French health minister: We could reach epidemic peak in 7-10 days if all goes according to plan
The situation in France has been deteriorating, with health minister Olivier Veran telling Inter radio this morning that “We could reach a peak of the epidemic in seven to 10 days if all goes according to plan. Then we need two extra weeks to reach a peak in intensive care units (ICUs) that could occur at the end of April.”
Reuters note that daily new Covid infections in France have doubled since February to average nearly 40,000. The number of Covid-19 patients in intensive care breached 5,000 this week, exceeding the peak hit during the six-week second lockdown enforced late last year.
Meanwhile prime minister Jean Castex has told parliament this morning that the French government is still expecting that upcoming regional elections will be held in June as planned, providing health conditions allow it.
Vietnam received 811,000 doses of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccines today, its first batch of vaccines under the global COVAX scheme, following a week-long delay caused by limited supply.
The Southeast Asian country, which began its coronavirus vaccination programme last month, is aiming to secure 30 million doses in total via the vaccine-sharing facility.
Thursday’s delivery took Vietnam’s number of AstraZeneca doses to nearly 930,000 so far, but the country is looking to diversify its procurement from more sources, including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, China’s Sinovac and Russia’s vaccine, Sputnik V.
In a meeting with health minister Nguyen Thanh Long, Russia’s embassy in Hanoi on Wednesday offered to help Vietnam manufacture Sputnik V locally, the health ministry said in a statement.
Long also said Vietnam would approve the Chinese vaccine within weeks, after Sinovac submits the required documents. Vietnam is among only a few countries in Asia yet to use the Chinese vaccine.
Phuong Nguyen reports for Reuters that Vietnam has been praised for its record in containing the virus through mass testing and tracing and strict quarantining, which has kept its cases to just 2,603, with 35 deaths. Nearly 50,000 people have been vaccinated. Vietnam’s population is 96 million.
Four Vietnamese companies are engaged in vaccine research and production and two are at the human trial stage. Vietnam’s first domestically developed vaccine, called Nanocovax, is expected to be put into use in 2022.
Andreas Rinke and Paul Carrel of Reuters have written this morning an analysis piece looking at the state of the pandemic in Germany. They write that a year into the crisis, Germany’s patchwork federal system is fraying. The unity between Berlin and the regions that marked the first year of the crisis is unravelling as many state premiers, facing pressure from business and voters, press for life to get back to normal.
They note that the approach of a federal election in September is straining those political threads even further. State leaders including North Rhine-Westphalia premier Armin Laschet, chairman of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and her would-be successor, are more eager to open up as they look ahead to the election in September, when Merkel is stepping down. In contrast Merkel, who doesn’t have to face the verdict of voters again, wants to double down with her push for tougher measures.
Fractious federal-state relations are not entirely to blame for Germany’s fumbling pandemic response they say: Berlin has also been accused of cautiousness and investing too much faith in the European Union for its vaccine rollout. But they have become an obstacle to taking coordinated, quick action as patience wears thin on all sides, resulting in policy flip-flops and waning support for Merkel’s conservative camp.
The increasingly tense relationship between Merkel and state leaders “only exacerbates pandemic mismanagement and comes back to hurt the CDU and CSU,” the Bavarian sister to Merkel’s party, said Naz Masraff at political risk consultancy Eurasia.
And while the politicians bicker, time is running short. Germany’s vaccine supplies are due to ramp up from April, though changing guidance on the AstraZeneca shot has put many Germans off it. The country’s leading virologist has warned a tougher lockdown will be needed anyway. None is in sight.
The intransigence is costing the CDU/CSU alliance, which has lost 10 points in polls since early February. “We are in a miserable state at the moment, and we have to get out of it,” lamented one conservative lawmaker. “I have never experienced the mood like this in our ranks before.”
China’s CanSino Biologics has said that the efficacy rate for its single-dose Covid vaccine may fall over time although it should still have a rate of 50% or more five to six months after inoculation.
A second shot given to trial participants six months after their first injection could offer substantial protection, Zhu Tao, CanSinoBIO’s chief scientific officer, said in an online presentation late yesterday reported by Reuters.
The vaccine has been approved in China, Pakistan, Hungary and Mexico, and CanSinoBIO is also planning a clinical trial in China for an inhaled version of the vaccine.
“A booster shot six months later led to a seven times to 10-times increase in neutralising antibody levels, so we expect in this case efficacy could reach over 90%,” Zhu said, though he cautioned more clinical trial data was needed for more precise estimates.
The company in February reported interim data that showed the shot was 68.83% effective at preventing symptomatic Covid-19 two weeks after vaccination but the rate fell to 65.28% after four weeks.
WTO head calls for wider licensing of Covid vaccines with poorer countries
The BBC are reporting that Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iwealam, the newly installed head of the World Trade Organization, has called for as wider distribution of the technology behind the manufacture of Covid vaccines.
She told BBC’s Economics Editor Faisal Islam that it was “not acceptable” that currently the poorest countries are at the “end of the queue” for vaccines.
She spoke in praise of the AstraZeneca licensing deal that is allowing the manufacture of its vaccine in different remote facilities, suggesting that “voluntary licensing” by other pharmaceutical companies “could save many more people.”
“There is some capacity in developing countries unused now. Let’s have the same kind of arrangement that AstraZeneca has with the Serum Institute of India. Novovax, Johnson and Johnson and all the others should follow suit.”
The call is likely to arouse some controversy, as some WTO member states are opposed to relaxing the rules on intellectual property which currently allows pharmaceutical firms to maintain a monopoly on the drugs that they develop.
Over the last year the Guardian and other media organisations have been using numbers collated by the COVID tracking project in the US. It was put together by a bunch of volunteers who worked together to bring national numbers into one place as the pandemic worsened in the US, and the federal government under Donald Trump’s failed to provide any similar kind of overview of the scale of the pandemic as it unfolded across the US.
They’ve bought the project to a close after a year, and one of the co-founders, Erin Kissane, has written today about what they learnt about Covid data and the way it was collected and interpreted during the course of the year.
We founded the project to count tests, and soon found that we needed to capture other basic public health data that wasn’t being published by the federal government: most notably cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. These metrics quickly fragmented into categories like unique people tested, specimens tested, suspected COVID-19 hospitalizations, confirmed COVID-19 hospitalizations, and so on.
A lot of our research and context work was about trying to find out what the numbers states published actually represented. We discovered early on that many states weren’t actually explaining what numbers they were publishing: Some states would post “total tests” but not say whether they were counting people tested or all tests ever performed or something else. Others would post cases, but never say—even in response to direct and repeated questions—whether those cases included probable and confirmed cases, or just confirmed ones.
This lack of clarity was present in most of the metrics we collected, and meant that we spent hundreds, maybe thousands, of person-hours reading footnotes in obscure state PDFs and watching press conferences to try to catch any turns of phrase that would tell us what—and who—was really represented in a given figure. Definitional problems substantial enough to shape whole narratives about the pandemic haunted our work all year, and we tried to communicate both the answers we found and the uncertainty we encountered. For some wings of the project, like the COVID Racial Data Tracker, we had to say as much about the dramatically incomplete state of the data than about what the data itself showed.
New emergency measures to be imposed in three prefectures in Japan from 5 April
Reuters report the worsening situation in Osaka, Japan, where the government has said it will impose emergency measures, such as shorter business hours and asking people to work from home and refrain from activities like karaoke, to try and halt a rebound in Covid cases.
Osaka governor Hirofumi Yoshimura called for Olympic torch events in the prefecture’s main city to be cancelled, a day after he raised the alarm about an emerging fourth wave of infections.
The infection control measures will cover the prefectures of Osaka, Hyogo, and Miyagi and will last from 5 April until 5 May, said economy minister Yasutoshi Nishimura, who also heads the nation’s coronavirus response.
The controls allow regional governments to order businesses to shorten hours and to impose fines of 200,000 yen ($1,806.52) or publish the names of those that do not comply.
A final decision on enacting the measures will be made at a task force meeting headed by prime minister Yoshihide Suga this afternoon.
The new measures are based on a revised infection control law and can be applied to a narrower area than a state of emergency, which Suga declared for most of the country in early January.
New infections in Osaka have exceeded those of the much larger metropolis of Tokyo in recent days. Osaka emerged early from the state of emergency, but then experienced a sharp rebound in cases toward the end of March.
“In Osaka in particular, the number of infected individuals in their 20 and 30 is increasing as people continue to go out at night,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato said on Thursday. “Reports of mutant strains are also increasing, and the contagion is expected to continue.”
France has imposed a nationwide month-long lockdown to curb a rising third wave of coronavirus. Schools will close for at least three weeks, workers will work from home, and travel within the country will be banned for a month after Easter. “We will lose control if we do not move now,” president Emmanuel Macron said.
Johnson & Johnson has said that a batch of its Covid-19 vaccines failed quality standards and can’t be used. The drugmaker didn’t say how many doses were lost, and it wasn’t clear how the problem would impact future deliveries.
Keir Starmer has dealt a blow to government hopes of pushing through a domestic Covid passport scheme, expressing scepticism about the idea and saying the “British instinct” could be against them.
Italy has made coronavirus vaccinations mandatory for all health workers, in a potentially controversial move aimed at protecting vulnerable patients and pushing back against significant ‘no-vax’ sentiment in the country.
Brazilhas detected a new Covid variant in São Paulo state that is similar to the one first seen in South Africa, it was reported earlier.
Rates of stillbirth and maternal death rose by about one-third during the coronavirus pandemic, with the impact most acute in poor and developing countries, a studypublished in the Lancet Global Health journalreported.
Finland’s government has withdrawn a proposal to confine people largely to their own homes in several cities to help curb the spread of Covid, the prime minister said.
Europe’s drug regulator is investigating 62 cases worldwide of a rare blood clotting condition which has prompted some countries to limit the use of AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine, its chief said in a briefing.
Sweden’s government will postpone a planned easing of some Covid restrictions until at least 3 May amid a severe third wave, the prime minister said.
Almost third of UK Covid hospital patients readmitted within four months – study
Ian Sample
Nearly a third of people who have been in hospital suffering from Covid-19 are readmitted for further treatment within four months of being discharged, and one in eight of patients dies in the same period, doctors have found.
The striking long-term impact of the disease has prompted doctors to call for ongoing tests and monitoring of former coronavirus patients to detect early signs of organ damage and other complications caused by the virus.
While Covid is widely known to cause serious respiratory problems, the virus can also infect and damage other organs such as the heart, liver and kidneys.
India opened up its coronavirus inoculation programme to people aged over 45 on Thursday as infections surge, which will delay vaccine exports from the world’s biggest maker of the drug, Reuters reports.
The country, with the most number of reported Covid-19 cases after the United States and Brazil, has so far injected 64 million doses and exported nearly as many. This has raised criticism at home as India’s per-capita vaccination figure is much lower than many countries.
The government has previously said that people over 45 can register for inoculation from 1 April.
A healthcare worker collects a Covid-19 test swab sample from a man at a temporary shelter for homeless people in New Delhi Photograph: Adnan Abidi/Reuters
India initially focused on front-like workers, the elderly and those suffering from other health conditions, unlike some richer countries that have made all their adults eligible to get inoculated.
New Delhi says it is working towards that goal, and health minister Harsh Vardhan tweeted that there would be no vaccine shortage in the country as it opens up the vaccination programme.
“Centre to continually replenish states’ supplies,” he said. “Avoid overstocking and under stocking.”
India has already decided to delay big vaccine exports for now, including to the WHO-backed global vaccine alliance Covax.
It is currently using the AstraZeneca vaccine and a shot developed at home by Bharat Biotech, which is struggling to step up supplies. India’s drug regulator is soon expected to approve Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine.
India has reported more than 12 million infections. Deaths stand at more than 162,400.
