Health News

The scramble to research the novel coronavirus has exposed weaknesses in the vetting of healthcare data being supplied by a growing number of U.S. firms, a flaw that forced two of the most respected medical journals to pull studies last week.

Chile on Thursday exceeded 154,000 confirmed cases of the new coronavirus and 2,600 deaths, one hundred days after the outbreak began and with the health service straining under massive admissions numbers.

France's coronavirus death toll rose by 27 on Thursday, versus an average daily increase of 50 over the last 15 days, to 29,346, the fifth-highest total in the world.

Beating the coronavirus was only the first step towards recovery for patients at a Barcelona rehabilitation centre providing treatment for a range of debilitating after-effects.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Thursday reported 1,994,283 cases of the new coronavirus, an increase of 20,486 cases from its previous count, and said that the number of deaths had risen by 834 to 112,967.

Georgia will send doctors to Armenia to help fight the coronavirus and will provide its neighbour with 10,000 diagnostic tests free of charge, Georgian officials said on Thursday.

British health minister Matt Hancock said on Thursday people should not attend large demonstrations for public health reasons after protests in support of the Black Lives Matter movement attracted tens of thousands over the last week.

AstraZeneca Plc on Thursday picked Emergent BioSolutions Inc to help produce the 300 million doses of the British drugmaker's potential COVID-19 vaccine pledged to the United States.

Italy, the first major European country to roll out a smartphone app to trace COVID-19 infections that does not rely on a centralized database, has already seen 2.2 million downloads in 10 days, a sign Italians are setting aside privacy concerns.

Europe could face a surge of COVID-19 infections in the coming weeks caused by mass protests in the continent over the last days, politicians, European Union officials and experts said on Thursday.

The Butantan Institute, one of Brazil's leading biomedical research centers, on Thursday announced an agreement with China's Sinovac Biotech Ltd to potentially produce a vaccine against the new coronavirus.

Ryanair rejected new British government guidance for passengers to check in all luggage including hand bags, saying on Thursday it would instead recommend that passengers minimise checked-in luggage.

From apple packing houses in Washington state to farm workers in Florida and a California county known as "the world's salad bowl," outbreaks of the novel coronavirus are emerging at U.S. fruit and vegetable farms and packing plants.

Emergent BioSolutions Inc said on Thursday it signed an $87 million deal to make AstraZeneca Plc's experimental COVID-19 vaccine in the United States, boosting the British drugmaker's efforts to bring a vaccine to the market.

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc on Thursday said it has begun human testing of its experimental antibody cocktail as a treatment for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

Moderna Inc on Thursday confirmed it plans to start a trial of 30,000 volunteers of its much-anticipated coronavirus vaccine in July as the company enters the final stage of testing.

China is offering candidate vaccines for the new coronavirus to employees at state-owned firms travelling overseas, as it seeks more data on their efficacy, state media Global Times reported on Thursday.

England's new track and tracing system was able to contact two thirds of the people who tested positive for COVID-19 and were referred to it in its first week, and then succeeded in contacting 85% of their contacts to ask them to self isolate.

England's COVID-19 Trace and Track is functioning effectively nationwide even though it can still be improved, program leader Dido Harding said after the first numbers of people tested and contacts traced were published.

Here's what you need to know about the coronavirus right now: