South Africa is in negotiations with an African Union (AU) platform for Covid-19 vaccines for at least 10 million people, a top health official has said.

Sandile Buthelezi, the Department of Health’s director-general, said the government was seeking to conclude an agreement with the AU, Afreximbank and the Serum Institute of India over AstraZeneca vaccine doses it is selling to other African countries.

About 18 African countries would benefit from those doses, he added.

More contagious Covid-19 variants are spreading in Germany, the head of the government’s disease control agency has said.

Lothar Wieler, the head of the Robert Koch Institute, said all vaccinations available in the country protect well against the B117 variant, and that 3 per cent of Germans have had two jabs.

Some 5 per cent of people have had one vaccination so far.

Up to 20,000 people could be hospitalised in Hungary as coronavirus infections surge, the country’s prime minister has said.

Just over 6,800 are in hospital now, and a large increase could put a big strain on the healthcare system in the coming weeks.

Viktor Orban, whose government announced tough new lockdown measures yesterday to curb the third wave of the pandemic, told state radio that “there will be enough (hospital) beds and ventilators”.

He said the lockdown, which includes closing all shops except food stores and pharmacies from Monday until 22 March, suspending all services except private healthcare and closing primary schools was needed to prevent a “tragedy”.

“We will see pressure rising on hospitals,” he told state radio.

France could block shipments abroad of Covid-19 vaccines, similar to moves on this front by Italy, Olivier Veran has said.

Asked by BFM TV if France could follow Italy’s move on this, the French health minister replied: “We could.”

On Thursday, two separate sources told Reuters that the EU had blocked a shipment of AstraZeneca’s vaccine destined for Australia after the drug manufacturer failed to meet its EU contract commitments.

The sources said AstraZeneca had requested permission from the Italian government to export some 250,000 doses from its Anagni plant, near Rome.

Moldova became the first European country to receive Covid vaccines from the global Covax scheme, president Maia Sandu has said.

The first batch of 14,400 doses arrived in Moldova last night, she said on Twitter.

Looking back on the beginning of the pandemic, Prof Hayward, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at UCL, told Times Radio: “I think one of the reasons that we’ve had so many deaths is that we left things far too late, in terms of taking more restrictive measures.

“We should have been taking social distancing measures, if not a full lockdown then other measures that were trying to separate people much earlier.

“At that time, of course, we also didn’t really have the same mechanisms to measure how much disease there was in the community, so we were largely only really seeing the tip of the iceberg of cases.

“By the time you start to see major increases in deaths then it was really too late to take action, and hence the levels got extraordinarily high before we took effective action, and it took a long, long time for them to go back down again.”

Society will have to live with a degree of mortality that will be “substantial”, but added that we will “get back to normal”, Professor Andrew Hayward, a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), has said.

He told Times Radio: “I think, you know, given the societal trade-offs, we are going to have to live with a degree of mortality that will be substantial.

“I think it will get less over time as more people get vaccinated, and as more people get immune, and I do believe that we’ve been through the worst of this.”

Prof Hayward said he does not think new variants of Covid-19 will completely evade vaccine-related immunity.

“The vaccines will still take the sting out of it, if you like, and reduce the case fatality rates,” he said.

“Of course, we have the technology to update the vaccines and I think that’s where we’re going really, a situation that will be much more like flu, the numbers of deaths will be much more like flu, the approach to surveillance of new strains and development of new vaccines and regular annual vaccinations will be like that.

“And we will get back to normal.”

Around six per cent of Covid-19 cases in France are from the more contagious Brazilian and South African variants, French health minister Olivier Veran has said.

Veran told BFM TV that France was doing all it could to avoid a new national lockdown, although the government would keep all options open, and that there were reasons to believe France’s coronavirus situation would improve in four to six weeks as more of its population gets vaccinated against the virus.

Around 60 per cent of French Covid cases were from the variant first discovered in England. 

Cyprus has taken the lead in the European race to open up to British holidaymakers who have been vaccinated.

The island’s deputy tourism minister told the Cyprus News Agency that people from the UK who have had the vaccine will not need to undergo tests or quarantine this summer.

Simon Calder, our travel correspondent, has the full story:

Hello and welcome to our Covid-19 live blog. Follow for the latest news as it happens on the coronavirus pandemic from around the world.