The latest country to tighten up anti-Covid measures, the United Kingdom announced on Tuesday that all travelers arriving in England will have to undergo two PCR tests, on the second and eighth days of quarantine ten day mandatory.
The most bereaved country in Europe with nearly 113,000 dead fears more and more of being exposed to variants of the coronavirus potentially resistant to vaccines.
For the same reason, Spain, which passed the threshold of three million detected cases on Tuesday, announced that restrictions on flights from the United Kingdom, Brazil and South Africa would be extended until to March 2.
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France, where the authorities announced that the threshold of 80,000 dead had been crossed, meets on Wednesday its Defense Council, without excluding new restrictions. But those that already exist are beginning to weigh on part of the population. The discontent thus swells among the French of the foreigner in front of the reasons “imperious“now required to return to France, as illustrated by a petition launched in North America which gathered more than 4,000 signatures on Tuesday.
In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel meets the presidents of the German regions on Wednesday to take stock of the epidemic, and, there too, without excluding a new turn of the screw.
In Greece, tighter containment, especially in the Athens region, will be put in place, leading to the closure of schools and shops.
– Depleted populations –
In this context, criticism is fired in Germany and in Europe on the delay taken by the vaccination campaign started on Boxing Day, while the populations appear exhausted by months of restrictions.
Ursula von der Leyen, who has already responded to these accusations several times, will once again explain herself, this time in front of European parliamentarians meeting in plenary session in Brussels.
On Saturday in the German press, she attributed these delays to a “global component shortage“used in the manufacture of vaccines.
Europe is not the only continent engaged in this race against time with the coronavirus. In South America, dozens of Brazilian companies and NGOs announced on Tuesday a joint initiative to help the authorities speed up vaccination, with the ambitious goal of immunizing the entire population “by September“.
Chile, for its part, exceeded the one million people vaccinated against Covid-19 on Tuesday, six days after the start of the mass vaccination process among the elderly, who joined the medical staff already vaccinated since December.
In Peru, the vaccination campaign with the Chinese vaccine from Sinopharm began Tuesday in hospitals in Lima for medical personnel.
– The world barricaded –
Since the first cases of coronavirus identified in December 2019 in Wuhan, in central China, the world has barricaded itself wondering about the origin of a dramatic health crisis that has so far made more than 2, 3 million dead.
Experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) ruled on Tuesday “highly improbable“the theory of a laboratory leak in Wuhan. The United States on Tuesday distanced itself from this theory supported by former President Donald Trump, and expressed its support for WHO experts.
The latter, who presented the results of their mission to China on Tuesday, nevertheless failed to identify the animal responsible for the disease.
Transmission of the coronavirus from a first animal then a second before contamination to humans is the hypothesis “most likely“, said Peter Ben Embarek, head of the WHO delegation, at a long-awaited press conference. However, this track requires”more specific and targeted research“, he added.
Mr. Ben Embarek also mentioned “the possibility“transmission of the coronavirus”through the frozen food trade“: “It would be interesting to examine whether a frozen wild animal that has been infected could have been a potential vector“, he asked himself.
This mission on the origins of the transmission of the virus to humans, which ended this week, has struggled to put in place, as China seems reluctant to let these global specialists from various disciplines such as epidemiology come. but also zoology.
More than 135 million doses of anti-Covid vaccines have been administered worldwide, according to a count made by AFP on Tuesday.
To date, at least 90 countries or territories have started their campaigns, but almost two in three doses (64%) have been injected in income countries “Student“(in the sense of the World Bank), which however house only 16% of the world’s population.
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