Coronavirus live: 'all hypotheses still open' on virus origin, says WHO; Greece extends lockdown

Ben Doherty in Sydney signing off. My day is done. I’m handing over this coverage now to my colleague in the UK, Ben Quinn. Dear readers, you are in good hands.

Thanks for your correspondence, comments, and occasional query today. Be well and look after each other.

Coronavirus infections have started to rise again in Hungary, likely due to the spread of the British strain of the virus, prime minister Viktor Orban told state radio on Friday.

Orban said there was no need for further lockdown measures to curb the spread of infections, as a planned acceleration of vaccinations with Russian and Chinese vaccines could offset the rise in new Covid-19 cases in coming weeks.

A recap for those following, and an update for those beginning their days, a summary of recent developments:

• US President Joe Biden has confirmed the US has ordered 200m more doses of coronavirus vaccine. He said “my predecessor did not do his job” in scaling up the country’s vaccine rollout and urged Americans to “mask up”.
• The Brazilian Amazon variant of the coronavirus disease may be “three times” as contagious as other strains, the country’s health minister has said.
• Germany will ban travel from Czech border regions as well as Austria’s Tyrol over a troubling surge in infections of more contagious coronavirus variants.
• Donald Trump was reportedly much more ill with Covid-19 in October than the White House publicly admitted at the time, with some officials concerned that he would need to be put on a ventilator.
• Melbourne, Australia, will go into a five-day snap lockdown – a “circuit-breaker” to stem the spread of a new outbreak
• The director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, appears to have rejected comments made on Tuesday by the team of experts studying the origins of the Covid-19 virus after they said it was “extremely unlikely” that it leaked from a Wuhan virology laboratory and “isn’t a hypothesis we suggest implies further study”. Tedros said “I want to clarify that all hypotheses remain open and require further study”.
• Portugal has extended a lockdown until 1 March or perhaps later to tackle its worst surge of Covid-19 infections since the pandemic began.
• People in the US who have received a full course of Covid vaccine can skip the standard two week quarantine following exposure to someone whose infected as long as they remain asymptomatic, health officials have suggested.
• Ireland, which, according to the latest official figures, has recorded 3,794 Covid related deaths, is set to extend its lockdown until April, prime minister Micheal Martin has said.
• Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has defended her government’s decision to extend Germany’s lockdown into March by highlighting the “very real danger” of a third wave driven by Covid mutations.
• The Philippines is poised to receive 600,000 doses this month of Sinovac Biotech’s vaccine donated by China, a portion of which will be used to inoculate military personnel.

Boris Johnson is facing fresh questions about whether he acted too slowly in the run up to Christmas, after it emerged that almost a third of all the patients hospitalised with Covid in England to date were admitted in January.

NHS England statistics show there were 101,956 new Covid-19 admissions last month, accounting for 29% of all admissions between March 2020 and the end of January, underlining the severity of the latest wave of the virus.

The number of patients admitted to hospital increased by 79% between December and January.

Today’s UK front pages deal with a number of aspects of the pandemic: the NHS re-organisation under health secretary Matt Hancock (Guardian); millions left in ‘NHS limbo’ (Independent); social distancing until autumn (Times), and, in the Telegraph, General Sir Nick Carter warns the pandemic risks a repeat of 1930’s chaos.

More children could be pushed into joining armed groups in conflict zones as families face increasing poverty due to the Covid-19 pandemic, a top UN official warned on Friday.

The exact number of child soldiers is unknown, but in 2019 alone about 7,740 children – some as young as six – were recruited and used as fighters or in other roles by mostly non-state armed groups, according to United Nations data.

Speaking on International Day against the Use of Child Soldiers – or Red Hand Day – the UN Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict Virginia Gamba said that number was likely to rise as a result of coronavirus-related hardship.

“There is a real threat that as communities lack work, and are more and more isolated because of the socio-economic impact of Covid-19, we’re going to see an increase in the recruitment of children for a lack of options,” she said.

“More and more children will be either attracted or sometimes told by their parents to just go and join because someone’s got to feed them,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a video call.

Girls and boys are still forced to join armed groups, as fighters or in roles such as cooks or for sexual exploitation, in at least 14 countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and Somalia, the United Nations has said.

The United Nations called for a global ceasefire last year to help fight COVID-19, but armed groups have continued fighting and Gamba said the pandemic had also hampered efforts to protect children in conflict zones.

She said she was concerned about a surge in attacks by Islamist militants against children in the Sahel and Lake Chad region, including kidnappings, killings and forced displacement, noting that COVID-19 was changing armed groups’ tactics.

“As children are not in schools, therefore the target of attacking a school for abduction or recruitment of children … is shifting to where the children are,” she said.

The pandemic has also delayed progress on implementing legislation in different countries to prohibit and criminalise the recruitment and use of children by armed forces and groups, Gamba said, calling for lawmakers to prioritise the issue.

“The issue of accountability is fundamental,” she said.

But despite some worrying trends, progress on combating the use of child soldiers is being made, Gamba said.

In South Sudan, the number of violations against children including their recruitment as fighters has significantly declined over the past five years, according to her office’s annual report.

And last week, the International Criminal Court (ICC) convicted Dominic Ongwen, a commander of Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army rebels and former child soldier, of dozens of crimes including child abductions and murder.

Ongwen’s conviction at the Hague-based court was applauded by the United Nations, but Gamba said a concerted effort at the national level was the best way to stop children becoming soldiers.

“In all our joint action plans with the government, and with the armed groups, we make it very, very clear we expect to see an oversight of the way their own officers, their own personnel are engaging in recruitment,” she said.

The Guardian’s Denis Campbell, Dan Sabbagh, and Jessica Murray report that London doctors are running out of priority patients to vaccinate, and fear lives will be lost unless they can immunise outside of the four priority cohorts.

Doctors at the Francis Crick Institute in London say they are providing first doses at a rate of 100 a day when they have capacity for 1,000.

Dr Sam Barrell, the chief operating officer at the institute, which opened as a mass vaccination centre on 18 January, said: “Every day lost, where you have vaccine supply and vaccinators, is lives lost and livelihoods lost.”