Health News at Your Fingertips

Turkey has recorded 15,805 new coronavirus cases in the last 24 hours, as well as 253 new Covid-19 deaths, Turkish authorities said on Tuesday.

The country’s total death toll now stands at 20,388, with Turkey’s total cases since the beginning of the pandemic now at 2,178,580.

Ankara has imposed full weekend lockdowns and weekday curfews to curb infections.

Turks will also be on lockdown from 9 pm on 31 December to 5 am on 4 January as part of the measures.

Argentina began to vaccinate its citizens against the coronavirus on Tuesday using 300,000 doses of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine delivered last week, the government said.

Latin America’s third largest economy has been hard hit by Covid-19, logging nearly 1.6 million cases of the disease and 42,868 deaths.

Officials said front-line health workers would be the first to be vaccinated, followed members of the security forces, teachers, the elderly and other high-risk groups.

Argentina became the third country to approve the Sputnik V vaccine, after Russia and Belarus. Critics both in Argentina and abroad have questioned the vaccine’s efficacy, side effects and the transparency of its trial results. Russia says those criticisms are unfounded.

“You have to be afraid of the disease, not the vaccine,” Argentine health minister Ginés González García told reporters on Tuesday.

Reuters reported on Monday that the vaccine sent to Argentina – Russia’s first major international shipment – consisted only of the first dose of the two-shot vaccine, which is easier to make than the second dose.

Russian and Argentine officials did not immediately comment on when the second dose might arrive.

The Russian president Vladimir Putin has referred to a single-component option as a “light-vaccine”, which he said would provide less protection than the two components, but “will still reach 85%” effectiveness.

Argentina has also approved the Covid-19 vaccine manufactured by Pfizer and BioNTech.

More areas of England could be placed under tougher coronavirus restrictions when the health secretary outlines changes to tiers on Wednesday.

Matt Hancock will address the recalled House of Commons after MPs have passed key legislation on the post-Brexit trade deal with the European Union.

A decision is expected to be made at a meeting of the government’s Covid-19 Operations committee on Tuesday evening, to be chaired by Boris Johnson.

With case rates rising in all regions of England, as well as the number of Covid-19 patients in hospitals, any changes are likely to involve areas moving up a tier rather than down.

Some parts of the east Midlands, such as Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, could be moved up from tier 3 to 4, while other counties such as Lincolnshire and Derbyshire may stay in tier 3, the Press Association reports.

All the areas within the West Midlands metropolitan county – Birmingham, Coventry, Dudley, Sandwell, Solihull, Walsall and Wolverhampton – might be facing a move from tier 3 to 4.

Hartlepool in north-east England, along with a handful of areas in Lancashire – Blackburn with Darwen, Burnley, Pendle and Ribble Valley – could also be upgraded from tier 3 to 4.

Cumbria might be moved from tier 2 to 3, as could Worcestershire and North Yorkshire.

Pressure has been mounting on ministers to expand tier 4 restrictions in the face of increasing strain on hospitals in England, where the number of patients has surpassed the April peak of the first wave.

The United Arab Emirates has discovered a “limited number” of cases of people infected with the new coronavirus variant in the country, a government official has said.

At a press conference on Tuesday, the official also said those affected had travelled from abroad, without specifying from where or the number of the cases.

Meanwhile, the UAE reported 1,506 new Covid-19 cases in the last 24 hours, taking the overall national tally of those infected to 204,369.

A 90-year-old woman who became the first person in the world to receive the Pfizer vaccine this month has been given her second dose.

Margaret Keenan was given the follow-up injection at Coventry’s University hospital in England on Tuesday, three weeks after making history with the first jab.

She received an initial injection on 8 December, and NHS England said at the time that she would have a “booster jab” 21 days later “to ensure she has the best chance of being protected against the virus”.

Prof Andy Hardy, the chief executive of University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS trust, said:

We were delighted to welcome Margaret Keenan back to Coventry’s University Hospital today to safely receive the second dose of the vaccination, after she became the first person in the world to receive the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine following its clinical approval.

Our hardworking staff who have been involved in the vaccination programme have remained in contact with Margaret’s family since that day and we are delighted that Margaret has been continuing to recover well at home following her discharge from hospital.

The most recent figures published by the Department of Health last week showed the number of people to have had their first jab between 8 and 20 December in the UK was 616,933.

But speaking on Christmas Eve, Boris Johnson said almost 800,000 people had been given their first dose of the two-step vaccine.

Since the initial jabs were administered in hospitals, the rollout has widened to GP-led sites and care homes.

Secondary schools in England are unlikely to fully reopen until after mid-January at the earliest, according to new plans being thrashed out within government that would also see school staff be given high priority for Covid vaccinations.

According to government sources, ministers are torn between heeding its scientific advisers over the rapid spread of the new Covid variant, and warnings from the Department for Education that switching to remote learning for the whole of January would make it hard for schools and colleges to reopen again before Easter, jeopardising next year’s exams.

The revised timetable being discussed would mean only older students who are taking exams, such as A-levels and GCSEs, would receive remote teaching for the week from 4 January, in effect giving most secondary pupils an extra week’s holiday while schools and colleges gear up for mass testing.

You can read the full report from my colleagues Richard Adams and Simon Murphy here:

In England, a further 365 people who tested positive for coronavirus have died in hospital, bringing the total number of confirmed deaths reported in hospitals to 49,225.

NHS England said the patients were aged between 26 and 101. All except 12, aged between 43 and 92, had known underlying health conditions.

The deaths were between 12 and 28 December. There were 11 other deaths reported with no positive Covid-19 test result.

The European Union has criticised the jailing of a citizen-journalist in China who reported on the early outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic from Wuhan.

Zhang Zhan, who reported at the peak of the crisis in the city where the coronavirus first emerged, was sentenced to four years imprisonment on Monday. Her lawyer said Zhang was jailed on the grounds of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”.

The EU called for Zhang’s immediate release, as well as for freedom for jailed human rights lawyer Yu Wensheng, and several other detained and convicted human rights defenders and individuals who engaged in reporting in the public interest.

“According to credible sources, Ms Zhang has been subject to torture and ill-treatment during her detention and her health condition has seriously deteriorated,” an external affairs spokesman for the 27-member EU said.

Citizen-journalist Zhang was among a handful of people whose firsthand accounts from crowded hospitals and empty streets painted a more dire picture of the pandemic than the official narrative.

Critics say China deliberately arranged for Zhang’s trial to take place during the holiday season in the west, to minimise scrutiny.

“The restrictions on freedom of expression, on access to information, and intimidation and surveillance of journalists, as well as detentions, trials and sentencing of human rights defenders, lawyers, and intellectuals in China, are growing and continue to be a source of great concern,” the EU spokesman said.

Ireland began administering the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine on Tuesday, amid surging Covid-19 cases.

Annie Lynch was the first person in the country to receive the vaccine at Dublin’s St James’s Hospital, Ireland’s health service said. Health staff and patients at four hospitals were also vaccinated.

“Today is a new day. It marks a new chapter in our fight,” health minister Stephen Donnelly told RTE Radio.

Donnelly said Ireland expected to vaccinate all 75,000 people who live or work in nursing homes and tens of thousands of other health workers by the end of February.

Earlier on Tuesday, a senior official said Ireland may be able to provide a Covid-19 vaccine to everyone in the country who wants one by August in a “fairly positive scenario” that would depend on the timing of approval of other vaccines.

The seven-day average number of daily cases of Covid has tripled in Ireland to almost 1,000 over the last two weeks, after restrictions were eased in the run-up to the Christmas holiday.

The government has since closed restaurants and is to meet on Wednesday to consider additional restrictions.

It also brought forward the vaccine programme by a day following criticism it was acting too slowly after receiving the first doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine on 26 December, as part of a coordinated European Union-wide roll-out.

A total of 86,894 have been infected in Ireland since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and 2,205 people have died as a result, health ministry data showed on Monday.