India has recorded the world’s highest infection tally for a second day, leaving hospitals across the country scrambling for oxygen supplies.
Meanwhile, France on Friday became the first high-income country to donate COVID-19 vaccines to a developing nation through the United Nations-backed COVAX rollout programme, shipping more than 100,000 doses to Mauritania.
Also on Friday, Japan declared a third state of emergency for Tokyo and three western prefectures.
Here are the latest coronavirus updates from around the world:
2 mins ago (18:29 GMT)
New Zealand pauses travel bubble after Australian outbreak
New Zealand paused its newly-opened travel bubble with Australia, the government in Wellington said, after a COVID-19 outbreak in its larger neighbour.
Bird Song of the Day
Really does sound like a bell!
#COVID19
At reader request, I’ve added this daily chart from 91-DIVOC. The data is the Johns Hopkins CSSE data. Here is the site.
I feel I’m engaging in a macabre form of tape-watching.
The Northeast jump looks like enormous data error; the CDC data doesn’t show it, so it’s down to Johns Hopkins of DIVOC-19; I’ve written the maintainer. UPDATE No response from the maintainer. I think I’ll try the telephone. (Here are the data status updates.)
“The number of Americans getting vaccinated is on the decline” [ABC]. “While an average of nearly 1.9 million people a day came in to get their first dose of the vaccine during the week of April 11, the average for the week of April 16 was around 1.47 million. The total doses the U.S. has administered nationwide since vaccines were first authorized has also flattened out over the past few days, CDC data show, interrupting the exponential growth of the last few mo
We got what s needed for COVID-19 vaccination completely wrong
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I would summarize the leading thought in 2020 on vaccination on LessWrong and the review that s now popular in the mainstream as:
New vaccination technology like mRNA-based vaccines and adenovirus-based vaccines allow faster development of vaccines. We still have the challenge of building enough vaccine factories. To build enough vaccine factories.
This seems to be wrong and the better view is:
Peptide-based vaccines are well understood and unsexy. We have existing adjuvants with well understood safety profile. They can be easily produced with equipment we already have. Given that they are unsexy nobody wants to run a clinical trial right and Western governments are interested in suing people for developing such technology then they are interested in vaccine development.