The World Health Organization (WHO) called on African countries Thursday to maintain tough measures to combat the spread of the coronavirus as some countries began easing lockdowns including South Africa, which has recorded Africa’s highest Covid-19 death toll.

Faced with Covid-19, many African countries have implemented partial or total containment measures to stop the spread of Covid-19.

These measures have helped slow the spread of Covid but it remains a considerable threat to public health, said Dr Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa, in a statement.

It is important to maintain strong surveillance, case detection and testing measures to end the pandemic, she said. If governments abruptly end these measures, they risk losing the gains that have been made so far against Covid-19, the WHO warned.

“Deciding when and how to lift these measures is extremely challenging,” Moeti said in a video post on Twitter. “There is always a need to balance.”

“We hope that these decisions are made having taken into account overall the balance between enabling economies to continue to grow and stopping the spread of a pandemic that can have profound long-term impact on the economies.”

South Africa began to gradually loosen its strict coronavirus lockdown on Friday, allowing some industries to reopen after five weeks of restrictions that plunged its struggling economy deeper into turmoil. The economy of Africa’s most industrialised nation was already teetering when the lockdown kicked into gear on March 27 to contain the spread of infections.

To combat the economic destruction, the government has adopted a gradual and phased approach to reopen the country from May 1.

Around 1.5 million workers in selected industries return to work in the next phase under strict health conditions, according to Trade and Industry Minister Ebrahim Patel.

Winter clothing, textile and packaging manufacturing are among the industries permitted to reopen factories. Restaurants will also open, but only for takeaway deliveries. Controversial bans on the sale of cigarettes and alcohol will remain in effect.

Some outside activities such as cycling, walking and running will be allowed, but for just three hours in the morning.

Social distancing and wearing masks in public and at workplaces will be mandatory.

Cooperative Governance Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma warned “companies that breach regulations will be forced to close”.

Covid-19 and Africa: What response?

President Cyril Ramaphosa took the decision to stagger the easing of the lockdown restrictions in a bid to strike a balance between protecting public health and the economy.

“Our people need to eat. They need to earn a living,” Ramaphosa said.

“Companies need to be able to produce and to trade, they need to generate revenue and keep their employees in employment.”

South Africa’s economy was in recession and reeling from low growth and high debts before the pandemic arrived.

The country’s number of confirmed infections has risen to 5,647 since March 5 when the first case was detected. It also has recorded Africa’s highest Covid-19 death toll, with 103 fatalities.

Africa’s FinTech companies could push continent to go digital during Covid-19 pandemic

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

US President Donald Trump has threatened China with new tariffs amid the coronavirus outbreak he blames Beijing for.

Trump said Thursday his ongoing trade deal negotiations with the Asian country were now of secondary importance to the virus pandemic as his administration crafted retaliatory measures over the outbreak.

“We signed a trade deal where they’re supposed to buy, and they’ve been buying a lot, actually. But that now becomes secondary to what took place with the virus,” Trump told reporters. “The virus situation is just not acceptable.”

Currently, a range of options were being discussed against China, Reuters cited two US officials as saying, noting that they cautioned that efforts were in the early stages.

According to one official, Trump’s top national security team or the president have not yet been informed of the recommendations.

“There is a discussion as to how hard to hit China and how to calibrate it properly,” one of the sources said. Trump also told reporters that he was confident the coronavirus might have originated in a Chinese virology lab, but refused to describe the evidence.

When asked if he had seen evidence that gave him a “high degree of confidence” the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, he said, “Yes, yes I have.”

He, however, declined to give specifics, saying, “I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that.”

“There’s a lot of theories,” he said, “but we have people looking at it very, very strongly. Scientific people, intelligence people and others.”

The Chinese institute has dismissed the allegations and other US officials have played down their likelihood.

His remarks come as the US intelligence community concluded Thursday that the novel coronavirus originated in China but was not man-made or engineered.

“The entire Intelligence Community has been consistently providing critical support to US policymakers and those responding to the COVID-19 virus, which originated in China,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a statement.

According to The New York Times, senior figures in the Trump administration have put pressure on US intelligence agencies to provide evidence to substantiate claims that the virus outbreak originated in state-run laboratories in China.

Meanwhile, most experts believe the virus originated in a market selling wildlife in Wuhan and was transmitted from animals to people.

Source: Presstv

A vaccine against Covid-19 developed in Britain has shown very encouraging results on rhesus macaque monkeys, among the animals closest to humans. The scientists working on the vaccine estimate that if they can prove its effectiveness, it could be ready as soon as September.

Its name is a mouthful, but it’s the vaccine on everyone’s lips: The ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, currently being developed by Oxford University scientists, has in recent days shot ahead to become the most promising potential vaccine against the novel coronavirus.

On Thursday, the British drug maker AstraZeneca said it would help Oxford develop, produce and distribute the vaccine.

“Our hope is that, by joining forces, we can accelerate the globalisation of a vaccine to combat the virus and protect people from the deadliest pandemic in a generation,” AstraZeneca Chief Executive Pascal Soriot said.

The partnership hopes to produce 100 million doses by the end of the year and prioritise supply in the UK, Soriot told the Financial Times.

The first good news came last week from a laboratory in the US state of Montana, where six rhesus macaques, who received a dose of the British vaccine a month ago, did not contract Covid-19 after being exposed to it. Other monkeys who had not been vaccinated caught the virus and fell ill.

“The rhesus macaque is pretty much the closest thing we have to humans,” Vincent Munster, the scientist who conducted the experiment, told The New York Times.

Morgane Bomsel, a molecular biologist working on Covid-19 at the Cochin Institute in Paris, agrees. “It’s true that it’s better than if the tests had been carried out on mice,” she told FRANCE 24.

Bomsel considers the results encouraging, but warns against celebrating too soon, if only because details of the experiment conducted in Montana have not yet been published. “We don’t know yet, for example, what dose of the virus the macaques were exposed to, or how they were contaminated,” she said.

First tests on humans in Europe

Work on the ChAdOx1 nCov-19 vaccine is moving ahead quickly in Britain as well. On April 24, the Oxford vaccine was the first in Europe to enter the human trial stage, with 1,110 healthy volunteers recruited for the tests.

“The goal is to ensure that the vaccine is not toxic for the human body,” Bomsel said. In other words, before checking whether the ChAdOx1 nCov-19 protects from Covid-19, the researchers first need to guarantee that it is not dangerous.

The next step usually is to “take blood samples from the subjects to check for the presence of antibodies and the effectiveness of the vaccine against the coronavirus”, Bomsel explained.

If the trial produces positive results, millions of doses of ChAdOx1 nCov-19 could be available as early as September, Oxford researchers told the New York Times, months ahead of other known efforts.

“Usually, in fact, it takes about 18 months,” a member of the crisis cell of the French Society for Virology (SVF), a network of over 1,000 virologists from different laboratories, told FRANCE 24.

Modular vaccine

The Oxford scientists might be able to work at record speed “because in a sense, this vaccine isn’t new”, said the SVF virologist, who asked to remain anonymous because she did not want to involve her employer in the debate.

The researchers used a “technological platform with which they already have quite a lot of experience”, she said.

The core of the vaccine – ChAdOx1 – is an adenovirus: that is, it belongs to a family of viruses that have a mild effect on humans, and it is present in chimpanzees.

“It exists in humans as well, but researchers preferred to take it from monkeys to be certain that the human body has not already developed antibodies to protect against it,” she explained.

It is then combined with parts of another virus to make a vaccine. Researchers at Oxford have already used ChAdOx1 in the past to test vaccines against Ebola, Chikungunya, Rift Valley fever and, above all, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) virus, a coronavirus related to Covid-19 that was first reported in 2012. British scientists had very encouraging results in the latter case, especially with tests on rhesus macaques.

For the current coronavirus, they simply “added the surface protein of Covid-19 to ChAdOx1”, said Bomsel. That is the part of the virus that allows it to attach to the host cells and infect them. The purpose of the vaccine would therefore be to allow the human body to develop defenses against this mechanism of attaching to a human cell.

Since the technology is already in place and they have already tested humans for other vaccines using ChAdOx1, the Oxford scientists were quickly able to adapt it to the current pandemic and develop the clinical trial protocols.

Ring vaccination strategy

But even if the results of the clinical trial currently under way end up being promising, it will still be too early to celebrate.

The following step, Phase III of the vaccine’s development, will be to administer it to volunteers who will then be released back into their regular environments where they could be exposed naturally to the virus. The complete process of ensuring that these subjects are effectively immune to the disease can take up to three years.

So how can British scientists commit to providing doses of ChAdOx1 by September if the trials succeed? By following a specific procedure for cases where there is not enough time to complete testing: ring vaccination.

“The idea is to administer the vaccine to members of the first circle of contacts of people who fall ill with the virus, and then to observe whether the virus contaminates the second circle. That way, it’s possible both to vaccinate and to evaluate,” explained the French virologist.

This was done during the 2018 Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and could be replicated to fight against Covid-19.

While the experts interviewed by FRANCE 24 recognised that the work of the Oxford team was very promising, they said other possible vaccines – like those being developed by the American pharmaceutical companies Inovio and Moderna – might also be in advanced stages of research by the autumn.

Despite the encouraging news, there is no guarantee that the vaccines will work. But even if the efforts at Oxford University are unsuccessful, Bomsel said, “we will at least have learned a lot about how the body’s immune system fights this virus”.

The FSV virologist was even more optimistic: “Even if the vaccine won’t successfully immunise the body against Covid-19, we can still hope that it will reduce the severity of the virus,” she said.

That alone would be preferable to watching, more or less helplessly, as the number of coronavirus victims grows every day.

Source: France 24

The city of New York has delivered a freezer truck to a funeral home after it was found to be storing dead bodies in unrefrigerated U-Haul vehicles, a Reuters eyewitness says.

The eyewitness saw bodies in a U-Haul van and said two vans and a truck were parked outside the funeral home.

ABC News reported about 100 bodies were stored in the vehicles after the owner of the Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home said the freezer that normally stores bodies stopped working.

ABC did not identify the owner and no one at the funeral home was immediately available to comment. It was not clear how long the bodies had been stored in the U-Hauls or whether any were COVID-19 victims.

The bodies were found after neighbors reported an odor coming from the trucks, New York media reported.

The New York Police Department declined to comment. The Department of Health could not immediately be reached for comment, too.

New York City has been at the epicenter of the global coronavirus pandemic and the city’s funeral homes have been overwhelmed. As of Wednesday afternoon, more than 18,000 people have died of COVID-19 in America’s biggest city, according to a Reuters tally.

Funeral homes say they are facing weeks-long backlogs to bury or cremate the dead.

(Source: Reuters)