COVID-19 UPDATE: OXFORD-ASTRAZENECA VACCINE APPROVED BY UK, S.AFRICA RISKS BECOMING VACCINE LAGGARD

Wed 30 December 2020:

The first cases of COVID-19 were reported in Wuhan, China in December 2019. However, Beijing has denied that China is the origin of the deadly disease, which has affected over 81.9 million people worldwide. More than 1.78 million people have died from the virus while over 46 million have recovered. Here’re the updates for December 30:

Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine approved for use in UK

The coronavirus vaccine designed by scientists at the University of Oxford has been approved for use in the UK.

It marks a major turning point and will lead to a massive expansion in the UK’s immunisation campaign, which is aimed at getting life back to normal.

The UK has ordered 100 million doses from the manufacturer AstraZeneca – enough to vaccinate 50 million people.

The approval, by the medicines regulator, means the vaccine is both safe and effective.

Sydney tightens Covid-19 curbs ahead of New Year’s Eve

Australian authorities have restricted movement and tightened curbs on gatherings in Sydney, hoping to avoid a coronavirus “super spreader” event during the city’s New Year’s Eve celebrations, after detecting a new cluster of cases.

Household gatherings were limited to just five people while the maximum number of people allowed to gather in public was capped at 30. Residential care facilities were closed to visitors.

“We don’t want New Year’s Eve to be the cause of a super-spreader,” New South Wales state Premier Gladys Berejiklian said as she announced the restrictions would take effect from midnight on Wednesday “until further notice”.

Tokyo governor warns of possible ‘explosion’ in cases

The coronavirus situation in Tokyo is quite severe and the Japanese capital could potentially face an “explosion” of cases, Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike has said ahead of the New Year’s holiday.

“Please emphasise life over fun,” she told a news conference, calling on people to stay at home as much as possible over the holiday, one of Japan’s longest, in which people hold parties, gather in their homes and return to their hometowns from the capital.

The number of new coronavirus patients in Tokyo was 856 on Tuesday.

France sees spike in COVID-19 cases

French public health authorities reported a spike in coronavirus cases over the past 24 hours Tuesday with 11,395 new infections after experiencing a lower number of cases since the Christmas holiday.

The daily death toll also rose to 969 and 413 more people were hospitalized.

The total number of cumulative cases now stands at 2,574,041, with the country having the fifth-highest number of infections worldwide.

On Dec. 24 and 25, health authorities recorded 21,634 and 20,262 positive cases, respectively. On Saturday, however, infections fell to 3,093. They rose to 8,822 on Sunday and then dropped to 2,960 on Monday. The rise and fall in the detection of cases could be due to the closure of testing facilities during the holiday period, local media reports suggested.

South Africa risks becoming vaccine laggard

South Africa, which has Africa’s worst recorded coronavirus outbreak, may have to wait months to receive its first vaccines even as other countries race to roll out the shots, Bloomberg reported.

The government only expects vaccines that it paid a deposit to secure from the World Health Organization’s Covax program to arrive in the second quarter of 2021, according to president Cyril Ramaphosa.

The wait bodes ill for a country that’s confronting a new more virulent strain of the virus, record new infections and a populace that’s increasingly eschewed social distancing.

Talks with drug companies about supplementing South Africa’s Covax allocation are ongoing, Ramaphosa said in an address Monday night, in which he announced the re-imposition of several restrictions aimed at curbing the pandemic’s spread.

It’s unclear when or whether those shots will be made available in South Africa, with several wealthy nations having already prepaid to pin down most of the initial production.

The Solidarity Fund, which was established to support the government’s pandemic response and is backed by some of the country’s biggest companies and richest individuals, paid the initial R283 million ($19.3 million) Covax deposit.

It will cost a total of R2.7 billion for South Africa to secure its full allocation of six million doses from the facility – sufficient to cover about 10% of the population.

EU to buy extra 100M doses of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine

“We decided to take an additional 100 million doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, which is already being used to vaccinate people across the EU,” European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen said on Twitter.

She added that the EU will therefore have 300 million doses of the vaccine which was approved by the European Medicine Agency (EMA) on Dec. 22.

“More vaccines will follow!” von der Leyen said.

The EU has made agreements with six companies that have so far conducted “promising” vaccine studies and is set to purchase about 2 billion vaccine doses, including 300 million from Pfizer and BioNTech.

The bloc also signed contracts with Moderna, AstraZeneca, CureVac, Johnson&Johnson, and Sanofi-GlaxoSmithKline.

Nigeria to suspend passports of those who shun virus tests

The Nigerian government announced Tuesday that the details of the passports of the first 100 passengers who fail to undergo COVID-19 testing after returning to the country will be revealed publicly and the passports will also be suspended until June next year, local media reported.

“With effect from 1st January 2021, the passports of the first 100 passengers that failed to take their day seven post-arrival PCR test will be published in the national dailies,” The Punch local website quoted Boss Mustapha, the chairman of the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19, as announcing in a briefing.

”The passports, as a deterrent, will also be suspended until June 2021,” he added.

The move comes as the country has been witnessing a second wave of the virus in recent weeks which has caused a spike in cases across the country, according to Nigerian officials.

Jobless to get weekly aid despite Trump’s last-minute approval

Jobless Americans who risked not receiving unemployment aid this week due to President Donald Trump’s delay in signing off on it will indeed receive the money, the Labor Department has said.

Congress in March expanded the US unemployment safety net as the coronavirus pandemic struck, creating the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) for freelancers and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) for the long-term unemployed but only funding them until the end of the year.