World Status Report

This report intends to give the UTD Community a snapshot of international risks, and other issues as reported by the linked official sources from the U.S. and other countries.

More health and security information for each country can be found in the travel advisories issued by the governments of the United States, Canada, the UK, New Zealand, and Australia, and the CDC, ECDC, and WHO sites. Not all advise in these sites will apply to US travelers.

Please note the publication date of this report, and go to the direct sources linked for the most up-to-date information.  The information in this report may change without prior notice.

Security

• Ethiopia. Forces from Ethiopia’s rebellious Tigray region said on Wednesday they were in talks to forge a military alliance with insurgents from Ethiopia’s most populous region, Oromiya, heaping pressure on the central government in Addis Ababa (Reuters).
• Somalia. The African Union’s peacekeeping mission in Somalia said it had started investigating reports that civilians were killed Tuesday during a gunfight between its troops and al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab fighters (Reuters).
• Afghanistan. Kabul makes power-sharing proposal to Taliban in exchange for halt in escalating violence, top source tells Al Jazeera (Al Jazeera on MSN). The Taliban have captured the strategic city of Ghazni, a provincial capital on the road to Kabul, leaving the Afghan capital increasingly beleaguered and cut off from the rest of the country (CNN).

Natural Disasters

• Argentina. A once-a-century drought has lowered the water level of Argentina’s main grains transport river, reducing farm exports and boosting logistics costs in a trend that meteorologists said will likely continue into next year (Reuters).
• Japan. Hundreds of thousands of residents of Nagasaki and other parts of Kyushu island in southwest Japan have been asked to evacuate to avoid floods and the risk of landslides caused by torrential rain, authorities said on Thursday (Reuters).
• Italy. Fires stoked by hot winds swept through southern Italy on Thursday, a day after a monitoring station in Sicily reported temperatures of 48.8 Celsius (119.84°F) which some scientists believe could be the highest in European history (Reuters).
• Turkey.  Flash floods impacted the Black Sea region in Turkey, resulting in casualties, displacement and damage (Reuters).

Health

• China reported one more H5N6 avian influenza infection, which involves a 55-year-old woman from Hunan province in the south, bringing its total for the year to 14, part of an uptick in activity involving the strain (CHP)

COVID-19

International preventative measures against COVID-19, including entry restrictions and in-country mobility remain fluid, and can be imposed without prior notice.  The UNWTO and IATA Destination Tracker offers relevant information on a destination status. The Timeline of EU Member States Reopening Their Borders offers a list of opened EU countries for travelers, and dates of warned opening.

As notable cases:

• Australia. Extra military personnel may be called in to ensure compliance with lockdown rules in Sydney. The capital city, Canberra, announced a snap one-week lockdown from Thursday evening after reporting its first locally acquired case of COVID-19 in more than a year (Reuters).
• China partly shut the world’s third-busiest container port after a worker became infected with Covid, threatening more damage to already fragile supply chains and global trade as a key shopping season nears (Bloomberg). China is mobilising massive resources to stop the spread of the coronavirus in an eastern city, where Vice-Premier Sun Chunlan warned the situation was not yet under control, according to a state media report on Thursday (SCMP).
• Israel is to require Covid tests from next week for children as young as three to enter schools, swimming pools, hotels or gyms as infections rise despite extensive adult vaccinations (Guardian).
• Finland. Limits on public gatherings will be tightened in the Finnish capital due to rising cases (Guardian).
• New Zealand will continue to pursue its ambitious Covid-19 elimination strategy indefinitely, and borders will not reopen until after New Zealand’s vaccine rollout is completed at the end of the year (Guardian).
• Canada is working to create a digital vaccine passport that would allow citizens to travel abroad and it should be available in the next few months, government officials said on Wednesday (Reuters).
• Switzerland plans to halt most free COVID-19 testing for people who are not vaccinated now that nearly half the population has got the jabs, it said on Wednesday (Reuters).

Global cases and deaths. As of 12 August, Johns Hopkins University counts 204,965,304 COVID-19 cases and 4,328,767 deaths, and the WHO COVID-19 dashboard reports as of 11 August 203,944,144 cases and 4,312,902 deaths.

As notable cases:

• Japan. Tokyo has reported a sharp rise in coronavirus cases in the capital and a record number of severely ill patients (Guardian).
• Russia has reported a record number of coronavirus deaths, with 808 people dying in the last 24 hours (Guardian).
• France reported 30,920 new daily COVID-19 infections on Wednesday, a figure above the 30,000 threshold for the first time since April 28, when the country was about to exit its third lockdown (Reuters).
• Cuba is bringing back hundreds of doctors working abroad and converting hotels into isolation centers and hospitals in order to battle a COVID-19 crisis that is overwhelming healthcare and mortuary services in parts of the Caribbean island (Reuters).

Vaccination campaigns around the world continue. As of 11 August, Our World in Data reports 30.7% of the world population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and 16% is fully vaccinated. 4.59 billion doses have been administered globally, and 36.63 million are now administered each day. Only 1.2% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose. The WHO COVID-19 dashboard reports as of 11 August over 4.39 billion administered vaccine doses.

As notable cases:

• Ireland has started registering children aged 12 to 15 for Covid-19 vaccinations after strong uptake by older children in recent weeks (Guardian).
• The United States will deliver nearly 837,000 Pfizer vaccines to Caribbean nations as the region with limited resources struggles with a spike in COVID-19 cases amid violent anti-vaccine protests (AP).
• Chile on Wednesday began administering booster shots to those already inoculated with Sinovac’s COVID-19 vaccine in a bid to lock in early success following one of the world’s fastest mass vaccination drives (Reuters).
• Americas. The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) is preparing to increase COVID-19 vaccine availability for member countries, officials said on Wednesday, as the highly contagious Delta variant spreads through the region (Reuters).
• World. Just over 1% of people in low-income countries have been vaccinated against COVID-19 to date, which stands in stark contrast to 51% of people in high-income countries. The lack of accessible and affordable vaccines for all will fuel additional waves of infections, human suffering and death across the globe.  IMF projections show that while high-income countries could reach pre-COVID-19 per capita GDP growth rates by the end of 2021, the economic impacts of COVID-19 may last until 2024 in low-income countries. The impact of vaccine injustice also ripples across labour markets, deepening poverty among those most vulnerable and renders the world more vulnerable to highly transmissible and deadly COVID-19 variants (WEF).

Please note the publication date of this report and go to the direct sources linked for the most up-to-date information.  The information in this report may change without prior notice.