Nine dead, four missing as avalanche hits Mount Manaslu climbers in Nepal

Washington, Jul 1: The United States has approved four coronavirus vaccine candidates for clinical trials, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) head Stephen Hahn told reporters.

"Four vaccines have been approved for moving into clinical trials... and another six are in the pipeline for us to review," Hahn said during a press briefing on Tuesday.

The US Administration launched in May Operation Warp Speed, a joint project of Health and Defense Departments, which aims to deliver 300 million doses of a vaccine for COVID-19 by January 2021.

The country's top pandemics expert Anthony Fauci warned on Tuesday, however, that there is no certainty the United States will be able to develop a vaccine against COVID-19 that works and will be safe.

Data on vaccine effectiveness, he added, may be available in the winter or early next year.

Vienna, Apr 13: Top oil-producing countries agreed on "historic" output cuts to prop up prices hammered by the coronavirus crisis and a Russia-Saudi price war, sending crude prices soaring on Monday.

The US benchmark WTI climbed 7.7 percent to $24.52 a barrel in early Asian trade while Brent was up 5.0 percent at $33.08.

OPEC producers dominated by Saudi Arabia and allies led by Russia thrashed out a compromise deal via videoconference Sunday after Mexico had balked at an earlier agreement struck on Friday.

In the compromise reached Sunday they agreed to a cut of 9.7 million barrels per day from May, according to Mexican Energy Minister Rocio Nahle, down slightly from 10 million barrels a day envisioned earlier.

OPEC Secretary General Mohammad Barkindo called the cuts "historic".

"They are largest in volume and the longest in duration, as they are planned to last for two years," he said.

The agreement between the Vienna-based Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and partners foresees deep output cuts in May and June followed by a gradual reduction in cuts until April 2022.

Barkindo added that the deal "paved the way for a global alliance with the participation of the G20".

Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, who chaired the meeting together with his Russian and Algerian counterparts, also confirmed that the discussions "ended with consensus".

May 5: Global coronavirus deaths reached 250,000 on Monday after recorded infections topped 3.5 million, a news agency tally of official government data showed, although the rate of fatalities has slowed.

North America and European countries accounted for most of the new deaths and cases reported in recent days, but numbers were rising from smaller bases in Latin America, Africa and Russia.

Globally, there were 3,062 new deaths and 61,923 new cases over the past 24 hours, taking total cases to 3.58 million.

That easily exceeds the estimated 140,000 deaths worldwide in 2018 caused by measles, and compares with around 3 million to 5 million cases of severe illness caused annually by seasonal influenza, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

While the current trajectory of COVID-19 falls far short of the 1918 Spanish flu, which infected an estimated 500 million people, killing at least 10% of patients, experts worry the available data is underplaying the true impact of the pandemic.

The concerns come as several countries begin to ease strict lockdowns that have been credited with helping contain the spread of the virus.

"We could easily have a second or a third wave because a lot of places aren't immune," Peter Collignon, an infectious diseases physician and microbiologist at Canberra Hospital, told Reuters. He noted the world was well short of herd immunity, which requires around 60% of the population to have recovered from the disease.

The first death linked to COVID-19 was reported on Jan. 10 in Wuhan, China after the coronavirus first emerged there in December. Global fatalities grew at a rate of 1-2% in recent days, down from 14% on March 21, according to the Reuters data.

DEATH RATE ANOMALIES

Mortality rates from recorded infections vary greatly from country to country.

Collignon said any country with a mortality rate of more than 2% almost certainly had underreported case numbers. Health experts fear those ratios could worsen in regions and countries less prepared to deal with the health crisis.

"If your mortality rate is higher than 2%, you've missed a lot of cases," he said, noting that countries overwhelmed by the outbreak were less likely to conduct testing in the community and record deaths outside of hospitals.

In the United States, around half the country's state governors partially reopened their economies over the weekend, while others, including New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, declared the move was premature.

In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who battled COVID-19 last month, has said the country was over the peak but it was still too early to relax lockdown measures.

Even in countries where the suppression of the disease has been considered successful, such as Australia and New Zealand which have recorded low daily rates of new infections for weeks, officials have been cautious.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has predicated a full lifting of curbs on widespread public adoption of a mobile phone tracking app and increased testing levels.