Advisers to government in Tokyo say Covid surge requires harsher measures, while Australian state of NSW announces 262 new cases
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Just over 86,000 vaccine doses have been administered in the Democratic Republic of Congo – enough to vaccinate fewer than 0.1% of the country’s 90 million people, Lisa Murray reports from Kinshasa.
The country is already facing shortages and huge logistical challenges in getting vaccines out to people in far-flung areas of a country almost the size of western Europe, and there is growing anger over the failures of rich countries to supply enough vaccines to poorer ones.
If people in Congo remain unvaccinated, the South African variant could meet with the Delta variant and the virus could mutate into a variant that is resistant to some vaccines.
If a Congo variant arrives in a country like the UK, which has high vaccination rates, it could put them back into the same position they were at the beginning of the pandemic. They’d have to get vaccinated again with a new vaccine.
The president said that he doesn’t trust AstraZeneca, so that makes me doubt it … I would die of anxiety if I took this vaccine, because of how the president described it. I would be worried that I was going to die.
They resisted, they doubted its existence. They thought it was a disease that killed white people.
Related: ‘They thought Covid only kills white people’: myths and fear hinder jabs in DRC
This is from Thursday’s Guardian morning briefing, by my colleague Warren Murray.
Millions of Britons have been given the green light to travel to Europe’s holiday hotspots, avoiding quarantine on return from France and Spain where concerns have been raised about Covid variants. Ministers announced fully vaccinated holidaymakers returning from France would no longer need to quarantine, and ditched plans for a “watchlist” of amber countries such as Spain. The move is likely to partially revive the struggling tourism sector but will raise questions about whether the government is being complacent about the spread of the Beta variant.
Related: Thursday briefing: Holidays get the green light
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