Coronavirus live news: fewer than 4% of Africans vaccinated; WHO backs Regeneron for high-risk patients

Emergency conditions could soon be lifted in most parts of Japan as the Covid-19 situation in the country improves, the country’s health minister has said.

Norihisa Tamura said the rate at which patients were being admitted to hospital and bed availability would factor into whether the state of emergency in Tokyo and much of the country can be lifted at the end of the month.

“After hearing the opinions of experts, the cabinet will make a final decision,” he was quoted as saying by the Reuters news agency.

Covid infection levels reached highs last month in a fifth wave of infections caused by the virus’s so-called Delta variant. The Japanese government responded with emergency restrictions covering about 80% of the population, which officials said were necessary to stop hospitals being overwhelmed.

Restaurants were asked to close early and stop serving alcohol. Workers were urged to work from home as much as possible and refrain from travel.

New daily cases in Tokyo have declined to about 550 in recent days, a tenth of their peak last month. At a meeting of health experts on Friday, the governor, Yuriko Koike, stressed the need to press on with vaccinations, saying some 80% of Covid-19 fatalities in Tokyo since August were among the unvaccinated.

The government is considering using checks of vaccination status or negative Covid-19 results as a means to ease restrictions on businesses and human mobility.

Yasutoshi Nishimura, economy minister, said a demonstration project of a vaccine confirmation system will be carried out in 13 prefectures.

A coronavirus outbreak among monks in Phnom Penh has led authorities in Cambodia to cancel the city’s “Festival of the Dead” – an annual holiday where Buddhists pay respects to deceased relatives.

Worshippers around the country visit pagodas during the two-week Pchum Ben festival to offer prayers and food to the spirits of their ancestors.

This year’s observance began on Tuesday but will come to an early end on the weekend after nearly 50 Buddhist monks tested positive for coronavirus and authorities locked down their temple in the Cambodian capital.

In a statement on Thursday night, the prime minister, Hun Sen, said the festival cancellation was “necessary to control the spread of Covid-19 … at the time that Cambodia is reopening schools and is planning to reopen the country.”

This is Damien Gayle taking over the reins of the live blog from London.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday recommended the synthetic antibody treatment Regeneron for Covid-19, but only in patients with specific health profiles, AFP reports.

Persons with non-severe Covid-19 who are nonetheless at high risk of hospitalisation can take the antibody combo, as should critically ill patients unable to mount an adequate immune response, according to a WHO finding published in BMJ.

Regeneron is only the third treatment for Covid to be recommended by the global health authority, which added it to its “living WHO guideline” on drugs for Covid-19.

In July, WHO gave the nod to a class of drugs that act to suppress a dangerous overreaction of the immune system to the Sars-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid.

These medicines work well in tandem with corticosteroids, which were first recommended by WHO for use in Covid patients in September 2020.

Tanzanian president Samia Suluhu Hassan has told the UN general assembly: “No one is safe unless we are all safe.”

As of mid-September, fewer than 4% of people in Africa have been fully immunised and most of the 5.7bn vaccine doses administered around the world have been given in just 10 rich countries, AP reports.

The struggle to contain the coronavirus pandemic has featured prominently in leaders’ speeches over the past few days – many of them delivered remotely exactly because of the virus. Country after country acknowledged the wide disparity in accessing the vaccine, painting a picture so bleak that a solution has at times seemed impossibly out of reach.

South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa pointed to vaccines as “the greatest defence that humanity has against the ravages of this pandemic”.

“It is therefore a great concern that the global community has not sustained the principles of solidarity and cooperation in securing equitable access to Covid vaccines,” he said.

“It is an indictment on humanity that more than 82% of the world’s vaccine doses have been acquired by wealthy countries, while less than 1% has gone to low-income countries.”

He and others urged UN member states to support a proposal to temporarily waive certain intellectual property rights established by the World Trade Organization to allow more countries, particularly low- and middle-income countries, to produce Covid vaccines.

Earlier this year, US president Joe Biden broke with European allies to embrace the waivers, but there has been no movement toward the necessary global consensus on the issue required under WTO rules.

While some non-governmental organisations have called the waivers vital to boosting global production of the shots, US officials concede it is not the most constricting factor in the inequitable vaccine distribution – and some privately doubt the waivers for the highly complex shots would lead to enhanced production.

Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.

Tanzanian president Samia Suluhu Hassan has told the UN General Assembly: “No one is safe unless we are all safe.”

As of mid-September, fewer than 4% of people in Africa have been fully immunised and most of the 5.7bn vaccine doses administered around the world have been given in just 10 rich countries.

Meanwhile the World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday recommended the synthetic antibody treatment Regeneron for Covid-19, but only in patients with specific health profiles.

Persons with non-severe Covid-19 who are nonetheless at high risk of hospitalisation can take the antibody combo, as should critically ill patients unable to mount an adequate immune response, according to a WHO finding published in BMJ.

• Coronavirus has caused male life expectancy in the UK to drop for the first time since records began. A boy born between 2018 and 2020 is expected to live until he is 79 years old – a drop from 79.2 years for 2015-2017, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.
• The number of people testing positive for Covid-19 in England has dropped to its lowest level since the end of June.
• Novavax has announced that it has applied to the World Health Organization for an emergency-use listing of its Covid-19 vaccine. The listing is a prerequisite for export to several countries participating in the Covax vaccine-sharing facility
• Covid-19 could resemble the common cold by spring next year as people’s immunity to the virus is boosted by vaccines and exposure, a leading British expert has said. Prof Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at the University of Oxford, said the UK was “over the worst”.
• Portugal will lift almost all remaining Covid-19 restrictions, allowing full occupancy in restaurants and cultural venues from 1 October, the prime minister, Antonio Costa, said on Thursday.
• Thailand is considering cutting hotel isolation requirements for vaccinated tourists in half to one week in a bid to attract foreign visitors again. It comes amid delays to plans to waive quarantine and reopen Bangkok and other tourist destinations from next month after the pandemic caused a collapse in the country’s tourism industry
• Covid deaths in Russia, where 820 people died from the virus in the last 24 hours, matched the all-time one-day high reached in August. Since the start of the pandemic, Russia has recorded 7,354,995 coronavirus cases.
• The US Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday authorized a booster dose of the Pfizer and BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for those ages 65 and older and some high-risk Americans, paving the way for a quick rollout of the shots, Reuters reports.