Coronavirus live: international travel ‘biggest factor in death rate’; WHO has ‘frank’ China talks over virus source | World news

Early restrictions on international travel might have made a difference in the spread of pandemic in western Europe, including the UK, a new study has found.

Restrictions on international travel had the greatest impact on death rates, according to a study from the University of Aberdeen.

It compared the 37 countries most severely affected by the first wave of the pandemic and looked into a range of factors that could have affected transmission including international arrivals, population density, the percentage of people living in urban areas, age, average body mass index and smoking prevalence.

They found a million international arrivals was associated with a 3.4% increase in Covid-19 deaths during the first wave of the pandemic.

One of the study’s authors Tiberiu Pana, said:

Our assessment of available data indicates that very early restrictions on international travel might have made a difference in the spread of pandemic in western Europe, including the UK.

These findings are particularly important as the world looks to control future waves and strains of the Covid-19 pandemic and prevent related deaths.

It comes as the UK government faces criticism for delays in implementing plans to quarantine international arrivals.

The head of one of the UK’s biggest airport hotel chains, Best Western, said his company had been “kept in the dark” over the government’s plan to quarantine international arrivals.

The chief executive, Rob Paterson, said the chain had made multiple offers to help with the isolation plans, first announced by ministers in mid-January, but “simply haven’t heard anything”.

He said:

Other than very broad information about what timings they’re thinking about and who is handling it we haven’t had any discussions at all.

We have connections in Singapore and Australia and New Zealand who are doing this, that we could learn from and easily get on the phone and offer their support. We’re just surprised that we haven’t heard anything.”

Royal Dutch Shell’s profit last year dropped to its lowest in at least two decades as the coronavirus pandemic hit energy demand worldwide though the company’s retail network and trading business helped cushion the blow, Reuters reports.

The Anglo-Dutch oil major’s annual profit slumped 71% to $4.8bn as its oil and gas production and profits from refining crude into fuels dropped sharply.

In a sign of confidence, however, Shell said it planned to raise its dividend in the first quarter of 2021, which would be the second slight increase since its slashed its payout by two-thirds at the start of last year due to the pandemic.

Analysts said that while Shell missed forecasts for both its fourth-quarter profit and cash flow, the results overall were not as bad as feared, especially after its rival British BP posted a loss of $5.7bn earlier this week.

Three intensive care patients and a ward doctor died in a fire in a south-eastern Ukrainian hospital treating coronavirus cases, a regional governor said on Thursday.

Reuters reports: “Oleksander Starukh said the fire broke out overnight on the first floor of the hospital in Zaporizhzhya where patients were on ventilators. He said eight other patients in the unit were evacuated.”

The prime minister, Denys Shmygal, said an oxygen leak could have caused the fire.

Ukraine has registered more than 1.2 million coronavirus cases with 23,229 deaths.

New vaccination centres are to open this month in the US in two urban California communities especially hard hit by the coronavirus, as state and federal officials try to tackle racial and economic disparities hindering US immunisation efforts.

Reuters reports:

Joint plans to launch the two sites on 16 February at the Oakland-Alameda Coliseum in Oakland and the California State University campus in east Los Angeles, were detailed separately on Wednesday by Governor Gavin Newsom and the Biden administration’s Covid-19 response coordinator, Jeff Zients.

The two sites, which the state’s Department of Health said will be capable of administering several thousand shots per day each, mark the first of more than 100 such vaccination centers expected to be established in communities of color across the United States, according to Newsom.

Newsom told reporters outside the Oakland coliseum:

Equity is the call of this moment. The reason this site was chosen was the framework of making sure that communities that are often left behind are not left behind.

Black and Hispanic populations, overly represented among the working poor and accounting for a large share of high-risk jobs in food service, factories, warehouses and healthcare, have been ravaged by the pandemic.

They also suffer disproportionately from chronic underlying health conditions, such as diabetes and heart disease, that put them at higher risk of severe illness if infected by the coronavirus.

Their risk of exposure, and the risk of transmitting the virus to others, is further amplified by rampant overcrowded housing in the greater Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay areas, where multi-generational households frequently live in cramped conditions.

Public health experts have pointed to extreme overcrowding in Los Angeles housing as a primary factor driving the year-end wave of infections that turned Southern California into a US epicentre of the pandemic.

German military doctors have flown into Portugal in a bid to to ease pressure on the European country.

German broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported that on Wednesday, a team of 26 doctors and nurses boarded a Luftwaffe Airbus A400M plane, flying from Wunstorf, in northern Germany, headed for a civilian hospital in Lisbon.

The medical staff will spend three weeks helping treat critically ill Covid-19 patients, after which they will be relieved by another team, DW reported.

Portugal currently has one of Europe’s highest infection rates – recording more than 5,000 deaths in January, almost half the country’s number of deaths during the entire pandemic.

Joao Colaco, an ICU doctor at Hospital da Luz in Lisbon, told Sky News that hospitals and ICUs across the country were full. He said:

A lot of the patients are very sick – some of them are young. The ones that survive will need help for weeks, months, even years.

Zahawi told Sky News that the UK government is looking to “gradually re-open the economy” in the first week of March.

He said a “roadmap” for opening schools would be discussed by parliament on 22 February.

The top-four groups of most vulnerable people in the UK would have received a first dose of the vaccine by mid-February, meaning that the first week of March would be the point when “vaccine protection really kicks in” – which would be the correct time to first open schools, then begin a gradual reopening of the economy.

Any reopening would be conditional on “good data”, he added.

Speaking on Sky News, UK vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi has sought to reassure UK residents who have had just one dose of the Pfizer COVID vaccination – after some studies suggested it may be less efficient against new variants.

He said the UK’s vaccines regulator, the MHRA, and all the UK’s chief medical officers had looked “thoroughly” at all the data and that at 15 -21 days, the single first dose gave “very high protection”.