Coronavirus live news: more lockdowns ‘unlikely’ to be needed, says UK expert; Australia has record day of cases

Equatorial Guinea is struggling with a drugs shortage as pandemic strikes. Santos Bimbile has been to four pharmacies in Malabo, the capital, and not one of them has the drug that his sister-in-law needs to ease stomach pain, AFP reports.

“It’s very difficult to get your hands on certain drugs, and especially for an affordable price,” he said.

It is a familiar story to many of the 1.4 million citizens of this country – a tiny state in central-western Africa known for its oil wealth, widespread poverty, and iron-fisted regime.

Problems are due to the fact years-long shortages of drugs have combined with the coronavirus pandemic. “We have received almost nothing for the past three years,” Francisco Ondo Nsue, director of Centramed, a government agency that supplies Equatorial Guinea’s hospitals and pharmacies, said in early July.

On Friday a record high of 15,645 new cases was reported in Japan, according to a tally by Japan’s public media organization NHK. The Tokyo Metropolitan government said there were an additional 4,515 cases while Osaka Prefecture logged a record 1,310 infections.

The figure in Tokyo – which is hosting the Olympics under a state of emergency – was the second-highest for the capital, which reported a record 5,042 cases Thursday.

The Guardian’s Sirin Kale has written an inspiring and touching feature article, after interviewing Covid patients alongside the NHS staff who looked after them through their illness.

In Thailand, Covid-19 deaths rose to a record 212 with 21,838 new cases over the past 24 hours, according to the Public Health Ministry.

Of the new cases, 20,915 were among the general population and 923 were inmates. Over the past 24 hours, 21,108 patients were discharged from hospitals.

Since 1 April, around when the third wave of Covid-19 began, there have been 707,659 Covid-19 patients, 489,586 of whom have recovered.

The UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, is facing mounting anger after it emerged he continued with a tour of Scotland and decided not to isolate despite a member of his team testing positive for Covid-19 on the trip.

A senior government source told the Guardian the prime minister and official were “side-by-side” on several occasions and even travelled together on an RAF Voyager between Glasgow and Aberdeen, but a Downing Street spokesperson said they did not come into close contact.

China stepped up measures to protect its capital, Beijing, as an uptick in coronavirus cases driven by the more infectious Delta variant spread across multiple cities in the country.

The National Health Commission reported on Saturday 107 new confirmed coronavirus cases in the mainland for 6 August, compared with 124 a day earlier.

Of the new infections, 75 were locally transmitted, the health authority said. That compares with 80 local cases a day earlier. Most of the local cases were in the eastern province of Jiangsu.

Those currently outside Beijing in higher-risk areas should temporarily postpone their return, and others should provide a negative Covid-19 test, according to details of a Saturday meeting by local officials reported by the Beijing Daily. Epidemic prevention measures at railways, highways and airports should be strengthened, they said.

Some local governments have been called out by Beijing for lowering their guard, leading to the spread of the Delta variant from multiple sources.

Russia reported 22,320 new Covid-19 cases on Saturday, including 2,235 in Moscow, taking the official national tally since the pandemic began to 6,424,884.

The government’s coronavirus taskforce said 793 people had died of coronavirus-linked causes in the past 24 hours, pushing the national death toll to 164,094.

Russia recorded about 463,000 excess deaths from April 2020 to June this year during the coronavirus pandemic, according to Reuters calculations based on data released by the state statistics service on Friday.

The Philippines’ health ministry recorded 11,021 new coronavirus cases on Saturday, the highest single-day case increase in almost four months, and 162 additional deaths.

In a bulletin, the ministry said total confirmed infections in the Philippines had increased to almost 1.65 million, while deaths had reached 28,835.

“We are already feeling the effects of the Delta variant in our country,” the health ministry undersecretary, Maria Rosario Vergeire, told a public briefing on Saturday.

India approved Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use on Saturday, the health minister, Mansukh Mandaviya, said in a tweet. The pharmaceutical giant had applied for emergency use approval on Friday.

A university is offering cash prizes to students who can prove they have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19 in an effort to drive take-up of the jabs.

All students at Sussex University are being entered into a draw, with 10 winners receiving £5,000 if they can prove they are double-jabbed or exempt.

Prof Adam Tickell, the university’s vice-chancellor, denied the move amounted to “bribing” students to get vaccinated.

The prize draw will take place at the end of November to allow students time to get vaccinated.

“We’re going to automatically enter every student in, and unless they have said they want to opt out after we’ve given them the opportunity to have vaccines – this will be about 12 weeks after the announcement – we’ll just randomly choose 10 names,” Prof Tickell told BBC Radio 4’s Today.

The US is now averaging 100,000 new Covid-19 infections a day, returning to a milestone last seen during the winter surge in yet another bleak reminder of how quickly the delta variant has spread through the country.

The US was averaging about 11,000 cases a day in late June. Now the number is 107,143.

It took about nine months to cross the 100,000 average case number in November before peaking at about 250,000 in early January. Cases bottomed out in June but took about six weeks to go back above 100,000, despite a vaccine that has been given to more than 70% of the adult population.

The seven-day average for daily new deaths also increased, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. It rose over the past two weeks from about 270 deaths per day to nearly 500 a day as of Friday.

Members of the government’s expert committee on vaccination remain largely opposed to extending Covid jabs to younger teenagers, despite politicians signalling they would like to see a shift in the guidance, the Guardian has been told.

Several members of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) said the mainstream sentiment on the body was still extremely cautious about expanding the programme to 12- to 15-year-olds, even though a deputy chief medical officer has suggested that outcome is highly probable and politicians have said they would like the issue to remain under review.

The JCVI recommended on Wednesday that all over-16s be offered jabs, just two weeks after saying children should not routinely be given Covid vaccinations. The U-turn provoked alarm at what was described as a “shambolic” vaccine rollout for older teenagers.

The JCVI has moved to “refresh” the membership of its Covid subcommittee in recent weeks, with one prominent critic of Covid jabs for children, Prof Robert Dingwall, leaving the body.

The state of Victoria in Australia has recorded 29 new locally acquired Covid-19 cases, all linked to current outbreaks but not in quarantine while infectious.

Australia detected a record daily number of new coronavirus cases for the year on Saturday, with the country’s most populous states of New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland recording a total of 361 cases of the highly infectious Delta variant.

Wales has moved to Covid alert level zero, which means most restrictions including social distancing will be scrapped.

It comes almost 17 months after Wales’ first lockdown and means nightclubs are allowed to reopen and meeting indoors permitted. However, face masks are still required in most public indoor spaces but not in pubs, restaurants, or schools.

The decision was confirmed on Thursday following weeks of declining case rates. The first minister, Mark Drakeford, has warned against a “free-for-all”.

In England, a top scientific adviser to the government has said lockdowns are “unlikely” to be needed again to control the Covid pandemic.

The claim comes as the number of people in hospitals with the virus has fallen, and the average rate of infection has decreased.

The number of Covid infections is expected to rise again in September when school and university terms begin and more workers are expected to return to the office.

But Prof Neil Ferguson, an immunologist among the government’s most prominent scientific advisers on Covid, has predicted it is unlikely a lockdown will be needed again to control the virus.

In an interview with the Times, he said: “I think it is unlikely we will need a new lockdown or even social distancing measures of the type we’ve had so far.”