Coronavirus live: one in 20 secondary school pupils in England had Covid last week – as it happened | World news

Mexico’s health ministry on Friday reported 7,388 new confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 471 fatalities.

It brings the total to 3,671,611 infections and 277,976 deaths, Reuters reports.

The government has said the real number of cases is likely significantly higher, and separate data published recently suggested the actual death toll could be 60% higher than the official count.

The US announced it is sending more than eight million Covid-19 vaccine doses to Bangladesh and the Philippines.

Five shipments totalling 5,575,050 doses will go the Philippines by next week, a White House official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Another 2,508,480 doses will arrive early next week in Bangladesh, the official said.

The vaccines – all Pfizer-BioNTech – are being donated through the World Health Organization’s Covax program.

Brazil had 18,578 new cases of the novel coronavirus reported in the past 24 hours and 506 deaths, the country’s health ministry said on Friday.

The South American country has now registered 21,445,651 cases since the pandemic began, while the official death toll has risen to 597,255, according to ministry data.

With 40% of Brazilians now fully vaccinated, the rolling seven-day average of Covid deaths has fallen to one third of the toll of almost 3,000 a day at the peak of the pandemic in April, Reuters reports.

US supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor has refused to block a requirement that all of New York City’s public school teachers and employees be vaccinated against Covid-19.

Sotomayor denied a challenge by a group of four teachers and teaching assistants who sought to halt the city’s vaccine mandate while litigation over the dispute continues in lower courts, Reuters reports.

Public school system workers were ordered to be vaccinated by 5pm EDT (2100 GMT) on 1 October or face being placed on unpaid leave until September 2022.

UK government data up to 30 September shows that of the 93,765,322 Covid jabs given, 48,863,490 were first doses, a rise of 34,372 on the previous day.

Some 44,901,832 were second doses, an increase of 34,459.

The UK government said a further 127 people had died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 as of Friday, bringing the total to 136,789.

Separate figures published by the Office for National Statistics show there have been 161,000 deaths registered in the UK where Covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate.

As of 9am on Friday, there had been a further 35,577 lab-confirmed Covid-19 cases in the UK, the government said.

Morocco will soon start giving a third dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, the country’s health ministry said.

Morocco has administered the most doses in Africa, inoculating 19.8 million people out of a population of about 36 million, mostly with Sinopharm, AstraZeneca and Pfizer jabs, Reuters reports.

US health officials are hoping data on Israeli military personnel can help clarify the risk of heart muscle inflammation in younger people who have received Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 booster shots.

A condition called myocarditis has in rare cases been linked to the two-dose mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, mostly in younger males, but US health officials are trying to better understand the risk, Reuters reports.

“The real question that we have not yet answered is the safety data of an mRNA in young people vis-a-vis myocarditis,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser and the top US infectious disease expert, said.

“The Israelis will relatively soon have that data because they’re vaccinating everybody in the country I think from 12 years old up, including their military recruits,” Fauci added.

White House Covid-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients said molnupiravir is “a potential additional tool… to protect people from the worst outcomes of Covid,” but added that vaccination “remains far and away, our best tool against Covid-19.”

The experimental antiviral pill developed by Merck & Co could halve the chances of dying or being hospitalized for those most at risk of contracting severe Covid-19, according to data that experts hailed as a potential breakthrough in how the virus is treated.

If it gets authorisation, molnupiravir, which is designed to introduce errors into the genetic code of the virus, would be the first oral antiviral medication for the virus.

Merck and partner Ridgeback Biotherapeutics said they plan to seek US emergency use authorisation for the pill as soon as possible and to make regulatory applications worldwide, Reuters reports.

The US administered 393,756,866 doses of Covid-19 vaccines in the country as of Friday morning and distributed 477,069,555 doses, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

Those figures are up from the 392,909,995 vaccine doses the CDC said had gone into arms by Thursday out of 474,245,945 doses delivered.

The agency said 214,597,690 people had received at least one dose while 184,852,416 people had been fully vaccinated as of 6:00 a.m. ET on Friday, Reuters reports.

Compared to coronavirus cases earlier in the pandemic, infections with the Delta variant lead to worse outcomes for unvaccinated pregnant women, new data suggests.

Doctors studied 1,515 pregnant women with Covid-19 who received care in Dallas in the US from May 2020 through to September 2021.

Overall, 82 women – 81 of whom were unvaccinated – developed severe illness, including 10 who needed ventilators and two who died, Reuters reports.

The proportion of severe or critical cases among pregnant women was around 5% until early 2021, and were “largely nonexistent” in February and most of March 2021, the researchers said.

In late summer, during the peak of the surge of the Delta variant, the proportion of pregnant Covid-19 patients requiring hospitalisation jumped to 10% to 15%, they reported in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.