Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Ireland is to double to 10 days its quarantine period for travellers from the UK who are not fully vaccinated, joining a growing list of countries imposing stricter travel rules on British arrivals due to concerns over the rapid spread of the Delta variant.
The announcement came after Boris Johnson on Monday delayed by a month the final stage of England’s exit from lockdown amid accusations the government should have acted faster by placing India, where the variant was first detected, on its red restricted-travel list before 23 April.
As lockdown easing in England is delayed from 21 June to a possible date of 19 July amid concerns of a substantial wave of hospitalisations due to the Delta variant of coronavirus, we take a look at the latest data on the protection offered by vaccines.
For more than a year, people who have wanted to get within breathing distance of Vladimir Putin have performed a ritual, two-week quarantine in Russian hotels and sanatoriums to protect the 68-year-old president from falling ill with coronavirus.
Since March 2020, powerful business people, regional governors, his pilots and medical staff, volunteers at an economic conference, and even second world war veterans have shut themselves away to meet the Kremlin leader or even stand in his general vicinity.
Israel and the UK were viewed as world leaders in their coronavirus vaccine campaigns but whereas the former is lifting almost all pandemic limitations, the latter is now glumly extending its restrictions in England amid a sharp rise in infections.
Despite starting its mass inoculation programme after the UK in December, Israel has sped ahead and it reached a key milestone on Tuesday, scrapping a requirement to wear face masks indoors, one of the final Covid limitations.
China is on track to administer 1bn vaccine doses by the end of this week, after bolstering production and distribution networks in an ambitious drive to vaccinate 40% of the population by this month.
Chinese authorities have been encouraging people to take the free and voluntary doses with cash incentives, gifts and colour-coded signage to laud or shame businesses depending on vaccination rates, as well as the promise of protection against Covid-19.
Instead of cutting the aid budget – including 95% from the plan to stamp out the disease – Britain should take a global lead
Despite the Covid pandemic, there have been just two recorded cases of wild polio in 2021 – in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the two remaining hiding places for the disease. But eradication is not guaranteed. Polio is virulent and spreads quickly. Even one case poses a threat to unvaccinated children everywhere, which is why a new strategy launched last week by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) outlines a plan to utilise this small window of opportunity for the world to end polio for good.
A 99.9% fall in polio cases globally in recent decades is thanks in large part to the GPEI and its supporters. The British government’s recent announcement that it will slash its contributions to the GPEI by more than 95% has been a body blow. The funding cut amounts to almost a quarter of the annual World Health Organization polio eradication budget.
This blog is closed. Follow the latest updates on the pandemic from around the world:
Bars at full capacity. No masks for vaccinated Disneyland goers. Fans sitting side-by-side at Giants and Dodgers games.
California rolled back its major public health restrictions on Tuesday, 15 months after it became the first state in the US to shut down to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
Vaccine thefts reported and hospitals unable to admit patients as cases leap 2,800% in a month
Uganda has all but run out of Covid-19 vaccines and oxygen as the country grapples with another wave of the pandemic.
Both private and public medical facilities in the capital, Kampala and in towns across the country – including regional hubs in Entebbe, Jinja, Soroti, Gulu and Masaka – have reported running out or having acute shortages of AstraZeneca vaccines and oxygen. Hospitals report they are no longer able to admit patients to intensive care.
Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene apologised for comparing Covid-19 mask requirements and vaccinations to the Nazi Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews. ‘I have made a mistake and it’s really bothered me for a couple of weeks now, and so I definitely want to own it,’ Taylor Greene said. Her apology on Monday came amid calls from some Democrats to censure her for the Holocaust remarks. Her comments had also been denounced by Republican congressional leaders
The roadmap out of lockdown – England’s strategy to return to a life more normal – was heavy on dates from the start. The first three steps, in March, April and May, passed so smoothly that a crucial point was easily forgotten: reopening rested on data, not dates, at least that was what scientific advisers hoped. Well, now the data has spoken.
England is not in lockdown today. Children are back at school. Cafes, restaurants and pubs are open. People can mix indoors, albeit in small numbers. Thousands can watch football matches. As the country moved from one step to another, more contact between people was expected to fuel cases, hospitalisations and even deaths. To keep them to a minimum, we have the vaccination programme.
Africa will get priority treatment for the Group of Seven’s pledged 870 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine, a senior World Health Organization adviser said on Monday.
“You will see that Africa is one of the most vulnerable, under-served (areas), so the priority would be for doses to go... to the African continent writ large. Those numbers will be sorted out the coming weeks,” Bruce Aylward, a senior WHO adviser and coordinator of the ACT (Access to Covid-19 Tools) Accelerator, told an online news briefing from Geneva.
Italy reported 36 coronavirus-related deaths on Monday against 26 the day before, the health ministry said, while the daily tally of new infections fell to 907 from 1,390.
Italy has registered 127,038 deaths linked to Covid-19 since its outbreak emerged in February last year, the second-highest toll in Europe after Britain and the eight-highest in the world. The country has reported 4.25 million cases to date.
Patients in hospital with Covid – not including those in intensive care – stood at 3,465 on Monday, down from 3,542 a day earlier.
There were 11 new admissions to intensive care units, down from 20 on Sunday. The total number of intensive care patients fell to 536 from a previous 565.
Some 79,524 tests for Covid-19 were carried out in the past day, compared with a previous 134,136, the health ministry said.
Boris Johnson has once again been persuaded that he must do the inevitable and cancel “Freedom Day” – a decision that will deeply rankle with him.
The prime minister is said to have complained to aides over the weekend about briefings to newspapers at the end of last week that a four-week delay was the likely outcome, saying he had technically not made the decision yet. But one thing matters more to Johnson than being able to join crowds in a packed pub on 21 June: not having to close them again a few weeks later.
The Delta variant of Covid-19, first identified in India, has been detected in 74 countries and continues to spread rapidly amid fears that it is poised to become the dominant strain worldwide.
With outbreaks of the main Delta strain and several of its sub-lineages confirmed in China, the US, Africa, Scandinavia and the Pacific, concern increasingly is focusing on how it appears to be more transmissible as well as causing more serious illness.
Fully vaccinated Germans have been urged not to storm the country’s pharmacies in the rush to obtain a Covid digital vaccination pass made available in thousands of stores on Monday.
The “Digitale Impfpass” or digital vaccination pass, is the official document to be used as part of the the European Union vaccine certificate scheme to facilitate travel across the bloc, which the European parliament agreed last month.
A Covid vaccine that is a critical part of the effort to vaccinate the developing world, as well as the UK, has an efficacy of 90% overall, its manufacturers have said after trials in the US and Mexico.
The UK has ordered 60m doses of Novavax, which has manufacturing agreements in Britain. Novavax has signed an agreement to provide 1.1bn doses to Covax, the UN-led initiative to get vaccines to poorer countries. The Serum Institute of India is contracted to make 100m doses, but has been making vaccines only for India in recent months in response to the Covid crisis there.
Scott Morrison was denied a one-on-one meeting with Joe Biden yesterday, at the PM’s first meeting with the US president, because Boris Johnson joined it.
Labor’s Penny Wong said it was disappointing that Morrison could not have a one-on-one meeting with Biden.
[The three-person meeting] was an opportunity that presented because we’re all here and so it was mutual.
It was a great opportunity for my first meeting, of course, with the president. I mean I’ve known Boris for many years.
The Australian army is investigating allegations of bullying and harassment of officer cadets at the University of Sydney regiment. Allegations include searches through women’s underwear drawers and a nearly three-month period in which cadets were forced to work seven days a week with no days off.
Health experts emphasize need for even those who have had disease to get inoculated
New cases of Covid-19 are declining across most of the US, even in some states with vaccine-hesitant populations.
But almost all states where cases are rising have lower-than-average vaccination rates and experts warned on Sunday that relief from the coronavirus pandemic could be fleeting in regions where few people get inoculated.
Ministers have been told that a four-week delay to easing all Covid restrictions would probably prevent thousands of hospitalisations, as Boris Johnson prepares to tell the English public they will have to wait up to another month for “freedom day”.
The government roadmap out of lockdown earmarks 21 June for the last remaining coronavirus restrictions to be lifted in England, but the prime minister is expected to announce on Monday that the timetable will be pushed back by two to four weeks amid a rapid rise in cases of the Delta variant first detected in India.
Delivering his closing press conference in the Carbis Bay hotel on Sunday, pale golden sand and azure sea visible behind him, Boris Johnson sought to play down the unseemly diplomatic spat that had marred his moment on the world stage.
“Actually, what happened at this summit was that there was a colossal amount of work on subjects that had absolutely nothing to do with Brexit,” he insisted.
Green campaigners and anti-poverty groups say Cornwall summit failed to address challenges facing the world
Boris Johnson has sought to defend the deal struck by G7 leaders at the Cornwall summit, as green groups and anti-poverty campaigners said the rich nations’ club had failed to match the scale of the challenges facing the world.
The final communique contained no early timetable to eradicate coal-fired emissions, offered only 1bn extra coronavirus vaccines for the world’s poor over the next 12 months and made no new binding commitments to challenge China’s human rights abuses.