Tag Archives: Pandemic

Pandemic picking up speed in half of the Americas: PAHO director

By Anthony Boadle

BRASILIA (Reuters) – New coronavirus cases are picking up again in half of the countries in the Americas, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) said on Wednesday, calling on Brazil to protect its people in the face of record infections and deaths.

Brazil is now reporting the highest number of new infections in the region, PAHO director Carissa Etienne said. Several areas of Brazil are witnessing record-high infections, and hospital beds are nearly at capacity across more than half of Brazilian states.

Brazil on Tuesday reported a record 2,841 deaths in 24 hours, as the incoming health minister pledged to continue the controversial policies of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who has downplayed the severity of the disease.

“The situation in Brazil is a cautionary tale that keeping this virus under control requires continuous attention by public health authorities and leaders to protect people and health systems from the devastating impact of this virus,” Etienne said.

According to a Reuters tally, Latin America has recorded around 22.9 million coronavirus cases, and 722,000 deaths, almost double the toll of Asia and Africa combined.

The news out of North America was mixed as the vaccine rollout in the United States gained momentum. The United States and Mexico are reporting a drop in new infections, though cases in Canada are accelerating, particularly among young adults ages 20 to 39, Etienne said.

But she said vaccines are limited and supplies face a bottleneck, with only two manufacturers providing shots through the World Health Organization and Gavi coalition’s COVAX facility to provide equitable access for poorer nations.

So far, nearly 138 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered in the Americas, although just 28 million of those shots were given in Latin America and the Caribbean.

New infections are decelerating in the Caribbean, but some islands are seeing the number of COVID-19 deaths double, she said.

Cases were rising in Uruguay, Ecuador and Venezuela in the last week, while Paraguay’s health system issued an urgent warning as hospitals filled up with COVID-19 patients, Etienne said.

(Reporting by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Franklin Paul and Bill Berkrot)

U.S. administers nearly 111 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines: CDC

The United States has administered 110,737,856 doses of COVID-19 vaccines and distributed 142,918,525 doses in the country as of Tuesday morning, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said.

The tally is for Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech, and Johnson & Johnson’s vaccines as of 6:00 a.m. ET on Tuesday, the agency said.

According to the tally posted on March 15, the agency had administered 109,081,860 doses of the vaccines, and distributed 135,847,835 doses.

The agency said 72,135,616 people have received at least one dose, while 39,042,345 people were fully vaccinated as of Tuesday.

A total of 7,569,120 vaccine doses have been administered in long-term care facilities, the agency said.

(Reporting by Mrinalika Roy in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)

COVID-19 situation in Paris area extremely tense: French PM

PARIS (Reuters) – The COVID-19 situation in the Paris region is extremely tense and authorities are ready to take new measures, French Prime Minister Jean Castex said on Friday, but he did not announce a tightening of curfew or new regional lockdowns.

Despite rising COVID-19 cases, the administration of President Emmanuel Macron has not to date declared a new national lockdown, opting instead to tighten measures locally in hard-hit towns like Nice and Dunkirk, but Paris has been spared so far.

“I call on everyone, and especially those who live in the capital, to be extremely careful, wear the mask and respect social distancing. The aim is to reduce the pressure on the hospital system,” Castex said during a visit to a hospital.

The number of people with COVID-19 in intensive care units on Friday exceeded 4,000 for the first time since Nov. 26, with nearly 1,100 COVID-19 patients in ICUs in the Paris region alone.

In Paris and the surrounding region, healthcare managers say the intensive care units are close to being overloaded.

Castex said that in the Ile-de-France region around Paris the vaccination campaign would be sped up this weekend, with the delivery of 25,000 extra doses.

France’s vaccination program has been hampered by logistical bottlenecks and problems with deliveries from vaccine manufacturers but Castex said the campaign was speeding up, with 320,326 shots administered on Friday, a new record.

As of Friday, 7.04 million people – more than one tenth of the French population — had been vaccinated, official figures showed, including 2.22 million second injections.

(Reporting by GV De Clercq; editing by Jonathan Oatis, Kirsten Donovan)

U.S., India, Japan and Australia agree to provide a billion vaccine doses in Asia

By David Brunnstrom, Michael Martina and Jeff Mason

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden and the leaders of Australia, India and Japan agreed in a summit on Friday to cooperate in providing up to a billion coronavirus vaccine doses to developing countries in the Indo-Pacific by the end of 2022, a move to counter China’s widening vaccine diplomacy.

Biden, hosting the first leader-level meeting of a group central to his efforts to counter China’s growing military and economic power, said a free and open Indo-Pacific region was “essential” to all four countries.

“The United States is committed to working with you, our partners, and all our allies in the region, to achieve stability,” he said.

Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said the leaders addressed key regional issues at the virtual meeting, “including freedom of navigation and freedom from coercion” in the South and East China Sea, the North Korean nuclear issue, and the coup and violent repression in Myanmar.

Sullivan told a news briefing the meeting discussed the challenges posed by China, although this was not the focus. He said that among the issues discussed were recent cyberattacks and semi-conductor supply-chain issues.

The Quad leaders committed to delivering up to one billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines to Southeast Asia by the end of 2022, Sullivan said .

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said he wanted the four “to forge strongly ahead toward the realization of a free and open Indo-Pacific” and that Japan had agreed to cooperate in providing vaccine-related support to developing countries.

He also told reporters he had expressed strong opposition to attempts by China to change the status quo in the region and that the four leaders had agreed to cooperate on the issue.

India and Australia also emphasized the importance of regional security cooperation, which has been enhanced by previous lower-level Quad meetings.

India Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla said the meeting had agreed U.S. vaccines would be manufactured in India, something New Delhi has called for to counter Beijing’s widening vaccine diplomacy.

In a joint statement the leaders pledged to work closely on COVID-19 vaccine distribution, climate issues and security.

“We strive for a region that is free, open, inclusive, healthy, anchored by democratic  values, and unconstrained by coercion,” they added, without mentioning China by name.

The meeting also agreed to set up a group of experts to help distribute vaccines, as well as working groups for cooperation on climate change, technology standards, and joint development of emerging technologies.

The leaders agreed to hold an in-person meeting later this year.

India, Australia and Japan have all faced security challenges from China, strengthening their interest in the Quad. Quad cooperation dates back to their joint response to the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami in 2004.

The Quad was revived under the Trump administration, which saw it as a vehicle to push back against China. The United States hosted a foreign ministers’ meeting in 2019, which was followed by another in Japan last year and a virtual session in February.

Friday’s meeting coincided with a major U.S. diplomatic drive to solidify alliances in Asia and Europe to counter China, including visits next week by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to Japan and South Korea.

Blinken will also meet in Alaska with China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, and State Councillor Wang Yi – the first high-level in-person contact between the world’s two largest economies under the Biden administration.

Washington has said it will not hold back in its criticism of Beijing over issues ranging from Taiwan to Hong Kong and the genocide it says China is committing against minority Muslims.

Modi told the session the Quad had “come of age” and would “now remain an important pillar of stability in the region.” Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison called the meeting “a whole new level of cooperation to create a new anchor for peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific.”

A fact sheet issued after the meeting said the United States, through its International Development Finance Corp, would work to finance Indian drugmaker Biological E Ltd to produce at least 1 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses by end of 2022.

It also said Japan was in discussions to provide concessional yen loans for India to expand manufacturing of COVID-19 vaccines for export.

The Biden administration told Reuters on Tuesday the United States and Japan would help fund Indian firms manufacturing vaccines for U.S. drugmakers Novavax Inc and J&J.

However, Indian government sources say U.S. curbs on exports of critical materials could hamper that effort and those to start large-scale distribution to Southeast Asia.

(Reporting by David Brunnstrom, Michael Martina, Jeff Mason and Doina Chiacu; additonal reporting by Kiyoshi Takenaka in Tokyo; Editing by Gareth Jones and Alistair Bell)

WHO tries to quash nervousness about AstraZeneca vaccine

By Emma Farge and Emilio Parodi

GENEVA/MILAN/SOFIA (Reuters) – The World Health Organization squarely endorsed AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine on Friday, as Thailand joined a number of smaller European countries in suspending use of the shot because of sporadic reports of blood clots among recipients.

Bulgaria also joined Denmark, Norway and Iceland, which all stopped using the vaccine on Thursday. Austria, Italy, Luxembourg, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia stopped using certain batches.

“Until all doubts are dispelled…, we are halting inoculations with this vaccine,” Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov said.

His health minister, Kostadin Angelov, said a 57-year-old woman had died of heart failure 15 hours after receiving an AstraZeneca shot, but urged those already inoculated to stay calm.

“We do not have any official data that proves a causal connection,” he said.

That line was reinforced by the WHO, which is keenly aware that AstraZeneca’s shot is by far the cheapest and most high-volume launched so far, and set to be the mainstay of vaccination programs in much of the developing world.

Spokeswoman Margaret Harris said the vaccine was “excellent”.

“It’s very important to understand that, yes, we should continue to be using the AstraZeneca vaccine,” she told a briefing. “All that we look at is what we always look at: Any safety signal must be investigated.”

The EU regulator, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), said on Wednesday that there had been 22 reports of embolisms from blood clots among 3 million people who had received the vaccine – no more than in the general population – but Bulgaria said it wanted to see that guidance in written form.

‘THIS NEEDS TO BE EXPLAINED’

Experts point to the difficulty of putting risks in perspective for a wider public that may be spooked by negative headlines.

In Sicily, where two people died shortly after being vaccinated, the regional health administrator said 7,000 inoculation appointments had been cancelled as a result.

Silvestro Scotti, a family doctor in Naples and head of the Italian Federation of General Practitioners, said he had been bombarded all day with inquiries from people nervous about getting the AstraZeneca shot.

“The crazy thing is that, even if the correlation between the vaccine and blood clots were proved, it would be a rate of 0.007 out of a thousand,” he said.

“To give an example: the birth control pill, which is used widely and doesn’t worry anyone, has a proven risk rate of 0.6 in a thousand. Even in the worst-case scenario, the risk/benefit ratio for this vaccine is extraordinarily favorable. That needs to be explained to people.”

The WHO’s Harris said 268 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines from various developers had been administered worldwide without being shown to have caused a single death.

In France, where distrust of vaccination is long-established, only 43% said they trusted the AstraZeneca shot in a Harris Interactive poll conducted on March 11-12, while 55% said they trusted COVID-19 vaccines in general.

Germany has also had to contend with substantial skepticism, to the extent that Health Minister Jens Spahn suggested that the AstraZeneca shot be given to the police force and army, after some health and other frontline workers baulked at receiving it.

However, German authorities’ main concern has been lack of supply, rather than lack of acceptance, as social and economic restrictions to limit transmission take their toll.

One doctor administering vaccinations in Berlin said recipients were now asking far fewer questions about the vaccine than two weeks ago.

(Additional reporting by Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva, Crispian Balmer in Rome, Paul Carrel in Berlin, Tsvetelia Tsolova in Sofia, Matthias Blamont in Paris; Writing by Kevin Liffey; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Italy to impose nationwide coronavirus lockdown over Easter weekend – draft decree

By Angelo Amante

ROME (Reuters) – Italy will be placed under a nationwide lockdown over the Easter weekend for the second year running, a draft decree law seen by Reuters said on Friday, underlining the struggle to stem a fresh surge in coronavirus cases.

Non-essential shops will be shuttered nationwide from April 3-5. On those days, Italians will only be allowed to leave their homes for work, health or emergency reasons.

However, a number of regions including wealthy Lombardy, which is centered on Italy’s financial capital Milan, look certain to be placed under full lockdown from Monday because of the recent jump in infections and hospitalizations.

“I hope that this will be the last sacrifice asked of our citizens,” said Lombardy President Attilio Fontana.

Italy, the first Western country hit hard by the pandemic, saw infections rise by 10% this week compared with the week before, and officials have warned that the situation is deteriorating as new, highly contagious variants gain ground.

The country was placed under its first nationwide lockdown a year ago, which lasted 10 weeks. A second lockdown was imposed at Christmas. In recent months, the government has introduced restrictions at a regional level, depending on case numbers.

It was not immediately clear how the decree would affect churchgoers in the Catholic country. However, it was expected to be similar to provisions last Christmas when people were allowed to go to churches in their neighborhoods.

A Vatican source said Pope Francis’ Easter Eve Mass likely would be held a few hours earlier so that faithful could get home in time for Italy’s 10 p.m. curfew and that the pontiff’s Holy Week activities before Easter would be held in the Vatican with a limited number of participants.

Unlike last year, the new decree, which was expected to be approved by Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s cabinet later on Friday, allows for limited visits to friends and relatives over the Easter holiday – for example to see elderly parents.

But the decree also imposes tougher curbs for the country’s low-risk “yellow” regions as of Monday, severely limiting movement between towns and closing restaurants and bars.

“The spread of the virus is accelerating due to the impact of variants. We agree with the government’s choices,” Stefano Bonaccini, president of Italy’s conference of regions, said in a statement after meeting ministers.

Alongside some nationwide measures, Italy calibrates restrictions in its 20 regions according to a four-tier, color-coded system (white, yellow, orange and red) based on infection levels and revised every week.

Italy has reported more than 100,000 deaths from the disease since discovering its first cases 13 months ago, the seventh highest toll worldwide.

(Reporting by Angelo Amante; Editing by Crispian Balmer/Mark Heinrich)

Army helicopter vaccine drop brings relief to tiny Irish island

By Clodagh Kilcoyne

ARRANMORE, Ireland (Reuters) – The army pilots landed their helicopter on the tiny Irish island of Arranmore just before lunch on Thursday and handed over their precious cargo of COVID-19 vaccines to Dr. Kevin Quinn and his grinning daughter Aoife.

The arrival of first batch of shots last month was a “joyous occasion,” Quinn said. Thursday’s delivery of second doses was even more momentous – he reckons he will now be able to fully vaccinate around half the population in the next few days.

With fewer than 500 residents, the remote island off the northwestern tip of Ireland is one of the hardest places to reach in a vaccination program that, like in the rest of the European Union, has been hampered by supply problems.

The two army pilots took one hour and 40 minutes to fly in from the Casement Aerodrome military air base on the outskirts of Dublin. Aoife, who works as a nurse on Arranmore, helped her father and the crew carry the frozen boxes of Moderna shots to his car, parked down a lane.

“We’re privileged to get the second doses so soon and grateful of the recognition of the unique need of isolated communities,” Quinn said after seeing the helicopter arrive.

“The mood was incredible after the first vaccine, a lovely joyous occasion and one of the best days I’ve had in general practice.”

Ireland has administered 536,000 vaccines among its population of 4.9 million to healthcare workers, care home residents and the most elderly. Just over 154,000 or 3% of the population have received the second of their two doses.

Army helicopters have also been deployed to drop vaccines to the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland.

Two Naval Ships docked in Dublin and Galway were used for temporary testing early in the pandemic, before officers ran a testing center at the national Aviva Stadium, with others redeployed to assist with contact tracing.

Personnel are now setting up and managing mass vaccination centers around the country and will soon be involved in the running of quarantine hotels.

For the people of Arranmore, half of whom are above the age of 60, some normality is at last on the horizon. The island is one of a small number of areas where the majority are fluent in native Irish and many use it as their working language.

“With an elderly population and a diaspora that mostly live in Dublin, Glasgow or America, it’s been extremely difficult,” said Quinn. “Hopefully this summer will be better than last.”

(Writing and additional reporting by Padraic Halpin; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

Sugar harvest no sweetener for Cuba’s ailing economy

By Marc Frank

HAVANA (Reuters) – Hopes in Cuba that sugar exports would soften an economic slowdown and plug an exchangeable currency gap appear in vain, with state media reports of output at least 200,000 metric tons short of forecasts for the end of February.

While no longer a top export and behind other foreign revenue earners such as medical services, tourism, remittances and nickel, sugar still brings Cuba hundreds of millions of dollars a year from exports, including derivatives, while also producing energy, alcohol and animal feed at home.

Like other industries, agriculture and cane cultivation face structural problems in the Communist-run import dependent command economy, which the government is only just addressing.

In the last six months it has adopted monetary and other market-oriented reforms, but these will take time to kick in.

Julio Andres Garcia, president of the Caribbean island nation’s sugar monopoly AZCUBA, said in December that the state-owned industry would produce 1.2 million metric tons of raw sugar in 2021, similar to the previous year.

Cuba’s output has averaged around 1.4 million metric tons of raw sugar over the last five years, compared with an industry high of 8 million tons in 1989.

The harvest runs from November into May with peak yields from January through mid-April.

Reuters estimates based on available data and local sources that this year’s harvest will come in under one million metric tons of raw sugar for the first time since 1908, and perhaps as low as 900,000 tons, a 25% decline.

All 13 sugar-producing provinces were behind schedule as March began, and the five largest producers Ciego de Avila, Camaguey, Villa Clara, Holguin and Las Tunas provinces by between 25,000 and 50,000 metric tons of raw sugar each.

The harvest has been plagued by a dearth of fuel and spare parts for mills and machinery, cane shortages and low yields and a COVID-19 outbreak in at least one of 38 active mills.

Cuba consumes between 600,000 and 700,000 metric tons of sugar a year and has a 400,000 metric ton toll deal with China.

Tough U.S. sanctions and the pandemic, which have gutted tourism, have cut into Cuban foreign exchange earnings causing scarcity, job losses and an 11% economic contraction in 2020.

So far this year appears no better, with the pandemic keeping visitors away, no change in U.S. policy and the scarcity of foreign currency leading to shortages of fuel, agricultural inputs and a general scarcity of even basic consumer goods.

The government reported that foreign exchange earnings were just 55% of planned last year, in part because the harvest came in 300,000 metric tons short, while imports fell between 30% and 40%. It did not provide further details.

“There is no reason to believe the shortfall will be made up and every reason to believe it could become worse,” a Cuban sugar expert said, requesting anonymity due to restrictions on talking to foreign journalists.

(Reporting by Marc Frank; Editing by Christian Plumb and Alexander Smith)

EU drugs regulator clears J&J’s single-shot COVID-19 vaccine

By Muvija M and Pushkala Aripaka

(Reuters) – The European Union’s drugs regulator on Thursday approved Johnson & Johnson’s single dose COVID-19 vaccine, as the bloc seeks to speed up a stuttering inoculation campaign and boost its supplies.

The COVID-19 shot is the fourth to be endorsed for use in the EU after vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca-Oxford University and Moderna, and is recommended for those over 18 years of age, the European Medicines agency (EMA) said. It’s the first single-dose shot.

The United States, Canada and Bahrain have also approved the shot. South Africa is carrying out an expedited review.

“With this latest positive opinion, authorities across the European Union will have another option to combat the pandemic and protect the lives and health of their citizens,” EMA’s Executive Director Emer Cooke said.

Final approval by the European Commission is expected soon. EU conditional marketing authorization allows a treatment to be sold for a year without full data on its efficacy and side-effects being available.

The region is having difficulty taming a spike in cases driven by a more contagious variant of the coronavirus, with countries including Italy and France imposing fresh lockdowns.

J&J chief scientific officer Paul Stoffels described it as a “landmark moment” for the U.S. drugmaker and the world as governments struggle to control the pandemic which has crushed economies and killed more than 2.7 million.

The shot, called COVID Vaccine Janssen after the J&J unit that developed it, will help bulk up EU vaccine supplies after a faltering rollout due to delivery delays from Pfizer and AstraZeneca.

J&J has agreed to deliver at least 200 million doses to the EU this year, including 55 million in the second quarter, with the first shipments expected next month.

Exact volumes are not clear though and the U.S. drugmaker has told the European Union it is facing supply issues that may complicate plans to deliver the second quarter doses in full.

The news came as Norway and Denmark temporarily suspended the use of AstraZeneca’s vaccine after reports of the formation of blood clots in some who have been vaccinated.

TRIAL DATA

In J&J’s 44,000-person global trial, the vaccine was found to be 66% effective at preventing moderate-to-severe COVID-19 four weeks after inoculation. It was 100% effective in preventing hospitalization and death due to the virus.

In its statement on Thursday, the EMA said the vaccine was found to be 67% effective two weeks after inoculation.

The side effects were usually mild or moderate and cleared within a couple of days after vaccination, it said. The most common ones were pain at the injection site, headache, tiredness, muscle pain and nausea.

Though many rival shots have reported a higher protection rate, J&J’s vaccine could help boost thin EU supplies and simplify inoculation campaigns because it does not require a second dose or need to be shipped frozen.

Direct comparison between headline numbers reported by different drugmakers is difficult because their trials had different goals, and J&J’s study was conducted while new, more contagious variants of the virus were circulating.

Its vaccine delivers immunity-building proteins through a weakened version of a common cold virus, similar to AstraZeneca’s shot. J&J has also used the technology in its EU-approved Ebola vaccine.

(Reporting by Muvija M and Pushkala Aripaka in Bengaluru; additional reporting by Francesco Guarascio in Brussels and Bart Meijer in Amsterdam; Editing by Josephine Mason, Mark Potter and Kevin Liffey)

Antibiotics may have been overused in COVID-19 patients: U.S. study

By Manas Mishra

(Reuters) – A majority of COVID-19 patients that were admitted to U.S. hospitals during the first few months of the pandemic were prescribed antibiotics even before a bacterial infection had been confirmed, a study showed on Wednesday.

The study by Pew Charitable Trusts suggests that such drugs were over-prescribed between February through July 2020, as doctors rushed to treat COVID-19 patients when treatment options were sparse.

Antibiotics do not fight viruses but are prescribed to treat secondary bacterial infections.

“Ultimately, what we’re really concerned about is what the data could mean about the long-term fight against antibiotic resistance,” said David Hyun, project director for Pew’s antibiotic resistance project.

The report, which included data from 5,838 hospital admissions, highlights the risk of prescribing antibiotics unnecessarily, which could speed up the emergence of drug-resistant ‘superbugs’.

Drug resistance is driven by the misuse and overuse of antibiotics and other antimicrobials, which encourages bacteria to evolve to survive by finding new ways to beat the medicines.

In the study, 52% of hospital admissions resulted in at least one antibiotic being prescribed. In contrast, 20% of those admitted with COVID-19 were diagnosed with a bacterial pneumonia, and 9% were diagnosed with urinary tract infections.

In 96% of cases, the patient received the first antibiotic within 48 hours of being admitted to a hospital.

The data did show that most patients who were given antibiotics immediately after hospitalization did not receive additional courses after 48 hours, suggesting some progress in efforts to limit overuse of antibiotics.

(Reporting by Manas Mishra in Bengaluru; Editing by Shailesh Kuber)