Category Archives: Infectious Diseases

Coronavirus live news: UK adds France to quarantine list from 4am BST on Saturday

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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.

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‘Here we go again’: Auckland fears a long lockdown as coronavirus returns

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Shops start stockpiling and charities helping with financial hardship expect flood of calls as PM warns outbreak will get worse

“I’m not afraid because I’m taking precautions,” says Nadeep Singh, a travel agent in Papatoetoe, the South Auckland suburb that has reportedly sparked a return to lockdown and a pivotal change in the country’s battle with the pandemic.

His business was closed to customers but Singh was working “flat out” – alone in his locked office – getting refunds for clients who are now unable to take the trips they had booked with him.

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Office pods may be the answer to working safely post-Covid-19

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Entrepreneur Xu Weiping is risking a fortune to build 2,000 3-metre square workspaces in east London

Welcome to cube city. Xu Weiping, a Chinese multimillionaire, has a vision for the future of office work in the post-Covid-19 pandemic world: thousands of office pods where each person works in their own self-contained 3m x 3m cube.

Xu reckons the coronavirus pandemic will have such a fundamental impact on the way people work that he is converting 20 newly constructed office buildings in east London into 2,000 of the individual cube offices.

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Coronavirus live news: Auckland back in lockdown; Paris marathon cancelled as cases rise

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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.

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‘They’ve jumped the gun’: scientists worry about Russia’s Covid-19 vaccine

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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.

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Polio vaccinations resume in Pakistan and Afghanistan after Covid-19 delays

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Fight to eradicate disease getting ‘back on track’ after surge in cases due to pause in vaccination campaigns

Polio vaccination campaigns have resumed in Afghanistan and Pakistan – the last two polio-endemic countries in the world – after a “surge” in cases.

The pandemic halted campaigns in both countries in March and confirmed cases have now reached 34 in Afghanistan and 63 in Pakistan – where cases are being recorded in areas of the country previously free of the disease.

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Covid live news: Lebanon hits record daily cases after blast; Russian vaccine must follow safety procedure, says WHO

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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.

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Coronavirus in Europe: French and Dutch on alert over rise in cases

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New infections back to nearly half their peak in the Netherlands as France reports ‘worrying increase’

New daily coronavirus infections in the Netherlands are back to roughly half their level at the peak of the pandemic, while France’s prime minister has said it is crucial for his country to avoid a new lockdown amid a “worrying increase” in cases.

Jaap van Dissel, the Netherlands’ chief epidemiologist, told the Dutch parliament on Tuesday that 4,036 new Covid-19 cases had been reported in the past week, an increase of 55% on the previous seven days. The figure translated to a daily average of more than 500, compared with nearly 1,200 at the peak of pandemic.

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Russia’s coronavirus vaccine: will it work, and is it safe?

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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.

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Global report: Covid cases worldwide near 20 million as Australia suffers deadliest day

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Cases in Britain rise over 1,000 a day for first time since June; one in every 65 Americans has tested positive; US health secretary praises Taiwan

Five months since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus crisis a global pandemic, the number of Covid cases globally is nearing 20m, with almost 730,000 known deaths.

The current number of confirmed infections stands at 19,792,519, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, with total new cases daily averaging more than 250,000.

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Coronavirus live news: Greece ‘formally’ in second wave, says expert, as WHO warns Europe to react fast

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World Health Organization says it has received just 10% of funds it needs for Covid fight

India has registered a record 1,007 fatalities in the past 24 hours as new coronavirus infections surged by 62,064 cases, the Associated Press reports.

The health ministry said the total fatalities reached 44,386 on Monday. The number of confirmed cases reported so far are 2,215,074. At least 634,935 patients were still undergoing treatment.

Concern is growing that a resurgence of coronavirus in Europe will lead to a “second wave” of uncoordinated border restrictions that will undermine the open borders on which the European Union is founded.

In a letter to national governments, seen by the Associated Press, the European commission warns that “while we must ensure that the EU is ready for possible resurgences of Covid-19 cases ... we should at the same time avoid a second wave of uncoordinated actions at the internal borders of the EU.”

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Ravers and boomers: is intergenerational Covid tension real?

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With ‘don’t kill granny’ warnings and talk of an over-50s lockdown, there are fears unity is fraying in the UK

On a Saturday evening in mid-July, Michael made a video call to his grandmother and checked she had everything she needed. Then, along with about 3,000 others, he set out for an illegal rave.

Despite coronavirus lockdown measures, Michael, a 20-year-old student from Bristol who asked to use a pseudonym, went to the event at a former RAF airfield near Bath three weeks ago with a group of friends. Before they met up, he said, their group chat was “mostly excitement, but a little bit of trepidation”. Michael added: “But we just thought, none of us live with old people, and the rules are all confusion.”

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What we are learning about Covid-19 and kids

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As schools around the world prepare to reopen, new scientific evidence about children and coronavirus is coming to light

Back in April, the French epidemiologist Arnaud Fontanet found himself leading an investigation in the town of Crépy-en-Valois, a small community of 15,000 inhabitants just to the north-east of Paris. In February, the town’s middle and high schools had become the centre of a new outbreak of Covid-19.

Fontanet and colleagues from the Pasteur Institute in Paris were tasked with conducting antibody testing across Crépy-en-Valois to understand the extent to which the virus had been circulating. As they surveyed the town, they noted an interesting pattern. While the virus had spread rampantly through the high school, with 38% of students being infected, along with 43% of teachers and 59% of non-teaching staff, the same was not true for the town’s six primary schools. While three primary-age pupils had caught Covid-19 in early February, none of these infections had led to a secondary case. Overall, just 9% of primary age pupils, 7% of teachers and 4% of non-teaching staff had been infected with the virus.

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Coronavirus live news: US nears 5m cases as Australian border closures ramp up

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US approaches horrific milestone; border restrictions tightened in Australian state of New South Wales; Brazil passes 100,000 deaths

Coatsworth is asked about the fatality rate in Australia. He says he hasn’t seen the data in the last week or two but Australia has generally been better than much of the rest of the world.

The reasons include the already high standard of Australian health care and in particular intensive care units and staff.

“But we’re also learning more and more. We’re applying new treatments and [a medication] that’s demonstrating in a recovery trial to decrease mortality. We have at our disposal... and our specialists that are backed up by the Australia New Zealand Intensive Care Society and are discussing the clinical treatment of patient whose are gravely ill with Covid-19 and how you ventilate them is a challenge and the contact of proning which is where you ventilate someone on their tummy, rather than on their back, has proven to be critical. The timing you do that.

Dr Nick Coatsworth, deputy chief medical officer in Australia is giving a national briefing.

Nationally in Australia there are 295 dead from Covid-19, and 658 currently hospitalised with 51 in intensive care.

It is not going to be acceptable for any single country to have the vaccine and Australia is joining with a number of different countries around the world through the initiative to ensure that any vaccine that is developed is available.

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Australia’s sheep left without shearers as Covid halts travel from New Zealand

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Nation is facing shortage of shearers for its 68 million sheep as hundreds are barred from taking their usual trip across the Tasman Sea

It’s a tradition that stretches back decades. Every year, hundreds of New Zealanders fly in to Australia for the spring shearing season – a huge mobilisation of workers essential to the success of the nation’s wool industry.

In dusty sheds on outback farms they join up with local shearers and, between them, relieve five million sheep of their fleeces over eight weeks.

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Fingers crossed at France’s brasseries and cafes as tourist quarantines loom

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Numbers of foreign visitors are already down – and the fresh surge of Covid cases could spell the end for the holiday season

In a normal August, the much-loved miniature tourist train in the French port city of Sète would be full of tourists from Britain and elsewhere, enjoying the ride.

Optimistically, the manager, Romiy Priore, took steps to make his attraction safe for Covid times. “With the virus, we decided to order disposable earphones for the start of the season on 23 June – 100 of them,” he says, huddling behind a Perspex screen in a cool cabin on the quayside. “It’s August, and I still have 70 left. That tells you how many foreign tourists we currently have.”

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Brazil’s ex-health minister attacks Bolsonaro as Covid-19 deaths top 100,000

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Luiz Henrique Mandetta says the Brazilian president’s ‘misguided’ handling of the crisis has failed to comfort families

Jair Bolsonaro’s former health minister has accused the Brazilian president of failing to offer “a single word of comfort” to the families of the 100,000 Brazilians who have lost their lives to Covid-19.

In an interview marking Brazil’s latest Covid-19 milepost, Luiz Henrique Mandetta – who was sacked in April after challenging the president’s internationally condemned coronavirus response – expressed consternation that Brazil’s leaders had failed to recognise so much pain.

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Coronavirus Australia: Victoria reports 466 new cases and 12 deaths, including second man in his 30s

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Victorian premier Daniel Andrews says number of mystery Covid-19 cases has risen by 130 as nine new infections announced in NSW

A man in his 30s and six aged care residents are among 12 new Victorian Covid-19 deaths that have taken Australia’s coronavirus death toll to 278.

On Saturday, the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, announced a further 466 cases of coronavirus in the state. Andrews said the number of cases attributed to no known source had risen by 130 to 2,584.

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‘The virus piggybacked on racism’: why did Covid-19 hit BAME families so hard?

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Ida lost two brothers in 10 days, and Ken’s teenage sweetheart died at 44. Now, they’re looking for answers

Sir Oyaseh Ivowi sits in front of a poster of two of his three boys. Olume, the older brother, hovers over Isi; both wear traditional Nigerian dress. Underneath are the words: “Gone too soon, but not forgotten. Olume Godfrey Ivowi, 7 November 1973 to 10 April 2020. Isi Benjamin Emitsemu Ivowi, 17 November 1985 to 19 April 2020.”

Olume, 46, and Isi, 34, died in Luton and Milton Keynes respectively. Their passing made headlines because it was so shocking: two brothers killed by Covid-19 in such a short space of time. A third brother, Osi, also caught the virus, but has recovered.

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