The official death toll from the first two years of the COVID pandemic is about 5.4 million, but there were 14.9 million excess deaths associated with COVID by the end of 2021, according to a new @WHO report https://t.co/fQukpsPqhh pic.twitter.com/zgkWMeQ6n4
— Reuters (@Reuters) May 6, 2022
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“It’s absolutely staggering what has happened with this pandemic, including our inability to accurately monitor it,” one epidemiologist said. “It shouldn’t happen in the 21st century.” https://t.co/o1i65RbwiR
— NYT Health (@NYTHealth) May 6, 2022
Unlike most of China’s coronavirus prevention measures, vaccination is not mandatory, and low uptake among the country’s most vulnerable groups is a major reason Communist Party leaders feel compelled to persist with a grueling “zero covid” approach. https://t.co/ALDxXCnov5
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) May 6, 2022
Beijing residents tentatively returned to work but the Chinese capital's streets were less hectic than normal, as home working was being encouraged and scores of bus and subway routes were closed https://t.co/uaoRyzqhnP pic.twitter.com/BrYETp4cBz
— Reuters (@Reuters) May 5, 2022
'How did we catch it?': spread of COVID baffles locked-down Shanghai residents https://t.co/eLBd94GHVd pic.twitter.com/OcCienzfan
— Reuters (@Reuters) May 6, 2022
China's lockdowns have left migrant workers unable to work and in dire strait. Some sleep under bridges or on construction sites.
“I have three kids. The pressure is huge,” one man, who hasn't been able to draw his $30/day wage for over a month, told me. https://t.co/jbQ2vO9R7c
— Vivian Wang (@vwang3) May 5, 2022
India’s main opposition Congress party on Friday demanded a hefty rise in compensation for the families of those who died of COVID-19, after the World Health Organization estimated the country’s toll was nearly 10 times the reported figure.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has rejected the WHO estimate released on Thursday that 4.7 million people died in India as a result of the pandemic until last year, when hospitals ran out of oxygen and beds due to a record wave driven by the Delta variant.
India has reported only 524,002 COVID-19 deaths – the most after the United States and Brazil – with more than 43 million infections. Actual infections are believed to be in the hundreds of millions in the country of 1.35 billion people.
“Science doesn’t LIE. Modi does,” Congress’s second-in-command, Rahul Gandhi, said on Twitter, citing the WHO report. “Respect families who have lost loved ones.”
He asked the government to compensate the families of each person dying of COVID with 400,000 rupees ($5,213). The government currently gives 50,000 once deaths are confirmed to be from COVID…
Some Indian states, nevertheless, have agreed to compensate more families than their official tally suggests.
Modi’s home state of Gujarat, for example, has recorded around 11,000 COVID fatalities since the start of the pandemic but has approved at least 87,000 compensation claims.
Africa's top public health body urged all those purchasing COVID-19 vaccines for the continent to place orders with South Africa's Aspen Pharmacare, saying the market was key to developing vaccine manufacturing on the continent https://t.co/hJNsym5yWp pic.twitter.com/mmpe5lutVI
— Reuters (@Reuters) May 5, 2022
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Additional reports of patients with long COVID who were helped by Pfizer Inc's oral antiviral treatment Paxlovid offer fresh impetus for conducting clinical trials to test the medicine for the debilitating condition, U.S. researchers said on Thursday. https://t.co/3gqMkdg2as
— Reuters Health (@Reuters_Health) May 6, 2022
Some very encouraging new data on booster durability vs Omicron severe disease out to 7 months, for age 60+https://t.co/pBrYhFpVg8 pic.twitter.com/807l7i6h0o
— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) May 6, 2022
… In Pfizer’s clinical trials, about 5.6 percent of patients reported an “altered sense of taste,” called dysgeusia in the medical literature…
Still, everyone I spoke with who had experienced Paxlovid Mouth said they’d take the drug again if they were reinfected and had another bout of COVID. “It’s a hell of a lot better than a ventilator,” Wright said. She’s immunocompromised, and has taken her fair share of medicines throughout her life. “It’s not my first encounter with a medication that leaves kind of a taste in your mouth,” she told me. “But I’ve never experienced anything this extreme. This is next-level.”
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Experts worried prisons weren't getting enough access to #Covid antiviral drugs to limit spread of the disease among inmate populations. But in reality, prisons used a tiny fraction of the Covid drugs they were allocated, @NicholasFlorko reports. https://t.co/x3TvqiMNld
— Helen Branswell ?? (@HelenBranswell) May 5, 2022
COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Thursday / Friday, May 5-6Post + Comments (40)