong health measures and #COVID19 vaccine preparedness. Data-sharing by #Tanzania is also key, with cases surfacing among travelers and visitors over the months. https://t.co/HfJEtrAohe
— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) January 28, 2021
Updated
Hungary’s government is extending a partial lockdown in force since early November until March 1 to help curb the spread of the coronavirus, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff said on Thursday.
Current lockdown measures, including a night-time curfew and the closure of shops and restaurants, had been due to expire on Feb. 1.
Gergely Gulyas also told a briefing that the government would ask parliament to extend emergency government powers by 90 days.
“The measures taken in November have helped slow down and keep the pandemic under control,” Gulyas said. “Experts say in the absence of a vaccine, any easing would lead to a new wave and even more drastic tightening later.”
Hungary, with a population of around 10 million, has reported 363,450 cases and 12,291 deaths.
The World Health Organization’s European director, Hans Kluge, said on Thursday Covid-19 transmission rates in Europe remained too high, putting health services under severe strain, and therefore it was “too early to ease up”.
“We need to be patient, it will take time to vaccinate,” he told an online briefing. “We have learned harsh lessons - opening and closing, and reopening (societies) rapidly is a poor strategy” in seeking to curb coronavirus contagion, he said.
Updated
Governments prioritised reopening the economy over people’s health, which resulted in “significant” Covid-19 outbreaks over Christmas, Australia’s top doctors body has said.
The Australian Medical Association (AMA) also argued at a parliamentary inquiry on Thursday that the Morrison government had failed to protect frontline health workers with new rules on protective gear.
The association’s president, Dr Omar Khorshid, giving evidence at the Covid-19 Senate inquiry, further warned the government might not meet its target of 4m vaccinations by the end of March due to supply disruptions.
Representatives from Pfizer and AstraZeneca, however, told the committee they were on track to provide the first vaccine doses in late February – although they recognised factors outside their control could delay the rollout.
Updated
Vietnam should prepare for 30,000 Covid-19 cases, state television said, citing the coronavirus taskforce chief.
The prediction came after the country reported its biggest daily number of new infections on Thursday which ended a 55-day run without a local case.
The deputy prime minister and taskforce head, Vu Duc Dam, said the two northern provinces where 83 cases were found should put measures in place to contain the spread, speed up contact-tracing and prepare for the scenario of 30,000 cases, state broadcaster VTV reported.
Updated
A survey by the University of Hong Kong has found that Hong Kong people are less trusting of Chinese coronavirus vaccines than those made in Europe and the United States, with fewer than 30% of people questioned finding China’s Sinovac vaccine acceptable.
Polls shows Hong Kong residents' distrust of Chinese vaccines https://t.co/yDtP2mtpOt pic.twitter.com/te5yTzJg3q
— Reuters (@Reuters) January 28, 2021
Malaysia reported 4,094 coronavirus cases on Thursday, raising the cumulative total in the country to 198,208 infections. The health ministry also reported 10 new deaths, bringing total fatalities during the pandemic to 707.
Updated
More on the EU AstraZeneca contract dispute.
EU health commissioner dismisses AstraZeneca contract argument – video https://t.co/3y2FlWWQ3r
— The Guardian (@guardian) January 28, 2021
India hails reduced infections
India said on Thursday it had curbed an increase in Covid-19 infections, with a fifth of its districts reporting no new cases for a week, even as its immunisation campaign has covered 2.4 million people.
The country of 1.35bn has recorded the highest number of cases in the world after the United States, though the rate of infection has come down significantly since a mid-September peak. Some studies have suggested pockets of India have attained herd immunity through natural infection.
“India has successfully contained the pandemic,” the health minister, Harsh Vardhan, said, noting that fewer than 12,000 cases were reported in the past 24 hours.He said 146 of India’s 718 districts have had no new cases for a week and 18 districts for two weeks.
India has so far reported 10.7 million infections and 153,847 deaths - one of the world’s lowest fatality rates from the disease, attributed partly to its younger population, Reuters reports.
Updated
Portugal says situation is 'terrible'
Portugal is in a terrible phase of the coronavirus pandemic, the prime minister, António Costa said, warning that it would be some weeks before things might start to improve and only limited help could be expected from abroad.
With a total of 668,951 confirmed Covid-19 cases and 11,305 deaths, including a record 293 dead on Wednesday, Portugal has the world’s highest seven-day average of new daily cases and deaths per million inhabitants.
The situation was not “bad”, it was “terrible”, Costa told the TVI broadcaster overnight.
“There is no point in feeding the illusion that we are not facing the worst moment,” he said. “And we’ll face this worst moment for a few more weeks, that is for sure.”
Costa said the situation had worsened partly because his government relaxed restrictive measures between Christmas and the end of the year, but also due to the virulence of a new variant of the virus first detected in Britain, Reuters reports.
Germany said on Wednesday that it was sending military medical experts to Portugal to see what kind of support it could bring. But Costa warned there was only so much Germany and other European partners could do, adding that “one should be cautious” about the idea of sending patients to foreign countries - like Germany, for instance, did last year with patients just across the border in France.
Updated
Senior UK cabinet minister Michael Gove has said there “will be no interruption” to vaccine supplies from AstraZeneca after the EU demanded to receive doses from UK plants.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:
First thing, we must make sure that we continue with the effective acceleration of our vaccination programme. That relies on the supply schedule that has been agreed to be honoured. That’s the first and most important thing.
But secondarily I’m sure we all want to do everything possible to make sure that as many people in countries which our are friends and neighbours are vaccinated and I think we best achieve that through dialogue and cooperation and friendship.
Pressed on whether the government will allow vaccines to go to the EU, he said:
No, the critical thing is we must make sure that the schedule that has been agreed and on which our vaccination programme has been based and planned goes ahead.
It is the case that the supplies that have been planned, paid for and scheduled should continue, absolutely. There will be no interruption to that.
Updated
Russia reported 19,138 new Covid-19 cases on Thursday, including 2,897 in Moscow, taking the national tally to 3,793,810 since the pandemic began. Authorities said 575 people had died in the last 24 hours, pushing the official death toll to 71,651.
Germany’s health minister expects the current shortage of coronavirus vaccines to continue well into April, he said on Thursday, as the government faced new criticism over the pace of its vaccination programme.
“We will still have at least 10 tough weeks with a shortage of vaccine,” Jens Spahn said in a tweet, adding that he wanted to call a summit of federal and regional leaders in Germany to discuss vaccinations
Updated
More on the WHO team leaving quarantine in Wuhan to begin their fact-finding mission.
Sri Lanka has welcomed the first 500,000 doses of a Covid-19 vaccine from India, which has donated the shots to eight countries in the region.
The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine was manufactured by the Serum Institute of India.
Sri Lanka said 150,000 health workers and 115,000 selected military and police troops will be the first to be inoculated at six hospitals in Colombo and its suburbs.
Updated
EasyJet expects to operate no more than 10% of flights until March
EasyJet expects to operate no more than 10% of its flight programme between January and March amid strict travel restrictions. The budget airline said its revenues plunged 88% at the end of last year, with turnover slumping to 165 million, PA Media reports.
It flew just 18% of its normal schedule in the three months to the end of December, which saw the second English coronavirus lockdown and tighter curbs on travel.
The Luton-based carrier also confirmed that 1,400 UK jobs were cut as it slashed its workforce by up to 30% to reduce costs to weather the crisis. But the group said it is planning for a surge in “pent-up demand” for travel once restrictions begin to lift and as vaccinations are extended.
Updated
In the UK, Prof Paul Elliott, director of Imperial College London’s React study, said that while coronavirus rates appeared to be decreasing in some areas, infections were growing in the east Midlands despite the lockdown.
On findings from the most recent study, he told Times Radio:
We are seeing different trends. The trends in London, the south-east, and particularly the south-west, do appear to be going down.
Whereas, in the rest of the country, it’s pretty flat, and actually in east Midlands it’s going up a little bit.”
Asked why he thought this was happening, Prof Elliot said:
I think it’s difficult to know. Certainly compared to the first lockdown, we know from mobility data that there is more activity happening generally, more people are going to work, the rules around the schools are slightly different to last time.
But also, you know, it really behoves us all to pay attention to the public health message.
We know how the virus is transmitted through social contact, so the social distancing, face coverings and hand washing are extremely important.
Updated
The variant of Covid-19 first discovered in England, which is said to have a higher rate of transmission, has been found in 10% of the Covid-19 cases in France, government spokesman Gabriel Attal said. Attal reiterated in an interview with France Inter radio on Thursday that the option of a stricter lockdown remained open to Emmanuel Macron’s government, but he did not provide more specific detail.
France reported nearly 27,000 new confirmed cases on Wednesday, its biggest one-day jump since mid-November when France was in its second full lockdown, indicating current curfew measures are not containing the virus, Reuters reports.
Updated
Germany is preparing entry restrictions for travellers from Britain, Brazil and South Africa, the interior ministry said on Thursday, as concerns of more contagious coronavirus variants are rising.
The new rules are being discussed with the German government, the spokesman added.
WHO team in Wuhan leave quarantine
A World Health Organization-led team investigating the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic left its quarantine hotel on Thursday to begin fieldwork, two weeks after arriving in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus emerged in late 2019.
The team boarded a bus and departed the hotel shortly after 3pm local time (0700 GMT) without speaking to journalists, Reuters reports.
Photograph: Ng Han Guan/AP
Updated
Covid-19 response country rankings, evaluated by the Lowy Institute and based on the availability of data across six indicators.
Covid-19 response.
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) January 28, 2021
Countries' Covid-19 response rankings, evaluated by the Lowy Institute and based on the availability of data across six indicators#AFPGraphics pic.twitter.com/izgX9wpaZ2
Good morning from London. Caroline Davies here, and I will be running the blog for the next few hours. You can get in touch on caroline.davies@theguardian.com
Summary
Here are the key pandemic developments from the last few hours:
- Covid cases in England ‘must fall faster to ease NHS pressure’. Cases of coronavirus have started to decline in England but must fall faster to relieve pressure on the NHS, scientists behind a Covid infection survey have warned.
- Pfizer vaccine only slightly less effective against key South African mutations. Pfizer Inc and BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine appeared to lose only a small bit of effectiveness against an engineered virus with three key mutations from the new coronavirus variant found in South Africa, according to a laboratory study conducted by the US drugmaker, Reuters reports.
- White House: ‘great concern’ over Covid origin ‘misinformation’ from China. The US wants a “robust and clear” international probe into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic in China, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, has said.Speaking to reporters, she said it was “imperative we get to the bottom” of how the virus appeared and spread. She highlighted “great concern” over “misinformation” from “some sources in China”.
- Tokyo Olympic qualification event postponed until May. The artistic swimming Olympics qualification event, due to be held in Tokyo in March, has been postponed until May because of novel coronavirus restrictions in Japan, Reuters reports. Tokyo 2020 organisers and Fédération Internationale de Natation (FINA) announced on Thursday that the tournament, which also doubles as a test event for this summer’s Tokyo Olympics, will now take place 1-4 May.
- Mexico posted its highest one-day total of newly confirmed coronavirus cases Wednesday, with 27,944 infections, and a near-record 1,623 confirmed deaths. That brings the country’s total so far to just over 1.8 million cases and 153,639 deaths. However, Mexico has an extremely low rate of testing, and estimates of excess deaths suggest the real toll is over 195,000.
- Vietnam has reported its first cases of community transmission in months, after two infections were detected in the northern provinces of Hai Duong and Quang Ninh, just weeks before the Lunar New Year holiday. While the new case numbers are very small, they have caused concern in Vietnam, which had gone 55 days without any local infections.
- Hospital incursions by Covid deniers putting lives at risk, say health leaders. Lives are being put at risk and the care of patients disrupted by a spate of hospital incursions from Covid-19 deniers whose online activity is channelling hatred against NHS staff, say healthcare and police chiefs.In the latest example of a growing trend, a group of people were ejected by security from a Covid-19 ward last week as one of them filmed staff, claimed that the virus was a hoax and demanded that a seriously ill patient be sent home
-
WHO says Covid ‘war’ can be won. The Biden administration launched its new level-with-America health briefings Wednesday with a projection that as many as 90,000 more in the US will die from the coronavirus in the next four weeks — a sobering warning as the government strains to improve delivery and injection of vaccines.
- WHO says Covid ‘war’ can be won. Humanity is not losing the war against the Covid-19 pandemic and will eventually conquer the virus, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.
- Madrid health authorities pause vaccinations amid supply issues. Authorities in the Madrid region of Spain said Wednesday they have suspended new vaccinations against the coronavirus for at least two weeks because of a shortage of jabs, while another region, Catalonia, warned its supply was running out.
- New Zealand sets up extra Covid test centres as quarantine hotel at heart of outbreak closes. Extra Covid testing centres have been set up overnight in Auckland as health officials raced to trace contacts of two fresh cases in New Zealandand closed down the quarantine hotel believed to be at the centre of this week’s outbreak.
- Former tennis world No 1 Serena Williams has praised Australia’s “insane” quarantine procedures ahead of the Australia Open. In an interview with late night US TV host Stephen Colbert the 23-time grand slam champion said Australia was “doing it right” when it came to border controls.“Yeah, it’s super, super strict but it’s really good. So Australia right now has, the last I heard, they had zero cases of Covid,” she said, eliciting a “wow” from Colbert.“Unbelievable, right? The whole country. So that is really amazing.
In Vietnam, thousands of factory workers will be quarantined after a cluster of Covid-19 cases were discovered in the north of the country - the nation’s first locally transmitted infections in almost two months.
Vietnam announced earlier that it had confirmed two community cases in the northern provinces of Hai Duong, where a factory worker tested positive, and Quang Ninh, where an airport worker was also found to have the virus. One of these infections has been linked to the more infectious strain of the virus found in the UK.
Since contact tracing measures were rolled out, 82 more cases have been identified. Most are concentrated in Hai Duong, where one village has been placed under lockdown.
The country’s health ministry said it will collect tens of thousands of samples for testing, while social distancing measures have been introduced.
In Quang Ninh province, all schools and educational institutions, including kindergartens and universities, have been shut until at least the end of the week. Large gatherings should also be minimised, and meetings avoided where possible, officials in the province said.
Vietnam has managed to avoid the very high case numbers seen in many countries around the world, due to its early and effective use of contact tracing. The country has also imposed restrictions on entry, while any citizens who return home must stay in quarantine facilities. Since the start of the pandemic, it has recorded 1,633 cases and 35 related deaths.
Pfizer vaccine only slightly less effective against key South African mutations
Pfizer Inc and BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine appeared to lose only a small bit of effectiveness against an engineered virus with three key mutations from the new coronavirus variant found in South Africa, according to a laboratory study conducted by the US drugmaker, Reuters reports.
The scientists are currently engineering a virus with the full set of mutations and expect to have results from that in around two weeks, according to Pei-Yong Shi, an author of the study and a professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch.
You know that daydream where you suddenly come into a vast fortune? You could buy a castle or a tropical island hideaway, help out all your friends, do a bit of good in the world. But what if it was a truly incredible sum? What if you had $1tn to spend, and a year to do it? And what if the rules of the game were that you had to do it for the world – make some real difference to people’s lives, or to the health of the planet, or to the advancement of science.
A trillion dollars – that’s one thousand billion dollars – is at once an absurdly huge amount of money, and not that much in the scheme of things. It is, give or take, 1% of world GDP. It’s what the US spends every year and a half on the military. It is an amount that can be quite easily rustled up through the smoke and mirrors of quantitative easing, which is officially the mass purchase of government bonds, but which looks suspiciously like the spontaneous creation of money. After the 2008 financial crash, more than $4.5tn was quantitatively eased in the US alone. All the other major economies made their own money in this ghostly way.
And it is not just governments that have this kind of money. Two of the world’s biggest companies, Microsoft and Amazon, are each worth more than $1tn; Apple stock is valued at $2tn. The world’s richest 1% together own a staggering $162tn. That’s 45% of all global wealth. At the start of 2020, private equity firms held $1.45tn in what they call “dry powder”, and what the rest of us call “cash”: piles of money sitting around awaiting investment. Just imagine what you could do with it.
Since the coronavirus hit, as after the 2008 crash, money has suddenly been found. Tens of trillions of dollars in economic stimulus packages are being chopped up, partitioned, allocated, siphoned. What if we could spend that cash? If only we could divert some of it, scrape a bit here and there from governments and banks, or quantitatively ease $1tn into existence and spend it before anyone noticed. Imagine the possibilities. Imagine what we could achieve:
Australia may have gone eleven days with no coronavirus cases. But it still has these:
South Korea said on Thursday it would begin coronavirus vaccinations for the general public in the third quarter of this year, the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency director Jeong Eun-kyeong told a news briefing, per Reuters.
Inoculations would begin in February starting with key groups, including medical workers and the elderly in nursing homes, Jeong said.
The country said it aimed to reach “herd immunity” levels through mass vaccinations by November.
Updated
Tokyo Olympic qualification event postponed until May
The artistic swimming Olympics qualification event, due to be held in Tokyo in March, has been postponed until May because of novel coronavirus restrictions in Japan, Reuters reports.
Tokyo 2020 organisers and Fédération Internationale de Natation (FINA) announced on Thursday that the tournament, which also doubles as a test event for this summer’s Tokyo Olympics, will now take place 1-4 May.
The Philippines’ Food and Drug Administration has approved the emergency use of AstraZeneca PLC’s Covid vaccine, the second to be approved in the Southeast Asian nation, Reuters reports.
The known and potential benefits of AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine outweighed the risks to date, FDA chief Rolando Enrique Domingo told a news conference.
The Philippines’ FDA has previously approved Pfizer and BioNTech’s coronavirus vaccine. Covid vaccines from Russia’s Gamaleya, China’s Sinovac Biotech and India’s Bharat Biotech are awaiting approval.
AstraZeneca’s vaccine was easy to transport and store and did not require ultra-cold temperatures, Domingo said. “It also has very good protection against severe Covid” he said.
Vietnam reports first community case in Months
Vietnam has reported its first cases of community transmission in months, after two infections were detected in the northern provinces of Hai Duong and Quang Ninh, just weeks before the Lunar New Year holiday.
While the new case numbers are very small, they have caused concern in Vietnam, which had gone 55 days without any local infections. The country has been praised for its strict quarantine and contact tracing efforts, which have allowed it to successfully limit the spread of the virus over the past year. Since the start of the pandemic, it has recorded 1,551 cases and 35 related deaths.
Contact tracing is underway in both of the affected provinces, while a village in Hai Duong has been locked down. One of the cases has been linked to the more infectious strain of the virus that originated in the UK.
“We have to make all efforts to locate the infected areas within 10 days to put down the outbreak,” Vu Duc Dam, head of the national Covid-19 task force said in a health ministry statement.
One of the patients, a 34-year-old factory worker, had been in contact with another worker who tested positive for Covid-19 after arriving in Japan last week, according to local media. The second case involves a man who works at the Van Don International Airport in Quang Ninh province, where many repatriation flights arrive.
The cases have been discovered just weeks ahead of the Lunar New Year, when gatherings are expected, and just as the ruling Communist Party meets in Hanoi for its five-yearly congress, an event attended by 1,600 delegates from across the country.
Mexico reports new daily record of almost 28,000 coronavirus cases
Mexico posted its highest one-day total of newly confirmed coronavirus cases Wednesday, with 27,944 infections, and a near-record 1,623 confirmed deaths.
AP: That brings the country’s total so far to just over 1.8 million cases and 153,639 deaths. However, Mexico has an extremely low rate of testing, and estimates of excess deaths suggest the real toll is over 195,000.
A group of over a dozen of the country’s top universities and medical institutes also recommended Wednesday that the use of face masks be made mandatory in Mexico, a move that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his advisers have long opposed.
The president himself seldom wears a mask, and over the weekend tested positive for Covid.
The president’s top pandemic adviser, Hugo López-Gatell, said the 67-year-old president was doing well and was active, and had almost no symptoms apart from an occasional low-grade fever.
Updated
Podcast: Why Brazilians are having to take the Covid crisis into their own hands
Tom Phillips, the Guardian’s Latin America correspondent, looks at the surge of infections in the Brazilian state of Amazonas that has left many hospitals without the most basic supplies and has prompted yet more protests against Bolsonaro:
Hospital incursions by Covid deniers putting lives at risk, say health leaders
Lives are being put at risk and the care of patients disrupted by a spate of hospital incursions from Covid-19 deniers whose online activity is channelling hatred against NHS staff, say healthcare and police chiefs.
In the latest example of a growing trend, a group of people were ejected by security from a Covid-19 ward last week as one of them filmed staff, claimed that the virus was a hoax and demanded that a seriously ill patient be sent home
“He will die if he is taken from from here,” a consultant tells the man on footage, which was later shared on social media. Following contact by the Guardian, Facebook took down footage and other shocking posts in which conspiracy theorists described NHS staff as “ventilator killers”.
The Guardian’s Ben Quinn and Denis Campbell report:
Police have raided a party at a bar on a popular resort island in southern Thailand and arrested 89 foreigners for violating coronavirus regulations, AP reports.
The Tuesday night raid on the Three Sixty Bar on Koh Phangan also netted 22 Thais, including one identified as the bar’s owner and another who sold drinks there, said police Col Suparerk Pankosol, superintendent of the provincial immigration office.
He said the gathering was illegal under a national state of emergency declared in March 2020 to combat the coronavirus.
Those arrested were from more than 10 countries including the US, Britain, Switzerland and Denmark, Suparerk said. Photos of the raid distributed by police showed a dark, crowded room with casually dressed partygoers, almost all wearing face masks:
Apple finished 2020 with its most profitable quarter ever as sales of its high end iPhones, tablets and laptops soared amid the pandemic.
The company announced that sales for the three months ending on 26 December 2020 totalled $111.4bn and it had made a profit of $28.7bn, 29% higher than the same period last year.
The holiday period is a crucial time for Apple, accounting for 30% of its sales, and 2020’s bumper quarter was boosted by strong sales of its latest iPhone:
And now for an important diversion from the news:
if british sitcoms were set during the pandemic pic.twitter.com/pF60iduWas
— Lucia Keskin (@chiwithaC) January 26, 2021
Japan faces Olympian task with slow start to Covid vaccinations
Japan was among the first countries to report cases of Covid-19 after the world was alerted to the virus in December 2019. But just over a year later, it is the last major economy to deploy a vaccine – a measure widely acknowledged as the best hope for a return to something resembling normal life.
The first round of jabs is not expected to begin in Japan until the end of February, months after the US and UK – which have recorded far higher death tolls and caseloads – began their vaccination programmes.
On explaining the apparent lack of urgency, officials have pointed to Japan’s relative success in averting a catastrophic outbreak, with 373,000 cases and 5,300 deaths recorded to date.
But getting the vaccine into arms has also been delayed by clinical trials involving Japanese people that must be completed before it can be approved, and a history of vaccine hesitancy among large sections of the public:
White House: 'great concern' over Covid origin 'misinformation' from China
The US wants a “robust and clear” international probe into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic in China, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, has said.
Speaking to reporters, she said it was “imperative we get to the bottom” of how the virus appeared and spread. She highlighted “great concern” over “misinformation” from “some sources in China”.
The coronavirus has killed more than two million people and infected at least 100m since first being detected about a year ago in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.
This month a team of experts from the World Health Organization arrived in Wuhan after repeated delays to investigate the virus’s origins:
Covid cases in England 'must fall faster to ease NHS pressure'
Cases of coronavirus have started to decline in England but must fall faster to relieve pressure on the NHS, scientists behind a Covid infection survey have warned.
Researchers at Imperial College London analysed more than 160,000 swabs taken between 6 and 22 January and found that while cases fell nationally in the past week the rate was not dropping swiftly enough to reduce strain on the health service.
“We are definitely heartened that we are now seeing what looks like a decline in the last week of our survey,” said Paul Elliott, professor of epidemiology and public health medicine at Imperial. “But we really need to get prevalence down more quickly because the pressure on the NHS is very extreme right now.”
An interim report from Imperial’s React-1 study, published last week, showed that coronavirus cases in England were stable and potentially even rising between 6 and 15 January.
But an updated report released on Thursday added swabs for the week until 22 January and showed cases finally starting to decline:
Mental health services in England do not have the capacity to cope with the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on children, Anne Longfield, the children’s commissioner for England, has warned.
Despite an expansion in the four years before the pandemic, the supply of treatment for child mental health problems was already falling well short of demand, with referrals rising 35%, but treatments only increasing by 4%, the watchdog said as she called for a “rocket boost” in funding:
Serena Williams full of praise for 'insane' quarantine measures before Australian Open
Former tennis world No 1 Serena Williams has praised Australia’s “insane” quarantine procedures ahead of the Australia Open.
In an interview with late night US TV host Stephen Colbert the 23-time grand slam champion said Australia was “doing it right” when it came to border controls.
“Yeah, it’s super, super strict but it’s really good. So Australia right now has, the last I heard, they had zero cases of Covid,” she said, eliciting a “wow” from Colbert.
“Unbelievable, right? The whole country. So that is really amazing.
“So when we come here in Australia, everyone has to quarantine in a room for 14 days and it’s insane and it’s super intense but it’s super good because after that you can have a new normal like we were used to last year this time in the United States.”
Williams is quarantining in Adelaide ahead of the year’s first grand slam, which begins in Melbourne on 8 February. She is one of 1,200 people isolating for two weeks in a number of hotels in order to create a “bubble” and allow the tournament to go ahead, notionally without the risk of an outbreak.
“It’s definitely hard with the three-year-old to be in the hotel all day, but it’s worth it because you want everyone to be safe at the end of the day,” she said.
Williams travelled to Australia with her daughter Olympia:
New Zealand has been ranked the best performer in managing Covid-19 while Australia is ranked eighth, according to an index published by the Lowy Institute today.
The Lowy Institute’s new interactive feature - the Covid Performance Index - looks at how countries and territories have performed in responding to the pandemic.
It’s based on crunching data for the 36 weeks that followed every country’s hundredth confirmed case of Covid-19, based on indicators such as confirmed cases, confirmed deaths, confirmed cases per million people, confirmed deaths per million people, confirmed cases as a proportion of tests, and tests per thousand people.
Of the nearly 100 jurisdictions with publicly available and comparable data in these categories, New Zealand comes out in top place. It’s followed by Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, Cyprus, Rwanda, Iceland and Australia.
The researchers say China was not included in the rankings due to a lack of publicly available data on testing, but South Korea is ranked 20th, Japan 45th, the United Kingdom 66th, Indonesia 85th and the United States 94th, with Brazil in last place at 98th.
“Although the coronavirus outbreak started in China, countries in the Asia-Pacific, on average, proved the most successful at containing the pandemic,” the interactive says. “By contrast, the rapid spread of Covid-19 along the main arteries of globalisation quickly overwhelmed first Europe and then the United States.”
Researchers Alyssa Leng and Hervé Lemahieu say smaller countries with populations of fewer than 10 million people “proved more agile than the majority of their larger counterparts in handling the health emergency for most of 2020” - but development levels or differences in political systems “had less of an impact on outcomes than often assumed or publicised”.
You can explore the interactive, and find out more about how they crunched the data, here.
New Zealand sets up extra Covid test centres as quarantine hotel at heart of outbreak closes
Extra Covid testing centres have been set up overnight in Auckland as health officials raced to trace contacts of two fresh cases in New Zealand and closed down the quarantine hotel believed to be at the centre of this week’s outbreak.
One man waiting in line in Orewa said he had moved 20 metres in 90 minutes but early queues appeared to ease by the middle of the day. Additional health staff have also been brought in from other regions.
Auckland mayor Phil Goff said the viability of major events coming up was now in doubt. The nation’s Waitangi events – the annual celebration of the treaty between Māori and Britain – are due to begin next week:
Updated
Madrid health authorities pause vaccinations amid supply issues
Authorities in the Madrid region of Spain said Wednesday they have suspended new vaccinations against the coronavirus for at least two weeks because of a shortage of jabs, while another region, Catalonia, warned its supply was running out, AFP reports.
Despite securing deals for vaccine supplies early on, many European Union countries are facing delays in shipments of both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, the only ones approved for use in the 27-nation bloc so far.
The deputy head of Madrid’s regional government, Ignacio Aguado, said the region was stopping new vaccinations so that existing stocks could be used for people waiting for their second dose.
“We don’t know what will happen after the following week, we hope the flow will return to normal and the number of doses arriving will increase,” he told a news conference.
In a tweet, Aguado said new vaccinations would be suspended for “at least the next two weeks” and urged Spain’s health ministry to “move heaven and earth” to procure more doses.
Hemos tenido que suspender el suministro de nuevas primeras dosis, al menos, durante las dos próximas semanas por falta de vacunas.
— Ignacio Aguado (@ignacioaguado) January 27, 2021
Le pido a la ministra Darias que mueva tierra, mar y aire para conseguir más. A este ritmo, en julio solo el 10% de los madrileños estará vacunado. pic.twitter.com/gDh7R2vSxw
He warned that, at the current pace of vaccination, only 10 percent of the population of the Madrid region will be inoculated by the end of July, short of the target of 70 percent set by Spain’s national government and by the EU.
Meanwhile, Catalonia’s public health chief Josep Argimon warned that the northeastern region will likely use up all of its 30,000 vaccine doses this week and its “refrigerators will be empty”.
Spain has administered just over 76 percent of the 1.73 million vaccines it received as part of the EU’s vaccination plan, according to health ministry figures.
Spain has been hard-hit by the pandemic, recording more than 57,000 deaths from nearly 2.7 million cases so far.
WHO says Covid 'war' can be won
Humanity is not losing the war against the Covid-19 pandemic and will eventually conquer the virus, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.
AFP: As daily global deaths from the disease topped 18,000 for the first time and with new variants spreading rapidly around the globe, Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on Covid-19, said the mutations did not imply defeat.
“Does it mean we’re losing this war? No,” she told a WHO live social media event.
“We are in the fight of our lives. We have to make sure that we’re not fighting each other; that we’re fighting the virus... the variants included.
“We can conquer this virus - and we will conquer this virus.”
White House predicts 90,000 more deaths by March
The Biden administration launched its new level-with-America health briefings Wednesday with a projection that as many as 90,000 more in the US will die from the coronavirus in the next four weeks — a sobering warning as the government strains to improve delivery and injection of vaccines, reports the Associated Press.
“I know this is not news we all want to hear, but this is something we must say so we are all aware,” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “If we are united in action we can turn things around.”
Walensky said her agency’s latest forecast indicates the US will reach between 479,000 and 514,000 deaths by 20 February.
The new briefings, beginning just a week into Biden’s tenure, are meant as an explicit rejection of President Donald Trump’s approach to the coronavirus outbreak.
Summary
Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic with me, Helen Sullivan.
I’ll be bringing you the latest for the next few hours. If you have questions, comments or news, let me know on Twitter @helenrsullivan.
As the World Health Organization said humanity was not losing the war against the Covid-19 pandemic and would eventually conquer the virus, the Biden administration launched its new level-with-America health briefings Wednesday with a projection that as many as 90,000 more in the US will die from the coronavirus in the next four weeks – a sobering warning as the government strains to improve delivery and injection of vaccines.
Here are the other key developments from the last few hours:
- British home secretary Priti Patel has outlined new rules for tighter border controls amid unprecedented pressure on the UK health service and over 100,000 Covid-19 deaths. The home secretary has said that those who want to leave will need to make a written declaration explaining why they need to travel.
- The Czech health ministry has recommended halting new Covid-19 vaccinations for the next two weeks to prioritise giving second doses due to supply delays.
- Pakistan will launch its Covid-19 vaccination programme next week, starting with frontline health workers, a government minister said on Wednesday. In the past 24 hours, the country has reported 1,563 new infections and 74 deaths.
- The German government has said that they expect to grow its economy by 3% this year, less than previously forecast, as the ongoing pandemic slows economic recovery.
- At a popular resort in Thailand, officials arrested 89 foreigners for violating coronavirus regulations at a party in a bar. Thailand has barred nearly all tourists from entering the country since last April.
- The UK recorded a further 1,725 deaths, up from 1,631 the day before, and a further 25,308 cases of the disease. This is the second-highest daily death toll since the pandemic started, with the highest daily number of deaths recorded on 20 January, 1,820.
- As the pandemic swept across Mexico, deaths increased by nearly 37% between January and August. Covid-19 was the second-leading cause of death nationwide during the eight months, after heart disease.
- The French Cannes 2021 film festival will take place between 6 July and 17 July instead of 11-22 May as initially planned, organisers said in a statement on Wednesday.
- Norway is set to close its borders to all but essential visitors from midnight on Friday local time.
- Pfizer’s production plant in Puurs, Belgium, have said that their back on schedule to produce the vaccine. Last week and the start of this week, dose production was 8% lower than initially expected, Le Soir reports.
- On holocaust memorial day, nearly 60 survivors received their Covid-19 vaccination in Bratislava, Slovakia.
- South Africa is expecting its first 1m Covid-19 doses to arrive on Monday, February 1, the health ministers Zweli Mkhize has said.
- Vaccinations in Israel will now be available for all citizens aged 35 and up beginning on Thursday, the health ministry said.
Updated
