Steroid breakthrough raises virus hopes, despite China outbreak
LONDON, United Kingdom — Britain will start giving seriously ill coronavirus patients a basic steroid treatment hailed as a breakthrough to help reduce the global pandemic's death toll even as worrying new outbreaks surfaced in China and elsewhere.
An "extremely severe" cluster of cases in Beijing cast doubt over efforts to get the virus under control although Tuesday's news from Britain came as a boost after months of grim statistics.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell meanwhile warned that the US economy is unlikely to recover as long as "significant uncertainty" remains over the course of the pandemic.
Researchers led by a team from the University of Oxford administered the widely available steroid dexamethasone to more than 2,000 severely ill COVID-19 patients.
Among those who could only breathe with the help of a ventilator, dexamethasone reduced deaths by 35 percent.
"Dexamethasone is the first drug to be shown to improve survival in COVID-19. This is an extremely welcome result," said Peter Horby, professor of Emerging Infectious Diseases in the Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford.
"Dexamethasone is inexpensive, on the shelf, and can be used immediately to save lives worldwide."
Britain's Health Secretary Matt Hancock said patients would start to receive the drug immediately.
"This is great news and I congratulate the Government of the UK, the University of Oxford, and the many hospitals and patients in the UK who have contributed to this lifesaving scientific breakthrough," WHO head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
Beijing outbreak
More than eight million people have now been infected by the virus worldwide since it first emerged in China late last year, claiming 436,813 lives so far as the tolls still surge in Latin America and South Asia.
In Europe, caseloads and death rates have broadly declined.
The UK, however, is still struggling with the world's third largest death toll and New Zealand -- which had ended community transmission -- said two new cases reported there were recent arrivals from Britain.
European countries are eager to drop coronavirus restrictions to save the imminent summer tourist season but Spain warned that it may quarantine British visitors should the UK persist with its plan to quarantine all overseas arrivals.
The latest reminder of the underlying threat came from China, which had largely brought its outbreak under control, as 27 infections were reported in Beijing, where a new cluster linked to a wholesale food market has sparked mass testing and neighbourhood lockdowns.
"The epidemic situation in the capital is extremely severe," Beijing city spokesman Xu Hejian warned, as the number of confirmed infections rose to 106.
Beijing authorities urged residents to not leave the city and closed schools again as officials scrambled to contain the outbreak.
In the US, the central bank chief Powell once again pledged the Fed will use all of its policy tools to help ensure recovery from the outbreak which he said has inflicted the worst pain on low-income and minority groups.
Despite a surprising rebound in employment in May, the US economy has shed nearly 20 million jobs since February and the contraction of GDP in the April-June quarter "is likely to be the most severe on record," he said.
'Heavy burdens'
While China's new cases have caused concern about a resurgence of the virus, the disease is also gaining momentum in other regions with massive populations.
Known infections in India have crossed 330,000 and already stretched authorities are bracing for the monsoon season, which causes outbreaks of other illnesses such as dengue fever and malaria every year.
Vidya Thakur, medical superintendent at Mumbai's Rajawadi Hospital, is used to managing "heavy burdens", she says.
But COVID-19 "has left us helpless... and the monsoon will make things even more difficult."
In Latin America, countries are struggling to contain the disease while trying to ease the crushing economic blow dealt by widespread lockdowns and social distancing measures.
Peru reported its economy shrank by more than 40 percent year-on-year in April, while Chile extended its state of emergency by three months.
Ecuador, which has the region's fourth highest official virus death toll after Brazil, Mexico and Peru, has extended its state of emergency for 60 more days.
The United States also agreed to keep its borders with Mexico and Canada closed until July 21, extending travel restrictions for a third time because of the pandemic.
Fans please stay away
After a gradual drop in new cases, European nations including Belgium, France, Germany and Greece have lifted border restrictions hoping to boost tourism and travel over the summer months.
But disruptions to normal social and economic life continue.
In Britain, the Premier League football season resumes on Wednesday, but in empty stadiums.
There are fears some supporters will ignore social-distancing rules by congregating outside the grounds where their teams are playing, risking new clusters of infections.
League chief executive Richard Masters said: "Please stay away and enjoy the matches at home. By turning up to the game you are putting things at jeopardy."
The US Open tennis championships will also go ahead as scheduled in August without spectators, officials confirmed on Tuesday.
After weeks of uncertainty surrounding the tournament — which is being staged in the epicentre of the US virus crisis — New York Governor Andrew Cuomo formally agreed to allow it to go ahead. — with Beiyi Seow in Beijing
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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