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 director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Rochelle Walensky, warned that a recent increase in coronavirus cases indicated a fourth surge could occur before a majority of the US had been vaccinated.
According to Johns Hopkins University, the US has recorded more than 28.5m Covid-19 cases and nearly 513,000 deaths. Daily case numbers fell steeply after a peak in January but have started to increase again, boosted by the spread of new variants
The coronavirus variant originally found in Manaus in Brazil and detected in six cases in the UK was able to infect 25% to 61% of the people in the Amazonian city who might have expected to be immune after a first bout of Covid, researchers say.
The extent to which P1 can evade the immune system, and potentially vaccines, emerged as the UK health secretary said the hunt for one person who tested positive for P1 – but did not leave contact details – had narrowed to 379 households in the south-east of England.
Authorities in Germany and France are under pressure to come up with creative solutions to shift the AstraZeneca vaccine at higher speed in order to avoid a pile-up of unused doses over the coming weeks.
On Monday, France’s medical regulator reversed its advice not to use the AstraZeneca jab on over-65s, and Germany’s vaccination committee is coming under increasing pressure to follow suit or even scrap prioritisation altogether.
Tokyo has requested Beijing to stop taking anal swab tests for Covid-19 on Japanese citizens because the procedure causes psychological pain, a government spokesperson has said.
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Katsunobu Kato, said the government had not received a response that Beijing would change the testing procedure, so Japan would continue to ask China to alter the way of testing.
Public Health England is facing a needle-in-a-haystack hunt for a person who tested positive for the “concerning” Brazilian Covid variant but did not leave their name and address with their test.
There are a few clues to go on. Public Health England thinks it knows when the test in question was taken and so is asking people who were tested on 12 or 13 February but have not received any test result to get in touch.
As the UK and other governments consider whether to give Covid-vaccinated people certificates that allow entry to bars, hotels, and swimming pools, one country, Israel, has already deployed its “green pass”.
The state of 9 million, which has administered jabs to half its population, released an app a week ago that shows whether people have been fully inoculated against the coronavirus or if they have presumed immunity after contracting the disease.
Amy Taylor was chatting to friends over a Zoom drink when the conversation took an unexpected turn. One of the group – all in their early 30s, mostly university-educated and in professional jobs – mentioned that she had concerns about the Covid vaccine because she wanted to try for a baby in the next year or two.
“I was surprised when others said they were also a bit anxious. Then I started thinking maybe I should be worried too – even though I’m pro-vaccinations and I know this is the way out of the pandemic,” said Taylor*. “This really plays into the fertility insecurity that lots of women in their 30s have anyway – have I left it too late, will I need IVF, should I freeze my eggs? We don’t want anything else that could interfere with our chances of motherhood.”
Germany could soon authorise the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine for seniors after the head of the country’s vaccination committee said his body’s advice to give the Oxford-developed vaccine only to those under 65 had “somehow gone wrong”.
Unlike the European Medicines Agency or Britain’s MHRA, Germany’s Standing Committee on Vaccination (Stiko) last month recommended against the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine on seniors, citing a lack of conclusive trial data to prove its efficacy in that age group.
The prospects of vaccines failing to trigger immune responses are dismissed as remote by scientists. “If a vaccine has not been properly refrigerated that might pose problems but doctors take great care to ensure that doesn’t happen,” said Prof Helen Fletcher at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “Frankly the only other way to get a failed reaction is for the doctor to miss your arm – which isn’t likely.”
Honduras will begin receiving nearly 430,000 doses of AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine in March through the World Health Organization’s (WHO) global COVAX program for poor and middle-income countries, the Honduran health minister said on Friday.
Reuters reports:
Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez had asked the WHO to make the Central American nation a priority for Covid-19 vaccines, citing the devastating effects of two recent hurricanes that pummeled the already weak economy.
Eventually, the vaccines via COVAX are meant to inoculate nearly 2 million of the 9.5 million inhabitants in the small Central American country, where more than 4,000 people have died from COVID-19. The AstraZeneca vaccine requires two shots.
England’s deputy chief medical officer has told people “don’t wreck this now” as he warned there were “some worrying signs that people are relaxing” in the batlle against coronavirus at “exactly the wrong time”.
PA reports:
Professor Jonathan Van-Tam alerted people who have already been vaccinated to the dangers of “taking their foot off the brake” and being tempted to break Covid-19 rules.
He told a Downing Street briefing on Friday: “All the patients that I vaccinate [...] I say to them, ‘Remember, all the rules still apply to you and all of us until we’re in a much safer place’. It doesn’t change because you’ve had your first dose of vaccine.
A single dose of the Pfizer vaccine can reduce asymptomatic infections by 75%, according to research that suggests the jab could substantially curtail transmission of the disease.
Doctors in Cambridge recorded the sharp fall in infections after 12 days of the first shot in an analysis of Covid tests performed on healthcare workers in the last two weeks of January.
When stocks of medical equipment in the general ward of Tengandogo University hospital in Ouagadougou ran low as resources flowed to the coronavirus unit, medical staff bought the essentials themselves.
Blood pressure monitors, glucose monitors and oximeters were needed. Even the ink in the printers had to be replaced.
“Stay at home. Protect the NHS. Save lives.” The catch cry of pandemic Britain under Boris Johnson, revived last month, might sound familiar to New Zealanders now enjoying their “unstoppable summer”.
Johnson’s three-part slogan reportedly derived last March from a suggestion by Ben Guerin, a 25-year-old Kiwi who advised on the Conservatives’ social media strategy. His attention had been caught by a phrase that was increasingly prevalent in Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s messaging back home: “Stay at home, save lives.”
Despite a tourism-dependent economy devastated by coronavirus shutdowns, Vanuatu’s Covid-19 vaccination programme will not inoculate most of its population until the end of 2023.
According to the ministry of health’s national deployment and vaccination plan, the first shots will be administered in April this year, but only the most vulnerable 20% of the population will get a jab in the first phase.
Covax has delivered its first Covid-19 vaccine doses in a milestone for the ambitious programme that seeks to offset “vaccine nationalism” by wealthy countries and ensure poor ones do not wait years to start inoculating people.
An aircraft carrying 600,000 doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine landed in Accra, the capital of Ghana, on Wednesday, where jabs will be administered to frontline health workers on Tuesday. Vaccine doses will arrive on Friday in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and will be given from Monday.
Chinese officials did “little” in terms of epidemiological investigations into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan in the first eight months after the outbreak, according to an internal World Health Organization document seen by the Guardian.
The internal WHO travel report summary, dated 10 August 2020, also said the team who met Chinese counterparts as part of a mission to help find the origins of the virus received scant new information at that time, and were not given any documents or written data during extensive discussions with Chinese officials.
The government’s roadmap for ending Covid restrictions in England commits it to steps that may increase the rate at which the virus spreads. Some of that is unavoidable. But even as we reopen, there is more that we could do to mitigate the risk, and get us to the summer – and normality – without a resurgence.
One reason that east Asian countries have done better during the pandemic is that prior experience with Sars has given people the understanding of how respiratory diseases spread, and how to avoid them. Japan’s three Cs guidance – avoidance of closed spaces, crowded places, and conversations – helped it avoid a serious epidemic without imposing a national lockdown.
Vaccinating children and teens could be key to stifling the pandemic, experts have said, as clinical trials begin to test Covid-19 vaccines in young people.
While Covid-19 is associated with a considerably lower burden of morbidity and mortality in young people, and there is evidence that children may be less likely to acquire the infection, the role of children in transmission is unclear, according to the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.