UK unveils large-scale study to track coronavirus
LONDON, United Kingdom — The British government announced plans Thursday for a major study to track coronavirus in the general population, with as many as 300,000 people expected to take part within a year.
In a first phase, a representative sample of 25,000 people will be regularly tested using self-administered nose and throat swabs, to establish if they currently have COVID-19.
Regular blood samples will also be taken from adults from around 1,000 households to help assess how many people have developed antibodies.
Initial findings could be available in early May, the health ministry said, and would likely inform the government's decisions on how to ease a month-long nationwide lockdown imposed to stem the spread of the virus.
Britain is one of the worst-hit countries in the global pandemic, with 18,100 deaths recorded so far in hospitals alone.
Testing for coronavirus infection is currently largely restricted to frontline health and care workers in Britain, although ministers have vowed to ramp this up in the coming weeks.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the large-scale survey "will help to track the current extent of transmission and infection in the UK, while also answering crucial questions about immunity".
"Together, these results will help us better understand the spread of the virus to date, predict the future trajectory and inform future action we take, including, crucially, the development of ground-breaking new tests and treatments," he said.
The chief medical officer for England, Chris Whitty, said on Wednesday that there is not yet a reliable antibody test to establish whether someone has had coronavirus in the past.
"We do not yet have a test that is as good as we would want," he said, but added that he hoped it would be developed in the "pretty near future".
Follow this page for updates on a mysterious pneumonia outbreak that has struck dozens of people in China.
New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins says on Sunday that he had contracted COVID-19, testing positive at a key point in his flailing campaign for re-election.
Hipkins saYS on his official social media feed that he would need to isolate for up to five days -- less than two weeks before his country's general election.
The leader of the centre-left Labour Party said he started to experience cold symptoms on Saturday and had cancelled most of his weekend engagements. — AFP
The World Health Organization and US health authorities say Friday they are closely monitoring a new variant of COVID-19, although the potential impact of BA.2.86 is currently unknown.
The WHO classified the new variant as one under surveillance "due to the large number (more than 30) of spike gene mutations it carries", it wrote in a bulletin about the pandemic late Thursday.
So far, the variant has only been detected in Israel, Denmark and the United States. — AFP
The World Health Organization says on Friday that the number of new COVID-19 cases reported worldwide rose by 80% in the last month, days after designating a new "variant of interest".
The WHO declared in May that Covid is no longer a global health emergency, but has warned that the virus will continue to circulate and mutate, causing occasional spikes in infections, hospitalisations and deaths.
In its weekly update, the UN agency said that nations reported nearly 1.5 million new cases from July 10 to August 6, an 80% increase compared to the previous 28 days. — AFP
The head of US intelligence says that there was no evidence that the COVID-19 virus was created in the Chinese government's Wuhan research lab.
In a declassified report, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) says they had no information backing recent claims that three scientists at the lab were some of the very first infected with COVID-19 and may have created the virus themselves.
Drawing on intelligence collected by various member agencies of the US intelligence community (IC), the ODNI report says some scientists at the Wuhan lab had done genetic engineering of coronaviruses similar to COVID-19. — AFP
Boris Johnson deliberately misled MPs over Covid lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street when he was prime minister, a UK parliament committee ruled on Thursday.
The cross-party Privileges Committee said Johnson, 58, would have been suspended as an MP for 90 days for "repeated contempts (of parliament) and for seeking to undermine the parliamentary process".
But he avoided any formal sanction by his peers in the House of Commons by resigning as an MP last week.
In his resignation statement last Friday, Johnson pre-empted publication of the committee's conclusions, claiming a political stitch-up, even though the body has a majority from his own party.
He was unrepentant again on Thursday, accusing the committee of being "anti-democratic... to bring about what is intended to be the final knife-thrust in a protracted political assassination".
Calling it "beneath contempt", he said it was "for the people of this to decide who sits in parliament, not Harriet Harman", the veteran opposition Labour MP who chaired the seven-person committee. — AFP
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