The Dutch government will begin opening museums and zoos this month by offering coronavirus tests before entry, ANP news reported on Tuesday, citing the health ministry, in a first easing of far-reaching lockdown measures.

Under current measures, public gatherings of more than two people are banned, restaurants are allowed to serve only takeaway food, and there is an evening curfew, Reuters reports.

Coronavirus cases in the Netherlands are falling, but intensive care admissions are still rising.

Dutch News reports:

The number of positive coronavirus tests declined for the first time in eight weeks during the first week of April, but the pressure on intensive care beds shows no signs of easing.

In total 48,186 people tested positive in the seven days to April 6, compared to 51,866 in the last week of March.

The drop of 7.1% contrasts with a 13% rise the previous week. Hospital admissions declined by 3% to 1,588, but 376 patients were transferred to intensive care, an increase of 18.6%.

The total number of patients in intensive care is currently at its highest level since last April. The fall in cases could be partly due to the Easter holiday period, the public health agency RIVM cautioned in its latest weekly update.

The Trinidad and Tobago prime minister, Keith Rowley, has tested positive for coronavirus, the prime minister of Barbados said on Tuesday.

Mia Mottley wished Rowley a quick recovery, in comments at a World Health Organization news briefing, Reuters reports.

Italy reported 421 coronavirus-related deaths on Tuesday against 296 the day before, the health ministry said, while the daily tally of new infections fell to 7,767 from 10,680 the day before.

The country’s seven-day average of infections has been declining since 22 March.

Italy has registered 111,747 deaths linked to Covid-19 so far, the second-highest toll in Europe after the UK’s and the seventh-highest in the world. The country has reported 3.69 million cases to date.

Patients in hospital with Covid-19 – not including those in intensive care – stood at 29,337 on Tuesday, up from 28,785 a day earlier, Reuters reports.

There were 221 new admissions to intensive care units, up from 192 on Monday. The total number of intensive care patients edged up to 3,743 from a previous 3,737.

Hungary’s economy will begin reopening as it has vaccinated more than a quarter of its 10 million people with at least a first shot, the prime minister, Viktor Orban, said on Facebook on Tuesday.

Orban, who faces an election in a year, is trying to balance measures to tame a huge surge of coronavirus infections and the need to reopen the economy to avoid a second year of deep recession.

Euractiv reports:

The central European country reported record coronavirus fatalities last week and doctors described hospitals filling beyond capacity, signalling the government may be forced to postpone a reopening.

Hungary has had the highest weekly per capita fatalities in the world for several weeks, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

Its health care system has come under extreme stress, the government has said, despite vaccinating a fifth of the population in one of the fastest inoculation drives in Europe.

There were nearly 12,000 coronavirus patients in hospital on Sunday, 1,451 of them on ventilators, the government said on Monday.

But the government has also vaccinated among the most citizens per capita in the European Union and imported the EU’s highest number of vaccine doses per capita, aiding a rapid inoculation drive.

The UK government said on Tuesday that 31,622,000 people in the country had received their first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, up from 31,582,000 in the previous day’s data.

The figures also showed there were 20 additional deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid-19 test, compared with 26 on Monday.

The pace of England’s vaccination programme could slow down sharply to 2.7m a week until the end of July, meaning there would be little surplus for first doses until tens of millions of second doses had been administered, my colleague Dan Sabbagh reports.

The latest modelling paper, produced for the Sage scientific advisory committee, said that “the central rollout scenario” provided to academics by the Cabinet Office was “considerably slower” than previously used.

That, the document added, amounted to “an average of 2.7m doses per week in England until the end of July (2m thereafter)” which was compared with “3.2m per week in the previous iteration (3.9m thereafter)”.

The Czech government has approved its first loosening of coronavirus curbs this year, including reopening shops selling children’s clothing and stationery, the industry minister, Karel Havlicek, said on Tuesday.

Reuters reports:

Limited outdoor operations at zoos and botanical gardens will also be allowed, he told the CTK news agency.

The relaxation will coincide with a return of 1st to 5th graders to school, which the government is likely to approve later on Tuesday, and the end of curfews and limits on movement around the country when a state of emergency expires April 11.

The Czech Republic has been one of the hardest-hit countries by Covid-19.

Shops, restaurants, services and most school classrooms have been closed almost continuously since October.

In March, the government shut all schools and used state of emergency powers to restrict people to their home districts.

Prime minister Andrej Babis’s minority government has come under criticism from opposition parties for its handling of the pandemic. It will let a state of emergency expire over the weekend after struggling to win approval to prolong its use in recent votes.

The government is also seeking to re-open schools, which have faced the longest period of full or partial closures in the European Union, according to UNESCO data.

The loosening comes as the number of daily infections has dropped below a seven-day average of 5,000 for the first time since mid-December. Hospitalisations have also eased.

However, the death toll has more than doubled to over 27,000 since the beginning of 2021 and is the highest in the world on a per-capita basis, according to Our World in Data.

France is likely to prioritise citizens based in its overseas territories and those with low income for the single-dose Covid-19 vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson, a health ministry official said on Tuesday.

Reuters reports:

French president Emmanuel Macron last week ordered a third national lockdown expected to last at least a month in the hope of pushing back a third wave of Covid-19 infections that threatens to overwhelm hospitals.

Meanwhile, authorities are speeding up vaccinations across the country after what critics depicted as a slow start earlier this year. The aim is for 30 million people to have received first-round doses by mid-June, compared with 9.35 million as of Monday.

The other approved vaccines in the EU, which are Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca, require a two-dose regimen, whereas J&J’s recently approved vaccine is delivered in a single dose.

This allows for more deployment flexibility, the official said.
J&J’s vaccine, like AstraZeneca’s vaccine, can also be stored at refrigerator temperatures. France expects to receive about 600,000 doses of the jab later this month.

“There are discussions still taking place, but we expect to prioritise first doses to overseas territories, where the vaccines are particularly difficult to deliver,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“We are also contemplating the possibility of assigning doses to low-income populations that are eligible to vaccination but who do not have good access to the healthcare system or are hard to reach.”

France has started administering vaccine shots inside the Stade de France, the national stadium that once hosted soccer’s World Cup final.

That’s it from me for now. I will now hand over the liveblog to my colleague Jedidajah Otte.

More than 1,000 people have marched through the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, demanding the resignation of the government over what they say is poor handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

The protesters blocked traffic in a central street in Sarajevo while hundreds more joined in from their cars, honking horns through the city. The protesters wore face masks and carried banners reading “Don’t play with our lives,” and “Resignation!”

Authorities said 99 people have died with coronavirus in Bosnia in the past 24 hours, a record for the country of 3.3 million people. Bosnia has so far reported about 7,000 fatalities from coronavirus, which is among the highest per-capita deaths rates in Europe.

The latest IMF world economic outlook has been published.

In the report, The International Monetary Fund is expecting a stronger economic recovery in 2021 as coronavirus vaccine rollouts get under way, but it warns of “daunting challenges” given the different rates of administering shots across the globe.

The organisation said it expects the world economy to grow by 6% in 2021, up from its 5.5% forecast in January. Looking further ahead, global GDP for 2022 is seen increasing by 4.4%, higher than an earlier estimate of 4.2%.

“Even with high uncertainty about the path of the pandemic, a way out of this health and economic crisis is increasingly visible,” IMF chief economist Gita Gopinath said in the latest world economic outlook report.

The US is set to expand by 6.4%. The positive assessment for the US is highly driven by Joe Biden’s $1.9tn (£1.37tn) coronavirus rescue package, which came into force last month.

The world’s second-largest economy, China, will record 8.4% growth this year and 5.6% in 2022, the IMF estimates, after a jumpstart – and heavily criticised – lockdown.

The monetary fund expects European countries which share the euro currency to collectively expand 4.4% this year and 3.8% in 2022. Japan is expected to register 3.3% growth this year and 2.5% next year.

US president Joe Biden is set to announce he is shaving about two weeks off his 1 May deadline for states to make all adults eligible for coronavirus vaccines.

From Associated Press:

With states gradually expanding eligibility beyond such priority groups as older people and essential, front-line workers, the president plans to announce that every adult in the US will be eligible by 19 April to be vaccinated, a White House official said.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss Biden’s plans before the formal announcement. Biden was scheduled to visit a Covid-19 vaccination site in Virginia on Tuesday, followed by remarks at the White House updating the nation on the administration’s progress against the coronavirus.

Biden is also expected to announce that 150m doses have been put into people’s arms since his inauguration on 20 January. That puts the president well on track to meet his new goal of 200m shots administered by 30 April – his 100th day in office. Biden’s original goal had been 100m shots by the end of his first 100 days.

The White House said on Monday that nearly 1 in 3 Americans and more than 40% of adults have received at least one shot, and nearly 1 in 4 adults are fully vaccinated. Among older people, 75% have received at least one shot, and more than 55% of them are fully vaccinated.

Hi everyone, this is Rhi Storer taking over from my colleague Jedidajah Otte for the next hour. Please feel free to send contributions to my email address [email protected] or my Twitter account. Thanks in advance.

Plans by EU countries to issue vaccine passports should have a legal basis to ensure that they are necessary and proportionate, the bloc’s privacy watchdogs said on Tuesday.

Reuters reports:

The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) and the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) also warned against using data in such travel documents to create a central EU database.

Tourism-reliant countries such as Greece, Spain and Portugal are hoping that vaccine certificates will revive international travel and save this summer’s holiday season. While some countries want an EU-wide approach to the issue, others are planning national schemes.

“Any measure adopted at national or EU level that involves processing of personal data must respect the general principles of effectiveness, necessity and proportionality,” EDPB head Andrea Jelinek said in a statement.

“Therefore, the EDPB and the EDPS recommend that any further use of the digital green certificate by the member sates must have an appropriate legal basis in the member states and all the necessary safeguards must be in place.”

The head of the EDPS, Wojciech Wiewiórowski, said the use of the documents should be restricted and that they should be scrapped once the pandemic is over.

“It must be made clear that the proposal does not allow for – and must not lead to – the creation of any sort of central database of personal data at EU level,” he said.

The watchdogs say EU countries should allow for three types of vaccine certificates – for people who have been vaccinated, recovered or tested – to avoid discrimination based on health data and hence a breach of fundamental rights.

The Indian capital of New Delhi on Tuesday imposed a night-time curfew until 30 April with much of the country struggling to contain a second surge in coronavirus infections that has eclipsed the first wave.

Reuters reports:

The next four weeks in India’s fight against Covid-19 will be “very, very critical,” said senior government health official Vinod Kumar Paul, saying the disease was now spreading much faster than in 2020.

“The pandemic has worsened in the country … There is a serious rise in cases,” Paul told reporters.

India, the world’s second most populous country with 1.35 billion people, has administered 80.9m vaccine doses, the most after the US and China, but it lags far behind in immunisations per capita.

Healthcare and similar frontline workers as well as people over 60 have been the main recipients of vaccinations so far. Inoculations of people above 45 began only on 1 April.

New Delhi authorities launched the 10pm to 5am curfew a day after India surpassed the milestone of 100,000 new daily infections for the first time.

The curfew echoes tough restrictions in Maharashtra, the country’s hardest-hit state where the financial capital Mumbai is also located.

Rising Covid-19 fatalities in the states of Punjab and Chhattisgarh are also cause for “extreme concern”, India’s top-ranked health official Rajesh Bhushan told reporters on Tuesday.

Coronavirus cases jumped by nearly 97,000 on Tuesday, data from the health ministry showed. There were 446 new deaths, taking the total to 165,547.

With 12.7 million cases, India is the worst affected country after the US and Brazil.

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has insisted that the government will make good on its promise to have 70% of the country’s adult population vaccinated by the end of the summer.

To date, 8,743,694 people in Spain have received a single dose of the vaccine, while 2,852,806 have received both doses.

The country’s population is about 47 million. Speaking on Tuesday afternoon, Sánchez said the pace of vaccination would be accelerated over the coming weeks.

“We’re going to manage to have 70% of Spain’s adult population – 33 million people – immunised thanks to the vaccine by the end of August,” he said.

The prime minister said Spain had ordered more than 87m doses of the vaccine for delivery between April and September, adding: “That allows us to ensure that any Spaniard who wants to be vaccinated within that period can be.”

Sánchez also said his government did not intend to seek an extension of the nationwide state of emergency in place since last October – which includes the current overnight curfew – when it expires on 9 May.

The prime minister was speaking after it emerged that the regional government of Madrid had held three meetings with the manufacturers of the Russian Sputnik vaccine.

The regional president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, said the meetings had been held “to offer citizens answers”, and attacked the central government for what she termed its tardiness in getting people vaccinated.

”It wouldn’t be the first, or the fifth, or the tenth, time that the Madrid regional government has responded more quickly than the national government and looked into all possible scenarios when it comes to fighting the virus,” she said.

Sánchez responded by calling on regional governments to behave in a spirit of solidarity and responsibility, adding: “The success of the EU has been that we’ve been doing it together and negotiating in the name of more than 400 million people … We want to guarantee maximum safety and that’s why we’re using vaccines that have been approved by the EU.”

Spain has logged 3,311,523 cases of the coronavirus, and registered 75,783 deaths, according to the health ministry. The country is currently facing a fourth wave of the virus.

Sweden has registered 21,802 new coronavirus cases since Thursday, health agency statistics showed on Tuesday, a marked rise in infections against the daily tally of cases recorded a week ago.

Reuters reports:

The figure compared with 16,427 cases during the corresponding period last week.

The country of 10 million inhabitants registered 35 new deaths, taking the total to 13,533. The deaths registered have occurred over several days and sometimes weeks and could be less accurate than normal due to the Easter holiday last week.

Sweden’s death rate per capita is many times higher than that of its Nordic neighbours’ but lower than in several European countries that opted for lockdowns.

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, said on Tuesday that his government expects 25 million Spaniards to be fully vaccinated against coronavirus by late July, while confirming the end-of-August target of inoculating 70% of the population.

“The pace of vaccination will accelerate in April and then each month we will improve the vaccination pace from the previous month,” Sanchez told a press conference.

Spain will update its 2021 economic outlook to reflect the impact of a third wave of the coronavirus pandemic that weighed on growth in January and February, Sanchez said.

The government projects a 7.2% rebound this year after output tanked 11% in 2020, but the central bank and other analysts expect slower growth, Reuters reports.

India’s fight against Covid-19 over the next four weeks will be “very, very critical” as its faces a faster second surge in infections, a senior government health official, Vinod Kumar Paul, said on Tuesday.

India’s daily infections passed the 100,000 mark for the first time on Monday, data from the health ministry showed. It recorded 96,982 new cases on Tuesday, Reuters reports.

Germany should impose tougher lockdown measures for two to three weeks to bridge the gap until more people have been vaccinated and an easing of restrictions is possible, the chairman of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) said on Tuesday.

Reuters reports:

Armin Laschet said the aim of the stricter measures was to reduce the incidence of the virus to below 100 cases per 100,000 and enable compulsory testing, digital contact tracing and some reopening of the economy.

“My plan is for another big effort,” Laschet, premier of Germany’s most populous state of North Rhine-Westphalia, told ZDF television.

“Then we can enter the new period where we can carefully reopen,” added Laschet, who wants to run as the conservative’s chancellor candidate in a September federal election.

Laschet, previously criticised by Merkel for resisting tighter measures, also wants to bring forward talks with the chancellor and other state premiers scheduled for April 12.

A government spokeswoman was cool on Laschet’s proposals.

“The federal government is always ready for consultations. The condition is that they are well-prepared,” said a government spokeswoman. The reaction among state premiers was mixed.

Despite months of restrictions, Germany is struggling to contain a third wave of infections and many virologists say a tough lockdown is unavoidable. Lagging Britain, Israel and the United States on vaccinations, only about 12% of Germany’s 83 million population has had at least one vaccine dose.

On Tuesday, Germany reported 6,885 new confirmed coronavirus cases within 24 hours and the incidence of the virus per 100,000 fell to 123 from 128 on Monday. However, the Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases said the numbers may be lower as less testing was carried out over the Easter holiday.

Due to its federal structure, Germany has a confusing patchwork of restrictions which varies from state to state. While the city states of Berlin and Hamburg introduced a night-time curfew over Easter, other states, including Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate were experimenting with some easing of curbs.

With an election due in September, many premiers are worried about a voter backlash if they impose new restrictions although polls show more Germans back a tougher lockdown than an easing.

The numbers of Covid-19 patients in hospital in Scotland has fallen to 196, the first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, confirmed.

She told a Scottish government coronavirus briefing there were 19 fewer people hospitalised with Covid than before the Easter break.

Of these patients, the number in intensive care remains the same as prior to the Easter break at 21, PA reports.

Sturgeon said 2,577,816 people have received the first dose of a Covid-19 vaccination and 463,780 have received their second dose.

The Polish president, Andrzej Duda, believes that the battle against the coronavirus epidemic is being handled well, the head of his office said on Tuesday.

First News reports:

Pawel Szrot told Polish Radio Three that the president has been participating in government activities to lower Covid-19 related mortality and infection rates in the country and “will continue to do so.”

Szrot added that the efforts of the president would be “similar” to those in which he participated before Christmas, such as “meetings with communities that are involved in combating the epidemic, that is to say, medics, the uniformed services and support staff,” said Szrot.

Poland recorded 8,245 fresh cases and 60 further deaths over the past 24 hours to Tuesday morning, compared with 9,902 cases reported on Monday, data released by the health ministry shows.

The number of hospitalised Covid-19 patients rose to 33,544 from 32,656 recorded the previous day, including 3,315 patients on ventilators, against the total of 4,245 ventilators available, the health ministry said on Twitter.

In total, 6,665,384 Poles have received jabs against coronavirus, with 2,074,033 of those having had both doses of the vaccine, according to data posted on the official government website, gov.pl.

Contract manufacturer Catalent Inc has reached an agreement with Moderna Inc to expand the US production of the vaccine maker’s Covid-19 shot, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The agreement will nearly double the vaccine output at Catalent’s Bloomington, Indiana, plant this month to about 400 vials a minute, the WSJ reported.

The Virgin Atlantic chief executive, Shai Weiss, told reporters that the UK government’s traffic light system for reopening international travel should work towards enabling people to return from “green” countries without the need for coronavirus tests.

He said:

The essence of the framework should allow for a path to green and removal of testing and quarantine when it is safe to do so.

We can’t have a prohibitively expensive testing system that puts businesses, people and families off travelling.

Passengers travelling to and from ‘green’ countries should be able to do so freely, without testing or quarantine at all, and vaccinated passengers travelling to and from ‘amber’ countries should not face testing or quarantine.

Other than for ‘red’ countries, we do not believe quarantine is the answer for controlling the spread of the virus.

Weiss said destinations that should be on the “green” list for international travel from 17 May include the US, Israel and the Caribbean.

He said the US was “vaccinating over 3 million people per day”, Israel was “the world’s leading vaccinated country”, and the Caribbean “has done an awesome job throughout this pandemic of keeping things under control”.

He added: “I think these three areas should be on that list.”

Speaking at the joint press conference, the Heathrow chief executive, John Holland-Kaye, said the United Arab Emirates could be included as “they also have very high levels of vaccination”, PA reports.

A senior official from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has told an Italian daily it is “clear” that there is a link between the AstraZeneca vaccine and a rare form of blood clot but that the cause is still not known, Agence France-Presse is reporting from Rome.

“In my opinion, we can say it now, it is clear there is a link with the vaccine. But we still do not know what causes this reaction,” the EMA head of vaccines, Marco Cavaleri, told Italy’s Il Messaggero newspaper.

The official reportedly told the paper that Europe’s drug regulator would be making a statement on the issue “in the coming hours”.

However the EMA later denied establishing a causal connection between the AstraZeneca vaccine and a rare blood clotting syndrome. See entry at 14.53 BST and full story here. In a statement to Agence France-Presse, the EMA said it had “not yet reached a conclusion and the review is currently ongoing”, adding that it expected to announce its findings on Wednesday or Thursday.

Germany, Italy, France, Spain and the Netherlands have all recently limited inoculation with the Anglo-Swedish company’s vaccine to older age groups pending an EMA investigation, while reports from the UK on Monday suggested Britain’s MHRA was considering a similar restriction and could make an announcement as early as Tuesday.

The MHRA’s chief executive, Dr June Raine, said no decision had been made and urged people to continue to get vaccinated.”No decision has yet been made on any regulatory action,” she said.

Prof Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London told the BBC that the clots raised questions over whether young people should get the jab. He said: “There is increasing evidence that there is a rare risk associated particularly with the AstraZeneca vaccine, but it may be associated at a lower level with other vaccines, of these unusual blood clots with low platelet counts.

“It appears that risk is age related, it may possibly be – but the data is weaker on this – related to sex.”

The World Health Organization (WHO) does not back requiring vaccination passports for entry or exit, due to uncertainty over whether inoculation prevents transmission of the virus, as well as equity concerns, a spokeswoman said on Tuesday, Reuters reports.

In the UK, the Labour party has warned that Covid status certificates, whereby people would have to prove they have been vaccinated to enter shops, pubs and other indoor settings and mass events, could be “discriminatory”, with the party leader, Keir Starmer, poised to vote against the measures, my colleague Aubrey Allegretti reports.

The WHO now expects to review China’s Covid-19 vaccines Sinopharm and Sinovac for possible emergency use listing around the end of April, as more data is required, WHO spokewoman Margaret Harris added at a UN news briefing.

Tanzania’s new president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, marked a difference with her predecessor on Tuesday by saying her government would form a committee for scientific research into Covid-19, Reuters reports.

The recently deceased former president John Magufuli had dismissed the threat from the coronavirus pandemic, saying God and steam remedies would protect Tanzanians.

I’m Jedidajah Otte and will be helming this blog for the next few hours. Feel free to get in touch with updates and tips, I’m on Twitter @JedySays or you can email me.

The Georgian prime minister, Irakli Garibashvili, has tested positive for coronavirus amid a fresh spike in cases in the Caucasus nation, despite the start of a vaccine rollout.

“I am feeling well,” Garibashvili, 38, said on Facebook. “I am in self-isolation and continuing to work remotely.”

AFP reports that on Tuesday, Georgia registered 897 new coronavirus cases – three times the average number of daily infections recorded over the past months. Overall, the Black Sea nation of 4 million people has registered more than 275,000 coronavirus cases and 3,832 deaths, the health ministry said.

In May last year, Georgia lifted its coronavirus lockdown and allowed shops to reopen, but a night-time curfew has remained in place.

In mid-March, Georgia began a national vaccination campaign by inoculating medical workers with AstraZeneca’s jab. Authorities have so far ruled out any further anti-virus curbs.