3 US sailors aboard warship in Philippine Sea test positive for COVID-19
MANILA, Philipines — Three US Navy sailors aboard an aircraft carrier sailing in the Philippine Sea tested positive for the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), the US Department of Defense or Pentagon confirmed.
Acting US Navy Secretary Thomas Modly said the three sailors have been evacuated from aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt after being diagnosed with the disease.
"We've identified all the folks they've had contact with, and we're quarantining them as well," Modly said at a Pentagon press conference on Tuesday.
"This is an example of how we are able to keep our ships deployed at seas and underway, even with active COVID-19 cases," he added.
The three sailors have been flown off the aircraft carrier to a US Defense Department hospital in the Pacific, USNI News reported.
According to a report from ABC News, about 5,000 crew members are aboard the warship currently in the Philippine Sea.
"Our force remains on watch throughout the world [during] this crisis, and they're continuing to execute their primary mission under the National Defense Strategy," Modly said.
In the same press briefing, US Navy Adm. Michael Gilday, chief of naval operations, said it was still unclear where the virus came from.
The aircraft carrier's last port call was in Da Nang, Vietnam, 15 days before the US Navy sailors were diagnosed.
"I think it would be difficult to tie down these active cases to that particular port visit. We’ve had aircraft flying to and from the ship, and so we just don’t want to say it was that particular port visit. We took great precautions when that crew came back from that shore period to do enhanced medical screening of the crew," Gilday said.
Gilday noted that the three sailors who tested positive for the virus are "running a temperature" and have some body aches but wouldn't necessarily be characterized as needing hospitalization.
"But they’re positive, those three cases. So we are rapidly removing them from the ship, and we are understanding who they came in contact with over the recent days and weeks so we can begin to take a look inside the ship, how we can isolate and contain as best we can," the admiral said.
The number of deaths around the world from the novel coronavirus now stands at 18,259, according to a tally compiled by AFP on Tuesday from official sources.
More than 404,020 declared cases have been registered in 175 countries and territories since the epidemic first emerged in China in December.
The tallies, using data collected by AFP offices from national authorities and information from the World Health Organization (WHO), likely reflect only a fraction of the actual number of infections. — Patricia Lourdes Viray with AFP
Follow this page for updates on a mysterious pneumonia outbreak that has struck dozens of people in China.
New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins says on Sunday that he had contracted COVID-19, testing positive at a key point in his flailing campaign for re-election.
Hipkins saYS on his official social media feed that he would need to isolate for up to five days -- less than two weeks before his country's general election.
The leader of the centre-left Labour Party said he started to experience cold symptoms on Saturday and had cancelled most of his weekend engagements. — AFP
The World Health Organization and US health authorities say Friday they are closely monitoring a new variant of COVID-19, although the potential impact of BA.2.86 is currently unknown.
The WHO classified the new variant as one under surveillance "due to the large number (more than 30) of spike gene mutations it carries", it wrote in a bulletin about the pandemic late Thursday.
So far, the variant has only been detected in Israel, Denmark and the United States. — AFP
The World Health Organization says on Friday that the number of new COVID-19 cases reported worldwide rose by 80% in the last month, days after designating a new "variant of interest".
The WHO declared in May that Covid is no longer a global health emergency, but has warned that the virus will continue to circulate and mutate, causing occasional spikes in infections, hospitalisations and deaths.
In its weekly update, the UN agency said that nations reported nearly 1.5 million new cases from July 10 to August 6, an 80% increase compared to the previous 28 days. — AFP
The head of US intelligence says that there was no evidence that the COVID-19 virus was created in the Chinese government's Wuhan research lab.
In a declassified report, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) says they had no information backing recent claims that three scientists at the lab were some of the very first infected with COVID-19 and may have created the virus themselves.
Drawing on intelligence collected by various member agencies of the US intelligence community (IC), the ODNI report says some scientists at the Wuhan lab had done genetic engineering of coronaviruses similar to COVID-19. — AFP
Boris Johnson deliberately misled MPs over Covid lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street when he was prime minister, a UK parliament committee ruled on Thursday.
The cross-party Privileges Committee said Johnson, 58, would have been suspended as an MP for 90 days for "repeated contempts (of parliament) and for seeking to undermine the parliamentary process".
But he avoided any formal sanction by his peers in the House of Commons by resigning as an MP last week.
In his resignation statement last Friday, Johnson pre-empted publication of the committee's conclusions, claiming a political stitch-up, even though the body has a majority from his own party.
He was unrepentant again on Thursday, accusing the committee of being "anti-democratic... to bring about what is intended to be the final knife-thrust in a protracted political assassination".
Calling it "beneath contempt", he said it was "for the people of this to decide who sits in parliament, not Harriet Harman", the veteran opposition Labour MP who chaired the seven-person committee. — AFP
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