Health

Paraguay's coronavirus camps, obligatory for anyone entering the South American country, have garnered praise from international health bodies for helping stem the spread of the epidemic. The government calls them the "first line of defense".

From apple packing houses in Washington state to farm workers in Florida and a California county known as "the world's salad bowl," outbreaks of the novel coronavirus are emerging at U.S. fruit and vegetable farms and packing plants.

Emergent BioSolutions Inc said on Thursday it signed an $87 million deal to make AstraZeneca Plc's experimental COVID-19 vaccine in the United States, boosting the British drugmaker's efforts to bring a vaccine to the market.

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc on Thursday said it has begun human testing of its experimental antibody cocktail as a treatment for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

China is offering candidate vaccines for the new coronavirus to employees at state-owned firms travelling overseas, as it seeks more data on their efficacy, state media Global Times reported on Thursday.

England's new track and tracing system was able to contact two thirds of the people who tested positive for COVID-19 and were referred to it in its first week, and then succeeded in contacting 85% of their contacts to ask them to self isolate.

Britain's Department of Health said its coronavirus tracing system contacted 31,794 people between 28 May and 3 June and of those it was able to reach 26,985, or 85%, and advise them to self-isolate.

England's COVID-19 Trace and Track is functioning effectively nationwide even though it can still be improved, program leader Dido Harding said after the first numbers of people tested and contacts traced were published.

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Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said on Thursday that it was "very regrettable" that Taiwan was not accepted to take part as an observer at the World Health Organization assembly last month.

Russia on Thursday rolled out a drug approved to treat patients suffering from the novel coronavirus, its state financial backer said, as the number of infections there surpassed half a million.

Britain published new guidance for airlines and airports on how to operate safely to minimize the risks from coronavirus, adding to hopes that the country will soon agree deals to allow quarantine-free travel.

Britain's death toll from COVID-19 could have been halved if lockdown had been introduced a week earlier, a former member of the UK government's scientific advisory group said on Wednesday.

British doctor Jihan Mohamud travelled to Somalia for the first time last year to bury her father in the land of his birth.

China is building hundreds of testing laboratories and stocking up on tests to ramp up screening for the coronavirus, even in healthy people, having all-but stamped out local transmission of the disease.

Africa will have a "steady increase" in COVID-19 cases until a vaccine is developed and strong public health measures are needed in current "hotspots" in South Africa, Algeria and Cameroon, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday.

Hundreds of children in Indonesia are believed to have died from COVID-19, giving the Southeast Asian country one of the world's highest rates of child deaths from the novel coronavirus that experts around the world say poses little danger to the young.

Malaysian health authorities on Thursday reported 31 new coronavirus cases, raising the cumulative total to 8,369 cases.

The Philippines' health ministry on Thursday confirmed nine more new coronavirus deaths and 443 additional infections.

Indonesia reported 979 new coronavirus infections and 41 new deaths on Thursday, taking the total number of cases to 35,295 and fatalities to 2,000, health ministry official Achmad Yurianto said.