Public health workers in England will begin door-to-door covid-19 testing of 80,000 people today in a bid to stem the spread of the so-called South African variant of the coronavirus. reuters.com/article/us-hea…
Death rates among people who end up in intensive care with covid-19 have improved dramatically since the start of the pandemic thanks to advances in treatment, according to an analysis of 52 studies worldwide. theguardian.com/world/2021/feb…
Japan plans to extend its state of emergency in Tokyo, Osaka and eight other prefectures as the country continues to battle rising covid-19 cases, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has said. edition.cnn.com/2021/02/02/asi…
BioNtech-Pfizer has promised to deliver up to 75 million more coronavirus vaccine doses to the EU in the second quarter of 2021. A new facility due to open in Marburg, Germany, in February will allow production to ramp up. dw.com/en/coronavirus…
Almost all people previously infected with covid-19 have high levels of antibodies for at least six months that are likely to protect them from reinfection with the disease, a @uk_biobank study has found. reuters.com/article/us-hea…
One dose of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine provides sustained protection against covid-19 for at least three months and cuts transmission of the virus by two-thirds, according to preliminary findings that have not yet been peer-reviewed. theguardian.com/society/2021/f…
Samples of the more transmissible B.1.1.7 coronavirus variant, which was first detected in the UK, have acquired a mutation that will help them evade immune protection – the same mutation already present in the B.1.351 variant in South Africa. newscientist.com/article/226642…
In 2008, a finger bone was found in Denisova cave, Siberia. Its DNA did not match Neanderthals or modern humans. It was assigned to an unknown group, named the Denisovans. Who were these mysterious early humans?
Excavations in the cave have yielded few Denisovans remains, so we have little idea what these people looked like. Skull fragments found recently suggest they could have had an “American football player body build”.
More clues emerged in 2019, when protein extracted from a jawbone found in Baishya Karst cave on the Tibetan plateau was found to match Denisovan bones. Now there is clear evidence that the Denisovans lived in one of the harshest environments on Earth 160,000 years ago.
Critically ill covid-19 patients are dying unnecessarily because they are refusing to go on ventilators due to unfounded fears that the machines increase the risk of death, UK doctors have said. theguardian.com/world/2021/jan…
Every care home resident in England has been offered a covid-19 jab, the NHS has confirmed. It follows the news that more than 600,000 doses of coronavirus vaccine were administered on Saturday, setting a new record. news.sky.com/story/covid-19…
The EU says AstraZeneca will now supply an additional 9 million covid-19 vaccine doses by March. The 40m doses now expected are still only about half of what had been hoped, amid continuing supply problems. bbc.co.uk/news/world-eur…
US President-elect Joe Biden's spokeswoman says the US will maintain travel bans on the UK, much of the EU and Brazil, despite an order from President Donald Trump to lift them. bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-…
A panel of experts commissioned by the World Health Organization has criticized China and other countries for not moving to stem the initial outbreak of the coronavirus earlier and questioned whether the agency should have labelled it a pandemic sooner. apnews.com/article/intern…
Stricter lockdown rules have been introduced in Portugal amid surging coronavirus cases. Gatherings of any number of people in public areas have been banned, stores and supermarkets will have shorter opening times and January sales are prohibited. euronews.com/2021/01/18/por…
People in England aged 70 and over, as well as those listed as clinically extremely vulnerable, will begin receiving offers of a coronavirus vaccine this week.
Travellers to the UK from abroad must now self-isolate for 10 days and show proof of a negative covid-19 test taken in the three days before the start of their journey as the government order shutting all travel corridors comes into effect.
The variant of coronavirus spreading across South Africa threatens to overrun both public and private hospitals, with more than 130,000 new covid-19 cases and 4,000 related deaths in the last week alone.
The US has taken a step closer to approving the Pfizer/BioNTech covid-19 vaccine, after a committee of experts recommended that the Food and Drug Administration grant it an emergency authorisation. ft.com/content/7bb4aa…
Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline have delayed the launch of their vaccine to late next year after finding that it showed an insufficient immune response in older people. uk.reuters.com/article/uk-hea…
A trial of a coronavirus vaccine developed by Australian firm CSK and the University of Queensland has been abandoned after participants returned false positive results on HIV tests. bbc.co.uk/news/world-aus…