Brazil crossed the threshold of 200,000 deaths from Covid-19 on Thursday, while the WHO called on Europe to mobilize more in the face of the “alarming situation” created by the new, more contagious variant of the coronavirus.
The situation is no better in the United States, which on Thursday recorded a new death record (nearly 4,000) or in Japan, where Tokyo is now placed in a state of emergency.
In Brazil, the virus has killed 200,498 people, the second heaviest death toll after the United States (364,691 deaths), and specialists expect the worst at the start of the year.
The Latin American giant of 212 million inhabitants has recorded a record of new contaminations (87,843) and no less than 1,524 new deaths in the last 24 hours.
The vaccination campaign has not yet started there, while far-right President Jair Bolsonaro remains in absolute denial, downplaying the severity of a virus he has accused of ruining the country.
“I am sorry, today we are reaching 200,000 dead”, but “life goes on, we deeply regret it”, he reacted on Facebook.
“There is no point in continuing (…) this old story of staying at home and then looking after the economy. It’s not going to work,” he said. “We cannot turn ourselves into a country of the poor, of the unemployed,” he added.
In Japan, a new state of emergency comes into force on Friday for a month in greater Tokyo, against the backdrop of a record of contaminations.
Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga made a special appeal to young people, urging them to respect the instructions on stopping night outings, when more than half of new infections in the Tokyo region concern people under 30 years old.
– “Alarming situation” –
The WHO has called on Europe to “do more” in the face of “an alarming situation”, due to the circulation in the region of a new more contagious variant of the coronavirus, first detected in the United Kingdom.
“This is an alarming situation, which means that for a short time we are going to have to do more than we have done,” WHO European Director Hans Kluge said during an online press briefing .
Twenty-two countries in the Europe zone, comprising 53 states including Russia, have now recorded cases linked to this new strain, said the WHO.
And Spain, which has once again ruled out generalized containment, in contrast to other European countries, announced Thursday that it alone has identified more than two million people infected. A figure, however, considered undervalued.
According to the WHO, the new strain “could gradually replace the others in circulation” in the European zone, “as observed in the United Kingdom and increasingly in Denmark”.
France announced in this regard on Thursday that two “risk clusters” of the British variant of the coronavirus had been detected on its territory, in Brittany (west) and in the Paris region.
Consequently, Prime Minister Jean Castex has indicated that the borders with the United Kingdom will remain closed “until further notice”.
With 25,379 confirmed cases of Covid Thursday, “we arrive at worrying figures”, for his part warned Jean-François Delfraissy, the president of the scientific council, who guides the government.
– British hospitals on the brink of crisis –
England has returned to a long and hard third confinement. Scotland suffers a similar fate, however Northern Ireland and Wales had already taken such a step just after Christmas.
The situation is such that British hospitals are approaching saturation, to the point of looking for available beds in nursing homes.
Ireland, for its part, has tightened its confinement because of a “tsunami” of contamination, to use the words of its Prime Minister Micheal Martin, and closed its schools until the end of the month.
On the other side of the planet, in Australia, Brisbane has decreed an immediate three-day lockdown, after a worker at a hotel welcoming people in quarantine contracted the highly infectious strain of Covid-19 discovered in the Kingdom -United.
On the American continent, more than 30 of the 50 million inhabitants of Colombia are subject to reinforced containment from Thursday and for five days.
As for the United States, they recorded a new record of deaths over 24 hours, reaching almost the mark of 4,000 daily deaths, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University which refer to it. At the same time, the country recorded more than 265,000 new infections.
Hospitals in California are overwhelmed with deaths, and at least 166 refrigerated trailers have been set up to serve as temporary morgues. In Los Angeles, a person dies from Covid-19 every fifteen minutes.
– “Long battle” of vaccination
Hope remains vaccination. After the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, authorized on December 21, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) gave the green light to that of Moderna, endorsed in the wake by Brussels.
Poorer countries will also start receiving their first doses of Covid-19 vaccine between late January and mid-February, the WHO said, warning that vaccination will be a “long battle”.
As for the CoronaVac vaccine, designed by the Chinese laboratory Sinovac, it has been shown to be effective “from 78% to 100%” in clinical tests carried out in Brazil, the governor of the State of Sao Paulo assured Thursday.
And it is also a Chinese vaccine, that of Sinopharm, which will be administered in the Seychelles, which will begin their vaccination campaign on Sunday.
The pandemic caused by the new coronavirus has killed at least 1,884,187 people worldwide since the appearance of Covid-19 at the end of December 2019, according to a report established by AFP on Thursday.
By Camille BAS-WOHLERT with AFP offices around the world, © 2021 AFP
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