Coronavirus live: UK sees highest daily death toll since February; Greek cases set new record high

Following Greece reporting a record-high number of new Covid cases, health officials have announced tighter rules for non-vaccinated people and heavier fines for people who do not comply.

From Saturday, anyone who has not been vaccinated will have to provide a negative Covid test before they can enter public buildings, shops and banks, AFP reports.

Workers in the public and private sectors will have to provide negative tests twice a week at their own expense.

Fines for shops and restaurants which don’t follow the rules have been doubled to EUR5,000 (GBP4,253).

The Dutch health council has advised the government to begin giving Covid-19 vaccine booster shots to everybody 60 and older and residents of nursing homes.

The council said it was seeing indications that Covid protection was waning among older people.

“To get ahead of an increase in serious illness, the council advises the health minister to start offering boosters now,” the council said.

The government, which was set to reimpose some Covid preventive measures on Tuesday, usually follows the health council’s advice.

The Netherlands health council has advised the Dutch government to begin giving Covid-19 vaccine booster shots to everybody 60 and older and residents of nursing homes, adding it was seeing indications that protection was waning among older people, AP reports.

“To get ahead of an increase in serious illness, the council advises the health minister to start offering boosters now,” the council said.

The government, which was set to reimpose some Covid-19 preventive measures later on Tuesday, usually follows the health council’s advice.

Other European countries already have begun giving booster shots. France started giving boosters to people over 65 two months ago.

Just under 80% of adults in the Netherlands are fully vaccinated. The government already has begun giving booster shots to people with severely compromised immune systems.

Covid-19 cases have been rising sharply for weeks in the Netherlands. The country’s public health institute reported Tuesday that infections rose 39% compared to the week earlier and hospital admissions were up 31% amid a weeks-long rise that began soon after the government ended most remaining lockdown restrictions in late September.

More than 50 million first doses of Covid-19 vaccine have been delivered in the UK, new figures show.

A total of 41,928,327 doses had been given in England as of November 1, along with 4,320,370 in Scotland, 2,446,430 in Wales and 1,329,893 in Northern Ireland.

The overall number of first doses – 50,025,020 – is the equivalent of 87.0% of people aged 12 and over in the UK, or 74.6% of the entire population.

The figures have been published by NHS England, Public Health Scotland, Public Health Wales and the Northern Ireland Department of Health.

Austria’s army has successfully trained two dogs to sniff out Covid, it said on Tuesday, adding to a mass of evidence that dogs can be deployed to identify carriers of the virus.

Trials across the world from Thailand to the UK have found dogs can use their powerful sense of smell to detect the coronavirus with a high degree of accuracy, suggesting they could be regularly deployed as an additional line of safety at large events and border entry points.

Airports in Finland began deploying dogs to screen arrivals for Covid last year.

Austrian authorities have now fully trained two dogs, a Belgian Shepherd and a Rottweiler, to detect the scent of Covid after sniffing more than 3,000 samples including from used face masks, with a success rate “far above 80%”, the defence minister Klaudia Tanner said.

“We have long known that our service dogs can sniff out various materials… But what we have achieved here is something very special,” she told a news conference.

It takes a dog with previous sniffer experience for other materials around two weeks to be able to tell which samples have Covid, and a further three months to fully train it, the head of the army’s dog-training centre, Colonel Otto Koppitsch, told the news conference.

Austria has no specific plans to deploy dogs trained to detect Covid, but will help train people in other countries how to teach dogs this skill, Tanner said.

This is from Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, calling for countries to pull together to get a greater number of people around the world vaccinated.

More than 5 million people are known to have died of Covid-19 worldwide, 19 months since the pandemic began, according to Johns Hopkins University.

The proportion of children absent from school for Covid-related reasons in England rose in the week before half-term, UK government figures show.

The Department for Education estimates 3.2% of all pupils – about 248,000 children – did not attend class for Covid-related reasons on 21 October, up from 2.6% (approximately 209,000 children) on 14 October.

Among pupils absent, the main reason for absence was a confirmed case of coronavirus, with around 127,000 pupils off for this reason, compared to around 111,000 a week before.

Overall, some 88.2% of students were in class on 21 October, which is down from 90% on 14 October.