Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
India launches bid to vaccinate 300m people amid fears over efficacy of domestically produced vaccine
Emerging from Holy Family hospital in New Delhi, Ram Verma, a sanitation worker, breathed a deep sigh of relief. As one of the first in India to receive a coronavirus vaccine on Saturday – marking the start of the world’s largest vaccination programmes – he had been feeling a little jittery.
“I must admit I was nervous,” said Verma, who had received his Covaxin jab in a centre set up in the hospital car park. “A lot of us were. I thought I might faint or have side-effects. After all, it is something totally new. But I’m fine. There is nothing to worry about.”
Reaction has been coming today from Russian sources after Brazil’s health regulator said it was seeking further data on Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine before considering its approval for emergency use.
Documents supporting drugmaker Uniao Quimica’s application for emergency use of the vaccine have been returned to the company because they did not meet its minimum criteria, the watchdog said on Saturday.
While people over 75 living at home will be able to get vaccinated from Monday in France, there are concerns in the field that there are not enough doctors, Le Monde reports today.
Jacques Battistoni, president of MG France, a trade union for general practitioners, said: “We expect tensions and a difficult start to the week.”
Joan Bakewell had been a broadcasting pioneer for more than half a century. And she’s still as forthright as ever. Here, she talks to Sophie Heawood about the empowerment of women, her newly streamlined life and why Boris has got it all wrong about the virus
Joan Bakewell writes in her memoir, The Centre of the Bed, about the moment she became an adult. It was 1949 and she was 17, a hard- working grammar schoolgirl from the industrial north, when her frustrated, depressive mother found a photograph of Joan kissing a boy and set fire to it in front of her eyes. Joan felt deep shame, but the shame began to transmogrify.
“Suddenly I was savagely and tremblingly angry,” she writes. “I was being forged in some bitter fire of my mother’s will, and I must survive the moment and emerge as myself. That was the end of innocence, not the loss of virginity or any fumbling that fell short of it. It was when I crossed into adulthood, knew my own mind and was sure of who I was.” Soon afterwards she left for university, where she joyfully discovered the world of ideas, as well as the one of sex, even though, as a student of the Cambridge women’s college Newnham, such things were banned.
Analysts are involved in an urgent effort to gauge the impact of Britain’s mass Covid-19 vaccine campaign and to pinpoint dates when lockdown measures can be eased.
More than 3 million people – most of them elderly or vulnerable individuals or health workers – have already been given jabs. Now researchers are trying to establish when the first fruits of the mass vaccination programme may be seen as the government heads towards its target of immunising more than 13 million people by 15 February.
Two-time Australian Open champion Victoria Azarenka is believed to be among a group of players who will be confined to their hotel rooms for the next 14 days after two people on the charter flight QR7493 from Los Angeles tested positive to Covid-19 on arrival in Melbourne.
A leaked email from Tennis Australia, which was sent to all players and officials who were aboard the flight and was posted on social media by Mexican world No 155 Santiago González, said players on the flight must isolate in their rooms for two weeks. This means they have no ability to train in the vital days leading up to the competition.
Easing England’s restrictions before March would be a disaster in the battle against coronavirus and would risk putting the health system under enormous pressure if lifted prematurely, a leading epidemiologist has said.
Prof John Edmunds, a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, said prime minister Boris Johnson would be very unwise to ease lockdown curbs before the majority of the public has received vaccinations.
Italy forecasts its debt to soar to a new post-war record level of 158.5% of gross domestic output (GDP) this year, surpassing the 155.6% goal it set in September, a government source told Reuters on Saturday.
The new estimate reflects the impact of a stimulus package worth €32bn ($39bn) announced this week, which will drive the 2021 budget deficit to 8.8% of national output, up from a previous target of 7%.
Prof Dominic Dwyer says he expects interesting answers even if they never find how and where the virus first infected humans
The medical virologist Prof Dominic Dwyer has barely been in China for 24 hours, but he has already joined several Zoom calls from his room in hotel quarantine planning the logistics of an ambitious investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The World Health Organization selected Dwyer, a director at New South Wales Health Pathology in Australia, for the complex and politically fraughttask, along with 14 other physicians, scientists and researchers from around the world. Most of the team arrived in China on Thursday after months of intense diplomatic negotiations with Chinese authorities and setbacks to their entry.
The UK government said a further 1,280 people had died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 as of Friday, bringing the UK total to 87,295.
Separate figures published by the UK’s statistics agencies for deaths where Covid-19 has been mentioned on the death certificate, together with additional data on deaths that have occurred in recent days, show there have now been 102,000 deaths involving Covid-19 in the UK.
A further 807 people who tested positive for coronavirus have died in hospital in England, bringing the total number of confirmed deaths reported in hospitals to 59,519, NHS England said on Friday. Patients were aged between 32 and 101. All except 51, aged between 40 and 97, had known underlying health conditions. The deaths were between 18 November and 14 January. There were 31 other deaths reported with no positive Covid-19 test result.
German toddlers called Fritz or Adele could be invited for a Covid-19 vaccination while octogenarian Peters and Brigittes will not, as an overzealous interpretation of data privacy laws in one state has forced officials to guess people’s ages from their first names.
Authorities in the northern German state of Lower Saxony claim legal hurdles blocked them from accessing official records when trying to send a written invitation for a vaccination appointment to all citizens aged over 80.
At a Shenzhen hospital, 21-year-old airport worker Wang Shuyue lines up to receive her second shot.
“I feel it’s safe because so many people around the country have taken the vaccine so there shouldn’t be any major problems,” she tells the Guardian. “I think it should be effective otherwise there wouldn’t be so many people taking it.”
Though questions remain that still need answering, there are encouraging signs that proof of immunity to Covid-19 could help people return to normality
As the world’s biggest ever vaccination programme gets underway, so-called immunity passports are back in the headlines. A document verifying the holder’s status as Covid-free could allow international borders as well as concerts and other events to reopen.
So are immunity passports just the ticket, or do they remain a flight of fancy?
The education secretary, Gavin Williamson, has put mass testing for coronavirus at the heart of his strategy to reopen schools after the lockdown. It is a controversial strategy that has divided scientists. Some believe mass testing can help reduce outbreaks at schools, while others argue it could make matters worse by giving teachers and pupils false reassurance.
Mass testing relies on lateral flow tests, or LFTs, which contain antibodies that bind to the virus. When a nasal swab is tested in an LFT, any virus present in the sample sticks to the antibodies and produces a dark band, a bit like a pregnancy test’s indicator. LFTs are not as accurate as the standard NHS lab-based PCR tests, but they are cheap and produce results fast – within 30 minutes.
Pre-prepared disaster plans for handling pandemics, natural disasters and terrorist attacks show London had 3,500 mortuary spaces. But the capital braced for the virus with an additional 12,000 mortuary spaces.
If cemeteries could not cope, bodies would be frozen to await their final committal. There were plans to transport scores of bodies at a time between storage locations in trucks, the official said, a practice that risks misidentifying or even losing the dead:
England’s high street pharmacies will begin rolling out Covid vaccines, as the virus death toll across the UK climbed above 100,000.
Boots and Superdrug branches will be among the six stores across England which will be able to administer the jabs from Thursday while the Government aims to hit its target of vaccinating all people in the four most vulnerable groups by the middle of next month.
Andrews Pharmacy in Macclesfield, Cullimore Chemist in Edgware, north London, Woodside Pharmacy in Telford and Appleton Village pharmacy in Widnes will be in the first group to hand out the injections, alongside Boots in Halifax, and Superdrug in Guildford.
Boris Johnson also told MPs that distribution “will be going to 24/7 as soon as we can” but said supply of doses remained the main barrier.
The Scottish Government published its vaccine delivery plan on Wednesday evening, including details of how many doses it expects to receive for each week until the end of May, prompting a row with London, which has declined to publish its numbers.
The six pharmacies have been picked because they can deliver large volumes of the vaccine and allow for social distancing, and Health Secretary Matt Hancock said it was “fantastic” that jabs would be available on the high street.
“Pharmacies sit at the heart of local communities and will make a big difference to our rollout programme by providing even more local, convenient places for those that are eligible to get their jab,” he said.
By the end of the month more than 200 community chemists will be able to give vaccines, according to NHS England.
The pharmacies join the 200 hospitals, around 800 GP clinics and seven mass vaccination centres where jabs are already being handed out.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer urged ministers to go further and use England’s 11,500 pharmacies to deliver round-the-clock vaccinations by the end of next month.
The expanded vaccination service in England comes as the daily reported UK death toll reached a new high on Wednesday, with 1,564 fatalities recorded within 28 days of a positive test.
The latest figures meant the grim milestone of more than 100,000 deaths involving coronavirus has now been passed in the UK, according to official data.
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.
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
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.
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.