Nations across the globe hit new COVID-19 pandemic highs and reimposed restrictions on Saturday as G20 finance ministers meeting in Venice said that the economic recovery was threatened by variants of SARS-CoV-2 and uneven vaccination campaigns.
The highly transmissible Delta variant, first detected in India, is sweeping the world as countries race to inoculate their populations to ward off fresh outbreaks and allow for economies and daily life to resume.
“The recovery is characterized by great divergences across and within countries and remains exposed to downside risks, in particular the spread of new variants of the COVID-19 virus and different paces of vaccination,” the G20 finance ministers said in a final statement.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The EU — lambasted early on for a botched vaccine acquisition program — on Saturday said it has delivered enough shots to cover 70 percent of the bloc’s population.
“By tomorrow, some 500 million doses will have been distributed to all regions of Europe,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said.
However, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control says that the proportion of adults aged 18 or older who are fully vaccinated in the EU and European Economic Area is still only 44.1 percent.
Supply shortages in South Korea have meant only about 11 percent of the country’s 52 million population is fully vaccinated, health authorities said.
South Korea reported 1,324 new COVID-19 cases as of midnight on Saturday, the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency said yesterday, down from a record 1,378 from the day before as the country battles a surge in infections.
From today, gatherings of more than two people are to be banned after 6pm, and schools, bars and clubs would be closed.
Australia reported its first COVID-19-related death of the year and a record for this year of 77 new cases of the virus in the state of New South Wales, which is battling an outbreak of the highly infectious Delta variant.
State Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the numbers in and around the country’s biggest city Sydney, already under a hard lockdown, are expected to rise.
“I’ll be shocked if it’s less than 100 this time tomorrow, of additional new cases,” Berejiklian told a televised briefing.
In Pakistan, where less than 8 percent of the population has been vaccinated, the government on Saturday said only those who had received jabs would be allowed to fly.
The country of about 215 million people has largely escaped the worst of the pandemic, with under a million recorded infections and 22,582 deaths — although cases are on the rise again.
Russia announced that cases continued to surge and it had a new record number of daily deaths, the fifth since the beginning of the month.
The 752 new deaths bring Russia’s total toll to 142,253. It also recorded 25,082 new infections, meaning there have been more than 5.7 million cases.
The Russian Federal State Statistics Service, which defines COVID-19-related deaths more broadly, put the figure at 270,000 by the end of April.
Less than 20 percent of Russians have received a single dose, despite shots of locally developed vaccines being readily available.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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