Covid news live: Pfizer says Omicron-specific vaccine could be available by March; Mexico president tests positive again – The Guardian

Spain’s foreign minister, Jose Manuel Albares, has said he does not have any information on whether tennis star Novak Djokovic visited Spain before travelling to Australia.

Asked by a reporter if he knew whether Djokovic had entered Spain in December, potentially invalidating a declaration the player completed on travelling to Australia, Albares responded:

I have no record of this presence of Djokovic.

We have not been contacted by the Australian government to request such documentation.

Djokovic took part in a Davis cup tournament in Madrid in early December.

Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is “doing well without serious symptoms” after being diagnosed with Covid for the second time, the country’s interior minister, Adán Augusto, said on Tuesday.

Augusto would take over a regular morning news conference while López Obrador, 68, recovered, the president said after announcing he tested positive on Monday.

New Delhi ordered the closure of non-essential offices and restaurants and bars but offered free online yoga classes to those in home isolation, as Covid cases soar, AFP reports.

With case numbers rising six-fold over the past week, the Indian government is terrified of a repeat of last year when thousands died of the virus every day and the health system teetered on the brink of collapse.

While stopping short of a full lockdown, authorities have steadily increased restrictions nationwide and capacity at private offices and eateries in the capital was already restricted to 50%.

But those in home isolation can take free online yoga classes, with Delhi’s chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, saying that it would help patients “boost their immunity and attain mental and spiritual peace”.

India’s capital registered 17 deaths each on Saturday and Sunday, the biggest single-day toll in more than 200 days. Every fourth person tested is coming back positive.

Nationally, India recorded almost 170,000 new cases on Monday, almost half the daily number recorded during the surge of last April and May. Deaths remain a fraction of what they were but are rising.

Meanwhile, the Indian Council of Medical Research, the government’s apex scientific body, on Monday tweaked its mandatory testing guidelines to ease the strain on the testing infrastructure.

Healthy, asymptomatic contacts of confirmed coronavirus patients no longer require mandatory testing.

Experts say that India is better prepared to deal with the latest coronavirus wave, driven by the Omicron variant, than last year.

The country has now administered more than 1.5bn vaccine shots and recently opened the programme to teenagers. It has also begun giving boosters to vulnerable groups.

The US has agreed to buy 600,000 more doses of GSK and Vir Biotechnology’s Covid antibody therapy for an undisclosed sum, according to the drugmakers, Reuters reports.

The additional doses of sotrovimab would be supplied to the US in the first quarter of 2022, the companies said, taking the tally of doses secured by nations worldwide to roughly 1.7m.

In November, the US government signed contracts worth about $1bn for an unknown number of doses of the treatment, after saying it would control the distribution of sotrovimab.

Sotrovimab, given via an infusion, belongs to a class of medicines called monoclonal antibodies, which are lab-generated compounds that mimic the body’s natural defences. Tests have indicated that it works against the fast-spreading Omicron variant.

Scientists and governments are scrambling to bolster defences against Omicron with testing, shots and therapies, as the variant threatens to become dominant globally by evading protection offered by current vaccines and drugs.

GSK and Vir said they expect to produce roughly 2m doses of sotrovimab globally in the first half of 2022.

Brazil has become the latest country where Omicron has become the dominant Covid variant.

The health minister, Marcelo Queiroga, told reporters: “It already is the predominant variant in Brazil, we are seeing cases rising.”

He said Brazil did not expect to see higher hospitalisation and death levels, citing Brazil’s vaccination programme.

Shares in the Spanish drugmaker PharmaMar jumped almost 20% after it said lab trials suggested its Plitidepsin drug was effective against Covid variants including Omicron, Reuters reports.

Results from in-vitro tests published in the Life Science Alliance journal showed that Plitidepsin, also known as Aplidin, had a potent antiviral effect in all variants and decreased the viral load detected in animal lung tissue by 99%, the company said.

The same paper also included previously published positive effects in Phase I and II clinical trials carried out on patients who were hospitalised with Covid.

The drug, originally developed as a cancer treatment, is now undergoing Phase III trials.

“All data we have seen so far with Plitidepsin corroborate our initial hypothesis about its antiviral activity,” PharmaMar’s chairman, Jose Maria Fernandez Sousa, said in a statement.

Shares in the company rose 19% in early afternoon trade, on track for their best day in nearly a year. The shares had gained about 20% in January last year, also following encouraging news on Plitidepsin.

Germany’s health minister, Karl Lauterbach, has called England’s relatively lax Covid rules an “unethical bet”, Politico reports:

The Social Democrat health chief is known for his tough approach to the pandemic, including a pro-mandatory vaccination position. After advocating for stricter rules in the hospitality sector last Friday and facing rapidly increasing case numbers, Lauterbach warned against copying England’s pandemic response.

“From my point of view, it’s an unethical bet,” he said, of England’s laissez-faire approach to the Omicron wave of coronavirus.

It is too soon to treat Omicron as a flu-like endemic illness, the World Health Organization has warned, Reuters reports.

On Sunday, the UK’s education secretary, Nadhim Zahawi, called for the UK to show the rest of the world how to move from pandemic to endemic Covid.

But that is “a way off”, WHO’s senior emergency officer for Europe, Catherine Smallwood, said at a news briefing today. She adding that endemicity requires a stable and predictable transmission.

Smallwood said:

We still have a huge amount of uncertainty and a virus that is evolving quite quickly, imposing new challenges. We are certainly not at the point where we are able to call it endemic.

It may become endemic in due course, but pinning that down to 2022 is a little bit difficult at this stage.

Omicron has become the dominant variant in the Philippines, according to the health minister, Francisco Duque.

He said Omicron replaced Delta as the dominant variant in the country on Monday, with 60% of the samples in the most recent genome sequencing testing positive for Omicron.

Bulgaria’s prime minister Kiril Petkov, President Rumen Radev and other officials have gone into quarantine after being in contact with the parliamentary speaker, who tested positive for Covid, AFP reports.

Bulgaria has the lowest vaccination rate in the European Union, with experts blaming low trust in the authorities and widespread conspiracy theories.

“Prime Minister Kiril Petkov is self-isolating … he continues to work remotely,” the government press service said.

Radev’s office also said the president and members of his administration were isolating but added they were “all in good health.”

Parliament speaker Nikola Minchev tested positive for Covid-19 after attending a five-hour meeting of the National Security Council hosted by Radev on Monday afternoon.

The talks were attended by key ministers – including those of the interior, defence and finance – as well as lawmakers and security sector officials.

Chief health inspector Angel Kunchev said all of them had gone into quarantine.

The Omicron variant is fuelling a fresh surge in cases, with 5,219 patients in hospital on Tuesday and 570 in intensive care.

Here is a round-up of the top Covid stories from the day so far:

• Scars left by the Covid-19 pandemic have deepened the divide between rich and poor countries and will make it harder to find common cause in the fight against global heating, according to the World Economic Forum.
• The UK’s main statistical body has reported more than 175,000 deaths involving Covid since the start of the pandemic where Covid was mentioned on the death certificate.
• Germany is reporting a daily rise of 45,690 new confirmed coronavirus cases and 322 deaths, according to the latest figures released by the Robert Koch Institute.
  
• Porfirije, the 46th Patriarch of the influential Serbian Orthodox Church, the country’s largest Christian denomination, has tested positive for Covid, his office said on Tuesday.
• Poland’s total Covid-19 death toll has surpassed 100,000.
• Health officials have clarified that the recommended Covid self-isolation period in the US is shorter than in the UK at a time when the prime minister is considering reducing it to five days.
• Nearly 1 million Hindu worshippers are expected to gather on the banks of the Ganges River this Friday and Saturday for a holy bathe despite soaring Covid infections across the country, an official told Reuters.
• The central Chinese city of Anyang has ordered five million people to begin home confinement today in a new lockdown to curb the spread of Omicron variant. Residents are not to leave their homes or drive cars on the roads, while all non-essential businesses have been closed and outbound travel is restricted, state news agency Xinhua reports.
• France announced an easing of Covid rules for schools as record-high case numbers shut down thousands of classes across the country.
• At least 600,000 passengers cancelled plans to fly from Heathrow in December due to the Omicron coronavirus strain and the introduction of tougher travel restrictions, the airport said.
• Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has said the government has secured enough Covid-19 vaccine doses for all eligible Canadians to receive a booster as well as a fourth dose.
• Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador announced he has tested positive for Covid-19 for a second time, saying that he only has light symptoms.
• Taiwan has tightened its entry requirements for new arrivals in the latest move to head off a large-scale Omicron outbreak.

That’s it from me, Tom Ambrose, for today. My colleague Matthew Weaver will be along shortly to pick up to global Covid live blog. Goodbye for now.

Slovenia reported a record 5,164 new Covid cases on Tuesday, a 52% rise from a week before, amid the spread of the Omicron variant.

Slovenia has vaccinated 67.3% of its population with at least two doses so far, according to the National Institute for Public Health.