Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
An extension to France’s “health pass” covering activities including going to restaurants and cafes, taking long-distance train journeys and visiting hospitals has come into effect after a fourth weekend of protests.
The pass sanitaire, which the government hopes will boost vaccination rates, is shown in the form of a QR code either digitally or on paper and given to those who are fully vaccinated, have a negative Covid-19 test or have had coronavirus and recovered.
The more aggressive Delta variant of Covid-19, detected in the Philippines in mid-July, has spread across much of the country, reaching 13 of 17 regions, health officials have said.
On Sunday, the Philippines reported a sharp rise in daily Covid fatalities, with 287 deaths, the highest daily increase in four months. A further 9,671 new infections were also confirmed.
One of the few neurosurgeons in the country, Mukasa declined lucrative opportunities to work overseas, dedicating himself to training a new generation and going the ‘extra mile’ for patients
Kennedy Owuor first fell over in his hotel room in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, before headaches followed. He initially brushed the symptoms off as a minor problem, but soon he started having difficulties speaking and moving.
A trip in August 2020 to northern Uganda, as part of his duties working for the UN’s food agency, had to be interrupted. He was instead driven for 12 hours to UMC Victoria hospital in Kampala.
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I fancy myself a federationist, but when Victoria closed down, I am ashamed to admit that the old serpent of NSW schadenfreudere-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.
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.