“China eats weird animals disease”

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates believes a return to “normal” life is further down the road for the US than people expect, despite a Covid-19 vaccine being approved and distributed this week.

Conceding that by the summer of 2021, the US should be “way closer to normal than we are now,” Gates, who has donated millions to vaccination efforts through his foundation, believes a full return to normal will likely not be possible until after 2022.

.@BillGates on Covid: "Even through 2022” we should be prepared for life to not return to “normal”

Says “sadly" it’s "appropriate” for bars and restaurants to close over the next "four to six months" pic.twitter.com/cmDD8pv3XR

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) December 13, 2020

From 6,000 deaths and and 300,000 cases by the end of April in Ontario alone, to 60,000 cases a day by the end of the year in Canada, the COVID-19 models have always garnered some form of skepticism.

Ontario reported 1,677 new cases of COVID-19 on Sunday along with 16 new deaths, as the province’s total confirmed death toll since the pandemic began approached 4,000.

“Locally, there are 456 new cases in Toronto, 356 in Peel and 143 in York Region,” Health Minister Christine Elliott wrote on Twitter.

Coronavirus: Germany to go into lockdown over Christmas

Germany is to go into a hard lockdown over the Christmas period as the number of deaths and infections from the coronavirus reaches record levels.

Non-essential shops will close across the country from Wednesday, as will schools, with children to be cared for at home wherever possible.

Chancellor Angela Merkel blamed Christmas shopping for a “considerable” rise in social contacts.

The latest figures showed 20,200 more infections and a further 321 deaths.

The promise of vaccination has been used, not to liberate us, but to keep us locked down for longer.

Ninety-year-old Margaret Keenan will be the answer to a pub-quiz question for years to come: who was the first person in the UK to be vaccinated against Covid-19? The answer to the question ‘Who was the second person in the UK to be vaccinated against Covid-19?’ might be, too.

From booming business to barely scraping by: Spa owner continuing to operate defying COVID restrictions.

Last Friday, five Bay Area counties announced that they were once again going into shutdown, for four weeks, due to rising Covid-19 rates. Nine months after it became the first region in the U.S. to introduce a stay-at-home health order—originally scheduled for three weeks, its restrictions have never been fully lifted—the Bay Area is resetting the clock, with a shutdown not quite as strict as in March but likely to have more severe social and economic effects.

Why has Pacific Asia “performed” so well on Covid-19? No country in this region has had an epidemic anything like as damaging as those in Europe, North America or South America — from Japan to South Korea, Australia to Taiwan.

The answer is of more than just epidemiological interest. Respect for the response of governments in this region has become a matter of political folklore — people like Jeremy Hunt talk about it all the time — and is fundamentally changing the reputation of the “Asian model” among the liberal commentariat. Where before there was scepticism and a distrust of the activist, technology-enabled, centralised control state, it is now commonly seen as having been more effective than Western democracies.