Dr Clive Dix also says UK well-placed to respond if vaccine-resistant variant emerges
The head of the UK’s coronavirus vaccination taskforce has said he is optimistic that government will meet its target of vaccinating all over-50s by May.
No 10 confirmed on Friday that the vaccine programme was intended to reach all those over 50 and those aged 16 to 65 in at-risk groups by May, having previously said it aimed to do so “by the spring”.
Continue reading...Life before was a little different, but not a lot. Now I feel a new resilience and hope
Read more: Laura Barton on how a daily call to California got her through lockdown and Elle Hunt on moving to the other side of the world and the pandemic
I’ve been inside my cramped terrace house for nearly a year now. There haven’t been walks outside, or trips to the shops. Every morning, I wake into a day the same as yesterday. I reach out a hand to the cat who I know will be curled by my right side, listen for the creak of my son climbing down from his bunk bed. He will come and bundle himself under my covers, and we will begin again, another day juggling his schoolwork and my writing work, all conducted mostly from my bed.
I remember, dream-like, two weeks in the summer last year when it felt safe enough for my partner to fly over from Denmark, after six months apart. We drove to quiet places and he pushed me in my wheelchair. I wept, happy to see him and the green trees, and to eat picnics on the warm ground, a family again. It has been six months since then, and so we sit each day in front of iPads, touching fingers to the screen, baffled and smiling to still be in this strange, unforeseen predicament – falling in love, still, because distance does nothing to halt that. My life is one of pain, fatigue, activity, laughter.
Continue reading...I moved from London to New Zealand, where the sense of normality is surreal
Read more: Laura Barton on how a daily call to California got her through lockdown
New Zealand doesn’t exist. So goes the meme, an internet in-joke arising from the frequency with which the island nation is left off world maps, and amplified by the whimsical news stories that often emerge there. For instance: a city road was recently closed for an entire month to allow safe crossing for a family of sea lions. How is New Zealand even real? As a citizen, with a black-and-silver passport to prove it, I have caught myself asking that question since I arrived back here from London a month ago. How can this place – where you can hug your parents, go to bars with your friends, and live life more or less like it’s 2019 – be only a flight away from the one I left behind?
I left London, where I’d been living since 2017, a few days before Christmas, just as coronavirus cases started rising again rapidly, and the government braced, too late, for another lengthy lockdown. “Getting out, are you,” a man had said, eyeing my bags on the bus to the Piccadilly line. At each stop on my journey to Auckland, totalling three planes over nearly 24 hours, my phone had lit up with news of the rapidly deteriorating situation I’d just fled. Two weeks later, I was released from my government-managed quarantine hotel into New Zealand, where there had been no local transmission of coronavirus since November. It felt as if I had slipped into another world through the back of my hotel wardrobe.
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The House has just passed the Senate-approved budget resolution, paving the way for the chamber to take up Joe Biden’s coronavirus relief proposal in the coming weeks.
The House voted 219-209 along mostly partly lines to approve the resolution as amended by the Senate. Jared Golden was the only Democrat to vote against the measure.
The rule for S.Con.Res. 5 – Setting forth the congressional budget for the US Gov't for FY 2021 & setting forth the appropriate budgetary levels for FY 2022-2030 was adopted by a vote of 219-209.
S.Con.Res. 5 is hereby passed.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, fresh from being stripped of her committee assignments, seemed unrepentant on Friday morning, as she used a press conference to sum up the intertwining of the Republican party and Donald Trump.
“The party is his – it doesn’t belong to anyone else,” Greene told reporters in Washington this morning.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on Trump and the GOP Party:
"The party is his. It doesn’t belong to anybody else." pic.twitter.com/XOL8VzRicW
Scientists say it offers only slightly lower protection compared with original Covid
The Covid vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca is nearly as effective against the Kent variant as it is against older forms of the virus, according to preliminary research results.
Researchers analysed swabs from trial volunteers who developed asymptomatic or symptomatic infections to determine which variant of the virus they had caught after receiving the vaccine or a control jab.
Continue reading...Report says pandemic gives Isis and al-Qaida opportunity to undermine governments in conflict zones
Islamic extremists are planning a possible “rash of pre-planned attacks” when restrictions on movement imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic are lifted, the United Nations has warned.
A report based on intelligence received from member countries over the last six months says Islamic State will seek to “end its marginalisation from the news” with a wave of violence and notes that the group recently urged supporters to spend less time on social media to free up time to launch operations against its enemies.
Continue reading...Increasing number of people report feeling worn out and unable to cope due to period of sustained stress
Psychologists are reporting a rise in “pandemic burnout” as many people find the current phase of lockdowns harder, with an increasing number feeling worn out and unable to cope.
They warn that many are finding the latest lockdown more difficult because of a realisation that coronavirus will be around longer than expected, dashed hopes about an easing of restrictions, and a period of sustained stress similar to overwork, which has prompted symptoms such as fatigue.
Continue reading...In the UK, all eyes are on South African, Brazilian and Kent variants - with mutations transmitting among the population
With the discovery of new coronavirus variants in parts of the UK, prompting intensive testing, we take a look at what the variants are and how concerned we should be.
Continue reading...While officials still urge caution over Covid, many older people are going out to see their family
It was a sight as common as birds chirping in trees or cars idling in traffic. Nobody would do a double-take when they saw children playing with their grandparents. That was before the pandemic, when it was simply a routine image of daily life and not a potentially fatal activity.
But more and more, in playgrounds across Jerusalem, a grandparent can be seen strolling along while a grandchild rushes ahead to slides and climbing frames.
Continue reading...Analysis: as need outstrips funding, experts are making the case for overhauling ‘old-fashioned’ donor-recipient narratives
This year one in every 33 people across the world will need humanitarian assistance. That is a rise of 40% from last year, according to the UN. More than half of the countries requiring aid to help deal with the coronavirus pandemic are already in protracted crises, coping with conflict or natural disasters.
Even before Covid-19 threw decades of progress on extreme poverty, healthcare and education into reverse, aid budgets were heading in the wrong direction. In 2020, the UN had just 48% of its $38.5bn (£28bn) in funding appeals met, compared with 63% of $29bn sought in 2019.
Continue reading...Staying home means starvation for many Zimbabweans, and those forced to work face police raids and dwindling custom
Pammula Chiunya, 68, is sitting under an open-sided shed outside a makeshift beer hall in Hopley settlement, six miles (10km) west of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare. She is not happy.
Chiunya serves roasted chicken heads in a twist of old newspaper to a visibly drunk man, then settles to wait for someone else to emerge from the shebeen, which is crammed with animated revellers dancing to loud music. Customers are elusive, even with her prices: four heads for a dollar.
Continue reading...Prix Pictet, the world’s leading prize for photography and sustainability, gathered responses to Covid-19 by 43 artists from 20 nations. A featured collaboration of four photographers with the Guardian, in the summer of 2020, draws on themes of isolation, confinement and political instability, and includes laureates and shortlisted photographers from the prize’s eight editions
Continue reading...It’s time to resolve the narrative – otherwise we’ll be stuck in act two for ever, says Veep writer Ian Martin
For a year now, the reality of humanity’s global struggle against the coronavirus has felt oddly fictional. Very much, in fact, like a blockbuster movie.
Covid-19: The Reckoning follows all the movie cliches. The story starts somewhere in the world requiring subtitles. Patient Zero eats a what? An infected bat? OK, maybe it’s a pangolin (what’s a pangolin? Who cares, never mind). Then the contagion spreads like a slow-motion tsunami across the planet as dumbass politicians first play it down, then panic. Or, in America’s case, dismiss it, blame China, promise it’ll go away, ignore it some more, commend the ingestion of light and disinfectant, ignore it again, actually get it, shrug it off, host a series of superspreader events, repeatedly lose an election then scuttle off to become a human pathogen infecting civilian life. Again.
Continue reading...The prime minister says Australia will increase the number of international arrivals after national cabinet agreed to raise the limits in certain states. Almost 40,000 Australians registered with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade as wanting to return remain overseas, with arrival caps and limited flights restricting their opportunities. From 15 February the number of arrivals in New South Wales and Queensland will return to previous levels while South Australia and Victoria will also increase their numbers
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Here’s a recap of the day, from me and Joan E Greve:
Covid is killing Native Americans at a faster rate than any other community in the United States, shocking new figures reveal.
American Indians and Alaskan Natives are dying at almost twice the rate of white Americans, according to analysis by APM Research Lab shared exclusively with the Guardian.
Related: Exclusive: indigenous Americans dying from Covid at twice the rate of white Americans
Continue reading...Germany warns new variants are set to spread; Israel to keep borders closed despite easing lockdown
Slovak regional authorities have quarantined a Roma settlement after a quarter of its residents tested positive for the coronavirus.
The settlement of Sacurov near Vranov nad Toplou in the east of the country, made up of two three-storey apartment blocks and around 70 shacks, is to be closed off for 10 days.
“In a week-and-a-half it grew [from five] to the unreal number of 113, due to a failure to maintain quarantine and isolation,” he said.
More than 80% of people in some developing countries have seen their incomes fall due to the coronavirus pandemic, economists have found, warning that rising poverty could mean poorer countries struggle to curb infections – especially with mass vaccination potentially years away.
“Economic help is part and parcel of fighting the virus,” co-author of the study Shana Warren told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“If you want people to stay home to stop the virus spreading while they wait for vaccines you need to provide them with the economic support to do so.”
Continue reading...Colchicine also found to reduce need for extra oxygen and has potential to be used in outpatient settings
A cheap drug normally used to treat gout has been found to have the potential to significantly reduce hospital stays among Covid-19 patients and the need for extra oxygen.
The results of new research into colchicine conducted in Brazil come after an international trial published on Wednesday found that it reduced hospitalisations and deaths among Covid-19 patients by more than 20%.
Continue reading...Survey finds hesitancy related to trust in government, and more acute in younger people
Nearly four in ten people in France, more than 25% of those in the US and 23% in Germany say they definitely or probably will not get vaccinated against Covid-19, according to a survey that underlines the challenge facing governments.
Hesitancy was markedly lower in Italy (12%), the UK (14%) and the Netherlands (17%), according to the seven-country survey, which revealed a close correlation between people’s reluctance to be vaccinated and their trust in central government.
Continue reading...Campaigners call for vaccines to be prioritised to frontline health workers and people at highest risk
Communities across Africa are reeling as a second wave of Covid infections recedes, leaving thousands dead amid fears of further surges before mass vaccination campaigns can begin to make a difference.
Few countries in Africa will start immunising even frontline health workers until much later this year, prompting accusations that large orders by wealthy nations are costing the lives of medical staff in poorer parts of the world.
Continue reading...Staff in countries including UK log on for two hours longer at home and face bigger workloads
Employees who work from home are spending longer at their desks and facing a bigger workload than before the Covid pandemic hit, two sets of research have suggested.
The average length of time an employee working from home in the UK, Austria, Canada and the US is logged on at their computer has increased by more than two hours a day since the coronavirus crisis, according to data from the business support company NordVPN Teams.
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