Coronavirus live news: Italy opens vaccinations for all over-12s; Bulgaria to share doses with Balkan neighbours | World news

Sweden’s government failed in several aspects of its handling of the pandemic, the country’s parliament’s constitutional committee has said.

The government was slow to put in place a testing and tracing system, failed to protect of the elderly and there was a lack of clear lines of responsibility between national and local authorities, Reuters reports the committee – which did not criticise Sweden’s absence of sweeping lockdown measure – as saying.

“It is … clear that Sweden was not sufficiently prepared before [the pandemic] and we can learn from many of the underlying failures that have been identified,” Hans Ekstrom, deputy chairman of the committee and a lawmaker from the governing Social Democrat party, told a hearing.

Sweden has been an outlier in the fight against the pandemic and has opted against lockdowns, instead relying on mostly voluntary measures as well as bans on mass gatherings amid a shift to mostly home working. The death toll has been higher than that among its Nordic neighbours, but lower than in most European countries that opted for lockdowns.

The committee said that the government should have been quicker to set up a framework for testing and tracing, quicker to draw up a law giving it wider powers to deal with the crisis and quicker to isolate care homes for the elderly, Reuters reports.

“The government’s response was not sufficient,” committee chairperson Karin Enstrom, of the opposition Moderate Party, said. “The elderly were particularly vulnerable … and … the government should have acted more forcefully.”

The Social Democrat-led government has already accepted that it did not do enough to protect elderly residents of care homes.

The pandemic has severely affected children’s rights worldwide, with young people risking a “generational catastrophe” if governments do not act, a rights group has said in an annual survey.

Millions of children have missed out on education because of Covid-19 restrictions while there will be a long term impact in terms of their physical and mental health, Dutch NGO KidsRights said as it launched its annual ranking, AFP reports.

The survey ranks Iceland, Switzerland and Finland as best for children’s rights and Chad, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone as the worst, out of a total of 182 countries.

Marc Dulleart, founder and chairman of KidsRights, said that the effects of the pandemic on children had “unfortunately exceeded our predictions at the outset last year”.

Apart from patients of the coronavirus, children have been hardest hit, not directly by the virus itself, but fundamentally failed through the deferred actions of governments around the world. Educational recovery is the key to avoiding generational catastrophe.

The group said schools for more than 168 million children have been closed for almost a full year, with one-in-three children worldwide unable to access remote learning while their schools were shut.

An additional 142 million kids fell into material poverty as the global economy was hit by the pandemic and the responses to it, while 370 million kids missed out on school meals.

Italy has today opened vaccinations for everybody over the age of 12, after the European Medicines Agency approved the Pfizer/BioNTech jab for 12 to 15-year-olds last week.

“It’s a beautiful day,” said Naples mayor Luigi de Magistris, saying it was an “excellent signal for both containing the pandemic and for resuming as soon as possible all forms of… activity.”

After a slow start due to organisational issues and lack of supply, Italy’s vaccination programme has been accelerating. More than 35 million doses have been administered, with 12.4 million people – almost 23% of the population – now fully vaccinated, according to health ministry figures.

Hailing the widening of the vaccination programme, health minister Robert Speranza said: “We can still accelerate our campaign to get through this difficult season.”

However, health experts have warned that immunising children against Covid should only be considered in special circumstances due to the potential of it raising important practical and ethical problems.

“Children transmit Covid to some extent, although they rarely suffer badly from the disease themselves. If you offer them vaccines, then you put them at risk of possible side-effects – so there really needs to be some significant, tangible benefit to them, not just the indirect protection of adults from Covid-19,” said Prof Adam Finn of Bristol University last week.

More than two billion Covid-19 vaccines have been given across the world, according to an AFP tally drawn from official sources.

The milestone comes six months after the first vaccination campaigns against Covid-19 began. At least 2,109,696,022 shots have been given in 215 countries and territories, according to the count from an AFP database.

Israel remains the country with the most vaccinated, with nearly six-in-10 people in the country fully inoculated against Covid.

It is followed by Canada (59% of the population have had at least one jab), the UK (58.3%), Chile (56.6%) and the US (51%).

Six out of 10 of the injections have been administered in the world’s three most populous countries – China (704.8 million doses), the US (296.9 million) and India (221 million).

Nearly four-in-10 people in the EU have had at least one shot, with Germany leading with 43.6%, followed by Italy (40%) and France and Spain on 39.4%.

Only six countries in the world have not yet started vaccinating – North Korea, Haiti, Tanzania, Chad, Burundi and Eritrea.

But with vaccination programmes now accelerating, China leads the league of countries giving doses the fastest over the last week, injecting 1.37% of its population per day. Bahrain and Uruguay are also covering about 1% a day.

Greece is to supply its northern neighbours Albania and North Macedonia with 40,000 doses of Covid-19 vaccines, the country’s spokeswoman has said.

“Greece, in coordination with the European Commission, as most European countries do for their neighbours, will offer vaccines … 20,000 doses to North Macedonia and 20,000 to Albania,” Aristotelia Peloni told a news conference.

Covid is many times more prevalent in Indonesia than shown by official figures in the world’s fourth most populous country, authors of two new studies told Reuters.

The news agency reports the country of 270 million has recorded 1.83 million positive cases, but epidemiologists have long believed the true scale of the spread has been obscured by a lack of testing and contact tracing.

One nationwide study between December and January suggested 15% of Indonesians had already contracted the virus – when official figures at the end of January had recorded infections among only around 0.4% of people. Even now, Indonesia’s total positive infections are only around 0.7% of the population.

The results of the survey were not unexpected given under reporting, said Pandu Riono, a University of Indonesia epidemiologist who worked on the study carried out with help from the World Health Organisation.

Siti Nadia Tarmizi, a senior health ministry official, said it was possible the study was preliminary, but there might be more cases than officially reported because many cases were asymptomatic. She said Indonesia had a lack of contact tracing and not enough laboratories to process tests.

Once touted by former US president Donald Trump, and subsequently derided by some as lacking efficacy evidence, the potential Covid treatment based on a cocktail of monoclonal antibodies developed by US drugmaker Regeneron and Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche has been purchased by the EU to the tune of about 55,000 doses.

Reuters reports that the deal is the bloc’s first contract for this kind of drug, as it aims to identify 10 promising treatments by the end of the month amid a failure by pharmaceutical companies to swiftly deliver sufficient supplies of vaccines after initial promise.

The deal with Roche was reached in April, the company told Reuters, but contract details were not made public. A European Commission spokesman said the EU had secured about 55,000 doses of the single-dose treatment.

The only other anti-Covid drug the EU has bought is Gilead’s remdesivir, an antiviral medicine. Last year, the EU reserved half a million courses after the drug obtained a conditional EU approval.

European countries would buy the Roche-Regeneron drug, which is composed of the monoclonal antibodies casirivimab and imdevimab, only after it was approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) or by national drug regulators.

“The EU authorisation is expected between August and October 2021,” an EU document says, citing Roche estimates.

Its Mattha Busby here taking over from my colleague Martin Belam. Hello to everyone reading – do drop me a line on Twitter with any tips or thoughts.

Reuters have very handily – for me, if not for you – wrapped up exactly which countries in Europe are now allowing children and adolescents to be vaccinated.

• France will start vaccinating teenagers from age 12 on 15 June
• Germany plans to offer a first shot to children aged 12-16 from 7 June, while Poland would offer shots to those aged 12-15 the same day.
• Lithuania’s prime minister said the country could start vaccinating children from age 12 in June.
• Italy on 31 May approved extending the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to 12-15 year olds.
• Austria aims to have over 340,000 children aged 12-15 vaccinated by the end of August.
• Hungary started vaccinating 16-18-year-olds in mid-May.
• Switzerland’s health watchdog said in early May Pfizer had sought approval for its shot in children aged 12-15.
• San Marino on 1 June opened vaccinations for children aged 12-15.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I usually slightly raise one eyebrow when reporting the official numbers out of Russia as they are remarkably consistent. They’ve pretty much been in the range of 7,000 to 9,500 daily every day since early March, which feels unusual as it suggest the virus is neither gathering pace or diminishing, which tends not to be how epidemics behave.

Today is no different, as Russia reported 8,933 new cases taking the official national tally since the pandemic began to 5,099,182.

The government coronavirus task force said 393 people had died of coronavirus linked causes in the past 24 hours, pushing the national death toll to 122,660.

Reuters always note that the federal statistics agency has kept a separate count and has said Russia recorded significantly more fatalities than that. They put the figure at around 250,000 deaths related to Covid from April 2020 to March 2021.

Bulgaria plans to provide about 150,000 Covid vaccines to its Balkan neighbours, health minister Stoicho Katsarov has said.

Bulgaria has the lowest inoculation rates in the European Union, but Katsarov said the country has agreed to receive about 13m doses under the EU supply scheme by the end of the year and can afford to help other countries.

“The idea is to distribute up to 150,000 doses among our neighbouring western Balkan countries,” Katsarov told reporters, adding that Sofia has received requests from North Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo and Bosnia.

“Our needs are fully covered so there is no danger whatsoever that Bulgaria can be left without vaccines,” he said.

Reuters report Katsarov said he expects to receive an answer on Friday from the European Commission how exactly the country should proceed and whether it could donate or sell the doses.

He said Bulgaria was looking to donate mostly AstraZeneca vaccines, not least because of the low interest in them at home.

Last week president Rumen Radev said Sofia plans to donate a significant amount of vaccines to North Macedonia in a move that could help improve strained relations over Bulgaria’s veto on the start of EU accession talks with Skopje.

A quick one from Sky here, that the reopening of indoor hospitality last month failed to boost footfall in town centres in England. The figures are compiled by a company called Springboard, and they said:

May was the wettest on record which inevitably lowered the initial exhilaration of consumers in being able to eat out as even visiting indoor environments necessitated braving the weather.

Secondly, the limitations on dining capacity in indoor venues inevitably means that the uplift in footfall generated has been limited; and thirdly most of the increase in footfall has occurred post 5pm when volumes of activity are far lower those than during retail trading hours.

Footfall in May 2021 was around 25% down on the same pre-pandemic period in 2019