Headlines
• California & NYC mandate vaccine tests for government workers • US to maintain its UK and Schengen travel restrictions
• EU reaches its 70% vaccine target on time
• Victoria, Australia, to ease lockdown tomorrow
• Ireland to vaccinate 12-15 year olds
World news
• A study, led by the University of Glasgow and published in the journal Scientific Reports , has shown people advised to shield during the first wave of the pandemic were eight times more likely to catch the virus and five times as likely to die following infection than the general population .
• California and New York City will mandate government workers to be vaccinated or be regularly tested.
• The number of cases across the US may have been undercounted by as much as 60%, researchers at the University of Washington have found.
• The US is maintaining its travel restrictions. Currently , most non -US citizens who within the last 14 days have been in the United Kingdom, the 26 Schengen nations in Europe without internal border controls, or in Ireland, China, India, South Africa, Iran or Brazil are banned from entering the country.
• The GMC’s annual national training survey of trainees or trainer doctors has found 60% of respondents always or often felt worn out at the end of a working day, and 44% felt their work was emotionally exhausting to a high or very high degree.
• A study of the Sinovac vaccine showed of participants who received two doses, two or four weeks apart, only 16.9% and 35.2% respectively still had neutralising antibodies above what researchers regard as a detectable threshold level six months after the second shot, although a third shot had a strong booster effect, according to a Chinese lab study.
• The European Commission has announced that the EU has met its target of administering a vaccine to 70% of adults by July.
• Tokyo saw a record 2,848 daily infections today. Some 20.8% of the capital’s 12,635 patients with Covid had been hospitalised.
• Mexican workers at American -owned company factories in Tijuana are being vaccinated in San Diego, US, without requiring visas.
• The IMF has warned the world economy risks losing $4.5tn from highly - infectious variants spreading through poor countries where vaccination rates are lower.
• The Victoria premier, Daniel Andrews, says the state will tentatively emerge from its fifth lockdown tomorrow, with the easing of restrictions accompanied by a tightening of the border with New South Wales. • Russia has approved testing a combination of the AstraZeneca vaccine and the single - dose version of the domestically -developed Sputnik V vaccine.
• The vaccination programme in the Republic of Ireland is to be extended to include 12 to 15 year -olds , after recommendations by the National Immunisation Advisory Committee.
• The average price of a UK house is up by 7.3% over the past year, reaching a new high of £230,700 , according to Zoopla. "Demand for houses is twice as high as typically seen at this time of year between 2017 and 2019, accelerating away from demand for flats, creating a disparity in average price growth across the two property types,"…"House prices are being supported in part by a severe shortage of homes for sale, with stock levels down some 25% in the first half of the year compared to 2020."
