German lockdown set to last until 28 March but some restrictions to be lifted next week; WHO says unrealistic to think pandemic will be over this year
- Weekend lockdown in Paris would be ‘inhumane’, says mayor
- Donald and Melania Trump quietly got Covid vaccines last month
- Coronavirus crisis unlikely to be over by the end of the year, WHO warns
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was vaccinated during a visit to the frontline in the eastern Donbass region on Tuesday, hoping to reassure sceptics that the vaccine is safe and effective in a country with a high degree of hesitancy.
Ukraine has only just begun inoculating its 41 million people after its first batch of 500,000 Indian-made AstraZeneca shots landed in the country last month. Frontline health workers and the military are being prioritised in the rollout, Reuters reports.
“Got vaccinated against COVID19. Did this on the frontline with our soldiers as Supreme C-in-C [Commander in Chief],” Zelenskiy tweeted.
“The same Oxford/AstraZeneca (Covishield) from India, which was delivered 1st to UA (Ukraine) & received by millions of people in the world. Vaccine will let us live without restrictions again.”
Got vaccinated against #COVID19. Did this on the frontline with our soldiers as Supreme C-in-C. The same Oxford/AstraZeneca (Covishield) from India, which was delivered 1st to & received by millions of people in the world. Vaccine will let us live without restrictions again pic.twitter.com/1diLtuRmqK
Q: Yesterday was the first day of vaccinations in Africa. There are only 39 days left in Covax target of delivering vaccines in first 100 days of 2021. Will the target be met in Africa, where only five countries have received doses?
Ghana’s health minister, Kwaku Agyeman-Manu, says “it looks like hesitancy can be managed” with a demonstration of leadership. Says there have been no side effects so far, and that he doubts there will be any.
Dr Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance says emerging variants show our “best chance out of the pandemic is to continue use of non-pharmaceutical interventions” but also roll out vaccines as soon as possible.
Says it will continue to add vaccines from any manufacturer that meets “stringent” approval standards.
Dr Richard Hatchett, CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi) compares the progress made to the distribution of vaccines in the 2009 H1N1 pandemic.
He says then, developing countries only received vaccines four months after richer countries, and only 100,000 doses were shared in the first six weeks of the programme. In the first three months, fewer than 10m doses were distributed in 17 countries.
More than 1.1m doses have been delivered, with more than 20 more countries expecting to receives hundreds of thousands more doses this week, Unicef chief Henrietta Fore says.
The Covax scheme aims to deliver 2bn doses by the end of the year to around 190 countries.
WHO and the vaccine alliance Gavi, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and UNICEF are holding a briefing on the progress made on the Covax programme.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said vaccine supplies are set to be delivered in Angola, Cambodia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria today.
The uptake of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine in France stood at 24% as of 28 February, an health ministry official said on Tuesday, well below the country’s target of between 80 and 85%. Authorities are fighting convince more people that a jab from the British-Swedish giant is just as effective as others.
In comparison, 82% accepted the vaccine manufactured by Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and 37% that made by Moderna, Reuters reports.
Israel, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom have administered the highest number of vaccine doses per capita globally.
In Israel, 93.5 doses have been given per 100 people, while in the UAE the figure is 60.87. In the UK, 30.77 shots have been administered for every 100 residents.
Italians have been clamouring to receive the Sputnik vaccine in San Marino after the microstate started administering the Russian jab last week.
San Marino, landlocked within central Italy, signed a deal with Russia after the doses it was expecting to receive from Italy via the EU’s procurement programme failed to arrive. The enclave received the first 7,500 batch of Sputnik doses on Friday, when it began its campaign to vaccinate its 35,000 residents.
Hello, I’m taking over the blog now from Haroon Siddique. Please feel free to message me on Twitter with any coronavirus developments you think I might have missed. Thanks in advance.
Nigeria’s first Covid-19 vaccines, Oxford/AstraZeneca shots from the international Covax scheme, landed in the capital city Abuja today, Reuters reports.
The 3.92m doses will kick off the arduous task of inoculating Africa’s most populous nation.
Austria and Denmark, chafing at the slow rollout of Covid-19 vaccines in the European Union, have broken ranks with Brussels to form an alliance with Israel to produce second-generation vaccines against mutations of the coronavirus, Reuters reports.
The move by the two EU member states comes amid rising anger over delays in ordering, approving and distributing vaccines that have left the 27-member bloc trailing far behind Israel’s world-beating vaccination campaign.
Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz said while the principle that the EU procures vaccines for member states was correct, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) had been too slow to approve them and lambasted pharmaceutical companies’ supply bottlenecks.
Here are some more details from Reuters on Germany’s plans to extend its coronavirus lockdown until 28 March, while easing some restrictions from next week:
Merkel is due to discuss lockdown and easing options, set out in a draft document, with the 16 state heads tomorrow, as coronavirus cases in Germany hit more than 2.4 million and public frustration mounts over restrictive measures and a sluggish vaccine rollout.
The draft document states that starting from 8 March a maximum of five people from two households, excluding children younger than 14, will be allowed to meet, up from a maximum of two people under current rules.
Germany plans to extend its coronavirus lockdown until 28 March but some restrictions will be eased starting from 8 March, Focus Online reported, citing a draft agreement for talks between Chancellor Angela Merkel and leaders of the 16 federal states.
Merkel is due to discuss lockdown options with the states’ heads tomorrow, as coronavirus cases in Germany reached more than 2.4 million.
Restaurants in Turkey reopened and many children returned to school today after the government announced steps to ease Covid-19 curbs even as cases edged higher, raising concerns in the top medical association, Reuters reports:
On Monday evening, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan lifted weekend lockdowns in low- and medium-risk cities and limited lockdowns to Sundays in those deemed higher risk under what he called a “controlled normalisation”.
Cafe and restaurant owners, limited to takeaway service for much of last year, have long urged a reopening of in-house dining after sector revenues dropped 65%. They also want relief from growing debt, and from social security and tax payments.
Indonesia has detected two cases of the more infectious Covid-19 variant first discovered in Britain, officials said today, Reuters reports.
Dante Saksono Harbuwono, the deputy health minister, said the discovery of the variant represented a new challenge.
“We’ll be facing this pandemic with a higher degree of difficulty,” he told a streamed conference.
France has eased restrictions on giving the AstraZeneca vaccine to people aged over 65 after new trial data proved the shot was effective, health minister Olivier Véran has said.
While the EMA, the bloc’s drug regulator, approved the AstraZeneca jab for use by all adults, health agencies in many EU countries, including France and Germany, advised against its use for the over-65s pending more trial data from older age groups.
Iraq today received 50,000 Sinopharm vaccines donated by China, the health ministry announced, launching a long-awaited vaccination campaign, AFP reports:
Health ministry spokesman Seif al-Badr told reporters that the first delivery in the early hours meant inoculations could begin.
“The doses will be delivered to Baghdad’s three main hospitals, and maybe to some provinces,” said Badr, who confirmed the jabs were donations.
New York governor Andrew Cuomo has retained a prominent white-collar criminal defence lawyer to represent his office in a federal investigation into the state’s misreporting of Covid-19 deaths among nursing home residents, Reuters reports, citing a spokesman:
Cuomo has come under fire in recent weeks over his office’s role in reporting the official count of coronavirus fatalities among patients of nursing and extended-care facilities, as well as for allegations of sexual harassment levelled against him.
Elkan Abramowitz, a former federal prosecutor working in private practice in New York City, was hired to represent Cuomo’s “executive chamber” – consisting of the governor and his immediate staff – in the US Justice Department inquiry into the Covid-19 nursing home deaths, senior adviser Rich Azzopardi told Reuters in a text message.
Hello, it’s Haroon Siddique here, taking over the blog.
You can contact me via the following channels:
Twitter: @Haroon_Siddique
That’s it from me, Helen Sullivan, and Nicholas Cage, who also encapsulates my feelings about liveblogging the pandemic for almost a year straight:
when it's March 2021 but it never stopped being March 2020 pic.twitter.com/FPv03bmJDP
Here are the key developments from the last few hours:
Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike said on Tuesday that the pace of the fall in coronavirus cases had eased, expressing concern that it may not be enough to lift a state of emergency remaining in the greater metropolitan area, Kyodo News reported.
“We may not make it in time,” she said, referring to the scheduled end to the emergency state on 7 March for the Japanese capital and three neighbouring prefectures, according to Kyodo.
The world has only a few months to prevent the energy industry’s carbon emissions from surpassing pre-pandemic levels this year as economies begin to rebound from Covid-19 restrictions, according to the International Energy Agency.
New figures from the global energy watchdog found that fossil fuel emissions climbed steadily over the second half of the year as major economies began to recover. By December 2020, carbon emissions were 2% higher than in the same month the year before:
Related: Fossil fuel emissions in danger of surpassing pre-Covid levels
Scientists have warned that emerging data on long Covid in children should not be ignored given the lack of a vaccine for this age group, but cautioned that the evidence describing these enduring symptoms in the young is so far uncertain.
Recently published data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has caused worry. The data suggest that 13% of under 11s and about 15% of 12- to 16-year-olds reported at least one symptom five weeks after a confirmed Covid-19 infection. ONS samples households randomly, therefore positive cases do not depend on having had symptoms and being tested:
Related: Data on long Covid in UK children is cause for concern, scientists say
Two Nigerian nurses were attacked by the family of a deceased Covid patient, the Associated Press reports. One nurse had her hair ripped out and suffered a fracture. The second was beaten into a coma.
Following the assaults, nurses at Federal Medical Centre in the Southwestern city of Owo stopped treating patients, demanding the hospital improve security. Almost two weeks passed before they returned to work with armed guards posted around the clock.
“We don’t give life. It is God that gives life. We only care or we manage,” said Francis Ajibola, a local leader with the National Association of Nigeria Nurses and Midwives.
The attack in Nigeria early last month was just one of many on health workers globally during the Covid pandemic. A new report by the Geneva-based Insecurity Insight and the University of California, Berkeley’s Human Rights Center identified more than 1,100 threats or acts of violence against health care workers and facilities last year.
Researchers found that about 400 of those attacks were related to Covid, many motivated by fear or frustration, underscoring the dangers surrounding health care workers at a time when they are needed most.
Insecurity Insight defines a health care attack as any physical violence against or intimidation of health care workers or settings, and uses online news agencies, humanitarian groups and social media posts to track incidents around the world.
It’s getting towards a year since the UK first went into lockdown. That’s almost 12 months of home-schooling, staying in at the weekends, and not being able to see groups of friends and family in person. For many, the pandemic has also brought grief, loss of financial stability and isolation. So it should come as no surprise that lots of us are feeling emotionally exhausted, stressed and generally worn down.
Related: Covid-19: why are we feeling burnt out?
Mexico’s coronavirus czar is back home after being hospitalized for Covid last Wednesday, but will still be monitored and receive treatment, a health official said on Monday, as the country’s coronavirus death toll passed 186,000.
Reuters: Deputy Health Minister Hugo Lopez-Gatell, the face of Mexico’s response to the pandemic, has drawn criticism for downplaying the need for face masks and spearheading a strategy of limited testing.
Lopez-Gatell “is practically asymptomatic ... he will remain at home over the coming days under medical supervision,” said Jose Luis Alomia, head of epidemiology for the national Health Ministry.
A March limerick:
A feeling continues to trend
Of Marches converging to blend—
The March that is here
Plus March of last year,
Which sadly neglected to end.
The United States must stick to a two-dose strategy for the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna Covid vaccines, top US infectious disease official Anthony Fauci told the Washington Post newspaper.
Fauci said that delaying a second dose to inoculate more Americans creates risks.
He warned that shifting to a single-dose strategy for the vaccines could leave people less protected, enable variants to spread and possibly boost skepticism among Americans already hesitant to get the shots.
“There’s risks on either side,” Fauci was quoted as saying by the Washington Post in a report published late on Monday.
“We’re telling people (two shots) is what you should do and then we say, ‘Oops, we changed our mind’?” Fauci said. “I think that would be a messaging challenge, to say the least.”
March 2020 March 2021 pic.twitter.com/tptCWHxpNO
In case you missed this earlier:
Japan said Tuesday an investigation would be launched after more than 1,000 coronavirus vaccine doses had to be thrown out when a freezer storing them malfunctioned, AFP reports.
The majority of California’s 6.1 million public school students could be back in the classroom by April under new legislation announced Monday by Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative leaders. Critics panned the plan as inadequate, AP reports.
Most students in the nation’s most populous state have been learning from home for the past year during the pandemic. But with new coronavirus cases falling rapidly throughout the state, Newsom and lawmakers have been under increasing pressure to come up with a statewide plan aimed at returning students to schools in-person.
If approved by the Legislature, the plan announced Monday would not order districts to return students to the classroom and no parents would be compelled to send their kids back to school in-person. Instead, the state would set aside $2bn to pay districts that get select groups of students into classrooms by the end of the month.
Crucially, the legislation does not require districts to have an agreement with teachers’ unions on a plan for in-person instruction. That’s a barrier that many districts, including the nation’s second-largest district in Los Angeles, have not been able to overcome.
The Philippines has documented six cases of the South African coronavirus variant, its health ministry said on Tuesday, raising concern among its experts that the current vaccines might be less effective.
Of the six South African variant cases, three were detected locally and two from Filipinos returning from overseas. The origin of the other case was still being verified, it said. The Philippines kicked off its Covid vaccination campaign on Monday.
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:
Related: Stop doing anal Covid tests on our citizens, Japan tells China
WELCOME BACK TO MARCH, BABY pic.twitter.com/JLVyz47h2I
Here is the full story on Trump and Melania getting the vaccine in January:
Donald and Melania Trump received the coronavirus vaccine before leaving the White House, according to multiple news reports on Monday.
Related: Donald and Melania Trump quietly got Covid vaccines last month, reports say
This is an interesting read on New Zealand’s baby boom:
Related: New Zealand's Covid baby boom: where familiarity didn't breed contempt | David Downs and Joe Davis
A reminder from US President Joe Biden – and a reminder that if you woke up today after a year and checked the US presidential Twitter account, you might be rather confused:
Wash your hands.
Stay socially distanced.
Wear a mask.
Get vaccinated when it’s your turn.
Despite our progress, we can’t let our guard down.
Ashley Bloomfield, New Zealand’s director general of health, has called on the nation to “not let the virus divide you” amidst frustration with rule-breakers linked to recent coronavirus cases, as well as with the government’s response.
Auckland has been in lockdown since Sunday morning as a result of two cases of community transmission, which were found to have happened while level-three restrictions were in place – threatening the fracture the unity of the “team of five million”.
Related: New Zealand urged 'don't let virus divide you' as Covid frustration builds
How is everyone feeling?
March again pic.twitter.com/rKWrCN4fGG
China’s annual session of parliament will chart a course for economic recovery and unveil a five-year plan to fend off stagnation, as strategic rivalry with the United States spurs a shift to reliance on consumption and home-grown technology, Reuters reports.
The National People’s Congress (NPC) opens Friday, when Premier Li Keqiang will deliver the 2021 work report, which for a second consecutive year is not expected to include an explicit economic growth target, sources have said, due to the disruptions caused by the Covid pandemic.
On the same day, China will also release its 14th five-year plan, a blueprint for 2021-2025 that calls for quickening reforms to unleash fresh growth drivers and make the economy more innovative. Sources have said a goal of the plan will be to achieve economic growth averaging around 5%.
China may also set electoral reforms in Hong Kong, where Beijing has been tightening its grip since imposing national security legislation last year after months of unrest in 2019. The reforms will reinforce Beijing’s ambition to have the Chinese territory run by “patriots”, and would further marginalise pro-democracy candidates.
This year’s NPC, which takes place in the massive Great Hall of the People facing Tiananmen Square in central Beijing, returns to its traditional March 5 start after last year’s pandemic-induced delay.
By contrast (and this is still good news from the States): the US recorded fewer than 50,000 new cases on March 1, the first time under that threshold since October last year. The trend is good.
For the first time since Oct 18, the number of new COVID-19 cases is below 50k. pic.twitter.com/FCkKyYIPfM
An update from New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state. 44 days without a local case.
NSW recorded no new locally acquired cases of #COVID19 in the 24 hours to 8pm last night, the 44th consecutive day without a locally acquired case. Three new cases were acquired overseas, bringing the total number of cases in NSW since the beginning of the pandemic to 4,994. pic.twitter.com/GEQtWH7Lwm
The Biden administration on Monday downplayed the prospect of sharing coronavirus vaccines with Mexico, saying it is focused first on getting its own population protected against a pandemic that has killed more than 500,000 Americans, Reuters reports.
The remarks by White House press secretary Jen Psaki came before a video conference between Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and U.S. President Joe Biden, in which the Mexican leader was expected to ask the United States to consider sharing some of its Covid vaccine supply.
“The administration’s focus is on ensuring that every American is vaccinated. And once we accomplish that objective, we’re happy to discuss further steps,” Psaki said at a White House news conference.
Health experts in China say their country is lagging in its coronavirus vaccination rollout because it has the disease largely under control, but plans to inoculate 40% of its population by June, the Associated Press reports.
Zhong Nanshan, the leader of a group of experts attached to the National Health Commission, said the country has delivered more than 52m doses of Covid vaccines as of Feb. 28. He was speaking Monday at an online forum between US and Chinese medical experts hosted by the Brookings Institution and Tsinghua University.
The target is the first China has offered publicly since it began its mass immunisation campaign for key groups in mid-December.
China has been slow to vaccinate its people relative to other countries, inoculating only 3.56% of its population of 1.4 billion so far, according to Zhong. Ranked first in the world in terms of percentage of population is Israel, which has vaccinated over 90% of its people. The US has vaccinated about 22% of its population.
Former US president Donald Trump and former first lady Melania Trump were quietly given a coronavirus vaccine in January, CNN reports. It is unknown which vaccine they received or how many doses they have had.
CNN:
The revelation comes after the former President urged his followers to get vaccinated for the virus during his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, on Sunday, telling the audience, “How unpainful that vaccine shot is, so everybody go get your shot.” That encouragement marked a notable shift as Trump, during his time in office, had long dismissed the gravity of the virus and eschewed practices like social distancing and mask wearing/
CNN previously reported that a White House official had said in mid-December that Trump wouldn’t be administered a coronavirus vaccine until it was recommended by the White House medical team. The official said at the time that Trump was still receiving the benefits of the monoclonal antibody cocktail he was given during his recovery from Covid-19 earlier in the fall, when both he and the first lady had tested positive for the virus.
Green apprenticeships would prepare young people for jobs in renewable energy and the restoration of the UK’s natural landscape, and stop young people having their careers blighted for life by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, a report says:
Related: UK urged to create green apprenticeships to help Covid recovery
More from the World Health Organization:
The WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said new case numbers rose last week in Europe, the Americas, southeast Asia and the eastern Mediterranean.
It is unrealistic to think the world will be done with the Covid-19 pandemic by the end of the year, the World Health Organization warned on Monday.
WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan said it might however be possible to take the tragedy out of the coronavirus crisis by reducing hospitalisations and deaths.
Already facing a daunting Covid vaccination challenge, French and German authorities are fighting to convince more people that a jab from the pharma giant AstraZeneca is just as effective as others, AFP reports.
Stocks of the vaccines from the British-Swedish firm are going unused in both countries despite the desire to end a pandemic that has sparked a social and economic calamity on a scale not seen since World War II.
Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic with me, Helen Sullivan.
I’ll be bringing you the latest developments from the next few hours – as always, you can find me to marvel at how it is March once again and we are very much still in the thick of a pandemic on Twitter @helenrsullivan.
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