Health News at Your Fingertips

Hungary has seen a steady increase in infections over the past weeks – with today’s numbers – 3,125 new cases – jumping from 1,668 daily new cases a week ago. However, daily new infections still remain below the numbers elsewhere in central and eastern Europe.

Reuters note that Hungary, a country of 10 million, has reported 30,647 deaths since the start of the pandemic. More than 5.7 million people have been fully vaccinated against the virus so far, and more than 1.1 million have received a third, booster shot.

In Hungary there are still few restrictions, and mask wearing is not mandatory in closed spaces, only in healthcare facilities. However, Janos Szlavik, the country’s chief epidemiologist, told public television on Tuesday that some measures will become unavoidable if infection numbers worsen.

Here’s some of the key points from the Telegraph’s report last night on the test and trace cost scandal. Laura Donnelly wrote:

The excoriating report details a host of missed targets and a lack of control over spending on consultants.

When it was launched last May, Matt Hancock said it would enable the Government to replace national lockdowns with “individual isolation” for contacts of Covid-19 cases.

The report shows how the performance of the system deteriorated just when it was needed most – despite spare capacity in laboratories. Meanwhile, less than half of the contact tracing staff hired were ever in use at any one time.

While the country was in lockdown in February, just 11 per cent of contact tracers were working.

Read more of our report here: NHS test and trace ‘failed its main objective’, says spending watchdog

A very quick Reuters snap: Hungary reported a jump in daily Covid-19 cases to 3,125 on Wednesday, the highest daily tally since April, the government said.

China has reported nearly 250 locally transmitted cases of Covid-19 since the start of the current outbreak 10 days ago, with many infections in remote towns along porous international borders in the country’s northwest.

China had 50 new local cases for 26 October, the highest daily count since 16 September, Reuters report official data showed.

The overall number is modest compared with more than 1,200 local cases reported during China’s July-August outbreak and the more than 2,000 cases in January during the last winter.

However, the steady increase of cases in the past week and their geographical spread alarmed local authorities and prompted the return of complex sets of restrictions on travel as well as on the tourism and catering sectors.

China has said the Covid-19 pandemic is the biggest challenge to its hosting of the Winter Olympics in February and Winter Paralympics in March. Officials suspected the current flare-up was caused by a virus source from overseas.

Prior to Covid-19, Ejina Banner, a remote administrative division on China’s border with Mongolia, saw 8 million visitors in 2019 thanks to attractions such as a drought-resistant forest that would turn a golden yellow in October.

But the settlement of its 36,000 residents has been hard hit in the latest outbreak. Ejina has gone into a lockdown since last week, rendering nearly 10,000 tourists unable to leave, a local official said. Nearly half of those visitors are aged over 60.

Ruili in the southwestern province of Yunnan, rocked by multiple domestic outbreaks this year, has been served with the toughest curbs ever seen in China.
People who want to leave the city, except for those leaving for a few essential reasons, must be quarantined at centralised facilities for at least seven days before departure

Following up on those comments, Dame Meg Hillier has been on the BBC this morning, saying that the Conservative government’s test and trace programme treated taxpayers as if they were an ATM. PA Media quote her saying:

There was a lot of gung-ho confidence from No 10 that we would have a ‘moonshot’ towards mass testing. Those messages kept getting more optimistic. Baroness Harding was also very optimistic about what they achieved.

But in the end it massively over-promised for what it delivered and it was eye-watering sums of money.

That is one of the biggest concerns – it is almost as if the taxpayer was an ATM machine. That lack of regard for taxpayer funding is a real concern for us as a committee.”

Here’s a reminder of the conclusion of the Commons public accounts committee chair Meg Hillier after that report into the money they say has been wasted by the UK government on its test and trace system led by Dido Harding, who was appointed by Matt Hancock. Hillier said:

The national Test & Trace programme was allocated eye watering sums of taxpayers’ money in the midst of a global health and economic crisis. It set out bold ambitions but has failed to achieve them despite the vast sums thrown at it. Only 14% of 691m lateral flow tests sent out had results reported, and who knows how many took the necessary action based on the results they got, or how many were never used. The continued reliance on the over-priced consultants who “delivered” this state of affairs will by itself cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds. For this huge amount of money we need to see a legacy system ready to deliver when needed but it’s just not clear what there will be to show in the long term. This legacy has to be a focus for government if we are to see any value for the money spent.

The Czech Republic reported 6,274 new Covid-19 cases, almost doubling in a week as the country struggles to contain a new wave of the pandemic.

The latest number is the highest since 7 April in the country of 10.7 million.
Hospitalisations have risen to 1,146 as of 26 October, up from 249 at the start of the month, with 166 people in intensive care, Reuters report.

Despite the rapid growth, cases and hospitalisations are still well below peak levels of early 2021 and the end of last year.

This chart shows the latest case rates across Europe.

A quick report from Tsvetelia Tsolova in Sofia for Reuters here: the number of coronavirus infections in Bulgaria rose by 6,813 in the past 24 hours, a new record high daily tally since the start of the pandemic, official data showed.

The virus has killed 124 people in the past 24 hours, according to the figures, bringing the total death toll to 23,440. Yesterday the data showed that 243 people had died, which was a record for Bulgaria.

Over 7,300 people were in Covid-19 wards in the European Union’s least vaccinated country, overwhelming hospitals amid medical staff shortages.

As anticipated, in the UK on Sky News the interview with former minister Robert Jenrick was mostly about Budget speculation. However he was asked briefly about the damning report from the public accounts committee of the Commons which concluded that NHS test and trace “has not achieved its main objective to help break chains of Covid-19 transmission and enable people to return towards a more normal way of life” despite receiving about 20% of the NHS’s entire annual budget – £37 bn – over two years. Jenrick defended it, saying:

It has played an important part in tackling the pandemic. Are there lessons that can or must be learned from it? I think absolutely. And we’re all going to have to pay heed – particularly the government – to what’s said by the public accounts committee.

I should imagine the details of this report are going to very quickly get swamped by news of the Budget today – you can read our health editor Andrew Gregory’s report on it here: NHS test and trace ‘failed its main objective’, says spending watchdog

Arwa Mahdawi has written her latest column for us, and today she says that telling anti-vaxxers to get the jab should not be controversial – even Fox News is doing it:

Telling people to get vaccinated during a pandemic shouldn’t be controversial. Neil Cavuto’s employer Fox News has worked overtime to ensure that it is. A recent analysis by a media watchdog found 60% of Fox News’ summer programming included claims undermining vaccinations. While Fox has been amplifying anti-vaxxer propaganda, however, it has also been quietly enforcing its own strict vaccination and testing policies. Nearly 90% of full-time employees at the Fox Corporation have been vaccinated, it was reported last month. The company has also said it will soon implement daily Covid testing for employees who haven’t had the jab.

It has become depressingly clear that we’re not going to end this pandemic by relying on everyone to do what is best for the greater good. If we want to have any hope of getting back to normal then we need strict vaccine and testing requirements – as Fox, for all its posturing about freedom, clearly realises. There are heated debates across the world about how to implement this. Indonesia has made vaccines mandatory, with big fines for refuseniks. While it seems unlikely that most countries will go that far, vaccine mandates for people such as government employees and care workers have been implemented in countries including the US, Australia, France and – from 11 November – in England. As well they should be. There is nothing controversial about requiring people to get inoculated; vaccination requirements for school and travel have been in place for decades. If you’re marching in the street to protest against the “tyranny” of being forced to consider other people, please get a grip. Even Fox News hosts think you are being an ass.

Read more here: Arwa Mahdawi – Telling anti-vaxxers to get the jab should not be controversial – even Fox News is doing it

Good morning, it is Martin Belam here in London taking over from Samantha Lock. It is Budget day in the UK, and Robert Jenrick is the former minister out doing the media round for the government. I don’t expect Covid will get a second thought in the questioning, but I will bring you any lines that develop out of that shortly.

A Brazilian Senate committee recommended that president Jair Bolsonaro face a series of criminal indictments for actions and omissions related to the world’s second highest Covid-19 death toll.

The seven-to-four vote on Tuesday was the culmination of a six-month committee investigation of the government’s handling of the pandemic. It formally approved a report calling for prosecutors to try Bolsonaro on charges ranging from charlatanism and inciting crime to misuse of public funds and crimes against humanity, and in doing so hold him responsible for many of Brazil’s more than 600,000 Covid-19 deaths.

The president has denied wrongdoing, and the decision on whether to file most of the charges will be up to prosecutor general Augusto Aras, a Bolsonaro appointee who is widely viewed as protecting him. The allegation of crimes against humanity would need to be pursued by the international criminal court.

Senator Omar Aziz, the chairman of the inquiry, said he would deliver the recommendation to the prosecutor general on Wednesday morning. Aras’ office said the report would be carefully reviewed as soon as it was received.

The world’s biggest economies should create a forum to facilitate global coordination for the next pandemic, as well as a new financing facility to keep up with emerging threats, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Indonesian Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati have said in a letter to their G20 colleagues

The two finance ministers said the forum would allow health and finance ministers to better cooperate and coordinate prevention, detection, information-sharing, and any needed response.

Yellen and Indrawati said the Covid-19 pandemic revealed a lack of readiness at the country level and a lack of coordination among G20 countries.

“While we are making progress in fighting Covid-19, we also face a stark reality: this will not be the last pandemic,” they wrote ahead of Friday’s joint meeting of G20 health and finance ministers. “We must not lose this opportunity to demonstrate leadership with a decisive commitment to act.”

Welcome back to our Covid blog where we’ll bring you all the latest news surrounding the evolving coronavirus crisis.

I’m Samantha Lock reporting to you from Sydney, Australia. Here’s just a quick guide on what you might have missed earlier.

A damning report to come out of the UK has lambasted the NHS test and trace system, saying it failed to achieve “its main objective” to cut infection levels and aid in returning to life as normal.

The initiative was handed an “eye-watering” £37bn in taxpayers’ cash but ultimately “has not achieved its main objective to help break chains of Covid-19 transmission and enable people to return towards a more normal way of life,” the Commons spending watchdog has said.

At the time of its launch, Boris Johnson claimed the programme would be “world-beating” but the watchdog says its aims had been “overstated or not achieved”. The funding – equal to about 20% of the health service’s entire annual budget – was used to hire more than 2,000 consultants who were employed on rates of more than £1,000 a day, the report by the public accounts committee (PAC) found.

• The Covid-19 crisis is far “far from finished”, the World Health Organization’s emergency committee has said. The 19-member committee, which meets every three months to discuss the pandemic and make recommendations, also called for research into next-generation vaccines and long-term action to control the virus.
• Vaccine booster rates are now exceeding first-shot rates across the US, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
• In Thailand, businesses are pleading with the government to drop the nation’s current alcohol ban when the country reopens, saying it will deter tourists.
• China has locked down a city of 4m over 6 Covid cases. Residents in Lanzhou, Gansu, have been told to stay at home as buses, taxis and key rail routes are suspended.
• FDA advisers recommend approval of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine for children aged 5-11. it will be the first vaccine available for younger children in the US. The nearly unanimous vote clears the way for possible approval for emergency use next month, making nearly 30m children eligible.
• Pregnant women are being turned away from Covid vaccine clinics despite clinical advice, experts have warned as they urged ministers to ramp up efforts to reach unvaccinated groups.
• The UK recorded 40,954 new Covid cases today and 263 more people have died, official figures show.
• A Brazilian Senate committee recommended on Tuesday that president Jair Bolsonaro face a series of criminal indictments for actions and omissions related to the world’s second highest Covid-19 death toll. The 7-to-4 vote was the culmination of a six-month committee investigation of the government’s handling of the pandemic.
• No exemptions are to be given for unvaccinated tennis players travelling from overseas for the Australian Open, the state’s premier has said. Players like Novak Djokovic has repeatedly refused to reveal his vaccination status.
• Fully vaccinated Australians will no longer have to apply for travel exemptions to leave the country, as Australia prepares to ease its international borders from 1 November.
• Australia could hit the 80 per cent full Covid-19 vaccination mark within a week.
• Russia, Bulgaria and the Ukraine all reported a record number of daily deaths on Tuesday. Russia reported 1,106 deaths in 24 hours, the most since the start of the pandemic bringing the total death toll to 232,775, Europe’s highest by far. Sluggish vaccination rates have allowed the virus to spread quickly across Eastern Europe.
• Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene has been fined for the third time for refusing to wear mask on House floor.