AFP, published on Wednesday 23 December 2020 at 11:12 pm
A new strain of Covid-19 from South Africa is now worrying as much as the British variant that has isolated the United Kingdom, despite the arrival of vaccines from which more than a million Americans received their first dose on Wednesday .
London announced that it had identified two cases of this variant “highly worrying” because “more contagious” in the United Kingdom, announcing the “immediate” implementation of travel restrictions.
The new variant of coronavirus detected in South Africa seems to be transmitted more quickly than older strains, say researchers who have identified it in South Africa, the African country by far the most affected by the coronavirus with 950,000 people tested positive including 25,657 dead.
“All the elements go in this direction,” Tulio de Oliveira, director of the KRISP research institute, backed by the University of Kwazulu-Natal, told AFP on Wednesday.
In the evening, the South African Minister of Health announced more than 14,000 new cases identified in 24 hours, while these figures oscillated between 8,000 and 10,000 new infections daily in recent days.
The discovery of this new strain that is more contagious in South Africa comes after the discovery of a previous new variant in the United Kingdom.
This change, which coincides with a surge in cases, led to the reconfinement of London and part of the south-east of England over the weekend and the suspension of links between the United Kingdom and around fifty countries, including France, causing a paralysis of cross-Channel traffic.
– mandatory PCR test –
The Netherlands announced on Wednesday that all passengers coming from a “risk area”, including the EU, will have to present a recent negative PCR test from 29 December on their arrival by plane in the country .
However, all the countries of the world were presented as potential “risk areas” on the map of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The English port of Dover reopened on Wednesday but it will take several days to loosen the sanitary cordon that surrounds the United Kingdom since the discovery of a variant of the coronavirus.
Around Dover, Polish truckers stranded while awaiting tests demanded by the French were still showing signs of frustration.
“We’ve been here for two days, without a shower, without water to drink, without anything to eat”, protested Patricia Szeweczyk, mother of two young girls.
Laurent Beghin was chomping at the bit with the hope that he would finally be able to be tested and return to the north of France, where he lives. “We were penned like animals,” he gets angry.
According to British authorities, there were 3,800 trucks stuck in Manston on Wednesday and nearly 1,250 others elsewhere in the port area.
– “palier crucial” –
On condition of being tested in time, French passengers, but also British passengers residing in France, took advantage of the re-establishment of Eurostar links to return home to spend Christmas with their families.
“Finally!” Cried a passenger on the Eurostar, in tears in the arms of a loved one, on the platform of the Gare du Nord, in Paris. His train was the first from London to enter the station for two days.
On the vaccination front, more than a million Americans have received their first dose against Covid-19 since the campaign began 10 days ago, the director of the main federal public health agency announced on Wednesday. from the United States, Robert Redfield.
“The United States has reached a preliminary but crucial level,” he said.
For their part, the clinical tests of the CoronaVac vaccine, from the Chinese laboratory Sinovac, have “reached the threshold of effectiveness” required by the WHO, revealed the same day the Butantan Institute, responsible for its production and distribution in Brazil, without making the official results public.
Argentina for its part authorized Sputnik V, becoming the first country in Latin America, and one of the first countries in the world to give the green light to the Russian vaccine against Covid-19.
Data from the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and the AstraZeneca group have been submitted to the regulator, paving the way for validation, announced the British Minister of Health.
The United Kingdom has already approved a first vaccine, created by Pfizer and BioNTech, sent since the beginning of the month to the most vulnerable people.
Canada, meanwhile, announced it had authorized the Moderna vaccine after giving the green light to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on December 9.
The vaccination campaign in the EU is expected to start on Sunday. In France, “a few dozen” people will be vaccinated in several retirement homes.
The vaccination campaign against Covid-19 began Wednesday in Switzerland: a woman over 90 years old in the canton of Lucerne was the first to benefit.
Mexico announced that it would begin its Covid-19 vaccination campaign on Thursday, once the first batch of Pfizer / BioNTech vaccines arrived. It is the fourth most bereaved country in absolute numbers – behind the United States, Brazil and India.
The new coronavirus was the leading cause of death in Colombia between January and October 2020, according to official statistics released on Wednesday.
The pandemic has killed at least 1,718,209 people around the world, according to an AFP report on Wednesday. More than 77,992,300 cases of contamination have been officially diagnosed since the start of the epidemic.
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