Coronavirus live news: new variant already in ‘great majority if not all’ European countries, says expert | World news

A new variant of the coronavirus that is spreading rapidly in Britain appears to have infected two students who returned to Hong Kong from the UK, Hong Kong’s Department of Health said on Wednesday, Reuters reports.

Virus samples from the two students, who returned to the Asian financial hub in December, appeared to match the British variant of the coronavirus, Dr Chuang Shuk-kwan, head of the communicable disease branch of the Centre for Health Protection, an agency under the Department of Health, told a daily press briefing.

More analysis needed to be done to verify the samples, she said.

Egypt has cancelled all New Year’s celebrations in order to stem rising coronavirus cases in the country, AFP reports Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouli as saying.

“There will be no New Year’s celebrations or gatherings as part of the precautionary measures taken to confront the coronavirus,” the premier said in a statement released after a cabinet meeting.

Egypt’s daily novel coronavirus caseload has been increasing steadily in recent weeks, and the Arab world’s most populous country has officially recorded more than 127,000 cases, including over 7,100 deaths.

While the official recovery rate remains high, limited testing of the general population has stoked fears that cases are going undetected.

On Monday, Mohammed al-Nady, a member of Egypt’s national coronavirus crisis committee, told prominent talk show host Lamees al-Hadidi that “infections, in reality, are at least 10 times higher than what is officially announced, and that’s being kind”.

Health and Population Minister Hala Zayed told Wednesday’s cabinet meeting that 364 hospitals nationwide, with a capacity of 5,000 “care beds” and equipped with 2,400 respirators, would be ready to receive critically ill Covid-19 patients when needed, according to the statement.

There is no evidence that long Covid is related to a variant, Prof Barclay says, adding that it is most likely due to a difference in the host response that an individual mounts.

Asked about whether we would have needed a tier 4 if we’d “cancelled Christmas” in November, Prof Horby points to the variant’s transmission over lockdown while saying modelling would need to be done to know.

A man has been arrested after disturbances in Dover and the nearby Manston lorry park, PA reports.

The man is being held for obstructing a highway in Dover, Kent Police said.

A spokesman added: “Officers on the ground at both locations are working with partner agencies to make sure those hoping to travel to the continent adhere to the latest government travel requirements regarding Covid testing.”

Some lorry drivers clashed with police early on Wednesday in Dover as they continued to be held up because of the impact of the now-lifted French travel ban.

Prof Ferguson says evidence from Denmark (a country with a relatively low infection rate) suggests that “almost certainly” this virus has already been introduced to the “great majority if not all” of European countries.

Q: The UK sequences 45% of the sequencing done globally, so we will discover more variants – are we being penalised for being more rigorous on the sequencing?

Prof Horby says countries that are more extensive and transparent expose themselves to important information being made available to others, but this is a “global public good” which is in “our interest”. He says European colleagues have said they need to replicate the UK’s genomic surveillance.

There is no evidence that the new variant is evolving any faster than the previous variants, Prof Ferguson says, and no variant in geographic links to the speed of mutation.

He says the new variant looks like a “point source” spreading out from the location but “we cannot completely rule out that it was an importation” from another part of the world.

Increased infectiousness poses a challenge for maintaining infection control, Prof Ferguson says. If children are found to be more infectious, it will pose a challenge to control measures, including what will be done with schools.

Asked about the possibility of children being more susceptible to the new variant, Prof Ferguson says comparisons with the non-variant show a statistically significant proportion of cases in under-15s.

“Beyond that we know nothing,” he says, adding there could be a number of hypotheses as to why that is the case. He emphasises that while it is a significant shift, it’s “not a huge shift”.

He says outcomes will be examined carefully, with comparisons made between hospitalisation rates (which are rare for children) and overall mortality rates.

Switzerland started its Covid-19 vaccine rollout on Wednesday, with a care home resident in her 90s becoming the first person to receive an approved shot, AFP reports.

The woman, who lives in the Lucerne region in central Switzerland, was given the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine just four days after it was approved by national regulators.

“I am very satisfied that we have now been able to start vaccinations in the canton of Lucerne,” the region’s health services chief Guido Graf said in a statement.

“These vaccinations are an important element in the fight against the coronavirus.”

Future variants may escape the vaccine, Prof Horby says. It is important to have processes in place to quickly create vaccine variants.

Of the seven mutations, there are three that haven’t been observed together before, that combined add up to a “biologically plausible mechanism” for enhanced entry and replication for the virus, Prof Barclay says.

Asked about the impact of the mutation on the vaccine’s efficacy, Prof Barclay starts by saying we don’t have the data yet.

However, she says while efficacy could be reduced, it is “highly unlikely” that the entire vaccine response will be rendered useless by this variant.

Prof Horby says there’s not been “any egging up” of the new variant’s transmissibility in response to speculation that the government did so to justify its last-minute changing of the Christmas rules.

The analysis suggests the virus is behaving biologically differently, he says.

Serbia will begin vaccinating people against Covid-19 on Thursday, the country’s president, Aleksandar Vučić,said on Wednesday.

Officials said Serbia has received nearly 5,000 doses of the vaccine, which is already in use in the United States and Britain.

Meanwhile European Union countries plan to roll out the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on 27 December.

“Vaccination starts tomorrow in Serbia,” Vucic told the press, adding that the first jabs would go to the elderly in retirement homes. “It is important to protect these people… more than 80% of the people who have died from this terrible virus are the elderly and they are most at risk,” he said.

Q: Could rapid transmission be due to lower adherence to lockdown measures?

Prof Horby says they are increasingly confident that the virus behaves differently.