Coronavirus live news: Dutch PM condemns Covid riots; France bans some homemade masks | World news

Turkey received 6.5 million further doses of the coronavirus vaccine made by China’s Sinovac Biotech on Monday, CNN Turk and other media reported, allowing its nationwide rollout to continue.

Reuters: An initial consignment of 3 million doses previously arrived in Turkey and it has so far vaccinated 1.245 million people, mostly health workers and elderly people, according to health ministry data.

State broadcaster TRT Haber said the latest shipment, part of a second consignment which will total 10 million doses, arrived at Istanbul Airport early in the morning on a Turkish Airlines flight from Beijing.

About 600,000 people were vaccinated in just two days when the vaccine rollout began in mid-January, but the pace later slowed as it moved beyond healthcare workers.

The Health Ministry will test the new shipment, which medics say takes around two weeks, before the vaccines are administered. That means Turkey would be constrained to around 100,000 inoculations per day for the next two weeks.

Turkey has recorded more than 2.4 million infections and 25,073 deaths due to Covid. A rise in cases over recent months led the government to introduce weekend lockdowns since December but daily cases have dropped to below 6,000 in recent days, from a high of more than 33,000 in early December.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Germany increased by 6,729 to 2,141,665, data from the Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases showed on Monday.

The reported death toll rose by 217 to 52,087, the tally showed.

The case total is among the lowest in recent weeks, though cases are often lower after the weekend.

Thailand reported 187 new coronavirus cases and two deaths on Monday, bringing the overall number of cases to 13,687 and fatalities to 75 since it detected its first case a year ago.

The tally included 10 imported cases, the country’s Covid taskforce said.

The US dollar stabilised on Monday after a recent decline as fresh worries about the coronavirus and the global economy prompted investors to hang on to the safe-haven currency, Reuters reports.

But analysts said the dollar could resume its fall if the U.S. Federal Reserve reaffirms its commitment to a highly accommodative monetary policy at its rate meeting later this week – as widely expected.

“I don’t think the Fed has any incentives to curtail its stimulus at this point, even though some market players may try to read between the lines for any signs of tapering in stimulus,” said Kazushige Kaida, head of FX sales at State Street Bank’s Tokyo Branch.

“I think the dollar is staying in a downtrend even though it is marking time for now,” he said.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is expected to signal he has no plan to wind back the Fed’s massive stimulus any time soon when the central bank concludes its policy review on Wednesday.

The dollar index stood at 90.172, flat on the day. It bounced back on Friday after hitting 90.043 on Thursday, last week’s lowest level.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is stepping up efforts to track coronavirus mutations and keep vaccines and treatments effective against new variants until collective immunity is reached, the agency’s chief said on Sunday.

Reuters: Dr Rochelle Walensky spoke about the rapidly evolving virus during a Fox News Sunday interview as the number of Americans known to be infected surpassed 25 million, with more than 417,000 dead, just over a year after the first US case was documented.

Walensky, who took over as CDC director the day President Joe Biden was sworn in, also said the greatest immediate culprit for sluggish vaccine distribution was a supply crunch worsened by inventory confusion inherited from the Trump administration.

“The fact that we don’t know today, five days into this administration, and weeks into planning, how much vaccine we have just gives you a sense of the challenges we’ve been left with,” she told Fox News Sunday.

China reported a climb in new Coronavirus cases driven by a spike in infections among previously symptomless patients in northeastern Jilin province, official data showed on Monday.

Reuters: The total number of confirmed cases in the mainland rose to 124 on Jan. 24 from 80 a day earlier, the National Health Commission said in a statement, amid the worst wave of new infections China has seen since March 2020.

Of the 117 new local infectons, Jilin accounted for 67 cases – all but three of whom were previously asymptomatic patients who were reclassified as confirmed cases after developing symptoms. Heilongjiang reported 35 new cases, while Hebei reported 11 new cases.

The number of new asymptomatic cases, which China does not classify as confirmed cases, fell to 45 from 92 cases a day earlier.

The total number of confirmed Covid cases in mainland China is 89,115, while the death toll remains unchanged at 4,635.

In India, Tata Medical & Diagnostics is said to have started initial discussions with Moderna Inc for a partnership to launch its coronavirus vaccine, the Economic Times reported on Monday.

Reuters: Tata could team up with the India’s Council of Scientific & Industrial Research to carry out clinical trials of Moderna’s vaccine candidate in India, the report added, citing officials familiar with the matter.

The Indian government this month gave emergency-use approval to a coronavirus vaccine developed by Bharat Biotech International Ltd and state-run Indian Council of Medical Research, and another licensed from Oxford University and AstraZeneca PLC that is being manufactured by the Serum Institute of India.

Moderna did not respond to Reuters’ request for a comment outside business hours, while Tata Medical & Diagnostics did not immediately respond.

Since the Chinese city of Tonghua, with its population of nearly 400,000, was put under lockdown a week ago, citizens have begun to complain of shortages of food and medicine.

On Weibo, some said they have only two or three days of food rations. Users wrote: “I’m out of food supplies” or “ unable to have a prenatal examination after seven months of pregnancy” and “unable to be hospitalised for chemotherapy”, according to local media reports.

“We will do our best to improve the distribution capacity and supplement the supply of materials for citizens,” Jiang Haiyan, Tonghua deputy mayor, told a media briefing on Sunday.

Efforts to tackle the outbreak had caused a shortage of manpower, she added.

The local epidemic control department later issued an announcement promising residents that basic living materials will be supplied for a 5-day demand of each household every time at half price from now on.

By Sunday this month, Tonghua has reported 246 coronavirus cases, of which 50 are asymptomatic.

The Hong Kong government lifted a lockdown in an area of Kowloon district in the early hours of Monday after testing about 7,000 people for coronavirus to curb an outbreak in the densely populated area, Reuters reports.

The government set up 51 temporary testing stations on Saturday and found 13 confirmed cases in the restricted area that is home to many ageing, subdivided flats in which the disease could spread more quickly.

“Businesses in the area have been hit hard and brought to a standstill,” the government said in a statement.

“The government hopes this temporary inconvenience will completely cut the local transmission chains in the district and ease residents’ worries and fear, so that they will regain confidence in resuming social and business activities in the area, and return to a normal life.”

The lockdown in the neighbourhoods of Jordan, across the harbour from the heart of the business district, was the first such measure imposed in the global financial hub since the outbreak happened.

On Sunday, the government reported 76 cases of coronavirus, taking the total to 10,086, of which 169 people have died.

Hong Kong authorities have taken aggressive measures to curb the spread of the virus, including a ban on in-house dining after 6pm and closing facilities such as gyms, sports venues and beauty salons.

Most residents wear face masks when moving around the city.