Europe braces for Delta variant

(MENAFN - Gulf Times) Reuters/AFP/ Brussels • Pfizer says vaccine is highly effective against Delta variant   German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron have urged fellow EU leaders to take a firmer line on travel from countries outside the bloc, such as Britain, to combat the Delta variant of the coronavirus (Covid-19). Merkel, arriving in Brussels for a European Union summit, said she would lobby for a more co-ordinated approach, particularly with regard to letting tourists in from regions where virus variants were widespread. ''We are obviously concerned about the Delta variant,” she told reporters. Macron told EU countries to be extremely vigilant about the variant, first found in India, which is highly infectious and appears to affect people who are not fully vaccinated. The president said that the 27-nation bloc needed to take co-ordinated decisions on opening borders to people from other countries. The warnings came as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson hinted that the UK was close to permitting unrestricted travel abroad for fully-vaccinated people. EU governments have agreed on a ''white list” of 13 countries, including Australia and the United States, for whose residents travel restrictions should be lifted. Noticeably absent is Britain, on which travel policy is mixed. France and Germany require visitors from Britain to quarantine, while Portugal and Spain, who rely on British tourists, do not. In the Lisbon region, over half of new Covid-19 cases are of the Delta variant. The recent jump in infections there comes around a month after tourism-dependent Portugal opened to visitors from the rest of the EU as well as Britain. Portugal’s foreign minister said on Wednesday that the country had not been careless when it opened its border to British tourists, after Merkel blamed the recent spike of Covid-19 infections on lenient travel rules. All British visitors must present a negative Covid-19 test on arrival. Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa said EU leaders would discuss controls on entry from third countries, specifically Britain, adding that Portugal had followed the line agreed by EU governments. He added Merkel was right to say that co-ordinated action was required, particularly as travel across borders within the EU eased. However, stricter Covid-19 rules will be imposed across the Lisbon region and Algarve tourism magnet Albufeira as Portuguese authorities try to control a rise in infections that threatens the country’s summer holiday season. ''We are in a fight against time between the progression of the disease and the process of vaccination,” Cabinet Minister Mariana Vieira da Silva told a news conference yesterday. Portugal was still ''far from its red lines but on the increase”, she said. From 3pm yesterday until 6am on Monday, people must present a negative coronavirus test or a vaccination certificate to leave or enter the Lisbon region. The tests must be PCR or antigen tests. Antigen tests are available for free in Lisbon pharmacies. Restaurants, cafes and non-food shops in the Lisbon municipality must close at 3.30pm over the weekend. Supermarkets and grocery stores must close at 7pm. These rules will also be in force in two other municipalities, including Albufeira in the southern Algarve region, famous for its beaches and golf courses. The measures, prompted by a surge in coronavirus cases especially in and around the capital, are reviewed on a weekly basis but are likely to remain in place until the situation improves. New coronavirus cases rose by 1,556 yesterday, the biggest jump since late February, when the country of just over 10mn people was still under lockdown. In total, Portugal has recorded 869,879 cases and 17,079 deaths. ''We would all like to have an end date for this situation, but we don’t,” Vieira da Silva said. ''We need to respond early. The Delta variant has a large presence here.” Portugal is also speeding up the vaccination of younger people, with those aged 18 and above able to register from July 4. Around 30% of the population has been fully vaccinated so far. Russia meanwhile reported more than 20,000 new coronavirus infections and 568 deaths, a peak not seen since January, as the country battles a surging outbreak of the Delta variant worsened by a sluggish jab drive. In total, officials reported 20,182 new cases across the country over the past 24 hours, including just over 8,500 infections in Moscow, the epicentre of Russia’s outbreak. The Russian capital also recorded 92 deaths – the highest in one day since the start of the pandemic, according to the state-run Tass news agency. The explosion of new cases since mid-June has been spurred by the highly infectious Delta variant. It represents 90% of new infections in Moscow, the city’s mayor Sergei Sobyanin has said. The surge has prompted Sobyanin to introduce a host of measures in the Russian capital. From June 28, restaurants will only be allowed to accept patrons who can prove they have been vaccinated, were infected within the previous six months or provide a recent negative PCR test. In a similar move, the governor of the Krasnodar region – home to Russia’s popular Black Sea resort city Sochi – announced yesterday that starting July 1 hotels will only accept vaccinated guests or those with a negative test. Earlier this month, some 60% of all service industry workers in Moscow – just over 2mn people – were ordered to be fully vaccinated by August 15, including taxi drivers, staff of cultural venues and restaurant workers. A number of regions are following suit. Speaking to reporters yesterday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that despite the measures vaccination ''remains voluntary”. ''It is voluntary because you can change jobs,” he said. Russia has several coronavirus vaccines that have been available for free since early December, but its campaign to inoculate its population against Covid-19 has lagged. As of yesterday, just 20.7mn out of a population of about 146mn had received at least one dose of a vaccine, according to the Gogov website, which tallies Covid figures from the regions and the media. Russia, with 131,463 coronavirus deaths officially recorded, is the hardest hit country in Europe. Under a broader definition for deaths linked to Covid-19, statistics agency Rosstat has counted at least 270,000 deaths since the pandemic began. A Pfizer official has meanwhile stated that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is highly effective against the Delta variant. ''The data we have today, accumulating from research we are conducting at the lab and including data from those places where the Indian variant, Delta, has replaced the British variant as the common variant, point to our vaccine being very effective, around 90%, in preventing the coronavirus disease, Covid-19,” Alon Rappaport, Pfizer’s medical director in Israel, told local broadcaster Army Radio. A study by researchers from the University of Texas together with Pfizer and BioNtech and published this month by Nature journal found that antibodies elicited by the vaccine were still able to neutralise all tested variants, including Delta, albeit at reduced strength. ''We continue to synthesise viruses in our labs and with collaborators as we see new variants emerge so we can conduct testing to obtain the most information we can about our vaccine’s impact on neutralisation of emerging strains,” a Pfizer spokesperson said in an e-mail to Reuters. Other recent studies have also shown the vaccine is likely to provide high protection against the variant. An analysis by Public Health England), where the Delta variant is more widespread, found that the Pfizer/BioNTech and AstraZeneca vaccines provide over 90% protection against hospitalisation from the Delta variant.MENAFN24062021000067011011ID1102340911