Category Archives: Coronavirus

Australia Covid live updates: Victoria to have freedom of movement from Friday as state records 1,935 cases; 296 cases in NSW

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Victoria may reach jab milestone allowing greater freedoms this week, while figures show worrying number of school closures from outbreaks

The full rundown on Covid in NSW today, brought to you by AAP:

NSW has added a further 296 locally acquired infections to its Covid caseload along with four more deaths.

Some 480 people with the virus remain in hospitals across the state, 119 of them in intensive care.

Meanwhile, Halloween enthusiasts are being warned to keep trick-or-treating Covid-safe.

“If you and your family are planning to celebrate Halloween this year ... aim to keep the celebrations outside, provide closed packaging for treats and instead of communal lolly bowls consider other ways to distribute your treats,” NSW Health’s Jeremy McAnulty advised on Saturday.

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UK government paves way to bring in tough ‘plan B’ Covid rules

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Councils consulted over support for measures such as vaccine passports amid warnings by senior doctors that NHS faces winter illness ‘triple whammy’

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New evidence has emerged that the government is paving the way to implement “plan B” measures in England to combat the spread of Covid-19, amid warnings from health chiefs that a “vortex of pressures” is encircling the NHS.

In the clearest sign to date that Whitehall is actively considering additional measures, the Observer has learnt that the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) contacted local authorities on Friday to canvass their level of support for the “immediate rollout of the winter plan – plan B”.

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‘It was quite overwhelming’: how it feels to have your business thrive in a pandemic

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From virtual puppy school to home bubble-tea subscriptions, lockdowns in Australia have created unlikely winners, but victory as an outlier is sometimes bittersweet

It’s no secret that on the work front, the Covid narrative has predominantly been a negative one, with two-thirds of Australian businesses reporting a hit to revenue in 2020 and underemployment hitting a historic high of 13.8%, impacting 1.8 million people.

Despite this, lockdowns have brought growth to certain sectors, with Australians spending big in areas such as beauty, hobbies and home furnishings. This increased desire for little luxuries is sometimes called the lipstick index. So what does it feel like to be an outlier in a downturn? We asked four business owners to share their experiences.

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‘Incredibly worried’: end of Covid disaster payment looms for many still out of work

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At 80% vaccination the support will be gone. Some will be hit hard, particularly if Australia’s economy doesn’t bounce back strongly

It’s the lifeline that’s kept nearly 2 million people in New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT on a steady weekly income during Covid lockdowns.

Since June, the government’s Covid-19 disaster payments – paid at either $750 or $450 a week, or $200 a week for existing welfare recipients – have been available to people who lost work due to stay-at-home restrictions.

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Owners offload dogs bought in lockdown by pretending they are strays

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Rescue centres say they are seeing more and more pets their owners are now too busy to look after

People are pretending that dogs they acquired during lockdown are strays so that rescue centres take them in, after failing to sell them online, animal rescue charities and shelters have warned.

Figures from March revealed that more than 3.2m pets were bought by UK households during lockdown. Since Covid restrictions were lifted and people have started to return to the office, charities have reported a growing trend of people abandoning their pandemic pets as they no longer have as much time for them.

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Nurses and shop staff in UK face tide of abuse since end of lockdowns

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Customer-facing workers in all sectors report greater hostility, research shows

People in public-facing jobs are facing rising hostility and verbal abuse since the end of the Covid lockdowns, according to organisations which represent them. Half of all shop, transport, restaurant and hotel workers and others dealing regularly with the public have experienced abuse in the past six months, figures from the Institute for Customer Service (ICS) show. This is a 6% rise over May’s 44%. Of those who had been abused, 27% had been physically attacked, it found.

The research comes as trades unions and industry bodies warn of growing public hostility towards workers since Covid’s second wave.

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Covid testing failures at UK lab ‘should have been flagged within days’

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Senior scientists say problems at Immensa site show private firms should not be carrying out PCR tests

Health officials should have known about major failings at a private Covid testing lab within days of the problem arising, rather than taking weeks to shut down operations at the site, senior scientists say.

About 43,000 people, mostly in south-west England, are believed to have wrongly been told they did not have the virus by Immensa Health Clinic’s laboratory in Wolverhampton in a debacle described as one of the worst scandals in the UK’s Covid crisis.

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New Zealand’s Covid outbreak spreads to South Island

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The first community case in the south was reported in Blenheim, but officials play down risk of further contagion

New Zealand has reported 104 new coronavirus infections, including the first community case of the virus in the country’s South Island in nearly a year, health officials said.

Most of the new infections reportedon Saturday were in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city that has been under a strict lockdown for more than two months. Looser restrictions are in place in most of the rest of the country of 5 million.

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‘Nervous giddy excitement’: relieved Melbourne residents enjoy weekend out of lockdown

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The world’s lockdown capital emerges for its first Friday night of freedom, but not everyone joined the party

From St Kilda to Coburg the traffic is heavy in Melbourne for the first time in months. The bars are filling up and friends are having long hugs as the world’s lockdown capital sheds its Covid restrictions and opens up.

“Melbourne is back!” yells one man out of his car window on Lygon Street in the inner-city suburb of Carlton.

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English schools struggle to cope as Covid wreaks havoc

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Despite government narrative of a return to normality, schools in areas with high Covid rates lack support

Schools in England hit by high numbers of Covid-19 cases among staff and pupils have been forced to reinstate mask wearing, send whole year groups home to study online and in some cases close early for half-term as the pandemic continues to wreak havoc in education.

Despite the government narrative of a return to normality in classrooms, schools in areas with high coronavirus rates say they have struggled to function, with many staff off sick and problems securing supply teachers because of high demand.

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Covid live news: Amnesty calls for inquiry into Italian care home deaths; India likely to miss vaccine target

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Action urged over reports of retaliation against Italian nursing staff; longer than usual gap between AstraZeneca doses slowing India’s roll-out

One thing regular readers will have noted is that I occasionally pop in this map that seems to indicate the extent to which the UK’s caseload is an outlier in the western end of Europe, while also showing the surge that is building up towards the east of the continent.

It can sometimes be quite the cognitive dissonance for a journalist to be reporting that Russia – with a much larger population and a much lower caseload than the UK – is going into a week of work-free lockdown to try and break transmission, while members of the UK government are failing to follow their own public health advice over face mask wearing, even as daily Covid cases top 50,000.

“The UK is an outlier, because it does have quite high coverage of vaccination — and is still having 45,000 cases per day,” said Quique Bassat, a pediatrician at the Barcelona Institute for Global health.

Yet after Britain marked “freedom day” in July, it was to be expected that there would be a “persistence of transmission as opposed to other countries which have maintained much more stringent preventive measures,” said Bassat.

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Zimbabwe’s older people: the pandemic’s silent victims

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Care facilities for older people used to be thought ‘un-African’. But destitution caused by Covid has seen demand for care homes soar

Lunch is Angelica Chibiku’s favourite time. At 12pm she sits on her neatly made bed waiting for her meal at the Society of the Destitute Aged (Soda) home for older people in Highfield, a township in south-west Harare.

Chibiku welcomes a helper into her room and cracks a few jokes. She loves to interact with those who bring her food and supplies.

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How to retrain your frazzled brain and find your focus again

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Are you finding it harder than ever to concentrate? Don’t panic: these simple exercises will help you get your attention back

Picture your day before you started to read this article. What did you do? In every single moment – getting out of bed, turning on a tap, flicking the kettle switch – your brain was blasted with information. Each second, the eyes will give the brain the equivalent of 10m bits (binary digits) of data. The ears will take in an orchestra of sound waves. Then there’s our thoughts: the average person, researchers estimate, will have more than 6,000 a day. To get anything done, we have to filter out most of this data. We have to focus.

Focusing has felt particularly tough during the pandemic. Books are left half-read; eyes wander away from Zoom calls; conversations stall. My inability to concentrate on anything – work, reading, cleaning, cooking – without being distracted over the past 18 months has felt, at times, farcical.

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‘I need to work’: Italy’s green pass rule triggers rise in Covid jab uptake

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Rule that pass must be presented to access workplaces forces hand of many vaccine-hesitant Italians

At the vaccination hub outside Termini train station in Rome, a steady flow of people have been turning up for their first Covid vaccine dose in recent days. The mood is begrudging. “If I didn’t have to do it, I wouldn’t,” said Rosanna Barbuto, a supermarket worker. Catalin, 41, who works in a factory, said: “I’m taking it because I need to work.”

They are among the vaccine-hesitant who caved in after Italy made it mandatory for all workers to present a so-called green pass to access their workplaces. The rules are the strictest in Europe and require workers to present proof of vaccination, immunity or of a negative test taken within the previous 48 hours. Some see Italy’s cautious approach as the key to its current low infection rate.

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‘The plan is to drink all day’: sunny Melbourne celebrates its freedom day. First stop – brunch!

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As the first hints of summer creep into the air, residents crowd into cafes – but a grim new record Covid death toll casts a shadow

For the first time in a long time, there are plenty of people out on Melbourne streets as the sun rises over the city.

Just hours after lockdown lifted, cafe workers are out in the cool morning air, dragging chairs and tables out the front of the stores, anticipating hordes of brunch-starved customers.

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Auckland’s lockdown has finally given me what I always wanted – a licence to pry | Leni Ma’ia’i

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I’m one of the city’s many undercover agents, ready to pounce on any and all lockdown infringements

Nine weeks into Tāmaki Makaurau’s lockdown, having pushed the limits on baking, introspection and backgammon, I’ve taken to running.

No, not for any of the health benefits – running at my size can’t be healthy; it’s a chance to go snooping. I’ve always enjoyed sticking my nose in other people’s business, but society has repressed these urges. Lockdown, finally, has given me the licence to pry.

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‘Sorry, a slight distraction’: Jacinda Ardern unruffled as earthquake interrupts press conference

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The 5.9 magnitude quake forced the prime minister to pause and grip her podium before continuing to outline post-Covid lockdown plans

New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern has been interrupted by an earthquake midway through announcing the country’s plans for a post-Covid-lockdown future.

The 5.9 quake rattled parliament in Wellington on Friday as Ardern was holding a press conference on the country’s new vaccination targets.

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Coronavirus live: WHO warns indoor socialising driving infections; Russia sees ‘isolated cases’ of Delta subvariant

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Indoor socialising in winter behind rise in cases, WHO warns; AY.4.2 subvariant may be around 10% more infectious than the original Delta

In the UK Labour’s shadow culture secretary Jo Stevens – she is MP for Cardiff Central – has been on Sky News, and has been highly critical of the government’s approach to rising Covid numbers in the UK, accusing the health secretary Sajid Javid of an “element of complacency” in his press conference yesterday. She said:

It’s a serious situation we’re in. Rising infection rates, rising hospitalisation rates, and suddenly rising death rates. And what we want to see and have pressed the government to do is to demonstrate their plan for dealing with this ahead of the winter situation.

The NHS is under pressure.

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UK’s neighbours criticise Covid policies as cases begin to surge across EU

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Several European nations have questioned British response but there are growing signs of fresh wave across continent

For the past several weeks, many western European countries have been eyeing Covid case numbers across the Channel with mounting trepidation.

“Why does Britain have more than 40,000 Covid cases a day, and why is it the European country with the most infections?” asked Spain’s ABC, while France’s L’Express criticised “disastrous myopia” in London.

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