Sri Lanka to impose nationwide lockdown – as it happened | World news

You can follow the latest Covid developments in Australia in our dedicated blog –

Mexico’s health ministry reported 21,897 new cases of Covid-19 and 761 more deaths on Friday.

It brings the total number of confirmed cases in the country since the pandemic began to 3,197,108 and the death toll to 252,080, Reuters reports.

The Euro 2020 final at London’s Wembley Stadium in July was a “superspreader” event because about 2,300 people who attended the match were “likely to be infectious” with the coronavirus at the time, The Times newspaper reported.

A further 3,404 people who attended the match between Italy and England went on to develop Covid-19 shortly after the July 11 match and may have contracted the virus at Wembley, Public Health England found, according to the newspaper.

The US Food and Drug Administration is aiming to give full approval to Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine on Monday, the New York Times reported.

Regulators had been working to finish the process by Friday, but were still working through “a substantial amount of paperwork and negotiation with the company,” the Times said.

Brazil has had 33,887 new cases of coronavirus reported in the past 24 hours and 870 deaths from Covid-19, the country’s health ministry said on Friday.

The South American country has now registered 20,528,099 cases since the pandemic began, while the official death toll has risen to 573,511, according to ministry data, Reuters reports.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said people at an increased risk for severe illness from Covid-19 should avoid travel on cruise ships, including river cruises, irrespective of their vaccination status, Reuters reports.

As epidemiologist Michael Baker scrolled through a growing list of New Zealand’s Covid-exposed locations, “my heart just sank,” he says.

Bars, nightclubs, churches, schools, restaurants and hospitals – the bullet points were an infectious disease expert’s nightmare. “Virtually every high risk, indoor environment was on that list.”

It was two days into New Zealand’s outbreak. The country, long a pandemic success story, now faces its biggest hurdle since the pandemic began.

Over the past two months, New Zealand has looked on as elimination success-stories across the Asia-Pacific region battle the Delta variant. Hong Kong, Australia, China, Taiwan and Singapore – all had achieved elimination or close to it. Delta arrived to them all, and many struggled to contain it.

The Florida Board of Education on Friday told two school districts in the US state they would have some of their state funding withheld if they failed within the next 48 hours to provide parents with a way to opt out of a requirement that their children wear masks, Reuters reports.

The US administered 360,634,287 doses of Covid-19 vaccines in the country as of Friday morning and distributed 426,106,115 doses, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
Those figures are up from the 359,623,380 vaccine doses the CDC said had gone into arms by Aug. 19 out of 422,175,735 doses delivered, Reuters reports. The agency said 200,421,787 people had received at least one dose while 169,998,983 people are fully vaccinated as of Friday.