(Reuters) – Japan will focus on hospitalising patients who are seriously ill with COVID-19 and those at risk of becoming so while others isolate at home, amid worries about a strained medical system as cases surge in Olympics host city Tokyo.
DEATHS AND INFECTIONS
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EUROPE
* France’s overseas territory of Guadeloupe will to go into a new lockdown for at least three weeks.
* British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he wanted to get the travel industry moving again with a simple user-friendly system to allow for trips abroad without importing new virus variants.
ASIA-PACIFIC
* China’s central city of Wuhan will test all residents as it screens them for coronavirus infections, as the country reported 90 new cases in the mainland for Monday.
* Australia’s New South Wales, home to Sydney, said it could ease a lockdown that demands five million people stay at home until the end of August if 50% of the population is vaccinated.
* Japan has carried out a threat to publicly shame people not complying with border control measures, releasing the names of three people who broke quarantine rules after returning from overseas.
AMERICAS
* The U.S. states of Florida and Louisiana were at or near their highest hospitalization numbers of the coronavirus pandemic on Monday, driven by the still-spreading Delta variant.
* Nearly three out of four Americans above the age of 18 have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine as of Monday, according to the U.S. CDC.
* New York’s governor urged businesses to turn away unvaccinated customers, while Florida grappled with an influx of hospitalized patients.
MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA
* Morocco will lengthen its night curfew as it tightens restrictions to counter a surge in infections.
MEDICAL DEVELOPMENTS
* Combining AstraZeneca’s vaccine with a second dose from either Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna’s jab provides “good protection”, Denmark’s State Serum Institute said.
* Arcturus Therapeutics Holdings said its Vietnamese partner received regulatory approval to start a clinical trial of its vaccine candidate in the Southeast Asian country.
ECONOMIC IMPACT
* Asian stocks slipped on Tuesday, as the Delta coronavirus variant spread in key markets in the region and put Chinese authorities on high alert, rattling investor confidence. [MKTS/GLOB]
* South Korea’s consumer inflation accelerated in July, staying at a nine-year peak marked in May, as hot weather conditions lifted prices of fresh food, while oil products and housing rental and other services costs continued rising.
* U.S. manufacturing activity grew at a slower pace in July for the second straight month.
(Compiled by Ramakrishnan M., Devika Syamnath; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli and Sriraj Kalluvila)
