Spain and Philippines join Cambodia and Fiji in restricting arrivals; England extends vaccines to those aged 42 and over
- Mutations, politics, vaccines: the factors behind India’s Covid crisis
- Global faith leaders call for drug firms to vaccinate world
- International aid arrives in India to combat deadly Covid crisis
- Indian journalist and Guardian news assistant Kakoli Bhattacharya dies from Covid-19
- See all our coronavirus coverage
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has been speaking to a group of 14 representatives from the culture industry in an in-depth discussion about their experiences of living through the pandemic and their struggles to survive.
In the meeting, broadcast live online, bookshop owners, cinema operators, musicians, curators, choreographers and event managers were among those to share their woes.
The UK health ministry on Tuesday said 33,843,580 people had received a first COVID-19 vaccine dose, adding that a quarter of adults in the country had now received both doses of a coronavirus shot.
Pupil attendance in state schools in England last week was the highest it has been at any point during the pandemic, government figures have suggested.
French health minister Olivier Veran said on Tuesday that the South African variant of the Covid-19 virus is on the rise in the Paris area but that no Indian variant has been detected in the region around the capital.
About 250 tour guides from Kenya’s famed national parks lined up in downtown Nairobi are to get vaccinated on Tuesday, as part of a government effort to revive the tourism sector that has been battered by the pandemic.
Reuters reports:
The vaccination drive comes ahead of the annual wildebeest migration across the Maasai Mara National Reserve. The migration typically draws several hundred thousand international visitors but last year drew a far smaller number of local tourists.
Kenya’s tourism sector lost close to $1bn in revenue between January and October of last year, when the number of foreign visitors plunged by two-thirds due to Covid-19, official data shows.
Amid falling new infections, the Slovak health authorities on Tuesday further relaxed restrictions.
The start of a night curfew has been postponed from 8pm to 9pm, and fans will be allowed to attend professional sporting events from Tuesday.
Iran has found three suspected cases of the coronavirus variant discovered in South Africa, health minister Saeed Namaki said on Tuesday, calling it an alarm bell after a record 496 deaths from Covid-19 were recorded a day earlier.
The country is battling a fourth wave of infections and reported 462 further deaths from the virus on Tuesday.
Unfortunately we received a report about three cases of the South African virus, and we are making more checks to confirm this.
We are also checking cases of Indian visitors infected with the coronavirus and hope that they don’t carry the [Indian] mutated virus.
The Irish government has agreed to allow the use of both the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines for people over 50 years old, prime minister Micheal Martin said on Tuesday.
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine had been paused by health authorities and AstraZeneca was only allowed for those over 60.
French finance minister Bruno Le Maire said the EU’s key challenge now is to implement the European recovery plan as it stands.
At a news conference with his German counterpart, he also said that comparisons between the US and EU stimulus plans are “unfair and inadequate”.
Vienna will cautiously loosen its coronavirus lockdown next week a month after it was introduced, its leftwing mayor said on Tuesday, criticising the conservative-led government’s plans for a broad countrywide easing of restrictions from 19 May.
From 3 May, retail and personal care services are to reopen in the Austrian capital with a strict mask requirement in place. Museums and zoos will also reopen.
Infections nationally have eased this month but remain stubbornly high at more than 1,500 a day. Despite that, chancellor Sebastian Kurz last week said restaurants, hotels and theatres will reopen nationally on May 19, though provinces can have stricter rules locally if needed.
“The situation is improving but must still be taken very seriously,” Vienna mayor Michael Ludwig of the Social Democrats told a news conference announcing that non-essential shops would reopen on Monday, May 3.
Belgium on Tuesday became the latest territory to ban travel from India, Brazil and South Africa, which are all grappling with surging infections and new, highly contagious variants of the virus.
Prime minister Alexander de Croo said in a statement:
Passenger travel by air, train, boat, and bus, including transit traffic, from India, Brazil and South Africa to Belgium will be banned.
People with Belgian nationality and people who have their main residence in Belgium can return from India, Brazil, and South Africa to Belgium. They are strongly advised not to travel to these countries.
Israel’s tourism ministry said on Tuesday it wanted to open up to vaccinated foreign tourists starting in May after a dramatic decline in new infections in the country, although the health ministry immediately suggested delaying the move by a month, “in light of the prevalent morbidity situation globally and the discovery of new variants”.
Tourism minister Orit Farkash-Hacohen said Israel would start admitting small numbers of vaccinated tourist groups from 23 May, expanding the quota over several weeks and opening up to tourists travelling alone by July, Reuters reports.
Israelis may be barred from travelling to certain Covid-hit countries and required to go into quarantine upon their return even if they are vaccinated, according to a health ministry proposal set to be debated by ministers on Tuesday.
The proposal, seeking to prevent the import of some Covid strains of concern, would place restrictions on traveling to and from Ukraine, Ethiopia, Brazil, South Africa, India, Mexico and Turkey, where high coronavirus infection rates have been reported.
After a year of lockdowns and vast numbers of people working from home in the British capital, London’s “Square Mile” financial district plans to convert empty offices into homes and offer lower rents to creative businesses as part of a recovery plan from the pandemic, which has left many once bustling streets deserted.
Reuters reports:
Built around the vast fortress-like Bank of England and home to ancient counting houses, narrow alleyways and Manhattan-style skyscrapers, the City of London is having to adapt to lure workers and companies back to a normal office life.
It set out an action plan on Tuesday to enhance its competitiveness, including broadening its appeal to creative companies more commonly based in trendier parts of the city, improved 5G connectivity and support for small businesses looking to grow.
Spain will send just over seven tonnes of medical supplies to India, the foreign minister said on Tuesday, to help authorities cope with a rampant Covid-19 wave that is killing thousands there every day.
“Nobody will be safe until we are all safe,” Arancha Gonzalez Laya told a news conference after the weekly cabinet meeting.
Sweden has registered 14,911 new coronavirus cases since Friday, health agency statistics showed on Tuesday, the lowest weekend figure in five weeks.
The figure compared with 16,692 cases during the corresponding period last week.
China’s state councillor Wang Yi, who is also the country’s foreign minister, said on Tuesday Beijing will help South Asian countries procure coronavirus vaccines.
In a video conference with the foreign ministers of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, Wang also said China was willing to set up emergency supply reserves with South Asian countries in the fight against Covid-19, according to a statement from China’s ministry of foreign affairs.
Authorities in Delhi ordered a luxury hotel to be converted into a Covid-19 health facility for the exclusive use of high court judges and their families, drawing outrage in a city that has no hospital beds or life-saving oxygen for hundreds of people.
The local government said in a public notice on Monday night that it had received a request from the Delhi High Court because of the rapid rise in coronavirus infections and had reserved 100 rooms at the Ashoka Hotel for the higher judiciary, Reuters reports.
The UK has no surplus vaccine doses at the moment and is prioritising vaccinating its population, a spokesman for prime minister Boris Johnson said on Tuesday when asked whether London was planning to export some shots to India.
“We committed in February to sending excess doses from the UK’s supply to the COVAX procurement pool and to countries in need once they are available,” he told reporters.
Spain and the Philippines joined other countries on Tuesday in tightening immigration restrictions against arrivals from India.
Spain will enforce a quarantine on all travellers from India in response to the emergence of a highly contagious variant of the coronavirus there, government spokeswoman Maria Jesus Montero said on Tuesday.
There is widespread criticism in Germany over the failure of the government and leaders of the 16 states to come up with concrete proposals over managing the next stages in the country’s vaccine campaign, following an eagerly anticipated meeting.
Campaigners for vaccine passports had hoped that the green light would be given to grant freedoms to those who are vaccinated – at the very least that they would no longer have to produce a negative test result in order to enter non-essential shops.
It’s not the citizens in a constitutional democracy who should have to explain why they want their basic rights back, it’s the state that should have to justify why it wants to take them away. From the point at which it is scientifically proven that those who are vaccinated and who have recovered from the virus are not infectious, it is neither necessary, or appropriate to forbid them from restaurants or beaches.
Organisers of last month’s concert in Barcelona by Catalan rock band Love of Lesbian that was attended by 5,000 people claim the results show that it is a successful model for Covid-safe mass gatherings.
The concert was held on March 27 in the city’s Palau Sant Jordi and was organised by local promoters in conjunction with the regional government and an AIDS research institute. Attendees underwent an antibody test on the morning of the concert.
Some Russians who have taken Covid-19 antibody tests and found their antibodies have fallen are having third and fourth shots of the Sputnik V vaccine, but researchers in the country suggest they are unnecessary.
Reuters reports:
Revaccination in effect simulates getting the disease so that the body develops more antibodies to fight it. Researchers have said an immediate rise in antibodies seen by those getting a third or fourth shot suggests they did not need revaccination.
Sputnik V was one of the first vaccines widely used in a population, so Russia’s findings on revaccination will be closely watched elsewhere. The question of how long a vaccine offers protection against Covid-19 will be vital as countries gauge when or whether revaccination will be needed.
Finland should end its Covid-19 state of emergency as infection rates decline, prime minister Sanna Marin said on Tuesday, adding that the issue would go before parliament.
“We see that the conditions no longer call for the emergency powers legislation,” Marin said.
India expects to secure the biggest chunk of the 60 million AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine doses that the US will share globally, two Indian government sources told Reuters.
On Monday, the White House said 10 million doses could be cleared for export “in coming weeks” and the rest by June. It has not revealed potential beneficiaries, but the sources said India could gain the most.
American multinational pharmaceutical company Merck & Co Inc said on Tuesday it had tied up with five generic drugmakers in India to expand access to molnupiravir, an experimental antiviral Covid-19 therapy it is developing with Ridgeback Biotherapeutics.
Vital medical supplies poured into India on Tuesday as hospitals starved of life-saving oxygen and beds turned away coronavirus patients, while a surge in infections pushed the death toll towards 200,000.
Cricketers at the ongoing Indian Premier League have been told they are playing for “humanity” and remain “totally safe” within the confines of the tournament’s bio-secure bubble as organisers look to stave off further departures.
The IPL’s continuation during India’s huge second wave of Covid-19 cases – one that has seen daily recorded cases top 350,000 in the past week – is coming under scrutiny after Ravichandran Ashwin and three Australians, Adam Zampa, Kane Richardson and Andrew Tye, opted to leave their franchises.
Related: IPL players told ‘you are playing for humanity’ in midst of Covid pandemic
US president Joe Biden marks 100 days in office on Friday, 30 April, and has more than fulfilled his promise of 100m shots of Covid vaccine in Americans’ arms by his first 100 days in office: Two hundred and 90 million shots have been distributed, more than 230m administered, and about 96 million Americans are fully vaccinated, 29% of the population.
In response to the harsh effect of the pandemic on the US economy and rising unemployment, Biden will on Tuesday continue his push for a national $15 minimum wage with an executive order that raises pay to at least that level for hundreds of thousands of federal contract workers, according to senior White House officials.
Some people in India are rushing unnecessarily to hospital, exacerbating a crisis over surging Covid-19 infections caused by mass gatherings, more contagious variants and low vaccination rates, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday.
“Currently, part of the problem is that many people rush to the hospital (also because they do not have access to information/advice), even though home-based care monitoring at home can be managed very safely,” WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic told Reuters by email.
That is it from me, Martin Belam, this morning. Jedidajah Otte will be along shortly to carry on with global coronavirus news, and if you prefer a UK flavour, than Andrew Sparrow has UK politics live here.
Jessie Yeung writes for CNN this morning that as grim as the numbers coming out of India seem, they may be a vast under-estimation:
Health workers and scientists in India have long warned that Covid-19 infections and related deaths are significantly underreported for several reasons, including poor infrastructure, human error, and low testing levels. Testing has greatly increased in the wake of the first wave, but, the true extent of the second wave now ravaging India is likely much worse than official numbers suggest.
“It’s widely known that both the case numbers and the mortality figures are undercounts, they always have been,” said Ramanan Laxminarayan, director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy in New Delhi.
Athletes representing Australia at the Tokyo Olympics and their support staff will be prioritised for vaccination ahead of the July Games with national cabinet agreeing to divert thousands of doses for the team.
Approximately 2,050 Australian athletes and staff travelling to Japan for the Olympics and Paralympics will now be considered a priority group under 1b of the rollout, the federal government said on Tuesday.
Related: Australian Olympic team to receive fast-track Covid vaccinations ahead of Tokyo Games
The World Health Organization said this morning that it was still in discussions about the Russian-made Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine and had not yet set a date to evaluate the shot’s clinical data for possible emergency use listing.
“On Sputnik, we are still waiting, we are still in the back-and-forth stage. So we don’t have a review meeting scheduled yet,” WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris told a briefing in Geneva, report Reuters.
Hong Kong will reopen bars and nightclubs from 29 April for people who have been vaccinated and who use a government mobile phone app, the Asian financial hub’s health secretary has said.
Reuters report that Sophia Chan told a press briefing the measures extended to bathhouses and karaoke lounges and would enable the venues to stay open until 2am. All staff and customers must have received at least one vaccine dose for the venue to be operational and they must operate at half capacity, she said.
“We all hope life can return to normal but we need to allow some time for everyone to adapt to these new measures,” Chan said.
Neha Mehrotra and Aniruddha Ghosal at Associated Press have been talking to medical students in India, who they say feel betrayed by the government’s handling of the Covid crisis there.
Dr Siddharth Tara, they report, has, since the beginning of the week had a fever and persistent headache. A postgraduate medical student at New Delhi’s government-run Hindu Rao hospital, he took a Covid-19 test, but the results have been delayed. His hospital, overburdened and understaffed, wants him to keep working until the testing laboratory confirms he has it.
My colleague Andrew Sparrow has just launched this morning’s UK live blog, which will have an inevitable political focus on the lobbying and sleaze row engulfing the UK government, but has a Covid component with prime minister Boris Johnsons reported – and denied – comments that he wanted “no more fucking lockdowns – let the bodies pile high in their thousands”.
Andrew introduces the day:
Boris Johnson is chairing cabinet this morning, and will reportedly tell his ministers to focus on the “people’s priorities”, but media and political attention is still overwhelmingly focused on the multiple “sleaze” allegations surrounding him. There are the unanswered questions about how the bill for his lavish Downing Street flat refurbishment was settled, controversy about his alleged remarks about his willingness to see thousands of people rather than order a further lockdown, his briefing war with Dominic Cummings and concerns about the government’s approach to lobbying and how it awarded Covid contracts worth billions.
It can be hard to keep up. But one of the attractions about “sleaze” as a concept for the opposition is that it is such an elastic, vague terms that it can embrace almost any revelation with implications for propriety. That’s why, as a label, it can stick.
Related: Tory sleaze row: minister casts doubt on Dominic Cummings’ credibility – politics live
A Covid-19 outbreak that forced Fiji’s capital into lockdown after the island nation avoided transmission for a year has been confirmed as the Indian variant, with health officials saying they feared a “tsunami” of cases.
The Pacific country had largely dodged community transmission before a cluster emerged this month centred on a quarantine facility in Nadi, the city that is home to Fiji’s international airport.
Sirin Kale has the latest in our Lost to the virus series today. It features Donna Coleman, 42. She was a devoted and popular member of the teaching staff at Burnley College. At the height of the second wave, working conditions left her terrified of doing the job she loved, as Covid ran riot through the college.
Related: Donna Coleman died after Covid ran riot at Burnley College. Should it have been open?
In terms of providing medical relief for the suge of Covid cases afflicting India, Gilead Sciences said yesterday it will give India at least 450,000 vials of its antiviral drug remdesivir and help boost production.
Remdesivir is approved in India for restricted emergency use to treat severe Covid-19 cases, but Reuters report that hospitals are facing supply shortages due to indiscriminate use and the drug is being sold at over 10 times its listed price in the black market. The shortage has raised concerns about hoarding as people queue up outside clinics and hospitals to buy the drug and millions take to social media to secure supplies.
There are a lot of retrospective looks at US president Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office knocking around. Zeke Miller at the Associated Press has looked specifically at the new president’s record specifically on Covid. Unlike his predecessor, Biden hasn’t once said “I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away.”
He spent his first 100 days in office encouraging Americans to mask up and stay home to slow the spread of Covid-19. His task for the next 100 days, Miller says will be to lay out the path back to normal.
Sarah Martin has more for us on the consequences of Australia’s suspension of flights to India:
The decision leaves more than 9,000 Australian citizens who have registered with the Department of Foreign Affairs in limbo, 650 of whom are considered vulnerable.
Related: Scott Morrison announces India flight suspension due to Covid crisis, leaving thousands in limbo
In England, the NHS coronavirus vaccine booking system has opened to healthy people aged 42 and over. The booking system has extended for the second time in a week to allow more healthy adults in their 40s to book their jab.
PA Media notes that people in England who are aged 42 and over, or those who will turn 42 before 1 July, can now arrange their vaccine appointment through the national booking website.
China’s latest vaccination figures are out, and as is usual, they appear to have put everybody else in the shade. Reuters report that the Chinese National Health Commission data reveals that yesterday there were 4.6 million vaccinations against Covid-19, taking the national total up to around 229m doses.
Back in January, the Greek government said it would prioritise immunity on smaller islands, promising they would be fully vaccinated by the end of April.
To that end, jabs are being distributed to inhabitants of dozens of islands in the Aegean sea to the east and the Ionian sea to the west, where municipalities are hungry to reopen fully to tourists next month. Agence France-Presse reporters have been in Elafonisos to see how the plan is taking shape.
Public health experts have pleaded with Australia’s political leaders to find an urgent fix to the problems with hotel quarantine, while the Western Australian government calls on the commonwealth to repurpose immigration detention facilities and airbases.
The outbreak in Western Australia has again prompted frustration over the continued problems with transmission in hotel quarantine and the reluctance of the main federal advisory group, the Infection Control Expert Group, to better acknowledge the significance of airborne transmission in spreading Covid-19.
In the UK, PA Media reports that the owner of Premier Inn has revealed the extent to which the Covid-19 pandemic devastated the hotels industry, with sales down 71.4% in the 12 months to 25 February, compared with a year earlier.
Whitbread bosses, however, said they were confident for the recovery – with 92% of hotels in the UK now reopened – and plan to invest 350 million into the business this year. Premier Inn bosses also said they believe there will be a strong internal UK holiday market during the summer holidays.
Related: HSBC and BP profits jump as economic outlook improves – business live
Brazil’s health regulator has denied a request from several states to import Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, saying it did not have the data needed to verify the jab’s safety and efficacy.
“We will never allow millions of Brazilians to be exposed to products without due verification of quality, safety and efficacy, or at minimum, facing the grave situation we are now going through, that the benefits will outweigh the risks,” said Antonio Barra Torres, president of federal health regulator Anvisa.
The government of Hungary, the 1st EU country to start using Sputnik V, released its latest data on safety and efficacy across 5 vaccines. #SputnikV has the best safety (7-32 times fewer deaths cases) and efficacy (2-7 times fewer COVID infections) per 100,000 vaccinated. pic.twitter.com/UKVjsZT8Ws
Incidentally, here’s a round-up of what the papers have been saying about British prime minister Boris Johnson and the row over his alleged “let the bodies pile high” comments over imposing a second lockdown late last year.
Related: ‘Boris on the ropes’: what the papers say about mounting pressure on PM
This morning’s political media round in the UK is almost certainly going to continue to be dominated by the allegations that British prime minister Boris Johnson said “no more fucking lockdowns – let the bodies pile high in their thousands” after reluctantly approving a second England-wide lockdown late last year. Johnson and senior ministers have emphatically denied he said it.
As Jessica Elgot and Robert Booth reported last night, media outlets, including the Guardian, have several sources between them saying that the remark – or something similar – was made:
ITV reported source claims that the “let the bodies pile high” comments were shouted from an office in Downing Street after a crunch meeting with ministers, rather than during the meeting.
Speaking to the Guardian, a source corroborated that account and hinted that the comments had been heard by a small number of people, outside Johnson’s office. A second source, who did not hear the comments directly, said there had been “chatter” about them in Downing Street last year, though the phrase the source expressly recalled was “no more fucking lockdowns … no matter the consequences”.
There will be so many viewers who have lost a loved one, perhaps lost a mum, or a grandma, a dad, a grandfather, who never got the opportunity to say goodbye properly - probably didn’t have a decent funeral. The remarks are sickening, they are disgusting, they are crass, they are wrong.
All 85,000-plus Covid fines issued in England during the pandemic should be reviewed, MPs and peers have said, after more than a quarter of prosecutions in the first two months of the year for breaching the regulations were shown to have been wrongly brought.
The joint committee on human rights said coronavirus regulations, which have been changed at least 65 times since March last year, were muddled, discriminatory and unfair.
Related: All Covid fines in England should be reviewed, MPs say
Japan will open a mass vaccination centre in central Tokyo next month ahead of this summer’s Olympic Games.
No decision has been made on which vaccine will be used or how many people will get shots each day, the chief cabinet secretary, Katsunobu Kato, told reporters.
Thailand on Tuesday reported 15 new coronavirus deaths, setting a new daily record for the third time in four days during a growing third wave of infections that has prompted new shutdowns in Bangkok and other areas.
The health ministry also reported 2,179 new coronavirus cases, bringing total confirmed infections to 59,687 and fatalities to 163.
Even though India’s case load was down from Monday’s global record (323,144 new cases, down from 352,991) some medical experts warned it was due to reduced testing, not a reduced infection rate.
“Please note that a huge fall in daily cases … is largely due to a heavy fall in testing. This should not be taken as an indication of falling cases, rather a matter of missing out on too many positive cases!” Rijo M John, a professor and health economist at the Indian Institute of Management in the southern state of Kerala, said in a post on Twitter.
More now on Australia’s decision to suspend flights from India until at least 15 May.
The move was announced by the prime minister, Scott Morrison a short time ago, and will affect two passenger services into Sydney and two repatriation flights into Darwin, involving about 500 people, Australian Associated Press reports.
India has welcomed vital medical supplies as it battles a major surge in cases. The external affairs ministry tweeted pictures of ventilators and oxygen concentrators that arrived in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
International cooperation at work! Appreciate the shipment of vital medical supplies from including 100 ventilators & 95 oxygen concentrators that arrived early this morning. pic.twitter.com/MBZFwSn4cH
Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the coronavirus virus, as vital medical supplies begin to arrive in India.
The ministry of external affairs spokesperson, Arindam Bagchi, said 100 ventilators and 95 oxygen concentrators had arrived early this morning from the UK.
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