BRUSSELS: The EU cleared a second coronavirus vaccine for use Wednesday, in a relief to struggling European countries as the world reached a grim new record of 15,700 deaths in 24 hours.
The Moderna vaccine is now set to join Pfizer-BioNTech’s jab for use in the 27-nation European Union, where governments are grappling with soaring caseloads and slow rollouts of the vaccines already available.
“We’ll have more than enough safe and effective vaccines for protecting all Europeans,” promised European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen.
The breakthrough came as 15,769 Covid-19 deaths around the world were registered in the past 24 hours, according to an AFP tally at 1100 GMT on Wednesday — a new record.
The United States, the world’s worst-hit country, logged a record 3,936 daily deaths in a separate tally by Johns Hopkins university.
In California, the new US epicentre of the pandemic, Los Angeles hospitals are so overwhelmed that ambulance workers have been told to stop transporting some patients with extremely low survival chances.
The numbers have also been spiralling across Europe, with Portugal — a nation of just 10 million people — reporting 10,000 new cases in the past day. Ireland closed its schools on Wednesday in a bid to bring its own infection rates under control.
Mass vaccinations are seen as key to returning the world to a semblance of normality, but the EU’s campaign has got off to a sluggish start compared to the United States, Britain and Israel. The Netherlands administered its first shot on Wednesday, becoming the last EU country to get started.
The United Kingdom may have been first to begin vaccinating, but the country nevertheless returned to a full lockdown Wednesday as the national daily death toll hit 1,000 for the first time since April.
British authorities are battling to contain the alarming spread of a new coronavirus strain which appears to be more infectious, and has since been detected in dozens of other countries.
One in 50 people in England were infected last week, according to official data, rising to one in 30 in London. The global crisis shows no signs of slowing, with more than 1.8 million people known to have died worldwide among some 86 million cases.
Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, announced on Tuesday that it was toughening its partial lockdown and extending measures such as store closures until the end of January.
Elsewhere in Europe, Orthodox Christians from Bucharest to Istanbul were celebrating the Epiphany at churches and public gatherings — with varying levels of social distancing measures in place.
The English Premier League, one of the world’s most-watched football competitions, said a record 40 players and staff have tested positive in the last two rounds of testing, but insisted the season will continue.
Manchester City confirmed three more cases on Wednesday, having already had to do without six infected players for their Premier League victory at Chelsea last weekend.
The Grammy music awards — initially slated for January 31 in Los Angeles — have been postponed until March, while Cannes, the world’s biggest film festival, said it may be pushed back from May to later in the summer.
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