Nations across the globe hit new COVID-19 pandemic highs and reimposed restrictions on Saturday as G20 finance ministers meeting in Venice said that the economic recovery was threatened by variants of SARS-CoV-2 and uneven vaccination campaigns.
The highly transmissible Delta variant, first detected in India, is sweeping the world as countries race to inoculate their populations to ward off fresh outbreaks and allow for economies and daily life to resume.
“The recovery is characterized by great divergences across and within countries and remains exposed to downside risks, in particular the spread of new variants of the COVID-19 virus and different paces of vaccination,” the G20 finance ministers said in a final statement.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The EU — lambasted early on for a botched vaccine acquisition program — on Saturday said it has delivered enough shots to cover 70 percent of the bloc’s population.
“By tomorrow, some 500 million doses will have been distributed to all regions of Europe,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said.
However, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control says that the proportion of adults aged 18 or older who are fully vaccinated in the EU and European Economic Area is still only 44.1 percent.
Supply shortages in South Korea have meant only about 11 percent of the country’s 52 million population is fully vaccinated, health authorities said.
South Korea reported 1,324 new COVID-19 cases as of midnight on Saturday, the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency said yesterday, down from a record 1,378 from the day before as the country battles a surge in infections.
From today, gatherings of more than two people are to be banned after 6pm, and schools, bars and clubs would be closed.
Australia reported its first COVID-19-related death of the year and a record for this year of 77 new cases of the virus in the state of New South Wales, which is battling an outbreak of the highly infectious Delta variant.
State Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the numbers in and around the country’s biggest city Sydney, already under a hard lockdown, are expected to rise.
“I’ll be shocked if it’s less than 100 this time tomorrow, of additional new cases,” Berejiklian told a televised briefing.
In Pakistan, where less than 8 percent of the population has been vaccinated, the government on Saturday said only those who had received jabs would be allowed to fly.
The country of about 215 million people has largely escaped the worst of the pandemic, with under a million recorded infections and 22,582 deaths — although cases are on the rise again.
Russia announced that cases continued to surge and it had a new record number of daily deaths, the fifth since the beginning of the month.
The 752 new deaths bring Russia’s total toll to 142,253. It also recorded 25,082 new infections, meaning there have been more than 5.7 million cases.
The Russian Federal State Statistics Service, which defines COVID-19-related deaths more broadly, put the figure at 270,000 by the end of April.
Less than 20 percent of Russians have received a single dose, despite shots of locally developed vaccines being readily available.
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