Geneva, May 27: The number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide has increased by nearly 100,000 over the past 24 hours to surpass 5.4 million, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said.
According to the WHO, the global case tally currently stands at 5,404,512 -- a rise by 99,780 over the past day.
The death count worldwide amounts to 343,514 -- an increase by 1,486.
Most cases of infection are recorded in the Americas -- 2,454,452, with 143,739 deaths.
Washington, Jun 18: US Defence officials are concerned over China's use of COVID-19 situation to gain stakes in strategically important companies of United States as the impact of novel coronavirus has left several companies in dire need of capital.
Amid the pandemic, it getting hard for the defence department to keep an eye on national security and help protect smaller companies down the chain, CNN reported.
"We are paying close attention to any indicators that China is leveraging Covid-19 to take advantage of a situation where defence companies need capital more than ever," a defence official told CNN.
In April, Ellen Lord, undersecretary of defence for acquisition and sustainment said it is paying close attention to 'adversaries' against the 'economic warfare' with the United States.
"We have to be very, very careful about the focused efforts some of our adversaries have to really undergo sort of economic warfare with us, which has been going on for some time," Ellen Lord, undersecretary of defence for acquisition and sustainment was quoted as saying by CNN.
US Committee on Foreign Investment protects its interest against hostile countries gaining ownership in strategically important companies. But the pandemic is changing the definition of national security concerns to include drugs, protective gear and medical supplies.
"These are now national security needs and we probably should have been thinking about it a long time ago in terms of biowarfare that we should have a trusted industrial base or a set of trusted allies -- the UK, or NATO allies or Japan or Korea -- who are trusted in that regard," Bill Greenwalt, a former Pentagon official.
Give the threat posed by foreign acquisition, Pentagon has been offering tools to help small US businesses defend themselves against adversarial investment and conducting background checks with other government agencies to ensure transparency.
US President Donald Trump's trade adviser Peter Navarro recently told CNN if Trump wins reelection, Washington DC will likely take offshore supply chains as national security priorities.
"If we fail to do that in the face of this crisis, we will have failed this country and all future generations of Americans," Navarro said.
The US State Department has also warned US allies to "avoid economic overreliance on China" and "guard their critical infrastructure" from China's influence.
Chad P Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, pointed to recent China's economic coercion of Australia on the political matter saying, "this is how China operates and everybody knows it."
Jun 9: The World Health Organization says it still believes the spread of the coronavirus from people without symptoms is “rare,” despite warnings from numerous experts worldwide that such transmission is more frequent and likely explains why the pandemic has been so hard to contain.
Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO''s technical lead on COVID-19 said at a press briefing on Monday that many countries are reporting cases of spread from people who are asymptomatic, or those with no clinical symptoms.
But when questioned in more detail about these cases, Van Kerkhove said many of them turn out to have mild disease, or unusual symptoms.
Although health officials in countries including Britain, the U.S. and elsewhere have warned that COVID-19 is spreading from people without symptoms, WHO has maintained that this type of spread is not a driver of the pandemic and is probably accounts for about 6 per cent of spread, at most.
Numerous studies have suggested that the virus is spreading from people without symptoms, but many of those are either anecdotal reports or based on modeling.
Van Kerkhove said that based on data from countries, when people with no symptoms of COVID-19 are tracked over a long period to see if they spread the disease, there are very few cases of spread.
“We are constantly looking at this data and we''re trying to get more information from countries to truly answer this question,” she said. “It still appears to be rare that asymptomatic individuals actually transmit onward.”
Ninety per cent of a sample group of coronavirus-recovered patients from a prominent hospital in China's Wuhan city where the pandemic broke out have reported lung damage and five per cent of them are again in quarantine after testing positive for the virus, according to a media report on Wednesday.
A team at the Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University led by Peng Zhiyong, director of the hospital's Intensive Care Unit, has been conducting follow-up visits with '100 recovered patients' since April.
The first phase of this one-year programme finished in July. The average age of the patients in the study is 59.
According to the first phase results, 90 per cent of the patients' lungs are still in a damaged state, which means their lungs ventilation and gas exchange functions have not recovered to the level of healthy people, state-run Global Times reported.
Peng's team conducted a six-minute walking test with the patients. They found that the recovered patients could only walk 400 metres in six minutes while their healthy peers could walk 500 metres in the same period.
Some recovered patients have to rely on oxygen machines even three months after being discharged from the hospital, Liang Tengxiao, a doctor from the Dongzhimen Hospital, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, was quoted as saying by the report.
Liang's team is also conducting follow-up visits with recovered patients aged above 65.
The results also showed that antibodies against the novel coronavirus in 10 per cent of the 100 patients have disappeared.
Five per cent of them received negative results in Covid-19 nucleic acid tests but positive results in Immunoglobulin M (IgM) tests, and thus have to be quarantined again, the report said.
IgM is usually the first antibody produced by the immune system when a virus attacks. A positive result in an IgM test usually means that a person has just been infected by the virus.
It is still unclear if this means these people have been infected again.
The 100 patients' immune systems have not fully recovered as they showed a low level of B cells -- - a primary force for killing viruses in the human body -- but a high level of T cells which only recognise viral antigens outside infected cells.
"The results revealed that the patients’ immune systems are still recovering," Peng said.
The patients also suffered from depression and a sense of stigma. Most of the recovered patients told the team that their families were not willing to have dinner with them at the same table, the report said.
Less than half of the recovered patients have returned to work, it said.
The findings are significant as the coronavirus first emerged in Wuhan city.
Hubei province for which Wuhan is the provincial capital has reported a total of 68,138 confirmed Covid-19 cases till now. The disease has claimed 4,512 lives in the province, according to the official data.
China reported 27 new confirmed Covid-19 cases on Tuesday, including 22 locally-transmitted cases, the National Health Commission (NHC) said on Wednesday.
Comments
Add new comment