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Summary
Here’s a quick recap of the latest coronavirus developments over the last few hours.
- Angela Merkel suggested Germany’s hard lockdown may last a further eight to 10 weeks. Health officials are particularly concerned about the spread of the new, far more contagious variant from the UK, which is thought to have been in Germany for several weeks.
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Portuguese president tests negative after a Covid positive test. Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa has now tested negative for coronavirus after a positive test saw him cancel all public engagements two weeks before a presidential election.
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Chinese coronavirus vaccine shows 50% efficacy in Brazil. The Chinese-developed Coronavac Covid-19 vaccine has demonstrated a 50% efficacy following tests in Brazil.
- French coronavirus cases up 19,753 over 24 hours. France reported 19,753 new coronavirus infections over the past 24 hours on Tuesday, while the number of Covid-19 patients in intensive care units continued to rise.
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Greece urges EU to adopt vaccine certificate for travel. Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis urged the EU to adopt a “standardised” vaccination certificate to boost travel this year.
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Dutch extend coronavirus curbs until 9 February. The Netherlands is extending coronavirus restrictions until 9 February as infections are still high and the government is “very concerned” about the UK variant of the disease, prime minister Mark Rutte said.
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UK private Covid test companies accused of failing to deliver. Private companies have been accused of cashing in on the coronavirus pandemic by offering expensive Covid tests to customers with urgent travel plans, then failing to deliver.
Argentina has successfully passed clinical trials for a hyperimmune serum to combat Covid-19 developed with antibodies from horses, and its distribution will begin over the next few days, the company involved in the studies said.
The serum, to be prescribed at hospitals and other medical facilities, is produced by Argentine biotechnology company Inmunova. “This week it will be ready for distribution,” an Inmunova spokeswoman told Reuters.
The anti-Covid-19 serum has already completed its last phase of clinical studies, she said.
“We are working at the moment with a capacity in the plant of about 60,000 vials per month, that implies between 12 and 15,000 treatments because the treatment is based on the weight of the patient so it varies between 4, 5 or 6 vials per patient” Linus Spatz, director of Inmunova, told media.
“After supplying Argentina, we are in contact with several Latin American countries and we are even thinking about increasing capacity further. We believe that in March we will be at 1,000,000 vials per month,” he added.
According to the latest official data, Argentina has recorded 1,730,921 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 44,654 deaths.
The head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has approved an order expanding coronavirus testing requirements for nearly all international air travellers starting 26 January, Reuters has reported.
The new rules will require all US-bound passengers age 2 and over to get negative Covid-19 test results within three calendar days of travel.
The CDC will consider temporary waivers from testing requirements for travellers from some countries with little or no testing capacity, the sources said.
Ireland said from Saturday all arriving travellers will have to show a negative coronavirus test as the country’s infection rate is now the highest in the world.
In the first such blanket restrictions, the Irish government said in a statement all travellers will need to show a negative test result taken within the last 72 hours.
Currently this only applies to travellers from the United Kingdom and South Africa, where new highly infectious strains have been detected.
Travellers from the UK and South Africa will still have to quarantine for 14 days on arrival, even after showing a negative test result.
Ireland, a country of five million, had the lowest infection rate in the European Union in December but the number of cases has soared since a dramatic relaxation of restrictions over the festive period.
The number of confirmed cases rose from just over 93,000 cases on 1 January to more than 150,000 on Monday. The number of cases per million of population - 1,288 - is the highest in the world, according to data compiled by the University of Oxford.
On Tuesday, Switzerland announced a quarantine on Irish travellers as World Health Organization emergencies director Michael Ryan said the nation has “one of the most acute increases in disease incidence of any country”.
Tunisia has announced a four-day coronavirus lockdown starting later this week in the face of a “very dangerous” situation in the North African country as infections rise.
The measures, which include a curfew between 4pm - brought forward from the existing 8pm curfew - and 6am, will be imposed from Thursday, in the face of mass protests on the 10th anniversary of the toppling of dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
Tunisia is where the Arab Spring started and has also been its relative success story. But celebrations will be muted, as the revolutionary optimism of the pro-democracy movement that deposed Ben Ali has given way to hopelessness among the one third of young people without a job.
The pandemic has exacerbated economic and social tensions in the country, with Tunisia facing a steep rise in infections recently after recording about 50 deaths in the first wave of the pandemic.
The recent rise in infections has seen several thousand new cases and dozens of new deaths reported each day, with a current official total of 5,284 deaths and 162,350 cases.
Nissaf Ben Alaya, director of the national observatory of new and emerging diseases, which recommended the measures, warned “the situation is very dangerous... and exceeds the capacity to care for the sick”.
Hospital officials have warned of a lack of intensive care beds, despite the establishment of makeshift hospitals.
Health minister Faouzi Mehdi said classes in schools, colleges and faculties would be suspended from 13 to 24 January.
All cultural and other events will be prohibited during the lockdown, he added, while also calling for people to work from home “as much as possible”.
The minister attributed the rise in infections to a “lack of respect for health measures”.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it had administered 9,327,138 first doses of Covid-19 vaccines in the country as of Tuesday morning and distributed 27,696,150 doses.
A total of 4,385,175 vaccine doses were distributed for use in long-term care facilities and 951,774 people in the facilities got their first dose, the agency said.
US federal officials have agreed to send states additional coronavirus vaccine doses requested by several governors, as the country tries to increase the pace of inoculations, with the daily Covid-19 death toll hovering at 3,200.
Officials also recommended states broaden vaccination eligibility to people as young as 65 or those who have other chronic health conditions that make them vulnerable to severe Covid-19, drawing a mixed reaction from states that have tailored their inoculation priorities differently.
Releasing additional vaccine doses was called for last week by president-elect Joe Biden’s spokesman and nine Democratic governors, including Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer and the New York governor, Andrew Cuomo.
“Michigan and states across the country remain ready to get more shots in arms, which is why the Trump administration’s decision to grant our request and release millions of doses of the vaccine is so crucial,” Whitmer said in a statement.
Whitmer, who had backed the lower vaccination age, also said she was still awaiting a reply from the administration to her request to allow Michigan to purchase 100,000 vaccine doses directly from its manufacturer, Pfizer.
The US Food and Drug Administration has authorised the vaccine from Pfizer and partner BioNTech, and a second vaccine from Moderna, for emergency use.
The US health and human services secretary, Alex Azar, said on Tuesday the administration would release vaccine doses it was holding back for second shots, and called on states to offer them to all Americans over the age of 65 or with chronic health conditions.
The plan relies on enough manufacturing capacity to ensure all those who got a first vaccine dose get their second shot on schedule: either three or four weeks later depending on which vaccine they received.
Azar also said the pace of inoculations in the US has risen to 700,000 shots per day and is expected to rise to 1 million per day within a week to 10 days.
Cuomo said he would begrudgingly agree to widen vaccination eligibility to include people as young as 65 and those with pre-existing conditions, even though he personally opposes it. “The policy and the intelligence of the federal system eludes me,” Cuomo told a news briefing.
Cuomo said including people who are immunocompromised, a poorly defined category he said could include smokers and the obese, could have more than 7 million of New York state’s 19 million residents vying for the 300,000 doses received each week by the state.
Cuomo initially targeted inoculations to healthcare workers and nursing home residents. Late last week, he agreed to include several groups of essential workers and people over the age of 75.
One encouraging sign over the past week is that the number of Covid-19 patients requiring hospitalisation has levelled off, at least temporarily, with 129,105 patients reported on Monday, according to a Reuters tally.
Health officials have expressed concern the effects of virus-spreading holiday gatherings have not yet been fully felt. Another potential super-spreader event erupted on Monday night in Tuscaloosa, as thousands of University of Alabama football fans jammed the streets to celebrate the team’s win over Ohio State University to capture its 18th national title.
In Washington, two US lawmakers have tested positive for the virus so far after being locked down for hours with other colleagues, including Republicans who refused to wear face masks, to avoid the mob that attacked the US Capitol last Wednesday.
Updated
A judge has ordered the US Department of Justice to delay the executions of two condemned murderers until at least 16 March in order to allow them to recover from Covid-19.
The two inmates, Cory Johnson and Dustin Higgs, had been scheduled to be executed on Thursday and Friday at a prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Updated
The French health ministry has reported 19,753 new coronavirus infections over the past 24 hours, while the number of Covid-19 patients in intensive care units continues to rise.
These latest figures will be discussed at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday by the government which is deciding whether to impose a third national lockdown or extend a 6pm curfew, now enforced in some areas, to all of France.
Jean-François Delfraissy, head of the scientific council advising the government on the epidemic, told TF1 Television that France will likely have to consider more restrictions on people’s movements soon to limit the spread of the UK and South African variants of the coronavirus.
The number of people treated in intensive care units for the disease was up by 12 over 24 hours to 2,688. The total number of people treated for the disease in hospitals stood at 24,737.
France’s cumulative total of cases stands at 2,806,590. The Covid-19 death toll was up by 362 in hospitals over 24 hours to 68,802, the seventh-highest in the world.
A list published on Tuesday evening showed nearly 190,000 people have been vaccinated, including more than 40,000 in the Paris region.
Updated
The US counterintelligence chief has said he is worried about threats from China and Russia to the coronavirus vaccine supply chain.
Bill Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, made the comments at a Washington Post live event.
Updated
Spectators will not be allowed at the 2021 Alpine Skiing World Championships, which to be held next month in Cortina d’Ampezzo, due to coronavirus restrictions, Italy’s sports minister has said.
“The government’s scientific committee considers the participation of spectators to be too risky,” said Vincenzo Spadafora.
Italy has registered 79,819 Covid-19 deaths, the second-highest toll in Europe and the sixth-highest in the world.
Cortina d’Ampezzo, located in the Dolomites, will also host the 2026 Winter Olympics, together with the northern Italian city of Milan.
Updated
Ontario has declared an emergency after the latest modelling put Canada’s most populous province on track to have more than 20,000 new Covid-19 cases a day by the middle of February, a nearly tenfold increase from the current count.
Ontario, which is battling a coronavirus surge that has swamped its hospitals and triggered a province-wide lockdown, could also see roughly 1,500 more deaths in its care homes by mid-February under a worst-case scenario, according to modelling from experts advising the government.
New restrictions that take effect on 14 January mandate residents must stay at home except for essential activity, while outdoor gatherings will be limited to five people, and non-essential construction work will be restricted.
“I know the stay at home order is a drastic measure, one we don’t take lightly. Everyone must stay home to stay lives,” said the Ontario premier, Doug Ford. “Enforcement and inspections will increase.”
Canada began targeted vaccinations in December, with current efforts focused on healthcare workers and residents of care homes.
The federal government has ordered an additional 20m doses of the coronavirus vaccine from Pfizer/BioNTech, the prime minister, Justin Trudeau,told reporters on Tuesday. That would take the total number of doses to be delivered this year in Canada to 80m.
Ontario, the country’s economic engine, has been under lockdown since 26 December, with non-essential businesses shuttered and schools closed.
Yet the daily number of Covid-19 cases has risen above 3,500 on average over the past seven days. On Tuesday, Ontario reported 2,903 new Covid-19 cases.
Under the worst-case scenario, with 7% case growth, there would be 40,000 new cases daily by mid-February, while the best-case scenario, with 1% growth, would result in 5,000 new cases every day, Ontario’s data showed. Case growth has recently been more than 7% on the worst days, the data showed.
“We will have to confront choices that no doctor ever wants to make and no family ever wants to hear,” said Dr Steini Brown, head of Ontario’s case modelling. “People will die from the virus itself and from the overloaded health system that is unable to respond to their needs.”
Brown warned the new Covid-19 variant from Britain was already in Ontario, and could decrease the doubling time of cases – or how long it takes for case counts to double, currently 30 to 40 days – to 10 days.
Last week Quebec, the Canadian province worst affected by Covid-19, became the first in the country to introduce a curfew to limit the spread.
Updated
France has reported 19,753 new coronavirus infections over the past 24 hours.
The Covid-19 death toll was up by 362 over 24 hours at 68,802, the seventh-highest in the world.
The country’s cumulative total of cases stands at 2,806,590.
The number of people hospitalised for the disease stood at 8,805 over the last seven days, including 1,350 in intensive care units.
Updated
Hi everyone, this is Jessica Murray, taking over the blog for the next few hours - feel free to drop me a message with any comments or questions.
Email: jessica.murray@theguardian.com
Twitter: @journojess_
Summary
Here is a summary of the latest developments:
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Ukraine asked EU countries for help procuring vaccines. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, asked for assisstance from the EU, having resisted asking Russia for help. The pandemic has killed more than 20,000 people in Ukraine, one of Europe’s poorest countries, and plunged it into recession last year.
- Sweden said it has registered 17,395 new cases since Friday. The news took the total to more than 500,000 cases since the start of the pandemic. Health agency statistics show the country of 10 million inhabitants registered 234 new deaths, taking the total to 9,667.
- Switzerland approved the Moderna vaccine, the second shot to be authorised in the country. The green light cleared the way for the country to get up to 1.5m doses from the firms through February. The Swiss drug regulator Swissmedic’s decision comes days after the European Medicines Agency (EMA) approved Moderna’s vaccine.
- Angela Merkel suggested Germany’s hard lockdown may last a further eight to 10 weeks. Health officials are particularly concerned about the spread of the new, far more contagious variant from the UK, which is thought to have been in Germany for several weeks.
- Israel may include children over the age of 12 in groups being vaccinated. A health official said the step could be taken within the next two months if research shows it is safe. Israel says it aims to have administered one or both shots of a vaccine to 5 million of its 9 million citizens and reopen the economy by mid-March.
Updated
The head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is expected to sign an order expanding testing requirements for all international air travellers beyond the UK, sources briefed on the matter have told Reuters.
The new rules are set to take effect two weeks from the day they are signed, which would be 26 January.
The CDC has been urgently pressing for an expansion of the requirements with the Trump administration for weeks. One remaining issue is how to address some countries that have limited testing capacity and how the CDC would address travel to those countries, the sources said.
A vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac showed “general efficacy” of 50.4% in a late-stage trial in Brazil, researchers have said; barely enough for regulatory approval and far short of earlier indications.
The latest results are a major disappointment for Brazil, as the Chinese vaccine is one of two that the federal government has lined up to begin immunisation during the second wave of the world’s second-deadliest outbreak.
The letdown after a more promising partial data disclosure last week may also contribute to criticism that vaccines developed by Chinese manufacturers are not subject to the same public scrutiny as US and European alternatives.
Indonesia will start a mass vaccination campaign on Wednesday, with the president, Joko Widodo, to receive the first shot. The ambitious vaccination drive is being launched amid record deaths in one of Asia’s most stubborn epidemics.
The campaign aims to inoculate 181.5 million people, the first of whom will receive the CoronaVac vaccine from China’s Sinovac Biotech, which Indonesia authorised for emergency use on Monday, with an efficacy rate of 65.3%.
The president, who is known as Jokowi, will be given a CoronaVac shot on Wednesday morning, his office said, in a sign of the priority placed on immunisation in a country that has done far less than its south-east Asian neighbours to track and contain the virus.
The minster of health, Budi Gunadi Sadikin, told parliament on Tuesday that nearly 1.5 million medical workers would be inoculated by February, followed by public servants and the general population within 15 months.
Updated
Canada has ordered an additional 20m doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, its prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has said, after provinces complained about inadequate supplies.
Trudeau told reporters Ottawa now had agreements with both Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna for a total of 80m doses of their vaccines, to be delivered this year.
Canada, which had initially ordered 20m doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine with an option for 56m more, now has a firm deal for 40m doses of the two-shot vaccines.
The country’s 10 provinces, which have responsibility for administering the vaccines, say supplies are being delivered far too slowly.
Trudeau said that, between April and June, Canada would have enough doses for 20 million people. Canada’s population is just over 38 million.
Trudeau also said he was extending an existing ban on non-essential travel between Canada and the United States until 21 February. The measures, which do not apply to trade flows, were first imposed last March and have been regularly rolled over.
Updated
Three US lawmakers who had to shelter for safety during the US Capitol riot have tested positive for Covid-19.
Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington state, announced her positive result early on Tuesday, while chastising Republican colleagues who refused to wear masks while they waited in a secured room for more than five hours.
The New Jersey representative Bonnie Watson Coleman, also a Democrat, said she decided to get tested because of the possibility of exposure and tested positive. She also tweeted that she was receiving monoclonal antibody treatment – which is still being investigated – on the advice of her doctor. Coleman, 75, is a cancer survivor.
Later on Tuesday, Brad Schneider, another Democrat, from Illinois, announced he too had tested positive.
Read more here:
Spain has extended for a further two weeks a ban on people entering from the UK by air or sea because of concerns over the new strain of the coronavirus, AFP reports.
The entry restriction, which does not apply to Spanish nationals and those with legal residency in Spain, will remain in effect until 2 February, the Spanish government said in a statement.
Like most European nations, Spain imposed the entry restrictions on 22 December following the discovery in Britain of a new strain of the coronavirus thought to be more contagious. The restriction, initially put in place for two weeks, has already been renewed once for a similar period.
The government said it had decided to extend it again because of “some uncertainties over the reach of the new strain” of the coronavirus, the statement said. “The epidemiological situation in the United Kingdom has progressively worsened.”
At the same time there has been an increase in Spain in cases “linked to the new strain,” the statement added.
About 70 cases of the variant have been detected in Spain, according to the latest health ministry figures.
Updated
The Italian health ministry has been criticised after a draft of the country’s new pandemic plan revealed medics would be permitted to choose which patients receive life-saving care.
This is the first time Italy has updated its pandemic plan since 2006. The absence of an adequate plan is thought to have contributed to Italy’s coronavirus death toll of more than 79,000.
The draft copy of the pandemic plan for 2021-23, seen by the Guardian, stipulates that while health workers are obliged to provide the best and most appropriate care to patients, there are circumstances that may make it necessary to prioritise who to try to save.
Page 25 of the plan reads: “The imbalance between needs and available resources may make it necessary to adopt criteria for triage in access to therapies,” and therefore “scarce resources could be allocated in order to provide necessary preferential treatment to those patients who are most likely to benefit”.
Read more here:
A Russian woman who was admitted to hospital heavily pregnant and with potentially fatal levels of Covid lung damage was reunited with her newborn baby after spending 51 days on a ventilator, Reuters reports.
Oksana Shelomentseva was hospitalised in the Siberian city of Irkutsk in the 32nd week of her pregnancy, having had a high fever for three days. A scan showed catastrophic lung damage and that her unborn baby was not receiving enough oxygen.
“My temperature rose to 38C and I battled with it for three days, but it became clear I could not do that independently,” Shelomentseva said.
Doctors immediately performed a Caesarean section to deliver her baby girl Liza, but still feared for the recovery of the mother, who went on to spend almost two months on a ventilator to help her breathe.
“It was a very serious case,” said Galina Shkandriy, the head of the anaesthesiology and intensive care department at the hospital where Shelomentseva was treated. The RIA news agency cited her as saying.
The entire ward is to thank for the patient recovering from 100% lung damage. When we consulted doctors from around the city, they all said ‘you probably won’t be able to do anything because with those indicators, people don’t survive.’
Oksana spent 51 days in intensive care in a most serious condition. We were able to save her from the most severe lung damage and multiple organ failure.
Shelomentseva was discharged on Monday and returned home to her husband and three children, including baby Liza.
Updated
The French government is to provide daily updates on the number of people it has vaccinated after criticism of the slow pace of its jab programme compared with other European countries.
Health minister Olivier Véran told parliament on Tuesday his ministry would publish a detailed table with the number of people vaccinated per region every evening, Reuters reports.
La vaccination, qu’elle se fasse en EHPAD, à l’hôpital ou demain dans les centres de vaccination, est un acte simple.
— Olivier Véran (@olivierveran) January 12, 2021
Certains se plaisent à inventer des procédures qui n’ont jamais existé autre part que dans les esprits chagrins, prompts à la polémique.@AssembleeNat pic.twitter.com/EcJo69vq1y
A first list was published on Monday evening, showing that more than 138,000 people have been vaccinated to date, including more than 30,000 in the Paris region.
That number is well below the more than 1mn vaccine doses available in France, but Véran said the government would stick to its policy of prioritising the most vulnerable people, even if that meant a slower pace, rather than opting for mass vaccination of all citizens.
For now, France is giving priority to residents of retirement homes, but early January it widened that to health staff over 50 or with existing illnesses.
Veran said the government was also drawing up plans to make vaccines available to people under 75 who suffer from certain illnesses – with a target of having a total of 1 million people vaccinated by the end of January.
He said:
We cannot vaccinate the entire population in one go. Vaccines need to be produced and distributed first.
Veran said that last week, France had 1,080,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine in stock and was being supplied with 500,000 more doses per week, which will increase to 1 million per week.
On Monday, France had received the first 50,000 Moderna vaccine doses, which will be deployed in areas which face a strong resurgence of the epidemic.
Updated
Italy has announced another 14,242 new cases and 612 new deaths from coronavirus. Both figures mark a rise on that tallies announced on Monday, when 12,532 new cases and 448 more deaths were reported.
Coronavirus, il bollettino di oggi 12 gennaio: 14,242 nuovi casi e 616 morti https://t.co/feQ2fIG9op
— Repubblica (@repubblica) January 12, 2021
In Europe, Italy is the second worst hit country by the pandemic. Before today’s announcement it had recorded 79,203 deaths, compared to the UK with 82,096, according to the tally run by Johns Hopkins University.
Updated
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) did not provide details on which documents or data were made available online, but said necessary action was being taken by law enforcement authorities.
Hacking attempts against healthcare and medical organisations have intensified during the pandemic as attackers ranging from state-backed spies to cyber criminals hunt for valuable information.
The agency continues to fully support the criminal investigation into the data breach and to notify any additional entities and individuals whose documents and personal data may have been subject to unauthorised access.
The watchdog has not so far named the third parties who were affected, but Pfizer and BioNTech announced soon after the EMA’s initial disclosure that documents relating to their vaccine were accessed in the incident.
Some Covid-related documents and data that were accessed in a cyber attack have been leaked on the internet, Europe’s medicines regulator has said. It did not provide details on which documents or data were made available online, but said necessary action was being taken by law enforcement authorities.
Sweden has registered 17,395 new cases since Friday, taking the total to more than 500,000 cases since the start of the pandemic, as hospitals struggled to cope with a rampant second wave, Health Agency statistics show.
The statistics showed that 17 December was the deadliest day since the start of the pandemic with 116 deaths, surpassing a previous peak of 115 daily deaths set in April.
More people are being treated at hospitals in Sweden now than at any time during the pandemic. While Sweden still has around 20% spare capacity at intensive care units, there are worries the spread will accelerate again as people return to work and schools after the holidays.
Anders Tegnell, the chief epidemiologist, told a news conference:
It’s quite obvious that the healthcare system is as strained now (as during the spring). We are near the limit for what the healthcare system can handle.
The country of 10 million inhabitants registered 234 new deaths since Friday, taking the total to 9,667. The deaths registered have occurred over several days and weeks with many from the Christmas period being registered with a significant delay.
The second wave has also affected how Swedes perceive authorities’ handling of the crisis. In December, 47% said they had relatively high or high confidence in the government’s and agencies’ actions; down from 52% in the previous month.
Sweden’s death rate per capita is several times higher than that of its Nordic neighbours but lower than several European countries that opted for lockdowns.
More than 70m doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech were produced by the end of 2020, the former’s chief executive Albert Bourla has said.
At the end of the last week of 2020, for example, we had already manufactured more than 70m doses and we had released from there – because there’s a quality control that you need to release – around 50m doses. Then we manufactured more the first week of January.
Right now, I think we’ve released 33m doses. And we have, let’s say, half of what we have manufactured sitting on the shelves.
BioNTech said on Monday the companies were boosted the 2021 delivery target for their vaccine to 2bn doses, up from 1.3bn previously, as they add new production lines and as more doses can be extracted per vial.
Mexico aims to conclude the vaccination of health workers by the end of January, the country’s president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has said.
The deputy health minister Hugo Lopez-Gatell added that health authorities will move quickly to authorise the use of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine. He said:
The president has instructed us to proceed speedily on finalising the process of sanitary approval.
Lopez-Gatell, Mexico’s coronavirus czar, said national health regulator Coferis would very soon make its decision on approving emergency use of the Sputnik vaccine and that the country is considering acquiring 24m doses.
The deputy minister also noted that Mexico could begin receiving its first batches of a vaccine made by Chinese company CanSino Biologics in February. The president said his government aimed to conclude the vaccination of the country’s health workers by the end of January.
The Dutch government is expected to announce a three-week extension of lockdown measures on Tuesday, national broadcaster NOS reported. The prime minister Mark Rutte was scheduled to announce the latest social curbs to fight the pandemic.
Citing government sources, NOS said the lockdown would be lengthened through the first week of February instead of being lifted on 19 January.
Infections in the Netherlands declined by 12% in the week through Tuesday, to 49,398, Dutch health authorities said, marking the second consecutive week in which cases fell. The National Institute for Public Health said:
The falling numbers are the first effect of the lockdown that went into effect on 15 December.
All schools and many stores across the country were shut in mid-December, following the closure of all bars and restaurants two months earlier.
Although the infection rate has dropped, the number of new daily cases remains too high to consider easing restrictions, Rutte said last week. His cabinet had considered imposing an evening curfew, NOS reported, but decided against it because of opposition from regional officials.
Last Wednesday, a Dutch nurse became the first person in the Netherlands to receive a shot as the European Union’s last national vaccination programme got off to a late start.
Ukraine pleads for more vaccine help from EU
The Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has asked European Union countries for more help in procuring vaccines after his government resisted turning to Russia for assistance.
The pandemic has killed more than 20,000 Ukrainians and plunged one of Europe’s poorest countries into recession last year.
Ukraine has agreed to buy some vaccines from China and also expects to secure some under the global Covax programme for poorer countries.
But it has dismissed calls from a Russian-leaning opposition leader to buy vaccines from Russia. The neighbours are estranged over Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its support for rebels in eastern Ukraine. During a televised statement while hosting the Moldovan president Maia Sandu in Kyiv, Zelenskiy said:
Today, for all countries of the Eastern Partnership initiative, in particular Ukraine and Moldova, the issue of obtaining vaccines is important. The countries of the Eastern Partnership should be given increased attention by the EU states in matters of joint procurement procedures and accelerating the supply of vaccines.
A week ago, 13 of the EU’s 27 member states jointly urged the bloc’s executive, the EU commission, to do more to help combat the coronavirus in the bloc’s Balkan neighbours and in Ukraine.
Sandu came to power in November by defeating Moldova’s Moscow-backed incumbent president Igor Dodon and has promised closer cooperation with the EU.
Last month, while visiting Chisinau, the Romanian president Klaus Iohannis promised to donate 200,000 doses of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to Moldova as a gesture of solidarity following Sandu’s election.
Updated
India’s Bharat Biotech has signed an agreement with a medicine distributor to supply its vaccine to Brazil, it has said, even as the shot’s emergency use approval in its home country has faced criticism.
India’s drug regulator has given emergency use approval to Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin, as well as to the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, known as Covishield in India, which is being produced by the Serum Institute of India.
But health experts and opposition lawmakers have criticised approval of Covaxin due to a lack of efficacy data, which the manufacturer is still conducting.
Bharat Biotech said it has signed an agreement with a Brazil-based pharmaceutical seller, Precisa Medicamentos, to supply Covaxin. The Indian company said:
It is understood between both parties that supplies of Covaxin (are) to be prioritised for the public market, through a direct procurement by the government of Brazil.
Criticism of India’s approval of the vaccine has grown after news that a regulatory panel approved the shot just one day after asking the vaccine maker for more evidence it would work.
Bharat Biotech, which developed Covaxin with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), said supplies to the private market would depend on authorisation from the Brazilian regulatory authority.
Brazil has registered more than 8m cases since the pandemic began, while the official death toll has risen over 203,000, the world’s second-deadliest coronavirus outbreak.
Brazil has signed agreements to receive other vaccines. Authorities there are facing growing pressure to speed up the vaccine rollout, which is lagging regional peers. Mexico, Chile and Argentina have already begun immunisations.
Austria has identified a new cluster of 17 cases; a mainly British group on a ski teacher training course, despite the country being on lockdown and having banned flights from the UK over fears of a new coronavirus variant, authorities have said.
The Alpine province of Tyrol, which suffered Austria’s worst outbreak to date at the ski resort of Ischgl, said the cluster in the town of Jochberg was suspected to be of the new, more infectious variant first pinpointed in the UK in September that has spread to dozens of countries.
The fact such a training course was allowed to happen despite lockdown restrictions, which include closing schools to all but daycare, stunned many Austrians. Florian Klenk, the editor of the leftwing weekly Falter, said:
Workers from eastern Europe have not been allowed to go home for weeks – or only under the strictest conditions – but ski teachers from around Europe are allowed to come to Tyrol for training and get infected? This just beggars belief.
The cluster touches on many areas of life that have been restricted to contain the contagion.
Ski resorts were allowed to open as of Christmas Eve but hotels remain closed to all but business travel, meaning only people who live close enough to a resort can go, for the day.
Updated
Lithuania’s parliament has held its first sitting online as part of efforts to curb a sharp increase in infections.
The Baltic nation of 2.8 million people had the highest rate of infections in the European Union in the two weeks ending on Sunday, with 1,199 cases per 100,000 people, data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control showed.
Only the parliamentary speaker Viktorija Cmilyte-Nielsen and her staff were physically present in the chamber, while lawmakers all connected to the proceedings via video chat from their offices elsewhere in the building or from home. Cmilyte-Nielsen, who has had the virus herself, said:
It was important, as members of parliament continued to fall ill, to create conditions for the parliament to continue working.
Lawmakers were asked to identify themselves by entering a code on their mobile phone before each vote and to have their picture taken on their laptops immediately afterwards to confirm their identity. Cmilyte-Nielsen told Reuters:
It was quite unusual to chair a meeting with an empty hall instead of 140 people. I really hope and wish that in the spring we can return to our usual way of life.
Four lawmakers out of 141 were ill as of last week, one of them in hospital. At least six others, including the speaker, have had the virus since the current parliament took its oath on 13 November, local media have reported.
Five lawmakers complained on Tuesday they were unable to cast their vote at the first division due to technical problems.
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Ukrainian pharmaceutical company Lekhim plans to deliver 5m doses of China’s Sinovac vaccine to Ukraine in the first half of 2021, the company has told the Reuters new agency.
Lekhim has signed an agreement with China’s leading vaccine manufacturer Sinovac Biotech on vaccine supply, Lekhim’s head of marketing Eleonora Miroshnik said. It includes 1.8m doses to be delivered starting from March under health ministry procurement.
Ukraine’s presidential office said in late December that the health minister had signed a contract to buy 1.8m doses of Sinovac vaccine. It will be supplied independently of the Covax initiative, which is coordinated by the World Health Organization. Ukraine hopes to receive 8m doses under the scheme.
Infections in Ukraine began rising in September and have been consistently high ever since, triggering several national lockdowns. A total of 1,124,430 cases have been registered, with 20,019 deaths.
Spain aims for all its nursing home residents to have received a first dose of vaccine by the end of the week, the health minister Salvador Illa has said after a weekly cabinet meeting.
Since kicking off its vaccination campaign at the end of December, Spain has administered 406,091 doses of the double-dose Pfizer/BioNTech shot.
The EU will have all the vaccine doses it needs from April when larger deliveries are made to the 27 member states, the bloc’s chief negotiator with the suppliers has said in response to criticism.
In evidence to the European parliament’s environment committee, Sandra Gallina – the director general for health and food safety in the European commission – said the bloc has purchased as much vaccine as had been possible.
The contracts we have agreed include schedules that will be much richer starting from April onwards – quarter two is going to be the quarter with the many doses. The first quarter we have doses and I would say that they are of course not as abundant as many would like to have them but they are, I would say, what was negotiated.
When we refer to the issue of the quantities I have also seen a big debate about the numbers, you know, some imagine that you know that there was say the possibility to buy more, I may say to you that we did, I would say, we went really very far with the quantities and we bought all that could be bought.
The commission has faced criticism for buying insufficient quantities of the vaccines from its suppliers. The EU’s executive branch secured up to 2.3bn doses from the most promising vaccine candidates but only two – BionTech/Pfizer and Moderna – have as yet received EMA approval.
The original orders from those two companies offered supplies sufficient for 230 million people for an EU population of about 450 million.
The commission this week announced a new order from Pfizer of 300m doses. It also has an advance order for 400m doses with AstraZeneca, which has applied for authorisation from the EMA. If successful, the deliveries of the AstraZeneca vaccine could be made in mid-February, Gallina told MEPs. She said:
I am not sure why this debate is there because the numbers are there, the production is ramping up. If I buy monopoly doses, paper doses, saying I bought billions, but they’re not delivered, what is the use?
The commission’s orders are shared pro-rata among the EU member states.
In response to the confirmation in Berlin that Germany had purchased extra doses beyond its share, Gallina said she did not believe the legal binding obligations on member states had been breached.
Germany has purchased doses that were rejected by other member states but Gallina said other member states had the option to do the same and such surplus vaccine would be shared equally among those interested.
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Bavarians will in future be required to wear FFP2 masks when out shopping, in public spaces and on public transport, the leader of the southern German state has said in a surprise announcement.
Markus Söder said the state had to be prepared for a rise in the number of cases, despite strict lockdown measures in place, amid growing evidence that the new, more contagious variant of the virus is spreading in Germany.
The FFP2 mask requirement will come into force next Monday, Söder said, following a decision taken by Bavaria’s cabinet on Tuesday in the state capital, Munich.
Söder said he was introducing the measure despite a drop in the number of reported infections. However, as for the whole of Germany, the figures remain skewed, according to health authorities, due to underreporting during the Christmas holidays.
The wearing of masks or face coverings has been prevalent across Germany for months. Söder has not said whether the state would be providing Bavarians with the FFP2 masks that, unlike ordinary coverings, are said to offer protection for both the wearer and those they come in contact with, or whether people were expected to procure them themselves.
Earlier on Tuesday, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said Germans may have to brace themselves for an extension of the current lockdown by eight to 10 weeks.
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Sweden registers 17,395 new cases over the weekend
Sweden has registered 17,395 new cases since Friday, taking the total above 500,000 cases since the start of the pandemic, health agency statistics show.
The country of 10 million inhabitants registered 234 new deaths, taking the total to 9,667. The deaths registered have occurred over several days and weeks with many from the Christmas period being registered with a significant delay.
The statistics also showed that 17 December was the deadliest day since the start of the pandemic with 116 deaths, surpassing a previous peak of 115 daily deaths set in April.
Sweden’s death rate per capita is several times higher than that of its Nordic neighbours but lower than several European countries that opted for lockdowns.
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Switzerland approves Moderna vaccine
Switzerland has approved the Moderna vaccine, making it the second shot to be authorised in the country and clearing the way to get up to 1.5m doses from the firms through February.
The Swiss drug regulator Swissmedic’s decision comes days after the European Medicines Agency (EMA) gave the green light to Moderna’s vaccine. The messenger RNA vaccine, relying on similar technology as that used by Pfizer/BioNTech is a two-dose shot that in trials showed 95% efficacy.
The country has been a second-wave hotspot, with infections totalling some 500,000 and deaths rising by dozens daily to more than 7,500.
The country, which has been vaccinating with the Pfizer/BioNTech’s shots since before Christmas, this week cancelled the famed Lauberhorn World Cup ski race.
Swiss health ministry officials have predicted the country will get a total of 500,000 doses in January, and a further 1m doses in February, with Moderna’s shot adding to totals. The regulator said:
Following a thorough review of all the submitted data on safety, efficacy and quality, Swissmedic has today temporarily authorised the Moderna vaccine.
Updated
The Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has called for the creation of an EU-wide vaccination certificate to help restore cross-border travel that has been devastated by the pandemic.
Greece, which relies on tourism for a fifth of its economic output and is keen to revive travel before the summer season, has already created its own standardised certificate to prove an individual has been vaccinated.
In a letter to the European commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, Mitsotakis proposed extending the scheme to the whole 27-nation EU. The certificate could be used when embarking on all forms of transport.
While we are not going to make vaccination compulsory or a prerequisite for travel, persons who have been vaccinated should be free to travel. (It is) urgent to adopt a common understanding on how a vaccination certificate should be structured so as to be accepted in all member states.
The difficulty in agreeing a common EU digital passenger locator form (PLF), established last year to try to track travel movements, has shown that there is a strong need for a high-level EU effort to move things forward, he said.
If EU states can agree a common formula “we can then push the issue forward in the relevant international fora, thus contributing to the re-establishment of mobility on a global scale”, the letter said.
For countries such as Greece, which are dependent on tourism, it’s imperative that this issue is resolved before the summer season.
Greece weathered the first wave of the pandemic relatively well but a surge in cases since October has badly strained its health system, weakened by a decade-long financial crisis, prompting authorities to order a second lockdown in November. It has so far confirmed 145,179 cases and 5,302 related deaths.
Updated
Summary
Here is a summary of the latest developments:
- Angela Merkel suggested Germany’s hard lockdown may last a further eight to 10 weeks. Health officials are particularly concerned about the spread of the new, far more contagious variant from the UK, which is thought to have been in the country for several weeks.
- Israel may include children over the age of 12 in groups being vaccinated. A health official said the step could be taken within the next two months if research shows it is safe. Israel says it aims to have administered one or both shots to 5 million of its 9 million citizens and reopen the economy, by mid-March.
- A quarter of coronavirus admissions to hospital are people under the age of 55, the head of NHS England has said. Sir Simon Stevens told MPs on Monday the virus was spreading out of control across much of the country, with worrying consequences for hospitals. “In London perhaps one in 30 people has the coronavirus, in parts of London it may be twice that number. In Merseyside in just the last week there has been a further 50% increase in the number of Covid hospitalisations,” he said.
- China locked down Langfang city. Authorities in China introduced new Covid-19 curbs in areas surrounding Beijing on Tuesday, putting 4.9 million residents under lockdown as new infections raised worries about a second wave in a nation that has mostly contained the diseases. The city of Langfang in Hebei on Tuesday said residents will be put under home quarantine for seven days and be subject to mass Covid-10 testing in the latest attempt to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
- Malaysia’s king has declared a months-long national state of emergency one day before a strict lockdown is imposed on millions of people, a decision that critics say will allow its unstable government to evade scrutiny and cling to power.
- Despite vaccines, no Covid herd immunity in 2021: WHO. The WHO’s chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan warned that it will take time to produce and administer enough doses to halt the spread of the virus and that herd immunity is not achievable in 2021.
- US CDC says nearly 9 million Americans vaccinated. The 8,987,322 people who have been given the first of two shots, according to the CDC, represent less than one-third of the total doses distributed to states by the US government.
- Immunity from Moderna Inc’s Covid-19 vaccine should last at least a year, the company said on Monday at the JP Morgan Healthcare conference. The drugmaker said it was confident that the messenger RNA (mRNA) technology it used was well suited to deploy a vaccine based on the new variant of the coronavirus which has emerged in a handful of countries.
- Gorillas at San Diego Zoo test positive for Covid in apparent first. Several gorillas at the San Diego zoo safari park have tested positive for coronavirus, with some experiencing symptoms, in what is believed to be the first outbreak among such primates in captivity.
- New Zealand will ask international travellers from most countries to show negative Covid-19 test results before boarding flights to the country as new contagious variants of Covid-19 spread across globally.
- Australian Open qualifiers halted mid-match to tell player he had Covid. Denis Kudla has been rushed into quarantine at the Australian Openqualifying event in Doha after testing positive for Covid-19.
Businesses in Portugal’s tourism-dependent Algarve region made €800m (£704m, $957m) less in 2020 than the year before – a 65% drop – as the pandemic kept visitors away from its beaches and golf courses and wiped out thousands of jobs. The hotel association AHETA said:
In 2020, the Algarve had the worst tourism year on record, both in terms of occupancy rates and in terms of economic and business results.
Hotel stays fell 75% and the occupancy was 28%, the lowest ever recorded, compared with 63% in 2019.
British visitors are Algarve’s main source of foreign tourists and, in 2019, pumped about €3.2bn into Portugal’s economy. In 2020, only 433,000 visited; 1.1 million fewer than the year before.
AHETA said the region’s tourism industry would not survive unless the government helped businesses urgently, to allow them to “maintain competitive levels in the recovery phase”.
In November, the number of registered jobless in the Algarve was up 67% from a year earlier.
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The European Union has concluded exploratory talks with the French drugmaker Valneva for the supply of up to 60m doses of its vaccine candidate.
Valneva is the eighth pharmaceutical firm with which the EU has said it is in talks to buy vaccines. It has already signed contracts with six companies, securing nearly 2.3bn doses. The EU commission said:
The envisaged contract with Valneva would provide for the possibility for all EU member states to purchase together 30m doses and they could further purchase up to 30m more doses.
Valneva has not yet begun large-scale phase 3 clinical trials for its candidate, which is based on an inactivated virus and is, like other leading candidates, expected to need a two-dose regimen.
Under the deal, the EU committed to giving the company an undisclosed, non-refundable down payment to secure doses. The remainder would be paid by EU governments willing to buy the shot if the vaccine is approved in Europe.
Valneva confirmed that it was “in advanced discussions with the European commission (EC) for the supply of up to 60m doses”.
It expects to report initial safety and immunogenicity data in April 2021, and added:
If clinical development is successful, an initial approval may be granted in the second half of 2021.
Valneva is the second French company to receive EU funds to develop a vaccine, after Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline, whose vaccine is still in trials.
Two senior Malawian cabinet ministers and two other senior political figures died on Tuesday from Covid-19, the government has said.
The deaths followed a cabinet meeting and other gatherings attended by politicians over the Christmas period but officials did not say where the victims were infected.
The local government minister Lingson Berekanyama and the transport minister Sidik Mia both succumbed to the disease in the early hours of Tuesday, the government spokesman said.
They were senior members of the Malawi Congress Party (MCP), the main partner in an alliance that unseated ex-leader Peter Mutharika in a second round election in June last year, delivering victory to the president Lazarus Chakwera. Mia had been tipped as a possible successor to Chakwera.
All 31 of Malawi’s cabinet attended the meeting in the president’s oval office on 21 December and, the following day, the labour minister Ken Kandodo reported having contracted the coronavirus. He has since recovered. Another minister, Rashid Gaffar, is self-isolating at home.
AstraZeneca has finally filed for approval of its Covid vaccine with the European Medicines Agency two weeks after it was given the go-ahead by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority in the UK.
The EMA says it could come to a decision on 29 January if all the data it needs is supplied and all its questions are answered by the company.
The UK gave the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine emergency approval on 30 December. India has approved a version of the vaccine made by the Serum Institute of India. Argentina, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Mexico and Morocco have also given emergency authorisation. But the world’s biggest regulatory bodies – the Food and Drug Administration in the USA and the EMA – are moving a lot more slowly.
The FDA is thought to want data from a big trial of about 30,000 people ongoing in the US before it considers approval. The existing data from trials in the UK, South Africa and Brazil left questions over the full extent of protection for older people and those from ethnic minority groups.
Because of the soaring numbers of infections in the US, it is possible that trial may soon come to conclusions.
AstraZeneca’s decision to officially seek approval from the EMA is likely to indicate that it hopes to be able to submit new data. At the beginning of January, the EMA’s deputy executive director Noel Wathion said that approval of AstraZeneca’s vaccine this month looked highly improbable because the company had yet to submit sufficient information.
Europe is also in need of many more vaccines. It has approved the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines but supplies are going to fall far short of the needs of the bloc.
The impact of Germany’s lockdown on the economy is not too severe and Berlin will use its fiscal firepower, which is adequate, where support is needed, the finance minister Olaf Scholz has said.
Berlin is forecasting economic growth to rebound by 4.4% this year after an estimated 5.5% contraction in 2020, though some private forecasters regard the official outlook as optimistic given the country is once again in grip of lockdowns.
Last month, Germany’s Ifo institute cut its 2021 growth forecast to 4.2% from 5.1%.
Germany unveiled a €130bn (£114bn, $155bn) stimulus package last June, the centrepiece of a fiscal response that is among the largest of any Western nation.
Germany’s additional government spending alone accounts for 8.3% of economic output, according to the European think tank Bruegel. That forced Berlin to suspend its constitutional limit on budget deficits, sending government borrowings soaring to a post-war record. The government is expected to rack up a total of more than €300bn in new debt in 2020 and 2021.
Nigeria expects to receive vaccine donations that will cover 20% of its population and then procure an additional 50% of its vaccine requirement to achieve herd immunity, the country’s budget chief has said.
The donations will include all types of vaccines, Ben Akabueze, the director general of the Budget office told a virtual conference during the 2021 budget presentation.
Belgium could see an increase in cases in coming weeks as more Belgians undergo tests on return from holidays, the government has said.
The health ministry spokesman Yves Van Laethem said a rise in cases in recent days could be explained by more tests being done than during the winter holidays.
The situation remains fragile, hesitant. There could be an upsurge in the coming weeks, although a reverse evolution cannot be ruled out either.
Van Laethem said Belgium recorded its highest annual mortality rate last year since the Spanish flu and the end of the first world war in 1918.
Data from the Sciensano health institute showed that the total number of positive tests reached 665,220 on Monday, with 2,000 new daily cases detected on average in the last seven days.
This increase affects all age groups globally but is more pronounced in 10-year-olds, young adults and, a more worryingly because they probably did not go on vacation, in people over the age of 90.
The country of 11 million, home to the headquarters of the European Union and Nato, has one of the world’s highest Covid mortality rates per capita, with 20,122 deaths since the start of the pandemic.
The federal government will meet on 22 January to review the lockdown measures. Belgium’s southern Wallonia region decided on Tuesday to extend its nightly curfew until 15 February.
Updated
Malaysia’s king declared a nationwide state of emergency on Tuesday; a move the opposition decried as an attempt by the prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin to retain control amid a power struggle.
In a televised address on Tuesday, Muhyiddin said the parliament would be suspended for a stipulated period of time and that elections would not be held in the south-east Asian nation during the emergency, which could last until 1 August.
Let me assure you, the civilian government will continue to function. The emergency proclaimed by the king is not a military coup and curfew will not be enforced.
Muhyiddin also gave his commitment that elections would be held as soon as it was safe to do so.
The move should reduce, at least for now, some of the political uncertainty hovering over Muhyiddin since his unelected alliance came to power with a razor thin majority in March following the collapse of the previous coalition led by Malaysia’s veteran leader Mahathir Mohamad.
Some lawmakers in the ruling coalition have pulled support for the premier and have called for early elections, while opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim said last year he had a majority to form a new government.
Updated
Canada’s most populous province, Ontario, is considering “next steps” to limit the spread of the virus, its premier Doug Ford has said, amid calls to introduce more stringent lockdown as the pandemic overwhelms its hospitals.
This afternoon, I met with @celliottability & Dr. Williams to discuss Ontario’s next steps to fight COVID-19.
— Doug Ford (@fordnation) January 11, 2021
As we continue to battle this virus, I'm asking everyone to band together. We need to protect our most vulnerable as we rollout vaccines. Everyone has a role to play. pic.twitter.com/7PTlocExbB
Ford is widely expected to announce further restrictions after Ontario health authorities release new case modelling on Tuesday, which the premier has previously described as “a wake-up call to anyone who’s seen it”.
Canada’s economic engine has been under lockdown since 26 December, shuttering non-essential businesses and extending closure of elementary schools in some parts last week.
Yet the daily number of cases has risen to more than 3,500 on average over the past seven days, government data showed. That is straining Ontario’s hospitals, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corp (CBC) reported on Monday the modelling would show Ontario’s intensive care units would be filled beyond capacity by mid-February.
Updated
Hello, I’m taking over from Sarah Marsh and will be with you for the next few hours. If you’d like to get in touch, your best bet’s probably Twitter, where I’m KevinJRawlinson.
Portugal’s President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa has tested negative for coronavirus after a positive test led to him cancellimg all public engagements, his office said on Tuesday, two weeks before an election he is set to win.
The 72-year-old head of state had returned an “asymptomatic” positive test, officials said on Monday, and he went into isolation in the presidential palace in Lisbon.
Updated
German lockdown could last another eight to ten weeks
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has suggested Germany’s hard lockdown may last a further eight to 10 weeks, with health officials particularly concerned about the spread of the new, far more contagious variant from the UK, which is thought to have been in the country for several weeks.
Merkel told a working group within her Christian Democratic Union that German cases of the virus could increase 10-fold by Easter, if the country is not successful in dampening its spread.
According to participants of the meeting, who later spoke to German media, Merkel said: “We still need eight to 10 weeks of hard measures.” The current lockdown, involving the closure of schools and all non-essential shops and services, was due to last until 31 January.
However, it has been hinted at for days, by Merkel and other political leaders, that it was likely to be extended beyond that. Germany began its vaccination programme on 27 December. By yesterday lunchtime, just over 630,000 people had been vaccinated with the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine. First batches of the Moderna vaccine from the US arrived in Germany on Tuesday.
Germany has been reporting a high daily incidence of the virus, although the figures still remain skewed due to underreporting over the Christmas holiday, and a true picture is not expected to be available until 17 January, Merkel has said. Daily death rates have frequently been in the 900-1,000 range since Christmas.
Martin Stürmer, a virologist from Frankfurt, insisted more had to be done in Germany to analyse the variants of coronavirus now believed to be in Germany, including the B117 variant from the UK, and the N501Y variant from South Africa.
Jens Spahn, the health minister, has ordered test laboratories to analyse the gene sequence data of every tenth coronavirus sample tested in order to better understand to what extent the variants have taken a hold in Germany. Up until now, only every 900th sample has been tested in this way.
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A total lockdown set to start this week will exacerbate the suffering of vulnerable Lebanese families struggling to make ends meet unless the government offers assistance, a charity has warned.
“We recognise the importance of taking thorough measures … but we are very concerned that vulnerable families and their children will be left to deal with a catastrophe on their own,” Jennifer Moorehead, Save the Children’s Lebanon director, said.
Lebanon, a country of more than 6 million people, is grappling with its worst economic downturn since the 1975-90 war.
A spiralling coronavirus outbreak has compounded the crisis, forcing businesses shut and denying daily wage earners an income in a country where more than half the population lives in poverty.
The Lebanese government on Monday said it would enforce a 24-hour curfew for 11 days from Thursday, after daily infections rose by 70% over the past week. The surge in new cases is among the steepest in the world.
Under the new measures, non-essential workers will not be allowed out of the house and supermarkets will only operate delivery services. This prompted fears of food shortages as such services are not readily available in impoverished and remote regions.
“Almost half of the population can’t afford to buy sufficient food to last them through the supermarket closures,” Moorehead said.
Updated
Israel may vaccinate children over 12
Israel may include children over the age of 12 in groups receiving Covid-19 vaccines within the next two months if research shows this is safe, a top health official said.
Vaccinating at a world-record pace, Israel says it aims to have administered one or both shots to 5 million of its 9 million citizens and reopen the economy, by mid-March.
Elderly Israelis and adults with medical conditions or jobs in critical high-risk sectors have been given priority. But with Israeli officials anticipating more regular vaccine shipments, the eligibility categories have been expanded.
Updated
Throughout the United States, Americans with chronic illnesses have been forced to navigate a healthcare system battered by the coronavirus pandemic while trying to afford medical treatment and resolve health insurance issues.
That has led to many Americans making difficult decisions about delaying vital care, or sacrificing other basic necessities – such as transport costs or food – in order to pay for health insurance so that they can get the treatment they need.
Quana Madison, a disabled artist in Denver, Colorado, has struggled with high medical costs for several years while fighting breast cancer that included requiring a double mastectomy, several other illnesses, chronic pain issues, and complications from surgeries.
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Egypt is reopening its airspace to Qatari flights and allowing the resumption of flights between the two countries, aviation sources and state media said on Tuesday.
The decision follows moves by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt to end a boycott in which they severed diplomatic, trade and travel ties with Qatar in 2017.
Malaysia’s king declared a nationwide state of emergency to fight a coronavirus surge and parliament was suspended, with critics charging it was a bid by the unstable government to cling to power.
The surprise move came a day after the prime minister announced sweeping new curbs across much of the south-east Asian nation, including the closure of most businesses, and warned the health system was “at breaking point”.
Sultan Abdullah Sultan Ahmad Shah agreed to declare an emergency until 1 August following a request from prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin, the national palace said in a statement.
Updated
The caskets are stacked three high in the Meissen crematorium’s sombre memorial hall, piled up in empty offices and stored in hallways. Many are sealed with plastic wrapping, others are labelled “infection risk”, “urgent” or simply “Covid”.
A surge in the number of coronavirus deaths in this corner of eastern Germany has boosted business for crematorium manager Joerg Schaldach and his staff, but nobody is celebrating.
“The situation is a little bit tense for us at the moment,” Schaldach said as another undertaker’s van pulled up outside. The crematorium would typically have 70 to 100 caskets on-site at this time of year when the flu season takes its toll on the elderly.
“It’s normal for more people to die in winter than in summer,” said Schaldach. “That’s always been the case.”
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Taiwan has reported two new local transmissions of Covid-10, bringing the total since April to three. Authorities said a doctor and nurse who had been treating an already infected patient had both contracted the illness. Taiwan has had fewer than 900 cases of the virus since the pandemic began. Seven people have died.
Until a Taipei woman was diagnosed last month, Taiwan had mot recorded a single local transmission in 253 days. Authorities said she got the virus from her friend, a pilot who had flown between Taiwan and the US while infectious and breached health regulations by moving around Taipei and not disclosing his movements or symptoms to authorities.
France faces a “challenge” to meet its forecast for 6% economic growth this year, with the outcome depending on how fast Covid-19 vaccines can be rolled out, finance minister Bruno Le Maire said on Tuesday. Le Maire said if things go well, France could experience a significant economic rebound in the second half of this year.
Updated
Europe’s drugs regulator will review AstraZeneca and Oxford University’s Covid-19 vaccine this month under an accelerated timeline after the British drugmaker submitted an application for conditional approval, the watchdog said on Tuesday.
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) said it would fast-track the assessment of the application and could issue an opinion on a conditional marketing authorisation by 29 January at a meeting of its human medicines committee (CHMP).
Updated
Britain’s GSK and US-based Vir Biotechnology will evaluate one of their monoclonal antibodies in patients with mild to moderate Covid-19 in an early- to mid-stage trial, the companies said on Tuesday.
The trial, under the UK-based AGILE initiative, is expected to begin in the first quarter of 2021 at multiple sites across the UK, the companies said in a joint statement.
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Russia reported 22,934 new Covid-19 cases on Tuesday, including 5,001 in Moscow, taking the national tally – the world’s fourth-highest – to 3,448,203. Authorities said 531 people had died from the virus in the last 24 hours, pushing the country’s official death toll to 62,804.
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Updated
China said on Tuesday that the World Health Organization’s team of international experts to investigate the origin of Covid-19 will fly from Singapore to the Chinese city of Wuhan on 14 January. Foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian was speaking at a regular news briefing.
Even after death, Covid-19 victims endure harrowing isolation in Thessaloniki, the city in Greece most acutely affected by the coronavirus pandemic.
Efcharis Gunseer, 84, couldn’t see her daughter during any part of a losing battle with the virus, neither at the nursing home where she first became ill or at the hospital where she spent several weeks. The staff of the overwhelmed intensive care ward also was too busy to set up phone calls, the daughter said.
When Gunseer died in late August, her body was wrapped in two plastic bags and placed in a shrink-wrapped casket. Under rules set by city authorities, she wasn’t buried next to her late husband but in a section of a cemetery reserved for people infected with the virus. Her grave remains off-limits to visitors.
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The British public must stick to tough rules to prevent the spread of Covid-19 or the government could bring in even stricter measures, the policing minister said on Tuesday.
“If we’re going to get through this in good shape, and hopefully make sure that this is the last big lockdown of the country, it’s very important that we all stick to the rules,” Kit Malthouse told Sky News, saying tighter rules would depend on “the numbers” relating to infections and hospitalisations.
Taiwan reported its first locally transmitted cases of Covid-19 since 22 December: a doctor in a hospital who was treating an infected patient, and a nurse who is the doctor’s girlfriend.
Until last month’s domestic transmission the island had not reported any local cases since 12 April, with the vast majority of infections in people coming to Taiwan from overseas.
Taiwan has kept the pandemic well under control thanks to early and effective prevention methods and widespread mask-wearing. It has reported 839 cases, including seven deaths, with 101 in hospital being treated.
Taiwan’s government has watched nervously as imported cases rise, albeit at a far lower rate than in many other places, with December’s domestic infection-causing particular worry.
“Of course, we really regret the hospital infection,” health minister Chen Shih-chung told reporters. “Our hospital control measures are extremely strict, but inevitably something may have been overlooked.”
While the doctor had been treating a Covid-19 patient, his nurse girlfriend had not, Chen said. A total of 464 contacts at the hospital have been screened with all returning negative tests, while another 42 people were in the process of being tested, he said.
All hospital workers will be tested again within three days, Chen said.
Taiwan has reported so few Covid-19 cases compared with many other places around the world that health officials hold news conferences to give details of every new infection.
Updated
Hello everyone. I am taking over the global live feed from London, bringing you all the latest on the coronavirus pandemic. Please contact me while I work today to share any comments or news tips.
Twitter: @sloumarsh
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Email: sarah.marsh@theguardian.com
That’s it from me, Helen Sullivan, for today. The bright-eyed and bushy tailed Sarah Marsh will be keeping you informed from London for the next few hours.
Summary
Here are the key developments from the last few hours:
- A quarter of coronavirus admissions to hospital are people under the age of 55, the head of NHS England has said. Sir Simon Stevens told MPs on Monday the virus was spreading out of control across much of the country, with worrying consequences for hospitals. “In London perhaps one in 30 people has the coronavirus, in parts of London it may be twice that number. In Merseyside in just the last week there has been a further 50% increase in the number of Covid hospitalisations,” he said.
- China locked down Langfang city. Authorities in China introduced new Covid-19 curbs in areas surrounding Beijing on Tuesday, putting 4.9 million residents under lockdown as new infections raised worries about a second wave in a nation that has mostly contained the diseases. The city of Langfang in Hebei on Tuesday said residents will be put under home quarantine for seven days and be subject to mass Covid-10 testing in the latest attempt to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
- Malaysia’s king has declared a months-long national state of emergency one day before a strict lockdown is imposed on millions of people, a decision that critics say will allow its unstable government to evade scrutiny and cling to power.
- Despite vaccines, no Covid herd immunity in 2021: WHO. The WHO’s chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan warned that it will take time to produce and administer enough doses to halt the spread of the virus and that herd immunity is not achievable in 2021.
- US CDC says nearly 9 million Americans vaccinated. The 8,987,322 people who have been given the first of two shots, according to the CDC, represent less than one-third of the total doses distributed to states by the US government.
- Immunity from Moderna Inc’s Covid-19 vaccine should last at least a year, the company said on Monday at the JP Morgan Healthcare conference. The drugmaker said it was confident that the messenger RNA (mRNA) technology it used was well suited to deploy a vaccine based on the new variant of the coronavirus which has emerged in a handful of countries.
- Gorillas at San Diego Zoo test positive for Covid in apparent first. Several gorillas at the San Diego zoo safari park have tested positive for coronavirus, with some experiencing symptoms, in what is believed to be the first outbreak among such primates in captivity.
- New Zealand will ask international travellers from most countries to show negative Covid-19 test results before boarding flights to the country as new contagious variants of Covid-19 spread across globally.
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Australian Open qualifiers halted mid-match to tell player he had Covid. Denis Kudla has been rushed into quarantine at the Australian Openqualifying event in Doha after testing positive for Covid-19.
China locks down Langfang city
Authorities in China introduced new Covid-19 curbs in areas surrounding Beijing on Tuesday, putting 4.9 million residents under lockdown as new infections raised worries about a second wave in a nation that has mostly contained the disease, Reuters reports.
The city of Langfang in Hebei on Tuesday said residents will be put under home quarantine for seven days and be subject to mass Covid-10 testing in the latest attempt to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
Gaocheng district in Shijiazhuang, Hebei’s capital which has been hardest-hit in the latest surge in infections, is gathering more than 20,000 people living in 12 remote villages into centralised quarantine as part of the city’s Covid-19 control, state media China News Service reported late Monday.
Malaysia declares Covid state of emergency
Malaysia’s king has declared a months-long national state of emergency one day before a strict lockdown is imposed on millions of people, a decision that critics say will allow its unstable government to evade scrutiny and cling to power.
A statement by the national palace said Sultan Abdullah Sultan Ahmad Shah had agreed to declare an emergency until 1 August following a request from the prime minister, Muhyiddin Yassin. If infections are brought under control, the measures could be lifted more quickly.
The decision is expected to hand huge powers to Muhyiddin and his cabinet. A state of emergency would allow for parliament to be suspended, meaning the government would have the power to introduce laws without approval. Elections would also be put on hold:
About 1,200 players and staff from all corners of the globe will be subjected to what the Victorian government has described as the “strictest rules for tennis” in the world when they fly into Melbourne for the Australian Open from Thursday.
The tournament, which will begin on 8 February after warm-up events that start on 31 January, is the largest international sporting event to be held in Australia since the beginning of the pandemic and in effect will broadcast the country’s Covid-19 response to the world:
WHO experts: Covid mission is not about finger pointing at China
When the scientists on the World Health Organization’s mission to research the origins of Covid-19 touch down in China as expected on Thursday at the beginning of their investigation they are clear what they will – and what they will not – be doing.
They intend to visit Wuhan, the site of the first major outbreak of Covid-19, and talk to Chinese scientists who have been studying the same issue. They will want to see if there are unexamined samples from unexplained respiratory illnesses, and they will want to examine ways in which the virus might have jumped the species barrier to humans.
What the mission will not be, several of the scientists insist, is an exercise in “finger pointing at China” – something long demanded by the Trump administration and some of its allies.
While some of the scientists will travel to China, others will be part of a wider effort that has drawn in global experts in diseases.
The importance of being on the ground in China, of seeing sites associated with the Wuhan outbreak, was underlined by Fabian Leendertz, professor in the epidemiology of highly pathogenic microorganisms at Germany’s public health body, the Robert Koch Institute, and part of the team.
Leendertz has few illusions how difficult tracing the origin of Covid-19 will be.
Involved in tracking down the source of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in west Africa to a bat colony in a tree, he has also worked on identifying when measles may have first jumped to humans:
New Zealand to ask international travellers for negative virus test before flying in
New Zealand will ask international travellers from most countries to show negative Covid-19 test results before boarding flights to the country as new contagious variants of Covid-19 spread across globally, Reuters reports.
“Given the high rates of infection in many countries and evidence of the global spread of more transmissible variants, it’s clear that most global air routes will be of critical concern for the foreseeable future,” Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said in a statement.
Hipkins said the pre-departure test requirement would soon expand to all countries and territories excluding Australia, Antarctica and some Pacific Island nations.
Travellers would still have to complete the 14-day mandatory quarantine and undergo testing upon arrival in New Zealand.
Border closure and a strict national lockdown during the initial phase of the pandemic has helped New Zealand keep numbers relatively low, with just over 1,800 confirmed cases and 25 deaths since the pandemic began.
The country last reported a local case nearly two months ago.
Critics have said the government has been taking the new Covid-19 variants too lightly and calls have grown for urgently extending pre-departure testing and accelerate the roll out of vaccines.
The government said it had secured enough vaccines to inoculate all of the country’s 5 million people, with agreements signed with pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca and Novavax.
It plans to inoculate border workers only by the end of March and the general public by mid-year.
Lebanese authorities tightened a nationwide lockdown Monday, including an 11-day, 24-hour curfew, amid a dramatic surge in coronavirus infections and growing criticism of uncoordinated policies many blame for the spread of the virus.
AP: News of the restrictions to be implemented starting Thursday morning sparked panicked grocery buying as people lined up outside of supermarkets to stock up, raising fears the crowds could further spread the virus.
Lebanon had only just announced a nationwide lockdown last week. But many, including the health minister and officials on a government committee, considered it to be too lenient because it exempted many sectors, such as florists, plant nurseries and factories. Hospitals, meanwhile, were running out of beds amid rapidly multiplying Covid-19 cases.
Critics have said uncoordinated and hesitant policies wavering between relaxing restrictions and shutting down were behind the failure to contain the virus.
For instance, despite a rise in infections, the government relaxed restrictions ahead of Christmas and New Year’s celebrations, hoping to boost a crumbling local economy as thousands of Lebanese expats arrived in the country. Bars and nightclubs, which had been ordered shut for months, were allowed to open.
Daily infection rates have since hovered above 3,000, hitting an all-time high of over 5,000 last week. Doctors and experts say the extent of the spread has yet to be felt, predicting numbers will skyrocket in the coming days, overwhelming health facilities in the country of nearly 6 million.
The spike in cases has exhausted the health care sector, prompting lawmakers and officials to call on the government to consider a 24-hour lockdown without exemptions, and to shut down the airport.
The government declared a “state of health emergency” from 14-25 January that includes a round-the-clock curfew. Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister said earlier that the country has entered a “very critical zone” in the battle against the coronavirus.
As of Sunday, the World Health Organization said 81.7% of Lebanon’s hospital beds were occupied and the intensive-care-unit bed occupancy had reached 91.4%, with the highest in Beirut. Some 2,295 health care workers had been infected by Jan. 10, up from 2,015 last week.
Egypt expects to start receiving Covid-19 vaccines through the Geneva-based GAVI vaccine alliance in the coming weeks, the health minister said on Monday.
Egypt will get 40 million vials via GAVI for 20 million people or 20% of the 100 million population, Hala Zayed said.
“It will give us the urgent needs during the first quarter,” Zayed said in a televised briefing.
“Within two or three weeks maximum there will be the beginning of the influx of GAVI vaccines, which largely will be AstraZeneca (vaccines),” she added.
Gavi and the World Health Organisation have established the Covax initiative to secure fair vaccine access for lower and middle income countries.
Zayed said Egypt also expected to sign a contract with AstraZeneca once an Egyptian drug regulator approves the company’s vaccines and that approval was expected within a week.
Egypt has asked Pfizer to send data for its vaccine to the regulator, Zayed said.
Egypt received its first shipment of vaccines developed by China National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm) in December, but further shipments have been delayed.
Zayed said more Sinopharm vaccines would arrive within days.
Podcast: Inside the investigation into how Covid-19 began
This week a team of international experts from the WHO will arrive in China to investigate the origins of Covid-19. A year into the pandemic, Guardian health editor Sarah Boseley looks at what questions still need to be answered:
Quarter of Covid hospital admissions in England aged under 55
A quarter of coronavirus admissions to hospital are people under the age of 55, the head of NHS England has said.
Sir Simon Stevens told MPs on Monday the virus was spreading out of control across much of the country, with worrying consequences for hospitals.
“In London perhaps one in 30 people has the coronavirus, in parts of London it may be twice that number. In Merseyside in just the last week there has been a further 50% increase in the number of Covid hospitalisations,” he said.
“It’s worth remembering that this affects all ages – a quarter of the Covid admissions to hospital right now are for people aged under 55.”
Officials later confirmed that for the week commencing 28 December, 3,326 under-55s were admitted to hospitals in England, out of 13,530 overall admissions.
Stevens’ comments came as data showed the youngest person with no known underlying conditions whose death from Covid-19 was reported in the last 24 hours was aged 26:
US CDC says nearly 9 million Americans vaccinated
Nearly 9 million Americans had been given their first Covid-19 vaccination dose as of Monday morning, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, as states scrambled to step up inoculations that have yet to slow the roaring pandemic.
The 8,987,322 people who have been given the first of two shots, according to the CDC, represent less than one-third of the total doses distributed to states by the US government.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer on Monday sought permission from the Trump administration to directly purchase 100,000 doses of the vaccine manufactured by Pfizer Inc, partner BioNTech SE, which was cleared by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for emergency use.
The FDA has also approved a vaccine made by Moderna.
“We remain ready to accelerate distribution to get doses into arms,” Whitmer, a first-term Democrat, said in a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.
In Australia, the state premier of New South Wales, home to Sydney, is “pleading” with people to come forward for testing after five cases of community transmission of coronavirus were identified in the state overnight, while in the state of Queensland a man was in the community with an infectious UK strain of the virus for two days before going into isolation.
“As we see, the disease is still bumbling along in the community and we need to be vigilant about that,” Gladys Berejiklian said on Tuesday. “And that’s why I’m pleading for people to come forward and get tested. We know that it takes some time to completely get to the target of zero community transmission after there has been an outbreak, but it’s so critical that we raise those testing levels.”
There were 14,700 tests reported in NSW on Monday to 8pm, which the premier said was “not really enough for where we’re up to in the pandemic”.
Of the five new cases included in Tuesday’s NSW numbers, two were announced on Monday: a man in his 40s who tested positive at Mount Druitt hospital emergency department, and his household contact. NSW Health are investigating the source of their infections. A further two cases were identified in the northern beaches and the source of their infections is also under investigation. The fifth case, a woman in her 40s, is linked to the Berala cluster and is a known close contact of someone already identified and in isolation:
Gorillas at San Diego Zoo test positive for Covid in apparent first
Several gorillas at the San Diego zoo safari park have tested positive for coronavirus, with some experiencing symptoms, in what is believed to be the first outbreak among such primates in captivity.
The park’s executive director, Lisa Peterson, told the Associated Press on Monday that eight gorillas who live together at the park are believed to have the virus and several have been coughing. Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, confirmed at his Monday news briefing that at least two gorillas had tested positive while three were symptomatic.
It appears the infection came from a member of the park’s wildlife care team who also tested positive for the virus but has been asymptomatic. The safari park confirmed the presence of Covid-19 through fecal samples from the gorillas, and the test results do not “definitively rule out the presence of the virus in other members of the troop”, the zoo said in a statement:
Boris Johnson has come under fire after he was spotted cycling in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic park in east London on Sunday, seven miles away from his Downing Street residence. Andy Slaughter, Labour MP for Hammersmith in London, accused the prime minister of failing to lead by example by exercising so far from home, but sources at No 10 insisted no rules had been broken:
Australian Open qualifiers halted mid-match to tell player he had Covid-19
Denis Kudla has been rushed into quarantine at the Australian Open qualifying event in Doha after testing positive for Covid-19.
Fourth-seeded Kudla downed Moroccan Elliot Benchetrit 6-4 6-3 but the match ended in controversy. Kudla’s positive Covid test result reportedly came through with Kudla leading 5-3 in the second and, according to Benchetrit, they had to finish the game in progress.
Because world No 114 Kudla won that game, which wrapped up the match, he was declared the winner. Had Benchetrit won the game to extend the match, it would have been declared a walkover in his favour.
“At 5-3, they got the result. So to sum up: if I’d won that game at 5-3 to make it 5-4, I’d have qualified for the second round,” Benchetrit said on Instagram. In another blow, Benchetrit may also have to isolate in Doha if he is deemed a close contact.
Kudla is the second player forced to withdraw from the event due to a positive test, joining Francisco Cerundolo in hotel quarantine:
UK retail sales suffered the biggest decline in 25 years last year as the closure of non-essential shops during lockdowns more than outweighed the online spending boom fuelled by Covid-19.
The British Retail Consortium (BRC) said total sales fell by 0.3% last year from the level in 2019 – the worst performance since records began in 1995 – reflecting the impact of government lockdowns and shifting consumer spending trends.
However, the overall drop in spending masks an explosion in sales for some shops, and a dramatic collapse for others. Amid a decline in spending in pubs, restaurants and hotels during the crisis, sales of food bought from shops increased by 5.4% on the year. However, sales of all other products fell 5% from a year earlier:
Moderna says Covid-19 vaccine immunity to stay at least a year
Immunity from Moderna Inc’s Covid-19 vaccine should last at least a year, the company said on Monday at the JP Morgan Healthcare conference.
The drugmaker said it was confident that the messenger RNA (mRNA) technology it used was well suited to deploy a vaccine based on the new variant of the coronavirus which has emerged in a handful of countries.
The company’s vaccine, mRNA-1273, uses synthetic mRNA to mimic the surface of the coronavirus and teach the immune system to recognize and neutralize it.
Moderna said in December it would run tests to confirm the vaccine’s activity against any strain.
The company said on Monday it expects to deliver between 600 million doses and 1 billion does of its vaccine in 2021 and forecast vaccine-related sales of $11.7 billion for the year, based on advance purchase agreements signed with governments.
“The team feels very comfortable with the track record we have now ... that we are on track to deliver at least 600 million doses,” Chief Executive Officer Stéphane Bancel said.
Despite vaccines, no Covid herd immunity in 2021: WHO
Despite vaccines against Covid-19 being rolled out in a number of countries, the World Health Organization warned Monday that herd immunity would not be achieved this year.
AFP: Countries across the globe are looking forward to vaccines finally allowing a return to normality in the months ahead.
But the WHO’s chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan warned that it will take time to produce and administer enough doses to halt the spread of the virus.
“We are not going to achieve any levels of population immunity or herd immunity in 2021,” she told a virtual press briefing from WHO’s headquarters in Geneva, stressing the need to continue measures like physical distancing, hand washing and mask wearing to rein in the pandemic.
She hailed the “incredible progress” made by scientists who managed the unthinkable of developing not one but several safe and effective vaccines against a brand new virus in under a year.
But, she stressed, the rollout “does take time.”
“It takes time to scale the production of doses, not just in the millions, but here we are talking about in the billions,” she pointed out, calling on people to “be a little bit patient.”
Swaminathan stressed that eventually, “the vaccines are going to come. They are going to go to all countries.”
“But meanwhile we mustn’t forget that there are measures that work,” she said.
There would be a need to continue taking the public health and social measures aimed at halting transmission for “the rest of this year at least.”
Summary
Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic with me, Helen Sullivan.
As the World Health Organization warned that global herd immunity would not be achieved in 20201, Moderna Inc said that immunity from those who are given the company’s Covid-19 vaccine should last at least a year.
The drugmaker said it was confident that the messenger RNA (mRNA) technology it used was well suited to deploy a vaccine based on the new variant of the coronavirus which has emerged in a handful of countries.
More on this shortly. In the meantime here are the key developments from the last few hours:
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Portugal’s president tests positive for Covid-19. President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who is seeking a second term in an election on 24 January, has tested positive for the coronavirus but has so far shown no symptoms, his office said.
- ‘Reckless’ Christmas rule relaxation blamed for Ireland’s dire Covid surge. The country has the world’s highest rate of infection with critics blaming socialising over festive period.
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Lebanon tightens Covid-19 restrictions as infections skyrocket. Lebanon has tightened coronavirus measures by imposing a total lockdown for an 11-day period and introducing new travel restrictions to stem an unprecedented rise in infections.
- Spain sees record weekend rise in infections. Spain reported a record rise in coronavirus infections over the weekend and the number of new cases measured over the past 14 days rose to 436 per 100,000 people on Monday, from 350 on Friday.
- Verdict unlikely from WHO team exploring Covid origins in China. Expectations should be set very low that a World Health Organization team of experts investigating the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic will reach any definitive conclusion from their first trip to China, a health expert affiliated with the WHO has said.
- US lawmaker tests positive for Covid-19 after Capitol siege. A 75-year-old US lawmaker has tested positive for Covid-19 after being locked down to avoid a mob attacking the US Capitol last week, saying she believed she was exposed while sheltering in place with maskless colleagues.
- CDC says nine million Americans now vaccinated. The 8,987,322 people who have been given the first of two shots, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, represent less than one third of the total doses distributed to states by the government.
- Two gorillas at San Diego Zoo test positive for Covid-19. The animals tested positive for the coronavirus after exhibiting symptoms of the disease, in what is believed to be the first known transmission of the virus to apes.
- Dubai removed from UK’s travel corridor list. Transport secretary Grant Shapps confirmed on Monday the United Arab Emirates is being taken off the list and anyone arriving from the country from 4am on Tuesday will be subject to the new restrictions.
