Paris (AFP)
France is suspended from a televised intervention by its president who should announce Wednesday evening a new turn of the screw against the Covid-19 pandemic, like several other countries in Europe which are increasing the restrictions.
Emmanuel Macron will speak on Wednesday at 8:00 p.m. (6:00 p.m. GMT) to express his arbitrations in the face of the third wave which hits his country head-on.
The trend there is worrying, with more than 5,000 patients in intensive care, beyond normal hospital capacities and the peak of the second wave of November, putting hospitals under very strong tension.
The Head of State is urged by many doctors, but also the opposition, to put in place more effective devices, even strict confinement.
A closure of schools, for which the mayor of the capital Anne Hidalgo pleaded Wednesday for his city, is in particular envisaged.
Faced with the third wave, several countries in Europe continue to announce measures to try to limit the spread of the virus, in particular concerning travel.
Germany will strengthen for the “next eight to 14 days” the controls around its land borders, in particular with France, Denmark and Poland.
Italy, most of whose territory is subject to severe restrictions, will impose five-day isolation on travelers from the EU. They will have to carry out a test before their departure and another after their isolation.
– First vaccines in Yemen –
The pandemic has killed nearly 2.8 million people, according to an AFP report on Tuesday.
Vaccination campaigns are gradually progressing, and Germany has maintained its goal of vaccinating its adult population against Covid-19 “by the end of the summer” despite the decision to limit the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Tuesday – it should no longer be injected to people under 60 – due to rare cases of thrombosis.
More than 565 million doses of Covid vaccines have been administered in at least 179 countries or territories, according to a count made by AFP on Tuesday. But the distribution of vaccines remains very uneven on the planet.
Yemen, at war and where a humanitarian disaster is unfolding, has received a first batch of 360,000 doses of AstraZeneca through the Covax mechanism to help underprivileged nations, the United Nations children’s agency announced on Wednesday. (Unicef).
This delivery came a few days after the alarm call launched by Médecins sans frontières (MSF) concerning the rapid spread of the disease in this country, which is currently registering around a hundred new cases daily, much more than at the start of the crisis. .
Australia is, for its part, far behind on its vaccination targets, admitted Wednesday Prime Minister Scott Morrison, partly attributing this disappointment to restrictions on the export of vaccines imposed by the European Union.
Only 670,000 doses were administered there, according to official statistics, while the government had set a target of four million at the end of March.
In Argentina, which is experiencing a marked increase in the number of cases like its South American neighbors, the vaccination campaign is also progressing painfully due to delays in deliveries.
About three million of the 44 million Argentines have received a first dose of the coronavirus vaccine and some 600,000 two doses, far from government forecasts.
– Contamination peak in Gaza –
In Brazil, the second most bereaved country with 317,000 dead, the health crisis, which is wreaking havoc, has also caused unemployment and poverty to skyrocket. The queues at food distribution points keep getting longer in big cities, such as Sao Paulo or Rio de Janeiro.
The epidemic situation is also worrying in other parts of the world. This is the case in the Gaza Strip, which recorded more than 1,000 new cases in 24 hours, one of the highest tolls in this Palestinian enclave since the start of the pandemic.
In China, the Chinese city of Ruili, on the border with Burma, has been placed in quarantine after the detection of six cases of Covid-19. This is the biggest case of contagion reported by authorities in nearly two months.
The United States and thirteen allied countries on Tuesday expressed their “concerns” in a joint statement regarding the report by Chinese experts and the World Health Organization on the origins of the Covid, calling on China to give “full access” to its data.
The boss of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, for his part, asked for an investigation into the hypothesis of a leak of the virus from a laboratory in China to explain the origin of the pandemic and criticized the insufficient sharing of data from Beijing.
The authors of the report, published Tuesday, however judged this scenario of “extremely improbable”.
Liang Wannian, the head of the delegation of Chinese scientists who collaborated on the report of the experts appointed by the WHO, on Wednesday expressed his incomprehension of the words of the head of this organization.
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© 2021 AFP
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