Health News at Your Fingertips

Auckland, New Zealand’s biggest city, emerged on Sunday from a strict weeklong lockdown imposed after a community cluster of the more contagious UK coronavirus variant, Reuters has reported.

There were no new local Covid-19 cases recorded on Sunday, health officials said, allowing for the restrictions to ease. If no community cases are confirmed during the rest of Sunday, it would make a full seven days since the last community case.
There are still limits on public gathering in the city of nearly two million, however, and masks are obligatory on public transport.

Footage on TVNZ, New Zealand’s state-owned television network, showed people lining up at coffee shops on Sunday morning with many saying they were feeling relieved.
The government said it might ease restrictions in Auckland further on Friday, to bring them to the same level as in the rest of New Zealand.

In neighbouring Australia, the state of Victoria, which was under a five-day lockdown in mid-February after a small Covid-19 outbreak, recorded nine straight days of no local transmissions on Sunday.

The reopening of England’s schools to all pupils on Monday will mark the first step back towards normality, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said.

Johnson has announced a roadmap for lifting lockdown measures that sees schools open first, followed in later stages by the gradual easing of restrictions on mixing with other people and the re-opening of non-essential shops and other venues. In the final stage, which will take place no earlier than June 21, the government hopes to remove all remaining legal limits on contact with others.

“The reopening of schools marks a truly national effort to beat this virus,” Johnson said.
“It is because of the determination of every person in this country that we can start moving closer to a sense of normality and it is right that getting our young people back into the classroom is the first step.”

Each step on the roadmap will depend on the level of Covid-19 cases, the government has said. It hopes the pandemic can be contained by a vaccine programme that has already delivered a dose to nearly 22 million people, as well as regular testing.

Many secondary schools and colleges had already started inviting students for their first “lateral flow” Covid-19 tests, which give rapid results, with nearly 1 million conducted last week, the government said.

After three initial tests on site, students will be provided with two tests to use each week at home, it said, adding that nearly 57 million tests had been delivered to schools and colleges across the country.

There have been 779 further deaths from coronavirus and 6,561 new confirmed cases in Mexico, bringing its total to 2,125,866 infections and 190,357 deaths, Mexico’s health ministry reported.

Officials have been frustrated by bottlenecks in the vaccine supply and raised concerns that wealthy countries are hoarding vaccines.

On Monday, the administration of the US president, Joe Biden, downplayed the prospect of sharing vaccines with Mexico.

Mexico has so far administered roughly 2.7m vaccine doses, enough for about 1.1% of the population, according to data compiled by Reuters.

Health officials have said the real number of infected people and deaths in Mexico is likely significantly higher than the official count.

Joe Biden hailed “one more giant step forward on delivering on that promise that help is on the way”, after Democrats took a critical step towards a first major legislative victory since assuming control of Congress and the White House, with a party-line vote in the Senate to approve a $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill.

After a marathon voting session through the night on Friday and into Saturday afternoon, Democrats overcame unified Republican opposition to approve the sweeping stimulus package. The final tally was 50-49, with one Republican absent.

One of the largest emergency aid packages in US history now returns to the House for final approval before being signed into law by Biden. Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, has said she expects to approve the measure before 14 March, when tens of millions of Americans risk losing unemployment benefits if no action is taken.

Read the full story here:

The US has administered 87,912,323 doses of Covid-19 vaccines as of Saturday morning and delivered 116,355,405 doses, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

The tally of doses are for both Moderna Inc and Pfizer Inc/BioNTech SE vaccines, the agency said.

The agency said 57,358,849 people had received one or more doses, while 29,776,160 people have received the second dose as of Saturday.

A total of 7,349,495 vaccine doses have been administered in long-term care facilities, the agency said.

French police cleared the banks of the River Seine in central Paris on Saturday over concerns people were getting too close together and not respecting coronavirus social distancing rules.

Hundreds of people were asked to leave the area – popular for strolling and picnicking on sunny days – and police officers closed the riverbanks for the rest of the day, Reuters reports.

“Social distancing rules are not being respected,” police called out through a megaphone.

The police have regularly been clearing the area over the past few weeks with warmer weather bringing people out to take advantage of the sunshine before a curfew kicks in from 6pm to 6am.

The Paris police banned the consumption of alcohol on the riverside on Friday and asked people to limit their gatherings.

The government has resisted putting the capital and its surrounding area back under lockdown despite a rise in coronavirus cases and growing numbers of patients in the capital’s intensive care units.

There is no evidence the mutated coronavirus strain first found in the Brazilian city of Manaus has been transmitted by the three Scots infected with the variant, Scotland’s health secretary Jeane Freeman has said.

A total of six cases of the P1 variant were identified in the UK last month – three in Scotland and three in England.

Since then, approximately 300 contacts or contacts of contacts linked to the three Scottish cases have been reached, told to self-isolate and offered a Covid-19 test, Freeman has revealed.

Freeman has now announced that there has been no community transmission linked to the variant strain of coronavirus identified since the first cases were discovered on 27 February.

She also confirmed that attempts to track down all passengers on the Heathrow to Aberdeen flight taken by the three Scots who tested positive for the mutated virus have ended, despite a failure to locate 21 of the 90 people on the plane.

Although the search for the remaining passengers has been called off, anyone who was on flight BA1312 on 29 January who has not been contacted is still being asked to call the national contact tracing centre on 0800 030 8012.

She said:

There is no evidence of any community transmission of the P1 variant so far, and I am grateful to health protection teams, local clinicians and contact tracers for their efforts to contact the remaining passengers.

We have used all available options and done everything possible to contact all passengers, including referring to flight manifests and telephone information from the Community Health Index to make contact.

Some passengers only have international telephone numbers so it is possible they are no longer in Scotland.

Ireland has now administered half a million coronavirus jabs.

The taoiseach, Micheál Martin, hailed Irish progress in the pandemic, tweeting on Saturday afternoon that he had been informed by the Health Service Executive that the country had passed the half-million mark.

Speaking earlier in a video posted on Twitter, Martin said he had been inspired by recent visits to vaccination centres where thousands of frontline healthcare workers were receiving the inoculation.

He said the government and the HSE were doing everything they could to secure supplies and to give vaccines to people as quickly as possible.

The first coronavirus vaccine in Ireland was given to a Dublin woman, Annie Lynch, on 29 December.

Read the full story here:

In the UK, Prince Charles has paid tribute to the courage shown throughout the Commonwealth in response to coronavirus in a broadcast that will air on Sunday.

The prince was joined by other royals, including his elder son and heir Prince William, in talking about the impact of Covid-19 in messages recorded for a programme marking Commonwealth Day dedicated to the countries, mainly from the former British empire, that maintain links with Britain.

He said:

The coronavirus pandemic has affected every country of the Commonwealth, cruelly robbing countless people of their lives and livelihoods, disrupting our societies and denying us the human connections which we so dearly cherish.

Amidst such heartbreaking suffering, however, the extraordinary determination, courage and creativity with which people have responded has been an inspiration to us all.

Commonwealth Day is usually marked with a service held at London’s Westminster Abbey, but it was cancelled this year due to the pandemic.

It will be replaced by a special programme – A Celebration for Commonwealth Day – which will be broadcast on BBC One at 5pm on Sunday.

The US Senate has passed President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief plan in a party-line vote after an all-night session that saw Democrats battling among themselves over jobless aid and the Republican minority failing in attempts to push through some three dozen amendments.

The final bill includes $400 billion in one-time payments of $1,400 to most Americans, $300 a week in extended jobless benefits for the 9.5 million people thrown out of work in the crisis, and $350 billion in aid to state and local governments, Reuters reports.

The Senate voted 50-49, with no Republicans voting in favour, on what would be one of the largest stimulus packages in US history.