Updated at 2/12/2021, 5: 52: 29 PM BST
Peter Wells in New York
The seven-day average of new coronavirus infections in the US on Friday dropped below 100,000 for the first time in more than three months.
The declining trend has been helped by several days earlier this week when reported new cases dropped below 100,000 for the first time since early November. However, states reported 102,570 additional cases, according to Covid Tracking Project data, up slightly from 102,417 on Thursday.
Over the past week, the US has averaged about 97,351 new infections a day. That is the first time since November 2 the seven-day average has been below 100,000.
The declining trend in cases, alongside a continued drop in hospitalisations over the past five weeks, suggests many states appear to have brought their most recent surge of the pandemic under control.
The number of people currently hospitalised in the US with coronavirus fell to 71,504 on Friday, which is down 46 per cent drop from a peak in early January.
The overall death toll in the US since the start of the pandemic rose to 470,986 from 465,568 on Thursday, according to Covid Tracking Project. That is an increase of 5,418, but 2,500 of these were historical deaths in Ohio, leading Covid Tracking Project to tally 2,918 new reported fatalities on Friday.
Ohio is reconciling its death count, with a particular focus on fatalities occurring in November and December. On Thursday, the state’s health department revealed 721 historical deaths, which Covid Tracking Project included in its daily tally of 3,885 fatalities for the US overall.
Ohio is not the only state to conduct a reconciliation this month. On February 4, Indiana said it had conducted an audit of fatalities in 2020 and 2021 that led it to report 1,507 historical deaths alongside new ones for the day. That pushed the overall US death toll up by 5,212 at the time, although Covid Tracking Project reported in a message on Twitter a daily increase of about 3,700.
Peter Wells in New York
Public health officials in Pennsylvania have ordered vaccine providers to administer at least 80 per cent of their doses within seven days of receiving them or risk having future allocations reduced in an effort to boost the vaccination effort across the state.
Acting secretary of health Alison Beam on Friday issued an order setting out the 80 per cent usage threshold as well as other new requirements for vaccine providers including issuing patients receiving two doses a card reminding them of the return appointment, having both an online and phone-based registration system for appointment scheduling, and more detailed reporting of vaccine inventory and recipients’ race and ethnicity.
“As there is very limited Covid-19 vaccine supply compared to demand, every possible effort must be made so that the vaccine received in the commonwealth is effectively administered,” Beam said in a statement.
Officials warned that vaccine providers in the country’s fifth most populous state risked having their allocation of first doses “reduced, or temporarily suspended” for failure to comply with guidance from the federal government and state law, including Friday’s order. Vaccine providers that are unable to meet the 80 per cent threshold for first doses within seven days of receipt will still receive second doses because those are “secure”.
Pennsylvania, which ranks fifth in the US by population, has administered 1.52m vaccine doses through February 11, the health department revealed on Friday. Since the start of the pandemic, the state has confirmed 888,256 coronavirus infections and 22,959 deaths, the eighth- and fifth-highest tallies among US states, respectively.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as of 6am local time today, the state has administered almost 1.67m shots. That equates to 13,026 doses per 100,000 people, which is among the 15 states with the lowest per capita rates in the US.
In early January, New York announced a similar use-it-or-lose-it-style approach in an effort to speed up the state’s vaccine rollout. Hospitals risked fines if they did not use up their allocations quickly enough.
Kiran Stacey
Schools can reopen safely without teachers being vaccinated as long as everyone wears masks and pupils stay six feet away from each other if possible, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said.
The US public health authority announced new guidelines on Friday for how schools can safely teach children in person, even as coronavirus cases remain high across much of the country. Schools in parts of the country have remained shut throughout the pandemic, with many others still only open part-time, despite mounting evidence that schools are not significant contributors to the spread of the virus.
Dr Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director, said on Friday that states should prioritise vaccinating teachers. But she added that safe reopening was possible even without vaccinations if schools took sufficient mitigation measures.
Walensky said: “The science also shows us that K-12 [primary and secondary] schools that have implemented strict mitigation strategies have been able to safely open for in person instruction and remain open. And today’s operational strategy provides the roadmap to do this safely.”
The CDC guidelines say that if cases are low in a district, schools can open safely as long as everyone wears masks. But if levels are as high — as they currently are in 90 per cent of US counties — children should be kept six feet away from each other and school sports should be reduced.
The CDC is also recommending regular hand-washing, good ventilation and rapid contact tracing should cases occur in schools. All of these remain recommendations however, and the final decisions about schools reopening will be made by state or local education boards, alongside individual schools themselves.
Jude Webber in Mexico City
Mexico City’s Covid-19 risk has reduced, with a decline in hospitalisations, allowing the city government to lower restrictions and pass from the red to the orange traffic light on the national epidemiological system, city authorities said.
“We’re moving into the orange light, but without lowering our guard,” Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico City’s mayor, said. Officials pointed to what they said was the fastest fall in hospital occupancy yet seen, to be about 68 per cent full. A few weeks ago, Mexico City’s hospitals were more than 90 per cent full.
As a result of the reduced risk level, restaurants will now be allowed to open until 10pm with five guests seated at a table outdoors. Gyms and pools can also permit limited entry, as well as churches. Non-essential shops can open at 20 per cent capacity with shoppers allowed to stay 20 minutes.
Overall, Mexico is on course to pass the grim milestone of 2m confirmed cases. As of Thursday night, the national confirmed death toll was 171,234 and case toll 1,968,566, but low nationwide testing and high excess mortality figures indicate that the true spread and impact is at least two and a half times higher.
Andrew Jack in London
Children in some lower income countries have missed out on up to a sixth of their total schooling as a result of closures linked to coronavirus, according to an analysis by a US thinktank which called for rapid measures to reopen and provide support in order to limit the long term economic and social harm.
The Centre for Global Development said that while children in North America had missed more days of schooling in recent months than others around the world, closures in parts of Africa and Asia had already far greater consequences given the shorter total number of years that children remained in school and the absence of alternative online provision.
It said those in South Sudan had already lost an estimated sixth of their total schooling, followed by children in Sudan, Chad, Pakistan and Ethiopia.
The analysis highlighted growing concerns over children falling behind in their education in different countries, with lower levels of learning and a greater impact among the vulnerable and disadvantaged.
There are also worries that many children in lower income countries will drop out of school entirely, with rising pregnancies and girls drawn into early marriages.
“The long-term impacts on earnings will be felt most clearly among those who were already disadvantaged,” David Evans and Susannah Hares, fellows at the thinktank, said.
Leila Abboud in Paris
A French panel of medical experts advising the government has recommended that people who have already been infected with Covid-19 should be given only one dose of vaccine roughly six months after infection so as to boost their immunity.
It represents a change from their earlier advice that people who had had Covid-19 already should not get the vaccine since they probably had natural immunity lasting at least three months.
If followed by the French, government the advice of the Haute Autorite de Sante will mean that more people will become eligible for vaccination in the coming months. France appears to be one of the first countries in Europe to issue such advice.
“At this stage of scientific research, people who have been infected are considered to have immunity,” the committee wrote in an opinion published Friday. “This leads us to recommend only one dose to people who have been infected, regardless of when they were infected. The single dose will then play the role of a booster.”
France has vaccinated about 4 per cent of its adult population — 2.8m people — with at least one dose since it began its national campaign in late December.
James Politi in Washington
Janet Yellen, the US treasury secretary, pressed G7 finance ministers and central bank governors to “go big” with fiscal support for the global economy and said the Biden administration would return to “international engagement” following four years of scepticism from Donald Trump.
According to a spokesperson for the US Treasury, Yellen said Washington was committed to “multilateralism to solve global issues” and placed “a high priority on deepening our international engagement and strengthening our alliances”.
As Joe Biden, the US president, pushes Congress to approve his $1.9tn fiscal stimulus plan in the face of Republican opposition, Yellen told the top G7 economic officials that “the time to go big is now” and that the G7 “should be focused on what more we can do to provide support at this time”, according to a US treasury department spokesperson.
In a big shift from the Trump administration, Yellen said the US supported G7 efforts to tackle climate change. “We understand the crucial role that the United States must play in the global climate effort,” she said.
As the US reviews whether to back a plan for the IMF to allocate up to $500bn in special drawing rights to its members to tackle the pandemic fallout, Yellen said the G7 should work to “address the challenges facing low-income countries”.
Matthew Rocco
Americans were feeling less optimistic about the economy in early February, as sentiment fell to a six-month low with lower-income households experiencing setbacks in their current finances.
The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index fell to a reading of 76.2 from 79 in January, bucking economists’ expectations for an improvement to 80.8.
Richard Curtin, chief economist for the university’s surveys of consumers, said the “entire loss” in the index was concentrated in consumers’ dimmer outlook for the economy and among households earning less than $75,000.
An index of consumer expectations dropped to 69.8 from 74 at the end of January. Consumers’ view of current economic conditions held fairly steady at 86.2, compared with 86.7 last month.
“Households with incomes in the bottom third reported significant setbacks in their current finances, with fewer of these households mentioning recent income gains than anytime since 2014,” Curtin said.
Only 23 per cent of respondents in that income bracket reported having improved finances, compared with 54 per cent of households with incomes in the top third.
“Presumably a new round of stimulus payments will reduce financial hardships among those with the lowest incomes,” Curtin added. “More surprising was the finding that consumers, despite the expected passage of a massive stimulus bill, viewed prospects for the national economy less favorably in early February than last month.”
President Joe Biden has proposed a third round of cheques for Americans as part of a $1.9tn package of fiscal stimulus and other measures.
Biden’s proposal faces opposition from Republicans wary of passing another massive bill, after Congress approved $3.5tn in pandemic-related spending last year. But Democrats recently moved forward with a budget reconciliation process that could allow them to pass the bill without Republican support.
Partisan opinions have swayed consumer sentiment since the November election, with Democrats viewing the economic outlook more favourably.
Mure Dickie in Edinburgh
The coronavirus pandemic and punitive US tariffs sent exports of Scotch whisky down by 23 per cent to £3.8bn last year, the lowest level in a decade.
Data compiled by the Scotch Whisky Association showed the value of exports to the US, the sector’s biggest international market, fell 32 per cent to £729m in 2020. Washington imposed 25 per cent tariffs on imports of single malt Scotch in October 2019.
“The US has been, for decades, our strongest and most valuable market, but Scotch whisky is now losing considerable ground there,” the association said, adding that it hoped the UK government would help soften the blow by cutting spirits duty.
Sales to France, the second largest export market for Scotch, were down 13 per cent to £375m. But some EU markets were harder hit, with exports to Germany down 25 per cent to £139m.
Chivas Brothers, the whisky arm of drinks group Pernod Ricard, said on Friday that there had been an improvement in international sales in the second half of the year. While its global sales were down 10 per cent year-on-year in the second half of 2020, this was much better than the 27 per cent fall suffered in the previous six months.
“These results reinforce our confidence in the resilience of Scotch,” said Jean-Christophe Coutures, Chivas chairman and chief executive.
The coronavirus crisis has hurt other premium Scottish exports. Overseas sales of whole, fresh farmed salmon fell 27 per cent to £451m in 2020, according to data from the Scottish Salmon Producers Organisation.
Shipments of fresh salmon to markets outside Europe have been badly disrupted by the cancellation of many flights and producers are concerned that EU sales will be hurt by the increased complexity and cost of trade caused by the end of the Brexit transition period.
Anna Gross
Coronavirus infection numbers are continuing to decline across the UK, according to several indicators published on Friday.
Government figures showed the top of the range given for the country’s estimated R value, which represents the average number of individuals whom one person with Covid-19 is likely to go on and infect, has dipped below 1 for the first time since July. The range now stands at 0.7 to 0.9.
Ministers have been at pains to bring the closely watched R number below 1, as scientists regard it as crucial that the milestone is passed before any lockdown measures are relaxed. Though the R number mid-point has hovered between 0.7 and 1.1 over the past few weeks, the latest data represent the first time in more than six months that the range as a whole has been estimated as lower than 1.
The estimates from the Government Office for Science mean that every 10 people with Covid-19 will infect between another seven and nine. That is a decline from between seven and 10 the week before.
Philip Georgiadis, Anna Gross and Jasmine Cameron-Chileshe in London
The UK government’s new border regime to tackle Covid-19 came under increasing strain on Friday, with its quarantine hotel booking system down for a second day and private providers querying the passenger testing system.
Anyone arriving in England from 33 high-risk countries will from Monday have to book into a government-approved hotel to self-isolate under supervision for 10 days, in response to growing concern that dangerous variants of Covid-19 could be imported from abroad.
But the government booking website went down shortly after its launch on Thursday afternoon and was still offline almost 24 hours later.
A message said that due to a “minor technical issue” the system would not be available until “later today”, the same message as when it first broke on Thursday.
A government spokesperson said on Friday the portal should be “back up and running” on Friday.
The technical problems are the latest blow to a policy that has been criticised by some parts of the Conservative party and from within the travel industry.
Airports said they would struggle to staff the new system, so Border Force officers will identify passengers before outsourcers, including G4S and Mitie, provide staff to help transport passengers to the hotels, according to two people familiar with the matter. Both companies declined to comment.
There have also been questions over whether passengers will be properly isolated once they arrive in hotels for their 10-day, £1,750 stays.
Read more here.
Anna Gross
About one in 80 people has Covid-19 in England, the Office for National Statistics said on Friday, pointing to a decline in the rate of infections in recent weeks.
More than 695,000 people living in England were estimated to have coronavirus in the week to February 6, a decline from 847,000 the week before, when one in 65 people in the country was believed to be positive.
London has the highest proportion of people testing positive, at about 1.6 per cent, followed by the West Midlands, North West, East of England, and East Midlands at 1.4 per cent.
In Scotland, the proportion with the virus was closer to one in 150, down from one in 115 in the previous week. Infection rates also declined in Wales, to about one in 85, and in Northern Ireland, to about one in 75.
Separate data from the Zoe Covid symptom study meanwhile found there were about 14,800 daily symptomatic Covid-19 cases in the week to Sunday, a 27 per cent decrease on the week before.
Leila Abboud in Paris
L’Oréal, the world’s biggest cosmetics maker, envisions a boom for beauty once the Covid-19 pandemic subsides similar to the roaring 1920s that followed the global influenza pandemic of 1918.
“This will be the fiesta of make-up and fragrances,” predicted chief executive Jean-Paul Agon at an investor conference on annual results on Friday. “Putting on lipstick again will be a symbol of returning to life.”
The upbeat message came after the company behind brands such as Maybelline, Garnier and Kiehl’s reported stronger-than-expected sales in the fourth quarter driven by Chinese shoppers and a surge in ecommerce. Both trends helped offset the damage wrought by the coronavirus pandemic last year, allowing L’Oréal to limit the profit hit from store and salon closures.
Read more here
Naomi Rovnick
Asset price inflation will “flip from Wall Street to Main Street” after coronavirus lockdowns end, strategists at Bank of America have forecast, as they predict investors will move out of stocks and bonds and into collectibles, commodities and even diamonds.
In a research note, the bank’s strategists argued that the release of “pent-up savings” combined with a government stimulus plan in the US will create a run on inflation caused by factors such as supply bottlenecks and higher food and energy prices. “Real assets will outperform financial assets,” they wrote.
Since 1950, according to BofA, prices of commodities, platinum, property and diamonds have been most correlated with accelerating inflation, with long-term government bonds doing the worst.
Fans of such “reflation trade” arguments often point out that stocks and bonds could suffer as consumer price indices rise. Inflation erodes the cash value of coupons paid by bonds, which could encourage a sell-off of assets such as US Treasuries.
This would push up Treasury yields, influencing investors to demand higher earnings yields from stocks and depressing equity valuations that have hit record highs.
Financial markets are forecasting faster inflation, while the US central bank has said that any bump in prices as the economy recovers will be temporary.
Meanwhile, a debate is raging over whether US president Joe Biden’s multitrillion dollar coronavirus relief and infrastructure spending package will cause the world’s largest economy to overheat.
The 10-year break-even rate, a market measure of future US inflation, is running at around 2.2 per cent.
Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell said this week, however, that any inflation bump in the US would be “neither large nor sustained” because America’s labour market remained weak.
Another senior Fed official has said that strong disinflationary forces from globalisation and technology will keep prices subdued.
Christopher Wood, strategist at Jefferies, said that even if the Fed did not respond to an overheating economy by raising interest rates, “the prescription from the progressive wing of the Democrat party will be to address it with higher taxation”, which would also be bad news for share prices.
“The risks are building for obviously overvalued US equities,” Wood wrote in a research note.
The Financial Times has been your guide to the pandemic since the first outbreak was detected over a year ago. Here are some of the developments we were reporting on a year ago today:
• A quarantine officer working on the stricken Diamond Princess cruise ship contracted coronavirus as Japan confirmed another 39 infections among passengers. Total cases on board reached 174 out of 492 passengers tested.
• Chinese authorities began emergency requisitioning of private hospitals, hotels, apartments, cars and even face masks as the country’s rising number of coronavirus patients threatened to overwhelm local government facilities.
• DBS, Singapore’s largest bank, evacuated 300 staff from its headquarters after one employee tested positive.
• Neil Ferguson, director of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London, said that case numbers so far were “the tip of the iceberg” and that it was “the early phases of a global pandemic”.
• Europe’s largest telecoms conference was cancelled after companies from Deutsche Telekom and Nokia to Amazon and Vodafone refused to attend over fears of the spread.
• London recorded its first case after a woman, who picked up the virus in China, was diagnosed.
For all the latest on the pandemic, visit the FT’s coronavirus home page.
Have coronavirus vaccines reduced infection rates so far? How effective are they in combating mutations? Can governments hit inoculation targets?
As the vaccine rush gathers pace, Financial Times experts in the UK and US are today answering your questions about coronavirus and the jabs being injected into arms around the world to end the crisis.
Issues covered so far include comparisons between the new vaccines and the annual flu equivalents, how frequently coronavirus mutates, and financial arrangements between drug companies and health systems.
One reader who has received two doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is concerned about its effectiveness and wonders if a booster or supplement would be advisable. Another asks whether it would be possible for scientists to genetically engineer a more benign strain to help eradicate more dangerous variants.
Join Clive Cookson, the FT’s science editor in London, and Hannah Kuchler, pharma and biotech reporter in New York, at the live Q&A session.
Naomi Rovnick
Investors snapped up Italian government bonds on Friday after the largest party in the national parliament backed former European Bank chief Mario Draghi to lead the nation out of the pandemic.
The yield on 10-year Italian government bonds, which moves inversely to the price of the securities, hit a fresh record low of just under 0.43 per cent, according to Refinitiv data.
This came after an online poll of rank-and-file supporters of Italy’s Five Star Movement showed that almost 60 per cent supported a coalition led by Draghi, who was asked last week by Italy’s president to form the unity government.
The result gave Draghi the backing of almost every political party in Italy.
Investors hope Draghi can deploy some €200bn of EU recovery funds to relaunch Italy’s sclerotic economy and break down barriers to investment.
Here, the FT’s Sam Fleming, Miles Johnson and Daniel Dombey explain the scale of Draghi’s challenge and how Brussels may use its leverage to back him.
Martin Arnold in Frankfurt
The head of Germany’s central bank has predicted that inflation in the country will surge to more than 3 per cent this year and warned that monetary policy will need to be tightened “if the price outlook requires it”.
Jens Weidmann, president of the Bundesbank, said that, while monetary policy was being kept “very expansionary” to tackle the fallout from the pandemic, “when inflation rates rise in the euro area, we will again discuss the fundamental direction of monetary policy”.
In an interview with Augsburger Allgemeine published on Friday morning, Weidmann also supported calls for Germany to return to its strict curbs on budget deficits next year and warned that once the pandemic ended countries would need to cut their inflated debt piles.
Weidmann is one of the most conservative “hawks” on the European Central Bank’s governing council. His latest comments are one of the first signs that the hawks among ECB policymakers are starting to think about tightening monetary policy once the pandemic ends, after months of being mostly supportive of its ultra-loose policies to tackle the crisis.
Oliver Ralph
Bill Michael has quit as chair of KPMG UK, days after he told staff to “stop moaning” about work conditions.
“I am truly sorry that my words have caused hurt amongst my colleagues and for the impact the events of this week have had on them,” Michael said in a statement on Friday. “In light of that, I regard my position as untenable and so I have decided to leave the firm. It has been a privilege to have acted as chair of KPMG.”
Michael had stepped aside this week while the Big Four accountancy firm investigated “alleged comments” he made during an online meeting with staff, a spokesperson said on Wednesday.
His move comes after the Financial Times reported comments made by Michael at a meeting with the firm’s financial services consultancy team on Monday where he told staff to “stop moaning” and to stop “playing the victim card”.
Bina Mehta has stepped in as acting chair of KPMG UK.
Alistair Gray
England is facing a critical week for determining the route out of lockdown, Home Office minister Victoria Atkins has said.
The public should expect to get a “really good idea” on February 22 of how restrictions might be loosened, Atkins said on Friday. That is the day prime minister Boris Johnson is due to set out his strategy for lifting the restrictions.
Before then, however, ministers had to examine data on the effectiveness of the vaccination campaign in dealing with infections and mutations of coronavirus.
“Next week is a critical week,” she told Sky News. “We’re going to gather all of the data and review that data.”
Atkins said she had not booked a summer holiday, adding: “We’re all looking to the summer, and hoping that things will be better.”
Sarah Provan
Jet2 has raised more than £400m in an equity issue, which the UK package holiday group believes will provide a buffer to help it through the difficulties thrown up by coronavirus-related national lockdowns and travel restrictions.
The leisure travel group’s sale of more than 35m shares at £11.80 each was “significantly oversubscribed” and raised £422m, Jet2 said in a statement on Friday. The price represents a discount of about 9 per cent to Thursday’s closing share price.
“The board believes that the proceeds will provide sufficient liquidity on an extended and likely unpredictable shutdown basis to deal with this continually challenging trading environment,” said executive chair Philip Meeson.
The group hopes the extra funds will enable it to take longer-term decisions and improve the ability of Jet2 to “exit the pandemic in a stable commercial position”, he added.
The Jet2 brand operates a fleet of almost 100 aircraft from a number of regional airports in the UK, such as Belfast International, Birmingham and Leeds Bradford. Before the pandemic struck last year the group became the second-biggest UK travel business by market share. It flies to popular holiday hotspots around the Mediterranean, cities popular for weekend breaks and ski resorts.
Oliver Ralph
Brit, one of the largest insurance companies in the Lloyd’s of London market, has predicted that the industry’s overall losses from the pandemic will be well above the $107bn that was initially forecast.
“Lloyd’s has suggested that Covid-19 could be the market’s largest ever single loss event, initially estimating a potential of $107bn in claims, with Lloyd’s share likely to be in excess of $4.0bn,” said Brit in a statement on Friday. “Given the protracted nature of the pandemic, these estimates are likely to be significantly exceeded.”
The comments came as Brit, which is owned by Canada’s Fairfax Group, posted a $232m net loss for 2020, against a $180m profit in 2019 as Covid-19 claims and a series of large natural catastrophes pushed up payouts.
Brit expects to pay $271m in Covid-related claims but said that the final total would depend on how long lockdowns and social distancing last. The company also said it was looking at “medium-term claims from a global recession, which typically brings increased moral hazard, fraud and a more litigious environment.”
The pandemic also hit the investment return that Brit earns on the money it holds to pay claims. The company recorded a 1 per cent return in 2020, down from 3.6 per cent in 2019.
Alice Hancock and Kate Beioley
Lastminute.com, the online travel company, is facing legal action from the UK’s competition regulator within a week unless it refunds £1m to customers whose holidays were cancelled last year.
The Competition and Markets Authority said on Friday that lastminute.com had promised in December to repay £7m to 9,000 customers whose travel plans were cancelled as a result of the pandemic, but that over £1m was still outstanding. The deadline for the refunds set by the watchdog was January 31.
The CMA added that the travel company had also failed to refund customers within the statutory 14 day period for holidays cancelled after December 3 and had told some customers that they had to reclaim their money directly from airlines – a breach of the package travel regulations.
Lastminute.com could not be immediately reached for comment.
The ruling comes as UK ministers warned this week that the public should hold off booking holidays until later in the year, once greater progress had been made with the vaccination programme.
Holiday companies that had been relying on the summer to recoup last year’s record losses fear that they could be pushed to the brink of collapse without bookings for the high season this year.
The CMA’s move represents a serious escalation in its work for package holiday customers, which has resulted in warnings to over 100 companies and commitments from Virgin Holidays and Tui among others.
“We take breaches of commitments extremely seriously. If Lastminute.com does not comply with the law and pay people their outstanding refunds quickly, we will take the company to court,” said Andrea Coscelli, the CMA’s chief executive.
Valentina Romei
The UK economy grew more than expected in the fourth quarter despite extensive Covid-19 restrictions, but the outlook for the start of the year has darkened.
UK output expanded 1 per cent in the three months to December compared with the previous three months, data from the Office for National Statistics showed on Friday.
This is stronger than the 0.5 forecast by economists polled by Reuters.
UK output was down 7.8 per cent compared with the final quarter of 2019. This is nearly twice the decline in Germany and about three times the drop in the US, reflecting long periods of strict restrictions in the UK.
In 2020, the UK output fell 9.9 per cent, the fastest pace in 300 years and more than twice the fall during the financial crisis, laying bare the full scale of the impact of the pandemic.
The Bank of England expects the economy to contract sharply in the first quarter as a national lockdown has closed schools and most client-facing services. But the UK has been swift with its vaccine campaign, raising hopes of an economic recovery from the spring.
At least 151,654,985 doses of coronavirus vaccines have been administered around the world, data from 84 locations show.
After a year of breakneck research into more than 230 vaccine candidates, seven coronavirus vaccines are now in use in at least one country. Israel has been the fastest to roll out inoculations. More than a third of its population have already received at least one dose of vaccine.
The numbers shown here are updated frequently, using data compiled by the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford as well as national data sources from some countries.
Check out the FT Visual and Data Journalism team’s tracker here
Emma Agyemang
When British pilots at Emirates, the Gulf airline, returned to the UK from the Middle East last year after losing their jobs because of the pandemic, they had little hope of finding more work in aviation amid a global travel shutdown.
To compound their difficulties, many now also face big and unexpected tax bills, having moved from a low-tax location back to Britain. Those who earned £80,000 in a year now face a bill of around £20,000, according to Max Porter, a tax consultant specialising in expat finances.
“They thought they were overseas earning tax-free cash … but they’re actually UK resident,” says Porter of the former Emirates pilots he has advised. Those with several years in the Gulf under their belt may have savings, but some worked for Emirates for as little as 12 months.
“The added kicker is that given the industry they work in, there are no jobs. They can’t even start working. They’ve got this tax bill to pay, but no way to pay it.”
Read more here
Anna Gross and Sebastian Payne in London
UK scientific advisers have questioned whether a “big wave of infection” should be allowed to flow through the country’s population once the most vulnerable groups in society have been vaccinated against coronavirus, in comments which may reopen the contentious debate around herd immunity.
With prime minister Boris Johnson preparing to set out the road map for lifting England’s Covid-19 lockdown on February 22, the scientists have warned a national discussion will soon be needed on the level of risk people are prepared to accept from the virus in the future.
“There will be a massive debate about whether we should allow a big wave of infection once we’ve vaccinated all the over-50s,” one influential member of the government’s Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M) told the FT. “Are we going to aim for low prevalence or accept high prevalence for a period?”
“It boils down to what we, as a society, are prepared to accept,” added Mike Tildesley, an academic at the University of Warwick and also a member of SPI-M. “We see waves of seasonal influenza and we don’t lockdown every winter, we accept a level of risk.”
Read more here
Gary Jones in Hong Kong
The World Health Organization on Thursday highlighted “three major threats” to the UN-led international equitable vaccine initiative, Covax.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director general, drew attention to a $27bn financing gap in the ACT Accelerator that supports the equitable distribution of coronavirus tests, treatments and vaccines globally.
“The longer this gap goes unmet, the harder it becomes to understand why, given this is a tiny fraction of the trillions of dollars that have been mobilised for stimulus packages in G20 countries,” he said.
Tedros also called on countries “to respect Covax contracts and not compete with them”, and he underscored the need for “an urgent scale-up in manufacturing to increase the volume of vaccines” with “innovative partnerships” to include tech transfer, licensing and “other mechanisms to address production bottlenecks”.
Robin Harding in Tokyo
A first shipment of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine has arrived in Tokyo as Japan prepares for a belated approval and start to inoculations against Covid-19.
Approval for the jab is expected as early as today after the company completed and submitted a local study testing whether the vaccine generated an adequate level of antibodies in Japanese subjects.
Japan intends to vaccinate healthcare workers first and then the elderly. However, the pace of the rollout is unclear and will depend on how fast Pfizer can deliver supplies from its plants in Belgium and the US.
Although Japan has a contract to buy 144m doses of the BioNTech/ Pfizer vaccine by the end of 2021, there is a fierce global competition to get the drug first.
Japan also has contracts with AstraZeneca and Moderna. AstraZeneca has begun its submission for approval in Japan and expects to deliver final data in mid-March. Moderna is still conducting local trials and is not expected to submit its vaccine for approval until May.
Jamie Smyth in Sydney
Australian authorities have ordered a five-day lockdown of the state of Victoria in efforts to prevent the spread of a growing cluster of Covid-19 cases connected to a breach of hotel quarantine at the city’s airport.
The Victorian state government said on Friday it had detected 13 cases of the fast-spreading UK variant of coronavirus linked to the outbreak, which occurred at the Holiday Inn at Melbourne airport.
The lockdown, which includes a stay-at-home order for people living in Melbourne, is likely to severely impact the Australian Open tennis tournament, which is currently taking place in the city in front of limited crowds.
Daniel Andrews, Victoria’s premier, said the lockdown was required as a “circuit breaker” because of the hyper-infectivity and speed at which the UK variant of Covid-19 was spreading in the community.
“We must assume that there are further cases in the community than we have positive results for, and that it is moving at a velocity that has not been seen anywhere in our country,” he said.
This is the third major lockdown in Victoria, which managed to eliminate community transmission of Covid-19 following a gruelling 112-day lockdown last year that enabled life to return to some semblance of normality.
Under the new lockdown rules people are expected to stay in their home unless they work in essential services, need to buy groceries or are involved in care-giving. People are also restricted to staying within 5km of their homes, except in exceptional circumstances.
The outbreak has been linked to a family of three people who stayed at the Holiday Inn and infected a hotel quarantine worker.
Gary Jones in Hong Kong
A surge in Covid-19 deaths across Africa is a “disturbing” sign that its health systems are dangerously overstretched, the WHO said on Thursday.
With the continent set to mark on February 14 one year since its first case, the WHO said Africa had experienced a near 40 per cent surge in Covid-19 fatalities in the last month, pushing the death toll towards 100,000.
“This grim milestone must refocus everyone on stamping out the virus,” the WHO’s regional director for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, said at a virtual press conference.
In the last 28 days, the WHO said, over 22,300 African deaths had been reported, compared with nearly 16,000 in the previous 28 days.
This jump in fatalities came amid Africa’s second wave, which began in October and peaked on January 6, having spread significantly faster and proven more lethal than the first wave. At the same time, the WHO said, new Covid-19 strains have been spreading rapidly.
The variant first identified in South Africa has now been detected in eight African countries, while the mutation originally discovered in the UK has been found in six.
“This is obviously very disappointing news but the situation is very dynamic”, said Moeti. “While a vaccine that protects against all forms of Covid-19 is our biggest hope, preventing severe cases which overwhelm hospitals is crucial.”
Jasmine Cameron-Chileshe in London
British ministers are expected to discuss initial proposals for vaccine and testing certificates on Friday, as the government begins to explore possibilities for the safe reopening of international travel.
Under the plans, first reported by Sky News, departments including the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the Department for Transport would be central to the programme, alongside the NHS.
The news comes as Grant Shapps, transport secretary, said earlier in the week that he had discussed with his counterparts in the US and Singapore the creation of an “internationally recognised system” to enable safe travel.
“I imagine that in the future there will be an international system where countries will want to know that you have been potentially vaccinated or potentially had tests taken before flying, before you come in,” he told the BBC.
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Gary Jones in Hong Kong
New Zealand’s first batch of BioNTech/Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine is due to arrive in the country next week, with vaccination of border workers set to begin February 20, the government said on Friday.
“Last year we indicated the vaccine would arrive in quarter two, and earlier this year we updated that to quarter one. It’s pleasing to be receiving doses this early in quarter one,” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said.
Ardern said New Zealand’s priority was its border workers and those working in managed isolation and quarantine facilities.
Starting in the Auckland region, the government aims for all such workers to receive the jab within two to three weeks. They will be followed by their household contacts.
“Healthcare and essential workers and those most at risk from Covid-19 will follow in quarter two, before vaccination of the wider population in the second half of the year,” Ardern said.
The government said its goal was subject to transportation and temperature control constraints. The BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine must be stored at -70C.
“On arrival, the vaccine must be independently tested for quality assurance, which is another important safety check,” said Chris Hipkins, New Zealand’s Covid-19 response minister. “The doses will then be formally released to start the first phase of the vaccination programme.”
Peter Wells in New York
The US on Thursday reported more than 100,000 new coronavirus cases for the first time in five days and daily deaths remained elevated, providing a pause to some encouraging downward trends that formed recently.
States reported 103,024 new infections, according to Covid Tracking Project. This was the first time since Saturday that daily cases have been over 100,000, having fallen below that threshold on Sunday for the first time since the start of November.
Authorities attributed a further 3,885 fatalities to coronavirus, up from 3,445 on Wednesday.
The latest figure was boosted by a record 721 deaths reported in a single day in Ohio, although the health department said that “about 650” of those were the result of reconciliation of coronavirus fatalities the state is conducting. “Newly reported deaths will be higher during the next few days” as it completes this reconciliation process, it said.
Thursday’s increase in the death toll was the biggest single-day rise in at least a week. On Thursday last week, an audit of deaths in Indiana for 2020 and 2021 resulted in the state adding more than 1,500 fatalities to its death toll.
On the day, Covid Tracking Project said on Twitter the country had reported about 3,700 deaths, but a Financial Times analysis of state totals, which included North Carolina’s revisions, put the one-day increase at 5,212.
Putting aside last Thursday’s 5,000-plus figure, the latest increase is the biggest one-day rise since January 28.
Hospitalisations continued their downward trend, though. The number of patients currently in US hospitals being treated for coronavirus dropped to 74,225, the lowest level since January 16.
Alice Woodhouse in Hong Kong
Asia-Pacific stocks were little changed on Friday with much of the region closed for the first day of the lunar new year.
Japan’s Topix was up 0.3 per cent, while the S&P/ASX 200 slipped 0.1 per cent in Australia.
Markets in China, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan are closed for the holidays.
On Wall Street on Thursday, the S&P 500 edged up 0.2 per cent and the tech-focused Nasdaq Composite added 0.4 per cent. Those moves came after a fall in new unemployment claims to 793,000 from 812,000 a week earlier.
“A downward trend is now evident in the data and this is expected to continue as Covid-19 case numbers ease,” ANZ analysts said in a note.
Peter Wells in New York
Florida’s governor responded to reports claiming the Biden administration was considering travel restrictions on Americans — and possibly those from his state — in an effort to curb rising cases of coronavirus variants, describing them as “unconstitutional” and “unjust”.
According to a Miami Herald report on Wednesday there are “active discussions” in the White House about what could be done to reduce the spread of several coronavirus variants that were first identified in the UK, Brazil and South Africa that are more infectious than the regular strain. The report said talk of potential travel restrictions did not target any specific states, and according to one unnamed White House official, no policy announcements were imminent.
Florida has confirmed more cases of a coronavirus strain first identified in the UK than any other US state. According to data as of February 9 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 343 cases of the B.1.1.7 strain have been identified there, more than double the 156 in second-ranked California and ahead of New York’s 59.
California on Wednesday confirmed its first two cases of a variant first identified in South Africa. It is the first time the B.1.351 strain has been identified away from the east coast of the US. South Carolina confirmed the first case of this variant in late January, and it has since been found in Maryland and Virginia.
The prevalence of variants in those states could make them targets if the Biden administration decided to impose travel restrictions.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, at a press briefing on Thursday, criticised the reported talks of “travel restrictions on Americans and Floridians” and that he would oppose the idea “100 per cent”.
“It would purely be a political attack against the people of Florida,” he continued.
According to the Miami Herald report, Florida Senator Marco Rubio wrote a letter to President Joe Biden in which he said restrictions on the state would be “reckless and economically harmful.”
In a Twitter message on Thursday morning Rubio said Donald Trump’s decision in late January 2020 to ban travel from China was met with accusations of “hysteria, xenophobia, and fear mongering … But now he [Biden] is considering restrictions on #Florida travel”.
Earlier this week transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg and CDC director Rochelle Walensky floated the possibility of a coronavirus testing requirement for domestic air travel. Delta Air Lines chief executive Ed Bastian voiced his opposition, calling it a “horrible idea” and a “logistical nightmare”.
Anna Nicolaou in New York
Disney said the pandemic knocked $2.6bn from its operating income in the most recent quarter, as its once-mighty theme parks were shut or operating at limited capacity.
The world’s largest entertainment company warned the pandemic would increase its costs by about $1bn in the current fiscal year, because it has to spend more on safety measures to combat spread of the virus.
However, Disney also revealed it had lured nearly 95m subscribers to its Disney Plus streaming service, the big bet that has cemented the legacy media group as a serious rival to Netflix.
Disney shares climbed more than 3 per cent in after-hours trade. The stock has jumped by more than a third in the past year, even as the company bled billions of dollars because of the pandemic, as investors focused on the promise of streaming.
Subscribers to Disney Plus grew to 95m as of January 2, up from 87m on December 2. The bump in subscriptions was helped by the Christmas Day premiere of Soul, a critically praised Pixar film, on Disney Plus.
Overall, Disney’s operating income shrunk 67 per cent to $1.3bn in the quarter. Net income of $29m compared with $2.1bn in the same quarter the year before, on total revenues that were down 22 per cent to $16.2bn.
On an adjusted basis, Disney posted earnings of 32 cents a share, down nearly 80 per cent from a year ago but eclipsing Wall Street forecasts.
Mamta Badkar in New York
Expedia, the online travel booking company, reported a bigger-than-expected revenue decline and a fourth consecutive quarterly loss as the pandemic continues to take a toll on the travel industry.
The Seattle, Washington-based company behind Egencia and Orbitz reported revenues of $920m in the fourth quarter, down by two-thirds from the same period a year ago. That missed expectations for $1.1bn, according to a survey of Wall Street analysts by Refinitiv.
Expedia on Thursday reported a loss of $412m or $2.89 a share — its fourth consecutive quarterly loss — compared with net income of $76m or 52 cents a share attributable to the company in the same period a year ago. Adjusting for one-time items, the company reported a loss of $2.64 a share, wider than analysts’ estimates for a loss of $2 a share.
Travel companies suffered a sharp drop in revenues because of the pandemic, which has hit air travel and holiday bookings. Expedia said gross bookings, or total value of booked transactions, fell 67 per cent to $7.57bn and that bookings worsened in November — amid a resurgence in cases — before moderating in December.
“The fourth quarter brought signs of hope in the form of vaccine approvals, but rising cases across the globe and rolling shutdowns of various travel markets made an impact,” chief executive Peter Kern, said.
For these reasons there was no real improvement from the third quarter, except for “some signs of modest improvement around the holidays that carried into the early part of 2021,” he added.
The arthritis drug tocilizumab saves lives and accelerates recovery in patients admitted to hospital with Covid-19, a UK trial has confirmed. The Recovery trial run by Oxford university studied 4,000 people who needed oxygen therapy but were not in intensive care. Tocilizumab cut patients’ mortality risk by about 15 per cent.
The global rollout of jabs has gathered pace with more than 150m administered but the EU’s inoculation rate has stuttered, according to the Financial Times vaccine tracker. Israel and the United Arab Emirates steam ahead with their programmes while the UK and the US are frontrunners among countries with larger populations.
The governor of Ireland’s central bank, Gabriel Makhlouf, has warned insurance companies not to avoid paying out to customers for business interruption claims. Disputes have erupted around the world since the start of the pandemic over whether policies should pay out for business losses.
First-time claims for US unemployment benefits fell to 793,000 last week, as the labour market showed modest signs of improvement as it tries to rebound from the winter surge in cases.
PepsiCo expects to increase sales this year after demand for snacks and sodas from housebound consumers helped the food and drinks company produce a bigger than anticipated rise in revenues in the last three months of 2020.
More than half of the UK adult population is exhibiting financial vulnerability in the wake of Covid-19, according to data from the UK regulator. Some 27.7m UK adults were showing characteristics of vulnerability including poor health, low financial resilience or recent negative life events in October, according to the Financial Conduct Authority’s Financial Lives Survey.
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