Coronavirus live: efforts to find Covid origin ‘not blame game’ says WHO; Indonesia reports record daily deaths | World news

Public Health England has upgraded its risk assessment of the Delta variant after national testing data revealed it is more likely to cause reinfections than the Alpha variant, which was first identified in Kent.

The health agency’s analysis found the risk of reinfection with Delta may be 46% greater than with the Alpha variant, with the highest risk seen six months after a first infection – when second cases caused by Delta were 2.37 times more common than with Alpha.

The finding is bolstered by new data from Public Health England’s (PHE) Siren study, which monitors more than 40,000 NHS staff for Covid infections. The latest figures show that positive tests rose steadily from May to July when 1.1% had the virus. Nearly a third of the healthcare workers had Covid before enrolling on the study and more than 95% have been vaccinated.

It is unclear why Delta may be causing more reinfections, but one possibility is that immunity from infections early on in the pandemic may be waning a little and so reducing the body’s defences against the variant which became dominant in the UK this year. PHE said that further work is now being undertaken to examine the risk of reinfection.

The US purchased 200 million more doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for flexibility if booster shots are later needed and the shots are approved for younger children, the White House said.

The vaccine makers announced the government’s purchase earlier on Friday , Reuters reports.

The number of people in hospital with coronavirus in England has risen to its highest level in four months, data shows.

Latest figures from NHS England show that 4,401 hospital beds were occupied by confirmed Covid-19 cases on Friday, the highest level since March 22.

This is a week-on-week rise of 30.7% from the 3,367 people in hospital on July 16.

But the numbers are still much lower than the peak of the second wave when patient levels in England reached 34,336 on January 18.

The North East and Yorkshire had the highest number of beds occupied with Covid patients on Friday, at 1,026, PA reports.

My colleague Justin McCurry reports from the Olympic opening ceremony in Tokyo.

Setting the right emotional tone for the precursor to an Olympics being held in such extraordinary circumstances was always going to be a perilous exercise in not causing offence, to a world traumatised by a pandemic and to a host nation deeply uneasy about its moment in the spotlight.

An opening ceremony that overstated its tragic backdrop would have sent a curious message to thousands of athletes, confined inside an Olympic bubble, who from tomorrow will begin their quest for medals. Yet one that appeared to overtly celebrate the start of the world’s biggest sporting event would have come across as insensitive – even callous – in a week when daily Covid-19 cases in Tokyo reached their highest for six months. In the end, Japan played it safe.

A scientist advising the UK government has accused ministers of allowing infections to rip through the younger population in an effort to bolster levels of immunity before the NHS faces winter pressures, my colleagues Ian Sample and Heather Stewart report.

The allegation comes after England’s remaining Covid restrictions were eased on Monday, with nightclubs throwing open their doors for the first time in the pandemic and all rules on social distancing and mask wearing dropped even as infections run high.

The European Central Bank has said it would end pandemic-era restrictions on banks’ payouts to shareholders but urged eurozone lenders to “remain prudent”.

AFP reports that the ECB “decided not to extend beyond September 2021 its recommendation that all banks limit dividends”, it said in a statement. But it warned that eurozone lenders “should remain prudent when deciding on dividends and share buy-backs”.

The ECB imposed a cap on banks’ rewards to shareholders at the onset of the coronavirus crisis in March 2020, to ensure lenders had enough liquidity to weather the fallout. The curbs were then extended twice, until September 2021.

With the eurozone recovery now firmly under way thanks to mass vaccinations and post-lockdown re-openings, the Frankfurt institution said it would return to the “pre-pandemic way of assessing” banks’ plans for dividends and share buy-backs, AFP reports.

But banks should “not underestimate the risk that additional losses may later have an impact on their capital trajectory as support measures expire”, the ECB said.

The US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England have also recently lifted their Covid-era restrictions on dividends after banks reportedly proved they had successfully weathered the changing economic circumstances.

Two hospitals in Florida reportedly have more Covid than at any point during the pandemic.

The New York Times reports that more than 140 people at two University of Florida hospitals in Jacksonville are admitted with the virus, a tenfold increase over five weeks — and the highest number of Covid patients so far at any one time.

Last month, the number of Covid-19 patients was down to 14 in total. “It’s very frustrating,” said Dr Leon Haley, the chief executive of UF Health Jacksonville, told the NYT. “Each day we continue to go up. There’s no sense of when things are going to curtail themselves. People are stretched thin.”

He added: “If we were able to get more people vaccinated earlier than this … We probably wouldn’t be here.”