Perth, in western Australia, will face a three-day lockdown starting from midnight.
Here’s a summary of this emerging news story from Reuters:
Western Australia’s capital of Perth and the neighbouring Peel region will enter a snap three-day lockdown from midnight on Friday after a man tested positive for COVID-19 and was in the community for a number of days following hotel quarantine.
The person is likely to have contracted the virus during his two-week quarantine in a Perth hotel, health officials say, raising concerns about community transmission as more virulent virus strains emerge.
“I know this is hard to take and I wish we didn’t need to do this. But we can’t take any chances with the virus,” Premier Mark McGowan said in a televised news conference.
In Indonesia, scores of prisoners have been sentenced to death over Zoom and other video apps during the pandemic in what critics say is an “inhumane” insult to those facing the firing squad.
Virtual court hearings are becoming more prominent in the south-east country as coronavirus restrictions shut down most in-person trials, including murder and drug trafficking cases, which can carry the death penalty.
In Amnesty International’s annual report on capital punishment, Indonesia has pressed on with the virtual hearings, despite the number of executions and death sentences dropped globally last year, with coronavirus disrupting many criminal proceedings
“Virtual hearings degrade the rights of defendants facing death sentences – it’s about someone’s life and death,” said Amnesty International Indonesia director Usman Hamid.
“The death penalty has always been a cruel punishment. But this online trend adds to the injustice and inhumanity,” he added.
Virtual hearings leave defendants unable to fully participate in cases that are sometimes interrupted in countries with poor internet connections, including Indonesia, critics say.
“Virtual platforms… can expose the defendant to significant violations of their fair trial rights and impinge on the quality of the defence,” NGO Harm Reduction International said in a recent report on the death penalty for drug offences.
Over in the UK, one dose of the Oxford/AstraZeneca or Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine reduces coronavirus infections by nearly two-thirds a study has found.
The researchers, from Oxford University and the Office for National Statistics analysed coronavirus test results from more than 350,000 people in the UK between December and April.
They found that 21 days after a first jab – the time it takes the immune system to mount a decent response – new coronavirus infections dropped by 65%.
The results, released in a preprint on Friday, are particularly important because they demonstrate the protective effect of the vaccines in the real world against the highly infectious and more lethal Kent variant.
You can read more from my colleague Ian Sample below:
A fire has killed 13 coronavirus patients in a hospital in western India early Friday.
The fire, at a hospital in the Virar area on the outskirts of Mumbai, occurred two days after 24 coronavirus patients on ventilators died due to an oxygen leak in a hospital in Nashik, in Maharashtra.
The fire on the second-floor intensive-care unit was extinguished and some patients requiring oxygen were moved to nearby hospitals, said Dilip Shah, CEO of Vijay Vallabh hospital.
Shah said there are 90 patients in the hospital, about 70 kilometers north of Mumbai, India’s financial capital.
The cause of the fire is still being investigated, he said.
An explosion in the air conditioning unit of the intensive care unit preceded the fire, according to the Press Trust of India news agency.
Good morning, this is Rhi Storer taking over from my colleague Helen Sullivan for the next few hours. Please send me your contributions at rhi.storer@guardian.co.uk, or alternatively, you can message me on Twitter.
For a break from Covid news, please enjoy this story about a gender reveal party:
New Zealand is cautiously re-opening the pathway home for travelers coming from India, after introducing a ban earlier this month. The rule changes allow a dramatically-reduced flow of arrivals from a new category of “very high risk” countries. India, Brazil, Papua New Guinea, and Pakistan are currently in that category.
Arrivals from those countries are restricted to New Zealand citizens and their parents, children, and partners – as opposed to other countries, where New Zealand has taken arrivals who are permanent residents or on “essential worker” visas.
Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said that “from India alone, this is expected to reduce the number of potential positive cases coming to New Zealand by an estimated 75%.” Hipkins said it would be possible to apply for exceptions on humanitarian grounds.
“I want to stress this was not an easy decision. It was based entirely on current risk assessment and will be reviewed regularly,” he said.
The New Zealand government is also introducing a new “cohorting” system to hold groups of arrivals together and keep Managed Isolation and Quarantine facilities empty for cleaning between cohorts, rather than accepting rolling groups of arrivals.
Countries have been designated ‘very high risk’ if there have been more than 50 Covid-positive cases per 1000 arrivals to New Zealand in 2021.
In more Australian news, the country is set to host the first human clinical trial of a genetically modified adenovirus vaccine for Covid-19 delivered via nasal spray.
Avance Clinical, an Australian contract research organisation, has applied to the office of the gene technology regulator for permission to conduct the phase 1 clinical trial on behalf US company Tetherex Pharmaceuticals Corporation.
The trial from June to September proposes using genetic modification to prevent the virus multiplying and insert a gene encoding the Sars-Cov-2 spike protein to help people produce antibodies against Covid-19:
Australia has received just 70% of the vaccine doses the government expected to have on hand by mid-April, according to a Guardian Australia analysis.
In a presentation published online on 14 March, the government included monthly forecasts for Australia’s expected vaccine supply, accounting for the disruptions to overseas supply that had already occurred leading up to that point.
Based on these forecasts, and figures cited by the health minister, Greg Hunt, for the number of doses received from domestic and international suppliers, there is a shortfall of about 1.8m vaccine doses:
Japan’s government is to declare virus states of emergencies in Tokyo and three other regions on Friday, exactly three months before the Olympic opening ceremony, as new infections surge, AFP reports.
The measures will be stricter than Japan’s last state of emergency, imposed in parts of the country from January, but still fall short of the harsh lockdowns seen in some parts of the world.
“We have a strong sense of crisis,” Japan’s minister for virus response Yasutoshi Nishimura said Friday.
The measures will ask businesses serving alcohol to shut or stop serving alcohol between April 25 to May 11, and also shutter major commercial facilities such as shopping malls and department stores.
An official declaration of the emergency is expected later Friday – with the measure expected to cover Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and Hyogo regions initially.
Previous emergencies have been expanded to other areas after being announced, and experts say the term may be extended if the spread of the virus continues.
“We will take strong, brief and focused emergency measures,” said top government spokesman Katsunobu Kato, calling restaurants “key points of infection” after an expert advisory panel endorsed the proposal.
The measure will coincide with the annual Golden Week holiday, Japan’s busiest travel period. It could involve cutting some train and bus services to discourage movement.
India recorded the world’s highest daily tally of coronavirus cases for a second day in a row on Friday, while daily deaths from Covid also jumped by a record.
With 332,730 new cases, India’s total caseload has now passed 16 million. Deaths rose by 2,263 to reach a total of 186,920, according to health ministry data.
As many as six hospitals in the Indian capital, Delhi, had completely exhausted their oxygen supplies by Thursday evening, as another unprecedented surge in Covid-19 cases overwhelmed health systems in major cities.
Hospital staff posted emergency alerts on social media and signs outside their wards warning that they desperately needed more oxygen to treat patients. Fortis Healthcare, a major provider, posted an SOS appeal on Twitter on Thursday night, writing: “Fortis Hospital in #Haryana has only 45 minutes of oxygen left” and urging the authorities to allow an oxygen tanker from Bhiwadi, south of the capital, to reach its hospital.
As infections have pushed hospitals to breaking point, some areas have been accused of blocking tankers of oxygen from reaching neighbouring states:
Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage of the pandemic with me, Helen Sullivan.
India recorded the world’s highest daily tally of coronavirus cases for a second day in a row on Friday, while daily deaths from Covid also jumped by a record.
With 332,730 new cases, India’s total caseload has now passed 16 million. Deaths rose by 2,263 to reach a total of 186,920, according to health ministry data.
Meanwhile in Japan, the government is to declare virus states of emergencies in Tokyo and three other regions on Friday, exactly three months before the Olympic opening ceremony, as new infections surge.
The measures will be stricter than Japan’s last state of emergency, imposed in parts of the country from January, but still fall short of the harsh lockdowns seen in some parts of the world.
