Washington (AFP)
The United States begins a vast vaccination campaign against covid-19 on Monday, after express preparations during the weekend, while on the other side of the Atlantic, France is embarking on a strategy of massive screening in some cities and that Germany is preparing for partial containment.
In one year, the pandemic has already killed more than 1.6 million people around the world.
In the United States, the most affected country, the death toll is approaching the threshold of 300,000 deaths with a total Sunday evening of 299,093 and more than 16 million cases.
This weekend, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine began shipping, in refrigerated crates at -70 ° C, from the Pfizer Michigan plant to hospitals and other locations.
Pfizer says 20 planes will carry its vaccines every day.
"The vaccines are shipped and on the way," US President Donald Trump said on Twitter on Sunday.
Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear said his state, located in the eastern United States, would be the first to vaccinate Americans, less than 72 hours after the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was set on fire green from US health authorities.
Nearly three million doses are expected to be made available by Wednesday, with the goal of vaccinating some 20 million Americans by the end of the year and 100 million by the end of March.
The urgency is felt: infections have skyrocketed, with 1.1 million new confirmed cases in the past five days.
The death on Saturday from Covid-19 of black country singer Charley Pride, 86, has stirred up emotion in the country.
The United States on Friday was the sixth country to approve the vaccine from the American-German alliance, after the United Kingdom, Canada, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Mexico.
The European Medicines Agency is expected to issue an opinion by the end of December.
Quebec also begins its first phase of vaccination on Monday, with residents and health staff of a retirement home in the eponymous city.
On the Old Continent, the hardest hit with 477,631 deaths and more than 22 million cases, fears are growing before the end of the year celebrations, and the second wave of the epidemic is accelerating in particular in Germany and Italy .
According to data compiled by AFP, Europe is the area with the most new contaminations this week (+236,700 on average per day).
- Massive screening -
France is embarking this week on a massive screening strategy targeted at a few agglomerations, Le Havre -nord-ouest) and Charleville-Mézières (north-east) to start, in the hope of better controlling the epidemic with a view to deconfinement .
The strategy is inspired by that attempted in the United Kingdom in Liverpool, carried out in early November and whose results were considered positive
In Germany, where the pandemic "is out of control" according to the leader of Bavaria Markus Söder, partial containment was decreed Sunday from Wednesday until January 10, reminiscent of that experienced in the spring during the first wave.
Some regions did not wait for Sunday's meeting to take action.
In Saxony (east), the regional state most affected by the epidemic at present, the closures of shops and schools come into force on Monday.
In Switzerland, the director of the Zurich hospital demanded the shutdown of the country and, according to the newspaper SonntagsZeitung, the five university hospitals in Basel, Bern, Zurich, Lausanne and Geneva expressed "their great concern" to health Minister.
Italy, fifth most bereaved country in the world after the United States, Brazil, India and Mexico, overtook the United Kingdom as the most affected European country on Saturday with 64,036 dead and more than 1.8 million of cases.
Further north, Lithuania will close most stores from Wednesday.
For its Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte, "the figures are frightening and saddening, the risk is now everywhere".
- Third wave in South Korea -
In Asia, South Korea, which is facing a third wave of infections, reported 1,030 new cases on Sunday, a record for the second day in a row.
Long set up as a model for managing the health crisis, the country was surprised by this revival and President Moon Jae-in spoke on Saturday of a "very serious" situation.
He apologized for the difficulties faced by his government.
In Africa, Mauritania announced on Sunday to re-establish a nighttime curfew in the face of the progression of the Covid-19, which threatens to saturate hospitals in this poor country with limited health resources.
As for the small kingdom of Eswatini, landlocked in South Africa, it lost its prime minister, who died more than two weeks after being diagnosed positive for Covid-19, even if the authorities did not specify the cause of this death.
burs-els / ob
© 2020 AFP