The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Friday that there are more than 104 million global GOVID-19 cases and 2.2 million deaths from the virus.
The United States remains at the top of the list as the location with the most infections, with more than 26 million cases, followed by India with 10.8 million and Brazil with 9.3 million.
Medical officials are urging U.S. residents to not turn Sunday’s Super Bowl, a yearly football game, into a superspreader event. Fans usually gather at large home parties or in bars and restaurants to watch the game on television. Medical authorities this year, however, are urging football fans to watch the game “with the people you live with.”
Some areas in the United States are running into difficulty ensuring that their residents are being inoculated equitably. The nation’s capital is no exception. Residents in some of the Washington’s poorest neighborhoods have been underrepresented in the city’s vaccination drive. Now, however, representatives from the mayor’s office have begun knocking on the front doors of senior citizens’ homes in Washington’s poorest neighborhoods in an effort to get them to sign up for the vaccines.
Washington residents aged 65 and older are eligible for the free vaccinations. In other areas around the country, local governments have begun their vaccine programs with senior citizens 75 and up.
City Health Director LaQuandra Nesbitt told The Washington Post the life expectancy for some of Washington’s poorest neighborhoods is as low as 68 while it is as high as 89 for richer neighborhoods.
“If we would have begun vaccinating individuals at 75 years of age or older, we would have missed the opportunity to have an impact in the neighborhoods with the highest burdens of disease,” Nesbitt told the Post.
New Zealand reopens borders
New Zealand says it is open to receiving refugees once again, The new measure comes almost a year after New Zealand closed its doors to foreigners in March because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fiona Whiteridge, the general manager of New Zealand's refugee and migrant service, said in a statement, “With health protocols in place and safe travel routes, we are ready to welcome small groups of refugee families as New Zealand residents to this country, to begin their new lives.”
According to Hopkins, New Zealand has 2,315 COVID cases, while it has suffered only 25 deaths.
Pfizer told Reuters in a statement Friday that it has withdrawn its application in India for emergency-use authorization of its COVID-19 vaccine developed with Germany’s BioNTech.
Pfizer did not conduct a trial with its vaccine in India, a measure India usually requires.
Pfizer’s decision to withdraw came after its meeting earlier this week with India’s drug regulator, the Central Drugs Standard Control Organization.
The drug regulator said Pfizer’s vaccine was not recommended because there were no data from an Indian trial and because of reported side effects from the vaccine in its use abroad.
Pfizer said it will “re-submit its approval request with additional information as it becomes available in the near future.”
India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare reported 12,408 new coronavirus cases Friday.
The British vaccines minister recently told lawmakers there are about 4,000 variants of the coronavirus worldwide. Nadhim Zahawi said, however, that a vaccine to combat a “a variant that we are really concerned about” could be developed in 30 to 40 days, that would then be mass produced, according to a report in The Guardian.
(VOA)