Morning mail: children face $2.1m in Covid fines, UK hits record cases, viral Christmas lunch

Thursday: Almost 3,000 minors in NSW have been hit with fines for Covid breaches, drawing ire of legal and advocacy groups. Plus: school’s ‘grim’ Christmas fare

Good morning. Europe braces for a surge in the Covid Omicron variant, advocacy bodies call for NSW Covid fines for children to be reversed and a Queensland coalmine faces scrutiny over repeated emissions failures.

Omicron has been found to multiply about 70 times quicker than the original and Delta versions of coronavirus, researchers from the University of Hong Kong have reported. The faster rate of infectiousness means the variant could cause greater fatalities than previous strains. Britain’s chief medical officer has warned the country is being hit by “two epidemics on top of each other” and big rise in hospitalisations is “a nailed-on prospect” as it reported its highest daily infection tally yet, with 78,000 new cases overnight. The cumulative death toll in the US has passed 800,000; a quarter of whom represent “preventable deaths”, a leading epidemiologist has said.

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from World news | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3soIhHB