Health News at Your Fingertips

That’s it from me for today. My colleague Rachel Hall will be taking up the global live blog from London; our Australia live coverage continues here:

Israel’s prime minister has announced that the country would offer a coronavirus booster shot to those people over 60 who have already been vaccinated.

The announcement by Naftali Bennett makes Israel, which launched one of the world’s most successful vaccination drives earlier this year, the first country to offer a third dose of a western vaccine to its citizens on a wide scale:

Japan is set to expand the coronavirus state of emergency in Tokyo to neighboring areas and the western city of Osaka on Friday in the wake of record-breaking surge in infections while the capital hosts the Olympics.

A government panel approved the plan putting Saitama, Kanagawa and Chiba, as well as Osaka, under the state of emergency from Monday until 31 August. The measures already in place in Tokyo and the southern island of Okinawa will be extended until the end of August.

Prime minister Yoshihide Suga is scheduled to officially announce the measures later Friday. Five other areas, including Hokkaido, Kyoto, Hyogo and Fukuoka, will be placed under less-stringent emergency restrictions.

Tokyo has reported a record rise in cases for three days in a row, including 3,865 on Thursday. The cases have doubled since last week, and officials have warned they may hit 4,500 a day within two weeks.

Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte on Friday approved the imposition of lockdown measures in the capital region.

The Manila capital region, an urban sprawl of 16 cities home to more than 13 million people, will be placed under the tightest quarantine curbs from 6 August to 20 August.

Presidential spokesman Harry Roque said in a televised address. “While it is a painful decision, this is for the good of all.”

The lockdown will prevent people leaving their homes, except for essential shopping, while indoor and al fresco dining is banned.

The Philippines also extended a ban on travellers coming from 10 countries including India, Indonesia, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates to 15 August.

Already battling the second-worst coronavirus outbreak in Asia, the Philippines has so far recorded over 1.57 million confirmed Covid cases and more than 27,000 deaths.

The country has reported 216 cases of the Delta variant, but health experts say there could be more undetected cases because of the slow pace of the country’s genome sequencing.

Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic with me, Helen Sullivan.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has approved lockdown measures in the Manila capital region, home to more than 13 million people. It comes after Duterte said on Thursday that officials should detain those who refuse to be vaccinated against Covid inside their homes. Legal experts said the move would be unconstitutional and reflected his “militaristic mindset”, after Duterte claimed responding to the pandemic was more important than laws guaranteeing freedom of movement

Meanwhile Japan is set to expand the coronavirus state of emergency in Tokyo to neighbouring areas and the western city of Osaka on Friday in the wake of record-breaking surge in infections while the capital hosts the Olympics.

More on these stories shortly. In the meantime here are the other key recent developments:

• Campaigners said the global vaccine rollout may represent “the most lethal profiteering in history”, as the People’s Vaccine Alliance published an analysis suggesting pharmaceutical companies are charging at least five times above cost price.
• Israel is to begin offering a third shot of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine to people over 60, local media said.
• The British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca has said it is considering its future in the vaccine market after it Covid jab generated $1.2bn in sales in the first half of the year, with quarterly sales tripling.
• Pakistan is to controversially ban air travel for anyone without a Covid-19 vaccine certificate from August and will require all public sector workers to get vaccinated by the end of next month.
• A “substantial chunk” of 9m Covid jab doses to be donated by the UK to developing states in the coming weeks expire at the end of September, “setting up African countries to fail”.
• The Biden administration announced it will allow a nationwide ban on evictions to end on Saturday, claiming that its hands are tied after the supreme court signalled it would only be extended until the end of the month – putting millions at risk of eviction amid a sluggish distribution of promised support funds.
• Health authorities in China set up checkpoints and reportedly suspended flights in the eastern city of Nanjing in the country’s worst coronavirus emergency in months.