Health News at Your Fingertips

With a quarter of Shepparton’s residents unable to leave their homes, food and medicine supplies disrupted, and the defence force moving in, it is as if the town in Victoria, Australia, has been hit by an earthquake or major flooding, not a Covid cluster.

“It almost needs to be treated as you would a natural disaster,” Chris Hazelman, the manager of the Ethnic Council of Shepparton and District, said. “It’s a huge, huge challenge. Look at Melbourne: if you said 2 million people were in isolation, how would you deal with it?”

The regional centre of about 65,000 people about 190km north of Melbourne recorded its first case of this outbreak on 20 August. In the past week, the cluster has grown to 67, with 16,000 people in isolation, my colleagues Nino Bucci and Calla Wahlquist report.

The staggering proportion of residents in isolation has caused two separate but interconnected problems: a surge in demand for the delivery of food and essential items, but a shortage of workers at the businesses that provide them.

That’s it from me, Léonie Chao-Fong, for today. I’m handing over to my colleague Mattha Busby. Here’s a quick roundup of what’s been happening so far:

• Japan will halt the use of 1.63m doses of Moderna’s Covid vaccine after a report of contamination of vials with particulate matter.
• NHS England has been told to prepare to administer jabs to all children aged 12 and above, as vaccine advisers continue to consider whether to extend the programme, according to reports.
• A government campaign urging students in England to have twice-weekly Covid tests for “a more normal year” at school and college has been labelled “naive” by school union leaders.
• New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has dismissed criticism of her ambitious elimination strategy to stamp out Covid, as the country’s outbreak grows, saying the approach has saved lives and will continue to do so.
• Russia recorded 19,630 new Covid cases and 820 deaths in the latest 24-hour period, the government’s coronavirus task force said on Thursday.
• China criticised the US “politicisation” of efforts to trace the origin of the coronavirus and restated dubious demands for a US military laboratory to be investigated, amid the release of an “inconclusive” American intelligence community report on the virus’s origins.
• Papua New Guinea has banned all repatriation flights from India, after accusing the country’s high commission of a deliberate “deception” that resulted in passengers infected with Covid-19 arriving in the country.

Air travel to the UK continues to be severely affected by the pandemic, new figures by the Home Office show.

Just 1.4m airline passengers arrived in the country last month, up 14% compared with July 2020 but 87% lower than July 2019. About 54% of arrivals last month were British nationals, PA reports.

An Aboriginal woman with Covid and breathing difficulties was allegedly turned away from a local hospital in the town of Wilcannia in New South Wales in Australia, as local health officials admit the town does not have a ventilator despite having the highest rate of Covid transmission in the state.

Wilcannia has a higher Covid transmission rate than the worst hotspots in Sydney, sparking fresh calls for a coordinated state and federal effort to help the tiny, majority-Aboriginal town manage increasing illness, as well as securing essential supplies and safe places for people to self-isolate.

Locals say they are scared that “all they have is body bags” as the town has recorded more than 50 active cases in 14 days.

Read the full report here:

Inmates at a prison in Arkansas in the United States have been prescribed a medicine used to deworm livestock to combat Covid, despite warnings from health officials that the antiparasitic drug should not be used to treat the coronavirus.

Washington County’s sheriff confirmed that the jail’s health provider had been prescribing the drug but didn’t say how many inmates at the 710-bed facility had been given ivermectin, AP reports.

“Whatever a doctor prescribes, that is not in my bailiwick,” Sheriff Tim Helder told members of the Washington County quorum court.

It comes after the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) told Americans to stop taking ivermectin instead of getting a Covid shot, after a spike in calls to the Mississippi poison control centre.

At least two people have been hospitalised with potential ivermectin toxicity after ingesting the drug, the state’s poison control centre said Monday.

Russia recorded 19,630 new Covid cases and 820 deaths in the latest 24-hour period, the government’s coronavirus task force said on Thursday.

The latest figures compare to 19,536 new cases and 809 deaths the previous day.

Here’s the full story on the proposed plans to extend the UK’s vaccination programme to 12- to 15-year-olds, from my colleague Damien Gayle.

NHS England has been told to prepare to administer Covid vaccinations to all children aged 12 and above, according to reports.

More on the story of Moderna withdrawing a supply of about 1.63m doses of its Covid-19 vaccine in Japan after a report of contamination of vials with particulate matter.

Spain’s drugmaker Rovi, which bottles or “fills and finishes” Moderna vaccines for markets other than the US, has confirmed that the potential contamination is under investigation and appears to be limited to “a few batches” for Japan.

A spokesperson for the company said production of the vaccine has not been halted at its plants.

As back to school looms and in-person teaching returns, there is an expectation that Covid-19 cases will rise, especially among children.

In the UK, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MRHA) has approved the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines for children aged 12 to 17, but they are still not available to most people in this demographic. At present, children aged 12 to 15 are only offered a jab if they are considered clinically vulnerable.

A public health expert has said the vaccine rollout should be extended to 12- to 15-year-olds, with the Delta variant “flying through schools”.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme today, Prof Devi Sridhar, a global public health specialist at the University of Edinburgh, said:

I think right now, if we know the options with Delta, given how infectious it is, is that either you’re going to be exposed to Covid without any protection or you can be exposed and have a vaccine.

And we should be offering teens that vaccine so they have that protection before going back into schools.

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has not yet advised on widening the rollout to healthy teens in the 12-15 age group.

Sridhar said the JCVI were being “very cautious” when it comes to widening the jabs rollout but “waiting and watching costs time”.

Time is the currency now that matters because it’s not like we can wait and watch and in six months say, ‘OK, it’s safe, let’s vaccinate.’

In those six months if a large percentage of 12- to 15-year-olds get infected, in some ways they’ve lost that window of time and so I think perhaps they don’t feel the urgency that they should be feeling given it’s an emergency situation and we have Delta, which is so infectious. I mean, it’s just flying through schools as we know.

A store in Malaysia is selling handmade paper Covid jabs for people to honour their loved ones who lost their lives during the pandemic.

A box set of a syringe and two vaccine vials made of paper have become a popular praying item at Raymond Shieh Siow Leong’s religious goods store in the southern Malaysian city of Johor Bahru.

Shieh said the idea came to him after reading testimonies by people who had lost friends and family before they had a chance to be vaccinated.

He told Reuters: “The Covid-19 situation in our country is quite serious and many people passed away before receiving the vaccine. I hope this product can help the deceased to fulfil their dying wish.”

Malaysia has one of the highest rates of Covid infections and deaths in south-east Asia, with almost 1.6m cases and a death toll of 14,818.