Health News at Your Fingertips

The European Union’s drug regulator will decide whether to approve Pfizer’s Covid-19 pill at the end of this month, before doing a final review of Merck’s similar but less effective drug in February.

Reuters reports:

Late last year, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) gave guidance to member states on how to use both antiviral pills as emergency treatments, while it carried out rolling reviews to help member states decide on quick adoption ahead of any formal EU-wide approval.

Italy, Germany and Belgium are among a handful of EU countries that have bought the drugs.

The EMA’s review of Merck’s pill, developed with Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, is taking longer than Pfizer’s because Merck released trial data in November showing its drug was significantly less effective than previously thought.

While vaccines are central to fighting the pandemic, regulators are looking at antivirals, which can be taken at home, as a new weapon against the fast-spreading Omicron variant. US and UK regulators have given the go ahead for both drugs to treat certain high-risk adult patients.

The EMA said on 10 January it could issue “within weeks” a decision on whether to approve the use of Pfizer’s two-drug regimen Paxlovid. In a clinical trial, it was nearly 90% effective in preventing hospitalisations and deaths when given at an early stage to patients at high risk of severe illness.

The source also said the EMA planned to issue its decision on Valneva’s VLA2001 Covid-19 vaccine candidate in March, in line with the timeline given by the French company on 6 January.

Associated Press has a summary of World Health Organization director general’s comments today, in which he warned that conditions remain ideal for more coronavirus variants to emerge and said it was dangerous to assume Omicron was the last one, but added that the acute phase of the pandemic could end this year if some key targets were met.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said:

Ending the acute phase of the pandemic must remain our collective priority.

There are different scenarios for how the pandemic could play out and how the acute phase could end. But it’s dangerous to assume that Omicron will be the last variant or that we are in the endgame

On the contrary, globally, the conditions are ideal for more variants to emerge.

He said: “We can end Covid-19 as a global health emergency, and we can do it this year,” by reaching goals such as WHO’s target to vaccinate 70% of the population of each country by the middle of this year, with a focus on people who are at the highest risk of Covid-19, and improving testing and sequencing rates to track the virus and its emerging variants more closely.

He said:

It’s true that we will be living with Covid for the foreseeable future and that we will need to learn to manage it through a sustained and integrated system for acute respiratory diseases.

But learning to live with Covid cannot mean that we give this virus a free ride. It cannot mean that we accept almost 50,000 deaths a week from a preventable and treatable disease.

Let me put it plainly: If the current funding model continues, WHO is being set up to fail. The paradigm shift in world health that is needed now must be matched by a paradigm shift in funding the World’s Health Organization.

The UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, says he plans to make changes to testing rules for international travellers who are fully vaccinated, given that Britain is “moving through the Omicron wave”.

He told broadcasters during a visit to the Academic Centre in Milton Keynes hospital:

Although we have to be cautious, we are now moving through the Omicron wave, and you can see the figures are starting to get better.

So what we’re doing on travel, to show that this country is open for business, open for travellers, you will see changes so that people arriving no longer have to take tests if they have been vaccinated, if they have been double vaccinated.”

The Guardian’s video team has put together a piece on Sunday’s violent clashes in Brussels between police and people protesting against Covid-19 restrictions.

New rules in France have come into force requiring people to be vaccinated against Covid-19 to enter bars, restaurants, trains and planes, after a fierce fight over details of the law in parliament.

Agence France-Presse news agency reports:

From Monday, a negative coronavirus test will no longer be enough to access leisure activities, some work events and long-distance travel.

The pass aims to “protect all those who host the public, because it prevents infections and allows them to stay open. Individual responsibility is the best protection against the virus,” the economy minister, Bruno Le Maire, told Franceinfo radio.

France has been recording the highest daily infection rates of any large European country, with an average of 360,000 over the past week.

But outrage at President Emmanuel Macron’s declaration early this month that he wanted to “piss off” the unvaccinated with restrictions until they accepted a shot slowed the vaccine pass law’s passage through parliament.

The government had originally wanted to apply it from 15 January.

About 40,000 people attended anti-pass demonstrations last weekend, according to interior ministry figures, down roughly 25% from the previous week.

The UK is to evaluate Merck & Co’s antiviral pill in a large trial as a possible treatment for patients in hospital with Covid-19.

Reuters reports:

The pill, molnupiravir, has been approved by Britain for use in people with mild to moderate Covid-19, but it is not known whether it would work in patients hospitalised with severe illness, and the trial, dubbed “recovery”, will look into that, scientists said.

China has lifted one of its longest lockdowns, in the northern city of Xi’an, as coronavirus spreads across the country.

AFP reports:

The city’s 13 million residents had been confined to their homes since 22 December after the discovery of a Covid-19 cluster that grew to more than 2,100 cases – China’s largest outbreak in months.

With the Winter Olympics beginning next week, Chinese authorities have been scrambling to eradicate flare-ups in several major cities, most recently Beijing, where more than 40 cases have been recorded since mid-January.

While China’s coronavirus caseload pales in comparison to global numbers, the country’s strict “zero-Covid” strategy means even the slightest hint of the virus is met with contact tracing, targeted lockdowns and long quarantines.

Officials began removing restrictions in Xi’an last week after daily cases slowed to single digits.

Residents with a clean bill of health are now permitted to leave the city, while public transport and economic activity have fully resumed now that Xi’an has been deemed a “low-risk” area, virus control authorities said in a statement on Monday.

Only one district remains under lockdown, the notice said, with restrictions to be lifted at a later date.

But travellers to Xi’an, home of the famed Terracotta Warriors, still need to provide a negative test result, while those from virus-affected areas of China are barred entry.

Rachel Hall here taking over the global coronavirus blog for the rest of the day. I’ll be keeping you updated on key happenings across the world, including the UK. If we’ve missed anything do drop me a line at rachel.hall@theguardian.com.

• In China, Beijing reported new local Covid cases for the seventh consecutive day as flare-ups persisted ahead of the Winter Olympics Games in February, while four provinces found infections linked to clusters in Beijing.
• The Fengtai district in Beijing, which on Sunday launched blanket testing, said it would start a second district-wide testing programme tomorrow. Outside of Beijing, the provinces of Shandong, Shanxi, Liaoning and Hebei have already found a total of eight infections linked to the capital.
• “The Covid-19 pandemic is now entering its third year and we are at a critical juncture,” the World Health Organization (WHO) director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has said. “Conditions are ideal for more variants to emerge,” he warned.
• Dr David Nabarro, the WHO special envoy for Covid-19, has said: “What people are seeing from around the world is this is still a very, very dangerous virus, especially for people who have not been vaccinated and who’ve not been exposed to it before. So quite honestly, we are not saying that this should be considered to be like flu or indeed like anything else. It’s a new virus, and we must go on treating it as though it is full of surprises, very nasty and rather cunning.”
• The Omicron variant has moved the Covid-19 pandemic into a new phase and could bring it to an end in Europe, the WHO Europe director has said. “It’s plausible that the region is moving towards a kind of pandemic endgame,” Hans Kluge told AFP, adding that Omicron could infect 60% of Europeans by March.
• The easing of measures put in place in Scotland in response to Omicron marks a “very significant moment of progress” in tackling the virus, John Swinney has said.
• Only the “findings” of Sue Gray’s report into alleged lockdown-breaking parties at Downing Street will be published, the UK education secretary, Nadhim Zahawi, has said, in another apparent step by the government away from promising full transparency with what she uncovers.
• Russia reported a new record number of Covid-19 cases confirmed in the past 24 hours – cases jumped to 65,109, from 63,205 a day earlier.
• Covid cases are rising rapidly among US nursing home residents and staff, causing shortages in admissions, exacerbating bed shortages at hospitals in turn, and in some cases requiring the national guard to be called in.
• Experts in India are warning that the peak of the country’s Omicron wave is probably yet to come. “The number of cases in cities like Mumbai and Pune are the tip of the iceberg,” said the national Covid taskforce’s Dr Subhash Salunke. He expects to see multiple peaks in the next eight to 10 weeks with the variant spreading to semi-urban and rural areas.
• Indonesia opened up two islands close to Singapore to visitors from the city-state today. Singaporeans can visit Batam and Bintan islands providing they are vaccinated against Covid-19, they undergo tests and have insurance coverage, authorities said.
• Hong Kong will take steps from Tuesday to cut the number of civil servants working in their offices, as it battles a spate of Covid-19 infections in the run-up to the busy Lunar New Year holiday.
• In Australia, national disability insurance scheme participants will be able to dip into their core funding to purchase rapid antigen tests for themselves and their support workers, but critics have warned the change is still inadequate.
• New measures are being introduced in New Zealand as coronavirus cases could rise to more than 1,000 a day driven by the more transmissible Omicron variant. Prime minister Jacinda Ardern has postponed her planned wedding in response.
• Nearly half of those who became ill with Covid in the first wave of infections may have long-term and even permanent changes to their sense of smell, according to preliminary research from Sweden.

Rachel Hall will be with you shortly, to bring you the latest Covid developments from the UK and around the world. Andrew Sparrow has our UK politics live blog. I will be back with you tomorrow.

Here is a little bit of the messaging coming out from the World Health Organization (WHO) this morning. There’s an event in Geneva where the director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has been talking.

He said it would be dangerous to assume that the highly transmissible Omicron was the last variant to emerge, and that the world was in the “end game” of the pandemic.

However, he said it was possible this year to exit the acute phase of the pandemic where Covid constituted a global health emergency if strategies and tools such as testing and vaccines were used in a comprehensive way.

Speaking at the opening of executive board meeting, Tedros said that since Omicron was first identified a little over nine weeks ago, more than 80m cases had been reported to the UN agency, more than were reported in the whole of 2020.

“Conditions are ideal for more variants to emerge,” he added.

Violent clashes broke out between police and people protesting against Covid-19 restrictions in Brussels on Sunday. Police used teargas and fired water cannon in an effort to disperse protesters. Authorities said about 50,000 people took part in the demonstration in the Belgium capital, which coincided with similar protests in other European cities.

Protesters hurled projectiles outside the European Union’s diplomatic service and metal barriers were thrown at officers in a metro station. Our video team have a package of clips here.

The easing on Monday of the restrictions put in place in response to the Omicron variant marks a “very significant moment of progress” in tackling the virus, John Swinney has said. PA Media quote him telling BBC Good Morning Scotland:

I think it’s too early to say it’s the beginning of the end, because I think anybody listening to the international commentary on the progress of Covid around the world would indicate that there are significant challenges that remain in the handling of Covid, particularly about the possibility of new variants.

But I think today marks a very significant moment of progress in Scotland in tackling Covid and enabling people to live lives a bit more closely to what we would normally expect to be the case.

Requirements for face coverings and self-isolation will remain for the foreseeable future. Swinney said: “I think the baseline measures that we have asked people to continue to follow around the wearing of face coverings, about trying to limit their social contact where it’s possible and to work from home where they can are sensible measures to try to ensure that we maintain protection against any possible resurgence of the virus.”

Swinney, who is also the Covid Recovery Secretary, said the Scottish Government has tried to take a “proportionate approach” to enable people to be able to get on with as much of their lives as close to normal as possible while applying “necessary caution” to protect them from the spread of the virus.

There’s a very slight update from Reuters here on the situation in China. They report that Fengtai district in Beijing, which on Sunday launched blanket testing, has said it would start a second district-wide testing programme tomorrow. The Winter Olympics start in Beijing on 4 February.

Russia on Monday reported a new record number of Covid-19 cases confirmed in the past 24 hours as the Omicron variant of the virus spread across the country, the government coronavirus task force said.

Daily new cases jumped to 65,109, from 63,205 a day earlier. The task force also reported 655 deaths. The previous peak of the pandemic in Russia, according to the official figures, was just over 40,000 cases one day in November 2021.

Andrew Sparrow has launched our UK politics live blog for today, and in his opening post he has identified six separate crises enveloping Boris Johnson’s government – and none of them were directly the pandemic. You can follow that here.

I’ll be continuing here with coronavirus news from around the world, and any major UK Covid developments.

Beijing reported new local Covid cases for the seventh consecutive day as flare-ups persisted ahead of the Winter Olympics Games in February, while four provinces found infections linked to clusters in Beijing.

The Beijing municipality reported six new domestically transmitted infections with confirmed symptoms for Sunday, after reporting nine a day earlier, data from the National Health Commission (NHC) showed. Since 15 January, the city has reported a total of 36 local symptomatic cases, according to NHC statements.

Outside of Beijing, the provinces of Shandong, Shanxi, Liaoning and Hebei have already found a total of eight infections linked to the capital. There were no new deaths, leaving the overall death toll at 4,636 report Reuters.

Fengtai district in Beijing on Sunday launched blanket testing of around two million residents, while some communities in other districts have started targeted testing in key groups.

People who bought over-the-counter treatments for fever, cough, infections or dry and sore throat should do a Covid test within three days upon the purchase, and should avoid going out before the test result is known, a statement published by the Beijing Municipal Health Commission said on Sunday.

Any lack of testing will be reflected in the individuals’ digital health code, which “may affect travel and daily life,” the statement said.

In the northern city of Tianjin, where an outbreak of the Omicron variant has been brought under control, Toyota’s joint venture complex with China’s FAW Group resumed operation on Saturday. It had been shut from 10 January for 11 days, a Toyota spokesperson said on Monday.

The head of the World Health Organization has urged countries to work together to bring the acute phase of the pandemic to an end, saying that they now have all the tools available to do so.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is now entering its third year and we are at a critical juncture,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a press conference, Reuters report.

“We must work together to bring the acute phase of this pandemic to an end,” he added. “We cannot let it continue to drag on, lurching between panic and neglect.”