New Zealand suspends “travel bubble” with Australia

The SARS-CoV-2 epidemic has killed more than three million people worldwide since the World Health Organization (WHO) China office reported the Covid-19 outbreak at the end of December 2019.

While vaccination campaigns are starting to bear fruit in many countries with the gradual lifting of restrictions, others are facing an increase in pollution.

• New Zealand suspends its “bubble” with Australia

New Zealand suspended on Friday The “travel bubble” you just opened with AustraliaWellington said. A reasoned decision The re-emergence of the epidemic in its neighbor : The action will be in effect Waiting for a new opinion from the government..

The decision came after authorities in Western Australia announced that they had imposed health restrictions for three days in the Perth and Bell regions as early as midnight Friday.

These new restrictions have been identified “Follow-up of a positive case in a person quarantined in the hotel and active in the community.”, Detail the Western Australian authorities on their website.

Australia and New Zealand, which have closed their international borders since March 2020, on Monday inaugurated this “travel bubble” that is supposed to allow its residents to move on both sides of the Tasman Sea without force majeure or hotel quarantine.

• Ten public holidays in Russia in May

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on Friday 23 April that ten days would be public holidays at the beginning of May – the period between the 1 bridges.^{he is} Until May 3 and from 8 to 10 – in order to fight the epidemic.

According to Anna Popova, director of the Rospotrebnadzor Health Agency, the epidemic is receding in the country, but this slowdown has been less pronounced in recent weeks. She argues that making the first ten days of May a holiday would limit travel and reduce the spread of the virus accordingly.

The capital, Moscow, recorded about 2,000 new daily cases of Covid-19 in recent days, and Russia between 8,000 and 9,000 cases every day in April, bringing the total number of reported patients in the country to 4, 7 million since the start of the epidemic. The death tolls vary sharply according to sources: The government admitted, on Friday, more than 107,500 deaths, when the statistics agency Rosstat reported at least 224,000 at the end of February.

• Saturation Intensive Care In Belgium

On Friday, the Belgian Ministry of Health warned against saturating the intensive care units in the Kingdom’s hospitals, As pressure mounts to ease restrictions against Covid-19.

During the authorities’ bi-weekly conference on the health crisis, Marcel van der Aouira, the ministry’s official, spoke about mobilizing caregivers for «130%» For a month, and maybe for a period “Two or even three weeks” repeatedly – The third wave of the pandemic appears to last much longer than the first two waves. “They continue to keep order in place, but they need everyone to make it happen.”, He insisted.

Belgium has around 2,000 intensive care beds, of which 900 are currently occupied by Covid-19 patients (a figure that has not changed for two weeks). Consequently, reception capacity is greatly reduced, especially for patients whose care requires constant monitoring. According to Mr. Van der Aouira, he stayed on Friday Eighty-two beds are available. In these units, which threaten for example the speed of caring for a person with a major burn or a victim of a road accident.

Germany, at the request of Belgium, has once again expressed its willingness to transfer Belgian patients to its hospitals. Such transfers already took place in November.

• Singapore puts more than 1,000 migrant workers in quarantine

Singapore has quarantined about 1,200 migrant workers after discovering positive cases of Covid-19 among men believed to have recovered from a previous infection.

The city has several hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, who work in construction or other sectors where wages are low. Among them are many immigrants from South Asia, most of whom reside in dormitories located in huge housing.

Thus was the first case detected in a Westlite Woodlands dormitory, of an agent who had already received two doses of the Covid-19 vaccine. Additional tests revealed seventeen additional positive cases in people who had already been infected and who had recovered. Singapore’s health authorities now want to check whether workers have been infected again or if they remain positive after the first infection.

Singapore, with a population of 5.7 million, has so far been relatively spared from the epidemic, with more than 60,000 cases and nearly 30 deaths recorded.