France begins cautious return to normality – as it happened

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Hi, I’m Edna Mohamed; I’ll be taking you through the latest coronavirus developments over the next few hours. For any tips, you can reach me on Twitter or email me at edna.mohamed.casual@theguardian.com

• India has suffered a world record one-day death toll, surpassing the previous highest toll, recorded in the US. According to the health ministry, 4,529 people were confirmed dead in the last 24 hours. It is the highest daily toll of any country on earth over the course of the pandemic and the first time India has seen a figure over 4,500.
• More than 1,500,017,337 vaccine doses have now been administered in 210 countries and territories, according to an AFP tally. Nearly three-fifths of the total have been given in three countries: China (421.9m), the US (274.4m) and India (184.4m).
• EU ambassadors are understood to have backed plans to allow vaccinated UK holidaymakers and visitors from other third countries to enter the bloc. A formal decision will be taken on Friday.
• It will be up to individual member states to decide if they will accept proof of vaccination to waive travel restrictions. Portugal and Greece are among the countries that have broken ranks by already welcoming UK tourists. Unvaccinated people will be able to travel if they can show proof of a negative test.
• Meanwhile there has been huge confusion in England over mixed messaging from the government over international travel. Ministers appear to be saying that you can go to countries on the “amber” list, but you shouldn’t.
• Cyprus has recorded its first cases of a Covid-19 variant first detected in India, its health ministry said.
• Ireland hopes to have the vast majority of its adult population fully vaccinated against the coronavirus by the end of September, deputy prime minister Leo Varadkar has said.
• It’s a big day in France as bars, cafés and restaurants are finally allowed to open their terraces for the first time since October last year. President Macron was among those seen having coffee in Paris.
• France will also see the reopening of all shops, cinemas, museums and theatres today. The nationwide curfew remains in place but is pushed back two hours running from 9pm to 6am.
• A manhunt is under way in Belgium for a heavily armed soldier with links to the extreme right who has made threats against a high-profile virologist who backed the country’s Covid lockdowns.
• The whole of Taiwan will move into level three of its four-tier alert system, as the virus spreads to more than half the island’s counties, infecting more than 1,300 people and killing two.
• A third Australian has died from Covid-19 in India. Sunil Khanna, 51, from Sydney’s west, had been caring for his elderly parents in New Delhi before his death.
• In Australia more than 1.5m Covid-19 vaccines – one in every four distributed – are sitting unused in clinics across the country, prompting calls for a “major campaign” to tackle vaccine hesitancy
• There’s been a diplomatic spat as Singapore has criticized an Indian politician for making unfounded claims on social media that a new Covid-19 variant in Singapore was particularly harmful to children and could cause a fresh surge of infections in India.
• Authorities in Malaysia have reported 6,075 new coronavirus cases, a new daily record.
• Tunisia has ended its one-week lockdown, despite having the highest reported deaths per capita of any country in Africa.
• A flaw in Japan’s coronavirus inoculation programme has been exposed barely a day after the government opened a facility in Tokyo designed to speed up the country’s slow vaccine rollout.

Andrew Sparrow has our UK Covid live blog. Edna Mohamed will be along shortly to continue here with the day’s global coronavirus developments. I’m Martin Belam, and I’ll see you here again tomorrow. Stay safe.

Cyprus has recorded its first cases of a Covid-19 variant first detected in India, its health ministry said, adding that they involved individuals who were swiftly isolated and quarantined after arriving on the island.

Authorities said the variant was found in four people who tested positive for Covid-19, while the South African variant was found in two individuals.

They had arrived from India, Pakistan, Philippines and Nepal, countries from which people need special permission to travel to Cyprus, with testing before or upon arrival and a compulsory two-week quarantine.

Reuters report that the individuals were placed in compulsory quarantine and isolation and had no contact with other people.

A quick one from PA here that could significantly alter what people are able to do in Europe this summer – EU ambassadors are understood to have backed plans to allow vaccinated UK holidaymakers to visit the bloc.

According to the reports, they have recommended at a meeting on Wednesday that rules should be changed to allow non-essential visits into the EU by people who have had two doses of a coronavirus vaccine.

It will be up to individual member states to decide if they will accept proof of vaccination to waive travel restrictions. A decision on whether to add the UK and other countries to the EU’s “safe list” will be made formally on Friday.

Travellers from locations on the list are permitted to enter the bloc even if they are not vaccinated, but are generally required to show evidence of a recent negative test. There are currently only eight countries on the list, including Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Israel.

Portugal and Greece are among the countries that have broken ranks by already welcoming UK tourists, but an EU-wide move would boost the chances of a major summer getaway.

19 May 202105.35 EDT

Third Australian dies of Covid in India while caring for elderly parents

Michael McGowan

A third Australian has died from Covid-19 in India. Sunil Khanna, 51, from Sydney’s west, had been caring for his elderly parents in New Delhi before his death late last month.

First reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, his brother, Sanjay Khanna, confirmed to the Guardian that his brother and mother – an Indian national – had both died a few days after contracting the virus in late April.

Khanna is now seeking urgent help from the Australian government to allow his 83-year-old father – also an Indian national – to travel to Australia on humanitarian grounds.

“He’s very anxious and quite teary and lonely when I speak to him, but I try to keep him positive,” Khanna told the Herald. “He’s my last remaining relative I have in India. An 83-year-old, alone by himself stuck in the home and I can’t go there.”

Read more here: Third Australian dies of Covid in India while caring for elderly parents

Ireland hopes to have the vast majority of its adult population fully vaccinated against the coronavirus by the end of September, deputy prime minister Leo Varadkar has said.

The government’s current target is to administer one dose to at least 80% of the population by the end of June.

“We hope to have the vast majority of our adult population vaccinated at least once by the end of June and fully by the end of September,” Varadkar told a parliamentary committee, reports Conor Humphries for Reuters.

There’s been a diplomatic spat as Singapore has criticized an Indian politician for making unfounded claims on social media that a new Covid-19 variant in Singapore was particularly harmful to children and could cause a fresh surge of infections in India.

Singapore’s Foreign Ministry said it summoned India’s high commissioner over the comments made by Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister of Delhi. Kejriwal called for a halt in air traffic between the two nations because of the new “Singapore variant.”

Associated Press rather dryly point out that it was unclear why he made such a call because Singapore has already banned flights from India over the high number of cases there.

Singapore’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it was “disappointed that a prominent political figure had failed to ascertain the facts before making such claims.”

It noted that Singapore’s Health Ministry has said there was “no Singapore variant” and that the strain prevalent in many cases in the city-state in recent weeks was the one first detected in India.

19 May 202104.57 EDT

Taiwan a 'victim of its own success' over lack of access to vaccines

Helen Davidson

Prof Chunhuei Chi, the director of Oregon State University’s center for global health, has said that Taiwan was “a victim of its own success”. Having locally eliminated the virus in early 2020 it did not get prioritised vaccination orders, and then failed to stay up to date with the changing science, such as the increased transmissibility and high asymptomatic rates of new variants like the UK one now spreading, he said.

“Taiwan is one of the few countries that never experienced a second, third, or fourth wave,” said Chi. “It basically resumed normal life so … most people including some government officials were lagging behind updated knowledge.”

The government in Taiwan remains opposed to mass testing on the grounds that false positives could waste resources. Chi said Taiwan did not have the capacity for mass testing because it never needed it before, and establishing it could take weeks. Rapid testing stations were established in Wanhua – where Taipei’s cases are concentrated – in order to encourage patrons of the hostess bars at the centre of infections to come forward alongside the rest of the community. But there have been reports of stations hitting capacity and turning people away.

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On Wednesday, the CECC said further stations would be set up in other hotspots, but continued to discourage people from getting tested unless they had symptoms and case connection.

“The virus is really vicious,” said Prof Chen Chien-jen from Academia Sinica genomics research centre, who was Taiwan’s health minister during the 2003 Sars outbreak, and sometimes consults current authorities. “Just one day [after we thought we’d controlled the Yilan outbreak], we found, oh my God, the Wanhua teahouse outbreak. Then the cases surged rapidly.”

Several of the experts the Guardian spoke to said the government was largely relying on the community to restrict their own movements voluntarily rather than impose lockdowns.

My colleague Haroon Siddique has a round-up here of the confusion over England’s international travel advice, with conflicting advice from different ministers.

Meanwhile, Andrew Sparrow has fired up the UK blog for the day, so if it is UK news you are after, you need to change channels to his live blog …

I’ll be carrying on here with the latest coronavirus develpoments from around the world.

Overnight, CNN’s Christina Maxouris and Holly Yan have reported it is a “landmark day” for the US in its fight against Covid:

The US has reached a “landmark day” in the Covid-19 pandemic as 60% of American adults have gotten at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

In addition, more than 3.5 million people ages 12 to 17 have received their first dose, Dr Rochelle Walensky said.

And more people of color are getting vaccinated – marking “encouraging national trends,” said White House Covid-19 Response Team senior adviser Dr Marcella Nunez-Smith.

In the past two weeks, 51% of those vaccinated in the US were people of color. That’s higher than the 40% of the general population these groups represent.

Meeting people where they are and bringing vaccines to communities seem to be working, she said.

Read more here: About 60% of American adults have had at least one dose of Covid-19 vaccine, including more people of color