Coronavirus: What’s happening in Canada and around the world on Monday

The latest:

Germany is looking to ramp up the use of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine after authorities last week gave the green light for it to be administered to people 65 and over.

Hundreds of thousands of doses have been gathering dust in recent weeks due to the restrictions on who could get the vaccine and misgivings among some who were eligible.

According to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, Germany has received 2.1 million doses of the AstraZeneca shot so far but administered just 721,000.

Berlin is opening a sixth vaccine centre Monday at the former Tempelhof airport in the centre of the city that will administer only the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Germany’s vaccine campaign has lagged behind Britain and the United States. By Sunday, Germany had given out 5.2 million vaccine doses, with 2.5 million people — or about three per cent of the population — fully vaccinated.

Finance Minister Olaf Scholz told public broadcaster ZDF that he expects Germany to be able to administer up to 10 million shots a week by the end of the month.

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What’s happening in Canada

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As of early Monday morning, Canada had reported 886,279 cases of COVID-19, with 29,969 cases considered active. A CBC News tally of deaths stood at 22,239.

In Atlantic Canada, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick reported two new cases of COVID-19 on Sunday. In Newfoundland and Labrador, health officials reported one new case on Sunday.

In an interview with CBC’s chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton, P.E.I. Premier Dennis King said the province has a « very robust » public health nursing system and is ready to go for the broader vaccine rollout. But the premier also noted that he is open to conversations about sharing some of the province’s allocated vaccine supply with provinces dealing with higher caseloads.

King also said Sunday that he believes the so-called Atlantic bubble will be back in action by early spring.

In Quebec, people in many parts of the province will be able to eat in restaurants and work out in gyms starting Monday as five regions are downgraded from red to orange on the province’s colour-coded pandemic alert level system.

The province on Sunday reported 707 new cases of COVID-19 and seven additional deaths. Hospitalizations stood at 592, with 107 COVID-19 patients in intensive care.

Ontario, meanwhile, reported 1,299 new cases of COVID-19 and 15 additional deaths on Sunday. The number of COVID-19 hospitalizations stood at 606, with 273 people in Ontario’s intensive care units.

A stay-at-home order in Toronto, Peel Region and North Bay is lifting Monday as the province loosens pandemic restrictions. The three regions were the last ones still under the order, and are transitioning back to the government’s colour-coded pandemic response framework.

Toronto and Peel will enter the « grey lockdown » category, something local public health officials asked for in both regions.

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In the Prairie provinces, Manitoba reported 56 new cases of COVID-19 on Sunday and two additional deaths. Saskatchewan health officials, meanwhile, reported 116 new cases of the illness caused by the novel coronavirus and two additional deaths. In Alberta, there wasn’t a formal update from health officials over the weekend because of a system upgrade.

In British Columbia, health officials will provide updated figures that cover the weekend later Monday.

Across the North, there were four new cases of COVID-19 reported in Nunavut on Sunday. Health officials in Yukon and the Northwest Territories don’t provide updates over the weekend.

–From CBC News and The Canadian Press, last updated at 7 a.m. ET

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What’s happening around the world

As of early Monday morning, more than 116.9 million cases of COVID-19 had been reported worldwide, with more than 66.1 million listed on the Johns Hopkins University tracking database as recovered. The global death toll was approaching 2.6 million.

In the Asia-Pacific region, Vietnam administered its first COVID-19 doses Monday to the front-line workers who made the nation’s relative success in controlling the pandemic possible — health workers, contact tracers and security forces who handled quarantine duties.

The Southeast Asian nation of 96 million people has a goal to inoculate at least half of the population by the end of the year. Thousands of doctors, nurses and technicians working at hospitals designated to treat COVID-19 patients lined up in the morning and received the first jabs of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

« I have been waiting for this day for a long time, » nurse Nguyen Thi Huyen said after she got her injection. Huyen has been caring for COVID-19 patients at a tropical disease hospital in Hanoi the past year. Health protocols have limited her time with family, among other challenges.

The first batch of over 100,000 AstraZeneca doses in a 30 million order arrived two weeks ago. Separately, Vietnam expects to secure another 30 million doses of the same vaccine through the UN-backed COVAX program for vaccine equality.

The UN children’s agency said Afghanistan has received nearly half a million coronavirus vaccine doses via the global COVAX initiative. War-torn Afghanistan received 468,000 AstraZeneca vaccines on Monday, the first shipment through COVAX, UNICEF said in a statement.

The vaccines were made by the Serum Institute of India, and arrived in the capital of Kabul aboard an Emirates flight, UNICEF said. More vaccines will arrive in the coming weeks and months. India previously donated 500,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccines to Afghanistan.

Thailand will reduce mandatory quarantine from 14 to seven days starting in April for foreigners arriving in the country who have been vaccinated.

In the Americas, Dr. Anthony Fauci is projecting that U.S. high school students will be able to get vaccinated early in the next school year and that elementary school students should be line for vaccinations in early 2022.

Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical officer and director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CBS News’ Face the Nation that vaccines for teens will be available « maybe not the first day but certainly in the early part of the fall. »

Currently, three vaccines are approved for use in the United States. The single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine and the two-shot Moderna vaccine are approved for individuals 18 and older. Pfizer’s vaccine is approved for 16 and up.

Trials are underway to determine the safety of vaccines on younger people. Teenagers contract the coronavirus almost twice as often as younger children, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.

Ecuador and Paraguay have both received some 20,000 doses of the Sinovac vaccine from Chile.

In the Middle East, Syrian President Bashar Assad and his wife have tested positive for the coronavirus, the president’s office said Monday, with both having only mild symptoms of the illness.

In a statement, Assad’s office said the couple did PCR tests after they experienced minor symptoms consistent with the COVID-19 illness. It said that Assad, 55, and his wife Asma, who is 10 years younger, will continue to work from home, where they will isolate for between two and three weeks.

Both were in « good health and in stable condition, » the statement said.

Syria, which marks 10 years of war next week, has recorded nearly 16,000 virus cases in government-held parts of the country, including 1,063 deaths. But the numbers are believed to be much higher with limited amounts of PCR tests being done, particularly in areas of northern Syria outside government control.

The pandemic, which has severely tested even developed countries, has been a major challenge for Syria’s health-care sector, already depleted by years of conflict. A decade of fighting has resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions.

Syria began a vaccination campaign last week, but no details have been given about the process, nor have local journalists been allowed to witness the rollout. The health minister said the government procured the vaccines from a friendly country, which he declined to name.

After delays, Israel started vaccinating Palestinians who work inside the country and its West Bank settlements on Monday, more than two months after launching an immunization blitz of its own population.

Palestinian labourers who crossed into Israel at several West Bank checkpoints received their first doses of the Moderna vaccine from Magen David Adom paramedics. The vaccination drive orchestrated by COGAT, Israel’s military agency co-ordinating government operations in the West Bank, had been beset by postponements.

Some 100,000 Palestinian labourers from the West Bank work in Israel and its settlements, which are widely seen internationally as illegal and an obstacle to peace.

Maj. Gen. Kamil Abu Rukun, the head of COGAT, said in a statement in Arabic that Israelis and Palestinians, « live in the same epidemiological space » and that it was a shared interest to vaccinate Palestinians.

Israel has administered over 8.7 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine to its population of 9.3 million. Over 3.7 million Israelis — more than 40 per cent — have received two doses of the vaccine. But until Monday, Israel had provided few vaccines for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a move that has underscored global disparities and drawn international criticism.

Israel withdrew its forces from Gaza in 2005, but still maintains control over airspace, the seafront and a large amount of the movement in and out of the area.

Human rights groups and many Palestinians say that as an occupying power, Israel is responsible for providing vaccines to the Palestinians. Israel says that under interim peace accords reached in the 1990s, it does not have any such obligation.

Israeli officials have said the priority is vaccinating Israel’s own population first, while the Palestinian Authority has said it will obtain its own vaccines through a World Health Organization partnership with humanitarian organizations known as COVAX.

To date, the PA has acquired enough vaccine doses for only 6,000 people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which are home to nearly five million Palestinians. It received 2,000 doses from Israel and acquired another 10,000 doses of a Russian-made vaccine. Each is given in two doses.

Israel had also announced plans to share surplus vaccines with far-flung allies in Africa, Europe and Latin America, but the decision was frozen by legal questions. On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with leaders of Denmark and Austria and said the three nations would join forces in the fight against COVID-19 with an investment in research and rollout of vaccines.

In Europe, British children returned to school on Monday after a two-month closure, part of what Prime Minister Boris Johnson said was a plan to get the country to « start moving closer to a sense of normality. »

As part of the plan, millions of high school and college students coming back to U.K. classrooms will be tested for the first few weeks. Authorities want to quickly detect and isolate asymptomatic cases in order to avoid sending entire schools home.

« We are being cautious in our approach so that we do not undo the progress we have made so far, » Johnson said as he urged people to get vaccinated. High schools and colleges can reopen in phases to allow for testing.

France could approve Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine by the end of this week, in line with the timetable for its broader European Union approval, the president of the country’s health regulator said.

In Africa, Ethiopian Airlines is set to take a lead role in ferrying COVID-19 vaccines around the world and expects demand for the service to last for up to three years.

The deputy chief executive of South African bank ABSA died on Sunday due to COVID-19 complications, his family said.

–From The Associated Press and Reuters, last updated at 8:25 a.m. ET