Team India to Arrive on Thursday: The Indian cricket team is to arrive in London on Thursday, June 3, on a chartered flight, and is expected to go straight into what the ICC has described as “managed isolation” at an on-site hotel at the Hampshire Bowl in Southampton. India is due to play the other
Team India to Arrive on Thursday: The Indian cricket team is to arrive in London on Thursday, June 3, on a chartered flight, and is expected to go straight into what the ICC has described as “managed isolation” at an on-site hotel at the Hampshire Bowl in Southampton. India is due to play the other top Test team, New Zealand, there from June 18-22. The New Zealand team is in England already and will go through a three-day quarantine in its hotel before being allowed to train. The Indian team will also be placed in quarantine for a period not specified yet.
A New Threat, All the Way from Vietnam: A new virus threat by way of a new mutation is here already, even if for much of the world it sits at present in Vietnam: so far as known. It may well have spread beyond that already. This one is a mix of the B.1.617.2 strain first found in India and the UK variant. The UK variant was found to spread faster than the earlier one, and the variant that emerged from India spreads faster than the UK strain. A combination of the two is found to spread faster than all the others, as it might be reasonable to fear it would. The virus has spread in industrial zones in Vietnam that produce for giant world companies such as Apple. Travel out of these zones is extensive. Vietnam has been inoculating people with the AstraZeneca vaccine, but cases there are rising rapidly despite that.
Vexing Vaccine Issues: A French study has found that the Pfizer vaccine is between a third to a sixth less effective against the B.1.617.2 variant of the virus than it is against the earlier UK variant. The AstraZeneca vaccine was found even less effective. The study could point to serious long-term consequences for vaccines against the B.1.617.2 strain and others that may emerge. A third wave has hit Europe and is now set to hit the UK. In the best-case scenario, this can be contained by vaccination, and the next set of vaccines that is being prepared already. That can mean there can be little respite after a current wave of the virus passes.
Cleaning up Southall: Bank Holiday on Monday could hardly have been put to better use than the launch of the Great Big Southall Clean-Up fortnight. By the looks of it, cleaning up Southall should take more than a fortnight, but it’s a great start. The programme being led by Ealing Southall MP Virendra Sharma has been launched to coincide with the Great British Spring Clean launched by the group Keep Britain Tidy. The programme in Southall began with a simple but urgent task – litter-picking.
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