Coronavirus: Greg Norman gets COVID-19 as Europe, US cases rise
Australian golf icon Greg Norman has dropped the F-bomb as he revealed he is the latest high-profile star to have been diagnosed with coronavirus.
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Australian golf icon Greg Norman has dropped the F-bomb as he revealed he is the latest high-profile star to have been diagnosed with coronavirus.
Norman, who live in the US, posted the news on his Instagram page, telling fans of his anger that he had the virus.
Photos shared by ‘The Shark’ show him in his hospital bed in isolation.
“This sums it all up. My Christmas Day. On behalf of millions, f*** Covid,” Norman wrote.
“Get this s**t behind us never to experience it again.”
The sportsman is due to hit Australian screens next year as part of the Seven Network’s new reality game show Holey Moley.
The news comes as the UK’s official COVID-19 death toll has surpassed 70,000 on Christmas Day, as 570 more people died from the virus.
A total of 70,302 people have now died within 28 days of testing positive for coronavirus, as reported by Johns Hopkins figures.
Meanwhile, 32,725 new infections have been recorded in the past 24 hours, meaning cases have increased by 45 per cent in a week. Those figures come from the Department of Health and Social Care and include deaths in hospitals, care homes and the community.
Europe is now the worst affected region in the world by the coronavirus pandemic followed by the US, India and Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia, according to an AFP tally and Johns Hopkins data.
Thousands of European truckers on Wednesday spent a fourth night sleeping in the cabs of their vehicles, which are stuck close to the major cross-Channel port of Dover while the drivers wait to pass a COVID test, as required by France for travel from the UK.
Europe was the first global region to record more than half a million deaths on December 17.
With England battling the new mutant strain of the virus, more travel restrictions have been imposed on travelling Brits in response to the new coronavirus variant that is said to have originated in the United Kingdom and is potentially more transmissible.
US CLOSES DOORS TO UK
Passengers arriving in the United States from the UK must test negative for COVID-19 before departure, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has announced.
Passengers will be required to have a negative PCR or antigen test within 72 hours of boarding their flight from the UK to the US.
Passengers are also required to provide documentation of their laboratory results.
Airlines are required to confirm the test results before the flight, and passengers will not be permitted to board if they do not provide proof of test results.
Since the discovery of the variant, around 50 countries have restricted travel from the UK, and in some cases, also travel from other countries that have documented cases with the variant.
“On March 14, President Trump issued a Presidential Proclamation to suspend the entry of foreign nationals who visited the United Kingdom in the past 14 days,” the CDC said in a statement. “This has reduced air travel to the U.S. from the U.K. by about 90%. This additional testing requirement will fortify our protection of the American public to improve their health and safety and ensure responsible international travel.”
The agency said the order will go into effect on Monday.
The rest of Europe is struggling with surging cases of the virus.
The Czech Republic has over 10,000 COVID-19 deaths and has reported over 14,000 new cases for Christmas Eve.
In Italy, residents of Rome are being forced to take their dead to other cities after the capital city’s crematorium set strict limits on numbers to handle its backlog.
With 1,500 coffins waiting for cremation at the Prima Porta cemetery this week, officials have said that they will accept only 200 a week while they try to catch up with demand.
POPE’S MESSAGE OF HOPE
Pope Francis said in his Christmas message on urges fraternity in these unusually troubled times exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.
“At this moment in history, marked by the ecological crisis and grave economic and social imbalances only worsened by the coronavirus pandemic, it is all the more important for us to acknowledge one another as brothers and sisters,” he said in his “Urbi et Orbi” message.
He said this call for solidarity was especially aimed at “people who are the most fragile, the sick and all who at this period find themselves without work or in grave difficulty due to the economic consequences of the pandemic and to women who have been subjected to domestic violence during these months of confinement.” The pontiff also touched on the plight of children caught up by war, singling out victims in Syria, Yemen and Iraq in his Christmas message.
“On this day, when the word of God became a child, let us turn our gaze to the many, all too many, children worldwide, especially in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, who still pay the high price of war,” he said.
“May their faces touch the consciences of all men and women of good will, so that the causes of conflicts can be addressed and courageous efforts can be made to build a future of peace,” he said.
CHRISTMAS CANCELLED
Coronavirus misery hung over Christmas, with countless millions forced to cancel plans or limit festivities under fresh virus lockdowns.
After a grinding pandemic year that has seen more than 1.7 million people die from COVID-19, a slew of new outbreaks are a stark reminder that despite emergency vaccine rollouts, life is unlikely to return to normal quickly.
Bethlehem, where Christians believe Jesus was born, was preparing for a Christmas unlike any in its recent history.
The Christmas Eve mass at the Church of the Nativity is traditionally the highlight of a holiday season that sees hundreds of thousands of visitors flock to the Palestinian city in the occupied West Bank.
The mass was broadcast online, with only clergy and select individuals allowed inside the basilica, which was sterilised ahead of the service.
“It is different this year, because we can’t pray at the Nativity Church,” said Jania Shaheen, who was with her two small children and husband in the square.
“We can’t gather as a family, everybody is afraid … It is good to see some people here today but there is a no one compared to last year. It is only for people of Bethlehem,” she told media.
In Europe, much of the continent is enduring a dark winter of resurgent outbreaks.
Germany was forced to cancel its famous Christmas markets and in the Catholic-majority Philippines some chose to spend the holidays alone because of the risk of catching the virus on public transport, as well as quarantine rules making travelling time-consuming and expensive.
“I am ordering food in, re-watching old movies, and catching up with my family by video,” said Kim Patria, 31, who lives alone in Manila.
In the United States, more than one million people have now been vaccinated, but the country’s coronavirus response remained chaotic as Donald Trump helicoptered off the White House lawn for one of the last times in his presidency.
The outgoing President and his wife Melania were bound for a vacation at his glitzy Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, after his shock rejection of a massive coronavirus relief package passed by Congress.
California has surpassed two million COVID-19 cases aording to Johns Hopkins University.
It’s the first U.S. state to exceed 2 million coronavirus infections. ,
New Year’s celebrations are looking downbeat globally, with lockdowns looming for Scotland, Northern Ireland and Austria through the post-Christmas period, while Portugal has imposed a New Year’s Eve curfew.
For now, Sydney still plans to ring in 2021 with its famous Harbour Bridge fireworks display, with New South Wales state Premier Gladys Berejiklian pledging the seven-minute spectacle will go ahead “no matter what”.
But as with most of 2020, people are being encouraged to watch on television from their sofas.
HOW DANGEROUS IS THE MUTANT STRAIN?
It comes as scientists around the world are rushing to gauge the dangers posed by a mutant strain of the coronavirus that has spread rapidly throughout Britain.
Scientists advising the British government say early evidence indicates the new strain is more contagious than older variants, but that there are currently no signs that it causes more severe disease, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Transmissibility, which means how easily the virus spreads from one person to another and the seriousness of the illness it causes, are both important metrics for assessing the potential threat.
Viruses mutate naturally and many strains of the new coronavirus have surfaced since it first spread around the world.
Health experts claimed that newly authorised vaccines will protect against the new strain.
Ugur Sahin, the chief executive of BioNTech SE, which partnered with Pfizer on a vaccine, said he thought the shot would work against the new variant of the virus, but that if it is indeed more transmissible, it could raise the threshold needed to protect the community.
“If the virus becomes more efficient in infecting people, we might need even a higher vaccination rate to ensure that normal life can continue without interruption,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
Virus think tank adviser William Haseltine wrote for CNN, “(T)he variant suggests that we must immediately begin to plan for the next generation of Covid vaccines to respond more effectively to a changing virus. It should provide some hope that the authorised vaccines are already being tested against the new variant. The companies have expressed confidence that their vaccine could protect against it, with BioNTech noting that its vaccine could be altered to fight the new variant.”
Over the past week the British government suggested the new strain was spreading between 50 per cent and 70 per cent more rapidly than other strains of the virus.
British scientists looked at how frequently the new variant was detected, whether changes in its replication might make it more transmissible and what data on the correlation between the increase in case numbers and increase in detection of the new variant showed.
“All those three strands of evidence really all point in the same direction that this virus is a new variant that is slightly more transmissible than the existing virus,” said Oxford Professor Peter Horby, who is chairman of the Nervtag panel, which advises the British government on new and emerging respiratory virus threats.
But Professor Horby said more research was needed to figure out how much more transmissible the new strain is.
“We still don’t understand the exact biological mechanisms of that, there is still a lot of uncertainty about exactly how it’s occurring, exactly the extent of the extra transmissibility.”
Genetics experts have expressed preliminary concerns that the COVID-19 vaccines might have less efficacy against this new variant.
Pfizer and Moderna are testing their vaccines to see if they work against the new variant.
The UK coronavirus variant has not been identified through genetic sequencing efforts in the US, the CDC said but that may be because the system hasn’t yet pinned it down.
“It could be in the United States, and we might not have yet detected it,” Assistant Secretary for Health Admiral Brett Giroir said.
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Originally published as Coronavirus: Greg Norman gets COVID-19 as Europe, US cases rise
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