Health News at Your Fingertips

On the subject of booster jabs, Dr Bruce Aylward, senior adviser to the director-general at the WHO, said: “Every single dose makes a difference, we need to make sure every dose right now is going into people who haven’t received any doses, not additional doses going into those who already have.”

The WHO previously called for a moratorium on booster doses until the end of 2021 so vaccines could be shipped to parts of the world where many at-risk people remain unvaccinated.

It said that while third doses may be necessary for immunocompromised people, widespread booster jabs could be put to better use elsewhere, PA reports.

Here is a round-up of all today’s main Covid news stories:

• England will scrap coronavirus quarantine travel rules for 47 destinations including South Africa on Monday. The government also said it would recognise the vaccine status of arrivals from more countries in the latest easing of restrictions.
• Pfizer’s new vaccine for children aged five to 11 could be ready as early as November pending approval from federal regulatory health agencies, White House Covid response coordinator Jeffrey Zients said on Thursday.
• US president Joe Biden will visit Chicago today to meet with the United Airlines chief executive and local Democratic leaders, as he touts his decision to impose Covid vaccine mandates on employees of large firms, the White House said.
• Germany has vaccinated millions more people against coronavirus than previously thought, the country’s health minister announced. Almost 80% of adults in Germany are fully vaccinated and about 84% have received at least one shot, according to the country’s disease control centre, the Robert Koch Institute.
• In the UK, a further 40,701 Covid infections were reported in the past 24 hours – the highest daily figure since 6 September. This is a slight increase on yesterday’s figure of 39,851 cases, according to official government statistics.
• Coronavirus aid supplies that have arrived in North Korea are being held in quarantine in its seaport of Nampho, the WHO confirmed. North Korea sealed its borders when the coronavirus pandemic began last year, though officials in neighbouring South Korea and the United States have cast doubts on its claim to have never had a case, despite a lack of signs of major outbreaks.
• UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres has appealed for $8 billion to help vaccinate 40% of people in all countries by the end of the year.
• Italy reported 41 coronavirus-related deaths on Thursday compared to 39 the day before, the health ministry said, while the daily tally of new infections fell to 2,938 from 3,235.
• In Northern Ireland, Stormont ministers have agreed to remove a legal requirement for social distancing in bars and restaurants, the PA news agency has reported.
• The Italian government could approve the reopening of nightclubs, closed since August 2020 due to Covid-19 outbreaks linked to nightlife venues, later on Thursday.
• Children could be forced to wear masks in schools across England again as part of the government’s back-up plan if the country’s Covid situation deteriorates significantly, the education secretary has admitted.
• Finland has announced that it will pause the use of Moderna’s vaccine for men under-30 due to reports of a rare cardiovascular side effect. It follows similar moves by Swedish and Danish health officials after a pan-Nordic study.

That’s it from me, Tom Ambrose, for today. I’ll be back tomorrow but am now handing over to my colleague Nadeem Badshah, who will see you through the rest of the evening. Goodnight.

Travel industry insiders predicted a surge in bookings for October half-term as ministers cut England’s travel red list to just seven countries, all in Latin America: Peru, Columbia, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Venezuela.

Travellers from other destinations will no longer have to quarantine in a hotel on their return to the country.

For more details on this evening’s announcement that England’s travel red list has been cut to just seven countries, here is the full story from my colleagues, Nazia Parveen and Rachel Dixon.

England will scrap coronavirus quarantine travel rules for 47 destinations including South Africa on Monday.

Its government also said it would recognise the vaccine status of arrivals from more countries in the latest easing of restrictions.

Transport minister Grant Shapps announced that travellers arriving in England from 37 countries and territories would also face fewer entry requirements as their vaccine status will be recognised, including arrivals from India, Turkey and Ghana.

“The measures announced today mark the next step as we continue to open up travel and provide stability for passengers and industry while remaining on track to keep travel open for good,” he said on Twitter.

Travel rules changed earlier this week to scrap the traffic-light system that graded countries red, amber or green. Now there are just two lists: “red” and “rest of the world”.

England’s travel red list has been reduced to just seven countries, all in Latin America: Peru, Columbia, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Venezuela.

US president Joe Biden will visit Chicago today to meet with the United Airlines chief executive and local Democratic leaders, as he touts his decision to impose Covid vaccine mandates on employees of large firms, the White House said.

Biden last month ordered all federal workers and contractors to be vaccinated, with few exceptions, and for private employers with 100 or more workers to require employees to be vaccinated or get tested for the coronavirus weekly.

The order spurred pushback from high profile Republican governors including Florida’s Ron DeSantis and South Carolina’s Henry McMaster, who vowed to fight the administration’s move “to the gates of hell”, Reuters reported.

“The President’s message will be clear: Vaccination requirements work,” the White House said in an emailed statement, previewing the visit. Such mandates “get more people vaccinated, helping to end the pandemic and strengthen the economy,” the statement added.

It came as IBM said on Thursday it required all US employees to be fully vaccinated against Covid by 8 December or face unpaid suspension.

Spain’s coronavirus rate dropped below 50 cases per 100,000 people on Thursday, reaching the threshold considered “low risk” by the country’s health ministry for the first time in over a year.

Spain recorded 1,807 new cases on Thursday, bringing the total up to 4.97 million since the pandemic began. The death toll rose by 23 to 86,701.

The infection rate, as measured over the past 14 days, fell to 49 cases per 100,000 people, the data showed, slipping below 50 for the first time since 27 July, 2020.

At that time Spain had just emerged from one of Europe’s strictest lockdowns, which reduced new cases to a trickle.

UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres has appealed for $8 billion to help vaccinate 40% of people in all countries by the end of the year.

It comes as the World Health Organization (WHO) launched a plan that aims to inoculate 70% of the world by mid-2022, reports Reuters.

Guterres urged the Group of 20 rich countries to deliver on their “desire to get the world vaccinated” at a summit in Rome later this month.

“Not to have equitable distribution of vaccines is not only a question of being immoral, it is also a question of being stupid,” he said at a joint news conference with WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

So far, more than 6.3 billion doses of coronavirus vaccines have been administered globally. But more than half of the world has yet to receive at least one dose of a Covid vaccine, according to Our World in Data, and less than 5% of Africans have been fully vaccinated, according to the continent’s top public health official.

Venezuela’s vice-president Delcy Rodriguez has said that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has not yet delivered funds under a program to help countries battle the Covid pandemic, amid a dispute over the government’s legitimacy.

In August, the IMF authorised Venezuela to receive around $5 billion in Special Drawing Rights (SDR) as part of a $650 billion global effort to boost liquidity for the world’s most vulnerable countries, but said it could not use them because of questions about whether President Nicolas Maduro or opposition leader Juan Guaido was the rightful leader.

Guaido, recognized by the United States as Venezuela’s legitimate president, said the two sides would discuss access to the SDRs at an internationally-mediated negotiation process in Mexico City to resolve the South American country’s protracted political crisis, Reuters reported.

Rodriguez said at the UN Conference on Trade and Development that the country had not yet received the funds, blaming a US “veto.”

The United States, the IMF’s largest shareholder, has sanctioned Venezuelan state institutions in a push to oust Maduro, a socialist who it accuses of election-rigging and rights violations. Maduro denies the accusations.

“Venezuela reiterates its denunciation that the IMF refuses to deliver our people the $5 billion our country is owed to fight the pandemic,” Rodriguez said.

In the UK, a further 40,701 Covid infections were reported in the past 24 hours – the highest daily figure since 6 September.

This is a slight increase on yesterday’s figure of 39,851 cases, according to official government statistics.

Meanwhile, official data also confirmed a further 122 deaths on Thursday – down from 143 deaths reported the day before.

The full data can be accessed here.

In Singapore, a further 3,483 new Covid cases have been reported today.

This is compared with 3,577 infections registered on Wedenssday, while three more deaths from the virus were confirmed today.

Italy reported 41 coronavirus-related deaths on Thursday compared to 39 the day before, the health ministry said, while the daily tally of new infections fell to 2,938 from 3,235.

Italy has registered 131,198 deaths linked to Covid since its outbreak emerged in February last year, the second-highest toll in Europe after Britain and the ninth-highest in the world. The country has reported 4.69 million cases to date, Reuters reported.

Patients in hospital with coronavirus – not including those in intensive care – stood at 2,824 on Thursday, down from 2,872 a day earlier.

There were 24 new admissions to intensive care units, same as on Wednesday. The total number of intensive care patients fell to 403 from a previous 415.

In Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon has been challenged to do more to help sufferers of long Covid as it was revealed that almost 80,000 Scots may be living with the condition.

New figures from the Office for National Statistics showed 79,000 patients had reported suffering from the condition after contracting Covid, the Press Association reported.

Of those, 61,000 are said to have been suffering from symptoms – which can include extreme tiredness, chest pains and shortness of breath as well as depression, diarrhoea and feeling sick – for more than 12 weeks, while 31,000 have been living with such problems for a year or more.

While the Scottish government recently published a long Covid plan, the Scottish Liberal Democrat leader, Alex Cole-Hamilton, said sufferers with the condition would receive better treatment in England.

He challenged Sturgeon on the issue at First Minister’s Questions, as he accused the health secretary, Humza Yousaf, of refusing to meet campaigners from Long Covid Scotland. Cole-Hamilton said:

The much-delayed long Covid plan published last week should have been transformative, but I have spoken today with a constituent who suffers from long Covid. He was, in his words, devastated to discover nothing has changed.

I have warned before that people with the condition are better off moving to England where there are well established clinics and a care pathway, and nothing in this document will match that.

Long Covid Scotland have been trying to meet the health secretary but he has refused them at every turn. If he hasn’t met them how can he possibly know what they need?

The first minister responded:

I believe the health secretary has met with long Covid patients and I am sure he would be more than willing to meet with others. This is a serious issue and one that we are going to be living with the impact of for some time.

While she said she was “not an expert” on arrangements for long Covid care in England, she added that she suspected “they don’t always live up to how they are talked about here in some of the detail”.

In the UK, just over half of workers do not want to return to their office, preferring to continue with the flexible arrangements brought in as a result of the pandemic, a new study suggests.

The finding comes despite the prime minister saying in his Conservative party conference speech on Wednesday that he wanted people back in offices.

A survey of 2,000 adults by the IT service provider Totality Services found that one in five wanted to stay away from offices so they did not have to work alongside colleagues, the Press Association reported.

Reasons for preferring flexible working included being able to spend more time with the family, keeping fit, and having better mental health. About 55% of those surveyed said they did not want to go back to their office.

Luis Navarro, a Totality Services co-founder, said:

After a tough 18 months and the majority of the nation having their first real experience of flexible working it’s interesting to see that the majority want this to continue rather than having time back in the office.

We’ve seen a sharp rise in existing and new clients looking to transition back into the office and move closer towards some form of normality at work. That said, we appreciate many may continue with the hybrid working model.

Germany’s vaccine advisory committee has endorsed Covid booster shots for those 70 years and older, as well as medical staff interacting with patients, even as the nation’s health system is already giving boosters to those over 60.

The expert panel, known as STIKO, said a repeat shot of mRNA vaccines by Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna should be given six months at the earliest after the initial standard course, Reuters reported. STIKO said:

Vaccine protection is decreasing over time in particular with regard to preventing asymptomatic infections and mild disease forms.

With older age the immune response after vaccination takes an overall weaker form and breakthrough infections can more frequently lead to severe disease.

Anyone who received Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot vaccine should get an mRNA booster four weeks after the initial dose because the rate of breakthrough infections for J&J’s vaccine had been the highest among the approved shots, it added.

In Northern Ireland, Stormont ministers have agreed to remove a legal requirement for social distancing in bars and restaurants, the PA news agency has reported.

The one-metre rule will be removed on October 31. From October 31, nightclubs can also reopen. On that date, customers will also now be able to move around all hospitality premises freely again and dancing is permitted again.

The Executive will ask event organisers and venues to require patrons to either prove full vaccination or a negative lateral flow test or evidence of a Covid infection within the previous six months.

While the US has been engulfed in a heated battle to prevent people from contracting and dying from Covid-19, another pandemic has been raging behind closed doors among children who have lost one or both parents, or their caregivers, to Covid.

A new study, published on Thursday in the journal Pediatrics, estimated that from April 2020 through June 30 this year, more than 140,000 children under the age of 18 lost their mother, father, or grandparent who provided their housing, basic needs and daily care to the disease.

The study reveals that Covid is not only disproportionately killing adults from communities of color, but the children in these communities are bearing the brunt of the aftershock of this “hidden pandemic” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (Nida), which co-funded the study.

Although people of racial and ethnic minority groups make up 39% of the US population, the study shows approximately 65% of minority Hispanic, Black, Asian and American Indian/Alaska Native children have lost a primary caregiver as a result of Covid. Thirty-five percent of white children have also lost a primary caregiver.

“The death of a parental figure is an enormous loss that can reshape a child’s life,” Volkow said. But researchers say the needs of these children have been largely overlooked.

“Compared to white children, American Indian/Alaska Native children were 4.5 times more likely to lose a parent or grandparent caregiver, Black children were 2.4 times more likely, and Hispanic children were 1.8 times more likely,” Nida said.

Germany has vaccinated millions more people against coronavirus than previously thought, the country’s health minister announced.

Almost 80% of adults in Germany are fully vaccinated and about 84% have received at least one shot, according to the country’s disease control centre, the Robert Koch Institute. That’s some 3.5 million people higher than previously stated.

Health Minister Jens Spahn told reporters in Berlin:

The discrepancy between the numbers that had been reported so far and those that the Robert Koch Institute now found out about in surveys is due to the fact that some vaccinations may not have been reported.

He added that vaccinations of employees at big companies and those given shots by mobile vaccination teams in nursing centres and elsewhere, in particular, may not have been fully reported.

The new figures by the Robert Koch Institute are based on surveys and did not include people under the age of 18, which is why the agency did not yet give a new overall number of vaccinated people in Germany, but has so far only adjusted the number of vaccinated adults.

Anybody aged 12 and older is eligible for a coronavirus vaccination in Germany.