World Coronavirus Dispatch: New York City crawls toward normalcy

100 mn J&J vaccine doses held up over contamination, poor jab rate in Africa threatens world's recovery, and other pandemic-related news across the globe

Poor vaccination in Africa threatens world’s recovery

Poor vaccination drives in the world’s least-inoculated continent of Africa could pose another big challenge for global efforts to end the pandemic. The danger is that while the rest of the world slowly returns to normalcy, the virus will spread in these African nations, mutating into variants that can evade current vaccines, cause deadly new waves that could spread far beyond their borders. Read here

Let's look at the global statistics

Global infections: 164,917,999

Global deaths: 3,418,023

Nations with most cases: US (33,026,739), India (25,772,440), Brazil (15,812,055), France (5,978,650), Turkey (5,151,038).

Source: John Hopkins Coronavirus Research Center

100 million J&J vaccine doses held up over contamination concerns

More than 100 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine have been kept on hold as regulators check them for possible contamination, Emergent BioSolutions disclosed for the first time. In more than three hours of testimony before a House subcommittee, the chief executive of Emergent Bio, Robert G Kramer, conceded that Johnson & Johnson had discovered contaminated doses, as he fended off aggressive questions from Democrats about his stock sales and hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses for top company executives. Read here

After more than a year of shutdown, New York City crawls toward normalcy

New York shut down 423 days ago in March 2020 when it accounted for half the United States' coronavirus cases. The city has partially reopened in recent months, but Wednesday was the first day businesses were allowed to operate with fewer restrictions and at near capacity. The new rules easing mask mandates and capacity limits were widely superseded by the personal comfort levels of millions of people. The reopening was messy and inconsistent and confusing. Many business owners chose to continue requiring customers to wear masks, making Wednesday look and feel not all that different from Tuesday. Read here

British tourists to EU may have to quarantine even if vaccinated

Fully vaccinated Britons could still be told to quarantine at their EU holiday destination due to concerns over the Covid variant first detected in India and a failure to allow Europeans to visit Britain freely, according to a policy agreed in Brussels. Representatives of the 27 member states provisionally approved a change of the policy under which anyone from a non-EU country could travel if they were able to prove they had been fully vaccinated. Read here