KARACHI: The city administration on Saturday enforced smart and micro-smart lockdowns in several emerging hotspots across Karachi to deal with the rising cases of Covid-19 as part of the second wave of the novel coronavirus. Official sources said that it had become fundamental to ensure quarantine, contact tracing and testing to reduce the transmission and spread of Covid-19, besides mandatory …

ISLAMABAD: The Pakis­tan Peoples Party (PPP) has criticised the government over its plan to sack thousands of employees of the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), Steel Mills and Railways and termed the decision illegal and unconstitutional. “It is unfortunate that unelected lackeys, who have served every government, are taking anti-labour decisions,” PPP leader Raza Rabbani said in a statement on Saturday. …

ISLAMABAD: The capital has the highest utilisation rate for hospital beds reserved for Covid-19 patients. Officials of the district administration that 362 beds, excluding ventilators, were reserved for patients in 12 hospitals. On Saturday, there were 240 patients admitted to these hospitals with the bed utilisation rate of 66.2pc. Punjab has 10.1pc utilisation rate as out of the 8,624 beds reserved …

PESHAWAR: As the Pakistan Democratic Movement will hold its power show here today (Sunday), chief of the opposition’s alliance Maulana Fazlur Rehman has asked the military establishment to ‘withdraw its support to the puppet’ PTI government. “Americans have sent Donald Trump home and our Trump, too, will be shown the door soon,” Mr Fazl told reporters here on Saturday without …

OLYMPIA — Gov. Jay Inslee announced Tuesday that Washington’s next secretary of health will be Dr. Umair Shah, the health director for Texas’s largest county. The new appointment comes as the state sees an increase in new COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations, and as Washingtonians brace for more cases, deaths and economic damage as the coronavirus surges. Shah — who replaces Secretary …

Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (Drap) Chief Executive Officer Asim Rauf on Saturday said the body has granted approval to a locally invented software that can “detect the coronavirus infection in a person’s lungs within a minute”. According to the certificate of registration granted by Drap, a copy of which is available with Dawn.com, the Cov-Raid — which has been developed …

Canada has granted interim authorization to Eli Lilly’s antibody drug for treating COVID-19 in patients who are not hospitalized, but are at risk of serious illness because of their age or other conditions, the drugmaker said on Friday. The news comes weeks after the treatment, bamlanivimab, was given U.S. emergency use authorization (EUA) by the Food and Drug Administration for …

LONDON: AstraZeneca started late-stage trials on Saturday of an experimental long-acting monoclonal antibody combination drug it hopes could be used as a so-called prophylactic to prevent COVID-19 infection in at-risk people for up to 12 months. The Phase III international clinical trial will recruit a total of 5,000 people across countries in Europe and the United States to assess the …

People whose immune systems responded strongly to a measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine may be less likely to become severely ill if they are infected with the new coronavirus, new data suggests. The MMR II vaccine, manufactured by Merck and licensed in 1979, works by triggering the immune system to produce antibodies. Researchers reported on Friday in mBio that among 50 COVID-19 patients …

Exposure to cigarette smoke makes airway cells more vulnerable to infection with the new coronavirus, UCLA researchers found. They obtained airway-lining cells from five individuals without COVID-19 and exposed some of the cells to cigarette smoke in test tubes. Then they exposed all the cells to the coronavirus. Compared to cells not exposed to the smoke, smoke-exposed cells were two- …