Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Patients in New Delhi stood in long queues outside hospitals while others waited with oxygen masks in ambulances as India's new coronavirus infections hit a record high for a fifth consecutive day on Monday. Infections in the last 24 hours rose to 352,991, with overcrowded hospitals in Delhi and elsewhere turning away patients after running out of supplies of medical oxygen and beds
Sources say new CDC guidance relates to outdoor mask-wearing
Democratic president promises ‘new normal’ by Fourth of July
The Supreme Court accepted what will be a closely watched gun rights case today –it could have a major impact on gun rights across the country.
Here’s more from the AP:
The case marks the court’s first foray into gun rights since Justice Amy Coney Barrett came on board in October, making a 6-3 conservative majority.
The justices said Monday they will review a lower-court ruling that upheld New York’s restrictive gun permit law. The court’s decision to take on the case follows mass shootings in recent weeks in Indiana, Georgia, Colorado and California and comes amid congressional efforts to tighten gun laws.
"The outlook does not look good for gun safety laws at the Supreme Court...the Court could issue a radical Second Amendment ruling that jeopardizes future progress as well as lifesaving gun laws already on the books." @GiffordsCourage says in a statement.
Republican Alaska lawmaker Lora Reinbold is banned from Alaska Airlines flights, after she has repeatedly refused to wear a mask. Masks can help protect other people from exposure to Covid-19 and other illnesses, if worn properly.
The ban is a major problem for the lawmaker, because Alaska Airlines operates the only flight to and from the capital, Juneau. Instead, she had to make a 14-hour trek to get to work
We have notified Senator Lora Reinbold that she is not permitted to fly with us for her continued refusal to comply with employee instruction regarding the current mask policy,” airlines spokesman Tim Thompson told the Anchorage Daily News.
“This suspension is effective immediately, pending further review. Federal law requires all guests to wear a mask over their nose and mouth at all times during travel, including throughout the flight, during boarding and deplaning, and while traveling through an airport,” he said.
Kakoli Bhattacharya, an Indian journalist who was a researcher, translator, news assistant and friend to Guardian correspondents for more than a decade, has died from Covid-19 in Delhi.
She died on 23 April after being admitted to hospital earlier in the week during a catastrophic second wave of the virus in India that has claimed tens of thousands of lives since it took off in March.
India is reportedly running out of Covid-19 vaccines just as a virulent second wave continues to devastate the country, threatening the government’s plans to ramp up the vaccination programme by the weekend in an effort to curb the spread of the virus.
From Saturday, everyone in India over the age of 18 will be eligible for a vaccine, a decision made by the government as the virus has brought India’s healthcare system to its knees, with more than new 352,000 cases on Monday and over 2,800 more deaths.
The EU is at an advanced stage of talks with the US over mutually recognising vaccine passports to boost transatlantic tourism this summer, but Brussels is yet to open discussions with the British government.
A spokesperson for the European commission said that while discussions had been held with US officials and the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, there were “no contacts at present with the UK”.
Boris Johnson has denied he said he would rather see bodies piled “high in their thousands” than order a third lockdown, an alleged comment that bereaved relatives described as “a punch in the stomach to all those grieving”.
Johnson said it was “total, total rubbish” that he had said those words. He said: “What I certainly think is that this country has done an amazing job with the lockdowns. And they’ve been very difficult. And they’ve been very tough for people. And there’s no question about that.
AstraZeneca said it would “strongly defend itself in court” and highlighted its supply of 50m Covid vaccine doses to European countries as Brussels launched legal action against the pharmaceutical company over delivery shortfalls.
The Anglo-Swedish firm said it regretted the decision by the European commission to start a legal case over alleged breaches of an advance purchase agreement.
India is now identifying more than 1 million coronavirus cases every three days, with many times more thought to be going unregistered in a vast country where public health surveillance is often poor. Daily deaths exceeded 2,800 on Sunday, but these too are thought to be many times higher.
Epidemiologists and other experts are speculating that several factors have coalesced over the past months to bring India to the point of the world’s worst Covid-19 outbreak.
For half a century, the police procedural Tatort (“Crime Scene”) has provided a rallying point for Germany’s culturally diverse regions, gathering viewers around their television sets every Sunday night to watch detectives from across the country solve gruesome murders over the course of 90 minutes.
But 13 months into living with a virus that can’t be put behind bars, Tatort has become the scene of a different kind of crime: a series of satirical videos making fun of coronavirus restrictions, recorded by TV actors associated with the crime drama, has plunged lockdown-fatigued Germany into a bitter culture war.
Mass cremations have been taking place in the Indian capital, Delhi, in makeshift facilities set up to cope with the huge rise in coronavirus deaths. India recorded another 352,991 new coronavirus cases on Monday, the fifth day of record highs, and 2,812 new deaths, its highest daily figure so far
Biden’s solution to the myriad crises is an ambitious economic agenda that promises to ‘own the future’ by expanding the role of government in American life
On the 50th day of his presidency, Joe Biden marched into the Oval Office and took a seat behind the Resolute desk, where the massive, 628-page American Rescue Plan awaited his signature. Across the room hung a portrait of Franklin D Roosevelt, a nod to the transformative presidency Biden envisions for a nation tormented by disease, strife and division.
Top doctor says leaks continue to happen because federal experts ‘deny’ virus is airborne; WA premier Mark McGowan to decide today whether Perth and Peel can reopen after three days of lockdown. Follow all the latest news and updates, live
The social media giant Facebook has released a short statement confirming it has removed the page of independent federal MP Craig Kelly for repeated breaches of misinformation policy.
A Facebook company spokesperson said:
We don’t allow anyone, including elected officials, to share misinformation about COVID-19 that could lead to imminent physical harm or COVID-19 vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts.
We have clear policies against this type of content and have removed Mr Kelly’s Facebook Page for repeated violations of this policy.
Thanks to Matilda Boseley for another electric display of web logging.
The government has caused anger among bereaved families by telling them it will be too busy to start an inquiry into the UK’s handling of the Covid pandemic for months.
In a six-page letter to lawyers for thousands of families calling for an immediate statutory public inquiry, the government said “an inquiry now is not appropriate” and “the very people who would need to give evidence to an inquiry are working round the clock”. It said “it is not anticipated that the government’s workload will ease in the coming months”.
Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser said on Sunday the recent pause on the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine should raise confidence in health agencies’ focus on vaccine safety, as the administration tries to curb deadly outbreaks across the US.
The catastrophe unfolding in India appears to be the worst-case scenario that many feared from the Covid-19 pandemic: unable to find sufficient hospital beds, access to tests, medicines or oxygen, the country of 1.4 billion is sinking beneath the weight of infections.
The two opposed assumptions of the global response to coronavirus – wealthy countries in the west prioritising vaccines for their own need in one camp, and the argument led by the World Health Organization for global vaccine equality in the other – are also failing to hold as the scale of the crisis in India points to an urgent need to prioritise the response there.
The government has hit both its self-imposed targets so far. How will it go the rest of the way?
More than half of the UK population has now received at least a first dose of vaccine against Covid-19. By Friday evening 33,388,637 people had received one of the Pfizer, AstraZeneca or Moderna vaccines. Here’s how it was done, and what is still left to do.
An 18th-century clergyman’s legacy is central to understanding the pandemic
Bunhill Fields burial ground contains the relics of John Bunyan, William Blake and Daniel Defoe. Of import to statisticians is the tomb of the Rev Thomas Bayes, Presbyterian clergyman from Tunbridge Wells, who died 260 years ago. He is famous for his work on conditional probabilities, which concern the chance of one event occurring, given another event has happened.
Take lateral flow tests. The conditional probability of getting an (incorrect) positive result (call this A), given you are not infected (B), is less than one in 1,000. That rate is very low. Bayes’s theorem shows how to calculate what we really want: the conditional probability you are not infected (B), given you have a positive test (A). In that case, you would be isolating with no benefit. Unintuitively, when the virus is rare and there are very few “true positives”, this probability can be high. Currently in secondary schools, around three in 10 positive lateral flow tests turn out to be false.
The messages started arriving less than a month ago and have grown more desperate and frequent as the days have progressed. WhatsApp pleas from people I have never met being forwarded to me, asking about the availability of hospital beds, or anguished requests for money so that they can treat loved ones. And most heartbreaking of all, despairing calls for oxygen so that they can breathe.
Coronavirus is suffocating India, and the devastating pictures and statistics tell their own grim tale of a nation facing what is being called the world’s worst outbreak. As its politicians and medical experts try to tackle the situation, those of us with deep bonds to the country find ourselves as helpless witnesses thousands of miles away, watching the tragedy unfold.