New Covid cases in China double German deaths top 40,000
The daily number of new coronavirus cases has doubled in China, prompting tougher movement restrictions and, in the capital, passengers must scan a health code before boarding a cab or ride-hailing car, officials said yesterday.
Mainland China reported 69 cases on Saturday, compared with 33 reported a day earlier, the country's national health authority said.
The new rule on cab journeys follows the discovery on Saturday that a ride-hailing driver in Beijing was an asymptomatic carrier of the new coronavirus, city health official Pang Xinghuo told media.
Since January 1, 96 drivers on a ride-hailing app Didi have been fined a total of 1 million yuan ($154,440) for improperly implementing coronavirus prevention measures, such as wearing a mask, Rong Jun, a Beijing city transport official, said.
Over the course of the pandemic, mainland China has reported a total of 87,433 confirmed coronavirus cases, with 4,634 deaths.
In its daily bulletin, the National Health Commission said 21 of the new cases were imported.
Most of the locally-transmitted cases, 46 out of 48, were in Hebei, the province surrounding Beijing that entered a "wartime mode" this week as it seeks to contain rising infections.
China reported 27 asymptomatic cases on Saturday, down from 38 a day earlier. China does not classify these patients, who have been infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the disease, but are not showing any Covid-19 symptoms, as confirmed cases.
Hebei has finished testing all 13 million people in the major cities of Shijiazhuang and Xingtai, a provincial officer said in a briefing yesterday.
GERMAN DEATHS TOP 40,000
Germany yesterday reported 40,000 fatalities since the pandemic began a year ago as the Pope and Britain's Queen Elizabeth became the latest high-profile figures to join the global vaccination campaign against the coronavirus.
And German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned that the worst was still to come.
More than 1.9 million people worldwide have now died from the virus, with new variants adding to soaring cases and prompting the re-introduction of restrictions on movement across the globe -- even as with mass inoculation drives underway.
Pope Francis urged people to get the vaccination saying he would be inoculated against the virus himself next week when the Vatican begins its campaign and denouncing opposition to the jab.
"There is a suicidal denial which I cannot explain, but today we have to get vaccinated," the pontiff tells Canale 5 in an interview broadcast yesterday.
Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Prince Philip received their Covid-19 vaccinations on Saturday, said Buckingham Palace.
A source told the Press Association news agency that the queen, 94, and Philip, 99, were given the injections by a royal household doctor at Windsor Castle.
More than 1.5 million people in Britain have so far been inoculated, in the biggest immunisation programme in national history, with the elderly, their carers and health workers first in line.
Countries across the world are following suit with coronavirus shots approved including those by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna and domestically made jabs from Russia and China.
Britain is racing to protect as many people as possible as a new variant believed to be more contagious pushes infections and deaths to unprecedented levels.
Health authorities announced more than three million coronavirus infections since the pandemic began last year. The total UK death toll stands at 80,868, one of the highest in Europe.
'WORSE TO COME'
Germany's topped 40,000 fatalities yesterday, the centre for disease control announced.
In her weekly video message, Chancellor Merkel had warned Saturday that the full impact of socialising over the Christmas and New Year's period had yet to be felt.
The coming weeks will be "the hardest phase of the pandemic" so far, she said, with hospitals stretched to their limits.
Belgium also passed a significant threshold yesterday, recording 20,000 deaths, more than half in retirement care homes, said health officials.
Cases and deaths also continue to spiral in the United States, the world's worst-hit country.
With the 24-hour death toll exceeding 3,000 in recent days -- more than 4,000 on Saturday -- the total figure stands at 372,051 fatalities, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Governments are being forced to reintroduce restrictions that helped slow the spread of the virus last year, but badly disrupted their economies.
France has imposed a stricter evening curfew in Marseille after authorities said the new variant of the Covid-19 virus initially found in the UK had been discovered in the Mediterranean city.
Marseille joined other French cities such as Strasbourg and Dijon in having its curfew moved forward to 6:00 pm from 8:00 pm, and running through to 6:00 am the following morning. The stricter Marseille measures started yesterday evening.
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