MH370 co-pilot made mid-flight phone call: Report

Beijing:  Around 5,000 people have signed up for the phase I clinical trial of recombinant novel coronavirus vaccine in Chinese city Wuhan where the virus first emerged late last year.

The recruitment for participants ended this week with nearly 5,000 volunteers signing up for the trial, state-run Beijing News reported on Wednesday.

A single-centre, open and dose-escalation phase I clinical trial for recombinant novel coronavirus vaccine (adenoviral vector) will be tested in healthy adults aged between 18 and 60 years, according to the ChiCTR (China Clinical Trial Register).

The trial, led by experts from the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, gained its approval on March 16 and the research is expected to last half a year.

Requiring at least 108 participants, the trial will be conducted in Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, the region worst-affected by the virus in the country, state-run China Daily reported.

Participants will experience 14-day quarantine restrictions after being vaccinated and their health condition will be recorded every day.

Chinese scientists are hastening the development of COVID-19 vaccines through five approaches --- inactivated vaccines, genetic engineering subunit vaccines, adenovirus vector vaccines, nucleic acid vaccines and vaccines using attenuated influenza virus as vectors.

So far, most teams are expected to complete preclinical research in April and some are moving forward faster, Wang Junzhi, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering said.

Wang noted that research and development of COVID-19 vaccines in China is not slower than foreign counterparts and has been carried out in a scientific, standardised and orderly way.

China has stepped up the process to finalise vaccines to counter COVID-19 after Kaiser Permanente research facility in Seattle and Washington stole the march and began human trials.

China lifted tough restrictions on the Hubei province on Wednesday after a months-long lockdown as the country reported no new domestic cases.

But there were another 47 imported infections from overseas, the National Health Commission said. In total, 474 imported infections have been diagnosed in China -- mostly Chinese nationals returning home.

Washington, Apr 17: A record number of 4,591 Americans have died in the last 24 hours due to the deadly novel coronavirus in the US, which has the highest number of COVID-19 casualties in the world.

According to the Johns Hopkins University data, by 8 pm on Thursday, as many as 4,591 Americans have died in the last 24 hours, The Wall Street Journal said.

The previous highest was 2,569 on Wednesday.

By Thursday, more than 662,000 Americans tested positive with the coronavirus.

The dreaded disease, which originated in Wuhan city in China in December last year, has so far claimed more than 144,000 lives and infected over 2.1 million people.

The virus has infected over 671,000 people and claimed more than 33,000 lives, the highest for any country in the world.

New York City and its adjoining areas, including New Jersey and Connecticut have emerged as the epicenter of the virus in the US.

New York alone accounts for 226,000 cases of infections and 16,106 deaths.

In New Jersey, as many as 3,518 people have died of the disease and 75,317 have tested positive.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, till April 14, four per cent of the Americans infected with COVID-19 were of Asian origin and nearly one-third (30 per cent) were African Americans.

US President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House that experts and scientists report that his strategy to slow the spread of the virus has saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Models predicted between 1.5 million and 2.2 million US deaths. If there was no mitigation, it could have even been higher than that and between 100,000 and 240,000 deaths with mitigation. It is looking like we will come far under even these lowest numbers, he said.

Noting that experts say the curve of the virus has flattened, and the peak in the new cases has passed, Trump said that nationwide, more than 850 counties or nearly 30 per cent of the country have reported no new cases in the last seven days.

Because of our early and aggressive action, we have avoided the tragedy of health care rationing and deadly shortfalls that have befallen in many other nations, nations which wherever possible we are helping, he said.

According to Trump, at least 35 clinical trials are already underway, including antiviral therapies, immune therapies, and blood therapies in the form of convalescent plasma. So far, more than 3.5 million tests have been carried out.

Amsterdam, Jun 18: A statue of Mahatma Gandhi has been vandalised here in the capital of Netherlands by unknown miscreants with graffiti and spray painting, amid a wave of attacks on controversial figures following the protests around the world after the custodial killing of African-American George Floyd, according to media reports.

The statue of Gandhi on the Churchilllaan in Amsterdam was covered with red paint and the pedestal has 'racist' and an abbreviation for an expletive against the police chalked on it, Metro, the Dutch newspaper, reported.

According to alderman Rutger Groot Wassink, the municipality will file a declaration for daubing.

"Obviously, we are opposed to any form of vandalism and daubing of these things is completely unacceptable," the city official was quoted as saying by the AD.nl.

"It is logical that we will file a declaration, the image will be cleaned," Wassink said.

It is not yet known who is behind the daubing. An employee of the Kunstwacht, who provides maintenance and repairs, says that the cleaning work can take hours.

A 75-year-old man saw the daubs on Wednesday and called the municipality. “I have lived here for forty years and I have never experienced this. I have been watching the statue for years," the man said.

Since the death of 46-year-old Floyd on May 25 in Minneapolis, US, and subsequent worldwide Black Lives Matter protests, there has been much debate about street names and statues of people with a colonial past. All over the world, statues of controversial historical figures are brought down or defaced.

Recently, images and buildings have been defaced in various places that refer to the colonial past of the Netherlands, including the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam and the statue of Piet Hein in Rotterdam. These are anti-racist expressions that follow the death of Floyd through a white police officer, Metro reported.

Gandhi was known as a champion of human rights and non-violence. But in his twenties, which he spent in South Africa, he still called black people “troublesome, very dirty and they live like beasts” and found that the white people were the “dominant race”. Later he renounced those ideas, the report added.

The statue was unveiled on the Churchillaan on October 2, 1990 in honour of Gandhi's 121st birthday.

The design was made by the sculptor Karel Gomes, who died in 2016. At the time, the plan for the statue came from the Hindu organisation Triveda.

Gandhi is depicted walking, featuring robes around the body, slippers on the feet, a book in one hand and a stick in the other.