Worldwide covid highlights of the week

Belgium

The Belgian government, regional chiefs and health experts decided after a three-hour meeting today to permit camping and cabin sites to reopen from Monday, hairdressers and zoos from 13 February and beauty parlours from 1 March.

Belgium has recorded more than Covid-19 21,000 fatalities among its 11 million people, more than most other countries proportionally. However, while cases have been inching up with more children tested, daily hospital admissions and fatalities have been heading down. 

The Belgian government says it needs to have fewer than 800 confirmed infections a day and 75 daily hospital admissions for a period of three weeks before substantially easing lockdown rules. Those figures are now respectively 2,349 and 121.

United Kingdom

The UK variant of coronavirus, more infectious than the previously dominant strain, has taken over as the main cause of new Covid cases in Slovakia, prime minister Igor Matovic has said.

Matovic said the government had checked all positive samples of PCR laboratory tests taken in the country yesterday and preliminary results showed 71% were the UK variant.

So far from 1,360 clinical samples positively tested by RT-PCR, 71% have been diagnosed as the B.1.1.7 UK variant of SARS-CoV-2.

USA

The Biden administration has said it is invoking the Defense Production Act to help Pfizer ramp up vaccine production and that “every option” was on the table to produce more Johnson & Johnson vaccine should it be authorised, Reuters reports.

The White House also said it would deploy 1,100 troops to help get Americans get the jabs at state vaccination centres after a request for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, AP reports.

Currently about 6.9 million Americans have received the full two-dose regimen required to get maximum protection from the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. That translates to about 2% of the US population.

Germany

A more contagious variant of the coronavirus first detected in Britain now accounts for almost 6% of all cases in Germany, officials said Friday.

The head of Germany’s disease control agency said labs examined the genome of the virus in more than 30,000 positive samples last week to assess the spread of the variant, known to scientists as B.1.1.7., and two others that were first found in South Africa and Brazil.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Thursday that the prevalence of new variants of the virus will play a role in discussions between the federal and state governments next week about whether to extend existing lockdown restrictions beyond mid-February.

Italy

Italy reported 377 coronavirus-related deaths on Friday against 421 the day before, the health ministry said, while the daily tally of new infections rose to 14,218 from 13,659 the day before.

Italy has registered 90,618 deaths linked to COVID-19 since its outbreak emerged last February, the second-highest toll in Europe after Britain and the sixth-highest in the world. The country has reported 2.61 million cases to date.

Patients in the hospital with Covid-19 – not including those in intensive care – stood at 19,575 on Friday, down from 19,743 a day earlier.