New York, Nov 27, : , The Wall Street Journal reports that US health regulators will make public a review of the Covid-19 pill molnupiravir by Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics LP.The review will include an analysis of clinical-trial data. According to the companies, the pill lowers the risk of death and hospitalisation for people at high risk for severe Covid-19 infections.The staff may also be able to provide their opinion on whether the drug should be cleared by health authorities.
Xinhua reported that Britain approved molnupiravir earlier this month.
According to the report, Molnupiravir and another experimental antiviral from Pfizer Inc are being reviewed by the US Food and Drug Administration.
According to The Washington Post (WP), “Coronavirus cases have been on the rise in the United States, a disturbing trend that began earlier this fall and has not slowed down since then,” The Washington Post (WP), Thursday.The White House reported Monday that the average daily number of coronavirus cases in seven days was just under 93,000.
This is an 18% increase over the week before.Hospitalisations increased 6 percent to 5,600 per hour.
Two-thirds of the states have seen their cases rise by at least 5 percent in the past week.North Dakota, Minnesota, New Mexico and New Hampshire all saw per capita increases of more than 60 percent.
There were also sharp rises in cases in some highly vaccinated states like Massachusetts and Vermont.
According to the report, “The rising caseload across the nation has raised the specter that another surge this winter — which would be the nation’s fifth,” Expert opinions differ, but Amber D’Souza from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health was quoted as saying that a surge is possible.
After the initial peak in Covid-19 vaccine use among healthcare personnel (HCPs) in the US hospital system, in early 2021, rates quickly declined in the second half.Currently, 30% of HCP are still unvaccinated, according to Medical News Today, a web-based source for medical news and information.
The report stated that data from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Unified Hospital Data Surveillance System (January-September 2021) was collected from over 3.3million HCP across 2,086 hospital.It found that as high as 30% of workers were not vaccinated.
HCP who worked in children’s hospitals had the highest vaccination rates of 77%.Critical access hospitals had 64% vaccination rates.The highest HCP vaccination rates were recorded in metropolitan counties (71%), followed by rural counties (65.1%) and non-metropolitan villages (63.3%).
Global health leaders urge caution as holiday season begins in Western countries.They point to a 23% spike in coronavirus infections across the Americas over the past week.
This surge follows spikes in Europe which officials warn could be a “window in the future for Americas,” WP reported on Thursday.
“Time and time again, we have seen how the infection dynamics of Europe are mirrored here several week later,” Carissa Etienne (director of the Pan American Health Organisation) stated during a Wednesday briefing.”The future is in our hands, and it must be a wake up call for our region, because we are even more susceptible.”
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of World Health Organisation (WHO), expressed concern about a false sense of security that vaccines had ended the pandemic.He said that people who have been vaccinated don’t need to take additional precautions.
He said, “No country or region are out of the woods.”
A growing number of countries, including Britain and France, Israel, Italy, Singapore and Israel, are moving to restrict travel from South Africa.This was just a day after South African authorities discovered a new variant of coronavirus with mutations.One scientist stated that this marked a “big leap in evolution.”
“In the past, travel restrictions have been issued by governments in response to new variants only after they had been announced.This has happened in the past.The restrictions were issued within hours of South Africa’s announcement and hours before health officials in the country began discussing the variants with the WHO,” The New York Times reported on Friday.
On Friday, the governments of Japan, Malta, Croatia, and Malta announced similar restrictions.Japan’s markets were affected by the discovery of the variant.Officials in Australia and New Zealand also said they were closely monitoring the situation, according to the report.
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