Coronavirus news live: Boris Johnson says Indian Covid variant of ‘increasing concern’

China backs talks on the World Trade Organization’s proposal to waive coronavirus vaccine patents, its commerce ministry has said.

A department spokesperson said: “China supports the WTO’s proposal on IP exemptions for anti-epidemic materials such as the COVID vaccine to enter the text consultation stage.

“China will work with all parties to actively participate in consultations and jointly promote a balanced and effective solution.”

This comes after British and EU officials suggested an intellectual property waiver would not necessarily solve global supply shortages.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has written to 100 travel firms reminding them of their obligation to refund cancelled holiday packages.

Since March last year, more than 23,000 people have complained to the CMA about refund issues.

Under the Package Travel Regulations, companies must give a customer a full refund within two weeks of cancellation.

Dozens of Japanese towns have scrapped plans to host Olympic athletes this summer, amid worries about the country’s fourth coronavirus wave.

More than 500 towns are registered to welcome the visitors for training camps prior to the games. However, 40 of them have now dropped out, according to a government source.

The eastern prefecture of Chiba will no longer host the US track and field team, with its governor Toshihito Kumagai saying that athletes would not be given priority over residents were they to fall ill.

“Chiba prefecture is not thinking about securing scarce hospital beds … for athletes and people involved in the Olympic Games in a way that would prohibit our residents from using them,” he said.

One leading online travel agent – On the Beach – has stopped selling holidays this summer because of all the unknowns.

On its website, it announced: “Plenty of other travel companies will be more than happy to take your money even though they’re not sure yet what the additional costs or inconvenience might be. We’re not.

“Basically, there’s too much unknown for us to take new bookings with the confidence that they will go ahead, or for us to know the potential inconvenience or extra costs that customers might face.”

Our travel correspondent Simon Calder reports:

The government has “been learning lessons” during the pandemic, a Tory minister has said.

Foreign Office minister James Cleverly made the comment after the prime minister announced that a coronavirus inquiry will take place in spring 2022.

He told BBC Breakfast: “Governments around the world, of course including our own, made decisions often based on limited information, in a situation that was changing, evolving, incredibly quickly.

“No one is pretending that every decision was perfect, that’s not possible when you are making decisions with an incomplete information picture as we had to, as all governments had to.

“We have been learning lessons, both as a Government and scientific community, as the battle against this pandemic has been conducted.”

The so-called Indian coronavirus variant “will get everywhere” in the UK, an expert has warned.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, James Naismith, of Oxford University, said: “I think we should view it as a country-wide problem.

“It will get everywhere. We keep learning this lesson, but we know that this will be the case.”

He added that local restrictions would not contain its spread. “When we tried locally having different restrictions in different regions that didn’t really make any difference. So I don’t think thinking about a localised strategy for containment will really work,” he said.

Ten people in India have reportedly died from a rare black fungal infection, supposedly linked to coronavirus.

Doctors think the infection – called mucormycosis – can be induced in Covid-19 patients through the over-use of steroids.

“Mucormycosis is a ferocious fungus and usually fatal if left unattended for one to three days,” Dr Anchal Gupta, senior eye surgeon at Netram Eye Foundation in Delhi, toldThe Independent.

My colleague Shweta Sharma has the details:

Sage will hold an emergency meeting on Thursday to discuss the Indian variant, amid concerns that it could delay the UK’s final stage of lockdown easing next month.

Boris Johnson has warned that the variant is of “increasing concern” for the UK.

The vaccination campaign in India has slowed down with several states reporting a shortage of doses.

Prime minister Narendra Modi had announced that vaccinations would be open to all adults from 1 May. At least two states — Maharashtra and Karnataka — have temporarily suspended vaccination for those in the 18-44 age group.

The national capital Delhi has also warned that it would be forced to stop the vaccination drive if more doses are not supplied by the central government.

As of Thursday, India had fully vaccinated just over 2.8 per cent of its population.

Experts have said that daily Covid-19 cases are surging in India’s rural areas where the healthcare system is ill-equipped to fight the virus.

With few hospitals and low testing capacity, rural areas are struggling to control the spread. More than half the cases this week in the western state of Maharashtra were in rural areas.

In a village in the state of Uttar Pradesh, more than 20 people died in April. A journalist there told India Today that there was no way of knowing if the deaths were due to Covid-19 because no one was tested. Those people had coronavirus symptoms, the journalist said.