The German air force is flying dozens of ventilators to Brazil, which is struggling with a severe coronavirus outbreak.
BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
BERLIN — The German air force is flying dozens of ventilators to Brazil, which has been severely hit by the coronavirus outbreak.
Soldiers loaded 80 ventilators onto an Airbus A310 MRTT at the military section of Cologne-Bonn Airport on Friday morning.
They are being flown to the Amazon metropolis of Manaus, where hospitals have been overwhelmed by the large number of COVID-19 patients requiring oxygen and ventilators.
THE VIRUS OUTBREAK:
— California expands vaccine eligibility to all adults
— Mexico's pandemic death toll passes 200,000
— Lebanon’s private sector importing Russian vaccines to speed up national campaign
HERE’S WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING:
ROME — The Vatican is beefing up its COVID-19 vaccination campaign for some of the most marginalized communities in Rome and providing shots to 1,200 local poor people during Holy Week.
Next week’s vaccine drive follows an initial round of inoculations by the Vatican health service for area homeless people using some of the Pfizer-BioNTech shots the Vatican city-state bought for the pope, Vatican employees and their families.
Pope Francis’ Office of Papal Charities is also accepting donations to purchase more vaccines for the poor through its website. The office, headed by Francis’ chief almsgiver, provides concrete acts of charity in the pope’s name, including showers and a barber shop for area homeless people.
In a statement Friday, the office noted Francis has urged everyone to get vaccinated as an exercise in collective well-being. Francis has also called for society’s most vulnerable and fragile to have priority since they are among the most exposed to the virus and least able to get medical care if they get sick.
PARIS — France’s president says he has nothing to be sorry about for refusing to impose a third virus lockdown earlier this year, even as his country is now facing surging infections that are straining hospitals and more than 1,000 people with the virus are dying every week.
Emmanuel Macron’s government has stressed the importance of keeping children in school and businesses afloat as the pandemic stretches into a second year.
“We were right not to implement a lockdown in France at the end of January because we didn’t have the explosion of cases that every model predicted,” he said late Thursday night. “There won’t be a mea culpa from me. I don’t have remorse and won’t acknowledge failure.”
For months, France has championed a “third way” between confinement and freedom, including a nationwide curfew and closing all restaurants, tourist sites, gyms, large shopping malls and some other businesses.
Many doctors and scientists have been urging the French government for weeks to impose stronger restrictions, notably because of the more contagious and more dangerous virus variant first identified in Britain.
“We’re not an island, and even the islands who’d protected themselves sometimes saw the virus come back,” Macron said.
France has recorded the fourth-highest number of virus infections in the world, and among the highest death tolls, at 93,378. Intensive care units are again at or beyond capacity in Paris and several other regions because of a new surge of critically ill virus patients.
MADRID — Spain’s official statistics institute says the country’s GDP contracted by almost 11% last year in its worst performance in at least 50 years.
Spain recorded zero growth in the fourth quarter as the economy reeled from pandemic restrictions, the statistics agency said Friday.
It was the first full-year contraction since 2013.
The only economic sector to show growth last year was agriculture, which expanded by 5.3%, while construction felt the sharpest contraction with a 14.5% drop.
The agency began collecting statistics in 1970.
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BUDAPEST — Officials in Hungary will loosen pandemic lockdown restrictions despite daily COVID-19 deaths breaking previous records for the fifth time this week.
New daily cases in Hungary reached 11,265 on Friday, breaking a record set less than a week ago. A new high of 275 deaths was recorded in the country of fewer than 10 million inhabitants. The surge has given Hungary the highest per capita death rate in the world in the last two weeks.
“We are living through the most difficult weeks of the pandemic,” Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, said in a radio interview Friday morning as he announced the numbers.
Hungarian officials nevertheless are loosening lockdown restrictions currently in place. In the Friday interview, Orban announced that non-grocery shops, which are currently closed, will be allowed to reopen with area-based maximum capacity limits.
Store opening hours will be extended by two hours to 9 p.m., and a night time curfew beginning at 8 p.m., in place since Nov. 11, will be extended to 10 or 11 p.m., Orban said.
As of Friday, 1.8 million people had received at least a first dose of a vaccine, giving Hungary the second-highest vaccination rate in the European Union.
ISLAMABAD — Pakistan’s prime minister is supposed to be under quarantine after testing positive for COVID-19 last week. But now he's facing criticism on social media for meeting with his media team only five days after testing positive.
A photo of Imran Khan and members of his media team, all wearing masks, was tweeted by Information Minister Shibli Faraz on Thursday.
Criticism of the face-to-face meeting as irresponsible continued as Pakistan on Friday reported one of its highest number of virus cases in the past eight months, with
Cabinet member Faisal Javed has responded to critics by saying the prime minister was fine and will soon start coming to his office.
LONDON — British lawmakers have agreed to prolong coronavirus emergency measures for six months, allowing the Conservative government to keep powers to restrict U.K. citizens’ everyday lives.
The House of Commons voted to extend the powers until September and approved a road map for gradually easing Britain’s strict lockdown over the next three months.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s large majority in Parliament guaranteed success but some Conservative lawmakers say the economic, democratic and human costs of the restrictions outweighed the benefits.