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Canada suspended all passenger flights from India and Pakistan on Thursday for 30 days, Transportation Minister Omar Alghabra announced, citing increased Covid-19 cases detected in travelers arriving from these countries, AFP reports.

“Given the higher number of cases of Covid-19 detected in air passengers arriving in Canada from India and Pakistan... I am suspending all commercial and private passenger flights arriving in Canada from Indian and Pakistan for 30 days,” Alghabra told a news conference.

The measure will go into effect at 11:30 pm Eastern Time Thursday (0330 GMT Friday).

It will not apply to cargo flights, Alghabra said, particularly to ensure the continued shipment of vaccines, personal protective equipment and other essential goods.

India, which is undergoing an alarming surge being blamed on a “double mutant” variant and super-spreader events, reported a single-day high of more than 300,000 new cases of Covid-19 on Thursday.

Health Minister Patty Hajdu said that overall only 1.8 percent of travelers to Canada have tested positive for coronavirus.

While India accounts for 20 percent of recent air travel to Canada, more than half of all positive tests at the border were from flights arriving from the country, she said, adding that “a similarly high level of cases... have also been linked to Pakistan.”

Canada in December briefly suspended flights from Britain over concerns about outbreaks of a Covid variant.

Earlier on Thursday Parliament voted unanimously to urge the government to ban non-essential flights from Covid hotspots where variants have surged, including India and Brazil.

Alghabra said there are currently no scheduled flights between Canada and Brazil, but added that “we will not hesitate to ban travel to other countries if the science bears that out.”

This report is from Reuters.

Ontario’s premier Doug Ford, facing backlash over his government’s handling of the pandemic, resisted calls to resign on Thursday as Canada’s most populous province grappled with a third wave of Covid-19 infections that critics said could have been prevented.

With pressure building on hospitals, Ottawa is sending federal healthcare workers to help. Ontario had 3,682 new infections on Thursday and 40 deaths, the highest of any province.

#Dougfordmustresign has trended on Twitter this week, while newspaper editorials and provincial opposition leaders also called on Ford, 56, to step down.

Some 46% of Ontario residents have a negative view of Ford, up nine percentage points from a week earlier, according to an Abacus Data poll on Wednesday. Ford’s Progressive Conservatives(PC) trailed the opposition provincial Liberals by one point in the same poll, ahead of a June 2022 provincial election.

“Mr Ford’s real mistake has been repeatedly ignoring the deep bench of scientists who are there to advise him, impulsively imposing himself as the province’s Fearless Decider,” an editorial in the national Globe and Mail newspaper said this week.

The premier ruled out resigning on Thursday, almost a week after issuing unpopular orders to close playgrounds and allow police to randomly stop people, both of which were abandoned within 48 hours.

Multiple police departments refused to enforce his orders while Toronto-area health units unilaterally ordered businesses that experience outbreaks to close.

“I’m not one to walk away from anything,” an emotional Ford told reporters on Thursday. “I know we got it wrong and we made a mistake, and for that I’m sorry.”

Ford said he was apologising for acting “too quick”. Critics said the problem was that he opened the economy up too fast after the second wave, and then moved too slowly when it was obvious that cases were surging.

Had Ontario kept stay-at-home measures in place longer in February, the case-count “would not have been nearly as bad as what we’re seeing now,” said Dr Isaac Bogoch, an infectious diseases specialist at Toronto General Hospital.

“We saw case numbers rising for a month ... and they were never really acted on,” said Bogoch, who is a member of the Ontario government’s vaccination task force.

Ford extended stay-at-home measures until mid-May last week and on Thursday said his government would provide paid sick leave to workers who need to isolate, a measure many say would have helped prevent the third wave.

On Thursday, Ford said 40% of the province would have at least one vaccine shot by the end of the month. But the political damage could be lasting.

Ford has been in power since 2018, sweeping to an unlikely victory after the PC’s former leader was forced to resign in the midst of the election campaign.

During the 2019 federal election campaign, the prime minister Justin Trudeau capitalised on Ford’s unpopular cost cuts, attacking him repeatedly while touring Ontario, a crucial battleground province that is home to almost 40% of Canada’s population.

“This does remind me of 2019 where absolutely the best asset in Ontario for the federal Liberal Party was Doug Ford,” a well-placed Liberal source said.

Millions of people in England could be provided with so-called Covid passports by 17 May to let them take holidays abroad this summer and potentially avoid quarantine when they reach their destination, the Guardian has learned.

The documents – likely to be different from domestic Covid certificates, which the government is working on separately – are still under development but should be made available before restrictions on international travel lift next month, sources said.

With many hoping for a summer getaway, or to see family and friends in other countries whom they have been unable to visit since the pandemic began, pressure is rising on ministers to help ensure that those who have had coronavirus vaccines can prove their immunity to avoid other countries’ entry requirements on isolation and testing.

The transport secretary, Grant Shapps, has said the passports “will of course be a part of international travel” and voiced hopes they would not be viewed as “controversial” – but stressed the need for a cautious reopening given the threat of virus variants.

The full story is here:

The Covid-19 variant contributing to a surge in coronavirus cases in India has been detected in Belgium in a group of Indian students who arrived from Paris, Belgian authorities said on Thursday.

Twenty nursing students, who arrived in Belgium in mid-April after travelling from the French capital’s Charles de Gaulle airport, have tested positive for the variant, the office of government commissioner Pedro Facon told AFP, confirming media reports.

The students have been placed in quarantine in Aalst and Leuven in northern Belgium where they had been due to begin a training course.

Several experts have suggested they may have been victims of a “super-spreader” - either a member of their group, or another passenger on the bus that brought them to Belgium from Paris.

“These students have been respecting strict isolation since their arrival. Twenty of the 43 students are as of today infected by the ‘Indian’ variant,” tweeted microbiologist Emmanuel Andre of the Catholic University of Leuven.

Virologist Marc Van Ranst, another expert who has been prominent in Belgian coverage of the crisis, told a Flemish radio station that the group had landed in Paris on 12 April. Several of the students began having virus symptoms five days later, he said.

The B.1.617 variant has already appeared elsewhere, including in the US, Australia, Israel and Singapore. Concern about it has led some countries, including the UK, to slap travel restrictions on India.

Israel and Bahrain have agreed to recognise each other’s Covid-19 vaccination programmes and let people who have had shots travel without restriction between the countries, Israel’s Foreign Ministry said on Thursday.

The arrangement, said the ministry said, would help boost tourism, trade and economic ties between the states, which normalised ties last year in a US-sponsored deal.

Israel has opened up much of its economy thanks to a rapid vaccine roll out, though it maintains tight restrictions on incoming travellers.

The ministry did not give details on when the Bahrain arrangement would start, but said it would reach similar agreements with other countries soon. The scheme would be managed digitally, it said.

This report is from Reuters.

Delhi resident Nitish Kumar was forced to keep his dead mother’s body at home for nearly two days while he searched for space in the city’s crematoriums - a sign of the deluge of death in India’s capital where coronavirus cases are surging.

On Thursday Kumar cremated his mother, who died of Covid-19, in a makeshift, mass cremation facility in a parking lot adjoining a crematorium in Seemapuri in northeast Delhi.

“I ran pillar to post but every crematorium had some reason ... one said it had run out of wood,” said Kumar, wearing a mask and squinting his eyes, which were stinging from the smoke blowing from the burning pyres.

India recorded the world’s highest daily tally of 314,835 coronavirus infections on Thursday, with the second wave of the pandemic crushing its weak health infrastructure. In Delhi alone, where hospitals are running out of medical oxygen supplies, the daily rise is more than 26,000.

People losing loved ones in the Indian capital, where 306 people have died of Covid-19 in the past 24 hours, are turning to makeshift facilities that are undertaking mass burials and cremations as crematoriums come under pressure.

Jitender Singh Shunty who runs a non-profit medical service, the Shaheed Bhagat Singh Sewa Dal, said as of Thursday afternoon 60 bodies had been cremated at the makeshift facility in the parking lot and 15 others were still waiting.

“No one in Delhi would have ever witnessed such a scene. Children who were 5 years old, 15 years old, 25 years old are being cremated. Newlyweds are being cremated. It’s difficult to watch,” said a teary-eyed Shunty.

Shunty, dressed in protective gear and a bright yellow turban, said that last year during the peak of the first wave, the maximum number of bodies he had helped cremate in a single day was 18, while the average was eight to 10 a day.

On Tuesday, 78 bodies were cremated in that one place alone, he said.

Kumar said when his mother, a government healthcare worker, tested positive 10 days ago, the authorities could not find a hospital bed for her.

“The government is not doing anything. Only you can save your family. You are on your own,” he said.

With India joining Pakistan and Bangladesh on the UK’s red list, travel from all three south Asian countries with diaspora populations in the UK is mostly banned, dashing hopes for thousands of families of reuniting over the summer.

And many who travelled in recent weeks are stuck in limbo, unable to return home to the UK because of the cost of hotel quarantine and rocketing flight prices. This means a sea of financial and mental struggles as families are separated, jobs and livelihoods are placed in jeopardy, and schooling and exams are missed.

Here is our full report:

Canada’s government, under pressure to suspend flights from India and Brazil over fears about the spread of the coronavirus, could make an announcement on the matter shortly, a senior medical official said on Thursday.

The prime minister Justin Trudeau said earlier this week that officials were studying the example of the UK, which is obliging travellers who have been in India in the past 10 days to spend 10 days in quarantine.

Reuters reports that Dr Howard Njoo, Canada’s deputy chief public health officer, said officials were looking at developments in hot spots such as India and Brazil, where Covid-19 cases are surging.

“I think perhaps we will have an announcement about the border soon,” he told a briefing when asked about a clamp-down on travel from India and Brazil, but did not give details.

Prominent right-leaning politicians complain Trudeau’s center-left Liberal government has not done nearly enough to combat the threat as a third wave of infections rips through Canada, overwhelming healthcare systems.

“The Liberals’ slow and incompetent pandemic response has allowed dangerous Covid variants into Canada. We must temporarily suspend flights from hot spot countries to secure the borders,” said Erin O’Toole, leader of the official opposition Conservative Party.

Trudeau, speaking to Global television on Wednesday night, said community spread rather than international travel continued to be the main concern.

Quebec premier Francois Legault said this week: “We worry about flights coming from countries like India and Brazil.”

The two countries have become the latest epicenter of the pandemic. France is imposing a 10-day quarantine for travellers from Brazil, Chile, Argentina, South Africa and India, while the UAE has suspended all flights from India.

Here is a quick recap of all the main Covid updates from around the world:

• Britain found 55 more cases of the B.1.617 Covid variant first detected in India in latest weekly figures, Public Health England said.
• French prime minister Jean Castex confirmed that domestic travel restrictions will be lifted on 3 May and that secondary schools will reopen that same day. France is due to impose a 10-day quarantine starting from Saturday for travellers from Brazil, Chile, Argentina, South Africa and India.
• The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency said there had been 168 cases up to 14 April of blood clots with low platelet counts in the UK in people who had had the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine.
• EU capitals have been asked by the European commission to back legal action against AstraZeneca by the end of the week over an alleged breach of its contractual obligations to supply member states with its Covid vaccine. Earlier today, a commission spokesperson confirmed legal action had not been launched against the company, following comments by Ireland’s health minister Stephen Donnelly.
• New coronavirus cases in the Netherlands rose by more than 9,000 in 24 hours, the highest level since early January, figures show.

Britain found 55 more cases of the B.1.617 Covid variant first detected in India in latest weekly figures, Public Health England has said.

A total of 132 confirmed and probable cases of the B.1.617 variant have now been found in Britain, Reuters reports.

On Monday, the UK health secretary, Matt Hannock, said India would be added to the red-list, meaning arrivals will have to quarantine in hotels.

The unprecedented spread of the virus in India, blamed on a more contagious strain as well as lax safety measures, has pushed hospitals to the brink.

There were 70 more cases of the variant first found in South Africa, known as B.1.351, in the week running to 21 April , PHE added.

Last Friday, the Guardian revealed that the first of the 77 cases of the India variant of coronavirus found in the UK were detected in specimens dating back to February.

Despite earlier unveiling the country’s first steps towards exiting lockdown, French prime minister Jean Castex has said the 1900 nation-wide curfew will stay in place for now.

Reuters reports:

French prime minister Jean Castex confirmed on Thursday that domestic travel restrictions will be lifted on 3 May and that secondary schools will reopen that same day, the first steps toward the country exiting its new Covid-19 lockdown.

He also said some businesses, including bars, restaurants and cultural venues might reopen around mid-May as the Covid-19 situation is improving, three weeks after France entered the one-month lockdown, its third to stop the spread of the virus.

“The third wave of the disease is behind us,” Castex told a news conference, adding that France’s vaccination campaign was going well and that 20 million people will have had a first shot by mid-May.

New infections rose by 34,318 on Thursday, a 4.25% increase versus the same day last week, the lowest rise since 13 March.

This has been shared by Matt Hancock, the UK health secretary: