More than half of UK population has had first jab – as it happened

At least 27 people were killed and 46 injured in a fire on Saturday at a hospital in south-east Baghdad that had been equipped to house Covid-19 patients, medical sources at three nearby hospitals said.

The fire at the Ibn Khatib hospital in the Diyala Bridge area of the Iraqi capital occurred after an accident caused an oxygen tank to explode, the sources said.

Many ambulances were rushing towards the hospital, ferrying away those hurt by the fire, a Reuters photographer said.

Patients not injured in the incident were also being transferred out of the hospital.

Costa Rica on Saturday registered 1,830 new Covid-19 infections, its highest daily increase since the start of the pandemic, health authorities said.
There have been 238,760 cases and 3,143 deaths from Covid-19 in the Central American country of five million people, Reuters reports.

“We are living through the darkest health moment of Costa Rica in modern times,” health minister Daniel Salas said in a televised address to the nation.

He added that the 125 beds in intensive care units allocated for severe Covid-19 cases are 94% full, and said the remaining space could be filled in the coming days.

At least 23 people have now died and 44 injured after the fire at a hospital in Baghdad that had been equipped to house Covid-19 patients (22:54), medical sources told Reuters.

The head of Iraqi civil defense unit said the fire broke out in the floor designated for the pulmonary intensive care unit and that 90 people have been rescued from the hospital out of 120, state news agency INA quoted him as saying.

Major General Kadhim Bohan added that the flames have been put out.

India’s daily Covid deaths and infections hit new records on Saturday, but doctors and bereaved families have warned that even these bleak official statistics are seriously underestimating the scale of the country’s tragedy.

As a court in Delhi said India is facing not just a second wave but a “tsunami”, and hospitals had to turn patients away as they ran out of both beds and oxygen, people in many parts of India are still avoiding testing or struggling to access it.

“The figures on Covid infections that the government is releasing are actually an underestimate,” Dr Manas Gumta, general secretary of the Association of Health Service Doctors in West Bengal, told the Observer.

At least 10 people were killed and 30 injured in a fire at a hospital in south-eastern Baghdad, Iraq, that had been equipped to house Covid-19 patients.

Reuters reports:

The fire at the Ibn Khatib hospital in the Diyala Bridge area of the Iraqi capital occurred after an accident caused an oxygen tank to explode, the sources said.

Many ambulances were rushing towards the hospital, ferrying away those hurt by the fire, a Reuters photographer nearby said.

Patients not injured in the incident were also being transferred out of the hospital, medical sources said.

Brazil has recorded 71,137 new cases of coronavirus and 3,076 further deaths, the health ministry said on Saturday.

Following an anti-lockdown protest in London, the Metropolitan Police said: “Eight officers were injured as they worked to disperse crowds in Hyde Park this evening.
“Missiles including bottles were thrown in small pockets of disorder. “Two officers were taken to hospital. Thankfully, they are not believed to be seriously injured. “Three people were arrested for offences including assault on police and are now in custody.”

Immunologists and virologists are questioning the ability of populations to ever achieve herd immunity to Covid-19.

They say gradually waning immunity to the virus after infection or vaccination, and the impact of variants, mean it is likely annual vaccinations will be required and cases will continue to occur.

Prof Miles Davenport, the program head of the Kirby Institute’s infection analytics program at the University of New South Wales in Australia, says “the concept of herd immunity is that once it’s achieved, then you will not have circulation of virus in the community”.

The Indian government has asked Twitter to take down dozens of tweets, including some by local lawmakers, that were critical of the handling of the coronavirus outbreak.

Twitter has withheld some of the tweets after the legal request by the Indian government, a company spokeswoman told Reuters.
The government made an emergency order to censor the tweets, Twitter disclosed on Lumen database, a Harvard University project. In the government’s legal request, dated April 23 and disclosed on Lumen, 21 tweets were mentioned.

The law cited in the government’s request was the Information Technology Act, 2000.

“When we receive a valid legal request, we review it under both the Twitter Rules and local law,” the Twitter spokeswoman said.

“If the content violates Twitter’s rules, the content will be removed from the service. If it is determined to be illegal in a particular jurisdiction, but not in violation of the Twitter Rules, we may withhold access to the content in India only,” she said.

The spokeswoman confirmed Twitter had notified account holders directly about withholding their content and let them know that it received a legal order pertaining to their tweets.

In Bangalore, a city besieged by India’s disastrous second wave of coronavirus, Pippa Baxter and her young family remained stoic.

From their empty house, living out of bags packed in anticipation, they could see a way out.

They would be on a repatriation flight back home to Australia in little over a week, leaving a nation where crematoriums and burial grounds are being overwhelmed by the dead.

Mexico has reported 3,308 new confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 349 fatalities, according to the country’s health ministry data.

It brings the country’s total to 2,326,738 infections and 214,853 deaths, Reuters reports.

The government has said the real number of cases is likely significantly higher, and separate data published recently suggested the actual death toll is at least 60% above the confirmed figure.

The US administered 225,640,460 doses of Covid-19 vaccines in the country as of Saturday morning and distributed 290,685,655 doses, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said.

That is an increase from the 222,322,230 vaccine doses the CDC said had been administered by April 23 out of 286,095,185 doses delivered, Reuters reports.

The agency said 138,644,724 people had received at least one dose while 93,078,040 people had been fully vaccinated as of Saturday.

Two men have been arrested after the anti-lockdown protests in Hyde park, London, today.

The Metropolitan Police said a 38-year-old man was arrested near Embankment on suspicion of a public order offence, while a 37-year-old man was arrested near Trafalgar Square on suspicion of being drunk and disorderly and a public order offence.