Covid tightens grip on Oz, France
Outbreak in Sydney declared ‘national emergency’; France reports 133% jump in cases in a week’s time
SYDNEY/PARIS: Sydney’s fastgrowing coronavirus outbreak has become a “national emergency”, officials said on Friday, as Australia’s largest city reported another record number of new infections.
Admitting that a month-long lockdown had failed to stop a Delta-variant outbreak, the state of New South Wales pleaded for Canberra to send more vaccines and resources.
“We have an obligation on behalf of the nation to contain the virus,” said New South Wales premier Gladys Berejiklian.
“There is no doubt that the numbers are not going in the right direction.”
Her state on Friday reported 136 new cases, a record for this outbreak, which now totals 1,782. With the virus “spreading everywhere” and half the country’s 25 million people currently in lockdown, Berejiklian said the government must “refocus” its glacial vaccine roll-out.
‘Long gap between Pfizer doses boosts antibodies’ An interval of eight to 10 weeks between doses of the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech boosts the effectiveness of the two-shot regimen compared with a shorter interval, a UK study found.
“Eight weeks is probably the sweet spot”, in terms of the trade-off between getting as many people fully vaccinated as quickly as possible and allowing the population to produce higher antibody levels, Susanna Dunachie, the study’s lead from the University of Oxford, said on Thursday.
Another variant probable this year: French expert The French government’s top adviser on Covid-19 warned on Friday that a new variant of the disease would “probably” emerge in the winter months.
The country reported 21,909 new Covid-19 cases and 11 new deaths in the 24 hours until Thursday. On average, the number of positive cases has gone up by a whopping 133% in a week.
“We will probably have another variant arrive during the winter,” Jean-Francois Delfraissy, head of the French government’s scientific council, told BFM news channel.
He said that he could not predict the consequences, or whether it would be more dangerous, adding that Covid-19 had “relatively limited” capacities to mutate. The infectious diseases specialist urged French people to return to social distancing and mask-wearing, and said a “return to normal” would probably be in 2022 or 2023.
The US, meanwhile, is “at another pivotal moment in this pandemic”, with Covid-19 cases once again climbing and beds at some hospitals filling up, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Rochelle Walensky said on Thursday. Daily hospital admissions have risen by more than 30% over the last week, she said.
Earlier, the seven-day average of confirmed Covid-19 infections in the US topped 40,000 until Wednesday for the first time since early May, data compiled by Johns Hopkins University and Bloomberg show. The death toll is averaging at 250 a day.
Both figures are a fraction of the levels reported in January but cases, on average, have more than tripled since the beginning of the month.