‘Cruise to nowhere’ cut short after Covid case

SINGAPORE: Nearly 1,700 passengers on a Royal Caribbean ‘cruise-to-nowhere’ from Singapore remained confined in their cabins for more than 14 hours on Wednesday after a Covid-19 case was detected on board, forcing the ship back to port.

All passengers aboard the Quantum of the Seas vessel had cleared a mandatory polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test for the virus up to three days before the four-day cruise started on Monday.

Merkel for tough curbs Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Germans to make an additional sacrifice over the Christmas holidays to contain the coronavirus as the country’s soft shutdown fails to slow its spread. Germany’s daily coronavirus-related deaths rose the most since the outbreak began, while the total number of infections in the US topped 15 million. Cases globally climbed above 68 million, more than the entire population of the UK.

While the German government will seek to keep schools open, closing non-essential stores, sending children home for the holidays early and further reducing contact between people is the right path, Merkel said on Wednesday in Berlin.

France may delay easing France will delay relaxing some Covid-19 lockdown restrictions if necessary to stave off a third wave of infections, government spokesman Gabriel Attal said on Wednesday.

France is due to reopen cinemas, theatres and museums and allow citizens to move between regions on December 15, but there are signs it may not meet preconditions to enter into the second phase of rolling back the curbs. “If we consider that ... we must modify this second phase (of lifting lockdown measures), then of course we will do it,” Attal told CNews television.

No mutant in mink farm A coronavirus outbreak detected last month on a mink farm in France did not involve a mutated strain of the virus, the agriculture ministry said on Wednesday. The outbreak had led the authorities to cull all the animals at the mink farm in the Eure-et-Loir region southwest of Paris.