Category: Medical

Cuito – At least 20,198 people have already received the second dose of the vaccine against Covid-19 in Bié province, corresponding to 89.8 percent of the coverage rate.

The process started on 24 April.

The municipalities of Andulo, Nhârea, Catabola, Cunhinga, Chinguar, Chitembo and Camacupa each received 500 doses.

In Cuemba municipality, due to the complexity of access (road), the administration of the second dose is scheduled for the 10th July.

In the first phase, 27,710 citizens were vaccinated.

According to the provincial health director, João Campos, the campaign is running without any constraints, calling on citizens to take the second dose.

Bié province has 1.7 million inhabitants.

To date, it has a cumulative total of 318 confirmed cases, of which 306 have been recovered, seven active and five deaths.

Source: Angola Press News Agency

JOHANNESBURG – South Africa is starting off the week with a daily corona-virus infection rate of 5,074 for the past 24-hour reporting cycle.

These take the country’s known caseload since the start of the pandemic to 1,696,000.

Sadly, 45 more people have also died after contracting the virus, with the death toll now at 56,974.

The Health Department said that 1,578,000 people had recovered so far, which worked out to a recovery rate of 93%.

Over 1.3 million healthcare workers and people over 60 have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Source: Angola Press News Agency

Luanda – Health authorities reported Saturday 287 new infections 6 deaths and 64 patients recovered in the last 24 hours.

According to the daily report, 153 cases were diagnosed in Luanda, followed by Huambo with 64, Huila (49), Benguela (7) , Cabinda (6), Zaire (6), while Uíge and Cuando Cubango reported one each.

The fresh cases feature 174 male and 113 female, with age ranging from 4 months to 80 years old.

Fatalities were reported in Luanda, with 3 cases, Huambo (2), and Zaire (1).

The recoveries are 32 patients residing in Luanda, 14 in Huambo, 12 in Huila, 4 in Benguela and 2 in Lunda Norte.

Laboratories processed 2,788 samples.

The sources also mentioned 209 patients as being hospitalised in the treatment centers, while 164 people in institutional quarantine.

According to the data, under epidemiological surveillance there are 2,556 contacts of positive cases.

The country has, so far, a total of 35,594 positive cases, 794 deaths, 28,866 recoveries and 5,934 active patients.

Source: Islamic Republic News Agency – IRNA

Melbourne went back under lockdown on Friday, as Australian health authorities said a cluster of confirmed COVID-19 positive cases had increased to 39.

Health officials have ordered residents to stay home for seven days to prevent the infection from spreading and buy time to investigate how the virus was transmitted from a man being quarantined at a hotel.

The outbreak has been traced to an overseas traveler who was found to be infected with an Indian variant of the coronavirus.

The acting premier of Australia’s southern state of Victoria, James Merlino, told reporters in Melbourne that the new outbreak is the result of “a highly infectious strain of the virus, a variant of concern, which is running faster than we have ever recorded.”

During the lockdown, residents will be allowed to leave their homes only for essential work, school, shopping, caregiving, exercise and medical reasons, including receiving their scheduled coronavirus vaccinations.

The new lockdown is the fourth one imposed on Victoria state since the start of the pandemic. The most severe period occurred in mid-2020 and lasted more than three months as Victoria was in the grip of a wave of COVID-19 infections that killed more than 800 people.

Merlino had already imposed a new set of restrictions for Australia’s second-most populous state, including limiting the size of public gatherings and making mask wearing mandatory in restaurants, hotels and other indoor venues until June 4.

Vaccine for ICE

The American Civil Liberties Union requested Thursday that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement “provide immediate vaccine access to the more than 22,100 people in ICE custody.”

“Over the course of the pandemic, ICE detention facilities have been some of the worst hotspots for the spread of COVID-19, with positivity rates five times greater than prisons and 20 times greater than the general U.S. population,” said the ACLU’s Eunice Cho.

The ACLU also said the COVID-19 death toll was actually higher than ICE reported because many of the infected people died after being released from the hospital.

Also in the U.S., Facebook said it will no longer remove statements that COVID-19 is created by humans or manufactured “in light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts.”

Since the beginning of the pandemic outbreak, Facebook has changed its policy several times on what is allowed on the topic and was not. Another claim banned for being discussed on the platform was the notion that vaccines were not effective or that they were toxic.

In other developments, the COVAX initiative to ensure vaccinations for vulnerable people called on world leaders Thursday to help deliver 2 billion doses of vaccines globally this year, as it faces a shortage of 190 million doses by the end of June.

COVAX also said it needed global help to make 1.8 billion doses available to 92 lower-income economies by early 2022.

“We are seeing the traumatic effects of the terrible surge of COVID-19 in South Asia — a surge which has also severely impacted global vaccine supplies,” COVAX said in a statement.

New vaccine late-stage clinical trial

Two European pharmaceutical giants, France’s Sanofi and Britain’s GlaxoSmithKline, announced Thursday that they are beginning a late-stage clinical trial of their experimental recombinant COVID-19 vaccine after reporting positive results from a smaller-scale trial.

The expanded trial will involve more than 35,000 adults in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the United States.

The drugmakers will test the efficacy of the new vaccine through a two-stage approach. The first stage will be tested on the original version of the coronavirus, while the second stage will target the B.1.351 variant that was first detected in South Africa.

The Sanofi-GSK vaccine will also be tested in the coming weeks to determine if it can be used as a booster shot for a previous inoculation, regardless of the vaccine the recipient had initially received.

An official with Sanofi says the vaccine could be granted authorization for use in the last quarter of this year if the Stage 3 trials are successful.

Source: Voice of America

Luanda – Angola has reported 269 new cases, 3 deaths and 62 recoveries in the last 24 hours.

As many as 215 fresh cases were reported in the provinces of Luanda, 37 in Huambo, 7 in Huíla, 5 in Cabinda, 4 in Benguela, 2 in Zaire and 1 in Malanje, according to the clinical bulletin reached Angop on Thursday.

The new infections feature 147 males and 122 females, aged from 8 months to74 years old.

The deaths occurred in Luanda, Cabinda and Huíla, with one each.

As for the recoveries, 37 were recorded in Luanda, 8 in Huíla, 7 in Huambo, 3 in Uíge, 3 in Zaire, 2 in Cunene.

While, Bengo and Benguela reported one each.

The country’s overall caseload stands at 33,607, recoveries at 27,529, while the total fatalities are at 745, according to the data released on Thursday.

Source: Angola Press News Agency

Luanda – Angola registered 310 new infections, 117 recoveries and 4 deaths in the last 24 hours.

The new cases were reported in the provinces of Luanda with 209, Zaire 61, Huambo 18, Cunene 10, Huíla 4, Cabinda and Benguela with 3 each, and 2 in Lunda Sul.

The new patients, aged from 5 months to 77 years old, include 188 males and 122 females.

As for the recoveries, 94 are residents in Luanda, 19 in Huíla, 2 in Cunene and other 2 in Huambo.

The deaths occurred in Luanda 2, one in Cunene and Huambo.

Angola has a total of 32,933 positive cases, 735 deaths, 27,204 recoveries and 4,994 active cases.

Source: Angola Press News Agency

A smoking trail of lava from a volcanic eruption appeared to have halted a few hundred metres from the edge of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’s main city on Sunday morning, said a Reuters reporter at the scene.

Goma, a lakeside city of about 2 million people, was thrown into panic on Saturday evening as the nearby Mount Nyiragongo erupted, turning the night sky an eerie red. Thousands fled with their belongings on foot, some towards the nearby border with Rwanda.

As the sun rose on Sunday, much of the hillside to the north of the town was burned black and houses had been demolished. The sky was again a cloudy gray.

“Local authorities who have been monitoring the eruption overnight report that the lava flow has lost intensity,” government spokesman Patrick Muyaya said on Twitter on Sunday.

Nyiragongo’s previous eruption in 2002 killed 250 people and left 120,000 homeless. It is one of the world’s most active volcanoes and is considered among the most dangerous. Saturday’s eruption appears to have been caused when fractures opened in the volcano’s side, causing lava flows in various directions.

Experts were worried that the volcanic activity observed in the past five years at Nyiragongo mirrors that in the years preceding eruptions in 1977 and 2002.

The Reuters reporter said the lava flow had stopped short of Goma’s airport and the city limits but that surrounding villages were hit.

Lava crossed a main road out of Goma, cutting if off from cities to the north. Traffic was in gridlock in most places as people tried to leave or return to assess the damage to their homes.

It was not possible to estimate material damage or if anyone had died.

A separate lava flow that headed east over unpopulated terrain towards Rwanda also appeared to have stopped, the reporter said.

Source: Angola Press News Agency

The main producers of vaccines against Covid-19, the G20 countries and the IMF pledged Friday to accelerate the vaccination of poor countries, very late, to put an end to the pandemic and revive the world economy. ‘a third of the inhabitants of the richest countries have already had at least a first dose, they are only 0.3% in poor countries, according to Covax, the global mechanism for providing vaccines to poor countries. at the end of May, 140 million doses will be missing from Covax and another 50 million in June compared to the volumes initially planned to vaccinate 20% of the population in poor countries.

Invited to a health summit co-organized by the Italian presidency of the G20 and the European Commission, the Pfizer / BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson laboratories have pledged to provide 3.5 billion doses to the poorest countries in 2021 and 2022. They are expected to provide 1.3 billion doses this year, the rest in 2022. The sera will be available at cost for low-income countries and at reduced prices for middle-income countries.

The EU has announced that it will provide 100 million doses this year, Italy 300 million euros and France 30 million doses via Covax.

“Everyone, everywhere” must have access to vaccines, underlined the president of the Commission of Brussels Ursula von der Leyen while the secretary general of the UN, Antonio Guterres, castigated “vaccine nationalism”.

The access of the most vulnerable countries to vaccines, international solidarity and the prevention of future pandemics are at the heart of this meeting of the Heads of State and Government of the G20, in which the European Commission, African States and from Asia as well as 12 international organizations and private foundations.

“$ 50 billion to vaccinate”

In order to put an end to the pandemic and its devastating economic and social consequences, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) at the same time presented to Washington a plan whose financing is estimated at 50 billion dollars with a vaccination target of at least 40 % of the world’s population by the end of the year. If the sum seems significant, it is very modest in view of the massive stimulus plans put in place by the rich countries – like the last of 1.900 billion dollars in the United States. It is also “small compared to the potential benefits of a faster end of the pandemic, estimated at around 9 trillion dollars” for the world economy by 2025, underline the economists of the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF recommends in particular to grant additional subsidies to Covax, to make donations of excess doses and to ensure free cross-border flows of raw materials and doses of vaccines. A Covax spokesperson told AFP on Friday that he had so far signed supply agreements for 1.8 billion doses, allowing 30% of the populations concerned to be vaccinated, but still lacking funding.

No consensus on the lifting of patents

The final declaration of the Rome summit, known as the “Rome Declaration”, should affirm the commitment of the richest countries to promoting the production of vaccines in Africa through the transfer of technology.

“We must vaccinate the world, and quickly,” warned Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi.

The text should not however support the idea of a temporary suspension of the patents of pharmaceutical companies for vaccines, but plead in favor of “voluntary sharing of licenses” and the lifting of obstacles to exports.

The suspension of exclusive patent rights is encouraged by Washington, but the Twenty-Seven have already expressed their skepticism, pointing out the length and complexity of the process. Chinese President Xi Jinping reiterated his support for the temporary lifting of patents and announced $ 3 billion in aid over the next three years to support the fight against the pandemic and economic recovery.

The Rome summit is being held on the eve of the 74th World Health Assembly (May 24 to June 1), the main issue of which is the reform of the WHO and its ability to coordinate the response to global health crises and prevent future epidemics.

An independent panel report released last week ruled that the WHO had taken too long to sound the alarm and that the disaster described as “Chernobyl of the 21st century could have been avoided.”

The pandemic has killed more than 3.4 million people worldwide since its appearance at the end of December 2019, according to the latest report established by AFP from official sources.

Source: Angola Press News Agency

Luanda – At least 223 new cases of Covid-19 have been reported in the last 24 hours in Angola, including eight deaths and 25 recoveries.

According to the daily Covid-19 report that reached ANGOP on Thursday evening, of the newly reported cases, 186 have been detected in Luanda, 12 in Huambo (centre) and nine Cunene (south),

Six have been detected in Cabinda (north), four in Huíla (south), three in Bié (centre), two in Cuanza Norte (north) and one in Malanje (north).

The new patients include ages from three to 81 years, 115 males and 108 females.

The deaths have occurred in the capital Luanda (2), Huíla (4), Cunene (01) and Huambo (01), all Angolan nationals.

The recoveries have been recorded in Luanda (18) and Huíla (7).

Angola’s current Covid-19 figures show 31,661 cases, 704 deaths, 26,483 recoveries and 4,474 active patients.

Source: Angola Press News Agency

Luanda – Angola reported 389 new infections, 11 fatalities and 445 recoveries on Wednesday, according to the State Secretary for Public Health.

Franco Mufinda confirmed seven deaths as having occurred in the provinces of Luanda, followed by Huambo with three and Cuanza Sul one, aged between 20 and 75 years old.

The new cases were reported in the provinces of Luanda with 347, Huambo 16, Huíla 9, Cunene 7, Cabinda 5, Zaire 4 and Bengo 1, and feature 208 men and 181 women belonging to 1-90 age group.

As for recoveries, 414 are residents in Luanda, 16 in Huambo, 7 in Bengo, 4 in Malanje and 4 in Uíge.

So far, Angola has tallied a total of 31,438 cases, with 696 deaths, 26,458 recoveries and 4,284 active patients.

Source: Angola Press News Agency