LONDON: Britain closed its schools Tuesday ahead of a new national lockdown, with Germany set to extend its own restrictions as Europe battles surging coronavirus infections.
The British government announced an extra £4.6 billion ($6.3 billion, 5.1 billion euros) to help battered businesses following Monday’s announcement of tough new measures across England, which include a full shutdown of restaurants, pubs and non-essential retail. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are also bringing in strict lockdowns.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the new English measures — initially set to last six weeks — in a televised address just hours after Britain celebrated the rollout of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, seen as a potential Covid-19 game-changer as it could prove more accessible to poorer nations than alternative jabs.
Senior British minister Michael Gove warned of “very, very difficult weeks” as the country struggles to contain a new coronavirus strain believed to spread faster.
Meanwhile pressure is growing on European authorities to speed up vaccine approvals and hasten the economic recovery from a pandemic that has infected more than 85 million people worldwide, with more than 1.8 million known deaths. Spain — expected to show the biggest slump of any western economy — registered a nearly 23-percent jump in unemployment in 2020, government figures showed Tuesday.
National governments in some European countries are also under fire for a slow start in deploying vaccines that have already been approved — particularly France, which has vaccinated only 2,000 people so far, compared to 264,000 in Germany.
Russian-German vaccine production?
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Vladimir Putin have discussed the possibility of jointly producing vaccines in a phone call, according to the Kremlin.
While Germany is using the vaccine jointly developed by Pfizer and the Mainz-based company BioNTech, Russia has put into mass circulation its homemade jab — Sputnik V — which has been viewed with skepticism in the West. Mass vaccinations are considered key to breaking the back of a pandemic that has severely restricted activities that involve large gatherings. The ease of storage and use of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, compared with the ultra-low temperatures needed for the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna alternatives, could mean greater access for less wealthy nations in the fight against the virus.
Mexico and India have approved the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab, while Rwanda, which on Tuesday banned transport in and out of the capital Kigali in a bid to combat surging infections, said it was in touch with its makers to purchase doses.
In China — where the pandemic began a year ago — experts from the World Health Organization are due for a highly politicised visit to explore the origins of the virus.