Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Traffic jams and soaring pollution levels are back. Political leaders are organising mass rallies, far more focused on fighting each other than any virus. If poorer Nepalis are struggling with the dire economic fallout from Covid-19, on the surface, at least, it appears daily life in the capital, Kathmandu, is back to normal.
“It’s as if nothing has happened. The nightclubs are crowded. Schools and colleges are reopening. Sports venues are full. It doesn’t seem like there is any Covid,” says Sameer Mani Dixit, a public health specialist. “It defies logic.”
For almost a year our small clinic has been struggling with the horrors of the coronavirus pandemic. So being able to give our staff and most vulnerable patients their first doses of the vaccine has been a real turning point
During the week I work in a small, inner-city GP practice in Edinburgh with 14 staff, caring for almost 4,000 patients. Before the pandemic, I used to see 25-30 people in face-to-face appointments every day. A year into the pandemic, the need out there is the same, but my GP colleagues and I manage more like five or six face-to-face (or mask-to-mask) consultations, a home visit or two, and the remainder on the phone or through video calls. It’s not the best way to practise medicine, but for the moment, it’s the best we have.
The first I heard of the vaccine rollout was back in October, when our practice manager received an email from the health board asking if we would have capacity to vaccinate the over-80s among our patients. We said yes, of course: in the past year we’ve had four patients die of Covid-19, three of them over 80.
With flights cancelled and travellers having to pay for hotel costs, three people talk about their difficulties returning to Britain
With many flights cancelled, and travellers facing hotel quarantine costs of £1,750 to return from high-risk countries that come into effect on Monday, some British residents have become stuck overseas. Three people have spoken about the difficulties they face in returning to the UK, and the costs they may incur.
The country began the pandemic with a degraded public health infrastructure, leading to more deaths than other high-income countries
The US could have averted 40% of the deaths from Covid-19, had the country’s death rates corresponded with the rates in other high-income G7 countries, according to a Lancet commission tasked with assessing Donald Trump’s health policy record.
Almost 470,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus so far, with the number widely expected to go above half a million in the next few weeks. At the same time some 27 million people in the US have been infected. Both figures are by far the highest in the world.
European commission president Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday acknowledged failings in the EU's approval and rollout of vaccines against Covid-19. ‘We were late to authorise, we were too optimistic when it came to mass production and perhaps we were too confident that what we ordered would actually be delivered on time,’ she told MEPs
Prosecutors in Fulton county, Georgia, have reportedly launched a criminal investigation of Donald Trump’s phone call to Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state, about the presidential election.
On Wednesday, Fani Willis, the recently elected Democratic prosecutor in Fulton County, sent a letter to numerous officials in state government, including Mr. Raffensperger, requesting that they preserve documents related to Mr. Trump’s call, according to a state official with knowledge of the letter. The letter explicitly stated that the request was part of a criminal investigation, said the official, who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal matters.
The inquiry makes Georgia the second state after New York where Mr. Trump faces a criminal investigation. And it comes in a jurisdiction where potential jurors are unlikely to be hospitable to the former president; Fulton County encompasses most of Atlanta and overwhelmingly supported President Biden in the November election. The Fulton County investigation comes on the heels of a decision Monday by Mr. Raffensperger’s office to open an administrative inquiry.
House impeachment managers are preparing to introduce new visual evidence during their presentation on Wednesday, as the trial begins in earnest following a vote to move forward with the proceedings.
The Democratic managers will lay out their case for why Donald Trump should be impeached, arguing that the former president committed “the most heinous constitutional crime possible” according to a senior aide on the impeachment manager’s team.
The latest edition of the Guardian’s Politics Weekly podcast is out. Jessica Elgot and John Crace look at why the latest coronavirus travel restrictions might not work the way the government expects, as well as Robert Jenrick’s latest announcement on cladding funds. Plus, Helen Davidson and Jon Henley on how the world sees the UK’s Covid response.
As HuffPost’s Paul Waugh reports, at the lobby briefing the prime minister’s spokesman had difficulty justifying some of the work done by the three taxpayer-funded photographers now working from Downing Street.
Asked why the taxpayer should fund ‘vanity’ photographers who took these pix of the PM’s dog playing in the snow, No.10 spokesperson suggests Dilyn works for govt: “These photographers document the work of the government, as well as the work inside Number 10.” pic.twitter.com/UgdDF2Tdrp
Jessica Elgot and John Crace look at why the latest coronavirus travel restrictions might not work the way the government expects. Plus, Helen Davidson and Jon Henley on how the world sees the UK’s Covid response
In response to the myriad of new Covid-19 variants entering the UK, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, announced in the Commons on Tuesday that travellers arriving from coronavirus hotspots who refuse to adhere to the new restrictions could face £10,000 fines and jail sentences of up to 10 years. The move might seem extreme, but given how long we have known about variants cropping up since the new year, many are asking, is it too little too late?
The EU is “not where it wants to be” with its coronavirus immunisation programme, Ursula von der Leyen has conceded, as she faced MEPs in the European parliament amid mounting criticism of the bloc’s slow deployment of vaccines.
“We were late to authorise,” the European commission president said. “We were too optimistic when it came to massive production, and perhaps too confident that what we ordered would actually be delivered on time. We need to ask ourselves why that is the case.”
The UK government has failed in its pledge to help those on the frontline of the global fight for human rights during the pandemic, according to a new report.
Amnesty International said health workers, lawyers, journalists and rights activists from around the world who were living under constant threat during the Covid-19 pandemic struggled to get support or funding from British embassies.
The health secretary, Matt Hancock, has unveiled new measures aimed at protecting the UK from new and potentially dangerous variants of Covid-19 arriving from abroad.
A French nun who is Europe’s oldest person has recovered from Covid-19 after it swept through a nursing home in the south of France, and will celebrate her 117th birthday this week.
Sister Andrée, born Lucile Randon in 1904, tested positive for the coronavirus last month at the Sainte-Catherine Labouré home near Toulon where 81 of the 88 residents contracted the virus – 10 of whom died.
Analysis: start of long process by Wuhan team junks Trump allies’ claim that coronavirus escaped from a laboratory
The press conference given by the World Health Organization’s investigative team in Wuhan is unlikely to silence the most conspiratorial of the conspiracy theorists who took their lead from the fever dreams of the former Trump administration.
Indeed, the first and very partial findings in what was always going to be a long and drawn-out process have not told us much we did not already know about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.
The head of the World Health Organization-led team looking into how Covid-19 originated said on Tuesday its investigation had uncovered new information but had not dramatically changed the picture of the outbreak.
Virus expert Peter Ben Embarek said the origin of the coronavirus pointed to a natural reservoir in bats. He said the hypothesis that it leaked from a lab in Wuhan was extremely unlikely and would not be part of any further study for his team
NSW and Victoria report no new local Covid cases as hotel quarantine worker in Melbourne diagnosed with UK variant. Follow all the latest news and updates, live
On the vaccine distribution in Australia, Paul Kelly says it is still on track for the first injections to be happening before the end of February, but will not put an exact timeline on it.
The aim will be to get 20 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine before the end of this year, in weekly deliveries. Kelly said the AstraZeneca and Novovax vaccines will also be used if and when they are approved by the TGA:
We don’t want a lot of vaccines sitting out in warehouses, so we will be looking to roll out particularly for those priority populations that people will know about now, as soon as we can. But then will be going back to the same population, those people, to give them a second dose. That is really important.
We will await the TGA advice in relation to AstraZeneca but some of the information that has been coming up in the last few weeks is that it may actually be a longer interval for that second dose.”
Australia’s chief medical officer, Prof Paul Kelly, is also moving to reassure people about the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine.
He said it was still in the process of being approved by the Therapeutics Goods Administration, and talked down claims it was less effective in treating the South African variant of the virus.
I just want to make a very clear statement about people taking small amounts of information quickly, without looking at it carefully. And making conclusions. At the moment, I can absolutely say, and this may change in future, and we will be nimble in the way we look at that information, and putting that into our planning, but at the moment, there’s no evidence anywhere in the world AstraZeneca effectiveness against severe infection is affected by any of these variants of concern.
And that is the fact. What we have at the moment is a small group of people in a study not yet peer-reviewed or published in South Africa where there was an effect on the mild or moderate disease in relation to that variant of concern in that country. But there were no severe infections in any of the people that received the vaccine in regards to any of those types of the virus.”
Canada is to oblige its citizens returning home from the US by land to show a negative Covid test, prime minister Justin Trudeau has said, Reuters reports.
Everyone one arriving in Canada by air already has to prove they took a negative test within the previous 72 hours and this measure is being expanded to land crossings, starting on 15 February, Trudeau said.
Although non-essential travel between the two nations is banned, many Canadians have second homes in the United States, and Ottawa is obliged to allow them to return if they wish.
Italian police have arrested three cemetery workers in Calabria accused of illegally removing bodies from tombs to make way for new corpses, as the country struggles with a shortage of burial space.
According to military police investigators, the suspects allegedly demanded money from mourning relatives to get the deceased a place in the local cemetery in Tropea, a seaside resort town near Vibo Valentia.
Scientists and senior MPs have renewed calls for sweeping border curbs to protect the UK’s vaccination programme against new variants as Boris Johnson prepared to introduce tougher measures and Britain saw internal infections fall.
The government is to announce new restrictions on arrivals into the UK this week, including mass testing of all arrivals. All passengers arriving in the UK will be tested for coronavirus on day two and day eight of their isolation – regardless of the country they have come from and whether they are at home or in hotel quarantine. The UK already requires all arrivals to have a negative Covid test from within the past 72 hours, taken while still abroad.
It had all been going so well. The government was on track to vaccinate the top four priority groups within the timeframe it had promised. Something that had astonished even Matt Hancock, one of the most naturally optimistic members of the cabinet. But then had come the bad news. Initial trials had suggested the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine didn’t appear to be that effective against the South African variant of the coronavirus and it turned out no one had actually yet got round to agreeing any contracts with hotel chains for quarantining arrivals from countries on the government’s red list.
So it was a somewhat subdued – brittle even – health secretary who fronted Monday’s Downing Street press conference. Hancock tried to remain upbeat but he’s beginning to look frayed around the edges. A year of trying to hold it together, of being that glass-half-full guy, appears to have taken its toll. Outwardly he still looks like one of the first contestants to be thrown off The Apprentice, but his eyes are the giveaway. They are almost dead. Empty hollows. I’m not sure how much longer he can keep this up. Even Tiggers have their breaking point.
Prof Jonathan Van-Tam has said that people should not be concerned about reports that early results suggest the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine has only 10% efficacy against the South African variant of coronavirus. Speaking at the Downing Street press conference on Monday, England's deputy chief medical officer said UK case numbers of the variant are 'very small', meaning it is unlikely to become dominant in the UK, and urged people to get vaccinated.
Emerging variants of the virus that causes Covid-19 have triggered concerns that the vaccines developed to date will not provide the high level of protection seen in clinical trials. Concerning variants have been identified in California, South Africa, Brazil and the UK.
But not every variant needs a new vaccine, since vaccines produce a broad immune response that will probably cover many mutations. Here’s what needs to be done to assess whether a vaccine needs to be tweaked, and how to tweak it.