Coronavirus live news: Japan concerned over nascent fourth wave; North Korea withdraws from Tokyo Olympics 

Renju Jose at Reuters reports overnight on the situation developing in Australia over the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, where authorities say the country has not yet received more than 3 million doses of previously promised AstraZeneca doses. That shortfall comes amid export curbs by the European Union, leaving a major hole in Australia’s early nationwide inoculation drive.

Authorities had pledged to administer at least 4 million first doses of the vaccine by end-March, but could only vaccinate 670,000 after the European Union blocked AstraZeneca vaccine exports to Australia in the wake of the drugmaker’s failure to meet its shipment pledge to the bloc.

“We were scheduled to have received over 3 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine from overseas by now, which have not arrived in Australia because of the problems with shipments that we’ve seen happening here and in other parts of the world,” acting chief medical officer Michael Kidd told Sky News.

Australia began vaccinations much later than some other countries due to low case numbers, recording just under 29,400 Covis-19 cases and 909 deaths since the pandemic began. But the AstraZeneca dose delay leaves it struggling to step up the pace of its vaccination drive.

The majority of Australia’s near 26 million population will be administered the AstraZeneca vaccine, with 50 million doses set to be produced locally from the end of March. About 2.5 million doses have been locally produced so far with thousands of doses already cleared testing and distributed to the vaccination sites.

The Pharmacy Guild of Australia, tasked to help with the rollout of the nationwide inoculation programme from May said on Tuesday that slow domestic vaccine approvals and logistics issues will now push deliveries to June.

Pharmacy Guild president Trent Twomey told Reuters he also blamed the slow rollout on a lack of co-ordination between the Australian national government and states, with the latter complaining about slower-than-expected distribution and a lack of certainty on vaccine supplies.

This morning we are carrying a joint op-ed by a group of leading health experts from around the world addressing the issue of global vaccination. They say that even with a worldwide approach to distributing vaccines, everyone is at risk from new coronavirus variants emerging. They write:

At the end of 2020, there was a strong hope that high levels of vaccination would see humanity finally gain the upper hand over Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. In an ideal scenario, the virus would then be contained at very low levels without further societal disruption or significant numbers of deaths.

But since then, new “variants of concern” have emerged and spread worldwide, putting current pandemic control efforts, including vaccination, at risk of being derailed.

Put simply, the game has changed, and a successful global rollout of current vaccines by itself is no longer a guarantee of victory.

No one is truly safe from Covid-19 until everyone is safe. We are in a race against time to get global transmission rates low enough to prevent the emergence and spread of new variants. The danger is that variants will arise that can overcome the immunity conferred by vaccinations or prior infection.

What’s more, many countries lack the capacity to track emerging variants via genomic surveillance. This means the situation may be even more serious than it appears.

As members of the Lancet Covid-19 Commission Taskforce on Public Health, we call for urgent action in response to the new variants. These new variants mean we cannot rely on the vaccines alone to provide protection but must maintain strong public health measures to reduce the risk from these variants. At the same time, we need to accelerate the vaccine program in all countries in an equitable way.

Read more here: Susan Michie, Chris Bullen, et al – Global rollout of vaccines is no longer a guarantee of victory over Covid-19

New Yorkers over 16 years old can sign up for Covid-19 vaccinations starting today, report Associated Press. It’s a major expansion of eligibility as the state seeks to immunize as many people as possible.

Beleaguered Governor Andrew Cuomo – who has faced calls for him to step down over allegations of sexual harrasment and a scandal over Covid deaths in nursing homes – expanded the eligibility to the over-30s last week, and announced that people aged 16 to 29 would be eligible starting 6 April. Democratic president Joe Biden has been urging states to open up vaccination shots to more of the population.

In New York state teens aged 16 and 17 will be limited to receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, since that is the only one that has been authorized for use by people under 18. Parental consent will be required for vaccinations of 16- and 17-year-olds, with certain exceptions including for teens who are married or are parents.

About one in five New York state residents were fully vaccinated against Covid-19 as of Monday, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A little more than one-third of the state’s residents had received at least one vaccine dose. The new vaccination rules add 1.7 million people to the list of eligible New Yorkers, for a total of 15.9 million individuals, state Health Department officials said.

North Korea’s sports ministry said on Tuesday that it will not participate in the Tokyo Olympics this year to protect its athletes amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The decision was made at a meeting of North Korea’s Olympic committee, including its sports minister Kim Il guk, on 25 March the ministry said on its website, called Joson Sports. “The committee decided not to join the 32nd Olympics Games to protect athletes from the global health crisis caused by the coronavirus,” it said.

The meeting also discussed ways to develop professional sports technologies, earn medals at international competitions and promote public sports activities over the next five years, the ministry said.

North Korea has one of the world’s strictest quarantine regimes, despite the government’s denial that any cases have been detected in the country.

The measures have allowed the government to increase its control over daily life to levels similar to the famine years of the 1990s, according to analysts.

Outsiders doubt whether the country has escaped the pandemic entirely, given its poor health infrastructure and a porous border it shares with China, its economic lifeline:

With just over 100 days to go to the Tokyo Olympics, Japanese health authorities are concerned that variants of the coronavirus are driving a nascent fourth wave.

The variants appear to be more infectious and may be resistant to vaccines, which are still not widely available in Japan. Osaka is the worst-affected city. Infections there hit fresh records last week, prompting the regional government to start targeted lockdown measures for one month from Monday.

A mutant Covid variant first discovered in Britain has taken hold in the Osaka region, spreading faster and filling up hospital beds with more serious cases than the original virus, according to Koji Wada, a government adviser on the pandemic.

“The fourth wave is going to be larger,” said Wada, a professor at Tokyo’s International University of Health and Welfare. “We need to start to discuss how we could utilise these targeted measures for the Tokyo area”:

Many Indian state leaders have asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to open up vaccinations to most of the country’s hundreds of millions of adults, following a second surge in infections that has eclipsed the first wave, Reuters reports.

India breached the grim milestone of 100,000 daily infections for the first time on Monday, and cases are likely to stay high again when fresh figures are released later on Tuesday.

The country, the world’s biggest vaccine maker, this month expanded its vaccination programme to include everyone above the age of 45. So far it has vaccinated only about 1 in 25 people, compared with nearly 1 in 2 in the United Kingdom and 1 in 3 in the United States.

“If a larger number of young and working population is vaccinated, the intensity of the cases would be much lower than the treatment that they need today,” Uddhav Thackeray, chief minister of India’s worst affected Maharashtra state, wrote in a letter to Modi late on Monday.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and many other states have also asked for faster and wider vaccinations, with some flagging tightness in vaccine supplies even for the prioritised groups.

The federal government has said it will widen the vaccination campaign in the “near future” to include more people, and that vaccine supplies are being stepped up.
With 12.6 million cases, India is the worst affected country after the United States and Brazil. Deaths have gone past the 165,000 mark.

The country’s daily infections have risen many fold since hitting a multi-month low in early February, when authorities eased most restrictions and people largely stopped wearing masks and following social distancing.

India has recorded the most number of infections in the past week anywhere in the world. More infectious variants of the virus may have played a role in the second surge, some epidemiologists say.

Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic with me, Helen Sullivan.

I’ll be bringing you the latest for the next little while – as always, you can find me on Twitter @helenrsullivan.

Indian state leaders have asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to open up vaccinations to most of the country’s hundreds of millions of adults, following a second surge in infections that has eclipsed the first wave.

India breached the grim milestone of 100,000 daily infections for the first time on Monday, and cases are likely to stay high again when fresh figures are released later on Tuesday.

The country, the world’s biggest vaccine maker, this month expanded its vaccination programme to include everyone above the age of 45.

Meanwhile with just over 100 days to go to the Tokyo Olympics, Japanese health authorities are concerned that variants of the coronavirus are driving a nascent fourth wave.

The variants appear to be more infectious and may be resistant to vaccines, which are still not widely available in Japan. Osaka is the worst-affected city. Infections there hit fresh records last week, prompting the regional government to start targeted lockdown measures for one month from Monday.

Here are the key recent developments from around the world.

• UK prime minister Boris Johnson confirmed it will move to the second stage of its lockdown lifting from next week, as non-essential shops, pub gardens and hairdressers will reopen.
• In France the number of people in intensive care units with Covid rose by 92 to 5,433 on Monday.
• Another 296 people have died in Italy, bringing its death toll to 111,326. New infections fell from 18,025 to 10,680.
• Authorities in Saudi Arabia said only people who have been vaccinated or had the virus will be able to do the umrah pilgrimage later this month.
• The infection rate in Spain has risen again to an average of 163.4 per 100,000 over the last fortnight, as it reported 85 more deaths.
• Up to 200 workers at Goldman Sachs’ office in London will return to the office this week.
• The US has now administered 167,187,795 vaccines and distributed a total of 207,891,395 to clinics, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has reported.
• Mexico’s government reported another 252 more deaths on Monday. It means that 204,399 have now died from the virus.
• People aged under-30 in the UK may stop being given the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine over concerns about rare blood clots.
• An investigation has been launched in France after a TV exposé revealed “clandestine” luxury dinners in Paris despite the pandemic.