Covid live: France lifts UK travel ban; teachers in France going on strike over rules for schools

“We had reached such a level of exasperation, tiredness, and anger that we didn’t have any other option but to organise a strike to send a strong message to the government,” said Elisabeth Allain-Moreno, national secretary of the SE-UNSA teachers union in France, where teachers are on strike today.

Unions have said they expect many schools to be closed for the day and large numbers of teachers – including about 75% in primary schools and 62% in high schools – to join the one-day strike. Unions representing school directors, inspectors and other staff have also joined the strike.

Schools in Paris and beyond offered a mixed picture on Thursday morning, with some entirely closed because of the strike, some partly open, others operating normally. Some were open only for children of health workers.

Mirlene Pouvin, whose child is in a high school where some teachers were on strike and others present, told Reuters she sympathised with those who walked off the job.

“I understand them, because the (Covid) protocol is impossible to apply – whether it’s in schools or in hospitals. I hold no grudge against them,” she said after an early morning school drop-off in Paris.

Their arguments have cut little ice with ministers. “I know it’s tough, but a strike does not solve problems. One does not strike against a virus,” the education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer told BFM TV.

Just a little bit more from Hungary here. Prime minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff, Gergely Gulyas, has told reporters that the government expects a substantial further increase in Covid-19 cases over the coming weeks due to the rapid spread of the Omicron variant. However, Reuters report that he said they did not expect a similar increase in hospitalisations and deaths.

Martin Quin Pollard and Pawel Kopczynski have been in Beijing for Reuters looking at preparations for the Winter Olympics. They report that arrivals for next month’s Winter Olympics are met by staff in white protective suits and undergo COVID-19 tests and swabs of luggage before being whisked in police-escorted buses to fenced-off hotels.

The perimeters of Beijing’s “closed loop” are sealed and guarded. Once inside, people cannot leave until they either depart the country or complete several weeks of quarantine. This includes about 20,000 Chinese volunteers and staff at the venues who will enter the loop.

Authorities are determined to create a physical barrier between participants and the general population. There will be no international spectators at the Beijing Games, and organisers have yet to say how many local spectators will attend.

Everyone in the loop must have a daily PCR test administered by staff. Food delivery from restaurants outside the loop is not allowed. More than 2,000 international athletes are set to come to China for the Games, along with 25,000 other stakeholders, according to organisers, a large number from overseas. Organisers did not say how many would be in the closed loop.

New Covid-19 infections in Indian cities such as capital New Delhi and Mumbai could peak next week after rising rapidly, experts said, as the country reported the highest number of daily cases since late May.

“Our modelling, and those of others, suggests that the big Indian cities should see their peaks in cases close to 20 January, while the overall peak in India may be shifted a bit later, to early February,” said Gautam Menon, professor of physics and biology at Ashoka University near the capital.

Reuters report the health ministry has said common pain relievers like paracetamol should be enough for people with mild fever due to Covid-19. It has warned, though, against complacency as infections have now started rising in as many as 300 districts from fewer than 80 a week ago.

“The experience from other countries informs us that it is more practical to track and monitor hospitalisations rather than new cases,” said Rajib Dasgupta, head of the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.

“Non-pharmaceutical interventions – lockdowns, etc – are increasingly losing their relevance with rapid and inexorable community transmission.”

Ben Butler and Peter Hannam report for us that in Australia, small businesses and unions have condemned as inadequate Scott Morrison’s response to a burgeoning staffing crisis caused by the Omicron wave.

The crisis has pushed supply chains to breaking point, emptied supermarket shelves and forced some retailers and hospitality operators to close.

Under new rules announced by the prime minister after a national cabinet meeting on Thursday, workers in a swathe of industries including food distribution and transport will be allowed to go straight back to work after recording a negative rapid antigen test.

However, Morrison again rebuffed calls from small businesses and unions for free rapid antigen tests in the workplace, and industries including general retail and hospitality have been excluded from the relaxed regime.

Read more here: PM’s response to Omicron staffing crisis falls short, Australian businesses and unions say

A quick snap from Reuters here that Swiss drugs regulator Swissmedic has said it had granted temporary approval to Regkirona, an antibody medicine that can be used for the treatment of Covid in adults. It can be used to treat adult Covid patients if oxygen therapy or hospitalisation is not required, and there is a high risk of developing a severe form of Covid-19.

Two hospitals in China’s locked-down city of Xi’an, including one that refused to treat an eight-month pregnant woman who later miscarried, have been closed while they “rectify” mistakes, authorities said today.

The city has been subject to strict home confinement for three weeks in line with Beijing’s “zero-Covid” strategy.

Top health officials were forced to apologise last week after a distressing social media post – including photos and video of the woman sitting on a plastic stool outside Gaoxin Hospital in a pool of blood – prompted outrage over the megacity’s harsh imposition of the rules.

She was refused treatment because her negative Covid-19 test fell slightly outside the 48-hour requirement.

In a separate incident at the second hospital, a Xi’an resident said her father had died last week after he could not get medical treatment for a heart ailment due to “pandemic-related rules”.

Both hospitals have been given warnings and made to “suspend operations for three months for rectification”, and will only be allowed to reopen after getting approval.

The city’s health commission said in a statement Thursday that the two hospitals had “failed to perform their duties of saving lives and rescuing the wounded”.

“This led to delays in the rescue, diagnosis and treatment of critically ill patients, arousing widespread public attention and having a bad social impact,” health authorities added.

Andrew Sparrow has launched what I imagine will be another very busy day for his combined UK Covid and politics live blog. You can follow that here.

I’ll be carrying on here with the latest global coronavirus news.

France will lift its ban on UK holidaymakers from Friday morning, the country’s tourism minister, Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, has announced.

The requirement to isolate on arrival in France will also be scrapped. PA Media note that travellers will continue to need evidence of a negative coronavirus test taken within 24 hours of departure.

On those two latest developments in the UK, ITV’s political correspondent Daniel Hewitt has tweeted more details about Boris Johnson pulling out of a trip today, quoting this from Downing Street:

The prime minister will no longer be visiting Lancashire today due to a family member testing positive for coronavirus. He will follow the guidance for vaccinated close contacts, including daily testing and limiting contact with others.

Meanwhile The Sun’s Harry Cole says his sources are “adamant” that the departure of Jonathan Van-Tam as deputy CMO has been “in pipeline for a long time”, but points out the timing of the announcement today is unlikely to go down well with a government trying to regain its balance after events of the last couple of days. Van-Tam will continue in his role until the end of March.

The health secretary Sajid Javid has just tweeted to pay tribute to the work of deputy CMO Jonathan Van-Tam. It has been announced he is stepping down from the role.

And this has just happened as well – reports that someone within the Boris Johnson family has tested positive for Covid, leading to the prime minister cancelling a planned excursion to a vaccination centre today, where he would have had to face the public for the first time since apologising in parliament for attending a lockdown party in Downing Street.

This news is just breaking that Jonathan Van-Tam is to leave his post as Deputy Chief Medical Officer. He has been in the role since October 2017.

There’s a very stark contrast in tone between the statements coming out of the Conservative Northern Ireland secretary Brandon Lewis and Labour’s Lisa Nandy on the airwaves in the UK this morning.

On Sky News, Lewis said this: “The prime minister has outlined that in his view he hasn’t actually done anything outside of the rules.”

By contrast, Nandy has just told ITV’s Good Morning Britain viewers:

We’ve got a prime minister who has lied to the country. My inbox is full of stories of people who lost loved ones, who weren’t able to say goodbye, absolutely heart-breaking stories about what was happening to them on the day that this party took place.

They are appalled, horrified and re-traumatised about the fact that we’ve got a prime minister who is still refusing to come clean about what other parties he attended, what parties the members of his cabinet attended, and how it could have been that we could have had senior ministers and the prime minister telling us about the impact the pandemic was having on the country, that we all must continue to do what they were telling us to do, and yet they weren’t doing it themselves.

Hungary has experienced another steep rise in daily confirmed Covid cases – up to 9,216 on Thursday from 7,883 reported on Wednesday.

The government said the Omicron variant “was spreading fast”, fuelling new infections, and urged people to take up booster vaccine shots. However, Reuters note that the number of patients being treated in hospital again declined. There are 2,647 coronavirus patients in hospital, including 249 on ventilators.