Coronavirus live: UK cases could reach 100,000 a day says health secretary; Germany to lift UK and India travel ban | World news

The coronavirus pandemic is forcing organisers of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics to restrict attendance at the Games’ opening ceremony to a limited number of VIPs, Japanese media have reported.

The curtain-raiser at the 68,000-seat main stadium on 23 July will be watched only by people connected to sponsors, along with diplomats and other special guests, with the number sharply reduced from an initial estimate of 10,000, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper said on Tuesday, citing multiple unidentified sources.

In addition, Olympic competitions at large venues and those scheduled for after 9pm will be held without spectators to discourage people spending time in the capital after the events have ended.

The Tokyo 2020 organising committee has already banned overseas spectators and set a cap on domestic spectators at 10,000 per venue for the Games, or 50% of capacity.

Read more of Justin McCurry’s report from Tokyo: Tokyo Olympics – attendance to be slashed at opening ceremony

David Hughes and Emma Bowden have teed up the rest of the day’s UK Covid developments for us after the morning media round, writing that the NHS Test and Trace system will be made more “proportionate”, Sajid Javid has promised, with double-vaccinated contacts expected to be spared the need to self-isolate.

The Health Secretary will update MPs on the latest plans for easing restrictions after Boris Johnson promised the wholesale lifting of coronavirus rules in England yesterday.

Javid will use his Commons statement to set out how the contact tracing system will operate in future, saying it is “absolutely right” that for people who have received both vaccination doses “we can take a different approach”.

Reports last week suggested ministers intend to drop all legal requirements on those who have had both jabs if they encounter a confirmed case, with advice for them to take a daily test but no compulsion to do so.

Javid also told MPs on Monday that ministers would set out “how we intend to exempt under-18s who are close contacts from the requirement to self-isolate”.

Education secretary Gavin Williamson will also make a statement in the Commons on plans to replace the requirement for entire school bubbles to isolate after a positive Covid contact with enhanced testing.

England’s one-day cricket squad have been plunged into isolation after seven members of the bubble tested positive for Covid-19.

Three players and four members of the team management tested positive yesterday and will self-isolate along with the remainder of the ODI squad who were deemed close contacts.

England’s ODIs and and T20 internationals against Pakistan will go ahead with Ben Stokes returning to the side to captain the squad which will be named later on Tuesday.

Tom Harrison, the chief executive of the England and Wales Cricket Board, said: ‘‘We have been mindful that the emergence of the Delta variant, along with our move away from the stringent enforcement of bio secure environments, could increase the chances of an outbreak.”

Read more here: Covid-19 outbreak forces England’s one-day cricket squad into isolation

Russia reported a record 737 deaths from coronavirus-linked causes in the past 24 hours on Tuesday, pushing the official national death toll to 139,316.

The country confirmed 23,378 new Covid cases, including 5,498 in Moscow.

Reuters remind us that federal statistics agency has kept a separate death count, and has said Russia recorded around 270,000 deaths related to Covid from April 2020 to April 2021, nearly double the official tally.

A quick Reuters snap here that Indian drug manufacturer Morepen Laboratories has begun production of the Russian Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), responsible for marketing the shot internationally, said on Tuesday.

The first test batch made by the Indian manufacturer in the state of Himachal Pradesh will be shipped to Gamaleya, the Moscow institute which developed the vaccine, for quality controls, RDIF said in a statement.

Here’s the full quote from UK health secretary Sajid Javid, that the government is planning to unlock the economy and remove Covid restrictions on 19 July, with the expectation that case numbers could reach as high as 100,000 cases per day by August. He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

This is uncharted territory for anyone, any country in the world. As you go further out, week by week, then the numbers in terms of projections are even less reliable. But I said this in parliament yesterday, that by the time we get to 19 July we would expect the case numbers by then to be at least double what they are now – so around 50,000 new cases a day. As we ease and go into the summer, we expect them to rise significantly and they could go as high as 100,000 case numbers. We want to be very straightforward about this, what we can expect in terms of case numbers. But what matters more than anything is the hospitalisation and death numbers, and that is where the link is really weak.

Earlier on Sky News, Javid said that the rising case numbers are only leading to 1/30th of the level of hospitalisations as they were before the vaccination programme.

The current figures for the UK show that there were 27,334 people tested positive reported on 5 July, which is a rise of 53%. Just under 2,000 people were admitted to hospital in the last week, which is a rise of 24% on the week before. 64% of the adult population have now had two vaccine shots.

UK health secretary Sajid Javid said he would set out self-isolation changes for those who have had both vaccine doses in parliament later today.

“We will have a more proportionate system of test, trace and isolate, and it is absolutely right that those that have been double jabbed that we can take a different approach than the one we take today,” he told BBC Breakfast.

PA Media quotes him saying: “In terms of what we will be doing exactly, you will have to wait for my statement to parliament later today.”

It is expected that people who have had two doses of vaccine will no longer be required to self-isolate for 10 days.

The health secretary is thought to be giving a House of Commons statement at around 12.30pm in place of the currently listed appearance by colleague Jo Churchill.

Just a follow-up here on the number of cases that the UK government seems to be thinking are acceptable under its current plans for unlocking England. Prime minister Boris Johnson said cases may be up to 50,000 per day when the country reaches 19 July. Health secretary Sajid Javid has just floated a number double that for the summer on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

The current caseload is around 25,000 new positive tests daily.

Some experts have criticised the plans saying that allowing this number of cases to flourish risks a breeding ground for potential variations, and is also exposing younger unvaccinated people to the risk of “long Covid”.

AFP has this report on the serious situation in Indonesia, where the nation is sourcing emergency oxygen for virus patients from neighbouring Singapore, and calling for help from other countries including China.

About 10,000 concentrators – devices that generate oxygen – were to be shipped from the city-state with some arriving by a Hercules cargo plane earlier on Tuesday, officials said.

“We have communicated with Singapore, China, and other sources” for help, senior minister Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan said. “We will also order (oxygen) from other countries if we still feel that the supplies are insufficient.”

Pandjaitan ordered all the nation’s oxygen supplies sent to hospitals overflowing with coronavirus patients on Monday, warning Indonesia could face a “worst-case scenario” where infections skyrocket to 50,000 a day, a crisis driven by the Delta variant.

More than a dozen hospitals in Indonesia’s second-biggest city Surabaya are now full and not taking any more patients, authorities said.

“The health system is on the verge of collapse; hospitals are already being overwhelmed, oxygen supplies are running out and health services in Java and Bali are woefully ill-equipped to handle this surge in critically ill patients,” NGO Save the Children said in a statement.

In the UK, health minister Sajid Javid’s opposite number, Labour’s opposition health spokesperson Jonathan Ashworth, has been setting out why Labour is unhappy with the way the government is handling the unlocking of restrictions in England. He told Sky News:

We’ve got to look at where we are in the trajectory, because when Boris Johnson says 50,000 cases a day on 19 July, he’s not saying that is the peak. He’s not saying it will start coming down after that. The likelihood is this will continue to rise and rise to a peak, hopefully in about August I suspect, and then start coming down again, so why not have more precautions in place if we know we’re going up? Why not have mask wearing in place? Why not do the ventilation? Until we know we’re coming back down again.

He earlier suggested a further delay, or further precautions, could get the number of people vaccinated in England up further, saying:

People who are exposed the virus can develop very serious long term health conditions, which risk permanent illness or permanent disability as a consequence. And, of course, we haven’t finished vaccinating yet. Only 50% of the English population have had two jobs. We’re going to get much further on vaccination. We’re nearly there, but we’re not quite there yet.

Struggling to contain an outbreak of the Delta variant, Fiji reported a record 636 Covid infections and six deaths on Tuesday, with the mortuary at Pacific island’s main hospital already filled to capacity.

Since the pandemic began, Fiji has reported a total 39 deaths, but most have come since the emergence of the Delta variant in April.

With a population of less than a million people Fiji had initially succeeded in keeping the coronavirus at bay. The government has resisted calls for a national lockdown.

The Colonial War Memorial hospital in the capital, Suva, is Fiji’s largest public hospital with 500 beds, and has been assigned the task of treating Covid patients.

On Monday, the government said many patients were seeking treatment too late, and the hospital’s mortuary was full, even though some victims were dying at home.

“Sadly we are seeing people with the severe disease die at home or on the way to the hospital before our medical teams have a chance to administer what could potentially be life-saving treatment,” Fiji’s ministry for health said in an emailed statement, Reuters report.

About 54% of Fijians have received at least one dose of the AstraZeneca or Sinopharm vaccines, according to official data, while almost 9% have received a second.

With all the attention this morning on the lifting of Covid restrictions in the UK, it is important to remember that the changes dominating the media – and consequently this blog – this morning only apply to England.

Yesterday, the Politico London Playbook email had a handy summing-up of the state of play in the other three nations that make up the UK, which is worth re-upping this morning:

• On 19 July, Scotland is set to move to level zero in its tiering system, the lowest level where some precautions are still in place.
• The government in Scotland will carry on urging Scots to wear face masks in shops and on public transport after their own unlocking on 9 August, when all other legal restrictions are set to be dropped.
• In Wales, there is no freedom day date set but another review of the data is set for 15 July. Welsh counsel general Mick Antoniw signalled on Sunday that the country could move to “increased normality” over the next few weeks.
  
• There’s no unlock date set in Northern Ireland either, though the BBC reports the Stormont executive is set to meet this week to discuss further relaxation of the rules as live music resumed yesterday.

It is very busy on the airwaves in the UK this morning in the light of the announcement yesterday that England is on course to drop all legal Covid restrictions on 19 July.

Prof Neil Ferguson, from Imperial College London, has said in a third UK coronavirus wave there would be “lower numbers” in hospital.

PA Media reports he told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme: “This third wave is going to look very different from the second wave.

“In terms of cases per day, I think we will at least reach 50,000, I think the prime minister was saying in his statement what he was expecting to see in the next couple of weeks, it will likely go higher than that.

“But what we do know is in the second wave there was a certain ratio between cases and hospitalisations and that ratio right now is being reduced by more than two-thirds, as we get more second doses into people it will go down even further.

“Even more positively, the ratio which we saw in the past between case numbers and deaths has been reduced by more like eight to ten fold.

“So the third wave, even if the number of cases per day gets very high, we’re still likely to see lower numbers of hospitalisations and deaths than we saw back in December and January just gone.”

Here’s a rewind to what Sajid Javid was saying earlier on Sky News. The UK health secretary was asked about dropping the requirement for face masks and didn’t really say much about face masks at all, instead saying:

Looking at the impact of a vaccine, and the severe weakening of that link [between cases and hospitalisations], we are very comfortable with the decisions that were announced. I fully understand why many people will be anxious, they’d want to be cautious, and that is why other protections remain in place, but the vaccines are working.

Pressed on the government advice on vulnerable people, it was put to him that: “Vulnerable people who may well be concerned about travelling on public transport, given that many people choose not to wear a mask, you’ve given them the opportunity to do so. The advice from government for vulnerable people … is to travel outside peak times. We’re telling people who perhaps have received the cancer diagnosis, that they will have to take a bus at five o’clock in the morning. That’s what this government means by personal responsibility?”

Javid replied:

I’ve given an example of when I would wear a face mask and I hope other people would do similar, but again to turn to your particular question on face masks, why can we move from a system of rules and regulations to guidance and personal responsibility? It is because of the vaccine and the vaccine is working, and the fact that now we’ve got the most successful vaccine rollout programme in the world thanks to the NHS and our scientists.

Earlier, asked if he himself would continue to wear face masks, Javid said:

For the foreseeable future I will be carrying a face mask with me, I think that’s a very responsible thing for anyone to do. As I’ve said the pandemic is not over. And if I’m in a crowded or enclosed space, I will wear a face mask or if I’ll wear one if I was next to someone or near someone that felt uncomfortable with others not wearing a face mask. That’s the point and that’s what I mean by personal responsibility.

I can’t say personally I was entirely convinced this sounded like a man who had ever approached a bunch of strangers on public transport and asked them to kindly put their face masks on because he was feeling uncomfortable and it was their personal responsibility to do so.