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Added on the 13/08/2021 15:49:38 - Copyright : France 24 EN
Russia cases surpassed 47,000 on Monday, as cracks in the country’s healthcare system become more apparent. The number of hospitals has halved since 2015, with medical workers dealing with shortages of equipment and protective clothing. The lockdown, now entering its fourth week, is expected to be extended until the end of May.
Millions of people in Beijing took their second Covid-19 tests of the week on Wednesday as the Chinese capital tried to keep an outbreak numbering in the dozens from spiralling into a crisis like the one the locked-down city of Shanghai is enduring.
Panama starts vaccinating children between the ages of five and eleven against Covid-19, in an effort to resume in-person learning at schools amid a new surge in cases.
France reported 261,481 new coronavirus infections on Thursday, less than the record of more than 332,000 set on Wednesday, but the seven-day moving average of new cases rose above 200,000 for the first time since thenstart of the health crisis.
Faced with the rapid spread of the Omicron variant, France will further tighten COVID-19 measures, but there will be no curfew for New Year's Eve and schools will reopen as planned in early January, the government said on Monday. Prime Minister Jean Castex said the COVID incidence rate - the number of infections per 100,000 people per week - is now well over 700 and at a record level since the start of the pandemic, forcing his cabinet to take new measures. Following the French Prime Minister's announcement of the latest measures to combat the spread of the highly-contagious Omicron variant, France 24 is joined by Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Professor McKee takes issue with the French government's limited restrictions, as he does with the UK's handling of their current health crisis. "We really are facing a crisis and it's not entirely clear that the seriousness of that crisis has been fully grasped." As the professor describes it, it is a race against time to curb the spread of the virus, warning that "we really don't have a lot of time given the rate with which this variant is increasing." Based on the data coming out of Austria and the Netherlands, Professor McKee asserts that lockdowns have proven "effective" and "both of those countries have turned their curves round." Looking ahead to 2022, Professor McKee would like the focus to be on "bringing cases down to as low a level as possible" rather than simply trying to "live with the virus." One of the ways we can do that, he explains, is by "making the environments much safer with air filtration, and ventilation, in particular."
U.S.-led air strikes hit 10 units of Islamic State fighters in Syria in recent days as well as militants with the al Qaeda-linked Khorasan Group. Jillian Kitchener reports.