Health

The death toll in the United Kingdom from confirmed cases of COVID-19 rose to 35,704, an increase of 363 on the day, culture minister Oliver Dowden said at a daily briefing on Wednesday.

GlaxoSmithKline's consumer health unit has tied up with Mammoth Biosciences to develop a test that uses a technology commonly used in gene editing to detect novel coronavirus infections, the California-based startup said on Wednesday.

Deaths from the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy climbed by 161 on Wednesday, against 162 the day before, the Civil Protection Agency said, while the daily tally of new cases fell to 665 from 813 on Tuesday.

U.S. drugmaker Moderna must decide which country would be first to get an experimental vaccine it is developing for COVID-19, should the treatment prove successful, Lonza Chairman Albert Baehny told CNBC on Wednesday.

U.S. immunotherapy company Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc said on Wednesday its experimental vaccine to prevent coronavirus infection produced protective antibodies and immune system responses in mice and guinea pigs.

(This May 18 story corrects paragraph 4 to say Tecentriq won "three" other NSCLC approvals and not "four")

Spain's overnight death toll from the new coronavirus was 95 on Wednesday, a slight rise on Tuesday's 83, the health ministry said.

Estonia has started to test one of the world's first digital immunity passports, created by a team including founders of global tech startups Transferwise and Bolt, seeking a safer return to workplaces following the coronavirus lockdown.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Wednesday a programme to test and trace those suspected of having been in contact with people who have tested positive for COVID-19 would be in place by June 1.

Switzerland has tasked its defense ministry with securing enough COVID-19 vaccine, the government said on Wednesday, amid growing fears that some countries could be left short of supplies when the medicine is eventually produced.

When a group of villagers in the Ecuadorean fishing community of El Real came down with coughs and fevers in early April, nobody was sure if they had the coronavirus - and no health workers were available to diagnose or treat them.

The city of Wuhan, the original epicentre of China's coronavirus outbreak, conducted 856,128 tests for the disease on Tuesday, the local health authority said on Wednesday, compared with 467,847 a day earlier.

Luxembourg began mass testing for COVID-19 this week with the goal of covering all of its 600,000 people as soon as possible to stave off a second wave of infections following the easing of lockdown measures.

Contract drug manufacturer Lonza still expects to supply drugmaker Moderna with active ingredients for its experimental COVID-19 vaccine by June or July to support laboratory trials, the Swiss company's interim CEO, Albert Baehny, told CNBC on Wednesday.

A Pakistani local legislator died on Wednesday after contracting COVID-19, hospital officials said, marking the first death of a political figure in the South Asian nation from the disease at a time the country has lifted its countrywide lockdown.

The idea of testing the BCG vaccine in Africa against COVID-19 was bound to cause controversy, yet officials say efforts underway could, if successful, give the continent a cheap and easily deployable weapon against the virus.

Johnson & Johnson on Tuesday announced it would stop selling its talc Baby Powder in the United States and Canada, saying demand had dropped in the wake of what it called "misinformation" about the product’s safety amid a barrage of legal challenges.

Before she died in a Moscow hospital earlier this month, Liubov Kashaeva, 74, twice tested positive for the new coronavirus. Her death was not attributed to the virus, however. It was put down to the cancer she had been suffering from.

The novel coronavirus is behaving differently in patients in northeast China who have contracted it recently compared with early cases, indicating it is changing as it spreads, a prominent doctor said.

Here's what you need to know about the coronavirus right now: