Experts encouraged by vaccine findings, but warn of challenges ahead

Over the past week, Europe has recorded a 10% decline in COVID-19 cases “for the first time in over three months”, but deaths continued to increase, data from the World Health Organization (WHO) showed on Tuesday.

The European Region “recorded 46% of all cases and 49% of all deaths reported globally, with nearly 2 million new cases and almost 30,000 new deaths”, WHO said in its latest epidemiological report.

Despite the decline in cases, deaths in Europe jumped by 18% during the past week in comparison to the previous one.

The countries reporting the highest number of cases in the past week were:

The countries reported to have the highest mortality rates (exceeding 60 deaths per 1m people) were:

Officers are using water cannon and pepper spray as they try to disperse a protest against coronavirus restrictions in the German capital, Berlin police said Wednesday.

The demonstration is taking place near the Brandenburg Gate, a few hundred meters away from Germany’s parliament, the Reichstag, which has temporarily locked its doors.

Officers at the demonstration have been targeted with “bottles, stones and firecrackers as well as with pepper spray. In turn, they are using physical coercion and pepper spray and have arrested some of the attackers,” a tweet from the Berlin police said.

A previous tweet said that because the protesters “did not fulfil the obligation to leave the location, people were just rained on by our water cannons.”

Television pictures showed a tense standoff between police officers and demonstrators. Police have been trying to slowly move the demonstrators away from the parliament after tweeting the demonstration was being dissolved.

Parliament is in session and there is a debate going on in the main plenary hall.

Berlin police spokesman Stefan Petersen earlier told CNN that several thousand protesters had gathered near the parliamentary district in central Berlin.

The organizers for several demonstrations asked for permission to demonstrate in the no-protest zone around the German parliament, and that permission was not granted, Petersen said.

TV footage showed many demonstrators without masks and not socially distanced. Some protesters were carrying flags for the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party, and at least one imperial banner — a flag now deployed by the far right as the swastika is prohibited in Germany — could be seen.

The Berlin police force tweeted that requests to wear a mask had not had any effect.

Around 2,200 police officers will be deployed overall Wednesday, Petersen said.

A final analysis of the Phase 3 trial of Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine shows it was 95% effective in preventing infections, even in older adults, and caused no serious safety concerns, the company said Wednesday.

The company counted 170 cases of coronavirus infection among volunteers who took part in the trial. It said 162 infections were in people who got placebo, or plain saline, shots, while eight cases were in participants who got the actual vaccine. That works out to an efficacy of 95%, Pfizer said.

The data show Pfizer’s initial claim of a better than 90% efficacy — a claim that stunned and pleased health officials and vaccine developers last week — holds up.

“Efficacy was consistent across age, race and ethnicity demographics. The observed efficacy in adults over 65 years of age was over 94%,” Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech said in a joint statement.

“There were 10 severe cases of Covid-19 observed in the trial, with nine of the cases occurring in the placebo group and one in the BNT162b2 vaccinated group.” BNT162b2 is the experimental name for the vaccine.

An independent group has been keeping an eye on results and side-effects. “To date, the Data Monitoring Committee for the study has not reported any serious safety concerns related to the vaccine,” the companies said.

“The only Grade 3 (severe) solicited adverse event greater than or equal to 2% in frequency after the first or second dose was fatigue at 3.7% following dose 2,” the companies said. Older adults tended to have fewer adverse events and those they had were milder.

Pfizer said it will seek US Food and Drug Administration emergency use authorization “within days.”

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The head of the UK government’s ‘Test and Trace’ program has been told to self isolate by the app that she is responsible for.

Harding will be in self-isolation until 26th November. She follows British Prime Minister Boris Johnson who is also self-isolating after getting the same message.

People in England and Wales were encouraged to download the NHS COVID-19 app when it was launched. There were teething issues with the app, which included it failing to alert people to their need to self isolate.

The governor of Erbil, capital of the semiautonomous Kurdistan region in northern Iraq, died Wednesday from coronavirus complications, a spokesman for the region’s health ministry, Aso Hweizi, told CNN.

Firsat Sofi was infected more than three weeks ago and was transferred for treatment in Turkey, Hweizi said.

Erbil alone recorded 156 cases and nine deaths on Tuesday, the health ministry said. The total number of cases recorded across Iraq that day was 2,961, with 40 deaths.

Iraq is the second worst-hit country in the Middle East with a total of 524,503 recorded cases, according to government data.

The United States is likely in the “last big surge” before a possible Covid-19 vaccine can start to offer help in the coming months, one expert says. But for now, the country is continuing to set grim case and hospitalization records and the pandemic shows no signs of slowing down.

His projection comes at the heels of more good news out of vaccine trials — with Moderna announcing this week its vaccine is more than 94% effective and Pfizer’s CEO saying the company is preparing to file for emergency use authorization for their own vaccine.

But it also comes amid a scary time for the country. For at least 15 days straight, the US has reported more than 100,000 daily infections. About 76,830 people are hospitalized with the virus nationwide, according to the COVID Tracking Project. That’s the highest number since the pandemic’s start. And each day, hundreds of Americans continue to lose their battle against Covid-19, with at least 11 days this month topping a 1,000 daily death toll.

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Japan reported 1,694 new Covid-19 cases for Tuesday, its third highest single-day jump since the pandemic began. 

The country’s daily new cases dipped below 1,000 for the first time in over a week on Monday, but they rose back up on Tuesday, according to the Health Ministry.

The total number of confirmed cases nationwide stands at 121,529, including 1,926 deaths.

Capital spike: Tokyo reported 493 new Covid-19 infections on Wednesday, the highest daily increase in cases for Japan’s capital since the pandemic began. 

The last peak was recorded on Aug. 1 with 472 new cases, according to Tokyo’s Metropolitan Government.

If there’s one thing he regrets about the pandemic, the US’ top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci says he wishes he had pushed harder for broader testing early on.

Fauci, who was an early member of the White House coronavirus task force, said he knew the pandemic would be bad when it was clear community spread was happening back in the late winter.

Importance of testing: Testing is the first step for contact tracing — a tried and true public health approach that involves identifying cases quickly, isolating and treating those people, identifying their contacts and testing them to see if they need to be isolated or quarantined.

“But deep down perhaps I should have been much more vocal about saying we have really, absolutely, got to do that,’” Fauci said. “I saw that it went nowhere and maybe I should have kept pushing the envelope on that.”

Testing is important because otherwise cases spread silently, Fauci noted. “What is going on now that you don’t recognize becomes a case a few weeks later,” he said.

“That becomes a hospitalization a few weeks later. That becomes intensive care a few days later. That becomes death a few weeks later.”

Fauci said he was hesitant to talk about his regrets for fear his statements would be taken out of context as sound-bites.

The United States reported 161,934 new coronavirus infections and 1,707 new fatalities on Tuesday, according to Johns Hopkins University.

The country has now reported a total of at least 11,357,322 cases and 248,672 deaths, according to the university’s tally.

The totals include cases from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and other US territories, as well as repatriated cases. 

CNN is tracking US cases: