Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
AstraZeneca has told the European Union it expects to deliver less than half the Covid-19 vaccines it was contracted to supply in the second quarter, an EU official told Reuters on Tuesday.
Contacted by Reuters, AstraZeneca did not deny what the official said, but a statement late in the day said the company was striving to increase productivity to deliver the promised 180m doses.
The failure of successive governments to enact part of the Equality Act, which would have imposed a duty to address socio-economic disadvantage, has exacerbated inequalities in England during the coronavirus pandemic, a thinktank has claimed.
The Runnymede Trust’s report, Facts Don’t Lie, says that the public sector duty provision would have imposed a legal obligation on education authorities in England to ensure working class children on free school meals were fed properly while schools were shut and had access to laptops for remote learning.
French researchers have developed a coronavirus test that they say delivers results three times faster than rapid lateral flow antigen tests with – according to initial trial data – almost the same accuracy as more reliable, but slower, PCR tests.
The electrochemical test, which uses nanobodies taken from the camelid group of animals, returns a result within 10 minutes and, in an early test of 300 samples, proved 90% as accurate as a PCR test for both positive and negative results. It is being developed by scientists at Lille and Marseille universities and from the French national scientific research centre CNRS.
From coronamüde (tired of Covid-19) to Coronafrisur (corona hairstyle), a German project is documenting the huge number of new words coined in the last year as the language races to keep up with lives radically changed by the pandemic.
Amid California’s slow Covid-19 vaccine rollout, millions of essential workers in high-exposure jobs are still waiting to get the life-saving doses, with many uncertain when or how they will get access.
Here are some of the key development in the last few hours.
The Philippines will let thousands of its healthcare workers, mostly nurses, take up jobs in Britain and Germany if the two countries agree to donate much-needed coronavirus vaccines, a senior official said on Tuesday.
Reuters reports that the Philippines, which has among Asia’s highest number of coronavirus cases, has relaxed a ban on deploying its healthcare workers overseas, but still limits the number of medical professionals leaving the country to 5,000 a year.
More than one in five people living in the state of Lagos in Nigeria had Covid-19 antibodies at the end of October, according to a study that suggests that infection rates were much higher across the country than previously thought.
Nigeria’s Centre for Disease Control (NDCD) and Institute for Medical Research collected blood samples from over 10,000 individuals living in a representative sample of households in four states in September and October.
Chinese officials did “little” in terms of epidemiological investigations into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan in the first eight months after the outbreak, according to an internal World Health Organization document seen by the Guardian.
The internal WHO travel report summary, dated 10 August 2020, also said the team who met Chinese counterparts as part of a mission to help find the origins of the virus received scant new information at that time, and were not given any documents or written data during extensive discussions with Chinese officials.
The government’s roadmap for ending Covid restrictions in England commits it to steps that may increase the rate at which the virus spreads. Some of that is unavoidable. But even as we reopen, there is more that we could do to mitigate the risk, and get us to the summer – and normality – without a resurgence.
One reason that east Asian countries have done better during the pandemic is that prior experience with Sars has given people the understanding of how respiratory diseases spread, and how to avoid them. Japan’s three Cs guidance – avoidance of closed spaces, crowded places, and conversations – helped it avoid a serious epidemic without imposing a national lockdown.
In a somber address, the president urged Americans to overcome their political divides and follow health guidelines
In a somber address to the nation as the US surpassed half a million coronavirus deaths on Monday, Joe Biden urged the country to unify in its battle against the virus.
“I ask all Americans to remember those we lost and those we left behind. But as we all remember, I also ask us to act, to remain vigilant, to stay socially distanced, to mask up, get vaccinated when it’s your turn,” the president said in his address from the White House.
Analysis: the president has ambitious plans to halt a public health crisis his predecessor wrongly claimed would simply disappear
Exactly one year after the first case of Covid-19 was confirmed in the United States, Joe Biden was sworn in as president, inheriting the worst public health disaster since the flu pandemic of 1918. In the days that followed, Biden pledged a “full-scale, wartime” effort to combat the virus, even as he braced a disease-weary nation for its darkest chapter yet.
“Things are going to continue to get worse before they get better,” Biden said at the time, offering a dire forecast. The national death toll, he warned, could exceed half a million by the end of February.
Trade bodies say many firms and workers face uncertain future, with 10 days to go until budget
Business leaders have told Boris Johnson that his roadmap for exiting the third Covid lockdown in England remains incomplete without fresh financial support for companies and workers hardest hit by the pandemic.
The prime minister promised the government would “not pull the rug out” from under struggling firms and workers while restrictions remain in place during the phased relaxation of lockdown, but to the disappointment of company bosses and trade unions he deferred details of future economic support to the budget in 10 days’ time.
The prime minister has announced that schools will reopen from 8 March, while non-essential retail outlets and outdoor service in pubs and restaurants could be back by 12 April, with indoor service earmarked for 17 May at the earliest. No 10 stresses that after the first step, the subsequent stages could be subject to delay and would be guided by 'data rather than dates'
The supreme court has rejected Donald Trump’s request to block New York prosecutors from gaining access to his tax returns.
In a one-sentence unsigned order, the court ruled that it would not step in to prevent the Manhattan district attorney’s office from obtaining eight years of Trump’s financial documents from his accounting firm.
The work continues.
The Senate judiciary committee has now started the confirmation hearing for Merrick Garland, Joe Biden’s nominee for attorney general.
Garland, a federal judge, is best known as Barack Obama’s supreme court nominee in 2016, who never received a hearing because Republican leader Mitch McConnell wanted to keep the seat open until after the presidential election. (The seat was eventually filled by Neil Gorsuch.)
Vaccinating children and teens could be key to stifling the pandemic, experts have said, as clinical trials begin to test Covid-19 vaccines in young people.
While Covid-19 is associated with a considerably lower burden of morbidity and mortality in young people, and there is evidence that children may be less likely to acquire the infection, the role of children in transmission is unclear, according to the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.
The virus has been used as a pretext in many countries to crush dissent, criminalise freedoms and silence reporting
António Guterres is secretary general of the United Nations
From the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic almost one year ago, it was clear that our world faced far more than a public health emergency. The biggest international crisis in generations quickly morphed into an economic and social crisis. One year on, another stark fact is tragically evident: our world is facing a pandemic of human rights abuses.
Covid-19 has deepened preexisting divides, vulnerabilities and inequalities, and opened up new fractures, including faultlines in human rights. The pandemic has revealed the interconnectedness of our human family – and of the full spectrum of human rights: civil, cultural, economic, political and social. When any one of these rights is under attack, others are at risk.
It’s another for the ‘always look at the bright side’ file.
From AAP:
The Morrison government has released the findings of an investigation that the environment minister, Sussan Ley, ordered into her own department over the export of rare and endangered Australian parrots to Germany.
The investigation was prompted by a 2018 investigation by Guardian Australia’s Lisa Cox and Berlin bureau chief Philip Oltermann.
The Italian government on Monday extended a ban on non-essential travel between the country’s 20 regions until 27 March as it looks to slow the spread of highly contagious coronavirus variants.
Reuters reports:
The ban on travel between regions was introduced just before Christmas and had been due to expire on 25 February, but officials fear a relaxation of restrictions could lead to a new surge in cases, driven by the so-called “British” variant.
In its first decisions on Covid-19, prime minister Mario Draghi’s new cabinet also extended restrictions on visiting family and friends, with no more than two adults allowed into another person’s home at the same time.
Chile is streaking ahead of the rest of Latin America in its campaign to vaccinate its population against coronavirus, which the Andean country’s leaders hope can help not only beat back the virus but also unite the nation.
Reuters reports:
As of 18 February the copper-producing country had given over 2.5m doses of vaccine, enough for around one shot for 12 in every hundred people, according to Our World in Data. It could fully vaccinate 10% of its population with two doses per person in just over 20 days at its current rate, Reuters data show.
That puts it in the top 10 globally of larger countries and compares to 172 days for Brazil and over 1,000 days for Mexico, which has faced delays in its inoculation program.