Coronavirus live news: Hawaii governor wants to curb travel; Israel boosters ‘beating Delta’ | World news

Cuba will supply large quantities of its home-grown Covid-19 vaccine, Abdala, to Vietnam and also transfer the production technology to the Southeast Asian country by the end of the year, the Vietnamese health ministry said.

After successfully containing the disease for much of the pandemic, Vietnam has been struggling to control its worst outbreak to date, Reuters reports, with a spike in infections and deaths ramping up pressure on authorities to speed up vaccinations.

“Cuba will send a large number of Covid doses and a team to Vietnam to support technology transfer by the end of this year,” the health ministry said in a statement, without specifying the number of doses.

Cuba has said its three-shot Abdala vaccine was 92.28% effective against the coronavirus in last-stage clinical trials in June.

Vietnam has so far signed deals for recombinant DNA protein and mRNA vaccine technology transfer and is also in talk with U.S. company Pfizer about locating a vaccine plant in the country.

The Southeast Asian country has secured more than 23 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines and expects to receive at least 50 million doses in the fourth quarter, the health ministry said.

Vietnam’s inoculation programme, which started in March, is still at an early stage with just 1.9% of the country’s 98 million people fully vaccinated – one of the lowest rates in the region.

At a factory in Sri Lanka’s Dehiwala-Mount Lavinia city, workers use staples and glue to assemble long cardboard boxes, which will be used as coffins for some of the country’s coronavirus victims.

The coffin is made out of recycled paper and costs a sixth of the cheapest wooden casket, according to 51-year old Priyantha Sahabandu, the local government official who first came up with the idea.

As Sri Lanka’s death toll from Covid-19 surges, some are opting for these cardboard coffins when they cremate their loved ones. The country recorded its highest daily death toll of 198 on Friday, with total fatalities reaching 7,560.

Currently, about 400 people die per day on average in Sri Lanka of various causes, including Covid-19, said Sahabandu, a member of the municipal council for Dehiwala-Mount Lavinia, a city in Colombo district.

To make 400 coffins you have to cut some 250 to 300 trees. To prevent that environmental destruction I proposed this concept to the health committee of the council.

With the spread of the coronavirus, people found it difficult to pay for expensive wooden coffins.

Each coffin costs around 4,500 Sri Lankan rupees ($22.56), compared with 30,000 rupees for a cheap wooden coffin, Sahabandu said. It can hold up to 100 kilograms.

The coffins were initially used mostly for Covid-19 victims, but have become more popular among those concerned about the environment. Some 350 cardboard coffins have been delivered since early 2020, and the factory is working on another 150 ordered by the council.

“The majority of the people in the country support this. The issue today is supplying it. We are working on that,” Sahabandu said.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa announced a total lockdown on Friday for ten days to curb a renewed surge in Covid-19 cases driven by the spread of the highly transmissible Delta variant.

There have been similar fun and games with cultural references in Australia where the prime minister, Scott Morrison, has likened the country’s Covid escape plan to the cartoon film The Croods.

Morrison, who is under pressure to find a way to lift the lengthy lockdowns affecting the most populous states of New South Wales and Victoria, explained the exit strategy thus:

Now, it’s like that movie in The Croods – people wanted to stay in the cave … and that young girl, she wanted to go out and live again and deal with the challenges of living in a different world. Well, Covid is a new, different world, and we need to get out there and live in it. We can’t stay in the cave and we can get out of it safely. That’s what the plan does.

In the real world, NSW recorded another 753 cases on Tuesday but passed 6m vaccination doses to open up the prospect of some lifting of restrictions for people who have been doubled-jabbed. The state is in its ninth week of lockdown, while Victoria is under lockdown until the end of the month.

New Zealand is bracing for its worst outbreak of the virus after it added a further 41 cases, taking the total to 148 since it started spreading last week.

The majority of those infected are Samoan, and are linked to a sub-cluster who assembled at the Assembly of God church in Mangere, Auckland before the lockdown.

A nationwide, level 4 lockdown – the highest setting – has been extended until at least the end of the week, as the country battles to contain the outbreak of the Delta variant.

New Zealand has been mocked for going into hard lockdown over relatively few cases, but our columnist Max Rashbrooke explains why he’s happy to live in “Jacinda Ardern’s mysterious socialist hobbit kingdom”.

Bright sunshine and fast evaporation have been linked with falling rates of coronavirus, while cloudy skies and slow evaporation appear to aid the spread of the virus.

A study into whether seasons affect the spread of Covid – as happens with flu – has been published in the journal GeoHealth.

It reveals that there were two variables – ultraviolet levels and air-drying capacity – that consistently correlated with Covid-19 levels in all countries.

Read more on this here:

Israeli officials and scientists have reported seeing infections fall after people began receiving a third vaccine shot.

After one of the world’s most successful vaccine rollouts, Israel saw a sharp increase in cases fuelled by the fast-spreading Delta variant. It began a program to deliver a third shot at the end of July, starting with the over-60s.

On Thursday, it expanded eligibility to 40-year-olds and up whose second dose was given at least five months prior, saying the age may drop further.

In the past 10 days, the pandemic is abating among the first age group, more than a million of whom have received a third vaccine dose, according to Israeli health ministry data and scientists interviewed by Reuters.

The rate of disease spread among vaccinated people age 60 and over – known as the reproduction rate – began falling steadily around 13 August and has dipped below 1, indicating that each infected person is transmitting the virus to fewer than one other person. A reproduction rate of less than 1 means an outbreak is subsiding.

Hawaii’s governor has asked that visitors and residents reduce travel to the islands while the state struggles to control the spread of the Delta variant.

David Ige said on Monday local time that he wants to curtail travel to Hawaii through to the end of October.

“It is a risky time to be traveling right now,” he said.

He said restaurant capacity has been restricted by staff shortages and there was limited access to rental cars.

Ige stopped short of the kind of mandate he introduced last year, saying that he did not want a repeat of measures that shut down Hawaii’s tourism industry.

Good morning/afternoon/evening wherever you are and welcome to our rolling updates on the coronavirus pandemic.

Hawaii’s governor wants to curtail travel to the state until the end of October while the state struggles to control the Delta strain. David Ige said late on Monday: “It is a risky time to be traveling right now.”

And Israeli scientists say the country’s vaccine booster drive is driving down a resurgence of infections driven the fast-spreading Delta variant. Cases are already abating among over-60s, the first group to have the third shot, Reuters reports.

More on these stories shortly. In the meantime, here are the key recent developments:

• US regulators have given full approval to the Pfizer vaccine in a decision likely to trigger a wave of formal vaccine requirements from government departments, businesses, schools and the military. Pfizer shares were up around 2.5% following the announcement.
• Deaths from Covid-19 are now averaging 100 a day across the UK, and there are warnings that case rates will jump again when millions of pupils return to schools next week. The country racked up more than 31,000 new cases on Monday.
• Almost 5,000 UK Covid-19 cases are linked to a music and surfing festival – Boardmasters – which took place in Cornwall this month.
• New South Wales recorded another 753 cases on Tuesday but the Australian state has passed 6m vaccinations and will announce some relaxation of the tight lockdown curbs this week for people who have received two doses.
• New Zealand is bracing for its biggest coronavirus outbreak yet as cases rose by another 41 on Tuesday. The majority of people are Samoan and are linked to a cluster at a church.
• Vietnam has deployed soldiers to enforce a lockdown in Ho Chi Minh City, after authorities claimed enforcement of recent curbs has not been sufficiently strict – with people from today people from today generally prohibited from leaving their homes.
• The WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that Covid-19 booster shots should be delayed as priority ought be given to raising vaccination rates in countries where only 2% of the population has been inoculated.
• A Spanish court rejected a renewed request, following a prior denial last week, by the regional government of Catalonia to reimpose a virus curfew in Barcelona and dozens of other cities, arguing the measure was “disproportionate” as infections have fallen.
• Berlin nightclubs are set to reopen after a court repealed a blanket ban on dance events in closed rooms in the German capital, but only for the vaccinated or those who have recently recovered from Covid.