Coronavirus live news: Biden vows to get vaccinated in public as South Korea reports highest cases in nine months | World news

California has announced sweeping plans for a new, regional stay-at-home order that is likely to affect nearly all of the state within days.

The order is pegged to hospital capacity – regions where where ICU capacity falls below 15% will come under the new restrictions.

The orders are the strictest to be imposed since the statewide stay-at-home order in March. “This is the most challenging moment since the start of the pandemic,” said the governor, Gavin Newsom, announcing the order on Thursday.

So what does it mean, and will it work?

The Guardian’s Vivian Ho explains:

South Korea said it is considering tightening its social distancing rules as it reported 629 new coronavirus cases on Friday, the most since the first wave of infections in the country peaked in late February, Reuters reports.

Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun said the situation was critical as infections continued to rise at an alarming rate despite the reimposition of social-distancing rules late last month.

The government would decide on Sunday whether to upgrade restrictions, he said.

“It’s been 10 days since we upgraded the social distancing rules to phase 2 in the Seoul metropolitan area, but the transmission still seems to be uncontainable,” Chung told a government meeting according to Yonhap news agency.

Of the new cases, 295 were from capital Seoul, the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency reported. South Korea has now reported a total of 36,332 infections, with 536 deaths.

Authorities are concerned that university entrance exams which nearly half a million students sat on Thursday could prove to be another source of infections.
Chung urged students to refrain from visiting high-risk areas such as karaoke bars and internet cafes as they celebrate the end of the exam period.

Japan’s prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, is set to hold a news conference to provide an update on the country’s pandemic response on Friday, local media reported, his first since coronavirus case numbers surged in November.

Suga is expected to explain his backing of a widely criticised travel subsidy campaign meant to help revive the economy amid infection controls.

In recent weeks, a third wave of the coronavirus has arrived in parts of the country, and some medical groups and experts blame it on a government campaign to encourage domestic tourism.

His news conference is scheduled for late Friday, Jiji Press said, but the Prime Minister’s Office has yet to confirm it.

Suga’s approval ratings have dipped, with many unhappy with his handling of the pandemic, polls showed. That could deal a blow to his plan to prop up local economies and may threaten the chances of his premiership beyond next autumn.

South Korea reported 629 new coronavirus cases on Friday, the highest number in nine months.

Of the new cases, 295 were from capital Seoul alone, the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency reported.

New Zealand’s Covid-19 minister has called for patience in the country’s vaccine roll-out programme, saying he was unlikely to follow the UK in using emergency provisions to fast-track approval.

Covid-19 minister Chris Hipkins said: “We are in a slightly different position to other countries who are using emergency provisions to approve the vaccine, and in many cases those countries are doing that because they are suffering hugely from Covid, with thousands of people dying every day.”

New Zealand faced a different situation, he said, but added: “We are getting ready, getting geared up so that when vaccines arrive in New Zealand they are pre-approved.”

New Zealand experts agree the country, like Australia, can sustain a longer wait and should take a strategic approach to its vaccination program:

Mexico’s health ministry on Thursday reported 11,030 new confirmed cases of coronavirus infection and 608 additional fatalities, bringing the total in the country to 1,144,643 cases and 108,173 deaths.

The government says the real number of infected people is likely significantly higher than the confirmed cases.

Here is the full story on the global death toll passing 1.5m:

NHS staff will no longer get the coronavirus vaccine first after a drastic rethink about who should be given priority, it emerged last night.

The new immunisation strategy is likely to disappoint and worry thousands of frontline staff – and comes amid urgent warnings from NHS chiefs that hospitals could be “overwhelmed” in January by a third wave of Covid-19 caused by mingling over Christmas.

Chris Hopson, the chief executive of NHS Providers, said: “If we get a prolonged cold snap in January the NHS risks being overwhelmed. The Covid-19 restrictions should remain appropriately tough.

“Trust leaders are worried about the impact of looser regulations over Christmas.”

Frontline personnel were due to have the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine when the NHS starts its rollout, which is expected to be next Tuesday after the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) approved it on Wednesday:

President-elect Joe Biden told CNN during an interview Thursday that he would be happy to get his vaccine publicly to encourage people to follow suit, following Barack Obama, George W Bush and Bill Clinton’s pledges to do the same.

“People have lost faith in the ability of the vaccine to work,” Biden said. “Already the numbers are really staggeringly low, and it matters what the president and vice president do.”

That follows Biden’s warning on Wednesday that the spread of the coronavirus pandemic over the next two months could kill as many as 250,000 more people, though he didn’t offer details to back up such a bleak assessment.

“You cannot be traveling during these holidays,” Biden told the public “as much as you want to.”

America’s leading infectious diseases scientist, Anthony Fauci, has apologised for implying that he thought Britain’s drug regulator had rushed through its coronavirus vaccine approval.

His comments came a day after Britain became the first country to approve the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for general use, prompting some scepticism among European neighbours and suggestions of politicisation.

Fauci, who leads the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the BBC: “I have a great deal of confidence in what the UK does both scientifically and from a regulator standpoint:

Moderna Inc said on Thursday it expects to have between 100 million and 125 million doses of its experimental Covid-19 vaccine available globally in the first quarter of 2021.

The company said 85 million to 100 million of those doses would be available in the United States, with 15 million to 25 million available outside the country.

The first-quarter doses are within the 500 million to up to 1 billion doses the company expects to manufacture globally in 2021, Moderna said.

Results from an early-stage trial showed that the vaccine, mRNA-1273, produced high levels of binding and neutralising antibodies that declined slightly over time, but remained elevated in all participants three months after the booster vaccination, the company said.

The drugmaker’s shares were down about 2% at $154.4 after the bell.

The US president-elect Joe Biden has told CNN that it was his “inclination” that, on his inauguration, he would ask the public to wear masks for the first 100 days of his administration to help drive down the spread of the virus.

Biden said he would issue an order for masks to be worn inside federal buildings and in transportation facilities.

The president-elect has also asked top US infectious disease expert Dr Anthony Fauci to continue in his job and serve as chief medical adviser to the new administration’s Covid-19 team after he takes office on 20 January, Biden told CNN on Thursday.

In the interview, Biden said he will get the Covid-19 vaccine when Fauci says it is safe and will take it publicly.

How is everyone’s December going?

Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic with me, Helen Sullivan.

I’ll be bringing you the latest news from around the world for the next few hours. You can find me on Twitter @helenrsullivan if you have something to say about that.

More than 1.5 million people have lost their lives due to Covid-19 with one death reported every nine seconds on a weekly average, as vaccinations are set to begin in December in a handful of developed nations.

The US president-elect Joe Biden has told CNN that it was his “inclination” that, on his inauguration, he would ask the public to wear masks for the first 100 days of his administration to help drive down the spread of the virus.

• A partial lockdown will begin this weekend in the Gaza Strip after Covid-19 infections surged in the densely populated territory, Gaza’s interior ministry declared on Thursday.
• Facebook bans false claims about Covid-19 vaccines. Facebook is to begin removing false claims about Covid vaccines, the company has announced, as the UK prepares to roll out the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. It is the strongest move yet by Facebook to prevent its platform from being used to promote anti-vaccination rhetoric.
• WHO looks at possible ‘e-vaccination certificates’ for travel. The World Health Organization does not recommend countries issuing “immunity passports” for those who have recovered from Covid-19, but is looking at the prospects of deploying e-vaccination certificates.
• Italy reports record number of deaths. Italy registered 993 more coronavirus fatalities on Thursday – the highest daily toll since the beginning of the pandemic.
• UK government’s coronavirus death toll exceeds 60,000. The UK government’s official Covid death toll has exceeded 60,000 deaths, just three weeks after it reached 50,000.The official death toll now stands at 60,113, a figure which counts known deaths among those who have died within 28 days of testing positive for the virus.
• Obama, Clinton and Bush pledge to take Covid vaccine on TV to show its safety. The former US presidents said they would get vaccinated for coronavirus on television to promote the safety of the vaccine, as the Food and Drug Administration prepares to meet next week to decide whether to authorise a Covid-19 vaccine produced by Pfizer and BioNTech.
• Conditions at Madrid and Catalan elderly care homes ‘alarming’. Conditions at elderly care homes in the Spanish regions of Madrid and Catalonia, where thousands died when the pandemic began, remain “alarming” despite improvements, Amnesty International has warned.
• Swedes’ support for anti-lockdown stance slips amid rising Covid deaths. As the national health agency announced 6,485 new infections and 33 more deaths on Thursday, a six-monthly poll by Statistics Sweden this week showed support for Löfven’s centre-left Social Democrats had dropped nearly five percentage points to 29.4% since May, amid signs Swedes are increasingly unconvinced by the country’s strategy.
• Couple face charges for boarding plane to Hawaii after positive Covid test. The couple in Hawaii are facing reckless endangerment charges after they boarded a flight with their four-year-old son even though they had tested positive for Covid-19.
• Switzerland won’t bow to foreign pressure on ski resorts, says minister. Switzerland will not bow to foreign pressure to close ski resorts over year-end holidays as some neighbours have done, health minister Alain Berset said, while warning infection rates in the nation remained “very worrying”.
• Greece extends lockdown to 14 December. Greece will extend its coronavirus lockdown by a week to 14 December, citing persistently high infection rates. An exception will be made for shops selling Christmas decorations, which can open from 7 December.