Coronavirus latest: National and international news

Spain is considering imposing a quarantine on visitors from the United Kingdom when it opens its borders next week in reciprocity to a similar measure imposed by London, Spanish Foreign Minister Arancha Gonzalez Laya said on the BBC.

“We will be checking what the UK will be doing and we will be in a dialogue with the UK to see whether or not we should be introducing reciprocity as they have different measures than the rest of the European Union,” Gonzalez Laya said.

 

A coronavirus vaccine being developed in the UK will provide protection against the disease “for about a year,” according to the drug maker currently carrying out trials.

AstraZeneca has joined forces with the UK government to support a Covid-19 vaccine developed by the University of Oxford.

Human trials of the vaccine are under way, with the firm already having reached agreements to supply around two billion doses across the world.

 

New Zealand’s 24-day streak without a new coronavirus case is over after two women who arrived from Britain to visit a dying parent tested positive for the disease.

The new cases are a setback for Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern who last week declared victory over the outbreak after imposing one of the West’s toughest lockdowns, at the expense of a greater economic hit than Australia is suffering.

Ardern has doubled down on New Zealand’s strict border controls which only let in citizens and residents, and blamed the handling of the two new cases on a lapse in the quarantine rules for new arrivals.

 

Germany has called on its citizens to download a delayed app designed to help prevent a resurgence of the coronavirus, betting that civic duty is enough to get people to use the software and rejecting criticism that it will be ineffective.

The goal for the new tracing app is to help break infection chains early and allow the country to manage the return to normality more effectively.

“It’s not the first corona app in the world to be launched, but I’m pretty sure it’s the best,” Helge Braun, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s chief of staff, said at a presentation in Berlin.

 

The Chinese capital Beijing has put more neighbourhoods under lockdown and boosted testing as it tries to contain an outbreak of coronavirus.

There were 27 new cases reported on Tuesday, bringing the total to 106 people over five days.

A Chinese official has described the new outbreak in the capital as “extremely severe”.

For more than seven weeks Beijing had only registered cases from people travelling in from abroad.

New clusters of coronavirus are “always a concern”, said Mike Ryan, emergencies programme head at the World Health Organization.

 

Mexico passed the grim milestone of 150,000 total confirmed coronavirus cases on Monday, as the health ministry reported 3,427 new infections along with 439 additional fatalities.

There are now a total 150,264 confirmed coronavirus cases and 17,580 deaths, though the government has said the real number of infected people is likely significantly higher than the official count.

 

South Africa saw a massive jump in coronavirus infections earlier this week with 4,302 cases recorded in 24 hours, bringing the total number of confirmed Covid-19 cases in the country to 70,038.

Zweli Mkhize, South Africa’s health minister, also said in a statement that 57 more Covid-19 deaths had been recorded, bring the total fatalities to 1,480 with a mortality rate of 2.2 per cent.

Despite the high numbers of cases and deaths, health experts continue to applaud South Africa’s mass testing campaign.

South Africa has so far tested 1.12 million people for Covid-19, with 34,071 tests done over the weekend.