Headlines
• UK deaths from drinking up 20% YoY
• Victoria, Australia goes into five-day lockdown
• UK payroll increases to 28.9m in June
• Catalonia to bring in new curfews
• Cuba lifts duties on foods and medicines
World news
• The ONS said there were 862,000 jobs on offer in the UK between April and June, 77,500 higher than the first three months of 2020. The rise was driven by vacancies in hospitality and retailing. The number of people on payrolls also grew in June, showing the biggest rise since the start of the pandemic increasing by 356,000 in June to 28.9 m.
• According to a report by Public Health England, the number of deaths in England from diseases caused by drinking increased by 20% in 2020 compared to 2019.
• More than 500,000 alerts were sent to users of the NHS Covid -19 app in England and Wales in the week to 7 July, warning of close contact with someone who had tested positive for the virus. This was up 46% on the previous week.
• Plans to tweak the NHS Covid -19 app to make its alerts less sensitive and avoid mass disruption to people’s lives will not be introduced for several weeks.
• The Australian state of Victoria, which includes the city of Melbourne, is to enter a snap lockdown, its fifth, today and will last until Tuesday.
• Catalonia, including the city of Barcelona, is to impose a curfew from 1am to 6am. The curfew order affect s those towns with a population of over 5,000 that surpass the rate of 400 infections per 100,000 inhabitants over 14 days.
• The Cuban Government is to allow travellers arriving in the country to bring in food, medicine and other essentials without paying import duties from Monday.
• Face coverings will continue to be a legal requirement on public transport in Wales.
• 5,000 anti -vaccine protesters rallied in Athens yesterday to oppose plans to make vaccines available to children aged 15 and older.
• Malaysia’s health ministry said the country will stop administering the vaccine produced by China’s Sinovac once its supplies end as it has a sufficient number of other vaccines for its programme.
• Rwanda is to put the capital Kigali and eight other districts across the country under lockdown from Saturday. The restrictions will last until 26 July, but international arrivals and tourism will continue. A dusk -to -dawn curfew introduced across the country in June remains in force.
• Chinese residents face bans from public spaces including schools, hospitals and shopping malls unless they get a vaccine, under new edicts covering a number of provinces including Yunnan, Jiangxi, Sichuan, Gaungxi and Fujian.
• A study published in the Lancet’s journal EClinicalMedicine, which surveyed 3,762 people with confirmed or suspected long Covid from 56 countries, has identified more than 200 symptoms from brain fog and hallucinations to tremors and tinnitus – spanning ten of the body’s organ systems, and a third of the symptoms continued to affect patients for at least six months.
