19:22
22:59
Austria’s general lockdown will end on 11 December for those who have been vaccinated, health minister Wolfgang Mückstein said on Monday evening, but will continue for those who have not been inoculated against Covid-19.
The president of intensive care physicians, Walter Hasibeder, expects that it will take another week until the number of Covid patients in intensive care units begins to drop.
But the situation would remain critical until only 10% of the intensive care places are occupied by Covid patients, Hasibeder said. Currently, that figure stands at 30%.
On Monday, Austria recorded 4,625 new infections and 48 deaths from the virus. A further 15 suspected cases of Omicron were also reported in Vienna on Monday, Der Standard newspaper reported.
Updated
21:54
Brazil has recorded 4,385 new Covid-19 infections in the past 24 hours, as well as 108 further virus-related deaths, the health ministry said on Monday.
The South American country has now registered 22,147,476 cases since the pandemic began, while the official death toll has risen to 615,744, according to ministry data, in the world’s third worst outbreak outside the US and India and its second deadliest.
With 65% of the population fully vaccinated, the rolling 14-day average of Covid deaths has fallen to 211 per day, compared with a toll of almost 3,000 a day at the peak of the pandemic in April, Reuters reports.
Updated
20:42
Healthcare disruptions linked to the Covid-19 pandemic led to malaria killing 69,000 more people in 2020 than in the previous year, but a worst-case scenario was averted, the World Health Organization said on Monday.
In total, over 627,000 people globally – most of them babies in the poorest parts of Africa – were killed by malaria last year, compared with 558,000 in 2019, the WHO said in its annual malaria report. The number is far higher than the 224,000 people reported to have died from Covid in Africa since the start of the pandemic.
About two-thirds of the additional malaria deaths in 2020 were due to coronavirus restrictions disrupting prevention, diagnosis and treatment of malaria, the WHO said.
But efforts to maintain health services in the face of the challenges meant Sub-Saharan Africa did not see the doubling of malaria deaths in 2020 that the WHO had warned was a possibility, Reuters reports.
Instead, the number of deaths in the region rose 12% compared with 2019, according to WHO data.
Pedro Alonso, director of the WHO’s global malaria programme, said:
Thanks to urgent and strenuous efforts, we can claim that the world has succeeded in averting the worst-case scenario of malaria deaths.
Experts hope the fight against malaria might gain considerable ground following the WHO’s recommendation in October that RTS,S, or Mosquirix – a vaccine developed by British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline – should be widely given to children in Africa.
Updated
19:44
The US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) has urged Americans to avoid travel to France, Portugal, Tanzania and Jordan after their Covid-19 risk level was elevated to “very high”.
The four countries have been added to a list now comprising 83 countries around the globe that Americans are advised to avoid travelling to.
Since today, all air travellers, regardless of citizenship or vaccination status, have to show a negative pre-departure Covid-19 test taken the day before they board their flight to the US, after the CDC shortened the timeline for required testing for all international air travellers last week.
19:33
Former UK prime minister Theresa May has urged the government to find ways for the population to learn to “live with Covid” rather than respond to new variants by “stopping and starting sectors of our economy”.
May and other senior Conservative MPs on the backbenches questioned the government’s response to the Omicron variant in the House of Commons on Monday.
May said:
The early indications of Omicron are that it is more transmissible but potentially leads to less serious illness than other variants.
I understand that would be the normal progress of a virus. Variants will continue to appear year after year.
When is the government going to accept that learning to live with Covid, which we will all have to do, means we will almost certainly have an annual vaccine and that we cannot respond to new variants by stopping and starting sectors of our economy which leads to businesses going under and jobs being lost?
Conservative former cabinet minister Theresa Villiers criticised the government’s decision to impose “new expensive requirements” for international travel, while former transport secretary Chris Grayling urged health secretary Sajid Javid to “face down the more conservative elements of the scientific community, do the right thing and keep the restrictions as minimal as possible”.
19:22
Jedidajah Otte
19:10
That’s it from me, Damien Gayle, for today.
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