The UK reported more than 1,300 deaths from Covid-19 on Friday, the highest daily figure since the pandemic began. Sadiq Khan, London’s mayor, said the spread of Covid-19 in London was “out of control”, adding that in some parts of the city one in every 20 people has been infected with the disease.
Indonesia has “lost control” of its coronavirus response, experts have warned, complicating a planned mass rollout of China’s Sinovac vaccine in the world’s fourth most populous country. The south-east Asian nation has been battling one of the region’s most stubborn outbreaks with ineffectual lockdowns.
While Europe suffers under a strict coronavirus lockdown, the airport in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates trade hub, has been rammed as British, French and Russian tourists flooded into what has recently become the world’s most open city, where visitors can enjoy restaurants, bars and even socially distanced raves.
The British government is to roll out mass community testing across England, to detect people who have Covid-19 but show no symptoms. The programme, announced by health secretary Matt Hancock on Sunday morning, will enable all 317 English local authorities to offer rapid testing.
Mike Speiser of Sutter Hill Ventures, which holds a $13.3bn stake in Snowflake
Private investors in Snowflake are collectively sitting on more than $48bn worth of shares. Its software product, which allows companies to remotely store and analyse large data sets, has proven wildly popular in public markets as investors clamour for businesses benefiting from the shift to remote working during the pandemic.
Commerzbank has raised its provisions for bad loans for the second time since November, as Germany’s second-largest bank braces for a bigger hit from the country’s latest lockdown. It is earmarking “at least” €1.7bn for loan losses, an increase of almost a fifth from its previous guidance.
Airbus chief executive Guillaume Faury said he was “cautiously optimistic” about a recovery in aircraft demand as the plane-maker revealed a 34 per cent decline in deliveries during 2020 to 566, Mr Faury said the group still hoped to increase production of single-aisle aircraft in the second half of the year.
The Covid-19 vaccine developed by BioNTech and Pfizer has been shown to work against the highly transmissible variants of coronavirus discovered in the UK and South Africa. Researchers at Pfizer and the University of Texas found that the vaccine can neutralise a virus engineered to contain the N501Y mutation.