The latest on the coronavirus pandemic and vaccines

Sweden’s parliament has voted in favor of a temporary act that will allow further disease control measures to counteract the spread of Covid-19, according to a statement on the parliament (Riksdag) website on Friday.

Sweden has long been an outlier when it comes to coronavirus measures, declining to impose the full-scale lockdowns favored by its European counterparts. The country has seen a higher death rate per capita than its Scandinavian neighbors, with a total of 9,262 deaths recorded in Sweden according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

The Covid-19 Act will apply from January 10 until the end of September and provides the government with the framework to "introduce special restrictions for both certain activities and places." 

The statement said the restrictions may apply to places where the public congregate including shopping centers and malls, public transport and domestic air travel and places where private gatherings are held.

"If necessary, it will be possible to prohibit public gatherings of a certain size at places to which the public have access and close premises that serve food and drink," the statement added. 

The parliament called on the government to provide "much more substantial" clarity as to which businesses may apply for compensation, saying that businesses affected by the new Covid-19 Act "should as a ruler receive compensation." They also asked the government to keep the relevant parliamentary committees informed when drawing up new regulations based on the Act.

Spanish Health Minister Salvador Illa has warned that the country will face some tough weeks as the number of Covid-19 cases continues to rise. 

“We are going to have some tough weeks ahead again, with an increase in the number of cases and hospitalizations,” Illa said during a press conference on Friday. “It is very important that we reduce mobility and reduce contacts to the maximum and strictly follow the measures that regional health authorities dictate.”

“If we do this, we’ll be able to stabilize the increase in cases,” Illa also said. 

Turning to the vaccination campaign, the health minister revealed that 140,000 people had already been vaccinated in Spain, but said he wanted to improve and speed up vaccinations across the country. 

"Our objective is to have more people vaccinated than infected in Spain, as soon as possible, and to reach a high threshold of 70% of Spaniards vaccinated by the summer,” Illa said. 

Spain has seen 2,024,904 Covid-19 infections and 51,675 related deaths since the pandemic began, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

Four inmates from Seoul's Dongbu Detention Center filed a compensation lawsuit after a Covid-19 outbreak infected more than 1,100 people at the prison.

A lawyer at South Korean law firm Chung told CNN in a statement that they filed a formal complaint at the Seoul Central District Court on Wednesday demanding 10 million Korean won (about US $9,155) per person.

The firm’s lawyer, Kwak Joon-ho, said in a statement that the purpose of the lawsuit is “to heal the wounds” of the inmates and their family members. Kwak said the government was responsible [for the Covid-19 cluster] for various reasons, including insufficient supply of face masks, lack of separation between confirmed cases and others, and density of the facility.

At least 1,177 cases have been linked to the Dongbu Detention facility as of Friday, according to a press release by the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency.

Earlier in the week, South Korea announced that it will test every inmate at all of the country's 52 detention facilities for Covid-19. A total of 1,207 have been tested positive as of Friday. 

There has been international concern about Covid-19 outbreaks within prisons and jails. A study published in September found that Covid-19 infection and mortality rates in US state and federal prisons was twice as high as in the general population, though the severity differed widely among states.

The European Union has extended its contract with Pfizer/BioNTech for “up to an additional 300 million vaccines” in 2021 -- doubling the amount of doses from that vaccine, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced at a press conference on Friday.

Speaking from Brussels, she said it was imperative to vaccinate the maximum number of Europeans "as quickly as possible," adding that she was "particularly pleased that 75 million of this order will already be available as of quarter two [of this year] onwards. The rest will then be delivered in the third and in the fourth quarter.”

Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine became the second coronavirus vaccine to be approved for use in the EU on Wednesday.

When asked to address the lag in the vaccination campaign in some European countries, Von der Leyen said it was down to production capacity not being able to keep pace with demand. “We’ve seen new production sites are being opened up or licensed, and that makes it possible to work on a basis of confidence with Pfizer/BioNTech to double the contract,” she added.

She added that the contract means the EU's vaccine portfolio "covers 2.3 billion doses... more than enough to vaccinate the whole European population.” That includes vaccines yet to be approved for use in the bloc.

These numbers do not take into account the extended contract with Pfizer/BioNTech announced Friday.

Two drugs typically used to treat rheumatoid arthritis were found to separately improve survival and speed up recovery among critically ill Covid-19 patients, according to early research by an international team.

Data from the REMAP-CAP trial showed that giving either tocilizumab or sarilumab infusions to critically ill Covid-19 patients was associated with an 8.5% improvement in surviving the disease and with being able to be discharged from a hospital's intensive care unit about a week to 10 days faster.

"That's a big change in survival," Anthony Gordon, a senior investigator in the REMAP-CAP trial and a professor at Imperial College London in the United Kingdom, said in a briefing. "We also saw the patients recovered more quickly. They were getting better and able to be discharged from the ICU quicker -- and that was on average and every patient is slightly different."

The findings -- which were posted in a pre-print paper on medrxiv.org but have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal -- included data on more than 800 critically ill Covid-19 patients hospitalized across six countries. The researchers emphasized that the findings were only among critically ill patients.

The new findings are a pivot from some separate studies that previously have found tocilizumab to fall short as a treatment for hospitalized Covid-19 patients.

CoronaVac, the Covid-19 vaccine developed by the Chinese company Sinovac, has been shown to have an efficacy of 78% during phase 3 trials in Brazil, its local partner, the Butantan Institute, announced on Thursday. 

"Today is a very important day for Brazil, for Brazilians, for life and health,” Sao Paulo Governor Joao Doria said during a press conference, alongside state health officials and executives from the Butantan Institute.  

“This result means that the vaccine developed by the Butantan Institute has a high level of efficiency and efficacy protecting the lives of Brazilians against Covid-19,” Doria also said. 

The phase 3 trials involved 13,000 health workers across eight Brazilian states. According to Reuters, Butantan Director Dimas Covas said that the full CoronaVac data would be released in an unspecified scientific publication but did not provide a timeline.

Doria also said his government, along with the Butantan Institute, had begun the process of applying for an emergency use authorization from ANVISA, Brazil’s national medicine agency, “with the objective of starting the vaccination in São Paulo" from January 25.

Even though the efficacy falls shorts of the success rates of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine candidates, CoronaVac is easier to transport and can be stored at normal refrigerator temperatures, Reuters reports.

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Friday that he does not trust coronavirus vaccines produced by the Western countries and called on officials to prohibit those vaccines from entering the country.   

“We must not import (Covid-19) vaccines from the US, the UK or even France. I do not trust them,” Khamenei said in a speech to the nation televised on state media. 

This comes as Iranian officials complain about US President Donald Trump's "maximum pressure" sanctions hampering their Covid-19 fight.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has previously accused the US of preventing Iran from making a payment to COVAX, an initiative led by the World Health Organization (WHO), which aims to provide worldwide access to effective Covid-19 vaccines.

“The United States even prevents us from using our own money in different countries to pay COVAX for the vaccine,” Zarif said, adding, “we’ve been trying, our Ministry of Health has been trying, our Central Bank has been trying to transfer money we have in billions in other countries to WHO for COVAX and we haven’t had much success.”  

Last month, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said his government plans to produce its own Covid-19 vaccine “with the help of Iranian scientists”, and to buy vaccines from abroad, according to state news agency IRNA.

The Delhi government announced a mandatory seven-day quarantine at an isolation facility for passengers arriving from the United Kingdom, even if they test negative for Covid-19 at the airport.

Passengers will then be required to spend a further seven days at a "home quarantine," a press release issued by the city’s Disaster Management Authority said Friday.

Those who test positive will be isolated in a separate facility.  

The Indian Ministry of Civil Aviation announced earlier this month that it was ending its temporary suspension of all flights to and from the UK on January 8.

“To protect Delhiites from exposure to virus from the UK... All those arriving from UK, who test positive will be isolated in an isolation facility. Negative ones will be taken to a quarantine facility for 7 days followed by 7 days home quarantine,” tweeted Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi chief minister.

This comes as India is about to embark on one of the most ambitious mass vaccination programs ever undertaken.

The number of people dying of Covid-19 in Los Angeles County in a day is now equivalent to the number of homicide deaths the city saw in an entire year, Mayor Eric Garcetti said in a Thursday news conference.

The city of Los Angeles has a population of nearly 4 million people, while the county's population is about 10 million.

"All of us need to continue to do more," he said.

The region has for weeks battled a brutal surge of Covid-19 infections and hospitalizations that have translated into climbing numbers of deaths. Los Angeles County officials now say one person dies of Covid-19 every eight minutes.

"People who were otherwise leading healthy, productive lives are now passing away because of a chance encounter with the Covid-19 virus," health officials said earlier this week. "This only ends when we each make the right decisions to protect each other."

More than 8,000 people are hospitalized with the virus across Los Angeles County, 20% of whom are in intensive care units.

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