Health

If the world is to gain access to a vaccine for COVID-19, there's a good chance it will pass through the doors of Serum Institute of India.

Canada will ramp up COVID-19 testing and contact tracing as it gradually lifts restrictions and is working closely with Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc's Google on a mobile phone app to help, the prime minister said on Friday.

Evofem Biosciences Inc's birth control gel received the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's approval on Friday, making it the first non-hormonal contraceptive for women in over three decades, sending its shares up 3.6%.

Russian-made ventilators now under investigation for causing deaths in Russia were not authorized by U.S. health regulators before the same model was sent to New York and New Jersey at the height of their coronavirus outbreaks, Reuters has learned.

(This May 21 story has been refiled to clarify university system name)

For the first time since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, French health authorities did not report the daily additional deaths linked to the infection, adding in a statement published on Friday those figures will be updated Monday, May 25.

South America has become a new epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic with Brazil hardest-hit, while cases are rising in some African countries that so far have a relatively low death toll, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday.

The United States called on the World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday to begin work immediately on investigating the source of the novel coronavirus, as well as its handling of the response to the pandemic.

A coronavirus vaccine tested for the first time in humans is safe and induces a rapid immune response, researchers at China's CanSino Biologics Inc reported on Friday in The Lancet medical journal.

Italy recorded 130 new deaths from the COVID-19 epidemic on Friday against 156 the day before, the Civil Protection Agency said, while the daily tally of new cases rose marginally to 652 from 642 on Thursday.

Oxford University and AstraZeneca are recruiting around 10,000 adults and children in Britain for trials of an experimental coronavirus vaccine, a day after receiving U.S. backing worth up to $1.2 billion.

Once held up as a role model for its battle against the coronavirus, Singapore has struggled to contain an infection spread centred around foreign worker dormitories, construction sites and factories.

Spain's overnight death toll from the new coronavirus rose by 56 on Friday to a total of 28,628, the health ministry said.

Sinovac Biotech Ltd said on Friday it had started mid-stage human trials of its experimental coronavirus vaccine in China earlier this month.

Some 80 million children worldwide could be at risk of vaccine-preventable diseases like diphtheria, measles and polio due to disruption of routine immunisation during the COVID-19 pandemic, U.N. agencies and the GAVI vaccine alliance said on Friday.

The coronavirus mortality rate among some of the poorest Catalans is five times higher than among the wealthiest residents of the Spanish region, a study showed, in the latest evidence of how COVID-19 hits the needy hardest.

Thailand will maintain its state of emergency over the coronavirus until the end of June, its COVID-19 task force said on Friday, in an effort to keep infections under control as the government prepares to ease restrictions further.

Britain should have learned more from other countries who were tackling coronavirus outbreaks earlier, the head of NHS England Simon Stevens said on Friday, acknowledging that not everything with the response had gone perfectly.

Children have milder COVID-19 symptoms than adults and the balance of evidence suggests they may also have lower susceptibility and infectivity than adults, scientists advising the British government have said.

President Vladimir Putin told officials on Friday to ramp up testing for the new coronavirus, but said Russia's outbreak was stabilising even as the death toll rose by a record one-day amount.