Health News at Your Fingertips

Clamping down on lockdown rule breakers will get coronavirus back under control, Priti Patel said, as she acknowledged that the number of Covid cases was still too high.

The home secretary warned people that their “actions have consequences” and urged them to adhere to legislation or face a fine.

But she said tougher lockdown measures were not needed to get the R number -currently estimated to be around 1.2 to 1.3- down below one.

She told PA media that officers had been tackling people breaking the law, including by holding house parties and illegal raves.

It comes as a further 532 people who tested positive for coronavirus have died in hospital in England, bringing the total number of confirmed deaths reported in hospitals to 61,453, NHS England said on Monday.

Covid case rates have fallen week-on-week across every region of England, new analysis indicates.

The analysis by PA Media shows that of the 315 local areas in England, 279 (89%) have seen a drop in case rates in the seven days to January 13 compared with the previous week, while 36 (11%) have seen a rise.

The rates have fallen across every region in the country over the same period, with the highest drop in London, down from 1,014.6 cases per 100,000 people to 761.3 in the week to January 13.

It is followed by eastern England, which is down from 755.0 to 556.6, and the south east which is down from 688.7 to 530.4.

Turkmenistan has become the first country in Central Asia to register Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine against coronavirus, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) said.

“The vaccine was approved under the emergency use authorisation procedure without additional clinical trials in Turkmenistan,” the RDIF said in a statement on Monday.

The number of new Covid infections in Germany is far too high, the government spokesman said on Monday.

Concern about new variants of the virus are the reason chancellor Angela Merkel and state leaders have brought forward a planned meeting to Tuesday, Steffen Seibert said.

“We still have a big risk… that is the risk of mutation,” Seibert told a regular news conference, adding that there needed to be a joint European response .

Shops in Greece reopened for the first time in two months on Monday as the government took its first cautious steps towards easing Covid curbs, in an effort to re-vitalise the beleaguered retail sector.

Retailers selling non-essential items were allowed to serve customers under heavy restrictions, with shoppers required to register by instant message and book appointments with hair salons.

Japanese doctors have detected a fast-spreading variant of the new coronavirus first discovered in Britain in three people who had not travelled there, the health ministry said on Monday.

The three, aged from their 20s to their 60s and living in Shizuoka prefecture, about 125 miles west of Tokyo, first had symptoms in early January, the ministry confirmed.

A health ministry official said the authorities are investigating how the three became infected, adding that there was no proof yet that the variant first detected in Britain was spreading in Shizuoka now, Reuters reports.

Japan has so far detected 45 cases of new variants of the virus that were first spotted in Britain, South Africa and Brazil, he said.

Update: Responding to questions over the vaccine rollout difficulties reported by Thérèse Coffey, the prime minister’s official spokesman said supplies were being “distributed equally” across the country.

Boris Johnson’s spokesman said:

I was asked a similar question last week and I said that we continue to make the vaccines available and distributed equally across England and the UK. That will remain the case. But in some areas where they have already vaccinated the majority of those four high-risk groups, we want to ensure we maintain momentum and continue to rollout the vaccine to more and more people who are at higher clinical risk – that’s why we sent out the letter to the over-70s.

“The prime minister has stated clearly that we will ensure that everybody in the first four priority groups will receive a vaccination by February 15 and we’ve also said that care home residents will all have received it by the end of the month,” he added.

Dozens of Moscow residents queued on Monday to be vaccinated against Covid-19 at the GUM department store, opposite the Kremlin on Red Square, where the shot is given on a first-come, first-served basis. Here are a few of the best captures:

Officials in the Swiss mountain resort of St Moritz have quarantined employees and guests of two luxury hotels, closed ski schools and kept schoolchildren home from class after a dozen positive tests for a highly infectious Covid variant.

About 300 employees and 95 guests at the Grand Hotel des Bains Kempinski St Moritz and Badrutt’s Palace Hotel were quarantined.

Those under quarantine will be tested and those receiving positive tests isolated, while people testing negative may be able to leave (but must follow quarantine rules once they arrive home), a spokesman for the region’s coronavirus task force said.

The nationalities of those affected were not revealed.

The prime minister’s tweet comes after Thérèse Coffey, the work and pensions secretary, said in a Facebook post that she has been contacted with concerns in the Suffolk Coastal area that some over-80s, and even over-90s, have not been invited for the coronavirus vaccination while younger citizens have been.

Public Health Wales has said 151,737 people have received a first dose of a Covid vaccine in Wales, with 201 people having received a second dose.

It reported a further 20 deaths, taking the total in Wales since the start of the pandemic to 4,294.