Scotland recorded seven coronavirus deaths in the last week, another decrease in the figures from the National Records of Scotland (NRS).

Between 27 July and 2 August, there were seven occasions of Covid-19 being mentioned on the death certificate, having been up slightly at eight deaths the week before.

The 20-26 July figure came after 13 consecutive weeks of the figures falling.

Scotland’s overall death toll as of 2 August now stands at 4,208 – up from 4,201 previously.

Deaths involving Covid-19 accounted for less than 1 per cent of all those registered between 27 July and 2 August, having been 1 per cent last week.

The peak was three months ago in week 17 – 20-26 April – when Covid-19 deaths accounted for 36 per cent of the total.

Ministers are coming under pressure to allow face coverings to be worn in schools in England ahead of their full reopening next month.

Shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth has said face coverings for older children in schools “should be considered” as students return in September.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Wednesday, Mr Ashworth said Labour would accept “tough decisions” to make sure all children can get back to class after months of partial closures.

Government guidance for schools returning in September says face coverings are not required as pupils and staff are mixing in consistent groups – and they should be removed on arrival at the school gates.

But the NASUWT teachers’ union has called on the Department for Education (DfE) to revise its guidance on face coverings “as a matter of urgency” to help staff return to school in the autumn with “confidence”.

It said the government should encourage school and college staff to wear clear facial visors if there are concerns that teaching and learning may be impeded by the use of face masks.

Patrick Roach, general-secretary of NASUWT, said the position in schools is “out of step” with public health guidance that suggests face masks should be worn when physical distancing cannot be assured.

Novavax said its experimental vaccine produced high levels of antibodies against Covid-19, according to initial data from a small, early-stage clinical trial.

The US company said it could start a large pivotal Phase III trial as soon as late September, and added that it could produce one billion to two billion doses of the vaccine in 2021.

Novavax research chief Gregory Glenn told Reuters the late-stage clinical trial could potentially glean enough data to obtain regulatory approvals as early as December.

Meanwhile, India’s Zydus Cadila said its vaccine candidate was found to be safe and well-tolerated in an early-stage human trial.

The company will now start a mid-stage trial of the vaccine candidate, ZyCoV-D, in over 1,000 healthy adult volunteers from Thursday to test its effectiveness.

Young people hitting nightclubs and beaches are leading a rise in new coronavirus cases across the world, with the proportion of those aged 15 to 24 who are infected rising three-fold from 4.5 per cent to 15 per cent in about five months, the World Health Organisation has said.

Apart from the United States, which leads a global tally with 4.8 million total cases, European countries including Spain, Germany and France, and Asian countries such as Japan, have said that many of the newly infected are young people.

“We’ve said this before and we’ll say it again: young people are not invincible,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a recent news briefing in Geneva.

“Young people can be infected; young people can die; and young people can transmit the virus to others.”

A new coronavirus outbreak in Vietnam spread to two more provinces on Wednesday, the country’s health minister said, as the Covid-19 task force declared the contagion “under control” in the central city where the outbreak began.

Aggressive contact-tracing, targeted testing and strict quarantining had helped Vietnam contain earlier outbreaks, but it is now battling infections in at least 10 cities and provinces, after going more than three months without domestic transmission.

The health ministry confirmed two new cases on Wednesday, bringing Vietnam’s total infections to 672, with 8 deaths.

The new outbreak was first reported on 25 July in the tourist resort city of Danang and has spread to major urban centres like Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, which have since closed entertainment venues, restricted gatherings and tested tens of thousands of people.

Health minister Nguyen Thanh Long told state media on Wednesday the outbreak had expanded to the provinces of Bac Giang near Hanoi and Lang Son, bordering China, both linked to the Danang infections.

Around one in 20 people in England who had been shielding because of coronavirus are not planning on returning to work over the next few months, new figures suggest.

Some 6 per cent of those classed as clinically extremely vulnerable, who had normally worked before receiving shielding advice, said they were not intending to go back to work in the near future.

A further 21 per cent said they planned to continue working from home, while 35 per cent indicated they would return to their previous place of work.
The figures are from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and are based on a survey conducted between 9 and 16 July.

A total of 2.2 million people in England were identified by the Government earlier this year as being clinically extremely vulnerable (CEV) to the impact of Covid-19, and had been advised to shield from others.

This advice was officially paused from 1 August.

England’s coronavirus track and trace system is not “virus beating”, is failing to give epidemiologists the data they need and its “clunky” set up is resulting in people giving up processing vital information, a government scientific adviser has claimed.

The remarks from professor John Edmunds – a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) – come three months after Boris Johnson vowed to have a “world beating” system to track and isolate those who have contracted Covid-19 by 1 June.

Speaking on BBC Newsnight, professor Edmunds said: “This is the system that is supposed to be in place for us to east the restrictions – but we’ve been easing the restrictions over the last few weeks and cases are going up, so it’s clearly not taking the strain as we hoped it would do.”

Pressed on the prime minister’s claim to have a “world beating” system to tackle the transmission rate of the virus, he replied: “Honestly I couldn’t care less whether it’s world beating or not. I just wanted it to be virus beating – and it’s not.”
 

The government cannot “decree” that keeping schools open must be prioritised over pubs during local lockdowns to combat spikes in coronavirus cases, the schools minister has said.

Nick Gibb insisted on Wednesday that all children will return to school in England in September but said the decisions to enforce closures to prevent new outbreaks will be made locally.

Experts have made it increasingly clear that some restrictions will need to return in order to fulfil the government’s commitment on schools while preventing the rapid spread of Covid-19 from resuming.

Professor Neil Ferguson, whose modelling led to the decision to impose the lockdown, suggested ministers would need to “row back on the relaxation of restrictions”, such as in social and leisure venues and with increased working from home, to allow a full-time return to schools.

He told BBC Radio 4: “I mean that really is a policy decision, but I’m just saying, in my view, it is likely that some form of those measures will be necessary to maintain control of transmission.”

The US secretary of Health and Human Services is scheduled to visit Taiwan in coming days in the highest-level visit by an American Cabinet official since the break in formal diplomatic relations between Washington and Taipei in 1979.

The visit by Alex Azar, and especially a planned meeting with Taiwan’s president, will likely create new friction between the US and China, which claims Taiwan as its own territory to be annexed by force if necessary.

Taiwan is a key irritant in the troubled relationship between the world’s two largest economies, which are also at odds over trade, technology, territorial claims in the South China Sea and China’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

In Beijing, foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said China has lodged “solemn complaints” over the visit with US officials in both Beijing and Washington.

“The Taiwan issue is the most important and sensitive issue in China-U.S. relations,” Mr Wang said at a daily briefing. He said Washington needs to stop all forms of official contact with Taiwan and make good on its commitment to Beijing to “avoid serious damage to China-U.S. relations and peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.”

The US maintains only unofficial ties with Taiwan in deference to Beijing, but is the island’s most important ally and provider of defense equipment.

The unnamed boozer has since been confirmed positive for the potentially deadly bug.

Now, the city’s Golden Fleece and Cavalier pubs, as well as the Ryhope Cricket Club, have all been forced to shut after it was revealed the man, in his 20s, had supped in all three on Friday night.

“It’s stupid behaviour,” said Peter Gibson, Sunderland City Council member for the Silksworth ward where two of the bars are. 

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A cruise ship with 123 passengers on board and a crew of 85 docked Wednesday in the Norwegian harbour of Bodoe but no one could disembark after a former passenger from Denmark tested positive for the coronavirus upon returning home.

“We take the situation very seriously,” mayor Ida Pinneroed told Norwegian broadcaster NRK, adding that authorities were in contact with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health on whether the remaining passengers should be tested. The crew will be tested.

In a statement, ship owner SeaDream Yacht Club said “we sincerely hope that there is no Covid-19 on board, and we are not aware of any other guests or crew who are infected or have any symptoms, but we are taking all necessary precautions.”

The ship owner said the former passenger on Tuesday was found to be positive for the virus during a routine check upon arrival in Denmark. The person had no symptoms of Covid-19 during the voyage and traveled home from Tromsoe on 2 August as planned.

Meanwhile, the number of people on another Norwegian cruise ship, the MS Roald Amundsen, who have tested positive for the virus has reached 44, authorities said. It is not clear how that outbreak began.

The Philippines’ health ministry on Wednesday reported 3,462 new coronavirus infections and nine additional deaths.

In a bulletin, the ministry said total infections had risen to 115,980, putting the tally just behind Indonesia’s 116,871 cases, which is the highest in East Asia.

Coronavirus deaths in the Philippines have reached 2,123. 

South Africa sees dip in new virus cases but warns of return
 

South Africa’s health minister on Wednesday reported decreasing rates of new confirmed cases of Covid-19 but warned that vigilance must continue “to prevent a renewed surge.”
 

South Africa has 521,318 confirmed coronavirus cases, the fifth highest in the world and more than half of all reported cases in Africa, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
 

So far South Africa has recorded 8,884 Covid-19 deaths, although studies of excess mortality rates indicate the actual toll could be higher.
 

The rapid spread of infections in poor, overcrowded urban centres in Cape Town, Johannesburg and other cities threatened to overwhelm public hospitals, but health minister Zwelini Mkhize told reporters that so far the health system has been able to cope.
 

Scientists say they may have discovered a new route to protect nerve cells in mice, which, if it can be replicated in humans, could prevent multiple sclerosis-related disability.

Researchers have already identified an existing, readily available diabetes drug, pioglitazone, which can trigger the natural process in mice cells and could become a potential treatment to halt the progression of the disease.

MS sufferers can become disabled because of damage to their nerve cells, which are stripped of the protective coating called myelin. Over time patients can find it harder to walk, talk and eat.

More than 130,000 people live with MS in the UK.

Health correspondent Shaun Lintern reports:
 

The minister told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “As I said, we are led by the science.”
 

Asked why over-11s must wear face coverings in shops and on public transport but not in schools, he said: “Well, that is what the science tells us.
 

“Within a school, of course, you’re not with people that you don’t meet normally, you see these same children every day, so there are different circumstances – when you’re on public transport for example, when you’re encountering people you’ve not come across or met before.
 

“And that is why you have different rules and things like face coverings for public transport and being in shops from where you are with the same people in the same bubble day in and day out.
 

“And that is why the rules are different.”

Many services were paused while the NHS focused on treating Covid-19 patients and other urgent and emergency care.
 

But the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) said that doctors are worried that their patients’ health may have worsened as a result of service disruptions during the pandemic.
 

It comes as an RCP poll found that 60 per cent of doctors worry that patients in their care have suffered harm or complications following diagnosis or treatment delays during the pandemic.
 

The survey of 1,029 senior doctors and consultants, conducted at the end of last month, found that 94 per cent are concerned about the general indirect impact of Covid-19 on their patients.
 

Only 5 per cent of doctors feel that their organisations are fully prepared for a potential second wave of Covid-19, the survey found.

He said “the prime minister knows what is going on in all the departments and must be in charge of the detail”.
 

Mr Khan added that he and local leaders need information on a range of issues, including the health, economic and social consequences of any measures, and “what the plan is if the virus rises in our city”.
 

He urged the government to “work with us” and with local leaders, adding: “By the way, scrutiny is a good thing.
 

“If you are challenged and the tyres are kicked, it leads to better decision-making and a safer car.”

The failure to enforce quarantines for arriving travellers has been blamed for making the impact of coronavirus “far worse” than if restrictions had been imposed.

It meant many hundreds of Covid-infected passengers arrived every day – particularly from Spain, Italy and France – as the UK stood “almost unique” in rejecting border checks, the committee says.

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