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South Africa tightens restrictions; France to review measures - as it happened

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A health worker in Pretoria, South Africa, inspects his equipment before starting work. Photograph: Phill Magakoe/AFP/Getty Images
A health worker in Pretoria, South Africa, inspects his equipment before starting work. Photograph: Phill Magakoe/AFP/Getty Images

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Members of the armed forces will be drafted in to support coronavirus testing operations for thousands of school and college students in England, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has announced.

The MoD said 1,500 military personnel would be deployed to ensure that testing systems were up and running by the time pupils returned for the new term in January.

The majority of the personnel will form local response teams, providing support and phone advice to institutions needing guidance on the testing process and setup of the testing facilities.

Students will swab themselves in the vast majority of cases, under the supervision of a school staff member or volunteer who has been trained for the role, and teachers are not expected to take a role in the testing process.

The defence secretary, Ben Wallace, said: “The UK armed forces are stepping up once again this holiday.

“They’ll share considerable experience of testing across the country and the successful school pilots conducted this autumn.

“We are grateful for the professionalism and commitment they and our colleagues in teaching are showing to get students back into the classroom and on with their education.”

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News of planned New Year’s Eve parties in Los Angeles is sparking outrage as the region faces a catastrophic Covid crisis, record deaths and a crushed healthcare system.

In the lead up to the new year, LA has become the new centr of America’s out-of-control pandemic, with one Covid death now happening every 10 minutes and hospitals faced with unthinkable choices as they run out of intensive care unit beds. But doctors’ warnings of “apocalyptic” scenes at hospitals have not stopped some businesses from planning in-person events to ring in 2021, drawing sharp criticism from health officials.

In upscale Beverly Hills, a fine-dining Italian restaurant called La Scala was caught advertising an indoor dinner for December 31, leaving invitations in take-out bags that said, “Welcome back to the 20’s Prohibition”. The note emphasised that it would host people indoors, adding, “Please keep this discreet, but tell all your friends.”

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Cuba has announced it would allow fewer flights from the United States and several other countries beginning 1 January, due to a surge in coronavirus cases since opening its airports in November.

Cubans living abroad and returning to visit, or returning from shopping trips, have spread the virus to family members and beyond by breaking quarantine, the government said.

Mexico, Panama, the Bahamas, Haiti and the Dominican Republic are also on the list. The government did not say how many flights per day would be allowed.

The health ministry reported 3,782 Covid-19 cases from 1 November to 23 December, of which it said 71.5% were visitors or their direct contacts.

The government said in a separate announcement that the famous Varadero beach resort had received 69,000 foreign tourists during the same period without an outbreak of the disease.

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Venezuelans wait in line to get a Covid-19 test at a testing centre in Cucuta, on the Colombian border with Venezuela. Colombia has been one of the worst-hit countries in Latin America with more than 1.5 million Covid cases and more than 40,000 deaths. Photograph: Schneyder Mendoza/AFP/Getty Images
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The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said it had administered 2,127,143 first doses of Covid-19 vaccines in the country as of Monday morning and had distributed 11,445,175 doses.

The tally of vaccine doses distributed and the number of people who received first dose are for both Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, Covid-19 vaccines as of 9am ET on Monday, the agency said.

According to the tally posted on 26 December, the agency had administered 1,944,585 first vaccine doses and distributed 9,547,925 doses.

The agency also reported 19,055,869 cases of coronavirus, an increase of 145,959 cases from its previous count, and said the number of deaths had risen by 1,345 to 332,246.

The CDC reported its tally of cases of the respiratory illness known as Covid-19, caused by a new coronavirus, as of 4pm ET on Sunday versus its previous report a day earlier.

The figures do not necessarily reflect cases reported by individual states.

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The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, said a Covid-19 vaccine would be available in the country within five days of being approved by federal health regulator Anvisa.

The president told journalists the health ministry would only buy a vaccine with a strong recommendation from Anvisa and it would be distributed equally among Brazil’s states.

Bolsonaro, who was infected with Covid-19 in July, has sought to downplay the severity of the virus and said he will not agree to be vaccinated.

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Everton football club in England has released a statement after its game tonight with Manchester City was postponed after the latter returned a number of positive cases, in addition to the four already reported on Christmas Day.

Everton Football Club regret the postponement of tonight’s match against Manchester City – not only for the 2,000 fans who would have been attending, but for supporters on Merseyside and across the world.

Our players were prepared for the game, as were both the team staff and everyone at Goodison. Matchday is the most important date in our calendar. And this was a big one.

Whilst Everton will always have public safety uppermost, we will be requesting full disclosure of all the information that Manchester City provided to the Premier League so the Club can be clear on why this decision was taken.”

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Brazil records further 431 deaths

Brazil recorded 20,548 additional confirmed cases of coronavirus in the past 24 hours and 431 deaths from Covid-19, the health ministry said on Monday.

Brazil has registered more than 7.5 million cases of the virus since the pandemic began, while the official death toll has risen to 191,570, according to ministry data.

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Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust in London said: “We declared an internal incident at Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) on Sunday 27 December as a precautionary step due to the high number of Covid-positive patients we are seeing at the hospital.”

Hundreds of British tourists have fled the Swiss ski resort of Verbier after being told they had to quarantine.

More than 400 UK holidaymakers are believed to have been booked into accommodation before Christmas.

Some reports say about half of those have left, while others state only about a dozen remain, after Swiss authorities ordered all people who had arrived in the country by plane from Britain since 14 December to quarantine for 10 days.

Switzerland was one of more than 40 countries to ban flights from the UK over concerns about the new coronavirus variant, but introduced an exemption on 23 December to enable residents of both countries to return home.

Health minister Alain Berset said the exodus of tourists was “obviously a problem”, adding: “There was an order to quarantine that has not been respected,” according to Sky News.

But director of Verbier Tourism, Simon Wiget, told the broadcaster “it was not a night escape” and that people had used “the possibility” of following the exemption to be able to return to Britain.

It is understood the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) has not received any requests for help from British nationals in Verbier.

The FCDO website states: “On December 20, Switzerland announced a general entry ban for all travellers from the UK, and suspended all flights between the UK and Switzerland.

“On December 23, the Swiss Government introduced an exemption to allow passenger flights to/from the UK from December 24 for the purpose of enabling residents of UK and Switzerland to return in both directions.”

Hundreds of Britons headed to Swiss ski resorts, where many of the slopes remain open, unlike many of the country’s neighbours.

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A summary of today's developments

  • Russia said its coronavirus death toll was more than three times higher than it had previously reported, making it the country with the third-largest number of fatalities.
  • The UK reported its worst daily figure for new infections since the pandemic began. Health authorities said there were 41,385 new positive tests. The previous highest number was 39,237, reported on 23 December.
  • South Africa has tightened restrictions. The president Cyril Ramaphosa banned alcohol sales and extended a nationwide curfew, as infections passed the one million mark owing to a faster-spreading variant of the disease discovered in the country.
  • The French health ministry reported 2,960 new infections; down from 8,822 on Sunday and from Saturday’s 3,093. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, planned to review the situation on Wednesday amid fears of a third lockdown.
  • The new variant of the virus was detected in Finland. The country imposed travel restrictions earlier this month on passengers from the UK amid concerns over the new variant, which is thought to be more contagious than previous ones.
  • A former Japanese minister died of Covid-19, his party said. Yuichiro Hata, who was transport minister in 2012 and is the son of the former prime minister Tsutomu Hatawho, became the first incumbent lawmaker to succumb to the disease in a nation scrambling to shut its doors to foreign travellers.
  • The Catalan regional government stopped short of threats to introduce more severe restrictions. That came despite 973 new cases and 26 deaths in the past 24 hours and a growing risk of a fresh outbreak.
  • Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said he is not opposed to private companies buying coronavirus vaccines to distribute to patients who want to pay for the doses.

Russia said its coronavirus death toll was more than three times higher than it had previously reported, making it the country with the third-largest number of fatalities.

For months, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has boasted about Russia’s low fatality rate from the virus, saying earlier this month that it had done a better job at managing the pandemic than western countries.

But since early in the pandemic, some Russian experts have said the government was playing down the country’s outbreak.

A bottle of the Covid-19 mRNA BNT162b2 vaccine manufactured by Pfizer/BioNTech. The first vaccinations were administered today in Rome. Photograph: Matteo Nardone/Pacific Press/REX/Shutterstock
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Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said he is not opposed to private companies buying coronavirus vaccines to distribute to patients who want to pay for the doses.

But he noted there is not much existing supply and warned companies not to try to buy vaccines already promised to the Mexican government.

“We are not opposed to commercialising the vaccine, to companies importing it and selling it to those who can pay,” López Obrador said.

“The catch is the supply of vaccines in the world markets, because there still isn’t enough production.

“We would be opposed if the ones we have under contract were to be given to a private company, that we would not permit and we would file a complaint,” he said.

Mexico’s medical safety commission must grant approval for any vaccine.

López Obrador has been criticised by some for centralising vaccine purchases and distribution, and for putting the effort – like many programmes in his administration – in the hands of the military.

The president has promised that vaccines will be free and available to everyone in Mexico, but so far the country has only received around 50,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine. To vaccinate 1.4 million healthcare workers — the first in line to get the shots — Mexico would need 2.8 million doses.

The government is placing hopes on three vaccines now in or entering phase 3 trials in Mexico; it announced Novavax Inc will be conducting part of its testing in Mexico. China’s CanSino and Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen Pharmaceutical business have also been conducting trials in Mexico.

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A manager at a pork plant in the US who was among seven people fired for betting on how many workers would contract Covid-19 said the office pool was spontaneous fun and intended to boost morale.

Don Merschbrock, former night manager at the Tyson plant in Waterloo, Iowa, told The Associated Press: “We really want to clear our names.

“We actually worked very hard and took care of our team members well.”

Tyson announced the terminations of the Waterloo managers on 16 December, weeks after the betting allegation surfaced in wrongful death lawsuits filed by the families of four workers who died of Covid-19.

Tyson said an investigation led by former US Attorney General Eric Holder found sufficient evidence to terminate those involved, saying their actions violated the company’s values of respect and integrity.

Merschbrock said managers were given the “impossible task” of maintaining production while implementing virus safety precautions. They had been working 12-hour days, six or seven days per week, he said.

The office pool involved roughly $50 cash, which went to the winner who picked the correct percentage of workers testing positive for the virus, Merschbrock said.

He added that those involved didn’t believe the pool violated company policy and thought the plant’s positivity rate would be lower than the community rate due to their mitigation efforts.

“It was a group of exhausted supervisors that had worked so hard and so smart to solve many unsolvable problems,” Merschbrock said.

“It was simply something fun, kind of a morale boost for having put forth an incredible effort. There was never any malicious intent. It was never meant to disparage anyone.”

A Tyson spokesman declined to comment on Merschbrock’s comments.

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