A Sage member and NHS England have pushed back against criticism of hospital admissions data
Claims that hospital admissions for Covid-19 in England were overreported at the peak of the outbreak may not be telling the whole story.
According to government figures, the daily hospital admissions for Covid-19 patients in hospital rose from 1,541 on 3 March to 17,172 on 12 April. On 20 August the figure was 516.
Continue reading...US companies make roughly 663m syringes a year but the Trump administration has calculated that an extra 850m may be needed
As the race for a vaccine against the coronavirus heats up, the US faces another potential crisis: a shortage of syringes.
The US federal government has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars in hopes of warding off a syringe shortage, if and when a Covid-19 vaccine is approved. It comes as shortages of personal protective equipment continue to hamper the response to the pandemic.
Continue reading...Lebanon enters partial lockdown to counter infections; pressure grows in India over rise in infections; concern over cases in Berlin schools
Spain has reported 3,650 new Covid-19 infections in the past 24 hours, bringing its total caseload to 386,054, while three more people have died, the health ministry said on Friday.
On Thursday, cases increased by 3,349. A further 125 people have died from the virus over the past seven days.
Italy registered 947 new infections on Friday, the biggest daily Covid case rise since 14 May, when the country was still in lockdown.
The total number of cases is now up to 257,065. Nine more people have died with the virus and the death toll now stands at 35,427.
Continue reading...Climate-driven loss is likely to be the worst for centuries, and is pushing up sea levels
The Greenland ice sheet lost a record amount of ice in 2019, equivalent to a million tonnes per minute across the year, satellite data shows.
The climate crisis is heating the Arctic at double the rate in lower latitudes, and the ice cap is the biggest single contributor to sea level rise, which already imperils coasts around the world. The ice sheet shrank by 532bn tonnes last year as its surface melted and glaciers fell into the ocean and would have filled seven Olympic-sized swimming pools per second.
Continue reading...Nearly 550,000 pupils in England receive GCSE results awarded entirely by assessment for first time, but BTec students face further disruption
My colleagues Pamela Duncan and Tobi Thomas from the Guardian’s data unit report discrepancies in today’s GCSE results:
A rising tide lifts all boats and this year’s algorithm-to-teacher-graded-U-turn has resulted in an increase in top grades across every subject. However, some subjects’ boats were lifted higher than others.
After all the uncertainty of the exams fiasco, head teachers across the country are celebrating their pupils’ GCSE success, but they say recent experiences have damaged relations with the Department for Education (DfE).
Jules White, head teacher of Tanbridge House secondary school in Horsham, West Sussex and leader of the Worth Less? education funding campaign, was with pupils this morning, watching with delight as they found out their grades.
Continue reading...Victoria reports 17 more deaths; ADF says it offered hotel quarantine support to the state; Sydney bus drivers threaten to strike unless masks are made compulsory for passengers. Follow live updates
The security guard who appears to have contracted Covid-19 while working at a hotel quarantine facility later worked at Sydney’s Flemington market and Parramatta Local Court, but did not work at Bankstown Central Shopping Centre, as chief health officer Dr Kerry Chant indicated earlier. A previous case attended the shopping centre on 8 August.
The security guard work at the Marriott Hotel on 3, 4, 7 and 8 August, developed symptoms on 11 August, and was diagnosed late on 15 August.
The Senate committee examining the Morrison government’s response to Covid-19 heard from officials from the Department of Social Services this afternoon. They confirmed that Australian pensioners would not have their payments indexed until at least next March because of soft economic conditions.
In plain English, this means no increase to pensions.
It’s unacceptable that the government is allowing pensions to stagnate in the middle of the coronavirus crisis and the prime minister must outline what he is going to do to fix this.
Continue reading...As the government made excuses for not providing adequate equipment, Josiane refused to stop caring for the Covid-19 patients who needed her. Soon she was admitted to the ICU, too
After a busy night shift at the hospital, there was nothing the nurse Josiane Ekoli liked to do more than come home and wake up her sleeping children. Her 22-year-old son, Kenan, a finance worker, got the worst of it, because his bedroom was the closest to the front door. “Oh my days,” Kenan groans. “Every day, I’m hearing my name, without a doubt. She’s screaming my name. Kenan! Kenan! She knew I hated being woken up.”
On Saturday mornings, when Josiane had not come off a night shift, she had a routine: at about 9am, she would blast gospel music through the house. If that did not get her children up – she had five, but two of her sons had moved out – she would go into their rooms and start talking to them. At them, really. “Sometimes, she woke me up just to talk,” says Kenan. “I’d say: ‘Mum, couldn’t you wait until I was awake to have this conversation?’”
Continue reading...Anders Tegnell appears to have asked if higher death rate among older people acceptable if faster herd immunity achieved
Sweden’s light-touch approach to Covid-19 has come under renewed criticism after emails show the country’s chief epidemiologist appearing to ask whether a higher death rate among older people might be acceptable if it led to faster herd immunity.
Speculation about the views of Sweden’s leading public health officials was further fanned after it also emerged that Anders Tegnell, the architect of the country’s no-lockdown strategy, had deleted some of his emails.
Continue reading...More than 170 teams of researchers are racing to develop a safe and effective vaccine. Here is their progress
Researchers around the world are racing to develop a vaccine against Covid-19, with more than 170 candidate vaccines now tracked by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Continue reading...Australian death toll stands at 379; France removed from UK travel corridor; Greece and Croatia impose midnight curfew on bars and restaurants
Related: For Manhattan's retail industry normal may never return
It should have been a great year for Spanish wine: a bumper crop of grapes resulting in millions and millions of extra bottles for sipping or swilling at home and abroad.
But with Covid-19 leading to a catastrophic drop in wine sales, the Spanish government is offering growers subsidies to destroy part of this year’s record grape harvest.
Related: Spain’s vineyards destroy record harvest as wine sales crash
Continue reading...Spain announces 11 new measures; Italy move affects travellers from Spain, Croatia, Malta and Greece; India reports over 60,000 new cases
Canada is preparing for a “reasonable worst case scenario” in which further surges of coronavirus cases would at times overwhelm the public health system, officials have said.
In this scenario, there would be a large peak later this year followed by a number of smaller peaks and valleys stretching to January 2022. Each of the peaks would exceed the health system’s capacity.
Hello, my name is Clea Skopeliti and I’ll be running the blog for the next few hours. You can get in touch with me on Twitter @cleaskopeliti or by email: clea.skopeliti.casual@theguardian.com. I won’t always have time to reply to everything but will read it all! Thanks in advance.
Continue reading...India’s infections grow by nearly 67,000 in one day; Russia vaccine not yet completed its final trials; global deaths climb towards 750,000. Follow the latest updates
Hello everyone. I am taking on the global live feed from London and will be bringing you all the latest updates on what is happening around the globe. Please do keep in touch with me as I work and contact me if you have any questions, news tips or thoughts. Thanks in advance.
Twitter: @sloumarsh
Instagram: sarah_marsh_journalist
Email: sarah.marsh@theguardian.com
That’s it from me, Helen Sullivan, for today. Thanks for following along.
My colleague Sarah Marsh will take you through the next few hours.
Continue reading...UK move takes effect as of 4am BST on Saturday; Pandemic has killed three quarters of a million people; Germany case jump shows ‘unsettling trend’; Iraq reports record daily Covid-19 cases
Britain’s decision to impose a 14-day quarantine on all arrivals from France will lead to a reciprocal measure, French junior minister for European affairs Clément Beaune said late on Thursday.
“A British decision that we regret and which will lead to a measure of reciprocity, hoping that things will return to normal as soon as possible,” Beaune said on Twitter at midnight.
Une décision britannique que nous regrettons et qui entraînera une mesure de réciprocité, en espérant un retour à la normale le plus rapidement possible @Djebbari_JB https://t.co/6pA0qDQun6
La France regrette la décision du Royaume Uni et appliquera des mesures de réciprocité dans le champ des transports. J’ai dit à mon homologue @grantshapps notre volonté d’harmoniser les protocoles sanitaires pour assurer un haut niveau de protection des deux côtés de la Manche. https://t.co/bH7LkqD3LB
Hi, Helen Sullivan joining you now.
I’ll be bringing you the latest for the next few hours. Get in touch on Twitter @helenrsullivan or via email: helen.sullivan@theguardian.com with questions, comments and news from your part of the world.
Continue reading...France cancels marathon as cases pick up; WHO warns displacement of people in Beirut risks accelerating spread; four new cases in Auckland
Jordan will close its only land trade border crossing with Syria for a week after a spike in Covid-19 cases coming from its northern neighbour, officials said.
They said the interior minister’s decision to close the main Jaber border crossing would come into effect on Thursday morning.
Britain’s NatWest is cutting at least 500 jobs across its retail business and closing one of its remaining offices in London as banks press on with cost-cutting in the face of a wave of expected loan losses due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The state-backed bank is finalising a voluntary redundancy round targeting cutting 550 full-time equivalent roles across its branches and ‘premier banking’ premium service, union Unite told Reuters.
Tens of thousands of people working for banks have risen to the challenge that the pandemic created. The banks’ response should not be a repeat of the austerity measures that we saw after the financial crisis.
Continue reading...Rising chorus of concern over Sputnik V vaccine stems from opaque development and lack of mass-testing
In 1977 Scott Halstead, a virologist at the University of Hawaii, was studying dengue fever when he noticed a now well-known but then unexpected feature of the disease.
Animals that had already been exposed to one of the four closely-related viruses that cause dengue and produced antibodies to it, far from being protected against other versions became sicker when infected a second time, and it was the antibodies already produced by the first infection that were responsible, allowing the second infection to hitchhike into the body.
Continue reading...Coronavirus updates: New Zealand records first new local cases in 102 days; global deaths likely to pass 750,000 this week, says WHO
As we reported earlier, the Dutch health minister said he plans to introduce mandatory home quarantine for people identified by local authorities as having been in close contact with somebody infected with coronavirus, and for travellers returning from high-risk countries.
Health minister Hugo de Jonge said in a letter to lawmakers that mandatory quarantine could be imposed if people refuse to isolate voluntarily.
Germany has extended a partial travel warning for Spain to the capital of Madrid and the Basque region due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the foreign ministry said on Tuesday.
The foreign ministry said it was warning against any unnecessary tourist trips to both regions because of a rising number of new infections and local restrictions put in place to contain the spread of coronavirus.
Continue reading...Research could pave way for cheap supercapacitor storage of renewable energy
The humble house brick has been turned into a battery that can store electricity, raising the possibility that buildings could one day become literal powerhouses.
The new technology exploits the porous nature of fired red bricks by filling the pores with tiny nanofibres of a conducting plastic that can store charge. The first bricks store enough electricity to power small lights. But if their capacity can be increased, they may become a low-cost alternative to the lithium-ion batteries currently used.
Continue reading...Sputnik V’s development has been marked by worrying opacity and ethical issues
The race to find a vaccine against Covid-19 has not always been particularly edifying, driven at times by so-called “vaccine nationalism”, much cautioned against by the World Health Organization, which has itself been accused of being invested as much in self-interest and prestige as global public health.
Russia’s announcement that it has registered its Sputnik V vaccine as safe and effective for mass production and inoculation even before so-called phase 3 large-scale safety trials, which usually take months, fits the pattern.
Continue reading...Dwarf planet, believed to be a barren space rock, has an ‘extensive reservoir’ of brine beneath its surface, images show
The dwarf planet Ceres – long believed to be a barren space rock – is an ocean world with reservoirs of sea water beneath its surface, the results of a major exploration mission showed on Monday.
Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and has its own gravity, enabling the Nasa Dawn spacecraft to capture high-resolution images of its surface.
Continue reading... Enhanced photosynthesis holds promise of higher yields in a drought-afflicted future
Tobacco plants have been modified with a protein found in algae to improve their photosynthesis and increase growth, while using less water, in a new advance that could point the way to higher-yielding crops in a drought-afflicted future.
The technique focuses on photosynthesis, the complex process by which plants are able to use sunlight and carbon dioxide to produce nutrients that fuel their growth. Enhancing photosynthesis would produce huge benefits to agricultural productivity, but the complexities of the process have stymied many past attempts to harness it.
Continue reading...