UK records a further 621 Covid deaths - as it happened

Brazil registered 44,299 new infections and 1,043 further deaths on Saturday.

This compares with 51,546 new cases on Friday and 50,872 eight days ago.

On Friday, 1,288 Covid-19 related deaths were recorded, and 1,239 eight days ago.

Brazil has registered more than 9.8 million cases of the virus since the pandemic began, while the official death toll has risen to 238,532, according to ministry data.

Talking about UK pubs reopening in April is “premature” and pub bosses need to realise there is a danger of going “back to square one”, an expert has said.

PA reports:

The warning comes after pub giant Young’s said there is no reason pubs cannot open in April, as its boss expressed exasperation at the government’s “lack of interest”.

The chain has called on Boris Johnson to “do the right thing” and show strong leadership when the industry “needs it most”.

In a letter to the Prime Minister, the chief executive of Young’s said the government is basing its decision to keep pubs closed on “unfounded and unproven statistics”.

But Dr Bharat Pankhania, senior clinical lecturer at the University of Exeter medical school, told the PA news agency: “It’s premature because we don’t know what the state of cases will be in the country at that point in time.

“It may be that the cases are low and that we have regained control because we are now managing to keep the case numbers down and our immunisation levels have been sufficiently high to have a majority of the vulnerable population immunised and therefore protected,” he said, highlighting the “criteria” required.

Dr Pankhania, who has widespread experience of advising on national communicable disease control action plans at national and international level, added: “What the executives of pubs etc etc need to know is that failure to get it right equals back to square one.

“And back to square one equals much more pain economically, much more hardship.

“It is better to get it right than to prematurely bow to pressure and open up when you’re not ready to open up,” he said.

Bangladesh has so far inoculated more than 730,000 people, according to authorities.

A total of 194,371 people in the country were given a Covid-19 vaccine on 13 February.

The Dhaka Tribune reports:

Among the vaccine receivers, 127,043 were male and 67,328 females, according to figures by the Management Information System of Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS).

The number of people who got the vaccine [so far] stands at 736,680 as of Saturday. 513,621 of these people are male and 223,059 female.

People aged 40 years and above now can get registered to receive Covid-19 vaccines, the health ministry [said].

According to [...] the government, [only] people aged 55 years and above were eligible for vaccines but the decision has been revised a day after the countrywide Covid-19 vaccination campaign [was launched] on February 7.

A coronavirus strain found on a Polish mink farm can be directly transmitted from the animals to humans and vice versa, the country’s agriculture ministry has said.

First News reports:

The mink virus variant, the first detected in farm animals in Poland is, up to now, not identical to any of the new strains found recently in humans, but belongs to an animal strain well-known to epidemiologists, the ministry said in a statement on Saturday.

It also differs from the strain detected in Danish minks, the ministry added.

Denmark has culled its entire farm mink population.

“Past experience from Denmark and the Netherlands clearly indicates that the virus can pass to humans and vice versa,” the ministry also said.

The infection on the Polish mink farm in the northern county of Kartuzy was detected in late January. All 5,800 minks have been culled.

The coronavirus has already been detected in minks in a number of European countries, including Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden.

Poland reported a further 6,586 new cases on Saturday, as well as 284 new deaths, bringing the overall official death toll to 40,709.

The health ministry said that 12,163 people with confirmed coronavirus infection had been hospitalised, and that 147,961 people were currently under quarantine.

2,071,009 people have already been vaccinated against Covid-19 in Poland, according to government data.

The UK government has been accused of repeatedly ignoring concerns that the quarantine rules for incoming passengers will fail to halt the spread of new coronavirus variants in the country, unions revealed two days before the measures become law.

The GMB Union has said its members and airport staff had been telling the Home Office for the past fortnight that they were concerned that passengers from 33 designated high-risk countries were still being allowed to mix with other travellers and staff before entering hotel quarantine for 10 days at a cost of £1,750.

Speaking ahead of the long-awaited quarantine measures in government-designated accommodation, which come into force on Monday, Nadine Houghton, GMB national officer, told the Observer: “If you’ve got people getting off planes from the red list countries, then being crammed into areas with passengers who aren’t going into quarantine – and staff as well - you’ve failed at the first hurdle.

My colleague Mark Townsend reports.

More than 800,00 people have died from coronavirus across Europe since the pandemic began in December 2019, according to an AFP tally Saturday based on official sources.

AFP reports:

As of Saturday, 1630 GMT, there were 800,361 deaths recorded in the 52 countries and territories that make up the continent - including Russia and Turkey - for 35,395,270 declared cases.

That puts the continent’s death toll ahead of Latin America and the Caribbean, which has 635,834 dead for 20,021,361 cases; of the United States and Canada’s 502,064 deaths for 28,312,719 cases; and Asia’s 247,730 deaths for 15,641,940 cases.

Europe as a whole recorded an average 4,478 deaths a day from the virus last week, 14 percent lower than the previous week.

But since November 11, the region has recorded at least 4,000 deaths a day on average - peaking at a record 5,700 daily deaths at the end of January.

For a month though, the figures for infections have been falling in Europe.

But if the curve of average daily deaths has dropped, the tendency remains constant over the long term - for since the beginning of November, 100,000 deaths have been recorded about every 20 days.

Thus Europe passed 500,000 deaths on December 17; 600,000 on January 7; and 700,000 on January 25.

The worst-hit countries in Europe are the United Kingdom with 116,908 deaths; Italy with 93,045; France with 81,488; Russia, with 79,696; and Spain with 64,747 deaths.

The worst death rates in Europe are Belgium with 186 deaths per 100,000 population; Slovenia, with 178 deaths; the UK with 171; the Czech Republic with 169; and Italy with 154 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants.

The French health ministry has reported 10,037 new patients had been taken to hospital with coronavirus over the past seven days and there had been 1,795 admissions to intensive care units over the period.

The total cumulative number of cases in France increased to 3,448,617, the sixth-highest in the world.

The president, Emmanuel Macron, has resisted resorting to a new lockdown, hoping that a national curfew from 6pm – in place since 15 December – will be enough to keep infections down.

The finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, told BFM television on Saturday that the French population was at the end of its patience and that a new lockdown could only be “the very last options when all others have been tried”.

Arnaud Fontanet, a member of the scientific council that advises the government on Covid-19 policy, told Europe 1 radio on Saturday he feared the variant first detected in the UK could account for the majority of the cases in March.

In the Moselle region in eastern France, where variant cases have surged, the prefecture ruled out at least for now closing the schools or implementing a local lockdown, which had been requested by some regional officials, Reuters reported.

Parents of unaccompanied minors travelling back to school in the UK have pleaded with the government to rethink hotel quarantine rules, with one father demanding: “Don’t lock my children up.”

Reuters reports:

Hundreds of children whose parents live and work overseas but who attend boarding schools in the UK are keen to return when the government allows educational establishments to reopen.

But those arriving from countries on the government’s red list will be required to quarantine in a hotel for 10 days once new rules are introduced on Monday and, with no date set for schools to reopen, parents have been left with a difficult choice.

Karl Feilder, 55, who lives in the United Arab Emirates, has three daughters, two of whom, aged 15 and 17, attend a boarding school near Reading, England and are hoping to be back in the country once it reopens for on-site learning.

Feilder said he would not allow his children to return if it meant quarantining in a hotel alone, telling the PA:

To be perfectly honest, I think anyone in their right mind would not do that with their children and indeed it’s completely mad, completely unnecessary.

The fact that they haven’t told us when schools are going back means we can’t take the decision now to put them on a plane today or tomorrow to beat the Monday morning deadline.

They’ve got nowhere to stay in the UK – are they going back to an empty school, or a school that’s closed, or is the school going to be open? We don’t know.

We’re quite happy to do the Covid tests, we’re quite happy to do the home quarantine, whatever – just don’t lock my children up.

A spokesperson from the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care said:

Children are not exempt from quarantine if they have been in a red-list country in the 10 days before their arrival in the UK.

Schools are currently closed and we urge parents to carefully consider whether it is essential for children who have been in red-list countries to travel unaccompanied into the UK at this time.

Where this is unavoidable, we would strongly advise parents put in place arrangements to ensure their children are accompanied by an appropriate adult to carry out the quarantine.

France on Saturday reported a further 199 Covid-19 related deaths, taking the country’s total official death toll from the virus to 81,647.

This compares to 191 deaths reported last week Friday.

France also recorded 21,231 over the 24 hours to Saturday, versus Friday’s 20,701.

Public Health Wales has said a total of 749,445 first doses of the Covid-19 vaccine had now been given, adding that 4,224 second doses had also been administered.

In total, 89.1% of over-80s in Wales have received their first jab, along with 88.4% of those aged 75-79 and 84.8% of those aged 70-74.

For care homes, 81.2% of residents and 84% of staff have received their first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine.

Infections in Germany continue to fall nationwide, as the country reported 8,354 new infections on Saturday, around 2,100 fewer than a week earlier.

551 more deaths were also reported, 138 fewer than last Saturday.

The nationwide seven-day incidence fell to 60.1. It indicates how many infections were recorded per 100,000 inhabitants.

According to data from the Robert Koch Institute, the number of reported new corona infections per 100,000 inhabitants within a week is lowest in the states of Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate with 51 each.

In Thuringia, which had been heavily affected until recently, the state government reacted with relief to the news that the value has sunk to 99, public radio broadcaster Deutschlandfunk reports.

Lebanon on Saturday received its first coronavirus vaccines, a day before an inoculation drive kicks off in the crisis-hit Mediterranean country.

A plane carrying 28,500 doses of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine flown in from Belgium landed at Beirut airport.

AFP reports:

The shipment was the first after the World Bank allocated $34 million to inoculate two million of Lebanon’s six million inhabitants.

Caretaker health minister Hamad Hassan was on the tarmac to welcome the plane and expressed great “relief”.

“It’s a dream being realised today thanks to the support of our UN and international partners,” he told reporters,

“The vaccine will reach all Lebanese citizens across the country,” as well as Syrian and Palestinian refugees and other residents, he promised.

Lebanon has been under strict lockdown since mid-January, after an unprecedented spike in cases blamed on holiday gatherings that forced overwhelmed hospitals to turn away patients.

Vaccination rollout is set to start on Sunday.

Health workers will receive their first dose at the Rafik Hariri Hospital, the country’s main public hospital tackling the Covid-19 outbreak, the American University of Beirut Medical Centre and Saint George Orthodox Hospital.

The UK’s health secretary, Matt Hancock, praised the country’s successful vaccination rollout but warned that the UK was “a long way off from getting this sorted” and emphasised that there are currently 25,000 people in hospital with coronavirus.

Hancock tweeted: “Each jab brings us one step closer to normal.”

Italy on Saturday reported 311 coronavirus-related deaths on Saturday against 316 the day before, the health ministry said, while the daily tally of new infections dipped slightly to 13,532 from 13,908 reported on Friday.

Last Saturday Italy had reported 385 new Covid-19 deaths and 13,439 new cases.

Some 290,534 tests for Covid-19 were carried out, compared with 305,619 the day before, the ministry said.

South Africa will reopen 20 of its land borders to allow normal travel after restrictions were implemented to control rising Covid-19 infections last month, the Home Affairs ministry said on Saturday.

The ministry said land borders, including those with Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Botswana, would reopen after being closed on 11 January, Reuters reports.

South Africa has recorded the highest number of coronavirus infections and deaths on the African continent, with more than 1.4 million cases and over 47,000 deaths.

Clashes broke out between police and activists in Cyprus on Saturday during a protest against corruption and lockdown measures.

Reuters reports:

Police used water cannon and tear gas in an attempt to break up the gathering of several hundred people just beyond the medieval walls in Nicosia, the capital of the east Mediterranean island, Reuters witnesses said.

At least one person who said he was struck on the head by police was taken to hospital.

Cyprus has been rocked by allegations of graft in a lucrative citizenship-for-investment programme, which was abruptly cancelled last November after a senior state official was secretly filmed allegedly offering to arrange a passport for a fictitious Chinese investor with a criminal record.

Despite the scheme being halted, uproar over the scandal-hit scheme has persisted, with comments from opposition politicians, newspaper editorials and from ordinary Cypriots on social media pointing to endemic corruption.

[…]

The use of violence at protests in Cyprus is highly unusual.

Authorities had banned the gathering, citing restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus. Those restrictions allow people out twice a day for mainly essential errands.

The Philippines reported 12 new deaths and 1,960 new infections on Saturday, the Department of Health announced, taking the country’s overall tally to 547,000 infections and 11,507 fatalities.

The agency’s case bulletin showed a total of 547,255 with 6.4% or 34,967 active or currently ill patients. At least 86.3% of the active patients have mild symptoms, 8.7% do not have symptoms, 2.3% are in critical condition, 2.2% are severe cases and 0.64% are in moderate condition, CNN Philippines reports.

So far, 2.10% of people who were recorded as having had the virus have died in the country, while 91.5% of the people who were recorded as positive for Covid-19 are considered recovered.

The UK has recorded a further 621 deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid-19 test, compared with 758 on Friday and 828 deaths reported a week ago.

The government said 13,308 new cases had been recorded, down from Friday’s 15,144. On Saturday last week, the UK had recorded 18,262 new infections.

Separate figures published by the UK’s statistics agencies for deaths where Covid-19 has been mentioned on the death certificate, together with additional data on deaths that have occurred in recent days, show there have now been 135,000 deaths involving Covid-19 in the UK, PA reports.

14,556,827 people have received a first vaccine, government data showed on Saturday, up 544,603 from the previous total, putting the country on course to meet its target of having given at least one jab to the most vulnerable and top priority groups by Monday.

Some 534,869 were second doses, an increase of 4,775 on figures released the previous day.

The seven-day rolling average of first doses given in the UK is now 441,660, which means an average of 221,587 first doses would need to be administered each day to meet the government’s target of 15 million first doses by 15 February.

I’m Jedidajah Otte and will be taking over for the next few hours. As ever, feel free to contact me if you have any updates, tips or comments you want to share, you can reach me on Twitter @JedySays and via email.

The US government has “deep concerns” about the way the findings of the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 report were communicated, the White House has said.

The White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said in a statement, seen by Reuters, that it was imperative the report be independent and free from “alteration by the Chinese government”.

Sullivan called on China to make available data from the earliest days of the outbreak.

The statement came after a member of the WHO-led team sent to China to investigate the origins of the pandemic complained that the country’s government refused to hand over raw data on early cases.

Dominic Dwyer, an Australian infectious diseases expert, told Reuters the team had requested raw patient data on 174 cases of Covid-19 that China had identified from the early phase of the outbreak in Wuhan in December 2019, as well as other cases, but were only provided with a summary.

People with learning disabilities in England have been given do not resuscitate orders during the second wave of the pandemic, in spite of widespread condemnation of the practice last year and an urgent investigation by the care watchdog, writes James Tapper for the Observer.

Mencap said it had received reports in January from people with learning disabilities that they had been told they would not be resuscitated if they were taken ill with Covid-19.

The Care Quality Commission said in December that inappropriate Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (DNACPR) notices had caused potentially avoidable deaths last year.

Singapore’s ministry of health reports no new community transmission of coronavirus today.

The tiny west African nation of Equatorial Guinea has announced a suspension of air and sea links between its capital, Malabo, which is located on an island some way from its coast, and the mainland, due to a lack of Covid testing kits.

The tiny state, ruled by its 78-year-old president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, for the past 41 years, scaled back a rigorously enforced range of restrictions in August. The economic capital, Bata, is located on the mainland and the suspended travel links will be a severe blow to the people of the oil-rich country, where the vast majority lives in grinding poverty.

State television announced the latest move on Friday, saying:

From Sunday February 14 until a date that will be decided later, all flights and boat crossings are suspended between Malabo and Bata and vice-versa because the Covid-19 testing kits have been depleted.

The country of 1.3 million, which has officially recorded 5,663 cases of coronavirus and 87 deaths, began administering vaccinations on Friday, after receiving a donation of 100,000 Chinese-made vaccines from Beijing.

Boris Johnson has echoed remarks by his health secretary, Matt Hancock, that coronavirus is a disease which people will have to “simply live with”.

Speaking during a visit to a vaccine manufacturing facility in Teesside, he said Hancock was right to say Covid-19 could become a “manageable disease” like seasonal flu. Johnson said:

A nasty disease like this will roll through. A new disease like this will take time for humanity to adapt to, but we are. The miracles of science are already making a huge difference, not just through vaccinations but therapies as well. New therapies are being discovered the whole time which are enabling us to reduce mortality, improve our treatments of the disease.

I do think that in due time it will become something that we simply live with. Some people will be more vulnerable than others - that’s inevitable. I think the health secretary spoke about the autumn. Let’s see where we get to.

A further 436 people who tested positive for the coronavirus have died in England, bringing the total number of confirmed reported deaths in English hospitals to 78,588, the NHS has reported.

According to the statement, the patients were aged between 21 and 100. All except 10 (aged between 49 and 89) had known underlying health conditions.

Their dates of death ranged from 4 January to 12 February 2021.

The number of deaths of patients with Covid-19 by region are as follows:

• East of England – 61
• London – 69
• Midlands – 96
• North-east and Yorkshire – 55
• North-west – 56
• South-east – 79
• South-west – 20

Portugal has extended a flight ban to and from Brazil and the UK until March, allowing only humanitarian and repatriation flights in the meantime, according to an interior ministry statement seen by Reuters.

Portuguese authorities suspended air links to Brazil at the end of January, and to the UK from 21 January, in an effort to keep out new Covid-19 variants detected in those countries.

The so-called Kent strain, first detected in Britain, appeared in Portugal at the end of last year and was regarded as partly responsible for a rise in cases in the new year that stretched the Portuguese healthcare system.

Portugal, a country of 10 million people, has so far reported 15,034 Covid-19 deaths and 781,223 cases.

Up to 60% of new Covid patients in the east of the Czech Republic had the variant of the virus first detected in Britain in January, data seen by Reuters shows.

On Friday, the region of 550,000 reported just four free beds in Covid-19 wards and eight in high dependency and intensive care units (ICUs) treating coronavirus patients.

The pressures have led to ambulances taking 15 patients to hospitals as much as 230 km (140 miles) away, as closer ones were also packed.

Náchod and Trutnov, neighbouring districts on the Polish border 150km east of Prague, are among several regions that have seen incessant spread of the disease, despite a national lockdown.

The Czech Republic has ranked among the European countries worst-hit by the pandemic. Only Portugal has reported more new cases per capita in the past two weeks, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

As of Friday morning, the country of 10.7 million had reported 17,902 Covid-19 related deaths. Still, the parliament voted on Thursday not to extend a national state of emergency, which will lift some of current lockdown measures including the closure of shops, a loosely policed ban on gatherings and a night-time curfew.

The UK health secretary, Matt Hancock, has said he hopes coronavirus could become a treatable disease by the end of the year as the government launched a fresh drive to encourage people to accept a vaccine amid continuing reluctance among some groups to have the jab.

Ministers are confident they would achieve their UK-wide target of offering a vaccine to all those most at risk from the virus, including all over-70s, by Monday.

NHS England said everyone in the top four priority groups in England has now been offered the opportunity to be vaccinated, with 14 million of the target 15 million most vulnerable having already receiving their first jab. Wales said on Friday it was the first UK nation to meet its target.

Up to 63% of people in parts of South Africa may have already had coronavirus, according to tests carried out on samples given by blood donors.

A study led by researchers from South Africa’s national blood service, published on Friday and reported by the GroundUp news agency, estimated that 63% of people in Eastern Cape province have been infected since the epidemic started, 32% in Northern Cape, 46% in Free State and 52% in KwaZulu-Natal.

The figures are far in excess of the clinically confirmed case rates of between 2% and 3% in the four provinces, TimesLIVE reported.

Findings from the study also showed striking differences in past infection rates between white and black South Africans, with black people between three and five times as likely to be carrying antibodies to the virus.

The study reported by GroundUp is a preprint, and is yet to be peer reviewed, so caution ought to be taken with its findings. If accurate, GroundUp notes, it could explain extraordinarily high excess death rates in the Eastern Cape, which at 485 per 100,000 people is higher than the official Covid-19 infection mortality rate for any country in the world.

The UK’s biggest airport has expressed concerns that the government’s hotel quarantine policy is not ready for its planned launch on Monday, writes Guardian reporter Molly Blackall.

From next week, travellers arriving in the UK from 33 “red list” countries must isolate in a hotel room for 10 days at their own expense.

But in a statement issued this morning, a spokesperson for Heathrow airport said that “some significant gaps remain” before the policy could be effectively carried out. The spokesperson said:

When the government announced its hotel quarantine plan, we immediately offered our help to make this successful in a complex airport environment. We have been working hard with the government to try to ensure the successful implementation of the policy from Monday, but some significant gaps remain and we are yet to receive the necessary reassurances.

We will continue to work collaboratively with government over the weekend but ministers must ensure there is adequate resource and appropriate protocols in place for each step of the full end-to-end process from aircraft to hotel to avoid compromising the safety of passengers and those working at the airport.

Over in Greece authorities are stepping up the country’s vaccination programme with the prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, opening the first of four so-called “mega vaccination centres” in Athens this morning, writes Helena Smith, the Guardian’s correspondent in Athens.

Housed in an exhibition and conference centre, the facility will open its doors on Monday. A similar centre will also begin operating in the northern metropolis of Thessaloniki.

Greece, where lockdown measures including a 6pm to 5am curfew at weekends are being implemented in several areas, surpassed 500,000 vaccinations on Friday. It is hoped that once the four centres are up and running, they’ll have the capacity to inoculate as many as 20,000 people daily.

Visiting the site facility in the capital’s northern suburb of Maroussi, Mitsotakis said: “We have to persuade the rest of our fellow citizens who possibly may still be suspicious [about the jabs] that vaccines are safe and effective.”

The participation of the Greek armed forces would play a pivotal role in changing citizens’ perceptions, he insisted. Greek military doctors will be seconded to the programme as part of a general mobilisation of forces.

With the nation’s economy so reliant on tourism, the centre-right government is betting on the elderly and other vulnerable groups being vaccinated by April, before Greek Orthodox Easter in early May when it hopes the first foreign visitors will begin flying in.

Late on Friday, the government announced that restrictions on movement, reimposed in Athens this week, would be extended regionally. As of today all schools, non-essential retail and hair and beauty salons will be closed until 22 February across the region of Achaia in the north-west Peloponnese and the island of Evia.

Although Greece has fared better than most European countries, infectious disease experts speak of a “steady deterioration” in the nation’s epidemiological performance amid a new surge in cases attributed in part to new variants – not least the “British strain” of the virus.

Athens’ latest lockdown came into force after officials revealed that intensive care wards for Covid-19 patients were at over 80% capacity, putting immense strain on a public health system already battered by years of austerity-induced cutbacks. Half of Greece’s 11m population live in the Greater Athens region, raising fears further.

Experts advising the government on Friday announced a further 1,410 coronavirus cases and 21 fatalities bringing Greece’s total case count to 170,244 and death toll to 6,077.

Malaysia on Saturday reported 3,499 new coronavirus cases, bringing the total number of recorded infections to 261,805, Reuters reports.

The health ministry also reported five new deaths, raising total fatalities from the pandemic to 958.

A member of the World Health Organization-led team sent to China to investigate the origins of the coronavirus pandemic has said that the country’s government refused to hand over raw data on early cases.

Dominic Dwyer, an Australian infectious diseases expert, told Reuters that the team had requested raw patient data on 174 cases of Covid-19 that China had identified from the early phase of the outbreak in Wuhan in December 2019, as well as other cases, but were only provided with a summary. According to the report filed by Reuters on Saturday:

Such raw data is known as “line listings”, he said, and would typically be anonymised but contain details such as what questions were asked of individual patients, their responses and how their responses were analysed.

“That’s standard practice for an outbreak investigation,” he told Reuters on Saturday via video call from Sydney, where he is currently undergoing quarantine.

He said that gaining access to the raw data was especially important since only half of the 174 cases had exposure to the Huanan market, the now-shuttered wholesale seafood centre in Wuhan where the virus was initially detected.

“That’s why we’ve persisted to ask for that,” he said. “Why that doesn’t happen, I couldn’t comment. Whether it’s political or time or it’s difficult ... But whether there are any other reasons why the data isn’t available, I don’t know. One would only speculate.”

Experts in child development are calling on the government to support a “summer of play” to help pupils in England recover from the stress of lockdown and a year of Covid upheaval, writes Sally Weale, the Guardian’s education correspondent.

Instead of extra lessons, catch-up summer schools and longer school days, they said children should be encouraged to spend the coming months outdoors, being physically active and having fun with their friends.

Psychologists have reported behavioural changes in some children following the first lockdown last year. After months of isolation from friends, some struggled to share and play together, teachers reported more fights and fallings-out, and Ofsted observed a worrying drop in physical fitness.

As the government draws up its latest education catch-up plans, to be unveiled in the coming weeks, a group of academics calling themselves PlayFirstUK have written to the education secretary, Gavin Williamson, appealing for a new emphasis on play, mental health and wellbeing as children emerge from lockdown.

Covid-19 has apparently claimed the lives of two 11-week-old white tiger cubs who died in a zoo in Pakistan last month.

The cubs died in Lahore zoo on 30 January, four days after beginning treatment for what officials thought was feline panleukopenia virus, Reuters reports. It is a disease that zoo officials said is common in Pakistan and targets cats’ immune systems.

But an autopsy found the cubs’ lungs were badly damaged and they were suffering from severe infection, with pathologists concluding they died from Covid-19. They are believed to have caught the virus from their handler.

Kiran Saleem, the zoo’s deputy director, told Reuters:

After their death, the zoo administration conducted tests of all officials, and six were tested positive, including one official who handled the cubs. It strengthens the findings of the autopsy. The cubs probably caught the virus from the person handling and feeding them.

Pakistan’s zoos are frequently criticised by animal rights activists, who say hundreds of animals have died from poor living conditions in them.

A UK health expert has called for the opening of long Covid clinics, saying that as many as 10 to 20% of cases of Covid-19 have resulted in people reporting symptoms of long Covid.

Danny Altmann, a professor of immunology at Imperial College London, said the figure of one in 20 people with long Covid, which was reported in October by King’s College London, was “a bit low”.

Speaking on Times Radio, he said:

Many people would have 10-20% as their range if you look at the papers on how many people are still reporting significant symptoms several months afterwards ... The UK has been fairly speedy at recognising it (long Covid), the problem is recognising it and doing something aren’t necessarily the same things.

Altmann said he made the case for long Covid clinics at a World Health Organization meeting this week, adding:

The point I was trying to make was really a call to arms for some really good solid research and mechanisms here, because there’s no point just having the banner above the clinic if we haven’t got the doctors to sit in them.

The perennial debate about the reopening of schools is rearing its head in England again this morning after reports indicating that the government intends to send children back to class on 8 March.

The chair of the NHS Confederation, Victor Adebowale, said the target date was too early, warning that the NHS workforce was “on its knees” and that ministers needed to be “very cautious” about any easing of coronavirus lockdown restrictions. Lord Adebowale told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4:

We have to be really careful, really systematic about easing any lockdown. What we cannot afford is another peak. I understand the pressure to open schools. We need to do so very safely. I think mid or late-March is when we should be re-assessing.

We have had a number of false dawns when we have set dates, taken the action, then find ourselves having to row back very quickly.

Meanwhile, the Conservative former cabinet minister David Davis called for a relaxation of controls on schools as part of a “stepwise” easing of coronavirus restrictions. He told Today:

I think we have got to do a stepwise change. I think we are going to have to relax the schools, that is the first thing to do. It is probably the lowest risk.

What I don’t want to see is yet more stop-start – relax it and then go back again, relax it and go back.

We are unlikely to get full freedom until April/May or maybe even a touch later than that, but we have to start soon.

Extra coronavirus testing will be carried out in Middlesbrough, in the north-east of England, following the detection of a case of the South African variant of the virus which is feared to be resistant to some vaccines.

Any resident over the age of 16 from the districts of Marton and Coulby Newham is being urged to get tested. An additional test centre has been opened in Coulby Newham to increase capacity, with no appointments needed.

According to Public Health England data analysed by the PA Media news agency, Middlesbrough currently has the fifth highest infection rate in England.

Esther Mireku, consultant in public health in Middlesbrough, told PA:

I urge everyone over the age of 16 in the Marton and Coulby Newham areas to come forward for a test. This will help us understand more about the potential spread of this new variant.

While the overall Covid infection rate in Middlesbrough has now halved from its peak in early January, it has still not decreased as much as we would have liked.

The high prevalence of Covid in the town, combined with the reporting of this variant, are a reminder to everyone of the importance of staying at home as much as possible and following hands-face-space when out for an essential reason.

According to this morning’s Times, internal UK government projections are predicting a halving of the number of coronavirus patients in hospitals over the next month.

Estimates presented to the prime minister reportedly showed infection rates falling faster than anticipated, with numbers expected to soon drop to October levels. According to the paper:

The projections are likely to lead to more pressure on Boris Johnson from Conservative MPs to accelerate the reopening of the economy. They have called for all restrictions to be lifted by May. Ministers remain concerned, though, that the emergence of mutant strains could derail plans to ease lockdown restrictions. Social-distancing restrictions are expected to remain in place until the autumn.

The Times’s tabloid stablemate, the Sun, carries a similarly hopeful message on its front page. According to the red top, pubs and restaurants will be able to serve customers outdoors by April if coronavirus cases continue to fall at the same rate.

As the paper’s political editor puts it, in typically jaunty Sun style:

The reopening of hospitality is being fast-tracked in a major boost to the blighted sector – and thirsty Brits.

Both the Times and the Sun are known for their proximity to power, with messages from top government officials often recycled through their pages. With public patience over lockdown measures apparently wearing thin, it seems that there is a major communications campaign under way to persuade Britain that we’re nearly there.

The UK health secretary, Matt Hancock, has said he hopes that Covid-19 will become “another illness that we have to live with” like flu.

Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, Hancock said:

I hope that Covid-19 will become a treatable disease by the end of the year. If Covid-19 ends up like flu, so we live our normal lives and we mitigate through vaccines and treatments, then we can get on with everything again.

He also said he was confident that all UK adults will have been offered coronavirus vaccines by September at the latest.

The Telegraph is not the only UK paper to strike an optimistic tone this morning. Most today are leading on predictions of an end to coronavirus lockdowns in the next couple of months.

The Guardian’s print edition is this morning leading on fears that many at-risk people could miss out on vaccinations amid confusion over who to target next in the mass Covid vaccination programme.

Thousands of vulnerable people in the UK are at risk of being overlooked for vaccination amid confusion over who is to be included in the crucial next wave of the programme, a Guardian analysis has found.

People with a range of conditions said they had been told repeatedly they were at a heightened risk from coronavirus, with some even being told to shield, only to discover they were being left out of the “at risk” group next in line for a jab.

Charities called for clarity on who should be included, urging ministers to err on the side of caution by casting the net as widely as possible to avoid needless Covid deaths.

Hullo, this is Damien Gayle taking charge of the blog now, on a clear and chilly morning in lockdown London. Over the next eight hours or so I’ll be bringing you the latest coronavirus-related news and updates from the UK and around the world.

If you have any comments, tips or suggestions for coverage, then do feel free to drop me a line, either via email to damien.gayle@theguardian.com, or via Twitter direct message to @damiengayle.

Russia has reported 14,861 new cases of Covid-19 and 502 deaths on Saturday, authorities have said.

Some 1,963 of the new cases are in Moscow. It brings the number of cases in Russia since the pandemic began to 4,057,698. The death toll stands at 79,696.

Back in Australia, the Greens party in Victoria has urged the state government to consider setting up hotel quarantine facilities made up of portable cabins to allow for better ventilation, rather than cutting the number of interstate and international arrivals.

The Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, has suggested the number of international arrivals be reviewed in light of the more transmissible UK variant of the virus, saying “this is not the virus of 2020”. Victoria is currently in a five-day lockdown because 14 people in a contained outbreak have tested positive to strain B117.

The outbreak is believed to be linked to aerosol spread of the virus, after a nebuliser was used in a quarantine hotel. Staff in quarantine hotels are now required to wear N95 masks when on floors that host returning travellers, instead of surgical masks.

The Victorian Greens said quarantining returning travellers in “separate cabins that open to the outdoors”, similar to the facilities on a military base at Howard Springs in the Northern Territory, where Australians repatriated by the government are quarantined, would reduce the risk of transmission.

Leading Australian epidemiologists have said the same thing. The thing is, there are not many facilities like Howard Springs in close proximity to both an international airport and a major hospital.

The Greens suggested that “portable cabins like those in holiday parks could be assembled sufficiently close to a hospital and airport as an alternative to CBD hotels”.

Spokesman Dr Tim Read said:

Bringing home stranded Victorians and staying on top of a potential Covid-19 outbreak shouldn’t be mutually exclusive ideas.

Let’s set up rows of quarantine cabins, separated by fresh air, to reduce the risk of transmission to guests and staff.

The state government shouldn’t have to shut the door on thousands of interstate or overseas Victorians to handle this pandemic.

Fewer than one third of UK doctors feel they are fully protected from Covid-19 at work, according to a survey by the British Medical Association.

It is a decline since July, when a similar poll found 41% of doctors said they felt protected.

Rob Harwood, the chair of the BMA consultants committee, said:

To be caring for patients, many of whom are seriously ill and need complex care, while anxious about the adequacy of your own protection from the virus should not be happening in a 21st-century health service.

He added:

It’s almost impossible to comprehend the mental anguish to frontline staff caused by the stress of working through this pandemic, but it’s time to try.

Another survey released last month found that 45% of UK doctors were experiencing psychological distress.

You can read more on this report by Sarah Marsh here.

Here’s a summary of the day’s news out of Victoria, Australia:

The Victorian government has released its coronavirus update for the day. Most of the information was covered off at premier Daniel Andrews’ press conference earlier today, but there are some more details about the 996 people who have been identified as primary close contacts.

All those people are isolating for 14 days. The number will increase over coming days as more contacts are identified through interviews, QR codes, sign-in sheets, and people coming forward as having been at one of the Tier 1 exposure sites during at-risk periods. Again, the full list of those sites is here. If you are in Melbourne or have been in the past few weeks, check it regularly.

Of those 996 close contacts, 78 are social and household contacts, 614 are staff and residents of the Holiday Inn hotel quarantine facility at the airport, and 304 are people identified as having been to an exposure site.

The daily coronavirus cases have fallen in South Korea, reportedly due to a dip in testing over Lunar New Year.

Yonhap news agency reports that South Korea reported 362 new cases on Saturday, including 345 local infections, down from 403 on Friday and 504 on Thursday.

It comes as the government has announced an easing of restrictions from Monday, allowing restaurants to remain open until 10pm. Gatherings of more than five are still banned.

The Hong Kong Bar Association has spoken out against a government proposal that could give “apparently unfettered power” to the immigration director to stop anyone leaving the city.

They said:

It is particularly troubling that the grounds on which such an intrusive power may be exercised are not stated in the proposed legislation, and no explanation for why such a power is necessary, or even how it is intended to be used, is set out.

If a new power to prevent Hong Kong residents and others from leaving the region is to be conferred ... It should be for the courts, not the director, to decide when it is necessary and proportionate to impose a travel ban.

Read more here:

A reporter asks Cassar if she will apologise to the man. She says:

I am deeply sorry for his treatment. No one ever wanted this to happen and I am sorry that this has been played out the way it has. It is awful. We have never accused him of doing the wrong thing, he hasn’t done the wrong thing.

A reporter interrupts to ask whether Cassar has spoken to the person. She says she has not, but would be happy to do so.

She is then asked what she is apologising for. She says:

I am sorry for the way he has been treated and I would really encourage media outlets to be respectful, to be kind.

A reporter says the man is not just upset with the media, he is upset with the government for that first report.

Cassar says:

Well, I am more than happy to do whatever we need to do to make him comfortable, but again we are acting on the information that we have.

A reporter says the details about the person in ICU being the person who used the nebuliser was first raised by Cassar and the premier, Daniel Andrews.

To be specific: Cassar, Andrews and Brett Sutton all discussed the nebuliser use in general terms at a press conference on Wednesday and linked it to an unidentified family – the same family that had been linked, through genomic testing, as the source of the virus that spread to the hotel quarantine workers. Andrews confirmed, in response to a question from a reporter, that the person who used the nebuliser was the person in ICU.

Cassar says:

I talked about the case, I didn’t talk about any specifics.

Cassar is asked if there is a record of the person having a nebuliser.

[There was no record] of a nebuliser in the system. I can’t disclose other things because that would be a breach of his privacy.

Was that question specifically asked?

They don’t ask ‘do you have a nebuliser’, they ask around medical devices or any other aids and there was no disclosure.

Cassar says that when you arrive at a quarantine hotel, “and the CCTV from the Holiday Inn shows this clearly”, the check-in process takes under three minutes.

The authorised officer would always say, if the person who is checking in raises an issue, please sir/madam can you go to your room and we will call you in the room.

Cassar says the system is designed to minimise face-to-face contact and ensure quick check-in.

The only other time staff have face-to-face contact is through swabbing, day three and 11 testing, and everything else is done on the phone.

My colleague Josh Taylor asked the Victorian government yesterday if the single bubble – which allows single people to have one person at their home, just as couples are allowed to visit each other – was still in place during this five-day lockdown.

The answer is no.

A spokesperson from the department of health says:

We know this circuit-breaker action is challenging for many Victorians, and we thank everyone across Victoria for following the rules and doing the right thing.

We know these kind of restrictions can be especially difficult for single people, but we are confident that five days will be enough to get ahead and slow the spread of this hyper-infectious and rapidly changing virus.

While intimate partner visits are allowed, the single person exception enabling them to form a ‘bubble’ with one other person for the duration of lockdown does not apply during the five-day circuit breaker action.

Victoria’s head of hotel quarantine, Emma Cassar, will give a press conference at 4pm.

She will be asked about the report of the person who used the nebuliser in the Holiday Inn hotel and is now in ICU, who told the Age that he was not told he wasn’t allowed to use it.

Authorities in New Orleans are trying to restrict the size of crowds at Mardi Gras in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

AP reports:

Police chief Shaun Ferguson held a news conference with state police and the New Orleans sheriff to drive home the point, saying a bar closure order that took effect Friday would be enforced through Fat Tuesday, the end of the annual pre-Lenten festivities.

All parades in the city have been cancelled.

Mardi Gras celebrations last year are now believed to have contributed to an early surge of infections in Louisiana.

The city said Bourbon Street would be closed to cars and pedestrians from 7pm to 3am each day, with access limited to residents, business employees, hotel guests and restaurant patrons. On Mardi Gras itself, the closure will begin at 7am, Ferguson said.

Restaurant capacity will be limited as it has been throughout the pandemic. And bars, including those that have temporary food permits enabling them to operate as restaurants, will be closed – not just in the French Quarter but throughout the city – until Ash Wednesday.

Other popular entertainment areas, including Decatur Street in the French Quarter and Frenchmen Street in the nearby Marigny neighbourhood were to be shut down during what are normally peak hours. And a popular corridor outside the French Quarter that is a gathering spot for locals was being put off limits with fencing.

Ferguson said police would be on the lookout throughout the city for violators of the bar shutdown.

“If you think you’re going to be that bad actor and get away with that, I would ask that you think otherwise,” Ferguson said.

Kelly says screening processes are in place to identify anyone who has complex health needs that may require additional medical support – like, say, reliance on a nebuliser.

There are processes already of looking prior to travel, and also particularly for those flights that have been funded and facilitated by the commonwealth, about any medical needs. And also on arrival in commercial flights, there is a screening process at the airport and then during hotel quarantine. It was a key component of the Halton review last year was to make sure that support, whether they be mental health or physical health, are catered for – and not just looking at Covid here, we’re looking at the whole person. Sometimes they have quite complex needs. We are finding many of those vulnerable Australians that need to come back are because of their complex needs in terms of medical needs and others, we have seen people with terminal cancer, people at very late stages of pregnancy.

We have seen this particular person who unfortunately is in intensive care, and really I give my sympathy to that family, and with a particular need in relation to respiratory illness. So no, they will not be denied that help, whether they need to be cared for in a different way would be something for the local authorities to absolutely know as they come into the quarantine facility to make sure that has been catered for in a safe way but also for the best benefit of that particular person.

Kelly is asked if Australia should adopt a national – that is, a federally run – hotel quarantine system, in light of outbreaks in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth in the past few months.

He says the AHPPC provides advice on the quarantine standards to the commonwealth, and looks at “continuous quality improvement and what we can do to make a very good system even better”.

I will point out that the UK this week are starting to use our template for their own purposes in relation to hotel quarantine arrivals from certain countries, so we will continue to do that.

He also says that, when the hotel quarantine system was first established in March 2020, “the states and territories themselves actually at a national cabinet meeting very early on said it should be [run by] the states and territories”.

That is where the public health system is run, that is the people that have the various staff that are needed for this type of exercise. We have assisted from the commonwealth in terms of some of those staff, though ADF personnel for example have been involved, but it has really been run in the states and territories, and we are contributing, and that is really the way it has been.

On whether Australia should further reduce its cap on overseas arrivals, Kelly says:

I would say we do have vulnerable Australians overseas, the Australian government does have a responsibility to Australians overseas and for those who are vulnerable and really desperate to come home. We need to have that, factor that in and to make it as safe as possible in terms of the virus transmission to the wider community, is certainly something we are absolutely focused on. We will continue to look at that in the coming weeks.

Kelly disputes a report in the Age that claims that 8.9% of close contacts linked to the Holiday Inn outbreak were not contacted within 48 hours on Monday, rising to 43.7% on Tuesday. The report says the information was discussed at a meeting of the AHPPC, which Kelly sits on, on Thursday night, and confirmed by three sources “familiar with the meeting”.

The Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, was also asked about this earlier and also disputed it, saying Victorian contract tracers were meeting their targets.

Kelly says:

I am aware of the Age report and I guarantee the information did not come from the AHPPC. It is up to that particular journalist to decide where that information may have come from.

He then says that all states and territories have to provide information “in some granular detail” about their contact tracing efforts, which is made publicly available once a week.

We gather that information and look at it daily and there are flags to see what is happening and to make sure that the support, if any is needed, is being given. So there was data shared with us earlier this week, we followed it up with the Victorian authorities and they assured us that it was a data issue and not an issue of contact tracing so it fulfilled what it needs to do.

The common operating picture was, is there a problem? Let’s check. There wasn’t. End of story. This in no way can be seen as any sense that they are not working together, and we are working together and the Victorian authorities have our full support and I feel confident in what they are doing.

Kelly then says he has “full confidence in the Victorian hotel quarantine system”.

They have run a very good quarantine system. As indeed all of the other states and territories are doing in their ways.

He says the many reviews of the hotel quarantine system “has stood us in very good stead”.

We have had a very small number of breaches, but of course we can always learn from what happens and that continuous quality improvement approach is what we are taking. The AHPPC met three times this week to discuss hotel quarantine specifically and we will continue to meet until we have really gone through and seen what else we can be doing to improve the quality of that system, and we will not stop there.

He says the AHPPC will have more to say on that later.

The commonwealth, we oversee those standards, we give guidance, we have meetings like the ones I’m describing, but the states are the ones that are running their quarantine systems and they need to do that in the way that best fulfils their needs within their own states.

And then he says that the Pfizer vaccine is on track to be delivered to Australia by the end of the month.

China has reported eight new Covid-19 cases on the mainland on Friday, down from 12 on Thursday. More from Reuters:

All of the new cases were imported infections, the National Health Commission said in a statement. New asymptomatic infections, which China does not classify as confirmed Covid-19 cases, rose to 14 from eight a day earlier.

China saw a major resurgence of the disease in January, when a cluster emerged in the northern province of Hebei, which surrounds Beijing.

The disease spread to north-eastern Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces in the country’s worst outbreak since March, triggering an aggressive package of measures including lockdowns in the worst-hit areas to curb the spread of the virus.

But data from recent days adds to evidence that China was able to effectively stamp out the latest wave of infections and avoid another full-blown Covid-19 crisis heading into the current Lunar New Year holiday.

Electoral officials in Canada have cancelled in-person voting in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador in response to a tightening of public health orders.

The province has reported 244 new cases of Covid-19 in the past five days, CBC news reports, and has 260 active cases. It only reported 390 cases for the entirety of 2020.

Election officials say that under new public health orders, issued on 11 February, in-person voting was suspended and elections will instead be conducted using mail ballots. The deadline for applying for mail ballots has been extended to Monday 15 February.

In some sobering news out of Europe, the head of the EU’s disease control agency has warned that outbreaks of the novel coronavirus could occur indefinitely.

Andrea Ammon, the head of the Stockholm-based European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, told AFP that European countries should not drop their guard against a virus that “seems very well adapted to humans” and may require experts to tweak vaccines over time, as is the case with the seasonal flu.

So we should be prepared that it will remain with us.

Helen Livingstone has more detail about that sad case in New Zealand, where a person who had tested positive to Covid-19 has died in hospital.

She writes that the person was in hospital for treatment for a “separate, serious medical condition” and their death is not, at this stage, being included in the country’s Covid-19 tally.

Let’s break from the press conference now to run through those new exposure sites in Melbourne.

Two sites were just added this morning. They are the Alberton Cafe in Albert Park from 8.50am to 10.10am on 9 February and 9am to 10.50am on 11 February, when a person who has since tested positive dined at the venue; and the Coffeeologist Cafe in Point Cook from 11am to 11.40pm on 8 February and 11.30am to 12.10pm on 10 February, when a person who has since tested positive attended the venue.

Anyone who was at either venue during the above times has been told to get tested and isolate for 14 days regardless of the test result.

There were a number of other exposure sites listed this morning, at Hoppers Crossing, Werribee, Sunshine, and other suburbs. The full list is here. It is updated regularly. If you have been in Melbourne this month, we recommend you check it regularly.

Andrews said it was too early to say what the rules and restrictions may be in Victoria once the five-day lockdown is over. It could be “a carbon copy of what it was,” or it may be something different: it will depend on the epidemiology.

And on the hotel quarantine issue, Andrews repeated his earlier comments that the new variants of the virus pose an additional risk, so that hotel quarantine may not continue to work as it (mostly) has for the past 12 months.

What I have said is that we should have a genuine discussion about how many people are coming back. The circumstances in which they are coming back and can be make this safer? And I would think that the commonwealth government would surely want to be a partner in that but I am not looking to handball the thing to somebody else. That is not the issue at all and I will just repeat what I said yesterday. If there was, and I’m not looking to try to resolve this today, if there was a reduction in the number of people coming back, that is not a cost saving exercise on my part.

We would then turn any and all staff we could from that program onto rolling out the vaccines. That is the real key here and as soon as we can get, particularly those vulnerable people, whether it is in residential aged care of people in underlying health conditions, get them the jab, that is the bridge to something approaching Covid-normal and normal beyond that.

Should note that the limiting factor on the vaccine rollout may not be trained staff but availability of the vaccine itself. Australia is yet to receive its first delivery of the Pfizer vaccine, which is due in a fortnight. It’s 80,000 doses, Australia is then expecting 80,000 doses per week but that will be subject to supply issues and the global demand is high.

The AstraZeneca supply is more secure, with the CSL manufacturing facility in Melbourne ready to turn out millions of doses, but that vaccine is still awaiting TGA approval.

Back to Victoria. Daniel Andrews said was asked if he takes full responsibility for the situation Victoria is currently in. He says:

I take responsibility for everything that occurs in the Victorian government and my primary and most important responsibility is to make difficult decisions, make sure that they work, make sure that we get on Wednesday night at midnight, we get out of these very painful and difficult set of rules. But that is the approach I have always taken.

In other news: Western Australia has recorded no new cases of Covid-19 overnight.

More questions about the nebuliser, more refusals to answer.

Is Andrews sure that the advice he has from CQV on their infection control policies and other matters is correct?

My understanding and my expectation is that all relevant material within any government department will be shared with anyone who needs to know about it and it was my sense that was happening. I certainly don’t have any advice to say it wasn’t. Probably the best person to be able to take you through, in quite some detail about the infection prevention and control framework they have as their own framework with the specific task and no other task, is the person who leads the team and she will speak to you later.

There was a much longer exchange between Daniel Andrews and reporters on why he would not address the conflicting reports on whether the person in Holiday Inn was told they could use a nebuliser.

I’ll summarise: reporters asked Andrews why he would not answer the question now, Andrews repeated that the head of Covid-19 quarantine Victoria (CQV), Emma Cassar, would be out later to speak about it, reporters asked why Cassar was not at this press conference to answer these questions earlier, Andrews said she was busy, reporters again asked why Andrews could not answer these questions, Andrews said that Cassar was the one who conducted the investigation.

Sutton said the lockdown, which has been called a “circuit-breaker” by Victorian authorities, is needed because the outbreak involves the UK strain, known as B117.

The way that it is transmitted to household members at a high rate and in a rapid period of time is a sign of its infectiousness. But we have chased down each and every case immediately. I think that is a difference.

And the way it is played out globally, and this is the same virus that variant of concern, the B117, it has taken off across the UK and now has become the predominant strain in many countries in Europe and doubling every week, 10 days, in terms of its prevalence of United States. It is looking like an extremely infectious virus.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t get on top of it but it does mean that you have got to have everything lined up and really robust in order to do so. This short, sharp circuit-breaker is part of that effort.

He continued:

There is some evidence from overseas that the time between the generations of cases may be a day shorter than four previous variants. Or four previous coronavirus strains. We have clearly seen transmission occurring within a very short period of time. That may just be an artefact of the small numbers and unlucky cases in those circumstances. But we cannot assume that. We know that overall there is very strong evidence for, you know, 40% to 70% greater infectiousness with the B117 strain. So we shouldn’t be surprised if we see short incubation periods and high attack rates within households.

Will the lockdown be extended past five days? Sutton says five days is “realistic”.

Clearly we need to make an assessment each and every day. We will look very closely only hours leading up to the five-day period. But we will have a greater number of results back and we will have almost all, if not all of those primary close contacts, through but it does depend on whether new cases emerge or any other surprises that might occur. But I am confident that five days is enough. But we will do whatever is necessary to get on top of this.

The Victorian chief health officer, Prof Brett Sutton, was asked why the lockdown health directions were written for 14 days, not five.

He says that all health directions have always been written until the end of the state of emergency period – which is 14 days.

So they will be revoked at any point where we think the settings need to be changed. So that has applied previously when we have already had a flagged date of easing of restrictions ... That has always been the way legal have approached it.

Nothing should be read into it as having an intention to extend beyond a day beyond when we think they need to be in place. For now, that is five days, absolutely.

Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, is being questioned by reporters about a report in the Age today in which the person who used a nebuliser in the Holiday Inn, which has been pinpointed as the cause of this outbreak, was “twice given permission from Victorian health authorities to use the medical device while in quarantine”.

That man, who is in ICU, told the Age:

If I was told that I couldn’t use it, I never would have used it. The way it has all come out in the news and through the government has made it sound like I was using it illegally or that I have snuck it in or something like that. It’s been very distressing.

You are left feeling like a criminal or that you’ve done the wrong thing. That has been the hardest thing in all this.

Andrews said the head of the hotel quarantine system would give a press conference about this matter later today. He refused to answer questions about it, saying:

Well, can I put it to you, I’ve been invited many times to reflect upon this person and I’ve been very consistent not to do that. I’ve been very consistent in not doing that. I don’t think it’s fair on him or anybody but as to the specifics of what did or didn’t occur, CQV other people to answer for that and they will because the head of CQV will be out to answer any questions later.

It appeared to me that the question was seeking a response from Andrews about whether an error had been made in hotel quarantine, not to reflect on a man who is gravely ill in hospital.

Andrews continued:

I have no advice that sees me doubt what I’ve been told by CQV. In terms of these issues, I’m not reflecting on the person, I don’t think that’s fair, and that is not something I’ve said today. I don’t think it is fair. Ultimately, it is my understanding, the advice I have is that machines have been taken from people, that is the normal process. If somebody speaks to the fact they have one of these machines, they don’t use these machines. I can only give you the advice I’ve been given. You need to speak to the head of the agency.

Weimar said contact tracers messaged about 2,500 people last night who travelled through Melbourne Airport terminal four on the morning of Tuesday, 9 February. They are being followed up with phone calls today.

If anybody listening is receiving messages from us indicating they are a close contact and need to isolate, please ensure you do so, so we can continue this investigation and make sure we run this to ground quickly.

Weimar said the fact that 11 of the 12 staff members who worked the same shift at Brunetti’s as the person who later tested positive, have all tested negative, is “an encouraging start”.

He said they had also followed up with 38 customers of Brunetti’s and they were being interviewed, tested, and told to isolate.

The head of Victoria’s coronavirus response, Jeroen Weimar, says the latest case is a man in his 30s in the Point Cook area who is a primary close contact of a hotel quarantine worker who has already tested positive.

We are continuing to investigate the full extent of those contact on that worker continues. It identified last night 38 primary close contacts of that particular individual, all contacted last night. We asked them all to remain fully isolated. Our interview teams around early this morning following up each of these households. All of them interviewed today. All tested today. We will seek to get those testing results. They will all be locked down with the full 14 days.

Andrews said he had also asked Victorian health experts to conduct an assessment of the hotel quarantine system “in light of this rapidly infectious, fast-moving and very infectious UK strain”.

I don’t have the outcomes of that thinking. When I do, I will have more to say. And that will be Victoria’s position in our national discussion about the real risks this UK strain poses, both now and until we get that vaccine rolled out.

A lot of people will be hurting today, this is not the position Victorians wanted to be in, but I can’t have a situation where in two weeks’ time we look back and wish we had taken these decisions now. I’ve got advice to do it, I’ve done it, it’s based on science, there is pain out there and I will have more to say about support for business and others who have been negatively impacted by this absolutely necessary public health measure, to protect all the things we’ve built, this precious thing we’ve built.

Victorians know it has to be done, we’ve done it before, we’ve shown a courage and a character and a compassion for each other that sets us apart and that is what is happening today, but I know it’s not easy, and that is why there will be support there and I will have more to say.

There is some good news with regard to the exposure site at Brunetti’s cafe in Melbourne airport terminal four, where a person who has since tested positive worked on February 9.

Andrews said 11 of the 12 Brunetti’s staff have now tested negative. One result is outstanding.

They were at the highest risk of exposure given their proximity to the affected coworker. It doesn’t mean all the challenges in association with that business, their customers and the terminal are over, far from it but it’s positive news, you prefer to be getting negative results and positive.

As we mentioned earlier, the health directions for the Melbourne lockdown state that the “restricted activity period” will run for 14 days, not five as announced yesterday.

We are still awaiting a formal response from the Victorian government on this. But the chief health officer, Prof Brett Sutton, said this in response to an opposition MP.

The World Health Organization says it has not ruled out any theory on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, despite one top official appearing to dismiss the idea it had escaped from a laboratory earlier this week.

Speaking at a briefing on Friday, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, said a summary report from the organization’s team sent to Wuhan to investigate the origins of the virus should be published next week, with a full report coming soon after.

But he confirmed that while the scientists made progress in understanding the circumstances around the outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019, more work was needed on all of the potential routes the virus may have taken into the human population.

What we know about Covid reinfection, immunity and vaccinesRead more

“Some questions have been raised as to whether some hypotheses have been discarded,” he told reporters. “Having spoken with some members of the team, I wish to confirm that all hypotheses remain open and require further analysis and studies.” He said more experts could join the team to achieve that work.

Read more here:

Daniel Andrews is due to step up any minute now.

Medical experts have published an open letter in the Lancet medical journal, saying that the coronavirus pandemic will not end without equal access to vaccines.

It comes in response to wealthier nations talking about implementing vaccine passports for international travel, and stockpiling vaccines for their own citizens.

More from AFP.

The letter warned that “vaccine nationalism” could leave the Covax initiative aimed at getting vaccines to low- and middle-income countries facing a huge dosage shortfall for several years to come.

“The stark reality is that the world now needs more doses of COVID-19 vaccines than any other vaccine in history in order to immunise enough people to achieve global vaccine immunity,” said lead author Olivier Wouters from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

“Unless vaccines are distributed more equitably, it could be years before the coronavirus is brought under control at a global level.”

Despite there being more than two dozen Covid-19 vaccines either in development or approved for use, lower income countries still have enormous logistical challenges to procure immunisations and deliver them to populations.

These include a lack of funds to purchase vaccines, as well as poor infrastructure to transport and store them - especially since the mRNA vaccines on the market currently need to be kept ultra cold throughout their delivery.

And despite unprecedented public and private investment in vaccine development and procurement, Covax estimates it will need an additional $6.8 billion in 2021 to secure supplies for 92 developing nations.

Based on available sales figures, the authors said that rich nations representing 16 percent of the global population had already secured 70 percent of vaccine doses - enough to inoculate every one of their owns citizen several times over.

“Securing large quantities of vaccines in this way amounts to countries placing widespread vaccination of their own populations ahead of the vaccination of health-care workers and high-risk populations in poorer countries,” said co-author Mark Jit from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

The letter called on manufacturers to accelerate technology transfer to developing nations to help them produce doses domestically, as well as price controls for what it termed “prohibitively expensive” vaccines currently on the market.

The authors said that vaccines developed by China, India and Russia, once authorised by the World Health Organization, could be a big help to poorer nations as their supply and storage were simpler than the US/European alternatives.

Victorian premier Daniel Andrews, chief health officer Prof Brett Sutton and coronavirus testing commander Jeroen Weimar will hold a press conference at 12.30pm.

The lockdown directions issued by the Victorian chief health officer, which is the legal instrument through which the lockdown is enforced, state that the new rules will apply for 14 days.

Point four of the directions says:

For the purposes of these directions, the restricted activity period is the period beginning at 11:59:00pm on 12 February 2021 and ending at 11:59:00pm on 26 February 2021.

Now, this does not mean that the lockdown will run for 14 days. The premier said five and, while that doesn’t mean it won’t be extended if needed, he has not announced an extension.

For the past 12 months, almost every health order has been issued with a 14-day expiration. It is the standard timeframe used in these directions.

We have sought clarification from the Victorian government and will let you know what they say.

The rules for people living on the NSW-Victoria border, which as has been demonstrated several times this year, is an incredibly interconnected community that does not really recognise the river crossing as entering a different jurisdiction, are a bit different.

For NSW residents living along the Victorian border, the five-day lockdown will only apply to people who visited greater Melbourne after 11.59pm Friday 12 February. So, after midnight last night.

NSW Health said:

It will not apply to NSW border residents who travel into regional Victoria.

The border community is defined in the same way as it was for the border bubble last year.

Of course, there should not travel from Victoria into NSW unless they are doing so for one of the four essential reasons permitted under lockdown. They are work, healthcare or to provide care, essential shopping, or exercise – with a 5km limit on the latter.

And with that, I might pass you over into the capable hands of Calla Wahlquist to take you through the next few hours.

Australia’s system of hotel quarantine is under scrutiny after the latest in a series of Covid-19 leaks caused a five-day shutdown of Victoria, AAP says.

Victorian premier Daniel Andrews said on Friday that there needed to be a “cold, hard discussion” about reducing the number of travellers returning to Australia from overseas.

On Friday evening, the Victorian government announced a pause on all international passenger flights from Saturday, excluding those already in transit.

Andrews asked whether there should be a “much smaller program” of hotel quarantine that was “based on compassionate grounds”.

The premier said the more infectious UK variant meant the “game [had] changed”.

This thing is not the 2020 virus. It is very different. It is much faster. It spreads much more easily.

We, all of us, have to have a conversation about what’s safe, what’s proportionate, what’s reasonable.

A reduced traveller cap would make it harder for Australians stranded overseas to make it home. Thousands are already struggling with constantly cancelled flights and high ticket prices.

Andrews said it was for the federal government to decide how many people would be returning to Australia. But prime minister Scott Morrison has defended the hotel quarantine program, telling 3AW radio on Friday that leaks are inevitable.

The issue is how you deal with it when it occurs.

Hotel quarantine is never 100 per cent fail-safe and to suggest it ever will be is just not realistic.

The virus has escaped from hotel quarantine in Sydney, Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide in recent months.

Authorities in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, have established an outdoor mobile court in an effort to prosecute individuals and institutions violating rules imposed to help reduce the spread of the coronavirus.

Africa’s most populous country is currently facing a second wave of infections, with 143,516 cases and 1,710 deaths reported – but these figures are believed to fall short of the real toll since the number of tests is low.

Face masks are compulsory in public spaces and social distancing is advised across the country, but these rules are rarely observed.

Since early February, the Abuja Covid-19 task force has prosecuted violators at a court set up on Eagle Square, steps away from the supreme court and national assembly.

Attah Ikharo, chairman of the task force spoke on Wednesday:

I think today we had about 46 people, three were minors.

Defence lawyer Nnamdi John said, “those who pleaded guilty [for not properly wearing a mask] were fined 2,000 naira”. This is around US$5.

Punishments can include community service and even jail time. President Muhammadu Buhari signed a new law in January prescribing a six-month jail sentence for those disobeying Covid-19 guidelines.

The city’s task force is hoping to establish two more mobile courts by the end of the week as the virus continues to spread.

A variant strain of coronavirus has been discovered in recent months in Nigeria but it remains unclear whether it is more contagious or deadly.

The country is expecting to receive 16 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine through the Covax programme by the end of the month.

Although it seems the majority of the Victorian community appear to be is supportive of the “hard and fast” lockdown, a small group gathered just hours after the new restrictions were announced to protest.

The crowd of around 100 marched from the Melbourne CBD to the Australian Open precinct, some carrying anti-vaccination signs and waving American flags.

Thousands of vulnerable people in the UK are at risk of being overlooked for vaccination amid confusion over who is to be included in the crucial next wave of the programme, a Guardian analysis has found.

People with a range of conditions said they had been told repeatedly they were at a heightened risk from coronavirus, with some even being told to shield, only to discover they were being left out of the “at risk” group next in line for a jab.

Charities called for clarity on who should be included, urging ministers to err on the side of caution by casting the net as widely as possible to avoid needless Covid deaths.

The UK is poised to meet its target of vaccinating the first four priority groups by Monday. So far the programme has focused on elderly people, care home residents and staff, people who are clinically extremely vulnerable, and frontline health and social care workers. By Friday a total of 14 million had received at least one dose, approaching the target of 15 million.

You can read the full report from Sarah Marsh, Frances Ryan and Dan Sabbagh:

Almost every state and territory in Australia have now imposed border restrictions with Victoria following the state entering a snap five-day lockdown.

• Queensland has created a hard border with greater Melbourne, barring travellers from the city from entering for the next 14 days.
• Western Australia will extend its current border restrictions for another seven days. Anyone entering WA from Victoria will need to be tested and enter 14 days of quarantine.
• Tasmania will bar non-essential travellers from the entirety of Victoria for the duration of the lockdown.
• South Australia had already closed their border before “stay at home” orders were even announced.
• Non-residents of the ACT will need an exemption to enter from Victoria and anyone entering will need to isolate for the duration of the lockdown.
• Anyone entering the Northern Territory from the locked-down region will need to quarantine for 14 days at their own expense.

Only NSW has opted to keep borders open, although those who travelled through Melbourne airport terminal 4, 4.45am and 1.15pm on Tuesday 9 February will need to get tested and self-isolate for two weeks.

The state will also mimic Victoria’s hard lockdown for those coming across the border.

Hello, Matilda Boseley here to take you through all the coronavirus news for today.

If you see anything that you think I should be aware of or should be in the blog, send me a message on Twitter on @MatildaBoseley or email me on matilda.boseley@theguardian.com.

Here is what’s been happening across the world to get you up to speed:

• WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has called the drop in confirmed Covid-19 cases across the globe encouraging, but cautions against relaxing the restrictions that have allowed us to reach this point.
• France reported 20,701 new confirmed cases on Friday. This is down from 21,063 on Thursday and 22,139 last Friday.
• Serbia has been approved to produce the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, Serbia’s minister for innovations Nenad Popovic said in a statement on Friday.
• Mexico city’s Covid-19 threat level has officially been lowered after two months of strict lockdown measures.
• As the Czech Republic continues to deal with a new, highly contagious coronavirus variant, the lower house of the Czech parliament has refused to extend a state of emergency.
• The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has announced that schools can restart in-school learning without the need for all teachers to receive a vaccine.

The biggest news coming out of Australia today is, of course, the state of Victoria going into a five-day snap lockdown as health authorities fight to contain a small outbreak caused by the “hyper-infectious” UK variant of Covid-19.

As of midnight local time, Victorians can only leave their homes for four reasons – shopping for essentials, exercising within 5kms from home for a maximum of two hours a day, accessing healthcare and caregiving, or working if this cannot be done from home.

Schools and universities have been closed and all hospitality businesses can only provide takeaway and delivery options.

This comes after a small UK variant cluster, originating in a hotel quarantine facility, made its way into the broader community. There are now 13 people associated with the outbreak, including a close contact of a hotel quarantine worker who worked an eight-hour shift at a popular Melbourne airport cafe while unknowingly infectious.

Australians are now bracing for more cases today, including worries there could be infections across the country given a large number of close contact boarded planes after interacting with the infected cafe worker.

The Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, said the UK variant of the disease was spreading at “a velocity that has not been seen anywhere in our country”, and the current contact tracing was not equipped to deal with the new version of the virus.

The snap lockdown is intended to buy contact tracers time, and ensure all close contacts of the cafe worker can be isolated and tested.