Sun, Feb 14, 2021 page1

• Virus could last indefinitely, EU health chief warns

  • AFP and Reuters, STOCKHOLM and SHANGHAI, China
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  The head of the EU’s disease control agency on Friday warned that COVID-19 could last indefinitely even as global infections slowed by nearly half in the past month and vaccine rollouts gathered pace in parts of the world.

  European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control Director Andrea Ammon urged European countries in particular not to drop their guard against a virus that “seems very well adapted to humans” and might require experts to tweak vaccines over time, as is the case with the seasonal flu.

  “So we should be prepared that it will remain with us,” Ammon said in an interview.

  

  An empty city thoroughfare is pictured on the first day of a five-day lockdown in the state of Victoria in response to a COVID-19 outbreak in Melbourne, Australia, yesterday.

  Photo: Reuters

  After the latest harsh wave of a pandemic that started in China more than a year ago, glimmers of hope flickered as an Agence France-Presse database showed the rate of new COVID-19 infections has slowed by 44.5 percent worldwide over the past month.

  More than 107 million people have been infected worldwide and nearly 2.4 million have died from COVID-19.

  However, disease experts warned that vaccines would not end the pandemic unless all countries receive doses in a fast and fair manner.

  Writing in an open letter published in The Lancet medical journal, the authors said with vaccine stockpiling in wealthier countries, “it could be years before the coronavirus is brought under control at a global level.”

  The warning came as US vaccine maker Moderna said it was seeking clearance with regulators around the world to put 50 percent more COVID-19 vaccine into each of its vials as a way to quickly boost current supply levels.

  In Britain, a marked drop in infections and accelerating vaccinations have prompted some within the governing Conservative Party to push for stay-at-home rules to be lifted early next month.

  Much of the country re-entered lockdown early last month to curb a more transmissible COVID-19 variant that was first identified in the UK.

  The British government nonetheless voiced caution, a watchword echoed elsewhere, including Italy, Portugal and Australia.

  In Australia, more than 6 million people in Melbourne and its surrounding area were under an emergency five-day COVID-19 lockdown.

  In related news, a member of the WHO-led team that visited China to probe the origins of the pandemic yesterday said that Beijing refused to give raw data on early COVID-19 cases to the investigators, potentially complicating efforts to understand how the outbreak began.

  The team had requested raw patient data on the 174 cases of COVID-19 that China had identified from the early phase of the outbreak in Wuhan in December 2019, as well as other cases, but were only provided with a summary, said Dominic Dwyer, an Australian infectious diseases expert.

  Such raw data are known as “line listings” and would typically be anonymized, but contain details such as what questions were asked of individual patients, their responses and how their responses were analyzed, he said in a video call from Sydney, where he is undergoing quarantine.

  “That’s standard practice for an outbreak investigation,” he told Reuters in the video call.

  He said that gaining access to the raw data was especially important since only half of the 174 cases had exposure to the Huanan market, the now-shuttered wholesale seafood center in Wuhan where the virus was initially detected.
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