Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
The UK is on course for record hospital admissions and deaths in the coming weeks, as coronavirus cases hit an all-time high following the loosening of restrictions in December and the rapid spread of the new variant.
On Monday, the chief medical officer for England, Chris Whitty, warned that the country was approaching the worst weeks of the pandemic. Data from the first wave of Covid-19 and statistical modelling may give us some indication of just how much longer deaths, cases and hospital admissions could continue to rise.
Job vacancies are booming in New Zealand since the country contained an outbreak of the coronavirus with a hard lockdown in early 2020.
The country’s biggest job advertising site, Seek, has reported a 19% national growth in jobs advertised in the final quarter of 2020, and the number of job ads on the website has bounced back to nearly pre-pandemic levels.
Australia’s chief medical officer, Prof Paul Kelly, and infectious diseases experts have defended securing 54m doses of a Covid-19 vaccine made by Oxford University and the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, amid concerns the vaccine will not be effective enough to achieve herd immunity.
Canada’s most populous province on track to see tenfold increase in daily case count within weeks
Ontario has declared an emergency after the latest modelling put Canada’s most populous province on track to have more than 20,000 new Covid-19 cases a day by the middle of February – a nearly tenfold increase from the current count.
Ontario, which is battling a coronavirus surge that has swamped its hospitals and triggered a province-wide lockdown, could also see roughly 1,500 more deaths in its long-term care homes through mid-February under a worst-case scenario, according to modeling from experts advising the government.
Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, would not say whether the 25th amendment should be invoked to remove Donald Trump from office.
Speaking to ABC News this morning, the cabinet secretary also would not say whether he has discussed the possibility of invoking the 25th amendment with other senior officials.
HHS Sec. Alex Azar won't say if he'd vote to remove Trump: "The rhetoric last week was unacceptable. I'm not going to get into or discuss the 25th Amendment here. I've wrestled with this, I'm committed to see this through in my role as Health Sec. during a pandemic..." pic.twitter.com/yD1vwwPBMv
Over the course of the pandemic, scientists have been monitoring emerging genetic changes to Sars-Cov-2. Mutations occur naturally as the virus replicates but if they confer an advantage – like being more transmissible – that variant of the virus may go on to proliferate. This was the case with the ‘UK’ or B117 variant, which is about 50% more contagious and is rapidly spreading around the country. So how does genetic surveillance of the virus work? And what do we know about the new variants? Ian Sample speaks to Dr Jeffrey Barrett, the director of the Covid-19 genomics initiative at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, to find out
Military helicopters could be used within days to airlift coronavirus patients from the Isle of Wight, the island’s medical director has said, after an “astronomical” rise in infections fuelled by mixing and visitors over Christmas.
A 74-fold increase in cases means the Isle of Wight has the 13th highest infection rate in the UK this week, from having one of the lowest in early December.
Los Angeles sees a person infected every six seconds. In a predominantly Latino neighborhood, Martin Luther King Jr community hospital faces ‘a sea of illness’
Husbands and wives, twin brothers in their 20s, parents and their children. Family members are turning up one after another at Martin Luther King Jr community hospital (MLKCH) in South Los Angeles. The deaths have been piling up.
Patients have been arriving at MLKCH terribly sick, and at higher rates than anywhere else in the region – the impoverished Latino and Black neighborhood is one of the worst Covid hotspots in America. Inside the hospital, staff face a dire scramble to ensure they have the supplies, the healthcare workers and the physical space needed to take care of the overwhelming crush of Covid victims.
Filming on his phone inside Egypt’s Hussainiya hospital, Ahmed Mamdouh pans around the ward to show beds occupied by motionless bodies. “All the people are dead,” he says. Mamdouh’s own relative had just died, for which he blames a lack of medical oxygen.
In another video, a screaming woman at Zeftah hospital in Gharbiyeh governorate demands nurses help resuscitate a relative. In a third, a man in Damanhour, in the Nile delta, gasps for air, glassy-eyed as he holds an oxygen mask in his hand. “There is a lack of oxygen,” he says, extending an invitation for local health minister to come and witness the problem. “Join us, minister.”
Young adults gathered in Japan to celebrate reaching 20, the age at which they can drink alcohol, smoke and get married without parental approval, although many events were cancelled due to coronavirus fears
When the scientists on the World Health Organization’s mission to research the origins of Covid-19 touch down in China as expected on Thursday at the beginning of their investigation they are clear what they will – and what they will not – be doing.
They intend to visit Wuhan, the site of the first major outbreak of Covid-19, and talk to Chinese scientists who have been studying the same issue. They will want to see if there are unexamined samples from unexplained respiratory illnesses, and they will want to examine ways in which the virus might have jumped the species barrier to humans.
This week a team of international experts from the WHO will arrive in China to investigate the origins of Covid-19. A year into the pandemic, Guardian health editor Sarah Boseley looks at what questions still need to be answered
A World Health Organization team of international experts tasked with investigating the origins Covid-19 will arrive in China this week. Scientists want to determine how the virus jumped species into humans. A year into the pandemic there are still many unanswered questions over the origins of the novel virus.
The Guardian’s health editor, Sarah Boseley, tells Rachel Humpheys about what the WHO has uncovered over the past 12 months and the challenges it has faced. Ideally, door-to-door detective work, talking to the first people to fall ill and their families and colleagues, would have begun in Wuhan in January. But the city was in lockdown, its streets deserted. And the rest of the world had not yet understood what it was facing, Bruce Aylward, the Canadian doctor and epidemiologist appointed by WHO to lead its fact-finding mission to China in early February told Sarah in a recent phone call.
NSW premier concerned over low testing levels as state grapples with growing number of mystery cases; partner of a Brisbane hotel quarantine cleaner who contracted new Covid-19 strain tests positive. Follow all the latest news and updates, live
Two Emirates flight attendants are in isolation in Australia after testing positive to Covid-19 on Sunday, two days after Australia introduced mandatory quarantining and testing of international flight crews.
The positive tests were included in Monday’s numbers.
The crew members identified as positive cases are being managed per usual processes and remain in Australia.
Since the incoming Emirates flight EK430 from Dubai to Brisbane was serviced by the same crew, as per the airline’s safety protocols the remaining crew members were determined to be close contacts. As a precautionary measure, the decision was therefore made to cancel flight EK431 from Brisbane to Dubai for the safety of its passengers.
The health and safety of our crew, customers and communities remains our top priority, and we continue to work closely with all relevant authorities to implement the latest health and safety protocols.
And just when you thought acting prime minister Michael McCormack’s controversial day was over, he has now used the controversial right-wing phrase “all lives matter” at a press conference when discussing the “black lives matter” protests.
The Nationals leader has come under fire today and yesterday for comparing the insurrection at the Capitol building by far-right rioters to the Black Lives Matter protest and riots earlier in the year.
I abhor violence of any form. The Black Lives Matter protests, as at mid-last year, cost 19 lives. That’s 19 lives that should not have been lost. I’m not going to apologise because I said that violence in any form should not happen, from a protest...
I appreciate there are a lot of people out there who are being a bit bleeding heart about this and who are confecting outrage, but they should know those lives matter too. All lives matter.
The Dutch government is expected to announce a three-week extension of lockdown measures on Tuesday, national broadcaster NOS reported. The prime minister Mark Rutte was scheduled to announce the latest social curbs to fight the pandemic.
Citing government sources, NOS said the lockdown would be lengthened through the first week of February instead of being lifted on 19 January.
The falling numbers are the first effect of the lockdown that went into effect on 15 December.
The Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has asked European Union countries for more help in procuring vaccines after his government resisted turning to Russia for assistance.
The pandemic has killed more than 20,000 Ukrainians and plunged one of Europe’s poorest countries into recession last year.
Today, for all countries of the Eastern Partnership initiative, in particular Ukraine and Moldova, the issue of obtaining vaccines is important. The countries of the Eastern Partnership should be given increased attention by the EU states in matters of joint procurement procedures and accelerating the supply of vaccines.
Gorillas are thought to have been infected by wildlife worker in what is believed to be first outbreak among captive primates
Several gorillas at the San Diego zoo safari park have tested positive for coronavirus, with some experiencing symptoms, in what is believed to be the first outbreak among such primates in captivity.
The park’s executive director, Lisa Peterson, told the Associated Press on Monday that eight gorillas who live together at the park are believed to have the virus and several have been coughing. Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, confirmed at his Monday news briefing that at least two gorillas had tested positive while three were symptomatic.
Cometh the hour, cometh the man. In these exceptionally grim times we’re all – Boris Johnson included – looking for a saviour to rise from these streets. And right now that salvation appears to be the England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty. Just about the only person left whom anyone can trust to tell the country the naked truth about coronavirus.
For months now, we’ve grown used to ministers being sent out on the morning media round to sell the latest U-turn. But sometime over the weekend, someone in Downing Street’s communications team realised many people tended not to take ministers all that seriously. They would hear the horrifying death statistics and still come up with a way of adapting lockdown guidance to their own convenience. And after Dominic Cummings got away with ignoring the rules during the first lockdown, who could really blame them. The rules were seen as an aspiration, not a binding necessity.
Ireland emerged from a six-week lockdown in early December with the European Union’s lowest coronavirus infection rate.
It eased restrictions in belief it could contain a rise in the virus over Christmas unlike, say, Germany and the UK, countries that had more than four times the level of infection. Then all hell broke loose.
Photographs of crowded beaches, parks and queues at food stalls outside popular walking spots, all at a time when the UK is on highest alert under tough coronavirus restrictions.
Despite Matt Hancock describing these as examples of “flexing the rules”, and Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, warning that stopping to chat in the street is a potential threat, many continue to interpret the government’s strict “stay at home” message as liberally as they can.
French president vows to overhaul France-Africa event to help mobilise Africa’s young people
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has pledged to invite young Africans rather than their political leaders to a key France-Africa summit in a video call with the actor Idris Elba.
The Élysée Palace said Elba, a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations’ international fund for agricultural development, had asked to speak to the French leader. The Guardian was the only newspaper invited to attend the discussion at the Élysée, which marked the start of the One Planet biodiversity summit in Paris.