Health News at Your Fingertips

Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud has received the first dose of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine, the state news agency SPA said.

The agency posted two pictures and a short video that showed medical staff injecting the 85-year-old.

The election campaign launch by Portugal’s far-right presidential candidate, Andre Ventura, got off to a shaky start on Friday when reporters walked out on his joint news conference with visiting French counterpart Marine Le Pen due to a lack of social distancing, Reuters reports.

Invited to a small, windowless conference room in a hotel basement in Lisbon, most of the several dozen reporters decided to leave over fears of coronavirus contagion, just as Portugal reported record daily infections and deaths.

But the incident did not appear to upset Ventura of the Chega party, whose political rise has troubled rights groups. The two far-right leaders ended up speaking to the media outdoors before laying a wreath at the monument to fallen soldiers on Lisbon’s main thoroughfare.

“We want another political system, we want another constitution, a different way to do justice,” said Ventura, who is known for his derogatory remarks against ethnic minorities, especially Roma communities.

Although there is little doubt the current president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, will comfortably win a second term in the 24 January election, Ventura, who in 2019 grabbed the far-right’s first parliamentary seat since the end of dictatorship in 1974, could get around 10% of the vote, according to opinion polls.

The party’s over in Argentina, where the government has issued a decree giving provinces the power to restrict nighttime activities after the media was flooded with images of packed beaches and outdoor parties, according to Reuters.

The decree asks provincial governments to restrict movement of people in the late night and early morning hours in the country, where it is the height of the southern hemisphere summer. Atlantic beaches that run alongside the populous province of Buenos Aires have been among the most crowded in the country.

Data show that new daily infections more than doubled as Argentina’s summer holiday season got going at the end of the year. As of Thursday, 1,690,006 cases of coronavirus had been recorded in the country, with 44,122 deaths.

Santiago Cafiero, chief of staff of the Argentine president, Alberto Fernandez, said at a news conference:

We have to be very aware of the situation we are in. What we do at the national level is set guidelines and warn about future risks, but then those who must apply the measures are the local authorities. Today they have been empowered to do that.

Argentina began an early and strict quarantine in March, which was later made more flexible, in part to help an economy that has been in recession since 2018.

Genetic variants of the Sars-CoV-2 virus, including the one first detected in the UK, could lead to false negative coronavirus test results, the US Food and Drug Administration has said.

According to Reuters, the agency has alerted clinical laboratory staff and health care providers to the possible false negative results from any molecular test, and has asked them to consider such results in combination with clinical observations, and repeat testing with a different test if Covid-19 is still suspected.

The FDA, however, said the risk that these mutations will impact overall testing accuracy is low. You can read more of the FDA’s report by clicking here.

The FDA said on Friday its analysis found the performance of three tests, that have received emergency use authorisation, to be impacted by genetic variants of the coronavirus, but noted that the impact does not appear to be significant.

Madrid, Andalusia and the Balearic Islands became the latest regions in Spain to announce tougher coronavirus restrictions on Friday, following similar moves by Castile and Leon, and Catalonia, according to Reuters.

Authorities in the Madrid region, which has one of the country’s highest rates of infection, at 452 cases per 100,000 people, extended localised lockdowns to about 40 neighbourhoods.

Some 1.2m people in the worst affected areas – about 18% of the Madrid region’s population – will be confined to their home district when the restrictions come into force on Monday, Madrid’s health chief, Antonio Zapatero, told a press conference.

The Madrid health department will also begin offering free rapid tests for 18-29 year olds in a push to detect asymptomatic virus carriers.

The southern region of Andalusia ordered bars and restaurants to close by 6pm, while on Mallorca they will be entirely shut down for two weeks.

In spite of the measures, most of the country has more freedom than in the rest of Western Europe. An opinion poll on Thursday showed some 60% of Spaniards believed measures should have been tougher.

The World Health Organization has received 13 “valid proposals” for possible emergency listing of Covid-19 vaccines since October, and some are at an advanced stage, assistant director general Mariangela Simao said.

Simao added the WHO expected to receive full data from Russia’s Gamaleya Institute on its vaccine by the end of January.

All Danes will have received a second shot of a Covid-19 vaccine by late June as long as the country receives enough vaccine shipments, the Danish health authority has said.

People aged 80 or higher are expected to be vaccinated by mid-April and all frontline health personnel are expected to be vaccinated by late April, it said in a document published on Friday.

All other eligible individuals over the age of 16 or 18 willing to take the vaccine will be vaccinated by late June, according to the document, which is based on estimates contingent on vaccines being approved and delivered on time.

As of Friday, 102,092 Danes had received their first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, or around 1.75% of the population, which puts Denmark ahead of most European countries.

South African scientists are testing whether vaccines will be less effective against a Covid-19 variant first detected locally and hope for initial results within two weeks, a professor at the national communicable disease institute said.

The variant, known as 501Y.V2, was identified by South African genomics experts late last year and is thought to be more contagious than older variants.

Prof Penny Moore told Reuters the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) had received samples from several local vaccine trials, including Oxford University and AstraZeneca’s shot, and would try to find out whether antibody responses are reduced against 501Y.V2.

Moore said the NICD would run tests on all the vaccines being trialled in South Africa, including doses being developed by Pfizer and BioNTech , Johnson & Johnson and Novavax.

She said concerns expressed by British scientists and politicians this week that vaccines may not be as effective against the 501Y.V2 variant were not unfounded because of worrying mutations in the spike protein the virus uses to infect human cells.

“There is enough evidence to justify a concerted effort to understand whether there will be reduced protection from vaccines,” Moore added.

The variant has driven a resurgence in infections in South Africa, taking total cases to more than 1.17 million – the most in Africa – and sending daily new cases to a peak of over 21,000 this week.

South Africa’s health minister said on Thursday hospitals were struggling to manage the influx of patients, as he laid out plans to vaccinate two-thirds of the population to achieve herd immunity.

Spain added 25,456 coronavirus cases to its tally on Friday in the biggest one-day jump since October, as the infection rate continues to accelerate in the wake of the holiday season.

Total cases since the start of the pandemic rose to 2,050,360, while the death toll climbed by 199 to 51,874, data showed.

The virus’ incidence jumped to 350 cases per 100,000 people from 321 cases on Thursday.

Denmark will restrict travel from all countries from 9 January, and has advised against going abroad, to limit the spread of Covid-19, in particular the more transmissible mutations first found in Britain and South Africa.

The move follows a decision this week to further tighten an already stringent economic and social lockdown.

Foreign minister Jeppe Kofod told reporters the travel measures were “a logical consequence of the domestic measures taken by the government in the last few days”.

Danish authorities have so far found no trace of the South African coronavirus variant, but they estimate the British variant will be the dominant one in Denmark by mid-February.

From Friday, entry to Denmark will be limited to people with a credible purpose and proof of a negative coronavirus test no older than 24 hours, transport minister Benny Engelbrecht told the news conference.

The travel restrictions will remain in place until at least 17 January.