Covid live: travel in and out of Lisbon to be banned after Portugal cases surge; Nepal plea for vaccine doses | World news

Kuwait has announced it is to allow foreigners who have been fully vaccinated against Covid to enter the country from 1 August, after a months-long suspension.

AFP reports that the Gulf country in February banned the entry of non-citizens in a bid to limit the spread of the virus, but has started to ease some of its Covid-19 restrictions in recent weeks.

Government spokesman Tareq al-Mizrem said foreign travellers will need to have been fully inoculated with one of the four vaccines that the Gulf country has approved – Pfizer/BioNTech, AstraZeneca, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson.

Passengers must also hold a negative PCR test conducted a maximum of 72 hours before travel, and undergo another test during a seven-day quarantine in the country, Mizrem told a press conference.

Covid passports have been criticised as devices which will inevitably “disproportionately discriminate” based on race, religion, age and socio-economic background.

Meanwhile, only Kuwaiti citizens who have been fully vaccinated will be allowed to travel abroad from 1 August, he said, although some exceptions would be made, such as for pregnant women. Previously, Kuwaitis were required to have had at least one jab in order to travel.

Mizrem also announced that Kuwait would allow access to large shopping malls, gyms and restaurants from 27 June only for those who have been fully inoculated. Kuwait has officially recorded 1,800 Covid-related deaths.

EU states must use all the vaccine options available to fight Covid, and it is too early to tell if a particular type is best, the European Medicines Agency said.

The comments come as several countries limit the use of so-called viral vector jabs like AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson due to a link with rare blood clots, and opt instead for Messenger RNA vaccines like Pfizer and Moderna.

“We are still in a pandemic, and it’s very important that in this fight against this pandemic we use all the options we have available,” said Marco Cavaleri, EMA head of vaccines strategy. It is “up to member states how they use them in the best interest of public health”.

The EMA earlier this week denied that Cavaleri had suggested in an interview with an Italian newspaper dropping the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine, even for people over 60 to whom it is currently limited in a number of states.

Cavaleri said the episode was “rather unfortunate and essentially was a misunderstanding on many aspects”. However, a full explanation and breakdown of how exactly the misunderstanding arose has not appeared to be forthcoming.

The EMA expert added it was “very difficult to say” which type of vaccine technology might prove the most dominant in future, and that all existing jabs had “already been saving thousands and millions of lives”.

“Whether in the future there will be a certain type of vaccine like the messenger RNA that will remain the main one or not, whether other platform technologies … will remain as ancillary vaccine that could play an important role in controlling this coronavirus, is difficult to say right now,” he said. “We are just glad to have so many options.”

Earlier this month, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, claimed that Europe had been slow to approve his country’s Covid vaccine because of a “battle for money” and that commercial interests were being put ahead of the welfare of European citizens.

Vietnam has called on the World Health Organization to speed up its stuttering Covax vaccine drive as the country’s new daily infections hit a record high.

Reuters reports that a new outbreak has infected 8,914 people since late April, or 75% of the total cases over the pandemic, prompting calls for Vietnam’s government to accelerate its vaccination programme.

WHO should speed up vaccine delivery through the international sharing scheme, Vu Duc Dam, head of the country’s Covid-19 task force, said during a meeting with WHO’s regional director for the Western Pacific, Takeshi Kasai.

Dam also urged the WHO to accelerate the transfer of vaccine manufacturing technology so Vietnam can become one of the vaccine production hubs in the region.

The WHO said last month it was reviewing a proposal by an unidentified vaccine manufacturer in Vietnam to become an mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccine technology hub in the Southeast Asian country.

The country of about 98 million people has received nearly 4m doses of the vaccine, most of which came from the Covax programme.

Vietnam’s domestic inoculations started in March. At least 1.77 million people in Vietnam have had one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, while 72,325 have been fully vaccinated, according to official data.

Travel in and out of the Lisbon metropolitan area is to be banned over coming weekends as Portuguese authorities respond to a spike in new Covid-19 cases in the region around the capital, officials have announced.

AP reports that the ban in the area where some 2.8 million people live comes into effect from 3pm local time on Friday, the cabinet spokeswoman Mariana Vieira da Silva said.

“We’re aware [the travel ban] isn’t easy and that it’s not what people want, but we feel it’s necessary to protect the rest of the country,” she said.

The travel restrictions are open-ended, pending periodic reviews. Flights out of Lisbon airport are exempt from the ban, as are work-related journeys.

Portugal is witnessing a rise in daily cases not seen since February. The authorities reported that 804 of the 1,233 new cases detected on Thursday were in the Lisbon region.

Experts believe there is community transmission of the highly contagious Delta variant in the Lisbon region.

The region this week crossed the red line established by authorities of a 14-day cumulative case notification rate per 100,000 people of 240. Today, Lisbon’s notification rate was 254. The national rate was 90.

The US embassy in Afghanistan has ordered a near-complete lockdown because of a spike in coronavirus cases among employees.

AP reports that the embassy in Kabul ordered those staffers remaining, amid the imminent withdrawal of American forces from the country, into virtual isolation to prevent the spread of the virus which has already killed at least one person, sent 114 into quarantine and forced several people to be medically evacuated.

The embassy said in a notice to employees that almost all group activities, including work meetings and recreational gatherings, are banned because intensive care units at military medical facilities in Afghanistan are at full capacity and the number of cases has forced it to establish temporary Covid-19 wards to care for patients requiring oxygen.

It said the restrictions would remain in place until the chain of transmission was broken. The notice said 95% of the cases involved people who had not been vaccinated or fully vaccinated against the virus and urged all staff to take advantage of available vaccines at the embassy.

“We must break the chain of transmission to protect one another and ensure the mission’s ability to carry out the nation’s business,” the acting US ambassador, Ross Wilson, said in the notice. “Restrictions will continue until the chain of transmission is broken … We are all in this together and rely on your cooperation during this difficult time. We can only return to normal operations with the cooperation of everyone.”

The US is devoting $3.2bn to advance development of antiviral pills for Covid-19 and other dangerous viruses that could turn into pandemics.

AP reports that Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, announced the investment at a White House briefing as part of a new “antiviral program for pandemics” to develop drugs to address symptoms caused by potentially dangerous viruses like Covid.

The pills for Covid-19, which would be used to minimise symptoms after infection, are in development and could begin arriving by year’s end, pending the completion of clinical trials. The funding will speed those clinical trials and provide additional support to private sector research, development and manufacturing.

Fauci said the new programme would invest in “accelerating things that are already in progress” for Covid-19 but also would work to innovate new therapies for other viruses. “There are few treatments that exist for many of the viruses that have pandemic potential,” he said. But he added, “vaccines clearly remain the center piece of our arsenal.”

The US has approved one antiviral drug, remdesivir, against Covid-19 and allowed emergency use of three antibody combinations that help the immune system fight the virus. But all the drugs have to be infused at hospitals or medical clinics, and demand has been low due to these logistical hurdles.

It does seem rather convenient for politicians to blame surges in Covid cases on variants, rather than their own public health policies, though it may well be true – in the absence of firm evidence in many places insofar.

This afternoon in Moscow, the mayor has said the situation with Covid-19 was unexpectedly and rapidly deteriorating, and that the city was probably facing new variants of the coronavirus that were more aggressive and infectious.

In televised comments, mayor Sergei Sobyanin said officials were rapidly increasing the number of hospital beds in the city to treat a possible influx of Covid-19 patients. He said there were currently enough beds available.

It comes after Moscow city authorities yesterday ordered all workers with public facing roles in the Russian capital to be vaccinated against Covid-19, one of the most forceful steps taken anywhere in the world to compel people to get shots.

A decree listed a range of jobs – from hairdressers, retailers and taxi drivers to bank tellers, teachers and performers – for which vaccination will now be obligatory, AFP reports. Deputy mayor Anastasia Rakova said the list covers more than 2 million workers in the city.

As China and Russia continue to face accusations of vaccine diplomacy from western nations, the US expects Covid-19 vaccines to be delivered “in very short order” to Taiwan.

A senior state department official said that it was working with Taiwanese regulators after Washington promised to donate 750,000 vaccine doses to the self-ruled island claimed by China.

“In very short order we do expect to have those vaccines on their way to Taiwan and hopefully into people’s arms shortly thereafter,” Jonathan Fritz, deputy assistant secretary of state for China, Mongolia, and Taiwan coordination, told a Senate hearing.

Asked if they would be delivered within weeks, Fritz said he hoped it would be “perhaps even sooner than that”, but that he couldn’t give a specific date, according to Reuters.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has said it was not willing to impose a 50% efficacy threshold for Covid-19 vaccines, adding that full trial data was necessary for it to make a sound assessment on the benefits and risks of a shot.

German biotech CureVac NV said on Wednesday that its Covid-19 vaccine was only 47% effective in a late-stage trial, missing the study’s main goal and throwing into doubt the potential delivery of hundreds of millions of doses to the European Union.

“We will need to collect all the final data from this clinical trial, and have a good analysis of the outcome throughout different regions, age groups and according to different variants,” Marco Cavaleri, head of Biological Health Threats and Vaccines Strategy at the EMA, told reporters.

“So I think it is premature to enter into what this means (…) We always felt it was difficult to define upfront a threshold,” he said.

France’s tourism sector is taking a further step toward normality with the reopening of Disneyland Paris, two weeks after the country reopened its borders to vaccinated visitors from across the world.

Europe’s most frequented theme park in Marne-la-Vallee, east of the French capital, opened its doors on Thursday after nearly eight months of closure.

A crowd of smiling visitors was welcomed by Disney characters dancing to the sound of joyful music.

“Amazing,” said Debbie Tater. The Delaware resident travelled from the United States to visit her family, including her daughter and two granddaughters, who live in France and whom she hadn’t seen for a year and a half.

“Happiest place on earth,” she said, with tears in her eyes.

“We couldn’t miss the reopening,” said Elodie Piedfort, from Haute-Loire region in central France. “Because I’m a nurse it’s been a very difficult year and being here, together with my son, is great. And the reopening, moving on is great as well.”

Visitors must wear masks inside the park and other measures are in place, including a cap on visitor numbers to ensure distancing.