Updated at 2/21/2021, 10: 26: 52 AM BST
Sarah Provan
Boris Johnson is preparing to outline a four-stage strategy to relax “cautiously” the lockdown that has closed schools and non-essential businesses and limited people’s movement across the UK since Christmas.
“Today I’ll be setting out a roadmap to bring us out of lockdown cautiously,” the prime minister said on Twitter. He said the government’s priority was to get children back to school, and that it was also looking for ways for “people to reunite with loved ones”.
Johnson is to address parliament in the afternoon before making a statement to the nation in the evening, setting out his plans to start easing restrictions in two weeks.
Under the plans for England, Johnson is expected to say:
From March 8
• All schools will return
• Children’s outdoor sports and activity can resume
• One-to-one outdoor socialising will relax, with two adults able to enjoy a coffee, picnic or drinks in public spaces
• Each care home resident will be designated a regular visitor with whom they can hold hands
From March 29
• Six people or two households will be able to meet outdoors, including in private gardens
• Organised and outdoor sport for adults, such as tennis, basketball and golf, will resume
• People will be able to travel beyond their local areas, but with guidance still recommending they stay local. Overnight stays will not be permitted
Progress on vaccinations will be central to how quickly the government moves through the remaining stages. A third of British adults have received the vaccine, with 17.6m receiving a first dose. All adults are to be offered jabs by the end of July. Also critical will be case numbers and deaths, how well the NHS is coping with hospital admissions and the risks of coronavirus variants.
Young primary pupils in Scotland on Monday were the first in the UK to return to their classroom. Schools in Wales will return a week later than in England. Some schools in Northern Ireland will return on March 8.
Martin Arnold
Confidence among German companies has rebounded to the highest level since the country’s second lockdown was imposed in November, boosted by an export-led surge in manufacturing, a widely tracked survey revealed.
The Ifo Institute in Munich said on Monday its business climate indicator rose to a four-month high of 92.4 this month, after hitting a seven-month low of 90.3 last month. The reading was higher than the 90.5 expected by economists polled by Reuters.
Europe’s largest economy has been weighed down by restrictions since November to contain rising coronavirus infections. While the government recently extended most restrictions until at least March 7, primary schools reopened this week in many regions.
“Assessments of the current business situation were more positive,” said Clemens Fuest, president of the Ifo Institute. “Moreover, pessimism regarding the coming months was markedly reduced. The German economy is proving robust despite the lockdown, especially thanks to strength in industry.”
The Ifo index of confidence among German manufacturers rose to the highest level since November 2018, while services companies in the country also grew more optimistic and pessimism abated among trading and construction companies.
Leke Oso Alabi in London
European equities fell on Monday after three consecutive weekly gains, as concerns about the inflation picture continued to undermine investor confidence.
In Europe, the region-wide Stoxx 600 fell 0.9 per cent in morning trading. London’s FTSE 100 benchmark lost 0.6 per cent and Germany’s Xetra Dax dropped 0.8 per cent.
A sell-off in US government bonds — whose returns are eroded by inflation — continued. The yield on the 10-year note, which moves inversely to price, climbed 0.03 percentage points to 1.37 per cent.
The 10-year yield started the year just above 0.9 per cent, but has risen consistently with predictions that US President Joe Biden’s proposed $1.9tn fiscal stimulus package will feed through to faster price rises.
“The main concern is related to the prospect of increased inflation,” said Tancredi Cordero, chief executive officer at advisory firm Kuros Associates. “There’s a lot of concern amongst investors in fixed income and businesses that are sensitive to that.”
Read the full story here
Valentina Romei
China has overtaken France as Germany’s second-largest export market after the Asian economy rebounded from the coronavirus crisis while Europe remained stuck in a downturn.
Data released on Monday showed Germany sold €96bn worth of goods to China in 2020, about the same as the previous year. In contrast, German goods exports to France dropped 15 per cent.
As a result, China became Germany’s second-largest goods export destination after the US for the first time since comparable data was available in 1990.
China also grew in relative importance as Germany’s trading partner compared with the US. German goods exports to the US dropped 13 per cent in 2020.
The pandemic has accelerated a long-running trend. In 2000, Germany sold more than seven times the value of its goods to France and the US than to China.
Sarah Provan and Josephine Cumbo
British Airways has agreed to defer £450m of pension deficit contributions and will pay no dividends to its parent International Airlines Group for the next three years, as it secured financing agreements that will increase its liquidity.
The company will defer monthly contributions of £37.5m from October 2020 to September this year, as part of its agreement with the trustee of the New Airways Pension Scheme.
The London-based airline will provide property assets as security, which will remain in place until the airline has repaid the deferred contributions. The £450m of accumulated contributions plus interest will be repaid monthly, adding to the end of the existing recovery plan in a revised scheme to March 2023.
The carrier will be barred from paying dividends to IAG before the end of 2023, after it secured a government guarantee that is designed to help its recovery from the impact of coronavirus and Britain’s exit from the EU. From 2024, any dividends paid will be matched by contributions to NAPS of 50 per cent of the value of dividends paid.
In response to the pandemic, the pensions regulator in April eased its rules to give companies hit by Covid-19 disruption breathing space to defer their monthly deficit pension contributions for up to three months.
Alistair Gray
Mitchells & Butlers has launched its plan to tap shareholders for £350m as the UK pub group said it was still burning through more than £30m in cash every four weeks.
The company behind the Harvester and All Bar One brands said its liquidity position had “deteriorated significantly” as a result of the pandemic and that the equity raise was “critical for the continued operation of the group and its immediate financial stability”. All 1,700 of its pubs are closed.
M&B also said it had agreed to delay contributions to its pension fund for the first three months of the year.
The company, which had £113m of cash as of January 16, said it planned to use the capital to help pay down debt debt. It estimated cash burn at between £30m and £35m every four weeks, and is spending £50m in debt repayments per quarter.
New shares would be offered at 210p. The offer is being fully underwritten by three of M&B’s largest shareholders — the businessman and Tottenham Hotspur owner Joe Lewis; Elpida Group, which is backed by two horseracing magnates; and Smoothfield Holdings, the vehicle of the currency trader Derrick Smith.
The fundraising would provide “the financial stability and strength to emerge from the crisis, allowing previous momentum to be regained”, M&B said.
Harry Dempsey
Nadhim Zahawi, the UK’s Covid-19 vaccine deployment minister, warned the lockdown easing will be done “cautiously and steadily” as prime minister Boris Johnson prepares to unveil a roadmap out of England’s coronavirus restrictions.
Johnson is expected to announce later on Monday that all schools in England will return on March 8 along with relaxed one-to-one outdoor socialising, followed by further easing if certain conditions are met.
Zahawi confirmed the four tests to measure England’s progress against Covid-19 that the prime minister will set out — vaccine deployment; evidence that jabs are reducing hospital admissions and deaths; the pressure on the NHS; and assessment of the risks of new virus variants.
“All of that goes into the gradual reopening of schools, and then gradually reopening the rest of the economy,” he said on Sky News. He later put emphasis on the lockdown easing being “sustainable” to ensure that it should be the last time England goes under severe restrictions.
England has been under lockdown, including the closure of schools and tough restrictions on mixing between households, since January 5, largely due a virus variant that caused cases to surge and put the healthcare system under enormous stress. However, during that time the UK has raced ahead of its peers in vaccinating its population against the disease.
Zahawi said that the prime minister would provide new data on the impact that the vaccination rollout is having on reducing hospitalisations and deaths in England.
“The prime minister will be saying more about that. Suffice to say the evidence looks good,” he said, adding that the government would not be in place to open schools on March 8 “if we’re not confident actually that the vaccine programme is beginning to really bear fruit.”
Joe Miller in Marburg, Germany
Tucked in a valley on the outskirts of a medieval town in central Germany, the entrance to the vaccine plant that has relieved the pressure on European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen is marked by a simple, white road sign.
The facility, acquired by Germany’s BioNTech in September from Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, was brought online this month and will produce 250m Covid-19 vaccine doses in the first half of 2021.
Most importantly for the EU, it will produce many of the extra 200m doses ordered by the bloc last week to top up supplies after widespread criticism of von der Leyen’s vaccine procurement strategy from member states.
Read more here
George Russell in Hong Kong
China reported 11 new cases of coronavirus infection in the previous 24 hours, compared with seven for the day before, the country’s health authority said on Monday.
All the new infections were imported cases, the National Health Commission said in a statement.
Three of the cases were identified in Guangdong in China’s south, while two cases each were reported in Shanghai and Sichuan province. Beijing and Tianjin, and the provinces of Fujian and Hunan, each reported one case, according to official figures.
There were no new deaths and there was one suspected case identified in Shanghai but imported from abroad.
In Hong Kong, the Centre for Health Protection on Monday announced 16 new cases, down from 20 the day before.
Peggy Hollinger in London
Four weeks after a turbulent transition in the US, and amid one of the worst pandemics of modern times, the head of chemicals multinational Solvay is calling on President Joe Biden to give businesses the clarity they need to help spur recovery of the world’s biggest economy.
Ilham Kadri, the first woman to run the 158-year-old company that generates about a third of its €10bn annual sales in the Americas, says Biden must provide clarity on tax reform, regulation and the US relationship with China.
“We need to understand the types of reforms that will allow business to start planning,” Kadri said in an interview with the Financial Times. “Predictability is important to us . . . This transition has not been smooth, so now is the time to have more visibility.”
Read more here
George Russell in Hong Kong
The Philippines on Monday approved the China-made Sinovac Biotech Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use, but the drug regulator said it was not suitable for front-line healthcare workers.
Eric Domingo, director of the Food and Drug Administration of the Philippines, said its relatively low efficacy of roughly 50 per cent meant it was not an appropriate jab for staff at serious risk of infection.
He said during a media briefing that the Sinovac jab, known as CoronaVac, was best used on healthy individuals aged 18-59.
Domingo cited results of clinical trials of CoronaVac in Brazil, Turkey and Indonesia.
Dave Lee in San Francisco
US grocery delivery service Instacart is exploring the use of robotic warehouses to fulfil its orders, as it looks to streamline the process of ferrying items from stores into customers’ homes.
The San Francisco-based company now uses more than 500,000 gig workers to process online orders at well-known grocery chains such as Safeway and Walmart.
Such a move could revolutionise Instacart, which has been a major beneficiary of the pandemic-driven surge in food delivery and is heading for an IPO in the coming months.
Read more here
George Russell in Hong Kong
Travel industry workers and market traders would be included in the second phase of vaccinations in Indonesia’s tourism-dependent island of Bali, provincial officials told state media on Sunday.
Health officials on Sunday received 130,300 doses of the Chinese-developed Sinovac Covid-19 jab made locally by Bio Farma in Bandung, West Java.
They said eligible recipients in Denpasar, the capital, would be prioritised before outlying areas.
The next round of jabs would include a “tourism component and market traders who provide direct services to the community”, Bali provincial health officer Dr Ketut Suarjaya was quoted as saying by the Antara news agency.
The remaining unvaccinated elderly people as well as police, civil servants and journalists would also be eligible, he said.
Suarjaya said there were more than 600,000 people in Bali eligible under the second phase but there were not yet enough vaccines delivered to inoculate all of them.
Leftwing economist and Ecuadorean presidential candidate Andrés Arauz speaks during a campaign event in Guayaquil
Gideon Long in Bogotá
Conservative businessman Guillermo Lasso has squeezed through to the second round of Ecuador’s presidential election at the expense of indigenous candidate Yaku Pérez, the country’s electoral authority said on Sunday.
Lasso, a millionaire former banker, will face leftwing economist Andrés Arauz in the run-off on April 11 to decide who will govern the country for the next four years.
The winner will inherit a nation that has been hit hard by coronavirus: Ecuador has a yawning fiscal deficit and is struggling to meet the terms of a $6.5bn lending programme with the IMF.
Read more here
George Russell in Hong Kong
Australia has not ruled out mandating Covid-19 vaccinations for workers in care homes for the elderly, a top doctor said on Monday.
Professor Michael Kidd, one of the country’s deputy chief medical officers, said the national cabinet had asked a top scientific panel to look at the issue.
He said the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee would examine the possibility of compulsory jabs for staff in centres run by the federal government.
“At the moment we can’t make it mandatory because we don’t have the vaccine available to everybody right across the country,” Kidd told the ABC News Breakfast radio programme.
He said a number of vaccine issues remained unresolved, such as whether people could still become infected and be at risk of asymptomatic transmission to other people.
“And of course, we don’t yet know how long the immunity conferred by the vaccine will last,” Kidd added.
Kate Beioley in London
Former Bank of England governor Mark Carney has joined the board of Stripe, an online payments provider and one of Silicon Valley’s most valuable private companies.
Stripe has seen its business surge during the coronavirus lockdown, as millions have been working from home and lockdowns have shut stores and restaurants.
“Mark’s unparalleled experience of the highest levels of financial services and central banking will be of enormous benefit,” said founder John Collison.
Read more here
Artists perform during a campaign to promote Covid-19 vaccinations in Medellin, Colombia
Gideon Long in Bogotá
Colombia has received its first batch of coronavirus vaccines from Chinese producer Sinovac Biotech, just days after it welcomed an initial delivery of doses from US company Pfizer and started its vaccination rollout.
About 192,000 doses of the Sinovac vaccine were flown to Bogotá over the weekend, following the delivery of 50,000 shots of the Pfizer vaccine on February 15. Vaccination of front-line health workers began on February 17.
Colombia, the third most populous nation in Latin America with 50m inhabitants, was among the last countries in the region to begin vaccinating. The government of Iván Duque has been criticized for the delay but said it wanted to ensure a steady supply of doses before beginning its programme.
In all, the government has secured pledges of enough doses to vaccinate 35m people which should be enough to ensure herd immunity.
It has signed deals to receive 10m doses each from Pfizer, its US rival Moderna and Anglo-Swedish company AstraZeneca, 9m doses from Janssen, the pharmaceutical wing of Johnson & Johnson, and 2.5m from Sinovac. It has also secured 20m doses from the Covax initiative backed by the World Health Organization.
Colombia has registered more than 2.2m cases of coronavirus, the 11th-highest total in the world and the second highest in Latin America behind Brazil. Nearly 59,000 people have died from the virus – the 12th-highest total in the world and the third-highest in the region behind Brazil and Mexico.
George Russell in Hong Kong
Storm-ravaged Texas will receive almost 1m Covid-19 vaccine doses in the next week, its governor said on Sunday, as officials promised to expedite inoculations in the state.
About 600,000 would be first doses, Greg Abbott wrote on Twitter.
“We will catch up for delays during the winter weather,” he said, adding that more than 5m jabs should have been administered in the state before March 1.
Texas, the second most populous state with about 29m people, has identified nearly 2.6m cases of Covid-19, including 42,202 fatalities.
Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Sunday that last week’s extreme weather delayed vaccine shipments to the state.
He told the NBC programme Meet the Press that about 6m doses were affected.
“We’ve gotten 2m out and we project that by the middle of the week we will have caught up,” Fauci said.
Some mourners wear masks as they accompany a funeral cortège in the Watts section of Los Angeles
Alice Woodhouse in Hong Kong
US Covid-19 hospitalisations fell for a 40th consecutive day as the number of new cases and fatalities also declined.
The number of people receiving hospital treatment for Covid-19 fell to 56,159 on Sunday from 58,222 a day earlier, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
The country reported 58,429 new cases of the virus, down from 71,951 a day earlier, taking the seven-day average to 64,301.
Fatalities slowed to 1,286 from 2,074 on Saturday as the total number of deaths for the country nears 500,000.
Upon taking office in January, President Joe Biden warned it would take time for his administration to ramp up vaccinations and said the US would reach 500,000 Covid-19 deaths by the end of this month
CTP figures show the US has reported 489,060 deaths linked to Covid-19.
That tally is slightly below the 498,786 fatalities recorded by Johns Hopkins.
Figures released over the weekend are usually lower than tallies seen during the week thanks to reporting delays. Bad weather across the country has also affected reporting.
George Russell in Hong Kong
The number of overnight stays in Swiss hotels fell 40 per cent in 2020 over the previous year, newly released data show.
In 2020, the sector registered 23.7m overnight stays.
While Swiss nationals spent 16.4m nights in hotels, down 8.6 per cent, stays by foreigners plunged 66.1 per cent to 7.3m.
“The exceptional context of Covid–19 explains this unprecedented fall at a level not seen since the end of the 1950s,” the Federal Statistical Office said in a statement.
The plunge occurred despite most of Switzerland’s skiing infrastructure staying open as normal, in contrast to that of France and Italy.
Lifts and runs operated with only minor restrictions and the Swiss government has insisted that skiing poses minimal risk of spreading the virus.
South Korea’s Kospi added 0.4% on Monday
Alice Woodhouse in Hong Kong
Asia-Pacific stocks gained at the start of a new week as investors eyed US inflation and vaccine rollouts.
In Japan, the Topix rose 1.2 per cent and the Kospi in South Korea added 0.4 per cent, while Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 dipped 0.1 per cent.
On Friday, the S&P 500 closed down 0.2 per cent as investors weighed the potential effects of President Joe Biden’s stimulus plan on inflation, while the yield on 10-year US Treasuries rose to a one-year high.
“The market is starting to digest the potential economic effects of the $1.9tn stimulus package and vaccine rollout, adding to the global reflation trend which still remains the key driver of yields,” Westpac analysts said in a note.
George Russell in Hong Kong
Chicago officials say they have improved the racial equity of Covid-19 vaccinations in the city.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the Chicago Department of Public Health said data from the most recent week showed that 50 per cent of first dose vaccines went to black or Hispanic Chicagoans, compared with 18 per cent early in the first phase of jabs in December 2020.
“Over the past month, we have doubled down on our efforts to not only drive vaccines into communities that need them most but ensure that our vaccination rates match the demographics of our city,” said Lightfoot.
The city’s health commissioner, Dr Allison Arwady, said communities with the highest case rates and the greatest number of deaths “mirrored the inequities we see in society overall”.
People living in areas hit hardest by the pandemic are being vaccinated at a slower rate than the rest of the US population, according to a Financial Times analysis of data from five major metropolitan areas, underscoring deep-seated racial disparities in access to inoculations.
Health officials are alarmed by lower vaccination rates in neighbourhoods where people of colour tend to live, especially African Americans, and analysis suggests that this is among the biggest factors in whether someone has received a jab.
Masked shoppers cross a San Francisco street
George Russell in Hong Kong
The city of San Francisco is offering residents free public transit rides for their Covid-19 vaccinations from Tuesday.
The mayor’s office said the city’s rail and bus system, known as the Muni, would enable people to ride to and from their appointment for free, regardless of which site they attend.
Destinations include the city’s high-volume vaccination sites, neighbourhood vaccine access sites, public health clinics and pharmacies offering vaccinations, as well as vaccination sites outside San Francisco.
“Getting San Franciscans vaccinated is the city’s highest priority at the moment,” said Jeffrey Tumlin, director at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.
“By allowing free Muni access to and from all vaccination sites, we are eliminating transportation and cost barriers from receiving this life-changing vaccine,” he added.
George Russell in Hong Kong
Australia launched its vaccination programme on Sunday with Scott Morrison, prime minister, among the first to be jabbed.
The government said quarantine and border workers, frontline healthcare staff, and elderly and disability care residents and staff would be among the first groups to be vaccinated.
About 60,000 Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine doses will be administered to priority populations with a deadline of April 30.
The Australian government has secured more than 150m Pfizer/BioNTech and AstraZeneca doses. More than 50m of the AstraZeneca doses will be made in Melbourne.
Mamta Badkar in New York
Small-caps are having a moment. After years of underperformance, companies with a smaller market capitalisation are rising faster than the bigger, blue-chip names that make up America’s mainstream stock indices.
The Russell 2000 index of smaller US-listed companies is up by more than 47 per cent since the start of November, when markets began to shoot higher on vaccine optimism, and has advanced 15 per cent year to date. By comparison, the benchmark S&P 500 is up 19.5 per cent since November and 4 per cent this year.
For months during the pandemic, investors favoured fast-growing tech stocks that were the winners of a shift towards working and shopping online. Smaller companies, whose performance is generally more exposed to traditional consumer trends and more closely tied to economic growth, suffered.
Read more here
George Russell in New York
The World Health Organization has pleaded with Tanzania to take more measures to control the coronavirus pandemic as more than nine months have passed since the east African nation provided any update on cases.
John Magafuli, Tanzania’s president, last year declared the country “coronavirus free” but doctors and health officials are sceptical.
The Zanzibar regional government announced that its first vice-president Seif Sharif Hamad died on February 17 as a result of Covid-19.
One of Magafuli’s closest advisers, John Kijazi, died the next day, officially of a heart attack, but at his funeral Magafuli led prayers to defeat unnamed “respiratory diseases” ravaging the country. “Maybe we have wronged God somewhere. Let us all repent,” he told mourners.
Tanzania has reported 509 cases with 21 deaths among its 58m people, but has not released any data since May 2020. Neighbouring Kenya, with a population of about 52.6m, has identified more than 104,000 cases, with 1,817 fatalities.
Shoppers use a hand-washing station as they enter a market in Dodoma, Tanzania
“This situation remains very concerning,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement on Sunday. “I renew my call for Tanzania to start reporting Covid-19 cases and share data.”
He said the government needed to step up public awareness that the pandemic was continuing around the world.
“I also call on Tanzania to implement the public health measures that we know work in breaking the chains of transmission, and to prepare for vaccination,” Tedros said.
The WHO head said several Tanzanians travelling to neighbouring countries and beyond had tested positive for Covid-19.
“This underscores the need for Tanzania to take robust action both to safeguard their own people and protect populations in these countries and beyond,” he said.
Sam Jones in Zurich
Many of us will be comfortable getting back into enclosed boxes with strangers sooner than we think, according to the head of the world’s second-largest maker of elevators and escalators.
For the past 12 months, the coronavirus pandemic has emptied city centres and upended the lives of office workers, a group that used lifts more than any other.
But, said Thomas Oetterli, chief executive of Switzerland’s Schindler Group, the pandemic will ultimately do little to change long-term trends that drive his business: urbanisation, construction and the ongoing importance of the office as a centre of commercial activity.
Read more here
George Russell in Hong Kong
US states continued to report declining new coronavirus cases, hospital admissions and deaths at the weekend.
Data indicate the country identified about 72,000 new cases on Saturday, after 75,000-plus on Friday, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
There were 58,222 people in hospital, according to Saturday’s data, compared with 59,882 the previous day.
Deaths totalled 2,477 on Friday and 2,074 on Saturday. “Vaccines are finally showing up in the data with dramatic declines in deaths from long-term-care facilities,” a CTP analysis said.
States reported 1.3m tests on Saturday and 1.9m on Friday.
“The seven-day average for Covid-19 tests is moving in the wrong direction,” CTP said. “Tests are down 16.7 per cent from last week.”
Data from Texas are “wobbly”, it added, given the week of severe weather that cut power to millions of residents.
“Texas numbers could be erratic for some time because of the storms and power outages,” CTP said. “We recommend keeping an eye on hospitalisations as the sturdiest metric there.”
A passenger wears a protective mask in the terminal at Toronto Pearson International Airport
George Russell in Hong Kong
Air travellers landing in Canada will have to quarantine for three days in a hotel at their own expense from Monday.
The enforcement date comes two weeks after the federal government said passengers returning from non-essential trips abroad will have to isolate for up to 72 hours while they await the results of a polymerase chain reaction test.
Justin Trudeau, prime minister, said the measures were put in place to keep Canadians safe, particularly given the threat of the emerging variants.
Initially estimated by Trudeau to cost more than C$2,000 (US$1,600), the stays have a variable price regime, which has been left up to individual hotels.
At the Calgary Airport Marriott In-Terminal Hotel, the three-day quarantine stay for one person costs C$1,272 plus tax, while the Sheraton Gateway Hotel at Toronto Pearson International Airport offers a C$957 package, according to CTV News.
The coronavirus pandemic will be at the top of the agenda during the first virtual meeting between Trudeau and Joe Biden, US president, on Tuesday.
“The meeting will be an opportunity for the two leaders to review joint efforts,” said White House press secretary Jen Psaki in a weekend briefing.
Canada has recorded more than 843,000 cases of Covid-19 among its 37.5m people, with at least 21,630 fatalities.
George Russell in Hong Kong
New Zealand began vaccinating border control workers at the weekend, as the country began to roll out an inoculation programme.
Dr Ashley Bloomfield, the country’s director-general of health, said the jabs were the culmination of a week of preparation.
“Today, we kick off the largest immunisation programme in our history, by vaccinating the first of our border workforce, a critical step in protecting everyone in Aotearoa,” Bloomfield said on Saturday, using the Maori name of the country.
He said the programme would be stepped up from Monday, as the country enrolled 12,000 border and quarantine workers over the next few weeks. “Once they’ve been vaccinated, we’ll start vaccinating the members of their household contacts.”
George Russell in Hong Kong
New Zealanders can enter Australia quarantine-free after a “travel bubble” suspended in late January was resumed from Sunday.
Passengers require proof of a negative coronavirus test result less than 72 hours prior to departure, if they have been in Auckland any time in a two-week period before travelling.
The one-way travel bubble was suspended in response to a strain of Covid-19 detected in New Zealand that was first identified in South Africa.
Australia’s chief medical officer, Professor Paul Kelly, said the outbreak in New Zealand, and the country’s contact-tracing efforts, showed the recent cases identified there posed a low risk of Covid-19 spreading in Australia.
“We will continue to move quickly to protect Australians as circumstances change, but we will always endeavour to move just as quickly when those situations are brought under control, or otherwise resolve,” Kelly said.
Argentina’s president fired health minister Ginés González García after it was revealed he helped arrange Covid-19 vaccines for VIPs with government connections. Some jabs went to people not considered priority cases, igniting a scandal in a country where the vaccination rollout has fallen far behind promises.
The Group of 7 rich democracies vowed to boost supplies of Covid-19 vaccines to the developing world, although divisions remain over the speed at which the West should share its doses. At a virtual meeting on Friday, G-7 leaders increased their pledges to the Covax global vaccine initiative to $7.5bn.
Masked students sit in a socially distanced class at the University of Oxford
UK prime minister Boris Johnson is on Monday expected to confirm plans for a mass return to school on March 8, then proceed with a “prudent” reopening of much of the economy by the summer. He said he wants to ensure “cautious but irreversible” progress in tackling the virus that has caused nearly 120,000 deaths.
A strong industrial recovery partly offset a downturn in services across the eurozone in February, according to a survey. Germany’s IHS Markit purchasing managers’ index for manufacturing surged to a three-year high of 60.6 — up from 57.1 in January. In France, the corresponding index rose 3.4 points to 55.
Philip Georgiadis in London
A menagerie of household pets, from dogs and cats to ferrets and budgies, has been left stranded around the world because of cancelled flights and rocketing air freight costs during the pandemic.
Pets normally travel in a part of the aircraft hold that is specially heated, pressurised and darkened to keep them calm.
But because airlines operated only half the flights they normally would last year, and now prioritise essential cargo such as medical supplies and manufacturing equipment, prices have shot up and pets have gone to the back of the queue.
Read more here
The market for ultra-cold freezers will grow as much as 60 per cent to $800m amid a pressing need to store certain coronavirus vaccines at low temperatures, says one large US supplier. “We are still in the mode of increasing capacity,” said Dusty Tenney, chief executive of Athens, Ohio-based Stirling Ultracold.
NatWest beat expectations to post a slim quarterly profit as the UK bank confirmed that it would retreat from Ireland after more than a century in the country. It reported a fourth-quarter pre-tax profit of £64m, compared with consensus forecasts of a loss. The lender reported an annual loss of £351m.
Customers wear protective masks and socially distance as they queue in front of the Hermès store on avenue George V in Paris
Sales at Hermès recovered strongly at the end of last year as Chinese shoppers unable to reach Europe snapped up colourful silk scarves and handbags from the Paris-based luxury fashion house at home. Sales rose 16 per cent in the fourth quarter as Hermès proposed a €4.55 dividend, down from €5 in 2019.
Warehouse owner Segro said that a surge in ecommerce in Europe during the pandemic would leave a lasting legacy. The value of the Slough-based company’s portfolio of UK and European warehousing increased 10.3 per cent to £13bn last year, and adjusted pre-tax profits rose 10.8 per cent against 2019 to £296.5m.
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