(Reuters) – Canada should use federal powers to ease the growing economic disruption caused by the blockage of a vital U.S.-Canada trade route by protesters opposed to coronavirus mandates, U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration said on Thursday.
DEATHS AND INFECTIONS
* Eikon users, see COVID-19: MacroVitals for a case tracker and summary of news.
EUROPE
* French President Emmanuel Macron refused a Kremlin request that he take a Russian COVID-19 test when he arrived to see President Vladimir Putin this week, and was therefore kept at a distance from the Russian leader, two sources in Macron’s entourage told Reuters.
* Britain’s government is failing to put enough effort into finding fraud in some of its COVID-19 support programmes as taxpayers face losing at least 4 billion pounds ($5.43 billion) to criminals and mistakes, a parliamentary report said.
AMERICAS
* President Joe Biden on Thursday said mask requirements for children would likely to start to fall away given federal plans to begin vaccinating children under the age of 5, but said it was probably premature to drop COVID mask requirements entirely.
* Eli Lilly and Co said on Thursday it had entered an agreement with the U.S. government to supply up to 600,000 doses of its developmental COVID-19 antibody drug for at least $720 million.
* Amazon.com Inc on Thursday informed staff at its U.S. warehouses and logistics sites that they must report being fully vaccinated by March 18 if they wish to receive paid leave due to COVID-19.
* New York City plans to fire roughly 3,000 municipal workers by the end of this week for failing to get the COVID-19 vaccine, the New York Times reported.
ASIA-PACIFIC
* China will fully support Hong Kong with its “dynamic zero” coronavirus strategy, its office overseeing matters in the city said, as the territory is expected to hit a new record for daily infections on Friday.
* Australian residents will need to receive booster shots to be considered fully vaccinated against COVID-19, although authorities said foreign travellers will continue to need only two shots to enter the country.
* South Korea’s Disease Control and Prevention Agency reported on Friday 53,926 new daily COVID-19 cases, the second straight day with more than 50,000 cases driven by the Omicron variant, with an increase of 49 deaths to a total of 7,012.
* More people arrived outside New Zealand’s parliament on Friday, as protesters calling for an end to a vaccine mandate and tough COVID-19 restrictions refused to end their demonstrations despite arrests by the police.
AFRICA AND MIDDLE EAST
* Tunisia will lift the night curfew it imposed last month to curb the spread of COVID-19 from Thursday, a statement from the government said.
* Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, who has been isolating since Saturday after contracting the coronavirus, tested negative for COVID-19, state-owned Anadolu news agency cited his doctor as saying.
MEDICAL DEVELOPMENTS
* Novavax Inc said on Thursday its two-dose vaccine was 80% effective against COVID-19 in a late-stage trial testing the shot in teens aged 12 to 17 years.
* A Japanese Health Ministry committee has approved the oral COVID-19 drug made by Pfizer, the ministry said.
ECONOMIC IMPACT
* Asian share markets fell on Friday, after red-hot U.S. inflation data and hawkish comments from a Federal Reserve official fuelled bets on U.S. interest rates being hiked more aggressively, and sent U.S. Treasury yields jumping. [MKTS/GLOB]
* International bookings for flights to Southeast Asian countries that are relaxing tight pandemic-related border controls rose sharply in January, data from online travel company Skyscanner shows.
* Toyota Motor Corp, General Motors, Ford Motor and Chrysler-parent Stellantis said they had been forced to cancel or scale back some production at North American plants on Thursday because of parts shortages stemming from Canadian trucker protests against pandemic mandates.
(Compiled by Shailesh Kuber, Krishna Chandra Eluri, Valentine Baldassari; Editing by Tomasz Janowski, Anil D’Silva and Arun Koyyur)
