Guardian- Ministers have moved to tighten Britain’s borders as new data suggests the Delta coronavirus variant is much more likely to cause serious illness and is circulating more rapidly within schools.

With England’s reopening on 21 June hanging in the balance, the government removed Portugal from the green list of countries and added seven more countries to the red list – moves that provoked fury within the travel industry and left many holidaymakers in limbo.

Portugal, including Madeira and the Azores, was the only mainstream tourist destination Britons could visit without having to quarantine. On Tuesday, these destinations will be moved to the amber list, requiring travellers to self-isolate for 10 days upon return.

British travellers count cost of Portugal’s sudden removal from green list

Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, said that as well as rising Covid test positivity rates in Portugal, a “difficult decision” hinged on worries about Covid variants, particularly a possible additional mutation of the Delta variant.

Data from Public Health England released on Thursday evening showed that the Delta variant, B.1.617.2, first detected in India, is dominant in the UK, now accounting for 75% of infections.

The data also indicated that the variant was significantly more likely to cause serious illness than the Alpha variant of Covid, which has been dominant across the UK since its detection in Kent in the autumn.

While the PHE team stressed that more research was needed, an analysis of 38,805 sequenced cases in England showed that the Delta variant carried 2.61 times the risk of hospitalisation within 14 days compared with the Alpha variant (B.1.1.7) once demographic factors and vaccination status were taken into account.

Data from Scotland pointed to a more than twofold higher risk of hospitalisation for those infected with the Delta variant compared with the Alpha.

The new PHE data also revealed for the first time the spread of variants within schools and colleges in England. By the start of June, there had been 140 outbreaks of the Delta variant within educational settings, and since the end of April the figures showed 90 outbreaks of this variant within schools alone.

Responding to the PHE report, Prof Christina Pagel, director of UCL’s clinical operational research unit, said: “Every technical report seems to bring worse news. Added to increased transmissibility and some vaccine escape, we now have evidence that your chance of being hospitalised might be twice as high with the Delta variant than with the Alpha variant. This makes it harder for vaccines to weaken the link between cases and hospitalisations.

“The other new thing in this report is data on outbreak settings, and it is clear that schools are a major source of transmission and that outbreaks in primary and secondary schools have been growing a lot week on week.”

Shapps tied the decision about Portugal to fears that returning travellers could bring in more variants, further jeopardising the government’s timetable to end many of the remaining Covid social restrictions on 21 June. There is still no decision as to whether the planned reopening will happen then, or if restrictions might need to be extended allowing more people to be vaccinated. A decision is due by 14 June.

“We just don’t know the potential for that to be a vaccine-defeating mutation, and we don’t want to take the risk as we come up to 21 June and the review of the fourth stage of the unlock,” Shapps said in a TV interview.

He also highlighted what he called “a sort of Nepal mutation”. A mutation of the Delta variant, this is suspected of potentially being more resistant to vaccines, but is not under observation by PHE. It has been seen in numerous countries but only once in Nepal, which carries out very little genome sequencing for Covid.

As news leaked out about the green list decision hours before the official announcement, hundreds of millions of pounds were wiped off the value of tour operators and airlines, and there was significant anger.

Green-list destinations are in effect the only choice for holidays. The listing allows people to return to England without quarantining, although they must take a Covid-19 test before coming back and another within two days of arriving.

Aside from Portugal, Gibraltar and Israel, the initial 12-destination green list mainly comprised places – such as Australia, New Zealand, the Falkland Islands and Iceland – that did not allow entry to Britons.

Ahead of the three-weekly review of the list, there had been expectation that more tourism centres could be added, for example Spain’s Balearic islands and some Greek islands.

Johan Lundgren, EasyJet’s chief executive, said the decision “essentially cuts the UK off from the rest of the world”.

John Holland-Kaye, chief executive of Heathrow airport, said: “Ministers spent last month hailing the restart of international travel only to close it down three weeks later, all but guaranteeing another lost summer for the travel sector.”

Henry Smith, the Conservative MP whose Crawley constituency includes Gatwick, said he was “very concerned that [the government was] not being more ambitious” on travel. “I think we should be going in the other direction and liberalising the amount of countries on the green travel list. This decision really puts a question mark over a significant number of travel and aviation sector jobs – going forward, if they can’t manage to have something of a summer season, I think it’s going to lead to increased unemployment.”

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Peru has had a turbulent year. The Andean nation has churned through three presidents since late 2020, has the world’s highest per capita COVID-19 death toll, and experienced its worst economic crash in three decades.

Now voters in the copper-rich nation have a chance to set a new course in elections on Sunday – a polarized run-off between surprise socialist candidate Pedro Castillo and Keiko Fujimori, the free-market scion of a powerful political dynasty.

Whoever wins, the South American country is set for a volatile and uncertain road ahead, analysts say.

Voters are almost evenly split between the two candidates, who offer sharply contrasting visions for the world’s no. 2 copper producer and its 33 million people.

Castillo, whose socialist Free Peru party has been buoyed by support in poorer rural regions, has a slim lead in the polls, ahead of conservative neo-liberal Fujimori, who is popular in capital Lima. Pollsters say the vote is too close to call.

The congressional vote in April saw around a dozen parties win seats, meaning there will be a fragmented legislature with no one party holding a majority.

Giovanna Peñaflor, a political analyst, said the stark divisions meant the new government would be vulnerable to more volatility, whoever won.

“Instability will be the norm in the years ahead, because we have weak institutions and because the government will lack legitimacy because things are so polarized,” she said.

“In theory, this election was supposed to end (instability), to bring a government with some legitimacy to make reforms, but this won’t happen and the political struggle won’t stop.”

Over the course of one week in November last year, one president was impeached by Congress and another forced out of office after fiery protests from young people angry at what they saw as an illegitimate coup led to at last two deaths. Since then, Peru has been ruled by interim President Francisco Sagasti. The uncertainty has rattled Peru’s once-steady markets.

In marches this week ahead of the vote, protest placards claimed Castillo would turn Peru into a “communist or chavista” state, a reference to Venezuela’s former leftist President Hugo Chavez. Castillo rejects the comparison.

Others lambasted Fujimori over corruption charges she denies and criticized her as “authoritarian,” linking her to her father Alberto Fujimori’s divisive presidency in the 1990s. He is currently in jail for human rights abuses and corruption.

“It’s because of the Fujimoris that we have a constitution with a neo-liberal economic model that benefits multinational firms to the detriment of the people,” said one university student who asked not to be named at an ‘anti-Keiko’ march on Tuesday.

‘FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY’

Fujimori supporters, who include the country’s storied writer Mario Vargas Llosa, say Castillo would risk destabilizing Peru, which has been a relative safe haven for investors and miners in the region despite the recent political turmoil.

“We have to fight for democracy, we do not want to be a Venezuela, we do not want to be Cuba,” said Roberto Rios, a pro-Fujimori protester who participated in one of the marches through downtown Lima on the weekend.

“We want to maintain our freedoms, that’s all.”

Castillo, a primary school teacher little-known until his surprise win in April’s first-round vote, plans to rewrite Peru’s constitution, taking vastly more profits from miners and increasing spending on education and health.

He has said that mining firms are “plundering” Peru’s mineral wealth and threatened to nationalize strategic sectors if needed, though has moderated his stance as the campaign has proceeded and he has sought to win middle-ground voters.

Fujimori, who came within a percentage point of winning the 2016 election, has shot up in opinion polls over the last month, playing up her security credentials following a May attack by Shining Path militants that left 16 dead.

The Fujimori family is loved and loathed in almost equal measure in Peru. Some herald Alberto Fujimori for his fight against the rebel group in the 1990s and say he laid the foundations for economic growth after years of crisis and hyperinflation.

Others condemn his authoritarian streak, a legacy that weighs heavily upon the younger Fujimori’s shoulders.

Analysts also said a close vote could spark off more protests, if the losing side did not accept the result.

“Crises have made the country quite unstable already,” said Peñaflor. “There will be people who are interested in pulling the rug out from under whoever is in power.”

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Lucrecia Huayhua has survived domestic violence for most of her life. Now, with other indigenous Aymara women in Bolivia’s highlands, she is taking things into her own hands with taekwondo classes to learn self-defense.

In the high-altitude cities of La Paz and El Alto, indigenous “cholita” women, who have long faced discrimination, train wearing their distinctive billowing skirts and bowler hats as part of a female empowerment drive by the Warmi Power project.

The women learn self-defense to protect themselves against domestic violence attacks, most often by partners or other family members. UN Women data shows eight out of ten Bolivian women suffer some type of violence during the lifetime.

“Men are not afraid of hitting women,” said Huayhua, 52, who has five children. “That’s why women live in great fear.”

“I have suffered a lot of physical and psychological abuse since I was a child. Up until now that I am an older woman, I have always suffered a lot.”

This year Bolivian authorities have already tallied 48 femicides, mostly by partners or husbands of the victims. Reports of abuse are common, though most perpetrators never face justice despite robust laws meant to prevent gender violence.

The self-defense classes are taught free of charge by instructors from the Warmi Power project, which says it has already reached some 20,000 Bolivian women.

“Our workshops look at psychology, attitude and emotions, to empower women to be able to stop certain aggressions,” said Laura Roca, a sports psychologist with the project.

“So women can recognize when they are in a situation of violence, a toxic relationship and can stop violence before it occurs and reaches femicide.”

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By Monique Washington 

A body of an unidentified man has been found in Bath Plains, Nevis.

The Police confirmed on Thursday, June 3 that Officers are on the scene and investigations have begun. The identity of the man has not been confirmed or the cause of death. More to this story as it becomes available.

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The government of Haiti has announced the imposition of a new nightly curfew and other restrictions in an attempt to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus as the French-speaking nation still awaits the long-promised delivery of the 756,000 AstraZeneca vaccine doses arranged through a United Nations program.

Though organised over a month ago, Haiti does not yet have any vaccines to offer its more than 11 million people as COVID-19 cases increase, raising concerns among health experts that the well-being of Haitians is being pushed aside as violence and political instability across the country deepen.

“We are all working hard with the government of Haiti, the Ministry of Health and other stakeholders so that Haiti can receive vaccines as soon as possible,” said Dr. Ciro Ugarte, director of health emergencies for the Pan American Health Organization, the WHO’s Americas branch.

The free doses were scheduled to arrive in May at the latest, but delays are expected because Haiti missed a deadline and the key Indian manufacturer is now prioritizing an increase in domestic demand.

Haiti is among 10 countries in the Americas that will receive vaccines at no cost through COVAX, an initiative to provide COVID-19 inoculations to countries that would otherwise have difficulty getting them. The nation of more than 11 million already struggled to administer routine vaccines and provide basic health care before the pandemic.

For this reason, all outdoor activity will be banned from 10 p.m. until 5 a.m. under the decree issued by President Jovenel Moise, who was in Ecuador on Monday for the inauguration of that country’s new president.

The decree also makes the use of face masks mandatory for anyone out in public, while temperature checks and handwashing stations are required for all public or private buildings, such as banks, schools, hospitals and markets. Social distancing in public places is set at nearly 5 feet.

The president also ordered public institutions to reduce staff on duty by 50 percent, while he encouraged that other employees work from home.

According to official government statistics, Haiti has had 13,906 coronavirus cases since the pandemic began in March 2020 and 288 deaths related to COVID-19. But a recent surge in daily cases of contagion has prompted authorities to declare a state of emergency.

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