Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Prime minster says rigorous testing essential for entering country but Anthony Albanese says government failed stranded citizens
Scott Morrison has rejected suggestions Covid-positive Australians were “unfairly blocked” from returning from India, despite conceding problems with the pre-flight testing regime.
About 80 returnees are now in quarantine in the Howard Springs facility in the Northern Territory after they landed from India on Saturday following the lifting of the travel ban from the virus-ravaged country.
Boris Johnson was under mounting pressure on Saturday to reconsider Monday’s relaxation of Covid rules in England because of the threat posed by the India variant. His own advisers and independent health experts raised fears that it could lead to a surge in hospital admissions, especially among young adults.
From Monday people will be able to meet in groups of up to 30 outdoors, while six people or two households will be permitted to meet indoors. Pubs, bars, cafes and restaurants will be allowed to serve customers indoors. Indoor entertainment such as museums, cinemas and children’s play areas can also open along with theatres, concert halls, conference centres and sports stadiums.
Indian community leaders call on officials to do more to avoid a repeat of the scores of empty seats on the first post-ban flight
The Australian government needs to do more to avoid a repeat of the scores of seats left empty on the first post-ban repatriation flight from virus-ravaged India, one community leader has said.
University of Southampton spends ‘hundreds of thousands’ on legal battle preventing access due to government veto
When the diaries and letters of Lord and Lady Mountbatten were “saved for the nation” in 2010, it should have created an invaluable public resource. Instead, a writer has spent four years and £250,000 of his own money in an ongoing – but still frustrated – attempt to force Southampton University and the Cabinet Office to allow the public to view them.
The university bought the Broadlands archive, named after the Mountbattens’ Grade I-listed house, for £2.8m in 2010, attracting funding by stating it would “preserve the collection in its entirety for future generations to use and enjoy” and “ensure public access”.
Greece is to lift its internal travel restrictions on 14 May, the day it’s tourism season opens, officials have said, whilst retaining health safeguards for the country’s more vulnerable islands.
AFP reports:
For the first time since a second Covid-19 lockdown was imposed in November, Greeks will no longer be required to notify authorities by SMS when leaving their homes. However, anyone travelling to Greek islands by sea or air must show a vaccination certificate or a negative test result, minister Akis Skertsos told reporters.
Officials aim to fully vaccinate at least 35% of island populations by the end of June. Greece is keen to attract crowds of holidaymakers back to its idyllic islands, which are some of its most popular travel destinations, with tourism bringing in as much as a quarter of Greece’s annual income
We now have confirmation that Norway will not resume the use of AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine and has delayed a decision on whether to start using jabs made by Johnson & Johnson, following a press conference led by the country’s prime minister Erna Solberg.
It comes after a government-appointed commission recommended that both vaccines should be excluded from Norway’s vaccination programme due to a risk of rare but harmful side-effects.
At least 90 more bodies of suspected Covid-19 victims have washed up in rivers in India, as the virus continues to spread into poor rural areas and the country recorded its highest daily death toll so far.
More than 70 corpses were discovered floating in the Ganges River in the Buxar district of the state of Bihar and dozens more bodies were found upstream in the Ghazipur and Ballia districts in the neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh.
Death and illness from Covid-19 is steadily rising once again. In the last week of April, more than 93,000 people died – approaching the worst of the global second wave. How can this still be happening? How can some countries still be experiencing wave after wave of infection when we know how to prevent them?
For the past eight months, the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response has been rigorously reviewing the evidence of what happened to allow Covid-19 to take a firm grip – and why. The panel spoke to hundreds of experts and people on the frontline of the response, and conducted extensive original research and numerous literature reviews.
Brazilian states halted vaccination of pregnant women on Tuesday after a death in Rio de Janeiro led health regulator Anvisa to warn against the use of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine for expecting mothers, Reuters reports.
A pregnant woman in Rio de Janeiro died after receiving the AstraZeneca shot, according to state Health Secretary Alexandre Chieppe, in a case authorities are still investigating.
Sao Paulo state suspended Covid-19 vaccination for pregnant women with risk factors and Rio state suspended immunisation of all pregnant women. Both states cited the Anvisa recommendation as a reason for the decision.
AstraZeneca investors narrowly approved pay package proposals for its chief executive, Pascal Soriot, after nearly 40% voted against the policy, which could hand him pay and perks of up to £17.8m for 2021, Julia Kollewe reports.
Usually very rare, mucormycosis has a high mortality rate and is difficult to treat
A rare black fungus that invades the brain is being increasingly seen in vulnerable patients in India, including those with Covid-19, as the health system continues to struggle in the midst of the pandemic.
The health ministry on Sunday released an advisory on how to treat the infection. In the state of Gujarat, about 300 cases had been reported in four cities, including Ahmedabad, according to data from state-run hospitals.
Waiting for India’s Covid wave to break over Nepal has been as painful as it was inevitable. Now that it’s happening, this country of 30 million people is even more hapless and unprepared than India seems to have been.
My friend, Dr Rakshya Pandey, a pulmonary care doctor in Kathmandu, says that during her long shifts, the thought sometimes enters her mind: ‘‘Where would I go if I get sick? Where would I take my mother if she gets the virus?”
Dozens of bodies believed to be Covid-19 victims have washed up on the banks of the Ganges River in northern India as the pandemic spreads into India’s vast rural hinterland, overwhelming local health facilities as well as crematoriums and cemeteries.
Local official Ashok Kumar said that about 40 corpses washed up in Buxar district near the border between Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, two of India’s poorest states.
Indian Americans scramble to secure oxygen canisters for family members, desperately work to raise funds and pressure US legislators to lift vaccine patents
Since the pandemic began, Fatima Ahmed has lost 29 of her family members in India and one in the US to Covid-19.
A few days ago, her uncle died in his car as he was driving back home from a hospital in Hyderabad, a city in southern India. “All the hospitals were at capacity, so they couldn’t take him in,” said Ahmed. “He pulled over and he called the rest of the family, the khandan – before he passed.”
People to mix indoors from next week ... China to set up ‘separation line’ on Everest peak to stop Nepal Covid spread ... calls grow for India national lockdown. Follow latest updates
Australia’s international travel ban is based on politics and not science, according to health experts who say there are a number of countries Australia could safely resume travel with this year.
On Sunday the treasurer Josh Frydenberg told SBS News that the budget expectation is that international travel will begin in 2022, with further detail expected when the budget is released on Tuesday. Meanwhile the prime minister Scott Morrison posted on Facebook that borders would only open “when it is safe to do so”, saying during media interviews over the weekend that Australians do not have an “appetite” for opening borders if it means further lockdowns and restrictions.
The reopening of outdoor bars and restaurants in France will go ahead on 19 May 19, health minister Olivier Veran has said on Monday, as the number of Covid cases in intensive care eases.
“The prospects look rather good but we must not let down the guard,” Veran told LCI television.
The number of Covid-19 patients in French intensive care units fell below 5,000 for the first time since late March on Sunday, Reuters is reporting that health ministry data showed.
The number was down for a sixth day in a row at 4,971, against 5,005 the previous day, the ministry said.
The United States is closer to getting the coronavirus pandemic under control and health officials are focused on the next challenge: getting more Americans vaccinated, the White House Covid-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients said on Sunday, Reuters reports.
“I would say we are turning the corner,” Zients said in an interview with CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Italy plans to lift quarantine restrictions for travellers arriving from European countries, including Britain and Israel, as early as mid-May to revive the tourism industry, Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio said on Saturday.
After meeting Health Minister Roberto Speranza to discuss the easing of restrictions for countries where vaccination levels are high, Di Maio said, quarantine requirements may also be scrapped for those arriving from the United States from June.
Tourism is an important key to Italy’s restart, and we need to plan the summer well so that health, economy and work are not put in danger.
With Minister Roberto Speranza we had a first confrontation on reopening measures to foreign tourists who want to visit our country this summer.
The German chancellor Angela Merkel said Europeans could forward to travelling this summer if coronavirus cases continue declining on the continent.
While the European Union is developing a vaccine certificate, valid throughout the 27-nation bloc, summer holidays should be possible again for people who haven’t had their shots against the virus, the chancellor said.
Merkel said that Germany also appears to have broken its most recent outbreak.
“Step by step, more will be possible in Germany, too, wherever the incidence drops, and that will hopefully be the case for all of Europe,” she said.
The pandemic overwhelming the big cities is reaching areas of Bihar where there is one doctor for 40,000 people
In the small rural village of Kathail, in the east of India’s poorest state, Bihar, access to healthcare has always been scarce. But when 34-year-old Umakant Singh fell sick with a cough and fever last week, his brother Mantu Singh did all he could to find help.
For four days Mantu rushed around, collecting the limited medicines he could find for his younger brother and nursing him at home. But he knew what these symptoms meant: Covid-19 had reached their village.
The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has told a Senate hearing on Covid-19 there are 173 unaccompanied children in India who are trying to return to Australia. More than 9,500 Australians are stranded in the country, 950 of them classed as vulnerable, following a flight ban from India that will end on 15 May. Australian airline Qantas doesn’t take unaccompanied minors, potentially limiting options to come home through Air India or special repatriation flights
The Covid-19 inquiry is hearing from Australians stranded in India, including Sunny, who traveled to India in May 2020 because his father was in a critical condition with no support during India’s coronavirus lockdown.
Sunny’s father passed away on 1 June 2020 while Sunny was in hotel quarantine in Dehli. He wants to bring his mother home to Australia with him, but his flights in July 2020 were cancelled due to the Melbourne lockdown.
Sunny said it was “next to impossible” to come back with 10,000 stranded Australians seeking seats on Air India flights and no Qantas repatriation flights until November. He paid $10,000 to fly to Australia from Japan, but was bumped from the flight.
Sunny said the Australian government had been “totally insensitive to stranded Australians” after he suffered “11 months of misery”.
Sunny and his mother live in an area experiencing a “tsunami of infections”, with 60-70% of people on the street infected with Covid-19. He said they lived holed up in the house “in fear for our lives” but worried it was only a matter of time before they were infected.
Sunny quoted the advice of the chief medical officer, Paul Kelly, that the India travel ban could, in the worst-case scenario, result in the death of Australians in India.
He called for a comprehensive schedule of repatriation flights to get all Australians in India and elsewhere home.
Meg, another Australian in India, has told the committee she was stranded in India after she travelled there on holiday in January 2020.
Meg was unable to fly back in October when her Cathay Pacific flight via Hong Kong was cancelled, and she hasn’t been able to get a seat in the “raffle” of respite or charter flights.
She said:
The daily fear of going out and contracting Covid was with us every day and it it still is now, the situation is so bad. The Australian government hasn’t provided any kind of emotional support to those stranded in India. We are part of Facebook and Whatsapp groups – people are depressed about the situation. Emotionally people are so down and depressed.
We haven’t really received anything from the high commission. Every time I’ve called for help, guidance, the phone would just ring out no matter how many times you call.
The website for the new Labor campaign we mentioned earlier is now live. It is seen as a bit of an opening salvo for an election which could be more than a year away.
Nepal is struggling to contain an explosion in Covid-19 cases, as fears grow that the situation in the Himalayan country may be as bad, if not worse, than in neighbouring India, with which it shares a long and porous border.
Following warnings by health officials earlier this week that the country was on the brink of losing control of its outbreak, Nepal has appealed for urgent international help.