Covid live: Delta variant will dominate globally in months – WHO; Rome cases surge linked to Euro 2020 celebrations | World news

From the Mirror’s senior political correspondent as the Labour leader enters self-isolation again today:

Vietnam has produced the first test batch of the Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine, Russia’s RDIF sovereign wealth fund and Vietnamese pharmaceutical firm Vabiotech has said.

The first validation samples taken from the batch of 30,000 doses will be shipped to the Gamaleya Center in Russia for quality control checks, the fund and the company said in a joint statement reported by Reuters.

A Vabiotech executive said that the quality check result would be available within 30 days.

Infections are surging in Vietnam, which is facing its worst outbreak yet after successfully keeping cases low during much of the last year. There were 5,357 new infections on Wednesday, up from 4,795 cases on Tuesday. The country has recorded 68,177 infections and 370 deaths overall.

Vabiotech will begin packaging Russian vaccines from July, with a monthly capacity of five million doses, according to a statement by Vietnam’s health minister Nguyen Thanh Long last month.

The army’s health department will be put in charge of Tunisia’s pandemic response, president Kais Saied has said, as tensions rise in government amid the country’s worsening health crisis.

The announcement comes a day after the prime minister, Hichem Mechichi, sacked health minister Faouzi Mehdi, who is close to Saied. Mechichi accused him of making “criminal” decisions that led to chaos at vaccination centres, according to Reuters.

The North African country is battling soaring cases and deaths while faced with critical oxygen shortages in hospitals and packed intensive care wards.

“The Military Health Department will take over the management of the health crisis in the country,” he announced in televised comments during a visit to a vaccination centre in Tunis.

Tunisia has reported about 18,000 deaths and more than 550,000 coronavirus infections since the pandemic began. Only 940,000 of its 11.6 million people have been fully vaccinated.

The Labour party leader, Keir Starmer, is self-isolating after one of his children tested positive.

A party spokesperson said:

One of Keir’s children tested positive for Covid this lunchtime. In line with the rules, Keir and his family will now be self-isolating.

Keir was already doing daily tests and tested negative this morning. He will continue to take daily tests.

He joins Boris Johnson, who has been self-isolating since the weekend, after meeting with Sajid Javid, the health secretary, who tested positive.

In the UK, people affected by long Covid are almost twice as likely to have been depressed as those who haven’t had coronavirus, research indicates.

Some 6.2% of adults said they may have experienced long Covid, with 3.6% saying they had it and 2.6% saying they may have had it, when polled by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) between 7 April and 13 June. PA Media writes:

Of these, 30% reported experiencing moderate to severe depressive symptoms in the last two weeks. This compares with 16% of respondents who did not think they had contracted coronavirus.

A quarter (25%) were likely to have some form of anxiety, compared with 15% of people not believed to have been hit by Covid.

Some 57% of adults who may have had long Covid said this had negatively affected their wellbeing, while 39% said their ability to exercise had been affected.

Considering only those who were sure they had experienced long Covid, 72% said their wellbeing had been negatively affected and 48% said the same about their ability to exercise.

The ONS warned against deducing cause-and-effect relationships from the results due to a combination of complicating factors including age, sex, disability status and deprivation level.

The highly transmissible Delta variant of the coronavirus now accounts for 83% of all sequenced cases in the US, a top federal health official said on Tuesday.

“This is a dramatic increase, up from 50% [in] the week of 4 July,” Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said in Senate testimony.

Walensky also said Covid fatalities had risen by nearly 48% over the past week to an average of 239 a day.

“Each death is tragic and even more heartbreaking when we know that the majority of these deaths could be prevented with a simple, safe available vaccine,” she said.

A cluster of midwestern and southern states have emerged as the new hotspots for Covid-19.

Germany’s infection levels will pass 400 per 100,000 people in September if cases keep rising at their current pace, the health minister has said.

Around 60% of the population have received at least one vaccine dose, Jens Spahn said in remarks reported by Reuters, while about 47% are fully vaccinated.

The country’s seven-day rate, which evens out daily irregularities in reporting, was at 11.4 per 100,000 on Wednesday, following a rise in recent weeks attributed to the spread of the Delta variant.

The German cabinet on Wednesday extended Covid-19 quarantine regulations for travellers arriving from higher-risk areas until mid-September.

A South African manufacturer has been found to produce the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine domestically, the companies said, announcing the first such deal on the African continent.

The deal will see Cape Town-based Biovac complete the final step in the production process, the companies said in a statement reported by AFP.

Once the process gets off the ground, Biovac will produce more than 100m doses each year to be distributed across African countries. However, the first South African-made vaccine are not expected until 2022.

The move comes amid growing criticism of vaccine inequality as richer countries leave poorer nations behind in immunisation campaigns. Eleven billion doses are needed to fully vaccinate 70% of the world’s population. About 3.2bn doses had been administered by early July.

BrewDog swung into the red last year as booming sales of its craft beers online during Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns failed to offset the impact of bar closures.

The Aberdeenshire-based company sank to a £13.1m pre-tax loss in 2020, despite reporting revenues of £238m for the year, 10% higher than in 2019.

Report by Joanna Partridge:

The Delta coronavirus variant is expected to become dominant globally within months, the World Health Organization has warned as 13 further territories detected cases. The highly contagious strain has now been discovered in 124 territories.

“It is expected that it will rapidly out-compete other variants and become the dominant circulating lineage over the coming months,” the UN health agency said in its weekly epidemiological update.

AFP reports that the WHO said overall, 3.4 million new Covid-19 cases were reported in the week to 18 July – 1 12% rise on the week before.

“At this rate, it is expected that the cumulative number of cases reported globally could exceed 200 million in the next three weeks,” said the WHO.

Cases were up 30% in the WHO’s Western Pacific region and up 21% in its European region.

The highest numbers of new cases were reported from Indonesia (350,273 new cases; up 44%), Britain (296,447 new cases; up 41%), and Brazil (287,610 new cases; down 14%).

The highly transmissible Delta coronavirus variant has become dominant in France, prime minister Jean Castex has said.

Castex told TF1 television that the major steps taken to tackle fourth wave of infections in the country have been settled upon by a cabinet meeting of the government, according to Reuters.

“We are in the fourth wave”, Castex said. “The Delta variant is the majority one, it is more contagious.”

The French government is presenting legislation to parliament this week to ramp up its vaccination take-up rates. Its plan includes requiring a health pass in a wide array of venues from the start of August and making vaccination mandatory for health workers.

Tunisia’s prime minister Hichem Mechichi has slammed the health minister over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic as the country’s hospitals face a critical lack of oxygen.

Mechichi’s officed announced that health minister Faouzi Mehdi had been sacked on Tuesday evening. The premier has hit out at the ex-minister for his role in the slow rollout of vaccines and soaring cases, according to AFP – a move some view as the premier trying to scapegoat him for wider failures.

“There’s an extraordinary level of dysfunction at the head of the health ministry,” Mechichi told health officials in footage published on his Facebook page late Tuesday.

Mehdi was sacked the day after vaccine centres opened their doors to over-18s, leading to runs on clinics and stocks quickly running dry.

Tunisia has been facing an overwhelming Covid-19 caseload that has left more than 17,000 people dead in a population of around 12 million. Fewer than 8% of the population are fully jabbed.

The country’s hospitals have faced acute shortages of oxygen, staff and intensive care beds, and fewer than eight percent of the population are fully vaccinated.

Coronavirus cases have reached a new daily high in Thailand, which has registered 13,002 new infections over the past 24 hours as the country battles against its third wave.

The previous daily high of Covid-19 cases was 11,784 on Monday, according to the Bangkok Post. Thailand on Wednesday also reported a further 108 further deaths.

The third wave has accounted for the bulk of Thailand’s coronavirus cases, with 410,614 of its 439,477 Covid-19 cases being recorded since 1 April. Its death toll has also soared in recent months, with 3,516 of its 3,610 fatalities recorded in the third wave.

Fewer than one in 12 people reported negative side effects in the week after having a Covid-19 vaccine, a study has suggested, with experts saying the figures are similar to those expected with any vaccination.

The Vac4Covid study found that some 7.9% of participants experience side effects, with the most common including fever, headaches and fatigue. The researchers recruited more than 12,000 people across the UK.

Meanwhile, 45% of study participants said they felt better in the seven days following their jab, according to the researchers from the University of Dundee’s School of Medicine.

Study clinical researcher Dr Amy Rogers said: “The side effects of Covid-19 vaccination have been a talking point, but the figure of 7.9% is very much in line with what we expect from any vaccination, such as seasonal flu.

“That should make these results very reassuring for anybody still concerned about the possibility of side effects from their Covid-19 vaccination.”

Saudi authorities have rolled out electronic “hajj cards” allowing contactless access to religious sites, accommodation and transport during the annual event amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Just 60,000 vaccinated Saudi citizens and and residents have been permitted to participate in the pilgrimage – compared with 2.5 million in 2019, according to AFP.

People hoping to attend the annual event had to apply online.

The digital system also allows the authorities to guide the tens of thousands who attend the pilgrimage, with different coloured cards corresponding to signage on the ground guiding pilgrims through the different stages of the hajj. In previous years, there have been deadly accidents and stampedes.

Each card contains basic information about each pilgrim including their registration number, exact location of their accommodation, mobile phone number and the ID number of their guide.

Saudi Arabia has reported more than 510,000 cases and 8,089 deaths.

Hi, this is Clea Skopeliti taking the liveblog reins for the next few hours. As always, you can reach me on Twitter if you have suggestions for our coverage. Cheers.

• A survey in India has found that 67% of the country has coronavirus antibodies, compared with 24% when the last survey was conducted in December-January.
• A major Buddhist group in Taiwan has said it has signed a deal to buy 5m doses of BioNTech Covid vaccine via the German firm’s Chinese sales agent, bumping the island’s order for the shot up to 15m doses.
• South Korea reported a daily record of 1,784 coronavirus cases for Tuesday, breaking a mark set last week, as the country grapples with Delta-driven outbreaks.
• Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, has refused to apologise for his government’s handling of the coronavirus vaccine rollout, amid testy exchanges during a radio interview as more than 13 million Australians – or half of the population – awoke in lockdown conditions.
• Russia has announced 23,704 new Covid cases on Wednesday, including 3,254 in Moscow. There were 783 further deaths.
• The first test batch of Russian-developed Sputnik V vaccine has been produced in Vietnam. The first validation samples taken from the produced batch will be shipped to the Gamaleya Center in Russia for quality control checks.
• Face masks and other Covid restrictions could be reintroduced in England in as little as three weeks if hospital admissions rise above anticipated levels, scientists advising the government have warned.
• The British Meat Processors Association has warned that production lines have started to fail due to the number of workers self-isolating over coronavirus contacts.
• Labour’s Lisa Nandy expressed sympathy for those who have been sent into self-isolation by the NHS app, and called on the government to provide more financial help for workers and for the introduction of a “test and release” approach.
• New infections in France are increasing at an unprecedented rate due to the Delta variant, after 18,000 cases were reported for the previous 24 hours, according to the health minister Olivier Véran.
• The delayed and Covid-affected Tokyo 2020 Olympics got underway with softball and women’s football matches. Japanese chief cabinet secretary Katsunobu Kato said on Wednesday he hadn’t heard of any major violations of infection prevention measures among athletes, certainly nothing severe enough to warrant pulling their accreditation.

Andrew Sparrow has our UK live blog, but the focus of that today is mostly politics. Clea Skopeliti will be here shortly to take you through the main UK and international coronavirus developments today.

Finally, just a quick personal note from me, Martin Belam. This has been my last day on the Covid live blog for a while. I’m going to be spending the next few weeks writing our daily Tokyo 2020 briefing for the Olympics and the Paralympics. You can sign up to get that here. I would say that I am looking forward to a nice change, but I suspect that I am still going to be writing an awful lot about Covid.

Anyway, thank you very much for reading over these past few months while I’ve been on the blog regularly, and especially to all of those of you who have been in contact with me by email or Twitter with tips or suggestions or spotting and helping me fix my errors – I really appreciate it. Take care, keep safe, and I will see you back here later in the year…