Blogroll

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.

With Facebook's adoption of permanent remote work on Thursday, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has untethered one of Silicon Valley's biggest companies from the place that incubated it.

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%.

Social distancing measures to curb the coronavirus pandemic are boosting broadband usage by up to 50% in Brazil, but may end up delaying the country's fifth-generation mobile network (5G) auction, the head of the country's telecoms watchdog said on Friday.

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.

When a man in Seoul tested positive for the new coronavirus in May, South Korean authorities were able to confirm his wide-ranging movements in and outside the city in minutes, including five bars and clubs he visited on a recent night out.

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.

Data from millions of mobile phones shows varying behavior across the United States in May as people responded to the loosening of stay-at-home orders, a Reuters analysis shows.

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.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd on Friday reported forecast-beating fourth-quarter revenues and profits, as more people shopped online for essentials because of the coronavirus lockdowns.

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.