Health News

The anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine, which U.S. President Donald Trump says he has been taking and has urged others to use, was tied to an increased risk of death in hospitalized COVID-19 patients, a large study published on Friday showed.

Canada will ramp up COVID-19 testing and contact tracing as it gradually lifts restrictions and is working closely with Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc's Google on a mobile phone app to help, the prime minister said on Friday.

In the fight against COVID-19, the decades-old anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine has become a political football, with U.S. President Donald Trump personally taking it and hailing it as a "game changer," to the derision of critics.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Friday reported 1,571,617 cases of the new coronavirus, an increase of 20,522 cases from its previous count, and said that the number of deaths had risen by 1,089 to 94,150.

If the world is to gain access to a vaccine for COVID-19, there's a good chance it will pass through the doors of Serum Institute of India.

Evofem Biosciences Inc's birth control gel received the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's approval on Friday, making it the first non-hormonal contraceptive for women in over three decades, sending its shares up 3.6%.

Oxford University and AstraZeneca are recruiting around 10,000 adults and children in Britain for trials of an experimental coronavirus vaccine, a day after receiving U.S. backing worth up to $1.2 billion.

The malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which U.S. President Donald Trump says he has been taking and has urged others to use, was tied to increased risk of death in hospitalized COVID-19 patients, according to a large study published in the medical journal Lancet.

Once held up as a role model for its battle against the coronavirus, Singapore has struggled to contain an infection spread centred around foreign worker dormitories, construction sites and factories.

Spain's overnight death toll from the new coronavirus rose by 56 on Friday to a total of 28,628, the health ministry said.

Sinovac Biotech Ltd said on Friday it had started mid-stage human trials of its experimental coronavirus vaccine in China earlier this month.

Some 80 million children worldwide could be at risk of vaccine-preventable diseases like diphtheria, measles and polio due to disruption of routine immunisation during the COVID-19 pandemic, U.N. agencies and the GAVI vaccine alliance said on Friday.

The coronavirus mortality rate among some of the poorest Catalans is five times higher than among the wealthiest residents of the Spanish region, a study showed, in the latest evidence of how COVID-19 hits the needy hardest.

Thailand will maintain its state of emergency over the coronavirus until the end of June, its COVID-19 task force said on Friday, in an effort to keep infections under control as the government prepares to ease restrictions further.

Britain should have learned more from other countries who were tackling coronavirus outbreaks earlier, the head of NHS England Simon Stevens said on Friday, acknowledging that not everything with the response had gone perfectly.

Children have milder COVID-19 symptoms than adults and the balance of evidence suggests they may also have lower susceptibility and infectivity than adults, scientists advising the British government have said.

President Vladimir Putin told officials on Friday to ramp up testing for the new coronavirus, but said Russia's outbreak was stabilising even as the death toll rose by a record one-day amount.

The United Kingdom's death toll from confirmed cases of COVID-19 rose by 351 to 36,393 as of 1600 GMT on May 21, the health ministry said.

The United States called on the World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday to begin work immediately on investigating the source of the novel coronavirus, as well as its handling of the response to the pandemic.

African nations should use antibody tests to find out whether the slower spread and lower mortality rate of the new coronavirus on the continent is due to patchy data or a more resilient population, former British prime minister Tony Blair said on Friday.