Health News at Your Fingertips

The Irish government is facing accusations of discrimination for stopping pandemic unemployment payments to people who holiday abroad.

Opposition parties and civil rights advocates condemned the policy after it emerged that 104 people had their payments halted after authorities detected them leaving Ireland. Another 44 people had other welfare payments stopped after boarding flights.

Under the rules of the social welfare benefits people are supposed to avoid foreign travel in accordance with public health advice to curb the spread of Covid-19.

However, critics say last week’s publication of a “green list” of countries deemed relatively safe for travel has confused people and undermines the stay-home message.

He told RTE on Sunday:

The Department of Social Protection gets information from the airports and if someone is not genuinely seeking work or is not genuinely living in the country any more, their welfare payments can be stopped.

Belgium’s government is expected to tighten restrictions designed to reduce the spread of Covid-19 after a sharp increase in the national number of infections and a 500% week-on-week spike in the city of Antwerp.

The country’s national security council (NSC), led by the prime minister, Sophie Wilmès, will meet on Monday to decide whether to to enact local lockdowns and reduce the permitted size of social bubbles in the face of a second wave of the disease.

Marc Van Ranst, a member of Belgium’s coronavirus advisory committee, said the meeting was “the most important … to be held since March”, when the national lockdown was imposed.

He added:

“We are acting earlier than during the first wave, we also want to stop [a new wave] earlier.

French health minister Olivier Véran has warned youngsters to maintain coronavirus safety measures including keeping their distance, washing hands and wearing masks after a rise in the number of cases of Covid-19 among young people

Véran appealed for “vigilance”. The minister said at the weekend:

When we carry out mass testing we are seeing a lot of young patients … more youngsters than during the previous wave.

This is particularly the case in the Île-de-France (Paris) region where we are seeing young people who are infected without knowing how it happened. Clearly, older people are still being very careful, while young people are paying less attention.

The French government has announced that Covid-19 nasal tests will be fully reimbursed by the country’s health service even without a medical prescription. Until now, anyone wanting to be tested had to first consult their GP.

Véran told Le Parisien France was carrying out nearly 500,000 tests a week and the rate of positive results was 1.5%. “As we are testing more, we are finding more people invected,” he said.

Asked if he had a message for youngsters, Véron added:

I say to them that I completely understand their need to get out and breathe some air, but the virus is not taking a holiday. We haven’t yet won the war.

A total of 30,192 people are believed to have died in hospitals and care homes in France since the pandemic began, according to the latest figures on Friday. Last week, the number of new cases rose to more than 1,000 per 24 hours.The statistics are no longer given over the weekend but will be updated on Monday evening. The last figures from the public health authority suggests 1.2% of tests were found to be positive and 127 clusters are currently under investigation.

In Quiberon, in Brittany, which has seen a rise in coronavirus cases, the local authority closed the beaches from 9pm to 7am after 54 young people were diagnosed with Covid-19.

Officials have warned more bars and beaches will be shut to the public if the number of cases continues to rise.

Hong Kong’s chief secretary, Matthew Cheung Kin-chung, is announcing new measures for the city as it battles a growing outbreak. We earlier reported that Hong Kong has seen five consecutive days with figures in the triple figures. More than half of Hong Kong’s total case count in the pandemic has been in July, the vast majority of it community transmission.

Cheung has just told media.

The next two to three weeks will be critical. We need to prevent the further spread of the disease in the community,”

There is a high risk of a major outbreak in the community. That’s why the community as a whole and the govt must remain highly vigilant. The pandemic is worrying, there is no sign of any improvement.

The new measures will come into place from Wednesday:

• Mask wearing is mandatory in all public places.
• Apart from specified premises, all dine-in services are suspended. Take-away service can continue.
• Sports venues, swimming pools will be included among businesses forced to close.
• Group gatherings are restricted to no more than two people.

It’s going to be a grim Summer in Hong Kong.

Prof Sophie Chan, secretary for food and health, tells media the government is continually expanding its testing capability (widely reported to be under pressure despite being in numbers far below other countries – around 10,000/day).

They’ll concentrate on vulnerable groups, aged care homes, and taxi drivers, and they aren’t ruling out bringing in more private labs to reinforce government testing capacity.

Vietnam is evacuating 80,00o people from the central city of Danang and reimposed disease-prevention measures, after four local coronavirus cases were detected, the first to be recorded in the country for more than three months.

The source of the new cases is not clear. Vietnamese media reported that the 57-year-old man, a retired grandfather, had not left the city in recent months, but had visited three healthcare facilities and had recently attended a wedding. He visited hospital with a cough and fever on 20 July and is reportedly in critical condition:

South Korea has said that a defector who recently fled to the North does not appear to have contracted Covid-19, a day after Pyongyang imposed a lockdown near the border, claiming the man was its first recorded case of the illness.

North Korean state media reported on Sunday that the 24-year-old man, who was reportedly in quarantine, was displaying symptoms of coronavirus after returning to his homeland across the border separating the two Koreas last week.

The North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, declared a state of “maximum emergency” and ordered the border town of Kaesong, where the defector was discovered, to go into lockdown, the state-run KCNA news agency said.

But on Monday, health authorities in the South said there was no evidence that the defector had contracted the illness: