Coronavirus live news: Millions in England wake up to tougher restriction amid fears over new strain; Australia grapples with Sydney cluster

From Australian Associated Press:

Western Australia is reinstating its hard border with New South Wales amid concerns the Sydney northern beaches outbreak is growing.

Premier Mark McGowan said WA’s “low risk” rating for the eastern state had been upgraded to “medium risk”, meaning that it would reinstate the same strict measures seen earlier in the year.

“This has been a difficult decision to make especially given the time of year,” McGowan said on Saturday.

“I understand this will be devastating news for people looking to meet family for Christmas in NSW.”

But he said the alternative, if the virus comes into WA and causes a shutdown there over Christmas, would be worse.

“That’s what we’re trying to avoid here,” he said.

McGowan said WA’s revised border measures had come following an Australian Health Protection Principal Committee meeting, where health chief across the country had received the latest advice.

The only people from NSW able to fly into WA after midnight on Saturday will be those with special exemptions.

McGowan had a strong message for NSW contact tracers chasing down infections: “They need to get it under control.”

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It seems that the flouting of coronavirus rules by senior politicians and other prominent figures in the media and public life is not a purely British disease.

The president of Chile was on Friday handed a fine of about £2,600 for posing for a bare-faced selfie on the beach with a fan. Masks are mandatory in all public places in Chile, on the pain of sanctions potentially including a spell in jail.

Pinera turned himself in shortly after the selfie surfaced on social media in early December, according to Reuters.

The president said he had been walking alone along the beach near his home in Cachagua, a Chilean seaside town, when a woman recognised him and asked for a photo together.

The selfie shows the president and the woman standing very near to one another on a sunny day, neither wearing masks.

Chile has reported 581,135 cases of the virus since the outbreak began in March, and 16,051 deaths from the disease.

The Sydney to Hobart yacht race appears likely to be cancelled or postponed for the first time in 75 years after Tasmania imposed a 14-day quarantine on all arrivals from Sydney.

Race organisers were on Saturday morning still doggedly pushing ahead with plans for the Boxing Day start despite the serious implications of the outbreak of Covid-19 in Sydney’s northern beaches suburbs.

About 150 sailors registered for the event – a third of the fleet’s crew – are locked down in that hotspot area and not allowed to travel to Tasmania. However, the escalation of health orders in Tasmania later in the day, quarantining all arrivals from Sydney, heaped further pressure on the race.

On Saturday evening the Tasmanian premier, Peter Gutwein, said the future of the 2020 race remained with organisers but conceded it would be hard to go ahead with it now, with no quarantine exception to be made for race entrants.

The UK’s medicines regulator has responded to a claim in a national newspaper that it is poised to approve a coronavirus vaccine developed at Oxford university, saying its review is “ongoing”.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) comments followed reports the vaccine could be approved before the new year, with the Daily Telegraph reporting senior Whitehall sources believe the MHRA will authorise it on 28 or 29 December.

An MHRA spokeswoman said:

Our rolling review of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine is ongoing.

Our process for approving vaccines is designed to make sure that any Covid-19 vaccine authorised meets the expected high standards of safety, quality and effectiveness.

Any vaccine must undergo robust clinical trials in line with international standards, with oversight provided by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), and no vaccine would be authorised for supply in the UK unless the expected standards of safety, quality and efficacy are met.

Health officials in the Philippines have reported 1,491 new confirmed cases of coronavirus, bringing the total number in the country to 458,044.

So far 421,086 patients infected with the virus have recovered, with a further 436 recoveries announced on Saturday. Thirty-six more people died from Covid-19, raising the country’s total death toll from the virus to 8,911.

With excitement growing in the largely Catholic country ahead of Christmas, the health undersecretary, Maria Rosario Vergeire, warned that infections could reach 4,000 a day if people continue to attend parties and shop in crowded malls.

“We are seeing right now cities in Metro Manila with numbers shifting to moderate risks compared to the numbers recorded last week,” she was quoted as saying by Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency.

Singapore reports no new local transmission of coronavirus today.

With parts of the UK said to be facing a new, more transmissible strain of coronavirus, as millions of people look forward to Christmas, the former health secretary Jeremy Hunt has said the government faces a “finely-balanced judgment” on whether to tighten the coronavirus rules.

Hunt, who now chairs the Commons health and social care committee, said that if ministers did not want to change the law they should consider strengthening the guidance on social-distancing, the PA news agency reports. He was quoted as telling BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

It is a very difficult, finely-balanced judgment. The biggest worry is what happens indoor in family gatherings and that’s where the risks do increase.

They have to respond to what is happening on the ground. I think they can be clearer about what is and isn’t advisable because it would be an enormous tragedy if we had a spike in deaths at the end of January/February because we took our foot off the pedal this close to having a vaccine.

Hunt said it was on a “knife-edge” whether a third national lockdown would be needed after Christmas.

Looking at the numbers it is difficult to judge at the moment because in the north-east and the north-west although infection levels are going up they are still much lower than they have been, and the second strain of the virus doesn’t seem to have spread as much in the north as it has in the south. I would say at the moment it is on a knife-edge.

Canada’s health regulator said it expects to complete its review of the Moderna mRNA coronavirus vaccine in the coming weeks, according to Reuters.

“There is still information and data to be provided by Moderna for review,” the regulator said in a statement, published after the US Food and Drug Administration approved its emergency use on Friday.

Health Canada said it could not provide a definite timeline for the vaccine approval but expected the process to be completed in the coming weeks.

Canada on Tuesday also announced an agreement to receive early deliveries of the Moderna vaccine amid a surge of cases that are forcing new health restrictions across the country.

Last week Canada’s health ministry had approved Pfizer Inc’s vaccine , developed with Germany’s BioNTech.

It has also received applications for other experimental vaccines from AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.

Most of the UK national papers are leading with some variation of impending third coronavirus lockdown today, and the apparently futile attempts by the government to find a way to forestall it.

A corner-stone of the UK government’s plans to try to get the pandemic back under control after the planned Christmas blowout is the testing of all secondary school children, a plan now in disarray after unions told members not to work on the scheme over the holidays, write Richard Adams, Heather Stewart and Ben Quinn.

A statement by the four main teaching unions and the National Governance Association advised staff to delay preparations until the start of term on 4 or 5 January and refuse to work on the scheme over the Christmas break.

“It is our view that due to the chaotic and rushed nature of this announcement, the lack of proper guidance and an absence of appropriate support, the government’s plan in its current form will be inoperable for most schools and colleges,” the statement said.

“Schools and colleges simply do not have the staffing capacity to carry this out themselves. As such, most will not be in a position to carry this out in a safe and effective manner.”

The Royal Statistical Society said it had “major concerns” that the government’s plans may be unsafe because the tests were “imperfect and must be used with great care”, and it called on ministers to “review them with urgency”.

The Times reports on another testing fiasco. According to its lead story, the prime minister’s plan to post millions of testing kits to UK homes every week, thereby avoiding the need for a lockdown, is being blocked by the medicines regulator.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) reportedly says the tests are not accurate enough when carried out by people at home.

The Telegraph reports that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is expected to be approved days after Christmas, with a drive to inject it into millions of people due to begin from the start of January.

Senior Whitehall sources believe the Medicines and Healthcare product Regulatory Agency will authorise the vaccines on 28 or 29 December, after final data are provided to the regulator on Monday.

Football stadiums and locations nationwide will then open from the first week of January to allow mass vaccinations on a scale not seen before in the UK.

Good morning, this is Damien Gayle taking over the live blog from London, with thanks to Lisa Cox for all her global news coverage so far today.

As usual on a Saturday, I’ll be mixing up UK and global coronavirus-related news on here. If you have any comments, tips or suggestions then let me know, either via email to damien.gayle@theguardian.com, or via Twitter DM to @damiengayle.

I’ll be handing over to my colleague, Damien Gayle, who will continue our global coverage from London. Thanks for following with us today.

In case you’ve missed anything so far, here is what happened:

• The total number of coronavirus cases in India surged past 10m on Saturday, the second highest in the world.
• Millions of people in England have woken to tougher coronavirus restrictions as parts of the south-east move into Tier 3. There are now 38 million people, or 68% of the country’s population, under the toughest restrictions.
• Germany reported 31,300 new cases and 702 deaths.
• Moderna Inc’s coronavirus vaccine on Friday became the second to receive emergency use authorisation from the US Food and Drug Administration. It is the first regulatory authorisation in the world for the Moderna vaccine.
• The northern beaches area of Sydney entered a four-day lockdown to midnight on Wednesday as authorities try to contain a Covid-19 outbreak ahead of Christmas.
• Twenty-three new Covid-19 cases were confirmed in the Australian state of New South Wales, 21 of those so far linked to the new northern beaches outbreak. The state’s premier, Gladys Berejiklian, warned further restrictions for the rest of Sydney were possible on Sunday if the outbreak appeared more widespread.
• The Australian states of Victoria, Queensland and Tasmania imposed new travel rules for people arriving in their states from New South Wales and urged their residents not to travel there.