Coronavirus live news: China battles to contain surging cases as soldiers deployed in Sydney

Vaccine shortages in developing countries are pushing refugees to the back of the queue, news agency AP reports.

About 85% of the world’s 26 million refugees live in developing countries struggling to vaccinate even the most vulnerable, according to the U.N. refugee agency.

For months the World Health Organization urged countries to prioritise immunising refugees, placing them in the second priority group for at-risk people, alongside those with serious health conditions.

That’s because refugees inevitably live in crowded conditions where the virus can spread more easily, with little access to the most basic health care or even clean water, said Sajjad Malik director of the U.N. refugee agency’s division of resilience and solutions. “They are really living in difficult situations,” he said.

Some countries, like Bangladesh, pinned their hopes on COVAX, the global initiative aimed at vaccine equity. In February, it altered its original vaccination plan to include nearly 1 million Rohingya refugees in crowded camps on the country’s border with Myanmar. But so far, it’s received only 100,620 doses— less than 1% of its allocated shots — from COVAX, leaving Rohingya refugees without.

Globally the initiative has delivered less than 8% of the 2 billion vaccine doses it had promised by the end this year.

Even in countries where refugee vaccination has started, supplies remain an issue. In Uganda’s Bidi Bidi camp less than 2% of the 200,000 refugees have received a single shot of the AstraZeneca vaccine, with second doses in short supply after India stopped exporting them after its own cases exploded.

Other obstacles ranging from language barriers to misinformation about vaccines are exacerbating the problem.

Great reporting from Amrit Dhillon in New Delhi: middle-class India has pulled up the drawbridge on domestic workers, as the part-time cleaners, cooks and childminders who used to work in their homes every day are no longer welcome due to Covid-19 fears.

Domestic workers are desperate to get their jobs back, despite the low pay and poor working conditions, but are being blamed as carriers of the virus.

It’s Robyn Vinter here, taking over the live blog and bringing you Covid-19 updates throughout the day.

Kate Nicholls, chief executive of the trade association UKHospitality, has warned that businesses are in a “fragile state” due to the so-called “pingdemic” hitting at the same time as the reopening of the hospitality sector, having a major impact on staffing.

She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

In the last month one in 10 of our businesses have had to close their sites and more importantly one in five have had to significantly adjust their offer or services in order to cope with the pandemic.

The pingdemic has hit at the same time as the reopening, they haven’t had time to rebuild cash reserves and so they are in quite a fragile state and the hit to revenues as a result of the pingdemic is running at about 15 to 20% of revenues for those businesses that are affected, so it is a significant suppression just at the point in time when these businesses needed to start recovering from about 16 months’ worth of closure and restrictions.

We are recommending that workers have daily and regular tests and that’s an important part of it for those who are a younger workforce who are through no fault of their own unable to be fully vaccinated by August 16… we are urging the government to develop a more workable, pragmatic self-isolation policy for those workers that continue to be affected.

That’s it from me, Helen Livingstone, today, I’m handing over to my colleague in London.

A quick roundup of what’s been happening so far:

• Health authorities in China are battling to contain the country’s most widespread coronavirus outbreak in months and several cities have rolled out mass testing of millions of people and imposed fresh travel restrictions. China reported 75 new coronavirus cases with 53 local transmissions, with a cluster linked to an eastern airport now reported to have spread to over 20 cities and more than a dozen provinces.
• US president Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser Dr Anthony Fauci has told ABC News he does not expect the US will be returning to lockdowns, despite the growing risks of Covid-19 infections posed by the Delta variant.
• In Australia, the state of Queensland has extended its lockdown until Sunday, defence minister Peter Dutton has been forced to isolate after a health alert at his son’s school and soldiers have been deployed on the streets of Sydney to enforce stay-at-home rules as New South Wales struggles to contain its own Delta outbreak.
• Brazil had 20,503 new cases of coronavirus reported in the past 24 hours and 464 deaths, the country’s health ministry said on Sunday. The South American country has now registered 19,938,358 cases since the pandemic began, while the official death toll has risen to 556,834, Reuters reports.
• Mexico’s health ministry has reported 6,740 new confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 128 more fatalities, Reuters reports. It brings its total to 2,854,992 infections and 241,034 deaths.
• Thousands turned out in Berlin on Sunday to protest the German government’s anti-coronavirus measures despite a ban on the gatherings, leading to clashes with police and about 600 arrests.
• The UK has registered 24,470 new Covid cases in the past 24 hours. There were 911 further hospitalisations and 65 more people have died within 28 days of a positive test.
• Italy reported five coronavirus-related deaths on Sunday, down from 16 the day before, the health ministry said. The daily tally of new infections fell to 5,321 on Sunday compared with 6,513 the previous day.
• A day after it recorded the most new daily cases since the start of the pandemic, Florida on Sunday broke a previous record in the US for current hospitalisations, as the number of patients in hospitals because of Covid-19 once again broke through the 10,000-person threshold.
• Tunisia, which has one of the world’s highest coronavirus death rates, received 1.5m Covid-19 vaccine doses from Italy on Sunday, the president’s office announced.

Guardian columnist Paul Daley has written about how the decision to allow uniformed troops to help enforce isolation restrictions could intimidate some of Australia’s most economically and socially marginalised people.

Meanwhile in Sydney, 300 soldiers, unarmed and under police command, have begun door-to-door visits to ensure people who have tested positive are isolating at their homes, as Australia’s biggest city enters its sixth week of lockdown, Reuters reports.

Army personnel also accompanied police officers around the streets of the areas of Sydney were most Covid-19 cases have been recorded. Footage published online showed police asking the few people encountered on the street as to why they were out of their homes in the largely deserted streets in Sydney’s south west.

New South Wales state, home to Sydney, said it had detected 207 Covid-19 infections in the past 24 hours as daily new cases continue to linger near a 16-month high recorded late last week.

The state has recorded more than 3,500 infections since the outbreak begun in June, when a limousine driver contracted the virus while transporting an overseas airline crew.

For some more upbeat news, Sheldon Chanel has written this lovely op-ed about how Fiji’s gold medal in the rugby sevens in Tokyo couldn’t have come at a better time:

Australia’s defence minister, Peter Dutton, who caught the virus early on in the pandemic, has been forced to quarantine due to the latest outbreak in Queensland. He released this statement:

My sons attend a school subject to the current Queensland Health directive and as a household member I am subject to the 14 day direction. I will quarantine at home with my family.

I will therefore be unable to attend parliament, although will take part in leadership, NSC, ERC and cabinet meetings remotely.

I will still perform my duties as minister for defence, however the Hon Christian Porter MP will perform leader of the house duties whilst I am unable to attend.

Having had Covid and being fully vaccinated, I have also tested negative this morning.

Another update from Tess McClure: New Zealand is opening a “travel corridor” from Samoa, Tonga, and Vanuatu, to allow seasonal workers into the country without quarantine.

New Zealand’s horticultural sector is highly dependent on seasonal workers from the Pacific, and this would allow them to enter New Zealand without having to spend two weeks in government’s managed isolation and quarantine facilities. All three countries have avoided community transmission of Covid-19.

The decision been made by cabinet in principle, and is light on details at this stage – it is likely to come into effect by September. Prime minister Jacinda Ardern is due to announce more details on New Zealand’s plan for reopening its borders next week.

New Zealand had its first mass-vaccination event over the weekend, with more than 15,500 people getting a shot over three days, our correspondent Tess McClure writes.

Organisers told RNZ the event was a “huge success,” but that they would examine whether there were ways the process could be improved before it was replicated. Covid-19 response minister Christ Hipkins previously called the event a “prototype” for the country to test the mass-vaccination process and get it right.

New Zealand’s next mass-vaccination event is due to take place in 6 weeks’ time.

Welcome to the Guardian’s rolling updates on the coronavirus pandemic with me, Helen Livingstone.

Health authorities in China are battling to contain the country’s most widespread coronavirus outbreak in months and several cities have rolled out mass testing of millions of people and imposed fresh travel restrictions. China reported 75 new coronavirus cases with 53 local transmissions, with a cluster linked to an eastern airport now reported to have spread to over 20 cities and more than a dozen provinces.

US president Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser Dr Anthony Fauci has told ABC News he does not expect the US will be returning to lockdowns, despite the growing risks of Covid-19 infections posed by the Delta variant.

In Australia, the state of Queensland has extended its lockdown until Sunday, while soldiers have been deployed on the streets of Sydney to enforce stay-at-home rules as New South Wales struggles to contain its own Delta outbreak.

Here’s a roundup of what’s been happening over the past 24 hours:

• Brazil had 20,503 new cases of coronavirus reported in the past 24 hours and 464 deaths, the country’s health ministry said on Sunday. The South American country has now registered 19,938,358 cases since the pandemic began, while the official death toll has risen to 556,834, Reuters reports.
• Mexico’s health ministry has reported 6,740 new confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 128 more fatalities, Reuters reports. It brings its total to 2,854,992 infections and 241,034 deaths.
• Thousands turned out in Berlin on Sunday to protest the German government’s anti-coronavirus measures despite a ban on the gatherings, leading to clashes with police and about 600 arrests.
• The UK has registered 24,470 new Covid cases in the past 24 hours. There were 911 further hospitalisations and 65 more people have died within 28 days of a positive test.
• Italy reported five coronavirus-related deaths on Sunday, down from 16 the day before, the health ministry said. The daily tally of new infections fell to 5,321 on Sunday compared with 6,513 the previous day.
• A day after it recorded the most new daily cases since the start of the pandemic, Florida on Sunday broke a previous record in the US for current hospitalisations, as the number of patients in hospitals because of Covid-19 once again broke through the 10,000-person threshold.
• US president Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser Dr Anthony Fauci has told ABC News he does not expect the US will be returning to lockdowns, despite the growing risks of Covid-19 infections posed by the Delta variant.
• Tunisia, which has one of the world’s highest coronavirus death rates, received 1.5m Covid-19 vaccine doses from Italy on Sunday, the president’s office announced.