Thanks for following along – this blog is now closed. You can catch up with the latest coronavirus coverage here.

We have also launched a new live news feed here with all the current developments.

Samantha Lock back with you on the blog taking over from my colleague Helen Livingstone.

Here’s a quick snapshot of how Covid is unfolding across Australia.

The state of NSW has recorded 20,293 new Covid cases and 18 deaths including a child aged under five while Victoria reported 34,808 cases and two deaths.

The Covid vaccine for children aged five to 11 is also being rolled out across the nation.

Good morning, this is Helen Livingstone taking over the blog in Sydney.

Though we’ll also be following the essentials from the Novak Djokovic court hearing here, please check out our dedicated blog run by Josh Taylor.

Of course don’t get too wrapped up and forget to follow our Covid updates!

Downing Street is facing calls to ensure that Boris Johnson will be personally interviewed by the Sue Gray inquiry about alleged No 10 gatherings during the first lockdown, after it emerged he may have been present at a “bring your own booze” party that month.

The inquiry, into allegations of social mixing bans being broken in No 10, was widened this weekend to include reported gatherings from May 2020, amid reports that an official emailed Downing Street staff inviting them to socially distanced drinks.

No 10 did not deny on Sunday that the prime minister and his wife attended the event on 20 May, which is said to have been organised by a senior civil servant in Johnson’s private office, Martin Reynolds, with food and wine set out on tables.

It comes after the Guardian reported a “wine and pizza” party in Downing Street in the garden and inside No 10 on 15 May, with staff drinking late into the evening after a press conference that day. After No 10 insisted staff were working, the Guardian obtained a photograph of the prime minister and his wife sitting with officials at a table with wine and cheese, with 15 other staff in the background and bottles of wine visible.

Reports on Sunday that free lateral flow tests could be axed under a strategy of living with Covid within weeks were met with a swift backlash. The government promptly denied the suggestion that free tests could soon be scrapped.

The story highlights a gulf in opinions on what “living with Covid” might look like, with some saying we will achieve this only through continued caution and others equating the phrase to ditching all Covid measures and partying like it’s 2019.

Wherever your instincts lie, it is not surprising – or even undesirable – that the mass testing of asymptomatic people is being reviewed.

The policy was rapidly brought in at a time when, faced with a new, highly infectious variant of unknown virulence, it made sense to throw everything we had at Omicron to slow down transmission and to minimise disruption caused by essential workers having to self-isolate. With case numbers wildly outstripping the UK’s laboratory testing capacity, lateral flow tests continue to be vital for tracking case numbers.

Mass Covid testing and vaccination should be ended for all but the most vulnerable after the booster campaign has been completed, the former chairman of Britain’s vaccine taskforce has said.

Dr Clive Dix has called for an overhaul of the current Government strategy in the coming months, claiming the impact of cellular immunity on fighting the virus may have been downplayed.

Covid should instead be treated like flu or a heavy cold among younger people who have been fully jabbed, the former vaccines tsar said.

Speaking to C4 News, Dr Dix claimed that mass vaccination has outlasted its main purpose, which he said was to curb the spread of infection.

Germany will study how reliable rapid antigen tests are in detecting the fast-spreading Omicron variant, the health minister, Karl Lauterbach, said on Sunday.

“We do not know exactly how well these tests work for Omicron,” Lauterbach said on public broadcasting channel ARD, adding the results of the assessment would become available within the next few weeks.

It was clear, however, that “the alternative not to test at all ... would be far too dangerous,” said Lauterbach, a scientist and physician.

Earlier, he had told a Sunday newspaper that Germany must revamp its Covid vaccination strategy to tackle the Omicron variant and to ensure it could develop a new vaccine rapidly if it faced a more deadly coronavirus variant in the future. New measures for dining out and bar visits were brought in only last Friday, Reuters reports.

Italy reported 157 coronavirus-related deaths on Sunday, down from 184 the day before, the health ministry said, while the daily tally of new infections fell to 155,659 from 197,552.

Italy has registered 139,038 deaths linked to Covid-19 since the initial outbreak in February 2020, the second highest toll in Europe after Britain and the ninth highest in the world. The country has reported 7.4m cases to date.

Patients in hospital with Covid-19 – not including those in intensive care – stood at 15,647 on Sunday, up from 14,930 a day earlier.

There were 142 new admissions to intensive care units, down from 154 on Saturday. The total number of intensive care patients increased to 1,595 from 1,557.

A total of 51,950,528 first doses of Covid-19 vaccine had been delivered in the UK by 8 January, government figures show.

This is a rise of 30,713 on the previous day.

A total of 47,677,951 second doses have been delivered, an increase of 45,468.

A combined total of 35,499,486 booster and third doses have also been given, a day-on-day rise of 225,541.

The UK reported 141,472 new coronavirus cases and 97 deaths in the latest 24 hours, according to the government’s Covid dashboard.

In Italy, it is now obligatory for people aged 50 or over to be vaccinated against Covid-19. Greece is pondering a similar move. In France, which has seen record numbers of positive cases, President Emmanuel Macron has also announced that he wants to “piss off” the unvaccinated, while Austria is contemplating a law to make the vaccine mandatory for all its citizens.

By contrast, in the UK, Boris Johnson has confined himself to accusing anti-vaxxers of talking “mumbo-jumbo”. But is that enough? Should the UK take a harder line on those who refuse to be vaccinated? After all, this is a virus that threatens to overwhelm the NHS. As doctors continue to point out, hospital beds are now filling up with more and more seriously ill Covid patients, many of whom are unvaccinated.

So, should vaccines against Covid be made mandatory, not just in certain workplace settings but for all individuals?

Rain Newton-Smith, chief economist at the Confederation of British Industry, said reports suggesting free lateral flow tests in the UK could be axed would “make no economic sense”, adding:

Free lateral flow tests are a vital weapon in the UK’s Covid defences – they are central to keeping the economy open and allowing the UK to live confidently with the virus.

Hong Kong has detected a second untraceable Covid infection over the weekend. Health officials reported 33 confirmed cases today, 27 of which were imported. Among the six remaining cases, five were linked to imported infections, while one was classified as possibly import-related.

As Bloomberg reports, the cases are a worrying trend for officials who have upheld a “Covid zero” strategy, sacrificing the city’s status as an international hub to bring in some of the world’s harshest measures and isolating itself from the rest of the world.

“Now it’s living with the worst of both worlds,” it writes, after a couple of imported infections triggered renewed measures. The government has banned indoor dining after 6pm and closed swimming pools, sports centres, bars and clubs, museums and other venues.

Expatriates who travelled home for Christmas have also been unable to return to Hong Kong, after authorities fearing the highly contagious Omicron variant suspended flights from eight countries, including the UK and the US.

Here’s more on those earlier comments by Prof Clive Kay, chief executive of King’s College hospital in London, that he may lose 1,000 staff to the Covid vaccination mandate.

Speaking on the BBC’s Sunday Morning programme, he said his organisation was working urgently to encourage staff to come forward for vaccination to avoid redeploying or losing them.

About 10% of the 14,000 staff at King’s College hospital are yet to be fully vaccinated ahead of a mandate for all NHS staff who work directly with patients that comes into force on 1 April.

Losing more than 1,000 staff would be the most extreme outcome and there had been an increase in the number of people who still required vaccination coming forward, Kay said.

“I don’t want, at this stage, to predict or give any numbers. We’re having conversations with staff, line managers are having conversations with staff, we have a helpline,” he said. “Ultimately if individuals choose not to, it’s their choice, their personal choice.

Read the full story by my colleague Hannah Devlin below:

Ireland’s health service is “under stress”, the head of the Irish Health Service Executive Paul Reid has said.

His warnings come as a further 21,384 cases of Covid were reported by the Department of Health, a day after Ireland reported a record 26,122 new cases.

As of 8am on Sunday, 984 people were in hospital with the virus, up 67 in the last 24 hours. That is the highest number of people in hospital since the surge last January.

Reid said yesterday that between 14,000 and 15,000 healthcare staff were on Covid-related leave, which is approximately 12% of all healthcare staff in Ireland.

The rapid spread of Omicron has smashed into Thailand’s economy in the middle of the peak new year holiday season and ruined any hopes that it might help save stricken tourist areas, South China Morning Post reports.

On the Thai resort island of Pattaya, one businesswoman said she has been forced to let go more workers with each new coronavirus wave. “I’ve lost over 100 employees now,” she told the paper.

Thailand has been forced to suspend its “Test & Go” quarantine-free entry scheme indefinitely. Now, travellers must undergo a 14-day quarantine, or enter under a “Sandbox” scheme via Phuket, which allows fully vaccinated tourists to stay for seven days before being cleared to move around the country.

Hotel operators have complained the scheme’s suspension has effectively wiped out new bookings for February and March, setting their recovery back by months.

About 20-25% of Thailand’s economy depends on tourism; the country was ranked eighth globally in international tourist arrivals in 2019. But passengers on international flights dropped 95% in September 2021, compared to the previous year and hotel occupancy rates were at just 9%.

A leading statistician has ruled out a “big rise” in UK Covid hospital admissions and deaths. Speaking on Times Radio, Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter said case rates may be stabilising across the country. He said:

The cases are not going up as fast as they were and may have stabilised over the whole country, but at very high levels and they’re not going to come down rapidly.

Despite this, he said daily infection rates could still be hitting around 500,000. Asked whether the prime minister had taken a “gamble” in resisting lockdown measures in England over the festive period, he replied:

I mean, it was a gamble, and you know, all I think the best we can say is he may have got away with it, but we’re going to have to see the next few weeks.

The boss of one of London’s busiest hospitals has said he is worried about losing staff when new rules come in requiring them to be vaccinated, BBC News reports.

King’s College hospital’s chief executive, Clive Kay, said 10% of his staff of 14,000 were still unvaccinated. He said staff were “not being forced” to have the jab, but instead “being encouraged”. He added:

There’s a possibility if they choose not to be vaccinated they could be redeployed. And if we can’t find that opportunity to redeploy them then the consequence is that they will [not have a job].

Asked how many frontline staff he could lose under the law change, he replied:

I am confident that we are already seeing a number of staff choosing to be vaccinated. I don’t want at this stage to predict or give any numbers.

A leaked briefing from the UK’s Health and Security Agency (UKHSA) shows a backlog of 250,000 PCR tests this week.

The Sunday Times’ Shaun Lintern said the backlog affected 4,600 care homes and 70 prisons. In some cases, testing was so delayed in labs that they became void, he said.

The US and Japan have reached an agreement to keep American troops within their bases amid concerns over a surge in Covid cases that has been linked to US military bases.

Starting Monday, US military personnel are confirmed to base facilities except for “essential activities”, a statement from the US Forces in Japan and the Japanese foreign ministry said.

The allies will share information and cooperate on coronavirus measures, “given the extraordinary virulence of the Omicron variant spreading throughout Japan,” the statement said.

Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, has come under increasing pressure to address outbreaks that began at US military facilities last month and have since spread to the local civilian population.

The Netherlands’ new finance minister Sigrid Kaag has said she will miss the ceremonial inauguration of the new Dutch government on Monday after testing positive for Covid.

She tweeted today: “I have tested positive for Corona. It will be a slightly different start than I had hoped for.

“My installation will take place digitally. Luckily I feel fine.”

Here’s a useful thread on case rates in England and in particular, London, by Oliver Johnson, professor of information theory at Bristol University.

He points out that the seven-day average across England is down but data from London suggests the Omicron wave has not dropped as scientists had hoped.

Although the situation “could all be very much worse”, he warns that recorded deaths – which have been a mess because of holiday reporting – will likely get worse for a while.

Overall, he estimates that England could reach 25,000 Covid deaths in the six months since the so-called “Freedom Day”. He concludes:

Everything could be worse, it isn’t as bad as it has been in the past, but it’s not nothing either, and it may not be reasonable to expect that everything sorts itself out in the next couple of weeks.

Three people have been arrested for breaking India’s coronavirus measures after police raided a dog’s lavish birthday party.

The gathering in Gujarat’s Ahmedabad city was held to celebrate the second birthday of Abby, an Indian Spitz, and was attended by its owners as well as their family and friends. According to police, the birthday event cost 700,000 rupees (nearly £7,000) and featured an elaborate birthday cake, a performance by a popular folk singer and giant photo cutouts of the canine guest of honour.

Social media footage from the event showed a crowd of people dancing in front of an ornate stage in defiance of local social distancing rules and without masks. The video went viral and was seen by Gujarat police.

“We got information about a big party going on, so we raided the venue,” police inspector V.D. Zala told Agence-France-Presse. “As per Covid protocol, it is necessary to take permission before organising a party. The organisers are responsible for ensuring social distancing among guests.”

The three men arrested for their role in staging the event were later released on bail.

Covid should be treated as an endemic virus similar to flu, and ministers should end mass vaccination after the booster campaign, the former chairman of the UK’s vaccine taskforce has said.

With health chiefs and senior Tories also lobbying for a post-pandemic plan for a straining NHS, Dr Clive Dix called for a major rethink of the UK’s Covid strategy, in effect reversing the approach of the past two years and returning to a “new normality”.

“We need to analyse whether we use the current booster campaign to ensure the vulnerable are protected, if this is seen to be necessary,” he said. “Mass population-based vaccination in the UK should now end.”

He said ministers should urgently back research into Covid immunity beyond antibodies to include B-cells and T-cells (white blood cells). This could help create vaccines for vulnerable people specific to Covid variants, he said, adding: “We now need to manage disease, not virus spread. So stopping progression to severe disease in vulnerable groups is the future objective.”

Read the full article here:

More on the Philippines, after the country set a record for new 28,707 Covid infections for a second consecutive day.

A senior government official confirmed an increase in hospital beds and medical resources in and around the capital Manila have been ordered, Reuters reports.

Nearly 60% of the cases recorded today came from the capital region, which has seen a steady increase in admissions in recent days, although government data showed hospital capacity still below critical levels.

Health authorities have also been instructed to push vaccination rates outside the region, acting presidential spokesperson Karlo Nograles said in a statement.

Wales may reach its peak of infections in around two weeks, the Welsh first minister Mark Drakeford has said.

Modelling shows there will be a “relatively rapid decline” after this point and the government should then be able to step down its coronavirus measures, he said.

Drakeford defended a recent comment that the UK government was the “outlier” in not introducing further restrictions, adding:

Wales is following the same path of putting protections in place that is being followed by Scotland, Northern Ireland, and not just devolved governments in the UK, but governments across Europe and across the world.

The questions as to why the UK government has decided not to follow that course of action are for them to answer, not for me.

In the spring of 2020, Hart Island, a mile from City Island in the Bronx, was a focal point of grief in New York. It was here, at the city’s public cemetery or potter’s field, the final resting place of more than a million people, that officials ordered trenches dug to accommodate those the coronavirus was expected to kill.

The trenches were never filled. Many bodies were returned to funeral parlours or stored in mobile freezers on Randall’s Island, better known for music festivals and the Frieze art fair than cold storage of corpses.

Last week, as New York was once again in the grip of a pandemic spike, the ferry jetty was devoid of morbid feelings, even with infections running at a 35% positivity rate, close to five times the peak of last winter.

“We haven’t seen anyone here – or any of the trucks coming like they used to,” said one Hart Island worker.

The winter Covid wave has hit the Bronx hard. The borough has the city’s highest positivity rate, in some neighbourhoods near 50%. But for many this wave feels different, not least in the way leaders and health officials are treating it.

Read the full story here:

Russia reported 16,246 new Covid cases in the latest 24 hour period, health officials said, bringing the country’s total number of cases to 10,650,849.

A further 763 deaths of patients with coronavirus were also confirmed, bringing the total death toll to 316,163.

London’s public health chief has said the Omicron variant “may have passed its peak” in the UK capital. Speaking to Sky News’ Trevor Phillips this morning, Prof Kevin Fenton said:

Data from the ONS (Office for National Statistics) suggests that the peak may have occurred at or just about the New Year period.

We’re seeing reductions in overall case rates across the city and the prevalence of infection within the community.

But he warned infection levels are still “very, very high” and that more than one in 10 Londoners are still infected with the disease.

It means we’re not yet out of this critical phase of the pandemic, although we may well be past its peak.

Tianjin, a major Chinese port city near the capital Beijing, has begun mass-testing its 14 million residents after a cluster of 20 children and adults tested positive for Covid-19, including at least two with the Omicron variant.

The citywide testing, which began on Sunday, is to be completed over two days. Residents have been advised to stay at or near home to be available for the community-level nucleic-acid screening. They have been told that until they obtain a negative test result, they will not receive a “green” code on smartphone Covid-tracing apps that nearly all people in China are now required to present when using public transport and in other situations.

China has stepped up its zero-tolerance Covid-19 strategy in the run-up to the Winter Olympics, which open on 4 February in Beijing. The Chinese capital is 150km (90 miles) north-west of Tianjin and connected by a high-speed rail link that takes less than one hour.

Elsewhere in China, millions of people are being confined to their homes in Xi’an and Yuzhou, two other cities that are farther away but have larger outbreaks. The city of Zhengzhou, a provincial capital 70km (40 miles) north of Yuzhou, is also conducting mass testing and closing schools starting Monday.

China reported 165 confirmed coronavirus cases for 8 January, up from 159 a day earlier, its health authority said on Sunday.