Coronavirus live news: UK variant hits New Zealand; WHO envoy expects ‘some sort’ of vaccine passports | World news

Russia has reported 14,207 new cases of coronavirus, including 1,818 in Moscow, taking the national infection tally to 4,086,090 since the pandemic began.

According to Reuters, the country’s coronavirus taskforce said 394 people had died in the last 24 hours, pushing the official national death toll to 80,520.

Vietnam is to put 2 million people under new coronavirus restrictions from Tuesday after a new outbreak in a northern province of the country.

Residents of Hai Duong province have been ordered to stay at home for 15 days, state media reported, according to the French news agency AFP, as a nation widely praised for its handling of the pandemic struggles to extinguish a troubling new outbreak.

According to AFP:

Since late January, Vietnam has recorded 637 locally transmitted coronavirus cases, including 461 in Hai Duong province alone.

“People (in Hai Duong) are asked to stay at home and only go out when necessary, such as to buy food or medicine, or to work at factories or production establishments that are not being asked to close,” said the official mouthpiece of Vietnam’s health ministry, Suc Khoe Doi Song.

Gatherings of more than two people will be banned, while schools, bars, restaurants and karaoke parlours that were shut early ahead of the lunar new year holiday will remain closed.

When they must go outside their homes, residents are instructed to stay 2 metres from others.

Traffic through the province of 2 million will also be limited, state media reported, with only vehicles travelling on essential business allowed to enter.

In addition to the social distancing directive, Hai Duong authorities have asked that people quarantining at three centres in the province be relocated after infections recently began spreading at those sites, according to the government.

A British man has pleaded guilty to violating his coronavirus quaratine order in Singapore by sneaking out of his hotel room to visit his fiancée several times in another hotel room.

Nigel Skea, 52, admitted leaving his room three times on 21 September last year, one of which was to meet his Singaporean partner Agatha Maghesh Eyamalai, who was not in quarantine but had booked a room in the same hotel.

The couple will appear in court for sentencing on 26 February. They face a possible sentence of up to six years in jail and a fine of 10,000 Singapore dollars ($7,500) on each charge.

According to court documents, seen by the Associated Press, Skea climbed an emergency stairwell and entered a room that his Singaporean fiancée had booked. The two spent nine hours together.

The prosecution asked that Skea be jailed for four weeks and fined 1,000 Singapore dollars ($750).

Defence lawyer Dhillon Surinder Singh, who is also representing Eyamalai, asked for a fine or a one-week jail term “to give him a slap on a wrist”.

Malaysia has reported 2,176 new coronavirus cases, bringing the total number of infections from the pandemic to 266,445.

The health ministry also reported 10 new deaths, raising total fatalities to 975.

The first guests have checked into quarantine hotels in the UK, as tougher rules for international arrivals from 33 “red list” countries came into force on Monday morning. (The rule applies to people returning to Scotland from any destination.)

Passengers arriving at London’s Heathrow airport were escorted by security personnel to coaches which took them to nearby hotels, the PA Media news agency reports.

A handful of people pulled up to the Radisson Blu Edwardian hotel shortly before 9am. One woman, who had flown in from Zambia, told PA: “I’m not happy, but you have to do it.”

People required to enter the quarantine hotel programme must enter England or Scotland through a designated port and have pre-booked a package to stay at one of the government’s managed facilities. No international flights are operating to Wales or Northern Ireland.

Peru’s foreign minister has resigned amid uproar over government officials being secretly vaccinated against coronavirus before the country recently received 1m doses for health workers facing a resurgence in the pandemic, according to the Associated Press.

The president, Francisco Sagasti, confirmed that Elizabeth Astete had stepped down and told a local television channel that Peruvians should feel “outraged and angry about this situation that jeopardises the enormous effort of many Peruvians working on the frontline against Covid”.

The scandal erupted on Thursday when the former president Martín Vizcarra, who was dismissed by Congress on 9 November over a corruption allegation, confirmed a newspaper report that he and his wife had secretly received shots of a vaccine from the Chinese state pharmaceutical company Sinopharm in October. Pilar Mazzetti resigned as health minister on Friday after legislators accused her of concealing information.

People aged 65 and over in South Korea will not receive the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine, the Korea disease control and prevention agency has said.

The announcement reverses an earlier decision and came as the KDCA scaled back targets in its vaccination programme as a result of a delay to shipments from the Covax vaccine-sharing scheme, according to the Reuters news agency.

South Korea had said it would complete vaccinations on 1.3 million people by the first quarter of this year with AstraZeneca shots, but it slashed the target sharply to 750,000.

KDCA’s director, Jeong Eun-kyeong, insisted that South Korea’s plan to reach herd immunity by November remained intact, telling reporters:

We do not believe the adjustments in inoculations in February and March will impact our goal of herd immunity by November.

South Korea also said it would delay inoculation of elderly people using the AstraZeneca vaccine until more efficacy data becomes available.

The World Health Organization special envoy for the global Covid-19 response has said he expects “some sort” of vaccine passport will be introduced in future.

Speaking on Sky News on Monday morning, David Nabarro said:

I am absolutely certain in the next few months we will get a lot of movement and what are the conditions around which people are easily able to move from place to place, so some sort of vaccine certificate no doubt will be important.

Nabarro said countries would only be able to form “bubbles” for travel purposes if they both had the same standards of coronavirus restrictions and similar levels of vaccination uptake. Transparency over Covid-19 measures between countries was key to keeping an eye out for new variants of the virus, he said.

That’s going to be with us for the foreseeable future, because even when much higher proportions of the population are vaccinated, there are still going to be these worrying moments when perhaps a version of the virus appears that can break through the defences provided by the vaccine.

Vaccine passports are among the most controversial potential measures that have been mooted to contain the spread of coronavirus in the future, with apparent disagreements within the UK government over their implementation. Cabinet ministers have several times contradicted each other over whether there are plans to introduce the documents, and whether they will be in use only for international travel or also for civil society.

A plane has landed in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, carrying the southern African country’s first consignment of coronavirus vaccines, 200,000 doses donated by China.

A further 600,000 Chinese-made Sinopharm vaccines – this time paid for – are expected to arrive in early March.

Constantino Chiwenga, the vice-president of Zimbabwe, who was with a delegation who came to meet the vaccines at Robert Mugabe airport, said frontline health workers would be the first to be vaccinated.

This is a timely donation … our people have suffered from this pandemic. The vaccine offers the possibility that our people who have borne the brunt of the economic ravages of the pandemic might finally turn a new page.

Zimbabwe has set aside $100m for vaccine procurement and is looking to buy 20 million doses in efforts to immunise about 60% of its population and achieve herd immunity, Reuters reports.

Matt Hancock, the UK health secretary, is doing the customary early morning ministerial parade of London’s broadcast studios today, answering questions on the latest lines that the government has managed to brief into the national papers.

The vaccination of 15 million people has been an achievement of which the government is particularly proud and, after so many missteps to date in handling the coronavirus crisis, will be wanting to tout for all its worth.

On BBC Breakfast, Hancock gave a breakdown of what percentage of people in each of the top four priority groups had been vaccinated, adding that he believed that everyone in those groups had at least been offered the vaccine. He said:

The take-up is incredibly important – it’s over 90% among the over 70s as a whole, so more than nine in 10 of everybody aged over 70 in the country has taken up that offer.

It is higher in some groups, so among the 75- to 79-year-olds, over 97% have taken up the offer and we obviously want to keep that proportion going up so anybody who hasn’t yet been able to be vaccinated for whatever reason … then please do come forward.

Hancock said the figure among healthcare staff was “a little bit lower than 90%”, with “around two-thirds” of social care staff jabbed and “four-fifths” of NHS staff receiving their first dose. In care home residents, among those eligible to be vaccinated, the percentage who had been given a jab was “over 90%”.

The challenge there is that there are some care homes that have recently had an outbreak and you can’t vaccinate people within 28 days of a positive test, so there are some people who have recently tested positive who aren’t able to be vaccinated yet who we will make sure we go back to in the weeks to come to make sure they get their jab when they are clinically eligible for it.

There is still more work to do. Everyone eligible has been offered a [jab] and we’ve visited all of the elderly care homes in the country but clearly … there is still more to do to increase take-up.