Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
As chaos continues to engulf Britain’s test and trace system, attention has focused on how successful other countries have been in using testing and contact-tracing to suppress coronavirus transmission.
While many have embraced test/trace regimes, comparing the relative successes – and failures – is complicated by the fact that different countries count things even as basic as the number of daily tests using different methods.
Victoria police have fined 76 people over the past 24 hours, including eight for not wearing a face mask.
Examples include three men “located in a carpark with no legitimate reasons for being there” and one man and one woman who drove from Tarneit to St Kilda East “to buy fried chicken”.
Queensland will re-open its border to people from the ACT from 25 September, the health minister Steven Miles has just announced.
News updates: Edward Argar says Boris Johnson does not want a new national lockdown; Matt Hancock due to announce restrictions in north-east of England
Care providers in England will receive more than £500m extra funding to help reduce transmission of Covid-19 during the winter, the government has announced. As PA Media reports, the infection control fund will help pay staff full wages when they are self-isolating and ensure carers work in only one care home, reducing the risk of spreading the infection. The fund was set up in May but has now been extended until March 2021 and will offer the sector an extra £546m ahead of an anticipated second wave of the virus over the winter months.
The global economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic may take as much as five years, the World Bank’s chief economist Carmen Reinhart has said.
“There will probably be a quick rebound as all the restriction measures linked to lockdowns are lifted, but a full recovery will take as much as five years,” Reinhart said in a speech during a conference held in Madrid.
The Czech Republic has reported more than 2,000 new Covid cases in a single day for the first time as it battles a surge in infections that is among the fastest in Europe.
The health ministry recorded 2,139 cases of the new coronavirus on Wednesday, up from a previous record of 1,675 reported the previous day, Reuters reports.
Tracers express their fears as infected people reveal multiple close contacts in multiple locations
In the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, Ireland’s contact tracers often made calls to people who were very sick, with some struggling to breathe.
“In a lot of cases people were suffering extreme physical distress,” said Eamonn Gormley, a tracer at University College Dublin. “One person collapsed on the floor and we could hear them gasping for air. You got questions like: ‘Am I going to die?’ Some nights I had trouble sleeping.”
The coronavirus pandemic has peaked earlier than expected in many African countries, confounding early predictions, experts have told MPs.
Scientists do not yet know why, but one hypothesis is the possibility of people having pre-existing immunity to Covid-19, caused by exposure to other infections.
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said a vaccine against the deadly coronavirus could be three or four weeks away, underscoring predictions made by US public health officials and Pfizer Inc earlier this month, Reuters reports.
Trump, speaking at a town hall hosted by ABC News in Philadelphia, defended his handling of the coronavirus crisis, and said a vaccine could be ready for distribution soon.
“We’re very close to having a vaccine,” he said. “If you want to know the truth, the previous administration would have taken perhaps years to have a vaccine because of the FDA and all the approvals. And we’re within weeks of getting it you know could be three weeks, four weeks.”
The average age of people infected with Covid-19 is coming down, according to a World Health Organization (WHO) expert, Dr Maria Van Kerkhove. She has told a Q&A that incidences of hospitalisation among those aged 15 to 49 years are increasing.
She also said it was possible for the same person to be infected with influenza and Covid-19, adding that the WHO was looking into the prevalence of that.
Earlier, we posted that the Czech Republic had reported its highest daily count since the beginning of the pandemic. The country’s health minister, Adam Vojtěch, has told its parliament the government plans to ban stand-up indoor events as of Friday to help stabilise the situation.
Inevitably the numbers in the coming days will be very similar to the current increases.
We have to calculate with that, although we are hoping for a certain decline or at least stabilisation from the measures adopted.
More than a thousand student teachers in New Zealand will graduate this year without having completed their classroom practice requirements amid the disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
The Teaching Council of Aotearoa New Zealand said Covid-19 had forced it to think creatively, because many student teachers had been unable to complete the required number of practical hours due to seven weeks of lockdown; and more in Auckland.
While many European countries are seeing their infection rates surge to levels not seen since the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, Sweden – whose light-touch approach has made it an international outlier – has recorded the fewest daily cases since the virus emerged.
The Scandinavian country’s rolling seven-day average of new cases stood at 108 on Tuesday, its lowest level since 13 March. Data from the Swedish national health agency showed only 1.2% of its 120,000 tests last week came back positive.
As cases continue to rise in the Netherlands, the Dutch government has said it will maintain heavy public spending in an effort to counter the losses from the pandemic despite its finances worsening.
In his annual speech outlining the government’s new budget on Tuesday, King Willem-Alexander said:
In these insecure times, the government chooses not to cut spending, but to invest, in job security, social safety nets and a stronger economy.”
New coronavirus cases in the Netherlands have hit a daily record of 1,379 in the past 24 hours, according to Dutch daily newspaper de Volkskrant.
On Monday, health authorities in the country recorded 1,300 new infections, it said.
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Coronavirus deaths pass 925,000; biosafety head at Chinese CDC says vaccine progress ‘very smooth’; South Korea to secure early vaccines for 30 million
As global coronavirus cases neared 30 million on Tuesday, a senior health official in China said she expected a vaccine to be publicly available as early as November this year.
According to the Johns Hopkins University Covid-19 tracker, which relies on official government data, there are 29,190,588 confirmed infections worldwide. Deaths stand at 927,245 and are expected to pass 1 million by October.
Pandemic could result in a ‘lost decade’ for developing countries says co-chair of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in stark report
The world’s poorest countries risk a lost decade of development unless leaders move quickly to help them recover from the fallout of Covid-19, Melinda Gates told the Guardian.
The co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has committed $350m (£270m) to support the global response to the pandemic, said it was in the hands of the global community to decide the long-term impact.
The Oxford-based Recovery trial which proved that steroids saved the lives of some Covid patients will now take on a promising but far more expensive new antibody combination treatment, it has been announced.
A cohort of patients joining the trial in most NHS acute hospitals will be randomly allocated to Regeneron’s experimental drug, called REGN-COV2. The drug is a combination of two human neutralising antibodies against the virus. The company previously developed a similar antibody drug against Ebola.
Authorities in Bordeaux and Marseille have announced strict new measures to limit public gatherings in an effort to rein in a rapid surge in Covid-19 cases that risks overwhelming the two French cities’ hospitals.
“The virus has accelerated despite the obligation to wear a mask introduced earlier this summer,” Christophe Mirmand, the government’s top official in greater Marseille area, said on Monday. “We need to take action to ensure health services can cope.”
Grouse shooting and hunting with guns in England are among outdoor activities exempted from the government’s “rule of six” coronavirus regulations.
Confirmation that the latest health protection regulations permit groups of up to 30 to take part in any “sports gathering” was published only minutes before coming into force.
A 10-year-old boy has become Covid-19’s latest fatality on Guam, as the island struggles to rein in an outbreak that threatens to overwhelm its public health system.
The boy, who had underlying health conditions, died on Sunday night at the US Naval Hospital, 10 days after contracting the virus. He is the 26th person to die from Covid on Guam.
Spending $5 (£3.90) per person annually on global health security over the next five years could prevent a future “catastrophic” pandemic, according to a former head of the World Health Organization (WHO).
It would cost the world billions of dollars, but that amount would be a huge saving on the $11tn response to Covid-19, said Gro Harlem Brundtland, who, with other prominent international experts, sounded the alarm over the threat of a fast-spreading deadly pandemic last September.