Coronavirus live news: Vaccine trial restarts as cluster worsens in Victoria, Australia

For the second day in a row, the Australian state of New South Wales has reported no new locally acquired Covid-19 cases.

There were five cases reported in hotel quarantine.

There were 12,890 tests reported to 8pm last night, compared with 13,686 in the previous 24 hours.

The Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, will provide his daily update at 11.30am AEDT today.

It’s the last update before tomorrow’s expected announcement of the further easing of restrictions in the state.

Australia’s ABC has reported the principal of the East Preston Islamic College in Melbourne has said the family of the child who attended school while infectious with Covid-19 is considering leaving the area after being devastated that it has led to the virus spreading.

The family had been isolating, but was told by the Victorian health department that two of the family’s children could return to school. English is not their first language, and it was interpreted that this meant all three children could go back to school, too.

The child was meant to keep isolating, and tested positive on Wednesday.

Now four new cases connected to the outbreak of 32 cases were reported on Saturday and around 800 people in the northern suburbs of Melbourne are currently isolating and being tested.

A bright yellow helicopter rose into a blue sky on Friday carrying a Covid-19 patient from the Netherlands to a German intensive care unit, the first such international airlift since the pandemic first threatened to swamp Dutch hospitals in the spring, AP reports.

The clatter of the helicopter’s rotors as it lifted off from a parking lot behind a hospital 30km east of Amsterdam was a noisy reminder of how the coronavirus is again gripping Europe and straining health care systems that struggled for equipment and staff during the pandemic’s first wave.

Elsewhere on the continent, an absence of noise will underscore the virus’ resurgence. More than two-thirds of the people living in France were to be subject to a nightly curfew starting at midnight Friday, hours after health authorities announced that the country had joined Spain in surpassing 1 million confirmed cases since the start of the pandemic.

“The epidemic is very strongly accelerating,” French President Emmanuel Macron said after visiting a hospital near Paris.

France became the second country in Western Europe and the seventh world-wide to reach that number of known infections after reporting 42,032 new daily cases. Of the 445,000 confirmed cases the World Health Organization had recorded in the past 24 hours, nearly half were in Europe, Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead on COVID-19, said.

I’m Josh Taylor and I will be seeing you through the rest of the morning and early afternoon of Saturday, Australian time.

Here’s what we know so far today:

• Victoria has reported no new deaths and seven new cases of Covid-19 overnight, including four new cases linked to an outbreak at the East Preston Islamic College. About 800 people who are either close contacts or secondary contacts of those associated with the school are currently isolating and awaiting test results. qll staff and students from the nearby Croxton School have also been told to get tested and self-isolate, even if they aren’t experiencing symptoms.
• AstraZeneca has resumed the US trial of its experimental Covid-19 vaccine after approval by US regulators, the company said. It was paused on 6 September after a report of a serious neurological illness, believed to be transverse myelitis, in a participant in the company’s UK trial.
• Dr Anthony Fauci, the US infectious disease expert, said the White House coronavirus task force’s meetings have become less frequent, even as infections rise in dozens of US states.
• The EU’s disease control agency joined health workers across Europe in sounding the alarm about the surge in coronavirus infections as the World Health Organization warned of an “exponential” rise in cases. Several countries in Europe are reporting infection rates higher than during the first wave of the pandemic in March and April, with Spain saying it has now more than 3 million cases.
• France’s second wave of coronavirus could be worse than the first, the boss of Paris public hospital group AP-HP said on Friday as the country registered a record number of daily cases. With pressure on hospitals rising fast, France has expanded a 9pm to 6am curfew to cover 46 million people, more than two-thirds of its population.
• Italy registered 19,143 new coronavirus infections, a jump of more than 3,000 within the last 24 hours. The northern Lombardy region, the worst hit region during the first wave of the pandemic, recorded almost 5,000 new cases while in Campania, in the south, there were 2,280.
• More than half a million people in the US could die from Covid-19 by the end of February next year, but about 130,000 of those lives could be saved if everybody were to wear masks, according to estimates from a modelling study.