EU grapples for Covid package
Deadlocked leaders attempt to save marathon talks for rescue plan
BRUSSELS/LONDON: European Union heavyweight Germany said on Monday that national leaders split over a massive coronavirus stimulus plan had sketched a framework agreement that could bring a successful end to a fraught summit dragging into its fourth day.
Old grievances between fiscally-frugal northern nations less affected by the pandemic and more indebted southern European nations like Italy and Greece, whose economies are in freefall, have made progress painfully slow.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said leaders now had a new basis for a deal on a 750bn euro ($858bn) recovery fund and the bloc’s next 2021-2027 common budget, worth around 1.1 trillion euros. “We worked out a framework for a possible agreement last night after long negotiations,” she told reporters ahead of the fourth day of marathon talks in Brussels in what could be the bloc’s longest ever summit.
The pandemic has sent the EU into a tailspin, killing around 135,000 of its citizens and sending its economy into an estimated contraction of 8.3% this year.
Countries in the EU bloc are still wary of a fresh wave of Covid-19. France has made it mandatory to wear face masks in supermarkets, shopping malls, banks, stores and indoor markets to curb worrisome signs that the virus is making inroads again. The measure took effect on Monday.
Meanwhile, the race to access a successful vaccine for Covid-19 continued.
The UK will get early access to 90 million doses of three promising Covid-19 vaccine candidates: adenoviral vaccines (University of Oxford/astrazeneca), MRNA vaccines (Biontech/pfizer, Imperial College London) and the inactivated whole virus vaccines (Valneva). The government on Monday also launched the NHS Covid-19 vaccine research registry to enlist volunteers for future vaccine studies.
In Russia, members of its business and political elite began getting shots of an experimental vaccine developed by the state-run Gamaleya Institute in Moscow, according to people familiar with the effort, as the country races to be among the first to develop an inoculation.
Back in China, where the pandemic began, cinemas are opening after six months.
A limited numbers of movie goers were allowed back into theatres on Monday in Shanghai, Hanzhou and Guilin where the risk of infection is considered low. Customers wore masks, left open seats between them and observed other safety precautions.
At Shanghai’s Tianshan theater, an audience gathered for a showing of the Chinese-made feature A First Farewell. Workers were disinfecting and polishing at theatres in Beijing, which on Sunday downgraded its emergency response level after seeing no new cases of local infection in 14 days.
A cluster of cases in the far western region of Xinjiang is China’s only current outbreak of domestic infections, and mandatory two-week quarantines remain in effect for Chinese arriving from abroad to guard against imported cases.
Another 17 cases were reported on Monday from Xinjiang, bringing the total in thelatest outbreak to at least 47. One case was from a second city, Kashgar.