Health

HONG KONG: China is in talks with Pfizer Inc to secure a licence that will allow domestic drugmakers to manufacture and distribute a generic version of the US firm’s Covid antiviral drug Paxlovid in China, three sources said. China’s medical products regulator — the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) — has been leading the talks with Pfizer since late last …

BEIJING: China defended on Thursday its handling of its raging Covid-19 outbreak after US President Joe Biden voiced concern and the WHO said Beijing was under-reporting virus deaths. The WHO’s emergencies director, Mike Ryan, said on Wednesday that Chinese officials were under-representing data on several fronts, some of the UN agency’s most critical remarks to date. China scrapped its stringent …

More countries around the world are demanding that visitors from China take Covid tests, days before it drops border controls and ushers in an eagerly awaited return to travel for a population that has been largely stuck at home for three years. From Sunday, China will end the requirement for inbound travellers to quarantine, the latest dismantling of its “zero-Covid” …

ISLAMABAD: After a month-long hiatus in multiple deaths from coronavirus in a single day, two patients died the same day, an official of the National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) said on Wednesday. A six-year-old child suffering from blood cancer died due to Covid-19 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, while in Sindh the virus claimed the life of a 75-year-old person, an …

Global health officials tried to determine the facts of China’s raging Covid-19 outbreak and how to prevent a further spread as the government’s mouthpiece newspaper on Wednesday rallied citizens for a “final victory” over the virus. China’s axing of its stringent virus curbs last month has unleashed Covid on a 1.4 billion population that has little natural immunity having been …

The Aga Khan University Hospital (AKUH) confirmed on Wednesday the detection of six coronavirus cases belonging to the highly-contagious Omicron subvariant category XBB in Karachi. “We have detected six cases, however, others have been found around the country,” AKUH Infectious Diseases Section Head Dr Faisal Mehmood told Dawn.com. “These have started since November.” According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the XBB is a …

China’s state media played down the severity on Tuesday of the Covid-19 wave surging over the country, with its scientists expected to give a briefing to the World Health Organisation on the evolution of the virus later in the day. China’s abrupt U-turn on Covid controls on Dec 7, as well as the accuracy of its case and mortality data, …

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on Tuesday that the Covid-19 situation in the country was “under control”, but instructed authorities to remain prepared to tackle any possible spread of the virus. The premier passed these remarks in a meeting held at the Prime Minister’s Office to review the Covid spread in Pakistan. The participants were informed in detail about the …

ISLAMABAD: In the wake of threat posed by the new BF.7 Omicron variant of Covid-19, National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) on Monday instructed National Institute of Health (NIH) to issue precautionary advisories for educational institutes, social gatherings and conduct weekly media briefings. In a related development, vaccination and screening test of pedestrians has been started at Torkham border on a …

BEIJING: Travellers from China now face restrictions when entering more than a dozen countries as concern grows over its surge in Covid-19 cases, with Australia the latest to demand a negative test before arrival. Last month, Beijing abruptly began dismantling its “zero-Covid” containment policy of lockdowns and mass testing, three years after the coronavirus first emerged in the city of …