Coronavirus live news: Germany downgrades Covid risk level; Heathrow opens separate ‘red list’ terminal | World news

Yemen’s Huthi rebels, who control most of the country’s north including the capital Sanaa, have been blocking international efforts to supply Covid vaccines, Human Rights Watch said.

The New York-based group accused Huthi leaders of suppressing information about both the dangers of Covid and the prevalence of the disease in territory under their control.

“The deliberate decision of the Huthi authorities to keep the real number of cases of Covid-19 under wraps and their opposition to vaccines are putting Yemeni lives at risk,” said HRW’s deputy Middle East director Michael Page.

“Pretending Covid-19 does not exist is not a mitigation strategy and will only lead to mass suffering.

“Given the weakened healthcare system in Yemen, Huthi authorities should at least ensure transparency so that civilians living in their areas can understand the scale of the pandemic and facilitate an international vaccination plan that meets the needs on the ground.”

AFP report that Yemen received 360,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine on 31 March, the first of 1.9 million doses to be delivered this year through the Covax programme for poorer countries.

However, the rebels’ failure to cooperate with the World Health Organization and the Yemeni government has prevented any vaccines from reaching the north, HRW said citing a medical source with “direct knowledge of the circumstances”.

As a result, vaccinations have only been occurring in the government-held south. HRW quoted Huthi officials as dismissing Covid-19 as a “conspiracy”.

“America bears the primary responsibility for the Covid-19 epidemic,” it quoted rebel leader Abdul Malik al-Huthi, as saying in a televised speech last year.

Our community team are interested to hear about your experiences of travelling through Heathrow, now that London’s airport has opened up a terminal specifically to deal with arrivals from the so-called “red list” countries. If you’ve travelled and want to get in touch with them, you can find all the details here…

This might be a useful ready-reckoner for some new language that you – and I – are going to need to get used to in the next few weeks, after the WHO recommended a new set of names for the coronavirus “variants of concern”. These are the four you need to know:

• Alpha – UK/Kent (B.1.1.7)
• Beta – South Africa (B.1.351)
• Gamma – Brazil (P.1)
• Delta – India (B.1.617.2)

For ease of use to start with, I’ll try to make sure I am using all three ways of naming each variant until we all get more acquainted with the new terminology.

There’s fuller details here: Covid-19 variants to be given Greek alphabet names to avoid stigma

The proposed Copa América this summer is in some disarray, with reports that Brazil will replace hosts Argentina, just 13 days before it is due to start. “The Copa América 2021 will be played in Brazil,” an official Conmebol statement said. “Tournament start and end dates are confirmed. The venues and the fixtures will be announced by Conmebol in the next few hours.”

The tournament, featuring 10 South American nations, had been due to be held in Argentina and Colombia with joint hosts for the first time in its 105-year history. Colombia was removed as a co-host on 20 May after a wave of protests demanding social and economic change spread across the country, and Argentina has followed.

Now Reuters report that Chilean national soccer star Arturo Vidal has been diagnosed with Covid-19 and is in hospital in what appears to be a an isolated case as the squad readies itself for World Cup qualifying match against Argentina on 3 June.

“He was diagnosed positive for Covid in the daily preventive exam performed today,” the team said in a statement late yesterday. The team plan to travel to Argentina for the game today.

A quick Reuters snap here that Germany’s Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for infectious disease is to reduce the coronavirus risk level for the country to “high” from “very high” as the situation improves, health minister Jens Spahn said on Tuesday.

“We have grounds for optimism,” said Spahn at a news conference with the head of the RKI, Lothar Wieler, who said developments were improving but the pandemic was not yet over.

Ireland will begin to gradually phase out temporary coronavirus-related jobless payments later this year while maintaining other income and business supports as the economy fully reopens, public expenditure minister Michael McGrath said today.

Ireland is emerging from its third and longest lockdown having had one the strictest regimes in Europe for the last 15 months, leaving more than 300,000 people who lost their jobs claiming the Pandemic Unemployment Payment (PUP).

Local media reported that the PUP, which is paid out at a higher rate than regular jobless benefits, would be reduced from September and withdrawn by February 2022.

“There won’t be a cliff edge in July, we will be looking at an extension of the PUP but also laying out a pathway towards the normalisation of our social welfare code and ultimately unwinding a payment that is pandemic related,” McGrath told national broadcaster RTE. “The changes will be gradual.”

The number of people temporarily or permanently unemployed in Ireland stood at 22.4% at the end April, with around three in four on the PUP. McGrath said he expected that cohort to fall very significantly over coming weeks as the economy reopens.

He added that additional supports for businesses reopening would be announced later today. Padraic Halpin reminds us for Reuters that the government allowed all shops to open for the first time this year two weeks ago with the hospitality sector to follow with limited capacity in coming days.

Nicola Slawson has launched our UK live blog for the day, with the leads line being the warning that the country is in a “perilous moment”. Join her for the latest UK Covid news as it comes in today.

I’ll be continuing here with the latest coronavirus news from around the world.

Russia has announced the resumption of air travel with Britain and a number of other countries which had been suspended due to coronavirus restrictions.

“Given the improvement of the epidemiological situation in the United Kingdom, a decision has been taken to resume regular air travel between Moscow and London from 2 June,” Russian health authorities said in a statement on Monday.

Russia will also resume air travel with Austria, Hungary, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Croatia, Mauritius, and Morocco from 10 June, it said. Flights to Turkey, a major tourist destination for Russians, will remain suspended until at least 21 June.

AFP note that since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, Russia’s borders have remained largely closed to foreigners.

Heathrow has begun processing arrivals from red list countries in a dedicated terminal following concerns about them mixing with other passengers. Travellers arriving from red list nations on direct flights are being taken to Terminal 3.

Passengers travelling to the UK on connecting flights from red list locations continue to transit through the airport alongside those from green and amber countries.

The red list currently consists of 43 nations from which arrivals are deemed to present a high risk of importing coronavirus. Red list countries from where direct flights to the UK are permitted include India, the Philippines, Pakistan, Kenya and Bangladesh.

Passengers arriving in the UK after being in one of those destinations during the previous 10 days must spend 11 nights in a quarantine hotel, costing 1,750 for solo travellers.

The decision to separate arrivals on direct flights from red list destinations was welcomed by the GMB union, which had previously warned that “bottlenecks” are putting passengers and staff at risk.

Heathrow insisted there were “several layers of protection to keep passengers and colleagues safe”, such as mandatory testing for all arrivals, segregation and ventilation.

PA Media notes that an airport executive said in April that passengers are being forced to queue for up to six hours to be processed through immigration halls. It is the first time Terminal 3 has been used since April 2020, when it was closed to save costs amid the collapse in demand for travel.

Heathrow plans to move its new facility for processing red list arrivals to Terminal 4 “as soon as operationally possible”.

The pressure to get England’s Covid restrictions dropped on 21 June is coming from several quarters, not least those sectors of the hospitality industry that are still unable to open their doors.

CEO of the Night Time Industries Association, Michael Kill, has been pushing for earlier clarification of when reopening might happen. He told Sky News:

Nine out of 10 late-night businesses feel that veering off the roadmap would threaten their survival. Ninety-five per cent of businesses have already made financial commitments in terms of stock, staff and entertainment. So this is a key time, and the government really needs to step up and make it very clear exactly what their intentions are.

The UK’s small businesses minister Paul Scully has been on LBC this morning reiterating the message from the government that people in the UK should use “caution” in the face of the growing number of cases of the “Delta” variant of coronavirus – the B.1.617.2 variant first detected in India. He stressed again that no decision would be taken until 14 June, saying:

I know for some people that won’t be quick enough, but we’ve got to make sure that we are working with the latest data, accurate data. Scientists have to be able to go through this with a fine tooth comb, because it’s a really really important decision that affects so many people.

Pressed about whether the country was in fact seeing increased hospitalisations and what the threat to the NHS currently was, he said:

We’ve just got to make sure that we are looking forward to see what happens in the next few weeks and months in terms of that modelling, based on the data. Because what we do know is that when case rates go up, hospitalisations to date have also gone up. But the vaccination progress is still continuing with 63 million vaccinations and that is what is going to help us win this race.

Eddie Blake writes for us this morning, asking what should Britain’s memorial to the Covid pandemic look like?

Memorials aim to be an eloquent last word on an event. A key quality is that they resist change: they attempt to fix for us an abiding sense of what exactly has happened. They can be many things: columns, tombs, plaques, cenotaphs, village halls, even housing. But who are they for? The people who suffered, their families, the wider public or future generations?

At some point, inevitably, there will be an official, national memorial of the pandemic in the UK (as well as many more, surely, at local and international levels). What, then, should it look like? It will have to contend with how messy the past year has been – the death, the sorrow, the fear, but also the ensuing political and social division. Perhaps through all of that, memorialisation can play a therapeutic role.

Memorials naturally remove some of the complexity of the past, replacing it with something smoother, better suited to a broad audience: the tomb of the Unknown Warrior doesn’t address one specific loss, so it can talk of all loss. Because of this universal ambition it is vital public memorials hit the right tone – being both honest and broadly interpretable, tending to avoid friction. As a result, though, memorials can feel as if they don’t talk to you directly or seem too vague. But at a time when narratives are brutally contested, it seems unlikely that a pandemic memorial will avoid controversy, no matter how skilful the architect.

Read more here: Eddie Blake – What should Britain’s memorial to the Covid pandemic look like?

Prof Adam Finn, from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, is a second expert in the UK on the airwaves today warning against further easing of domestic restrictions on 21 June. He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “There’s vulnerability across the country. The idea that somehow the job is done, is wrong.

“We’ve still got a lot of people out there who’ve neither had this virus … nor yet been immunised, and that’s why we’re in a vulnerable position right now.”

PA Media reports Finn added: “There are a lot of people who are very fed up about the idea of us even worrying about this. Since I’ve been saying in the last 24 hours that we should be cautious I’ve been getting lots of messages from people telling me to shut up basically.

“But the truth is that a more infectious virus, which is what it looks like we’ve got, will reach people who are vulnerable – those who did not make a good response to the vaccine, those who have not yet had their doses – and that will be a problem for everyone because in the end it will be worse economically as well as for public health if we end up having to shut down again.”

Malaysia has begun a tough nationwide lockdown to battle a worsening coronavirus outbreak, AFP reports, as countries across Southeast Asia struggle with a resurgence in cases driven by infectious variants.

It writes,

Much of the region escaped the pandemic’s first wave last year relatively unscathed by rapidly closing borders and introducing curbs.

But countries from Thailand to Vietnam are being hammered by fresh surges, with efforts to quell outbreaks hampered by slow vaccine rollouts and populations weary of restrictions.

Malaysia is among the worst hit. Of almost 2,800 deaths from Covid-19 recorded in the country of 32 million since the start of the pandemic, over 40 percent were in May alone.

More than 570,000 infections have been reported, with a string of new daily records last week.

As well as variants, the outbreak has been fanned by gatherings in the Muslim-majority country during the holy month of Ramadan and the Eid al-Fitr holiday, often in defiance of coronavirus rules.

Under what authorities have termed a “total lockdown” in force from Tuesday, only essential businesses – such as supermarkets and medical clinics – can operate, people can only go outside for necessities, and most schools are closed.

Travel between most parts of the country had already been banned for months.

Just following up on Prof Ravi Gupta’s words there with a quick check on the UK government’s own coronavirus dashboard, and we can see that with data in from 31 May now, that the rolling seven-day averages of cases, deaths and hospitalisations are all up – all admittedly from a baseline much lower than was in the earlier peak of the second wave of the virus. You can have look for yourself here.