Coronavirus live news: Japan to expand state of emergency; Biden review of Covid origins reportedly ‘inconclusive’ | World news

The review into Covid’s origins ordered by the Biden administration 90 days ago is inconclusive, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, citing US officials familiar with the matter.

The report’s findings are due to be unclassified any day now but are reportedly inconclusive on whether the virus jumped from animals to humans or escaped from a Wuhan laboratory.

The Washington Post writes:

The assessment is the result of a 90-day sprint after Biden tasked his intelligence agencies in May to produce a report ‘that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion’ on the origins of a virus that has killed more than 4 million people globally and wrecked national economies. But despite analysing a raft of existing intelligence and searching for new clues, intelligence officials fell short of a consensus, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the report is not yet public.

Covid has killed 4.6 million people worldwide, but its precise origins remain mysterious. The first known cases emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019 and US agencies started looking into the origins shortly afterwards.

US spy agencies initially strongly favoured the explanation that the virus originated in nature, Reuters reports.

A team led by the World Health Organization (WHO) that spent four weeks in and around Wuhan in January and February said the virus had probably been transmitted from bats to humans through another animal.

But their March report, which was written jointly with Chinese scientists and concluded that the lab theory was “extremely unlikely,” did not satisfy Washington.

Meanwhile, China has refused to give US researchers the kind of access to the Wuhan lab and officials there that the U.S. believes it would need to definitively try to determine the virus’ origins.

Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.

Japan is set to expand a state of emergency to eight more prefectures, taking the total to 21, the minister in charge of coronavirus countermeasures said on Wednesday, as a surge in cases overwhelms its hospitals.

And the review into Covid’s origins ordered by the Biden administration 90 days ago is inconclusive, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, citing US officials familiar with the matter.

The report’s findings are due to be unclassified any day now but are reportedly inconclusive on whether the virus jumped from animals to humans or escaped from a Wuhan laboratory.

More on this story shortly. In the meantime, here are the key developments from the last few hours:

• New daily coronavirus infections in Israel are approaching record levels, despite the country’s largely successful vaccination campaign and the recent rollout of the world’s first widespread booster shot. The spread of the virus has been driven by a surge in the Delta variant even among the vaccinated.
• Bereaved families call for UK-wide Covid inquiry to start before end of the year. The UK government, Welsh and Northern Irish administrations must “show some leadership” and ensure that statutory coronavirus inquiries start before the year is out, campaigners have said.
• Growing numbers of US districts have stopped in-person learning at schools. More than 80 school districts or charter networks have closed or delayed in-person classes for at least one entire school in more than a dozen states because of an increase in Covid cases.
• The vaccine supply contract between Brazil and Pfizer has been made public, in what is believed to be the first such time in history between a state and a pharmaceutical company.
• The Edinburgh Festival Fringe has launched a £7.5m emergency appeal after it lost millions of pounds during the Covid pandemic. The festival’s directors said the crisis had had a devastating impact on the event, which until last year was the world’s largest annual arts festival. It was entirely shut down in 2020 and this year has operated at a fifth of its normal size.
• In Australia, Indigenous Covid vaccination rates have risen rapidly in the past month, but new data shows the gap is widening between First Nations people and overall vaccination rates in almost every state and territory.
• The Greek government has announced that all indoor eateries, bars, clubs and entertainment venues will be off limits for unvaccinated citizens. The ban starts next month.
• More than five billion anti-Covid jabs have been delivered globally, an AFP tally of official sources shows. While it took around 140 days to administer the 1bn shots, the third, fourth and fifth billions each took between 26 and 30 days, the data show.
• Covid booster shots may only be needed for about 40% of immunosuppressed people, preliminary UK data suggests.Researchers looked at immune responses after two shots of either the Oxford/AstraZeneca or Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines in people with compromised immune systems, due to underlying disease or the medicines they are taking for their underlying disease.