Omicron variant Updates: Gujarat govt extends night curfew till Feb 11

COVID-19 vaccines are saving an untold number of lives, but they can't stop the chaos when a hugely contagious new mutant bursts on the scene, leading people to wonder: Will we need boosters every few months? A new vaccine recipe? A new type of shot altogether? That's far from settled, but with the shots still doing their main job many experts are cautioning against setting too high a bar. “We need collectively to be rethinking what is the goal of vaccination," said Dr Daniel Kuritzkes, infectious disease chief at Brigham & Women's Hospital. "It's unrealistic...to believe that any kind of vaccination is going to protect people from infection, from mild symptomatic disease, forever.”

The Ministry of Education has written to states and union territories with a plan for learning recovery to ensure continuum of learning and mitigate the impact of the pandemic. This includes a financial support to students, funds for primary school teachers to purchase tablets and Rs 20 lakh per state and union territory to conduct oral reading fluency (ORF) study. "A comprehensive learning recovery plan (LRP) has been prepared which delineates the action to be undertaken by each stakeholder, indicative annual calendar of activities, existing interventions which can be utilised and additional support with funding as a one-time measure.

Assam on Thursday registered a marginal decline in fresh COVID-19 cases with 1,019 more people testing positive for the infection, while 19 patients died, the National Health Mission (NHM) said.
The state's positivity rate also decreased to 3.04 per cent as 33,489 samples were tested for coronavirus.
Assam had recorded 1,028 cases and a 3.08 per cent positivity rate against the testing of 33,425 samples on Wednesday.
Kamrup Metropolitan district, which primarily comprises Guwahati city, reported 238 fresh cases.
The NHM said that the number of recoveries decreased by nearly 55 per cent to 2,392 people on Thursday from 5,293 on the previous day.
In Assam, 6,98,288 COVID-19 patients have so far recovered.

Maharashtra on Thursday recorded 15,252 new coronavirus cases and 75 fatalities, the state health department said. No Omicron infection was reported during the day. The state has so far reported 3,334 infections of the Omicron variant. The COVID-19 caseload rose to 77,68,800, and death toll to 1,42,859. On Wednesday, the state had recorded 18,067 cases and 79 fatalities. Pune recorded 2,156 new cases on Thursday, followed by Nagpur (1,420), Pimpri-Chinchwad (1,012), Mumbai (834) and Nashik (474).

Mumbai's daily coronavirus count again dropped below the 1,000-mark as it reported 827 new COVID-19 cases on Thursday, while seven more patients died due to the infection, the city civic body said.
With these additions, the tally of coronavirus infections rose to 10,49,348, while the death toll increased to 16,647, a Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) bulletin said.
Mumbai reported a dip of 301 cases from a day ago and the daily tally again went below 1,000. On Wednesday, the financial capital had reported 1,128 cases and 10 fatalities after recording 803 infections and seven fatalities on Tuesday.
The daily positivity rate (cases detected per 100 tests), however, increased to 2.29 per cent from 2.44 per cent from a day ago.

Serum Institute has urged Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya to consider reducing the gap between the second and the precaution dose of Covishield from current nine months to three, in line with Centre's revised guidelines for officials on election duty, official sources said on Thursday. 
The Pune-based firm also requested the minister to allow it to administer Covishield's precaution dose for all individuals aged above 18 years.
In a letter to Mandaviya, Prakash Kumar Singh, director, Government and Regulatory Affairs at SII, is learnt to stated that the third dose of COVID-19 vaccine is being administered within 6 months of the second dose in various countries and this schedule is giving very good results to control the infection, an official source said. 

Wedding ceremonies held in closed venues in the state can be held with a limit of 150 persons & wedding ceremonies in open spaces can be held with a maximum of 300 people. Night curfew has been extended till February 11th from 10 pm to 6 am: Gujarat CMO

Covid-19 cases in Andhra Pradesh are dropping, leading to a significant reduction in the daily and weekly positivity rate, government data showed.
Week-on-week, the Covid-19 positivity rate declined from 29.85 to 25.64 per cent as on Wednesday while the average daily positivity rate too fell from 27.71 per cent to 17.07 per cent. After over 3.25 crore sample tests, the cumulative positivity rate stood at 7.03 per cent, as the total cases touched 22,93,171. On an average, the state reported 9,428 cases per day during the past week. The overall recovery rate was 94.96 per cent as 21,85,042 infected persons got cured so far. The mortality rate remained constant at 0.66 per cent, with a total death count of 14,641, the Medical and Health Department data showed.

Sikkim registered the lowest number of daily Covid-19 infections this year on Thursday when 62 people tested positive for the virus, the health department said in a bulletin. The coronavirus tally rose to 38,415 in the small Himalayan state. The death toll remained unchanged at 432 as no fresh fatality due to the disease was reported in the last 24 hours. Out of the 62 new cases, 34 were reported from East district, 26 from West district and two from South district. The state has 655 active cases. Currently, the recovery rate is 97 per cent and the positivity rate is 12.2 per cent, the bulletin said.

After learning that a friend tested positive for COVID-19, Thembi Ndlovu went to a health clinic in Zimbabwe's capital in search of a free coronavirus test. But there were none left that day, leaving the 34-year-old hairdresser unsure if she needed to take precautions to protect clients.
“I wish we could just walk into a pharmacy and buy a cheap self-testing kit like we do with pregnancy or HIV,” she said as she left the clinic in a working-class township of Harare. “It would be much easier.”
For millions of people in rich countries, COVID-19 self-tests are abundant and free, including in Britain, Canada, France and Germany. But most people across Africa have limited access to them.
Zimbabwe introduced free walk-in testing centres in November 2020, but supplies are tight and the country still has no national program to distribute at-home tests.

As new infections in Mumbai decline, other urban centres in Maharashtra including Pune, Pimpri-Chinchwad and Nashik are driving the daily COVID-19 numbers of the state, the health department data shows. Cities like Pune, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Nashik and Nagpur have been reporting more cases than Mumbai in the last few days. According to experts, the latest surge of the pandemic has plateaued in the state capital.

The government on Thursday said 34 states and union territories, including Karnataka, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, are recording a decline in COVID-19 cases and positivity rate, while Kerala and Mizoram are still recording an increase in cases and positivity.

The number of active coronavirus cases in the national capital has registered a fall of over 60 per cent in the last one week, even as DDMA authorities are slated to meet on Friday to discuss further
relaxations in COVID-19 curbs in view of improving situation.
While daily cases count, positivity rate, and several other metrics have shown a downtrend in the past several days, the number of deaths reported here due to Covid, has not abated much in the last few weeks.
On January 26, the daily cases tally had stood at 7,498 with a positivity rate of 10.59 per cent, and 29 deaths were registered. The active cases tally on that day was 38,315 while the cumulative death cases had stood at 25,710, as per official data.

Pakistan has confirmed 6,047 new Covid-19 cases and 29 more deaths in the last 24 hours, the National Command and Operation Center (NCOC) said on Wednesday.

The NCOC, a department leading the nation's campaign against the pandemic, said that the country's number of confirmed cases has increased to 1,436,413 while 1,304,980 out of them have recovered.

The active cases dropped to 102,103 after 9,590 patients recovered on Tuesday. Currently, 1,559 patients in critical condition are being treated at intensive care units in different hospitals across the country.

The Italian government has relaxed anti-Covid rules for schools, as the infection surge linked to the Omicron variant seemed to be gradually falling under control.

A key change was to cut the mandatory quarantine -- from 10 days to 5 days -- required to unvaccinated pupils who had a direct contact with a person positive for Covid-19, Xinhua news agency reported.

Their vaccinated peers would not be subjected to quarantine, but only be asked to put in place a "self surveillance," meaning to use FFP2 face masks for 5 days and undergo a swab test. The same rule would apply to students who recovered from the disease within 120 days.

The global coronavirus caseload has topped 384.4 million, while the deaths have surged to more than 5.69 million and vaccinations to over 10.1 billion, according to Johns Hopkins University.

In its latest update on Thursday morning, the University's Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) revealed that the current global caseload and the death toll stood at 384,410,210 and 5,699,273, respectively, while the total number of vaccine doses administered has increased to 10,141,772,019.

The US continues to be the worst-hit country with the world's highest number of cases and deaths at 75,665,937 and 894,174, according to the CSSE.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has scheduled a virtual meeting of its advisors on February 15 to discuss the request for emergency use authorization (EUA) of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for use in children 6 months through 4 years of age.

Pfizer and BioNTech have initiated a rolling submission seeking to amend the EUA of its Covid-19 vaccine to include children 6 months through 4 years of age, Xinhua news agency cited the two pharma majors as saying in a joint announcement.

They expect to complete the EUA submission in the coming days.

Bulgarian President Rumen Radev has been in self-isolation after his wife Desislava Radeva has tested positive for Covid-19. Radeva is in good general condition, Xinhua news agency quoted an official statement as saying on Wednesday.

"The President is in good health and his coronavirus test today was negative," the statement said.

The President has cancelled the meetings scheduled for the next few days, it added. Radev has self-isolated for the second time since the beginning of this year.

Several schools in Bangladesh have closed amid surge in Omicron cases 

The Supreme Court has set aside an order for detention of a Jabalpur man accused of procuring fake Remdesivir injections during the second wave of COVID-19.

A bench of justices DY Chandrachud and Dinesh Maheshwari said the failure of the central and the Madhya Pradesh governments to communicate the rejection of the representation of the accused in a time bound manner vitiates the order of detention.

The top court said that its earlier judgement which quashed the detention order of the main accused, doctor Sarabjit Singh Mokha, would be applicable in the matter.

Scientists have developed a new handheld breathalyser test that can non-invasively and accurately diagnose COVID-19, even in asymptomatic individuals, in less than five minutes. The test, described in the journal ACS Nano, could allow rapid screening of people attending large gatherings, such as conferences and weddings.

Currently, the gold standard for COVID-19 testing is a technique called reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR).

However, researchers from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, noted that RT-PCR is slow, requires an uncomfortable nasopharyngeal swab for sample collection and must be performed in a lab.

Odisha on Thursday recorded 3,629 new COVID-19 cases, five per cent more than the previous day, which pushed the tally to 12,59,405, the health department said in its bulletin. Eighteen patients, including three each in Khurda, Cuttack, Bhadrak, Jagatsinghpur and Sundargarh, succumbed to the infection, the bulletin said.

The toll mounted to 8,666.

A day after testing positive for COVID-19, the manager of India's Winter Olympics contingent, Mohammad Abbas Wani, has returned negative results in two retests conducted in the last 24 hours, the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) said on Thursday.

Wani was found COVID-19 positive upon his arrival at the Beijing Airport here on Wednesday. IOA president Narinder Batra said the official has now returned negative in the last two tests.

"The manager of Indian team Mr Abbas Wani tested negative in the 2 tests done on him in last 24 hours. Hence, the entire Indian contingent in Beijing is Covid free," Batra said.

Puducherry registered 499 new coronavirus infections on Thursday pushing up the overall tally in the Union Territory to 1,63,132.
In a press release, Director of Health G Sriramulu said the fresh cases identified at the end of examination of 3,082 samples in the last 24 hours ending at 10 am were spread over Puducherry (286), Karaikal (159), Yanam (53) and Mahe (one).

The Director said the active cases count was 6,638 with 134 patients admitted in hospitals and the remaining 6,504 affected people staying in home isolation.

He said 711 patients recovered and were discharged from hospitals during last 24 hours while the overall recoveries so far in the UT were 1,54,551.

The COVID-19 death toll in Ladakh climbed to 226 on Thursday following one more fatality in Leh, while 214 fresh cases pushed the infection tally to 26,400, officials said. The number of active cases in Ladakh stands at 1,140 which includes 698 cases in Leh district and 442 cases in Kargil, they said.

The Union Territory has recorded 226 Covid-related deaths -- 167 in Leh and 59 in Kargil -- since the outbreak of the pandemic last year, they said.

As many as 177 patients were cured and discharged from hospitals in Ladakh. Of these, 131 were discharged in Leh and 46 in Kargil, they said.

The Delhi High Court Thursday refused to permit outdoor sports activity in the national capital amid the COVID-19 pandemic, saying that the Delhi Disaster Management Authority should be allowed to do its work.

Justice V Kameswar, who was dealing with a petition against the prohibition on such activities on account of the third wave, observed that there was no reason to continue the petition when the DDMA was scheduled to hold its meeting on February 4 to further examine the situation.

The judge also stated that the restricted opening of malls and cinema halls cannot be compared with the prayer sought in the present case as the former provided employment to people associated with that industry.

South Korea on Thursday began enforcing a new coronavirus testing policy centered on rapid testing as health officials reported a record number of new infections following the Lunar New Year holiday. The 22,907 new cases reported by the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency marked a second straight day of over 20,000 new infections and about a five-fold increase from daily cases seen in mid-January, when the highly contagious omicron variant first became the country's dominant strain.

Long lines snaked around testing stations in the capital Seoul and other major cities, where most people were provided rapid antigen test kits to use under the supervision of health workers, who then approved lab tests for anyone who tested positive.

Since the start of the pandemic, South Korea's testing regime had centered on PCR lab tests, which are considered most accurate but require a large number of health workers to administer nasal and throat swabs, and high-tech machines to analyze samples.

India reports 1,72,433 fresh COVID cases (6.8% higher than yesterday), 2,59,107 recoveries, and 1008 deaths in the last 24 hours 

Active cases: 15,33,921
Death toll: 4,98,983
Daily positivity rate: 10.99%

Total vaccination: 167.87 crore

The Chinese mainland reported 21 new locally-transmitted COVID-19 infections and 18 new imported cases on Wednesday.
A total of 36 new covid cases were reported in China on Tuesday, reported Xinhua.

Of the new local cases, nine were reported in Tianjin, nine in Guangdong, two in Beijing, and one in Zhejiang, according to the National Health Commission on Thursday.

The price of Paracetamol, the most commonly prescribed medicine for COVID patients, has now been increased, with the Drug Regulatory of Pakistan (DRAP) approving the hike and fixing the rate up to Rs 2.67 per tablet.

Price has been hiked as the raw materials used for Paracetamol have increased up to 4-5 per cent, said Pakistan Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Association (PPMA) chairman, reported ARY News.

Meanwhile, Pakistan is currently facing the fifth COVID-19 wave and the number of active cases across the country has crossed the 100,000 mark.

Bihar's Covid-19 caseload increased to 8,25,423 after 799 more people tested positive for the infection on Wednesday, 25 less than the previous day's count, a bulletin issued by the state health department stated. It said that two more deaths from Gopalganj and Muzaffarpur districts pushed the state's total fatality figure to 12,226.

Bihar now has 3,752 active cases.

Batsmen Shikhar Dhawan, Ruturaj Gaikwad, Shreyas Iyer, and fast bowler Navdeep Saini have tested positive for COVID-19. They will remain in isolation till complete recovery is attained

New Zealand's government on Thursday said it will end its quarantine requirements for incoming travelers and reopen its borders, a change welcomed by thousands of citizens abroad who have endured long waits to return home.

Since the start of the pandemic, New Zealand has enacted some of the world's strictest border controls. Most incoming travelers need to spend 10 days in a quarantine hotel room run by the military, a requirement that has created a bottleneck at the border.

The measures were initially credited with saving thousands of lives and allowed New Zealand to eliminate or control several outbreaks of the coronavirus.