Health News at Your Fingertips

There’s a more on New Zealand’s lockdown from Eva Corlett in Wellington, and Tess McClure here:

New Zealand’s coronavirus cluster has grown to 10, with genomic sequencing linking it to the Delta outbreak that began in Sydney, as the country woke up to day one of a snap lockdown stemming from just one case.

Due to staff from private hospitals across greater Sydney and some regional areas being deployed to assist the response to Covid-19 in New South Wales, Australia’s health department has announced non-urgent elective surgery at just under 30 private hospitals will be postponed from Monday 23 August.

The federal government has agreed to the temporary suspension. Emergency and urgent elective surgery will continue as normal.

Asian markets rallied on Wednesday as investors engaged in bargain hunting despite losses on Wall Street and a surge of the coronavirus Delta variant stoking fears about the global economic recovery, Agence France-Presse reports.

A fresh lockdown in New Zealand and a curfew imposed in Australia’s second-largest city of Melbourne over a Delta outbreak added to concerns about lockdowns along with travel restrictions in China, the world’s second-largest economy.

A lacklustre US retail sales report also exacerbated worries about the latest Covid-19 wave, bringing Wall Street’s streak of five straight records for the Dow and S&P 500 indices to a stuttering halt.

But Asian markets appeared unmoved by gloomy prospects, with Tokyo snapping a four-day losing streak to close higher Wednesday.

Hong Kong also enjoyed gains, with investors seemingly broadly unfazed by new antitrust plans from Beijing designed to rein in China’s burgeoning tech giants – plans that saw Chinese firms listed on Wall Street slide overnight.

In China, markets were well up, recouping losses after disappointing economic data from Beijing earlier in the week. Seoul rose, while Australia was steady.

New Zealand made gains despite fears over fresh virus cases as the country’s Reserve Bank chose to keep interest rates unchanged, opting against a move that would have seen it become the first advanced economy in the Asia Pacific to normalise policy.

Malaysia has reported 22,242 cases yesterday, a new daily record for the country.

Research should focus on diseases of the airways to help patients with long Covid, experts in the UK have said.

International bodies and governments are being advised of the research priorities which have been identified to address the long-term effects of coronavirus in airways diseases, PA reports.

This includes conditions such as in cystic fibrosis, asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Professor Tony De Soyza, professor of pulmonary medicine at Newcastle University, who led the research on behalf of the International Group of Airways Diseases, said:

The challenges of long Covid cannot be understated – this is an entirely new disease which we need to understand better so we can treat better.

Symptoms of the condition can include extreme tiredness, shortness of breath, chest pain or tightness, and range from joint pain to depression and anxiety.

The international team adapted the established Child Health and Nutrition Research Initiative (CHNRI) method to set research priorities.

This uses the principle of crowdsourcing to independently generate research ideas from a large group of experts and score these against a predefined set of criteria.

They also considered patients’ views.

Dr Samantha Walker, Asthma UK and the British Lung Foundation director of research and innovation, said:

We’re really pleased that these research priorities, which will guide the direction of future research into the long-term effects of Covid-19 on respiratory diseases, have been developed with patient needs at their heart.

Far too often the hugely valuable lived experiences of patients have been peripheral or absent.

By embedding the needs of those living with long Covid into the very structure of the research questions, people across the globe will benefit from this effort to deepen our understanding of the impact of Covid-19 and help improve the range and effectiveness of treatments in years to come.

Here is more detail on Red Cross’s call for more vaccines support for south-east Asia, from the Guardian’s correspondent Rebecca Ratcliffe:

The UK has called for an immediate and sustained pause in clashes and unrest in Myanmar to allow vaccinations as an intense Covid-19 surge is ravaging the country.

Britain’s deputy UN ambassador, James Kariuki, told reporters after closed Security Council discussions:

Prior to the coup, Myanmar had a strong vaccination record and was developing a COVID-19 plan. Now, Myanmar’s health system is barely functioning, unacceptable attacks on hospitals, doctors and nurses continue, and only 3% of the population are vaccinated.

Myanmar has been struggling with one of the worst Covid-19 surges in Southeast Asia, and the military leadership that ousted Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s democratically elected government 1 February has been accused of diverting critical medical supplies to itself and its supporters.

Kariuki said: “The UK is calling for an immediate and sustained humanitarian pause to allow vaccines to get to all in need, and for medical and humanitarian staff to work without fear or attack.”

Hello, Robyn Vinter here (actually in the north of England).

The US reported more than 1,000 Covid-19 deaths on Tuesday, or about 42 fatalities an hour, according to a Reuters tally, as the Delta variant continues to ravage parts of the country with low vaccination rates.

Coronavirus-related deaths have spiked in the past month and are averaging 769 per day, the highest since mid-April, according to a Reuters tally. Since the start of the pandemic, the country has lost 622,813 people to Covid-19, the highest number of deaths for any country in the world.

That’s all from me on the blog today. I will now be handing over to my colleague Robyn Vinter in London