Category Archives: Infectious Diseases

WHO blames ‘perfect storm’ of factors for India Covid crisis

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Health body says mass gatherings, low vaccination rates and more contagious variants all to blame for surge in cases

The World Health Organization (WHO) has said India’s deadly Covid-19 second wave was caused by a “perfect storm” of mass gatherings, low vaccination rates and more contagious variants.

Speaking on Tuesday, WHO spokesperson Tarik Jašarević warned against blaming mutations of the virus as the sole cause of the tsunami of cases that have engulfed India in recent weeks, pushing the country’s healthcare system to the brink of collapse, and said that complacent behaviour had also played a role.

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Covid ‘vaccination persuasion’ teams reap rewards in Turkey

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Door-to-door initiative targeting elderly people reluctant to have jab to be rolled out after local success

A coronavirus “vaccination persuasion” initiative targeting elderly people who have declined invitations to get vaccinated is gearing up to be rolled out across Turkey after proving a resounding success in a district in the country’s south-east.

Since February, doctors and healthcare workers in the mainly Kurdish city of Adıyaman, or Semsûr‎, have been calling people in age groups already eligible for the vaccine to ask why they have not come to clinics for appointments.

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India reportedly running out of vaccines amid Covid surge

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Government’s plans to ramp up the vaccination programme by the weekend under threat

India is reportedly running out of Covid-19 vaccines just as a virulent second wave continues to devastate the country, threatening the government’s plans to ramp up the vaccination programme by the weekend in an effort to curb the spread of the virus.

From Saturday, everyone in India over the age of 18 will be eligible for a vaccine, a decision made by the government as the virus has brought India’s healthcare system to its knees, with more than new 352,000 cases on Monday and over 2,800 more deaths.

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Mutations, politics, vaccines: the factors behind India’s Covid crisis

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Analysis: experts believe a number of things coalesced to cause the world’s worst coronavirus outbreak

India is now identifying more than 1 million coronavirus cases every three days, with many times more thought to be going unregistered in a vast country where public health surveillance is often poor. Daily deaths exceeded 2,800 on Sunday, but these too are thought to be many times higher.

Epidemiologists and other experts are speculating that several factors have coalesced over the past months to bring India to the point of the world’s worst Covid-19 outbreak.

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Australia news live: AMA says WA hotel quarantine not ‘fit for purpose’ for containing Covid

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Top doctor says leaks continue to happen because federal experts ‘deny’ virus is airborne; WA premier Mark McGowan to decide today whether Perth and Peel can reopen after three days of lockdown. Follow all the latest news and updates, live

• WA Covid hotspots: list of exposure sites
• Perth and WA Covid lockdown rules explained
• WA premier furious that Australian residents are travelling to ‘Covid-infected countries’

The social media giant Facebook has released a short statement confirming it has removed the page of independent federal MP Craig Kelly for repeated breaches of misinformation policy.

A Facebook company spokesperson said:

We don’t allow anyone, including elected officials, to share misinformation about COVID-19 that could lead to imminent physical harm or COVID-19 vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts.

We have clear policies against this type of content and have removed Mr Kelly’s Facebook Page for repeated violations of this policy.

Thanks to Matilda Boseley for another electric display of web logging.

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Why India’s worsening Covid crisis is a dire problem for the world

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Analysis: Urgent supplies are needed to stem the rampant spread of infections in country of 1.4bn

The catastrophe unfolding in India appears to be the worst-case scenario that many feared from the Covid-19 pandemic: unable to find sufficient hospital beds, access to tests, medicines or oxygen, the country of 1.4 billion is sinking beneath the weight of infections.

The two opposed assumptions of the global response to coronavirus – wealthy countries in the west prioritising vaccines for their own need in one camp, and the argument led by the World Health Organization for global vaccine equality in the other – are also failing to hold as the scale of the crisis in India points to an urgent need to prioritise the response there.

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Halfway there … the key numbers that tell the story of the UK’s vaccine drive

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The government has hit both its self-imposed targets so far. How will it go the rest of the way?

More than half of the UK population has now received at least a first dose of vaccine against Covid-19. By Friday evening 33,388,637 people had received one of the Pfizer, AstraZeneca or Moderna vaccines. Here’s how it was done, and what is still left to do.

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Mallorca man arrested for infecting 22 people with Covid

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Police arrest man on suspicion of assault for going to work and the gym despite signs he had the virus

A Mallorca man who infected 22 people with Covid-19 has been arrested on suspicion of assault for going to work and the gym despite signs he had the virus, police have said.

Officers on the Spanish island began investigating at the end of January after an outbreak in the town of Manacor, following reports an employee had “become infected but hidden his illness”, a statement said on Saturday.

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Western Australia Covid lockdown: new case confirmed as hotel quarantine failures condemned

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Australian Medical Association president Dr Omar Khorshid says state governments are not doing enough to protect those in quarantine from coronavirus

Continued leaks from hotel quarantine are “a frustration to all Australians” and state governments are not doing enough to prevent it, the president of the Australian Medical Association, Dr Omar Khorshid, has said, while the Western Australian premier called on the federal government to “step up and help”.

Authorities revealed one new community case was detected on Saturday – a man in his 40s – as WA’s Perth and Peel region began a snap three-day lockdown after the latest hotel quarantine outbreak. The virus spread in the corridors of the Mercure quarantine hotel in Perth, infecting a man who was staying adjacent to a couple with the virus who had returned from India.

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‘We’re the poo crew’: sleuths test for Covid by reading signs in sewage

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Scientists in Exeter are identifying Covid through human faeces – this could be be expanded to monitor other diseases

They call themselves the “poo crew” – a team of health detectives who are tracking down and heading off Covid outbreaks by reading the signs in our sewage. And they are expanding. Earlier this month, the Environmental Monitoring for Health Protection Programme opened a purpose-built laboratory on the fringes of Exeter, its sterile interior in stark contrast to the unsanitary subject of its investigations.

The opening of the laboratory marks a dramatic expansion of what was, until less than a year ago, just a soil pipe dream: testing sewage for coronavirus to understand where it is circulating and get an early warning of future potential spikes in infection. In the future, this network could be expanded to monitor other infectious diseases including flu.

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Australian authorities say three new cases of blood clots ‘very likely linked’ to AstraZeneca vaccine

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The Therapeutic Goods Administration says the patients, including an 80-year-old man, are all in a stable condition and recovering

Australian health authorities say another three cases of rare blood clots – including in an 80-year-old Victorian man – are very likely linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine.

The medicines regulator on Friday night said the suspected cases of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) were in a 35-year-old New South Wales woman, a 49-year-old Queensland man and the 80-year-old.

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UK scientists find evidence of human-to-cat Covid transmission

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Researchers in Glasgow find two cases where cats were infected by owners with coronavirus symptoms

Two cases of human-to-cat transmission of Covid-19 have been identified by researchers. Scientists from the University of Glasgow found the cases of Sars-CoV-2 transmission as part of a screening programme of the feline population in the UK.

The cats, of different breeds, were living in separate households and displayed mild to severe respiratory signs. Researchers believe both pets were infected by their owners, who had Covid-19 symptoms before the cats became unwell.

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Japan to declare targeted state of emergency as Covid cases surge

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Yoshihide Suga under pressure to act after sharp rise in infections in Tokyo, only months before Olympics

Japan is hoping that a short blast of tough coronavirus measures will halt a recent surge in coronavirus cases, with the prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, poised to announce a targeted state of emergency for Tokyo, Osaka and two other prefectures, just three months before the Tokyo Olympics.

Suga has come under pressure to take action after a sharp rise in infections in the capital, and evidence that new variants of the virus are driving serious outbreaks in Osaka and the two neighbouring prefectures of Hyogo and Kyoto.

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Delhi hospitals issue SOS alerts over oxygen supplies as India’s Covid crisis mounts

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Staff posted emergency messages on social media as several hospitals in the capital exhausted oxygen supplies on Thursday night

Hospitals in Delhi issued SOS alerts on Friday morning, warning they had just a few hours supply of oxygen left, as another unprecedented surge in Covid-19 cases overwhelmed health systems in major Indian cities.

Hospital staff posted emergency messages on social media throughout Thursday and Friday, saying they were unable to cope with demand and pleading for assistance from government.

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Coronavirus live: EU asks states to support legal action against AstraZeneca; UK finds 55 more cases of Indian variant

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Some member states raise concerns over wisdom of action, saying it could undermine confidence in vaccine; further cases of B.1.617 found in Britain

Canada’s government, under pressure to suspend flights from India and Brazil over fears about the spread of the coronavirus, could make an announcement on the matter shortly, a senior medical official said on Thursday.

The prime minister Justin Trudeau said earlier this week that officials were studying the example of the UK, which is obliging travellers who have been in India in the past 10 days to spend 10 days in quarantine.

Here is a quick recap of all the main Covid updates from around the world:

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The Gambia becomes second African state to end trachoma

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Health workers spent years targeting agonising and blinding eye disease, which was rife in rural areas

The Gambia has become the second country in Africa to eliminate trachoma, one of the leading causes of blindness.

The achievement, announced by the World Health Organization on Tuesday, came after decades of work on the disease, which has damaged the sight of about 1.9 million people worldwide. Ghana was the first country in Africa to eliminate the disease in 2018.

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India reels from second Covid wave as families beg for supplies on social media

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Rapid glut of cases stretches supplies of beds in intensive care units, ventilators and oxygen

Hundred of Indians, including Delhi government administrators, have begged for help finding oxygen and other crucial medical supplies on social media as India reels from a devastating second wave of coronavirus, leading to caseloads growing by nearly 300,000 every day.

Faulty oxygen supplies at a western Indian hospital have killed more than 20 Covid-19 patients, adding to the country’s highest-ever daily death toll from the virus.

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Victorious over Covid, Australia and New Zealand grapple with vaccine rollout

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Australia’s glacially slow delivery of jabs derided as a ‘farce’, while in New Zealand only 4.5% of eligible people have been vaccinated

They were held up as Covid success stories, two countries at the bottom of the world that kept outbreaks under control and deaths low as the pandemic swept the rest of the globe.

Daily life in cities including Sydney and Auckland now feels largely back to pre-pandemic normal – restaurants are full, theatres are open, masks are scarce and offices are busy. A degree of international travel is also a reality thanks to the new “trans-Tasman travel bubble” – a two-way quarantine-free corridor between the neighbours.

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Why is India seeing such a huge surge in Covid-19 cases?

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A ‘double mutant’ strain, lack of medical supplies and the relaxation of lockdowns have combined to foment disaster

India has seen a terrifying increase in coronavirus cases in the past few weeks. Tuesday saw another new record when the country racked up 295,041 new cases, up from around 273,000 from the previous day, with no sign that the surge is abating.

The capital Delhi was placed in lockdown for a week from Monday, and Maharashtra state, the centre of the surge and home to the financial capital, Mumbai, further tightened restrictions on shops and home deliveries from Tuesday.

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How vaccines are affecting Covid-19 outbreaks globally

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Despite their life-saving capabilities, many countries have yet to administer enough doses to reap the full benefits

Nearly six months after the first Covid-19 vaccines were approved for emergency use, Guardian analysis shows that the vast majority of the world is yet to see a substantial benefit.

Supply shortages, safety concerns, public apathy and slow rollouts have resulted in most countries still being reliant on onerous lockdowns and other quarantine measures to reduce the severity of their outbreaks.

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