Covid live updates: U.S. trial finds AstraZeneca vaccine 79% effective; Europe imposing new lockdowns

Amazon warehouse and delivery employees in Italy have gone on a 24-hour strike to draw attention to concerns around working conditions.

Workers and trade unions calling for changes to shifts, workloads and benefits. Trade unions FILT-CGIL, FIT-CISL and Uiltrasporti said they called the strike after negotiations broke down with Assoespressi, an employer association representing last-mile and e-commerce couriers, including some of Amazon’s third-party delivery firms in Italy.

Workers also highlighted the need for pay increases as Amazon warehouses continued to operate throughout the coronavirus pandemic, which saw an unprecedented surge in e-commerce activity. Amazon was one of the biggest beneficiaries of this surge, supplying both essential and non-essential goods to stuck-at-home shoppers.

An Amazon spokesperson told CNBC the company and its delivery partners “already offer what these groups are asking for.”

— Annie Palmer

Microsoft said that starting March 29 more employees can return to its Washington headquarters.

The company will allow employees who work at its Redmond, Wash., sites and nearby campuses to choose between returning to work full-time, continuing to work remotely or implementing a hybrid model.

“We’ve been closely monitoring local health data for months and have determined that the campus can safely accommodate more employees on-site while staying aligned to Washington state capacity limits,” the company said.

Following several months of office closures due to the coronavirus pandemic, employers are beginning to permanently shift to more hybrid work models or planning to forgo traditional office spaces entirely.

Microsoft told employees last October it will allow more flexibility to work from home, even after it’s safe to return to the office. The company said it planned to allow employees to work remotely less than 50% of the time. Employees can also request approval from their managers to work remotely full time or to potentially move to a new location.

—Jessica Bursztynsky

New Jersey will likely pause its reopening plans as Covid-19 cases begin to rise again in the state, Gov. Phil Murphy said.

New Jersey has opened up its indoor capacity of restaurants and other businesses to 50%, but the state leads the U.S. in new Covid cases per capita over the past week, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“My guess is, we won’t be opening up further capacity for some time now because of .. the caseload,” he said, adding that he thinks things should improve as the weather gets warmer and more people in the state get vaccinated.

Other states are also seeing a rise in new cases as they reopen, and health officials are concerned that could cause a new surge as highly contagious variants spread across the nation.

—Berkeley Lovelace Jr.

The European Union is considering restricting exports of Covid-19 vaccines across to the U.K. and the 27-member region is increasingly frustrated at AstraZeneca.

The firm has not respected its delivery targets to the bloc on different occasions, having reduced the number of shots delivered to the EU twice in the first quarter and once for deliveries in the second quarter.

On the other hand, AstraZeneca has met its delivery targets for the U.K. — where the vaccination rate is higher than in the EU — even though some of these vaccines are coming from plants in the European Union. The U.K. placed its order for the AstraZeneca shots earlier than the EU.

“The EU needs to secure deliveries of vaccines to Europeans in line with companies’ contractual obligations,” a spokesperson for the European Commission told CNBC.

—Silvia Amaro

With competition for vaccination appointments extremely high in many areas of the U.S. — despite new vaccines becoming more readily available — families and friends are turning to computer programmers they know to help snag elusive slots, NBC News reported.

Github, a website where programmers can share their codes, hosts myriad uploaded scripts that are designed to help people secure vaccine appointments, according to NBC News. For example, some of these programs scrape official state vaccination websites or pharmacy chain sites every few seconds searching for open slots. 

While a few programmers have used these programs to create large public portals, such as the NYC Vaccine List, many are keeping limiting their searches for just family and friends, NBC News said. The reason? Some told NBC News they know that a system that makes it easier to get a vaccination slot if you know a programmer is fundamentally unfair.

—Terri Cullen

Ruud Dobber, president of AstraZeneca U.S., joined CNBC’s Meg Tirrell on “Squawk Box” to discuss the company’s plans for seeking U.S. approval of its coronavirus vaccine developed with the University of Oxford.

—Melodie Warner 

Conor McQuaid, chairman and CEO of Irish Distillers, discusses business performance and the impact of Covid-19, EU-U.S. trade tensions, and changing consumer habits on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

The findings of a late-stage U.S. trial have shown that the Covid vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford is 79% effective in preventing symptomatic illness and 100% effective against severe disease and hospitalization.

The data, which is based on more than 32,000 volunteers across 88 trial centers in the U.S., Peru and Chile, reaffirms that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is both safe and highly effective.

It comes shortly after several countries worldwide had temporarily suspended the use of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine following reports of blood clots in some vaccinated people.

AstraZeneca said an independent data safety monitoring board found there were no safety issues regarding blood clots.

— Sam Meredith

More than a year after the coronavirus outbreak was declared a pandemic, Europe is struggling with a third wave of infections and ramping up of lockdown measures.

At the same time, the bloc’s vaccination rollout remains sluggish amid manufacturing issues and supply snags. European Union leaders are meeting this week to once again discuss a possible ban on vaccine exports.

It comes as a handful of countries, such as France, Poland and Ukraine, implement stricter measures that are set to last several weeks at least.

A month-long partial lockdown was reintroduced in Paris Saturday, as well as in 15 other regions in France, in an effort to get on top of rising case numbers, largely attributed to new, more infectious Covid variants.

— Holly Ellyatt

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