Schools in 23 countries, with 405 million pupils, are still partially or fully closed because of Covid, the United Nations Children’s Fund says. The charity, Unicef, estimates 147 million children have missed at least half of their in-person schooling. Some vulnerable children, especially girls, have not returned to those schools that have reopened. Unicef executive director Catherine Russell says children are “the hidden casualties of the pandemic”. While children have been less vulnerable to the most serious health effects of coronavirus, their lives have been turned upside down by the school closures of the pandemic. In March 2020, 150 countries around the world completely shut their schools, with partial closures in a further 10. Two years later, 19 still have some of their schools closed. In a further four – the Philippines, Honduras, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu in the South Pacific – at least 70% remain shut, the proportion Unicef categorises as full closure.(BBC)…[+]

The governor of Ukraine’s Chernihiv region says there is no let-up in attacks by Russia, despite its pledge to reduce military activity there. The governor, Viacheslav Chaus, told the BBC that he did not believe Russia’s promise. “We’ve already seen that there wasn’t even a single time when their military forces kept their word,” he added. Russian and Ukrainian negotiators made no “breakthroughs” in Tuesday’s peace talks, the Kremlin has said. “What is positive is that the Ukrainian side has at least started to specifically formulating and putting on paper what it is proposing. Until now we had not managed to achieve that,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. “As regards the rest, we cannot, put it this way, at present state there have been any breakthroughs, anything very promising,” he said, adding that a lot of work was still to be done.(BBC)…[+]

Shanghai’s Covid lockdown has left thousands scrambling to stock up on supplies, while others quarantine in their offices to keep business running. After weeks of isolated compound lockdowns, the city of 25 million has been split into two. Earlier this week those living in Shanghai’s eastern half were told to stay home, with the western half due to enter a lockdown on Friday. The move comes as the city battles a surge in Omicron Covid cases. The city has reported around 20,000 Covid-19 infections since 1 March, registering more cases in four weeks than in the previous two years of the pandemic. China’s zero-Covid strategy has been increasingly challenged by the highly infectious Omicron variant. Officials in China’s cosmopolitan financial capital had earlier attempted to keep the city running by limiting lockdowns to select neighbourhoods or buildings. But on Sunday authorities announced a mass lockdown that saw the city being split along the Huangpu River. Residents living in the Pudong area, on the river’s eastern bank, were told to stay at home for four days starting on Monday. Puxi, on the western bank, will enter lockdown on Friday. Mass testing is also being carried out to screen all of Shanghai’s residents for the virus.(BBC)…[+]