Covid live: UK under-30s to be invited for jabs this week; Labour calls for ‘amber list’ to be axed

Eradicating the world from Covid-19 is not currently a “reasonable target”, a World Health Organization Covid-19 official has said.

Dr David Nabarro, a special envoy to the WHO, said people will have to learn to live with the disease, comments which were echoed by Dame Anne Johnson, a professor of infection disease epidemiology at University College London (UCL).

Nabarro told Sky News’ Trevor Phillips on Sunday: “Humanity is going to have to learn how to co-exist with this virus, preventing it from spiking and then surging and causing hotspots of disease, and we’re going to have to be able to do this for the foreseeable future.

“Eradication is not currently a reasonable target for the world.”

He said: “Each time there is a sudden surge, it does stimulate in one’s mind the thought that there might be a new variant appearing. That wouldn’t be surprising.”

He said that will be “the pattern for the future”, adding: “This virus isn’t going away any time soon, there will be variants emerging.”

A Dublin pub landlord has said the hospitality industry in Ireland faces difficulties replacing staff who left during the pandemic.

Kevin Barden, whose family owns the traditional Irish music pub O’Donoghue’s, told PA Media he has been fortunate to welcome back 19 of his 20-strong team after 15 months of closure.

Others have struggled to recruit staff and are finding it hard to fill roles ahead of reopening.

“We’ve only lost one for the moment and hopefully we’ll get him back by the end of the summer. So we’ve been lucky enough – we’ve retained the majority of the staff here, which has been great.”

Like so many workers across Ireland, the staff have received an income through government Covid-19 wage subsidy support.

“They’ve obviously had to take a hit and they all have families and mortgages and bills to pay as well,” said Barden.

It’s a month tomorrow since Public Health England published a report on the India variant in the UK when there were 509 identified cases.

Since then the case numbers in the country have risen 20-fold and case numbers are continuing to rise.

This thread from PHE expert Meaghan Kall on where things in England are now is well worth a read:

Countries in the Asia-Pacific region are looking to develop their home-grown vaccines as supply shortages threaten efforts to tackle the pandemic.

Japan, South Korea, India, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam are hoping to develop their own jabs after struggling to get vaccines from overseas, according to the South China Morning Post.

While locally developed vaccines aren’t likely to affect the pandemic in its current phase, they believe it’s a better long-term approach.

Germany has registered 2,440 new cases in the last 24 hours, and 24.7 cases per 100,000 people, according to the country’s Robert Koch Institute.

The latest figures show 74 more people have died from the virus, meaning the death toll now stands at 89,222.

There has been a total of 3,700,367 positive tests for Covid since the start of the pandemic.

Away from the UK, Russia has reported 9,145 new Covid-19 cases and a further 399 deaths.

A total of 5,117,274 people have tested positive in the country. The death toll in the country now stands at 123,436.

Russia’s own state statistics service, Rosstat, keeps its own records and said on Friday that about 270,000 people had died from the virus and related causes as of April.

Excess deaths in the county stand at 425,000 from between April 2020 and April 2021.

Marr rounds off by asking whether the health secretary regretted using the phrase about a “protective ring” around care homes. “I said that much later about what we were doing for the winter plans, but it’s been interpreted,” he says, but changes the subject on to the return of children to school tomorrow after half-term.

“On testing, tomorrow schoolchildren will be going back to school. You must get tests done this evening because right now secondary school-age children getting their tests done tonight is the most important thing that can be done today.”

Marr asks whether Hancock will apologise for any failings on his part during the pandemic, as Cummings did.

“At that time everybody was working as hard as possible to protect as many lives as possible on the evidence we had at the time,” he says. “This is true of different administrations and across the whole of Europe.

“I know those decisions were taken on the best evidence with the best of intentions.”