Category Archives: Coronavirus

Australia Covid live update: Victoria records 11 cases; business urges states to mandate vaccines with Moderna due to arrive next month

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Victoria reports 11 new Covid cases as state expands access to AstraZeneca; Business Council of Australia says vaccinations should be highly targeted. Follow all the day’s news

All things going as normal, we should hear from the NSW authorities around 11am

A women’s and children’s hospital in St Albans has been listed as a tier one exposure site in Melbourne.

The maternity assessment centre at Joan Kirner women’s and children’s hospital on Furlong Road was listed on the Victorian exposure site list late last night. Anyone who attended the centre between 8.15am and 2.45pm on Friday 6 August has been ordered to isolate immediately for 14 days, get tested, and notify the Department of Health. The pathology lab – Dorevitch Pathology – on the ground floor of the same hospital has also been listed as a tier one site.

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UK allows quarantine-free travel from France – as it happened

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This blog is now closed. You can find all of our coverage of the pandemic here.

This blog is closing now but thanks very much for reading. We’ll be back in a few hours with more rolling coverage of the pandemic from all around the world.

In the meantime you can catch up with all our coverage of the pandemic here.

Tunisia launched a Covid-19 vaccination drive for the over-40s, after receiving more than six million doses from abroad to combat surging infections.

The health ministry said 551,008 people had been given jabs in more than 300 centres across the country, in what was billed as an “open day” for vaccinations, AFP reports.

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Rice, rice baby: Japanese parents send relatives rice to hug in lieu of newborns

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Each bag matches birth weight and features baby’s face, so new arrival can be hugged in pandemic

Parents in Japan are sending bags of rice that weigh the same as their newborn babies to relatives who are unable to visit them due to the pandemic.

The bags come in a wide range of designs, with some shaped like a baby wrapped in a blanket so that relatives can feel as though they are hugging the new arrival while looking at a picture of their face, which is attached to the front.

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Fears as more children falling ill in latest US Covid surge and school approaches

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  • National Institutes of Health director says 1,450 kids in hospital
  • Teachers union shifts, calls for vaccine mandates for teachers

Amid increased fears that children are now both victims and vectors of the latest Covid-19 variant surge, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins signaled on Sunday that increasing numbers of children are falling ill in the US.

His comments also came as one of America’s largest teachers unions appeared to shift its position on mandatory vaccinations for teachers.

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UK competition watchdog to look into pricing of Covid tests for travel

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CMA to investigate PCR tests market after concerns about vastly different prices being charged

The competition watchdog is to look into fees for the Covid-19 tests required for international travel after concerns about the vastly different prices being charged for them.

The Competition and Markets Authority will provide advice and intelligence on the market in PCR tests to the health secretary, Sajid Javid, to enable the government to act.

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Britain’s Covid experts Neil Ferguson Sage are under attack, but they are just doing their jobs

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Those who attack Neil Ferguson and Sage’s pandemic predictions only expose their ignorance about science

• Coronavirus – latest updates

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It feels like open season on Professor Neil Ferguson right now. Sections of the media and several columnists delight in castigating the epidemiologist, or “Professor Lockdown”, for being “doomster in chief”, constantly predicting catastrophe and then back-pedalling when the worst numbers don’t materialise.

Opponents of Covid restrictions blame Ferguson and his team at Imperial College London for persuading Boris Johnson to shake off his libertarian instincts and take us into lockdown. One presenter on new channel GB News described Ferguson as a “numpty” on air, and the very mention of his name attracts groans in some circles.

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Macron tells critics: vaccine passport will protect all our freedoms

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French protests expected to enter fourth week but president’s hardline strategy is succeeding

When the Great Plague struck Marseille in 1720, killing more than half of the city’s population, travellers were ordered to carry a “bill of health” and ships arriving at the Mediterranean port underwent a 40-day cordon sanitaire or quarantine. As a gateway for trade, the city authorities struggled to find a delicate balance between halting the spread of the disease and damaging vital commerce.

Three hundred years on, President Emmanuel Macron is walking an equally tricky tightrope just eight months before he seeks re-election in April 2022. And unlike the ancient Marseillais, Macron has to answer to social media.

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Australia Covid live news update: NSW records 262 new cases and Victoria 11; Cairns to enter snap lockdown

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Victorian clinics to offer AstraZeneca to under 40s as state records 11 cases; Gladys Berejiklian says vaccine rollout ‘is a race’ as NSW records 262 cases and one death; Queensland records nine new cases, with lockdown to end for 11 LGAs today. Follow live

The new drive-through vaccination clinic will have capacity to administer 10,000 vaccines per week. That’s a conservative number, Bromley says, and may be limited by Pfizer supply.

She urges people to book ahead before turning up at the drive-through clinic.

To start it will be 10 cars at a time. Obviously this week all the processes will be reviewed and they’ll make it as big and as fast as efficient as possible. But we’ll start with 10 cars coming through.

Bromley says the rest of the state-run clinics will soon be allowed to deliver the AstraZeneca vaccine to under 40s. Only nine will be used initially, to test demand and the informed consent process.

So we’ll just do that initially, open up the nine hubs and the reason for that is, A, we want to see what the demand is. We want to know that we’re going to be able to manage that and we want to make sure that the process, because there is an additional process, as Brett sort of talked through, for these individuals coming through, they will go through a slightly more rigorous consent process. We want to make sure we got the systems and the workforce all set up perfectly so it’s running smoothly and so it doesn’t impact on the overall efficiency of the system.

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Willing to be set on fire or jump off tall buildings? New Zealand needs more stunt people

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During the pandemic New Zealand has become a safe haven for international film studios, creating a surge in demand for ‘stunties’

Burrowed in a beige building block in Auckland’s industrial east, a neat line of stunt hopefuls wait their turn to take their first step on an “air ram”. With enough power to flip a full sized car, the menacing looking metal pedal is designed to vault the “stunties” high into the air, as if tossed from an exploding building.

Standing by and keeping a watchful eye, Dayna Grant points up to the rafters of the converted warehouse at least 10 metres above, fondly remembering a time she was tossed up high enough to touch the ceiling. But today’s NZ Stunt School class of ex-circus performers, working stunt people, and retirees, won’t come close to that.

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There are no happy lockdowns but every lockdown is unhappy in its own way | Kirsten Tranter

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Competitive suffering shows itself as another face of the trauma we’re going through. But eventually there will be unpredictable moments of delight

It’s coming up on a year since the skies over San Francisco turned red because of smoke from wildfires in surrounding areas, an uncanny reminder of Sydney’s Black Summer of late 2019 and early 2020. Now there is different kind of grim echo, as Sydney goes further into lockdown in the grip of a new surge of coronavirus. Here in California we are cautiously taking off our masks and trying to remember how to talk to friends face to face.

Meanwhile, in a horrible reversal, I see my Sydney friends and family experiencing something like we did in March 2020, when the schools closed, the shelter-in-place order went into effect and there was no certainty about how long it would go on, and how bad it would get.

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Prof Francois Balloux: ‘The pandemic has created a market for gloom and doom’

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The UCL scientist and ‘militant corona centrist’ on the risk of new variants, psychosomatic long Covid and when he expects the crisis to end

Prof Francois Balloux is director of the University College London Genetics Institute. His work focuses on the reconstruction of disease outbreaks and epidemics. With his colleague Dr Lucy van Dorp, he led the first large-scale sequencing project of the Sars-CoV2 genome. During the pandemic, he has become a prominent scientist on Twitter, where he describes himself as a “militant corona centrist”.

Would you say a new variant of concern is still the major threat to our way out of this pandemic?
We haven’t had one in a while. The four variants of concern all emerged in the second half of 2020, and it’s important to keep in mind that viruses evolve all the time at a fairly regular pace.

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Australia Covid live news update: NSW reports 319 new cases, five deaths and Armidale lockdown; Victoria records 29 cases and Qld 13

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None of new Victorian cases in quarantine for infectious period; Queensland won’t make lockdown decision until Sunday

Cricket Victoria’s indoor training centre in St Kilda has been identified as a tier one exposure site, after a positive case attended on Wednesday night, according to the latest health department update: https://www.coronavirus.vic.gov.au/exposure-sites

And NSW Health has also confirmed some details about the earlier news that tighter restrictions are being enforced for the next week in Armidale:

⚠️PUBLIC HEALTH ALERT – ARMIDALE REGIONAL LGA⚠️

To protect the people of NSW from the evolving COVID-19 outbreak, new restrictions will be introduced for the Armidale Regional Local Government Area, including the towns of Armidale and Guyra, from 5pm today. pic.twitter.com/bwRSE4MZyV

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Covid patients reunited with the medics who saved them

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Four people who were so ill that they barely remember their time in the ICU meet the doctors and nurses who held their hands

In a light-filled studio in east London, a petite woman in scrubs receives a bouquet of flowers from a tall man, dressed smartly, only faintly out of breath.

The room is thick with emotion. They are strangers, but stare at each other with wonder in their eyes. And then Dr Susan Jain, an intensive care consultant at Homerton university hospital, breaks the silence with a laugh.

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I want this pandemic to end – yet I secretly pine for another lockdown

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For some of us, living with Covid the past 18 months gave us permission to slow down, and to re-evaluate how we want to live when this is finally over

When I walked out of my town’s massive conference center in early April, a second Pfizer shot fresh in my arm, a flood of emotions swelled in me. Creeping behind the feelings of joy and anticipation, I felt a strange bit of sadness that, all the way home, I could not shake. When I walked into my house and my three-year-old dashed into my arms, it hit me.

‘I think I’m going to miss being locked down,’ I realised, in disbelief.

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Biden said America had ‘gained the upper hand’ over Covid – has Delta changed the game?

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A month ago, Americans were getting vaccinated, cases and deaths were falling, and Biden seemed to have the virus in his grasp. Not so fast

It was not supposed to be this way.

A month ago Joe Biden appeared to have victory over the coronavirus pandemic within his grasp. As tens of millions of Americans got vaccinated, cases, hospitalizations and deaths were falling precipitously.

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A fractured federation? How the closing of state borders in the Covid crisis has raised old quarrels

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I fancy myself a federationist, but when Victoria closed down, I am ashamed to admit that the old serpent of NSW schadenfreude re-awoke in me

Last time there was a national cabinet in Australia, I was a somewhat dyslexic six-year-old to nine-year-old and the nation was in great peril. And even then the national war cabinets were not along the lines of the Covid national cabinet – the states were beneath making war policy and had no part in it.

Since those days I have seen a gradual accretion of powers to the federal sphere. There was certainly no federal health ministry at federation and, at the last pandemic in 1918-19, quarantine seemed to be the chief health business the federal government was engaged in. A formal federal health ministry was not brought into being until after the pandemic in 1921. As for a federal education ministry, it came into being in 1968, and the first minister was John Gorton.

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Alarm as US Covid cases above 100,000 a day for first time since February

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  • Seven-day hospital admissions average up 40% from last week
  • Mississippi health official says Delta surging ‘like a tsunami’

Daily Covid-19 cases in the US moved above 100,000 a day for the first time since February, higher than the levels of last summer when vaccines were not available, and came as health officials sounded alarm over lagging rates of vaccination driving the surge of the infectious Delta variant.

The seven-day average of hospital admissions has also increased more than 40% from the week before, with health workers describing frustration and exhaustion as hospitals in Covid hotspots were again overwhelmed with patients, almost 20 months into the pandemic in the US.

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St Vincent leader attacked by anti-vaccine protester – video

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Ralph Gonsalves, the prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines, has been taken to hospital after a protester threw a rock at his head during a demonstration led by nurses and other workers in the eastern Caribbean island.

The protest was organised by unions representing nurses, police and other workers who claimed that the government planned to mandate vaccines for certain employees. Gonsalves clarified that he would not make vaccines mandatory

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Coronavirus live news: Gibraltar reports first Covid death since March; England’s proportion of cases decreases

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Gibraltar officials say man who died was in his 60s and unvaccinated; one in 75 had Covid in England last week, down from 1 in 65

Europe’s drugs regulator has said it had so far not found a causal link between Covid-19 vaccines and menstrual disorders and advised three new conditions be added as possible side-effects after vaccination with Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus shot.

Reuters reports that cases of menstrual disorders reported after vaccination were studied by its safety committee, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) said, adding that it had requested for more data from vaccine developers to assess the issue.

Sri Lankan authorities have tightened coronavirus restrictions as reports emerged of Covid patients dying while awaiting admission to overcrowded hospitals.

AFP reports that the government said state ceremonies and public gatherings were banned until 1 September because of the growing health crisis. Public servants had previously been asked to return to work from Monday but that order has now been revoked in a significant u-turn and bosses told to decide who should report for duty on-site.

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St Vincent PM bloodied by rock thrown by anti-vaccine protester

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  • Ralph Gonsalves taken to hospital after attack on Thursday
  • Nurses and police protesting over fears of mandatory vaccines

Ralph Gonsalves, the prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines, has been taken to hospital after a protester threw a rock at his head during an anti-vaccine demonstration led by nurses and other workers in the eastern Caribbean island,.

Related: CNN fires three employees for coming to work unvaccinated

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