England's pubs may be allowed to ditch social distancing – as it happened

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Reuters reports that the “No Zoom” policy for this year’s Oscars ceremony is proving a headache for multiple nominees who live outside the US and who are still under pandemic restrictions, according to Hollywood publications.

Variety and Deadline Hollywood reported on Wednesday that publicists and some studio executives have complained to the film academy about logistics, costs and quarantine issues raised by the decision to bar nominees from taking part in the ceremony remotely.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which organises the ceremony, did not return a request for comment on the reports.

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the 25 April show to hand out the highest honors in the movie industry will be held both at Union Station in Downtown Los Angeles and the traditional home of the Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.

Producers said last week that there will “not be an option to Zoom in for the show” and encouraged nominees to attend in person.

At least nine nominees, including “Promising Young Woman” director Emerald Fennell and star Carey Mulligan, live in Britain. England is next week expected to ban non-essential international travel until at least 17 May.

Representatives of the five international feature films - submitted by Denmark, Hong Kong, Romania, Tunisia and Bosnia - could also face hurdles getting to Los Angeles, Variety and Deadline noted.

Some of the other 200 or so nominees will be working on productions that require quarantine or living in restricted “bubbles” with cast and crew, the publications said.

Visitors to California are currently expected to quarantine for 10 days. Travellers to nations outside the United States are also subject to varying quarantine requirements.

Variety said a meeting this week to discuss the issues between the Academy, movie studio executives and publicists had been cancelled.

Other awards shows in recent months have replaced the usual in-person gatherings at gala dinners and on stage with pre-recorded appearances or virtual events, or a combination of those with small in-person gatherings.

But television audiences have slumped, with the Golden Globes and the Grammys attracting the smallest numbers in decades.

India will likely delay deliveries of AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine doses to the GAVI/WHO-backed Covax facility for March and April, the programme’s procurement and distributing partner Unicef told Reuters early on Thursday.

“We understand that deliveries of Covid-19 vaccines to lower-income economies participating in the Covax Facility will likely face delays following a setback in securing export licenses for further doses of Covid-19 vaccines produced by the Serum Institute of India (SII), expected to be shipped in March and April,” Unicef said in an email.

“Covax is in talks with the government of India with a view to ensuring deliveries as quickly as possible.”

Reuters reported on Wednesday that India had put a temporary hold on all major exports of the AstraZeneca shot made by SII, the world’s biggest vaccine-maker, to meet domestic demand as infections rise.

Unicef also said that Covax participant countries have also been told about lower-than-expected supplies of AstraZeneca doses made in South Korea for March.

“In line with the challenges of the current global supply environment, this is due to challenges the company faces in rapidly scaling up supply and optimising production processes for these early deliveries,” Unicef said.

The number of lives lost to Covid-19 in Brazil passed 300,000 on Wednesday. Latin America’s biggest country, already home to the world’s second-highest coronavirus death toll after the United States, has become the global epicentre of Covid-19 deaths, with one in four global fatalities currently a Brazilian.

Brazil registered a further 2,009 deaths from the disease on Wednesday, taking the national death toll to 300,675, second only globally to the 558,203 lives lost in the US.

24 Mar 202117.32 EDT

Jessica Elgot

Pubs in England could be allowed to ditch social distancing rules and allow people to crowd together as long as they check customers’ Covid-19 status on entry, the Guardian understands.

Details of the proposed incentive emerged as the prime minister Boris Johnson told MPs he believed landlords should be able to set the criteria for entering their establishments.

The comments from Johnson, a far stronger endorsement of the widespread use of Covid certification than has previously been made by the prime minister, prompted an immediate backlash from some Conservative MPs, who called it “a dangerous path”.

Johnson said he believed Covid certification had the backing of the British people who understood the need for protective measures, and suggested he backed a more wide-ranging use for vaccine passports, which a taskforce is currently investigating.

The UK government’s review into social distancing measures, due to report in June, is currently considering whether allowing venues that demand Covid status on entry – which includes either a recent test or proof of vaccine – could be allowed to relax all rules on social distancing.

That move would mean many pubs would be able to operate far more profitably, and is likely to be an incentive for citizens to get vaccinated or tested.

A Whitehall source stressed the consultation was in its early stages and that no decision had been made, but said it was a measure being considered as part of the social distancing review ordered by Johnson when he set out the roadmap for easing restrictions. A separate review is also looking at how Covid certification could work in practice.

Read Jessica Elgot’s full report here:

Brazil is set to pass 300,000 Covid-19 deaths, as the president Jair Bolsonaro’s fourth health minister used his first official day in the job to pledge a vaccination goal of one million shots a day to put the brakes on the country’s spiralling crisis.

Reuters reports that the country, already home to the world’s second-highest coronavirus death toll after the US, has become the global epicentre of Covid-19 deaths, with one in four global fatalities currently a Brazilian.

The outbreak is reaching its worst ever stage in Brazil, fanned by a patchy vaccine rollout, an infectious new variant and a lack of nationwide public health restrictions.

The scale of the outbreak is placing fresh pressure on far-right Bolsonaro, who has won international notoriety for his efforts to block lockdown measures, sow doubts over vaccines and push unproven cures like hydroxychloroquine.

In his first press conference as health minister on Wednesday, a day after Brazil recorded a record death toll of 3,251 fatalities, Marcelo Queiroga said the government aims to speed up the inoculation drive and pledged to deliver a million shots a day.

He added that vaccinations, masks and social distancing are all key to slowing the virus, and that nobody wants lockdowns, especially as Brazilians are unlikely to adhere to them. Queiroga said he would focus on science and transparency.

As the pandemic has worsened in recent weeks, Bolsonaro has showed signs of taking it more seriously. The return of his political nemesis, former leftist president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, whose corruption convictions have recently been annulled, allowing him to run in next year’s election, also appears to have stirred him into action.

On Wednesday, Bolsonaro said the government will seek more coordination with state governors, with weekly meetings to discuss coronavirus-fighting measures in a newly launched committee. But the pandemic outlook remains bleak.

“The outlook for the coming weeks will be very difficult,” the former health minister Nelson Teich, who left the ministry after clashing with the president, told Reuters. “Our vaccination program is slow.”

Teich, the former health minister, said he thought the situation in Brazil could still “get much worse” if the transmission of the disease is not controlled nationally by measures such as testing, case screening, isolation of infected people, quarantines and payment of financial aid for people to be able to stay at home.

The disease is now dictating its own evolution, because we are not able to control it. It is a difficult situation.

WestJet Airlines is restoring some suspended domestic routes beginning in June, as executives hope that a pickup in Covid-19 vaccinations can salvage summer travel, Canada’s second-largest carrier said on Wednesday.

Reuters reports that while Canada has trailed the US in the pace of its vaccine rollout, supplies are expected to ramp up over the next two weeks, and Canada’s top vaccine coordinator expects there should be enough to give every citizen a first dose by the end of June.

“That’s the type of encouraging news that’s allowed us to make today’s announcement,” Andy Gibbons, WestJet’s director for government relations, told reporters.

Onex Corp-owned Westjet would resume flights to five airports serving Atlantic Canada and Quebec, beginning on 24 June. Canada’s largest carrier, Air Canada, also plans to resume summer service to certain destinations that are seasonal or were suspended due to the pandemic.

Gibbons called for government to transition away by 1 May from crippling requirements that oblige international travellers to self-isolate for up to three days in a hotel, before completing a 14-day quarantine.

He said WestJet’s announcement was unrelated to a government demand to protect regional routes as part of talks to reach a financial aid package for the aviation sector.

Calgary-based WestJet, which currently operates at around 10% of pre-pandemic traffic, is restoring routes of “its own volition,” said its chief commercial officer, John Weatherill.

Later in the day, the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau acknowledged in a radio interview that the country needed to move faster on vaccinations, but he was optimistic about summer.

We are going to have all adults fully vaccinated by September and, looking at the horizons some of the provinces have put forward, I think it’s possible that many, many Canadians will have their first doses by the time summer rolls around.

Vienna and two other provinces in eastern Austria will go back into lockdown for several days over Easter in a bid to ease the growing strain on intensive care wards from rising coronavirus infections, Austria’s health minister said on Wednesday.

Reuters reports that the three provinces - Vienna and the province surrounding it, Lower Austria, as well as Burgenland, which borders Hungary - have been working on tighter restrictions with the Health Ministry after the conservative-led government decided on Monday the rest of the country’s curbs would remain unchanged.

Of Austria’s nine provinces, those three are among the hardest-hit and have high levels of the more contagious UK variant of the coronavirus, which has been causing severe cases faster and in greater numbers.

“We want to introduce restrictions on movement as was the case in Austria before and after Christmas, from midnight until midnight,” the health minister Rudolf Anschober told a news conference with the governors of the three provinces, referring to curbs during Austria’s second and third national lockdowns.

Anschober has spoken of a “looming collapse” in eastern Austria’s intensive-care wards and said recent projections by experts were so alarming that such strong action was necessary.

The lockdown will last from 1-6 April. Non-essential shops, which reopened when Austria’s third lockdown was eased last month, will close over the same period. In a normal year virtually all shops are closed on Easter Sunday and Monday.

Face masks of the FFP2 standard, which are already required on public transport and in shops, will also be compulsory in crowded outdoor spaces, Anschober said, adding that a negative coronavirus test result would then be required to enter non-essential shops as of 7 April.

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The Finnish government on Wednesday proposed locking down residents of five cities, including the capital Helsinki, and only allowing people to leave their homes for limited reasons, to curb rising coronavirus infections and hospitalisations.

Reuters reports that the lockdown, which would be the first time Finland confines people to their homes during the Covid-19 pandemic, is subject to a parliamentary vote and assessment by the constitutional law committee.

Earlier this month, the government closed restaurants and secondary schools throughout the country.

The Nordic nation of 5.5 million people has recorded 73,516 coronavirus infections and 811 deaths. It has been praised for its handling of the pandemic and has been among the least-affected countries in Europe. It has 295 people in hospital with Covid-19.

“These are now the cities with the most difficult epidemic situations but the list can be updated if the situation changes,” Paivi Anttikoski, communications director at the prime minister’s office told Reuters.

In the draft legislation published on Wednesday evening, the government said the lockdown would mean people would only be allowed to leave their home for a predetermined purpose such as buying food or traveling to a second home. Disobeying the restrictions would result in a fine.

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Several Caribbean island nations have issued a plea to the US to share its stockpile of Covid-19 vaccines with the region as it has said it would with Mexico and Canada, calling on it not to neglect its “third border.”

Reuters reports that the independent island states of the Caribbean archipelago - except for Cuba, which is developing its own homegrown vaccines - have complained of inequitable global access to vaccines hurting countries like them without the financial or political heft to seal deals.

These nations have only received a dribble of shots as donations from India or through the Covax vaccine-sharing mechanism, while neighbouring Caribbean islands that are still territories of former colonial powers, like the Cayman islands, have already started mass vaccinations.

The tourism-dependent economies of Caribbean nations are among those that have been most ravaged by the pandemic, which has devastated the travel industry, forcing the already debt-laden region to take on new loans.

And several countries, including Jamaica and Antigua and Barbuda, are experiencing severe Covid-19 outbreaks at the moment with new cases per capita more than twice the global average.

The head of the Caricom Caribbean bloc, Trinidad and Tobago’s prime minister Keith Rowley has written to the US president Joe Biden seeking provision of World Health Organization-approved vaccines for the region, a foreign affairs ministry source told Reuters, confirming an earlier report by Trinidadian newspaper Newsday. The US State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The US plans to send roughly 4 million doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine that it is not using to Mexico and Canada in loan deals with the two countries, the White House said last week.

The Biden administration has come under pressure from countries around the world to share vaccines, particularly its stock of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, which is not authorise for use yet in the US. AstraZeneca has millions of doses made in a US facility, and has said it would have 30 million shots ready at the beginning of April.

The governments of Caribbean twin-island nations Saint Kitts and Nevis and Antigua and Barbuda have also written to the Biden administration.

“I have myself indicated to the United States that ... having benefited the other two borders Mexico and Canada, that it would perhaps be useful for them to think of their ‘third border’, the Caribbean,” Mark Brantley, the minister of foreign affairs for Saint Kitts and Nevis, said at a virtual forum hosted by the Organization of American States (OAS) last week.

Antigua and Barbuda’s prime minister Gaston Browne said he underscored the fact that the economies of Caribbean island states had shrunk up to 30%, with unemployment rising to more than 50% in some cases.

The vulnerability of states must become an important criterion in the provision of vaccines, and the Caribbean region is among the most vulnerable in the world.

Jamaica last week became the first Caribbean country to receive Covid-19 vaccines through Covax, but at just 14,400 doses it will not go far among the island nation’s nearly 3 million inhabitants.

• India has temporarily suspended exports of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine produced by the Serum Institute of India (SII) to meet domestic demand as cases rise, two sources have told Reuters.
• AstraZeneca has dismissed as “inaccurate” a report in the Italian press that 29m doses of its Covid-19 vaccine found in factory near Rome were destined for the UK. The manufacturer said no exports were currently planned other than to developing countries via the Covax facility.
• The European commission will extend the bloc’s powers to potentially halt vaccine exports to the UK and other areas with much higher inoculation rates.
• Ukraine has reported a record daily number of Covid-related deaths for the second consecutive day, as well as its highest daily number of hospitalisations
• Spain has restarted its AstraZeneca vaccination drive after a week-long suspension of the jab over fears about potential side-effects.
• Finland is to resume use of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine from Monday, but will only give it to people aged 65 and over
• Belgium will impose fresh lockdown restrictions, shutting schools, hairdressers and non-essential stores.
• Iceland has tightened Covid-19 measures following a spike in the number of new cases recorded in the country.
• Coronavirus lockdowns are to be imposed in three more regions in France, including the city of Lyon, the country’s government has said.
  
• Turkey registered its highest daily number of new infections this year on Wednesday, adding 29,762 infections to its tally in the last 24 hours.
• Luxembourg has announced a partial reopening of its hospitality industry, with cafés and restaurants able to serve customers again in outdoor areas from 7 April.

I’m handing over to my colleague Lucy Campbell now, who will guide you through the remainder of the evening.

Ukraine has reported a record daily number of Covid-related deaths for the second consecutive day, as well as its highest daily number of hospitalisations, according to Reuters.

A further 342 deaths were recorded over the past 24 hours, up from 333 in the previous 24 hours, taking the overall death toll to 30,773, the health minister Maksym Stepanov said.

Meanwhile a peak figure of 5,438 Covid patients were admitted to hospital over the past day, Stepanov said on Facebook. The previous record figure was 4,887, recorded on 11 March.

March’s hospitalisation figures have been well beyond the pandemic’s last peak in late 2020, when daily numbers were below 2,000.

The surge has been attributed to the more transmissible variant of the virus first detected in the UK.

Seven in 10 patients hospitalised with Covid-19 have still not fully recovered after five months, and they appear to cluster into four distinct categories based on their symptoms, research suggests.

The study, one of the world’s largest into long Covid in hospitalised patients, includes a group with persistent brain fog, which bears little relation to the severity of their other symptoms.

More than 300,000 Britons are estimated to have received hospital care for Covid-19 during the pandemic, and the UK-wide Phosp-Covid study has been following the health of 1,077 of those discharged between March and November 2020 – ranging from intensive care patients to some who only visited hospital for a few hours.

More than 50 soldiers at Switzerland’s nuclear, biological and chemical threats army training centre have tested positive for the coronavirus variant first detected in the UK, the country’s defence ministry has said.

The military school’s training has been temporarily suspended.

Along with the 59 who tested positive for the highly transmissible variant at Spiez’s NBC 77 training school, 87 others have been quarantined, AFP reports the ministry as saying.

Fortunately, there are no serious cases,” it said in a statement. “Clarifications to determine how the virus may have spread through the school on such a scale are still ongoing.”

The training service is temporarily suspended, the statement said, adding that medics were treated those who had contracted the virus.

The United States has administered a total of 130,473,853 doses of Covid-19 vaccines since its vaccine drive began, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said as reported by Reuters.

The total is made up of vaccines produced by produced by Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech, and Johnson & Johnson.

A further 2,256,824 doses were given in the 24 hours up to 6am on Wednesday.

The agency said 85,472,166 people had received at least one dose while 46,365,515 people have had both shots.

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