Covid live: third day of record deaths in Russia; Barcelona curfew returns amid rising cases
Close to 800 Covid-linked deaths in Russia; Catalan city and surrounding area returning to curfew after just two and a half months
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- France: clashes with police amid anger at tighter Covid rules
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More than 5,000 anti-vaccine protesters rallied in Athens yesterday to oppose plans make Covid jabs available to children 15 and older.
Shouting “take your vaccines and get out of here!” and calling on prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to resign, the protesters gathered outside parliament under heavy police presence, Reuters reports. Protesters chanted “Hands off our kids” and held up a banner reading, “We say no to vaccine poison”, ABC reports.
UK prime minister Boris Johnson has said it is “highly probable” that the worst of the pandemic is over provided people are careful when restrictions lift in England on Monday.
In a speech in Coventry, he said:
I wish I could say that this pandemic that we have been going through is over and I wish I could say that from Monday we could simply throw caution to the winds and behave exactly as we did before we’d ever heard of Covid.
But what I can say is that if we are careful and if we continue to respect this disease and its continuing menace then it is highly probable – almost all the scientists are agreed on this – the worst of the pandemic is behind us.
We need to say from the beginning that, before the pandemic began, the UK had and still has a more unbalanced economy than almost all our immediate competitors in Europe. And when I say unbalanced, I mean that for too many people, geography turns out to be destiny.
Take life expectancy, even before Covid hit. It is an outrage that a man in Glasgow or Blackpool has an average of 10 years less on this planet than someone growing up in Hart in Hampshire or in Rutland. I don’t know what people do in Rutland to live to prestigious ages, who knows, but they do. There is glaring imbalance.
Read the original article at The Guardian