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 Pfizer says vaccine highly effective against Delta variant
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is highly effective against the Delta
variant of COVID-19, a Pfizer official in Israel said on Thursday.
First identified in India, Delta is becoming the globally dominant
version of the coronavirus, according to the World Health
Organization.
"The data we have today, accumulating from research we are
conducting at the lab and including data from those places where the
Indian variant, Delta, has replaced the British variant as the
common variant, point to our vaccine being very effective, around
90%, in preventing the coronavirus disease," Alon Rappaport,
Pfizer's medical director in Israel, told local broadcaster Army
Radio.
Russia's new cases surge to highest since January
Russia on Thursday reported 20,182 new COVID-19 cases, the most
confirmed in a single day since Jan. 24, amid a wave of infections
that authorities blame on the Delta variant and people's reluctance
to get vaccinated.
The government coronavirus taskforce also confirmed 568 coronavirus-related
deaths in the last 24 hours. Both Moscow and St Petersburg recorded
the most deaths in a single day since the pandemic began.
As cases began rising rapidly this month, officials scrambled to
coax and compel people to get inoculated amid tepid demand for the
vaccine despite the widespread availability of shots.
Sydney faces 'scariest period' in pandemic
Australia's most populous state, New South Wales (NSW), reported a
double-digit rise in new locally acquired cases of COVID-19 for the
third straight day as officials fight to contain an outbreak of the
Delta variant.
"Since the pandemic has started, this is perhaps the scariest period
that New South Wales is going through," state Premier Gladys
Berejiklian told reporters.
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 NSW has imposed tough
restrictions in Sydney, Australia's largest city
and home to a fifth of the country's 25 million
population, with health officials saying
transmission could be happening even through
minimal contact with infected persons.
Britain wants to allow travel again but is wary
Britain wants to allow people to have holidays abroad again but the
government is wary of the risks, a minister said on Thursday ahead
of an announcement on whether a narrow list of quarantine-free
travel destinations would be expanded.
Anger is growing at Britain's onerous restrictions on foreign
travel: pilots, cabin crew, travel agents and other workers from the
travel industry held protests on Wednesday, begging the government
to open up more routes.
Over 2 million people in England might have had COVID-19 for a long
period, suffering one or more symptoms that lasted at least 12
weeks, one of the biggest surveillance studies of the coronavirus
found on Thursday.
Singapore drawing up road map to live with COVID-19
Singapore is drawing up a road map on how to live more normally with
COVID-19 on expectations that the virus will become endemic like
influenza and as vaccination rates pick up, said ministers leading
the country's virus-fighting task force.
The city-state has vaccinated about half its 5.7 million population
with least one dose of vaccines developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and
Moderna.
While Singapore's vaccination pace is relatively high, the country
has been slower at resuming social activities and travel, compared
with other places with similar inoculation rates.
(Compiled by Linda Noakes; Editing by Kim Coghill)
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