Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro turned down UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s call to ‘get AstraZeneca vaccines’ during a meeting in New York on Monday.
- The UK prime minister praised the vaccine, saying he has had it twice. In response, Bolsonaro pointed to himself, laughing, and wagged his finger. ‘Not yet,’ he said through an interpreter. Bolsonaro boasted he had developed ‘excellent’ immunity to Covid after contracting it.
- Meanwhile, with the coronavirus pandemic now in its 19th month, the US is grappling with a new reality. The death toll from the coronavirus pandemic has now surpassed 676,000, according to Johns Hopkins University. That number exceeds the estimated 675,000 death that occurred in the United States during the Great Influenza pandemic of 1918.
- Despite the fact that over 675,000 people in the United States have now died from the current coronavirus pandemic, many Americans are still not heeding the lessons learned from the health crisis of 103 years ago to be better prepared this time around, according to epidemiologist Stephen Kissler of the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.
- In California, it officially has the lowest coronavirus case rate of any state, federal figures show, underscoring the progress made in the ongoing battle against the highly infectious Delta variant.
- However, overseas New Zealanders trying to return home are facing a queue tens of thousands of people long, as the country reopens bookings to cross the border.
The country’s borders have been strictly controlled since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic only citizens, permanent residents, and a handful of essential workers can enter, and all of them must make a booking to spend two weeks in government-controlled quarantine (MIQ).
