Coronavirus Global Updates, Nov 17: Vaccine trials 'encouraging' says WHO; South Korea tightens curbs in Seoul

Tue Nov 17 10:43:25 CAT 2020

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Zimbabwe COVID19 Update

COVID-19 update: As at 16 November 2020, Zimbabwe had 8 897 confirmed cases, including 8 116 recoveries and 257 deaths.

Vaccine trials 'encouraging' says WHO; South Korea tightens curbs in Seoul

EUROPE

* British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is considering a temporary cut to the aid spending to help the country’s Covid-ravaged public finances, The Times reported.

* The Premier League said 16 people had returned positive results in its latest round of tests conducted on players and staff last week.

* The World Health Organisation (WHO) said there had been 65 coronavirus infections among staff at its Geneva headquarters.

* German Chancellor Angela Merkel said leaders of the country’s 16 federal states were resisting her efforts to agree stricter measures.

AMERICAS

* US President-elect Joe Biden said “more people may die” if outgoing President Donald Trump continues blocking a US transition of power as the pandemic worsens.

* Canada’s remote Arctic territory of Nunavut is suffering its first community outbreak and will close all non-essential services, as well as schools, for at least two weeks.

* Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine will be easy to distribute, particularly to rural areas, because it can be stored for one month at standard refrigerator temperatures, the head of vaccines for the US Operation Warp Speed program said.

ASIA-PACIFIC

* South Korea will impose stricter social distancing rules for the greater Seoul area a month after easing them.

* Australia’s fifth most populous state on Tuesday reported one new Covid-19 case overnight, dampening fears of another deadly cluster emerging.

* New Zealand has made masks mandatory from Thursday for users of public transport in Auckland as well as on all domestic flights.

MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA

* Israel cast a wider net on Monday in its quest to secure a vaccine for Covid-19, approaching Russia to discuss buying its Sputnik V vaccine.

* Iran reported a record 13,053 new infections and 486 deaths over the past 24 hours as the government planned tougher restrictions.

MEDICAL DEVELOPMENTS

* Samsung BioLogics said it is mass-producing a Covid-19 antibody treatment developed by Eli Lilly, as the United States began distributing the drug last week after emergency-use approval.

* Moderna’s experimental vaccine was 94.5% effective in preventing Covid-19 based on interim data from a late-stage trial, the company said.

* The U.S. government will send over 7 million of Abbott Laboratories’ BinaxNOW rapid antigen tests to states, hospice providers, and for other uses this week.

ECONOMIC IMPACT

* Asian stocks cautiously pushed further into record territory on Tuesday, and oil edged higher after US benchmarks were pepped up by news of another promising coronavirus vaccine.

* The German economy is likely stagnating or contracting as Covid-19 measures hit leisure activities as well as exports, the Bundesbank said.

* The coronavirus is a bigger risk to the US economy than a prolonged dispute over the presidential election result, according to a Reuters poll that showed the near-term economic recovery was slowing more than previously thought.

Russia has just reported a record high of 442 deaths related to the novel coronavirus, taking the official death toll to 33,931.

Authorities also reported 22,410 new coronavirus infections in the last 24 hours, including 5,882 in the capital, Moscow, bringing the national tally to 1,971,013.

France appears to have passed the peak of the Covid-19 epidemic but it is still too early to announce an end to the country’s lockdown, the minister of health, Olivier Véran, has said.

He also confirmed that French travel restrictions will not be lifted on 1 December.

“The virus is circulating a little bit less rapidly than it did earlier, at the start of curfew. We are regaining control over the virus but it is still too early to claim victor,” Véran told BFM TV, a day after the daily tally of new cases dropped to a more than one-month low.

“We are in a phase where the pandemic is decreasing, even if it remains at a high level but we cannot give any dates regarding any end to French lockdown for now,” he added.

“As of now, I do not think the health situation is appropriate to allow certain shops to reopen on 27 November.”

The low-cost airine easyJet has reported pre-tax losses of £1.27bn for the year to 30 September, marking the first loss in the carrier’s 25-year history, PA Media has just reported.

Easyjet announced this morning it is in line for a pre-tax loss of up to £845m for the full year, the first time the budget carrier will have reported an annual loss.

In a trading update, easyJet said passenger numbers for the full year had halved, falling to 48 million as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Shares in the airline fell three-quarters of a per cent as markets opened.

That’s it from me, Helen Sullivan, for today. Thanks for following along.

My colleague Amelia Hill will be bringing you the latest pandemic news for the next few hours.

I will be googling giant salamanders for the next few hours.

Australia asks 4,000 people to quarantine

Australian authorities conducted mass tests on Tuesday and about 4,000 people were confined to quarantine in the hope of stifling a new cluster of cases of the novel coronavirus after hopes it had been largely eradicated, Reuters reports.

The state of South Australia reimposed social distancing restrictions on Monday after detecting 21 cases of the coronavirus, most of which were acquired locally.

The cases were the first local transmissions of the virus in Australia in nine days.

South Australia Premier Steven Marshall said testing had identified five new cases in the past 24 hours, while 14 people were suspected to be infected and were awaiting test results.

“We are not out of the woods. We are just at the beginning stages of dealing with this particular very nasty cluster,” Marshall told reporters in Adelaide.

Marshall said all cases could be traced back to an Australian who arrived in South Australia from overseas on 2 November and entered mandatory quarantine in a hotel.

Hotel workers are believed to have contacted the virus after touching a surface contaminated with the virus, Marshall said.

Authorities fear the virus could have spread beyond hotel workers and their close contacts, prompting a mandate that confined about 4,000 people to their homes.

“This is a very, very worrying situation. I’m not going to underestimate the concern that I’ve got about this,” said Nicola Spurrier, South Australia’s chief public health officer.

Australia has recorded about 27,800 novel coronavirus infections and 906 deaths.
The bulk of the infections were in Victoria state, which forced nearly 5 million people into a stringent lockdown for more than 100 days after a surge in cases.

That outbreak has been contained, with Victoria recording no new cases for the past 18 days.

Hopes are rising for a Covid jab to end the pandemic in the UK after a second company, Moderna, confirmed over 90% effectiveness of its vaccine in trials. The UK has secured 40m doses of Pfizer’s vaccine, and has rushed to reserve 5m of Moderna’s, but Britain has the most riding on the inoculation being developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca, of which it has reserved 100m doses. A source at the Department of Health and Social Care said the results from the Oxford vaccine trials were “imminent” and it could be one of the first to be rolled out.

Pfizer has launched a pilot delivery programme for its experimental Covid-19 vaccine in four US states, as it seeks to address distribution problems posed by its ultra-cold storage requirements. It has to be shipped and stored at -70C, compared with 2-8C for most other vaccines. California’s governor has pulled the “emergency brake” on reopening efforts amid a surge in cases. South Korea is to tighten its pandemic measures after health authorities reported more than 200 new infections for the fourth day in a row:

As France enters its third week of its second coronavirus lockdown, known as “le confinement,” here is a is a snippet of an account by Associated Press journalists of what it is like at the intensive care unit at La Timone, southern France’s largest hospital, as doctors struggle to keep even one bed open for the influx of patients:

The doctors and nurses tell themselves and each other that they just have to hold on a little longer. Government tallies show infections may have reached their second-wave high point, and hospitalisations dropped last weekend for the first time since September.

But the medical workers are also frustrated that France did not prepare more in the months after the first wave. And while doctors and nurses were seen as heroes back then, this time is different.

‘Before, they applauded every night. Now they tell us it’s just doing our job,’ says Chloe Gascon, a 23-year-old nurse who has spent half her 18-month career under the shadow of coronavirus.

Marseille has been submerged with coronavirus cases since September. The port city, on France’s Mediterranean coast, was spared the worst of the virus last spring only to be hit with a vengeance as the summer vacation wound down. Bars and restaurants closed across the city on 27 September, more than a month before they shut down nationwide. It wasn’t enough.

A decade of budget cuts left France with half the number of intensive care beds this year, when it needed them most. By the time the first confinement ended on 11 May, more than 26,000 people had died in France. The government pledged to take advantage of the expected summer lull to add beds and train reinforcements.

That was the time to act, when new infections were at their low point, said Stephen Griffin, a virologist at the University of Leeds.

‘It was always bubbling away under the surface,’ he said.

Here are the key global developments from the last few hours:

*	Mainland China reported 15 new Covid-19 cases on 16 November, up from eight cases a day earlier, the country’s national health authority said on Tuesday. The National Health Commission said in a statement all new cases were imported infections originating from overseas.
*	India’s daily cases fall to lowest number since mid-July. Daily coronavirus infections in India fell to their lowest since mid-July, with 29,163 new cases reported for the last 24 hours, taking the total to 8.87 million, the health ministry said on Tuesday.
*	Parts of west Scotland braced for Level 4 restrictions, with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon to announce her decision on Tuesday. On Monday, Ms Sturgeon said at the Scottish Government’s coronavirus briefing that rates in Greater Glasgow and Clyde and Lanarkshire health board areas are “stubbornly high”.
*	Virus vaccine to be free in Belgium. The Belgian government said Monday it intends to make any coronavirus vaccine available to around 70% of the population, some eight million people, and free of charge.The jab will not be compulsory, added Health Minister Frank Vandenbroucke as he and regional counterparts attended an interministerial health conference.
*	Philadelphia bans indoor gatherings. In one of the most aggressive actions taken in the US to confront the looming crisis, Philadelphia officials on Monday ordered a ban on “indoor gatherings of any size in any location, public or private,” except among individuals who live together.
*	WHO hails ‘encouraging’ virus vaccine news. Reported breakthroughs in Covid-19 vaccine research are “encouraging”, the World Health Organization’s chief said on Monday, but voiced concern about surging cases and warned against complacency.
*	California will dramatically roll back its reopening efforts, the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, announced on Monday, saying he was pulling the “emergency brake” amid a troubling surge in cases. The changes, which take effect Tuesday, will see more than 94% of California’s population and most businesses across the state return to the most restrictive tier of rules aimed at slowing the spread of the virus.
*	The US biotech firm Moderna has claimed that its Covid-19 vaccine is 94.5% effective, according to an interim analysis released on Monday and based on 95 patients with confirmed Covid infections. The company plans to apply to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency-use authorisation.

The experience of having to respond so rapidly to the Covid-19 crisis should serve as a wake-up call to accelerate action to deal with climate change, which is already hitting vulnerable communities hard, the Red Cross said on Tuesday.

In its annual World Disasters Report, the world’s largest humanitarian network said the coronavirus pandemic had shown how governments can “take unprecedented steps affecting their entire economies, and find the necessary resources to robustly face a major global threat”.

The same level of “energy and boldness” should be mobilised to curb global warming and use a window of opportunity created by the pandemic to prepare for future shocks, it added.

“A global catastrophe of the magnitude of Covid-19 could finally open this window wide enough for us to look directly into the face of the climate crisis,” the report said.

At the same time, the pandemic has exacerbated the difficulties facing poor countries and communities struggling to deal with worsening climate and weather extremes as the Covid-19 situation soaks up scarce resources, it noted.

In the first six months after the pandemic was declared in March, more than 100 disasters occurred, from floods to storms, affecting more than 50 million people, it said.

Jagan Chapagain, secretary general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, cited Sudan as one country that had suffered such pressures - first a locust infestation, then Covid-19, followed by severe flooding.

Three months on, when he visited in October, more than 800,000 people were receiving minimal humanitarian support, with the transitional government forced to divert resources to tackle Covid-19, he added.

And here is the full story on Pfizer launching a vaccine delivery trial:

Here is our full story on the new restrictions in South Korea:

South Korea has strengthened social distancing measures amid a rise in new coronavirus cases, with the country’s prime minister warning that action was needed to avoid a crisis with the arrival of the winter flu season.

The country has won widespread praise for preventing a serious Covid-19 outbreak through a combination of mass testing, vigorous track and tracing and isolation, coupled with social distancing and mask wearing.

But the decision to implement stricter rules on distancing comes after health authorities reported more than 200 new infections for the fourth day in a row on Tuesday.

The country added 230 more cases, raising the total to 28,999, according to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency. The death toll remained unchanged at 497, it added:

South Korea facing 'crisis', says PM, as Covid measures tightened

India's daily cases fall to lowest number since mid-July

Daily coronavirus infections in India fell to their lowest since mid-July, with 29,163 new cases reported for the last 24 hours, taking the total to 8.87 million, the health ministry said on Tuesday.

Reuters: Daily cases have fallen in India, the country with the second-highest number of infections behind the United States, since hitting a peak in September.

Indians celebrated Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, over the weekend, and experts have warned that the festival season could lead to a new spike.

Deaths rose by 449 over the last 24 hours, the ministry also said, with toll now at 130,519.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Germany increased by 14,419 to 815,746, data from the Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases showed on Tuesday.

The reported death toll rose by 267 to 12,814, the tally showed.

As Switzerland contends with one of the worst coronavirus surges in Europe, the Swiss are gripped by one melting-hot question: is it still safe to share a fondue?

This pungent story from AFP: The beloved Swiss national dish consists of cheese melted down with white wine in a “caquelon” pot heated by an open flame.

By tradition, Swiss cheese fondue is eaten by dipping in bread with long-handled forks, with several friends or relatives joining in and sharing the same pot.

But can the convivial Swiss culinary experience still be done safely in the midst of a pandemic?

Internet sages are piling in on the hot topic. “Eat your fondue with a fishing rod”, reads one suggestion for maintaining physical distancing.

Another - with a touch more realism - proposes: “Each guest takes two forks and a knife, and it’s fixed: one fork to dip in the fondue, the knife to help remove the bread and the second fork to eat it.”

The press has called experts to the rescue, even dragging in Geneva’s celebrated infectious disease specialist Didier Pittet.

“A risk linked to fondue? Certainly not,” said the man considered the godfather of alcohol-based hand rub.

While Austria was held up as a model to follow during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, its return to lockdown Tuesday has sparked a backlash against the government, AFP reports.

Experts, news outlets and opposition politicians have been lining up to condemn the conservative-green coalition government of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz for its handling of the second wave.

“Lack of anticipation” and “irresponsible behaviour” are just some of the criticisms levelled at the administration since the new lockdown was announced on Saturday.

The closure of all non-essential stores and schools is “without question the expression of a total loss of control” said Pamela Rendi-Wagner, leader of the opposition Social Democrats (SPOe).

“It is because of the government in particular that more severe measures are now necessary and that Austria has gone from being a model country to being the bottom of the table in terms of infections.”

Rendi-Wagner is herself a former health minister and trained as a doctor.

Saturday’s measures came two weeks after the closure of restaurants, bars, cultural and sports venues in a failed bid to curb the spread of the virus.

The country is now under curfew until December 6, with limited exceptions such as essential travel for work, buying groceries, helping or caring for others, or for exercise.

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