Health News at Your Fingertips

Iraq has resumed direct flights to and from Saudi Arabia after a 19-month suspension due to Covid, according to the state news agency INA.

In March 2020, Saudi Arabia suspended entry from and travel to Iraq along with eight other countries due to the spreading coronavirus pandemic.

The country said last week it was easing its Covid measures from 17 October as a result of a sharp drop in daily infections.

A systematic disinformation campaign in Russian media to foster doubts and misgivings about Western coronavirus vaccines has backfired as the death toll in Russia rises to record daily tolls, a European Union (EU) report said.

The EU study said Russian state broadcaster RT and other media outlets had sown mistrust about the efficacy and safety of vaccines on their European websites in a number of languages, including Russian.

“Disinformation can kill. That should be kept in mind when we see Kremlin media continue spreading lies on Covid-19 and the vaccines, even as the death tolls in Russia are surging,” said the EU study, entitled “Disinformation Review”.

The Kremlin denies all disinformation allegations by the EU, which produces regular reports and seeks to work with Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft to limit the spread of fake news, Reuters reported.

The EU has documented what it says is Russian disinformation since early on in the pandemic in January 2020, via the bloc’s foreign service EEAS. It is part of what the EU says is a broader Russian effort to weaken and divide western societies.

More social mixing indoors after the lifting of restrictions just as winter sets in is driving a rise in Covid infections in many countries across Europe, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) emergency director Mike Ryan said today.

He told a news conference:

Most of those restrictions are now not in place anymore in many countries. And we’re seeing that coincide with the winter period in which people are moving inside as the cold snaps appear.

The question remains as to whether or not we will have the same experience as last year with health systems coming once again under pressure.

Russia has recorded its highest daily hospital death toll from the disease in a very long time, while the week-on-week rise in coronavirus cases in Britain was less than in parts of eastern Europe, he said.

Italy reported 36 coronavirus-related deaths on Thursday compared with 33 the day before, the health ministry said, while the daily tally of new infections rose to 3,794 from 3,702.

Italy has registered 131,724 deaths linked to Covid since its outbreak emerged in February last year, the second-highest toll in Europe after Britain and the ninth-highest in the world. The country has reported 4.73 million cases to date.

Patients in hospital with Covid – not including those in intensive care – stood at 2,439 on Thursday, down from 2,464 a day earlier, the Reuters news agency reported.

There were 22 new admissions to intensive care units, down from 25 on Wednesday. The total number of intensive care patients increased marginally to 356 from a previous 355.

The decision to halt vaccinating young people with the Moderna Covid vaccine in Sweden and Denmark is being monitored by a World Health Organization (WHO) advisory group.

The ‘pause’ follows “very rare” myocarditis identified in some who received it and a statement was expected soon, WHO’s assistant director general Mariangela Simao said today.

Work on a review of Sputnik V vaccine made by Russia’s Gamaleya Institute for possible WHO emergency use listing has restarted, after being on hold due to a “legal procedure”, she told a news briefing.

Further inspections were planned in the next few weeks and additional clinical data was expected, Reuters reported.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has called on the world’s 20 richest nations, holding a summit next week, to step up donations of Covid doses to the global south where vaccinations lag.

“The @g20org countries must fulfil their dose-sharing commitments immediately,” WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told a news briefing.

Gordon Brown, WHO ambassador for global health financing, said that if the world’s richest countries cannot mobilise for a vaccine airlift to developing countries, an epidemiological and economic “dereliction of duty will shame us all”, Reuters reported.

There is still a shortfall of 500m vaccines to reach WHO’s 40% vaccination target in all countries in mid-2022, while 240m doses are lying unused in the west, Brown said.

Russia has reported “isolated cases” of coronavirus with a subvariant of the Delta variant that is believed to be even more contagious, the state consumer watchdog’s senior researcher said.

The researcher, Kamil Khafizov, said the AY.4.2 subvariant may be around 10% more infectious than the original Delta – which has driven new cases and deaths to a series of record daily highs in Russia – and could ultimately replace it.

However, he said this was likely to be a slow process, adding:

The vaccines are effective enough against this version of the virus, which is not so different as to dramatically change the ability to bind to antibodies.

The AY.4.2 subvariant is also on an increasing trajectory in England and had already accounted for about 6% of all sequences generated on the week beginning 27 September, a UK Health Security Agency report released this week said.

The UK’s health secretary, Sajid Javid, on Wednesday said there was no reason to believe the subvariant posed a greater threat than Delta, Reuters reported.

Russian immunologist Nikolay Kryuchkov said Delta and its subvariants would remain dominant and might in the future adapt in some ways to vaccines, especially where vaccination rates are below or just above 50%. He added:

But it seems to me that a revolutionary jump will not happen, because the coronavirus, like any organism, has an evolutionary limit, and the evolutionary jump has already happened.

Thailand will allow visitors from 46 countries vaccinated against Covid to skip quarantine from next month, up from 10 previously announced, Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha confirmed.

The south-east Asian country is poised to introduce the new quarantine-free travel arrangements on 1 November as it seeks to revive its vital tourism industry.

Last week, Prayuth said that at least 10 countries, including Britain, Singapore, Germany, China and the United States, would be exempt from quarantine, Reuters reported.

He did not name the extra countries in a Facebook post on Thursday, but said the visitors could skip mandatory quarantine providing they arrive via air, have been fully vaccinated and have a document to show they are virus-free.

Tourists vaccinated against Covid will be able to enter Israel from next month, its government announced on Thursday, further easing curbs on foreign arrivals that were imposed when the pandemic broke out.

A joint plan between the tourism and health ministries and the prime minister, Naftali Bennett, will allow the admission of foreigners who received vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca and others as of 1 November.

The plan is subject to cabinet approval and “will be updated in accordance with developments and the discovery of new variants”, the joint statement said.

Israel’s borders have largely been closed to foreigners since March 2020.