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COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AFP) — Denmark’s health authorities said Sunday the country had seen a “concerning” jump to 183 confirmed cases of the Omicron variant of Covid-19. The number represented a tripling of confirmed cases in 48 hours, from 18 confirmed and 42 suspected cases on Friday, according to data from the SSI public health institute. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) had previously tallied just 182 cases across all of the European […]
LONDON, United Kingdom (AFP) — The UK government said late Wednesday it has ordered 114 million additional Covid-19 vaccine doses, from pharmaceutical giants Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, to bolster its jabs drive over the next two years. The orders — 60 million extra doses of the Moderna vaccine and 54 million more Pfizer-BioNTech shots — come as Britain expands its booster program following the emergence of the Omicron variant. The country has set a two-month target […]
GENEVA, Switzerland (AFP) — The WHO warned Wednesday that the world was creating toxic conditions for new Covid-19 variants like Omicron to emerge and then spread around the globe. The World Health Organization said the combination of low vaccination coverage across the planet, mixed with very low testing to track the virus, was a fertile breeding ground. The UN health agency stressed that measures to stop the globally-dominant Delta variant would also hinder Omicron. The […]
GENEVA, Switzerland (AFP) — Brazil’s health regulator on Tuesday reported the discovery of two “preliminary” cases of the Omicron coronavirus variant in a traveler from South Africa, where it was first detected, and his wife. Positive samples from the two Brazilians will now be sent for further laboratory analysis for confirmation, the Anvisa regulator said in a statement. If confirmed, they would be the first Omicron cases in Latin America. The passenger arrived at the […]
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AFP) — Dutch health authorities said Tuesday that the new Covid-19 variant was present in the Netherlands a week earlier than previously believed and checks are underway to see how far it has spread. The RIVM National Health and Environment Institute said it “has found the corona variant Omicron in two test samples that had already been taken in the Netherlands… on November 19 and 23”. The first cases in the […]
BARCELONA, Spain (AFP) – A fire ripped through an abandoned bank occupied by squatters in central Barcelona on Tuesday, killing four people, including a baby and a three-year-old boy, Spanish firefighters said. “While we were battling the fire, we found four people. Emergency services tried to revive them but unfortunately they failed, they could not do anything to save them,” the head of the firefighting operation, Angel Lopez, told reporters. Firefighters rescued four other people who […]
by Mathieu GORSE / Valentin BONTEMPS MADRID, Spain (AFP) — The coronavirus pandemic will cost the global tourism sector $2.0 trillion in lost revenue in 2021, the UN’s tourism body said Monday, calling the sector’s recovery “fragile” and “slow”. The forecast from the Madrid-based World Tourism Organization comes as Europe is grappling with a surge in infections and as a new heavily mutated Covid-19 variant, dubbed Omicron, spreads across the globe. International tourist arrivals will […]
BERLIN, Germany (AFP) — Germany on Saturday confirmed its first two cases of the new Omicron strain of Covid-19, in travellers who arrived at Munich airport from South Africa, regional officials said. “Two suspected cases of the new virus variant Omicron classified by the World Health Organization as a variant of concern have been confirmed in Bavaria,” the health ministry of the southern state said in a statement. The people, who arrived back in Germany […]
by Joris FIORITI with Jan HENNOP in The Hague SCHIPHOL, Netherlands (AFP) — Dutch health authorities said Saturday the new Omicron strain of Covid-19 was “probably” among some of the 61 passengers who tested positive after arriving on two flights from South Africa. The cases — more than one tenth of the 600 people on the two planes — were quarantined in a hotel near Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, one of Europe’s biggest international air travel […]
PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AFP) — The regional hospital in the northern Czech city of Liberec confirmed the new Omicron strain of Covid-19 in a female patient, its spokesman Vaclav Ricar told Czech Television Saturday. “My colleagues from the department of genetics and molecular diagnostics confirmed the strain with 90-percent probability after a sequence analysis,” said Ricar. Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis said earlier Saturday that the woman had been in Namibia and flew back to […]
by Daniel Woolls with AFP bureaus The United States, Brazil, Canada, and Saudi Arabia became the latest countries Friday to restrict travel from southern Africa, where a new Covid strain labelled a “variant of concern” has been discovered in a potentially heavy blow to the world’s efforts to end the coronavirus pandemic. The World Health Organization said the new variant is more infectious than the dominant, highly transmissible Delta strain, and renamed this B.1.1.529 strain […]
by Paul RICARD Agence France Presse It is, scientists say, the most worrying Covid-19 variant since delta and perhaps ever. Here is what we know — and what we don’t — about the strain thought to have originated in Southern Africa. – How worrying? “This one is worrying and I’ve not said that since delta,” British virologist Ravi Gupta said on Twitter, about the variant labelled B.1.1.529. Concerns among disease experts stem from the variant’s […]
