‘Unethical’
The World Health Organization chief warned Monday against just allowing the coronavirus to spread in the hope of achieving so-called herd immunity, saying it was "unethical" as China rushed yesterday to test an entire city within days after a minor outbreak.
The virus is still spreading rapidly around the world, with well over 37 million infections, and nations that had suppressed their first outbreaks are now struggling with fresh surges -- especially in some parts of Europe.
"Herd immunity is a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus pointed out during a virtual press briefing.
For measles, for instance, it is estimated that if 95 percent of the population is vaccinated, the remaining five percent will also be protected from the spread of the virus. For polio, the threshold is estimated at 80 percent.
"Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it," the WHO chief said.
"Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak, let alone a pandemic," he insisted.
In the absence of a vaccine, governments are wary of allowing the virus to spread unchecked, with China launching a sweeping drive to test all residents of Qingdao after a handful of cases were detected on Sunday.
"As of 8 am... our city has taken 3.08 million samples for nucleic testing," the city's health commission said yesterday, adding that no new positive samples were found.
Chinese officials intend to test the entire city -- around 9.4 million people -- by Thursday.
In Europe, governments are battling to curb surges with new controls and increased testing, while trying to avoid the devastating nationwide lockdowns of March and April.
Cases have climbed rapidly in Britain, France, Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic in recent weeks, raising fears that the still-low death rate could rise.
Hospitals in Paris could have most of their intensive care beds packed with Covid-19 patients as soon as next week, the system's chief warned yesterday.
"It's inevitable," Martin Hirsch, the head of the 39 hospitals in Paris and its suburbs, told the Parisien newspaper, estimating beds will be at 70%-90% capacity by October 24.
President Emmanuel Macron is widely expected to announce tighter restrictions in a prime-time TV interview Wednesday night, with some media speculating Paris and other cities could face evening curfews.
Italy also imposed new hardened rules to control a resurgence, including an end to parties, amateur football matches and snacking at bars at night, reports AFP.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki yesterday became the latest high-profile figure to go into quarantine after coming into contact with a person with Covid-19.
Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose country has the highest death toll in Europe, on Monday night had already ordered pubs in Liverpool to shut as part of a new strategy.
He said businesses forced to close would get support from the government, but his focus on shutting hospitality venues sparked anger as similar measures have elsewhere.
"Catastrophic, catastrophic," said Simon Ashdown, owner of the Chepstow Castle pub in Liverpool. "I don't think there'll be many businesses after this lockdown."
VACCINE SETBACK
India's total cases rose by 55,342 in the last 24 hours to 7.18 million yesterday morning, the lowest daily rise since mid-August, data from the health ministry showed. Deaths from infections rose by 706 to 109,856, the ministry said.
With the pandemic already claiming more than one million lives worldwide, scientists in different nations are rushing to develop vaccines and effective treatments.
Some have made it to late-stage clinical testing, but the optimism was dented Monday when Johnson & Johnson announced it had temporarily halted its 60,000-patient trial because of an unexplained illness in one participant.
The company said in a statement that illnesses, accidents and other so-called adverse events "are an expected part of any clinical study, especially large studies," but that its physicians and a safety monitoring panel would try to determine what might have caused the illness.
The pause is at least the second such hold to occur among several vaccines that have reached large-scale final tests in the US.
There are ten firms conducting final Phase 3 trials of their products globally, including Johnson & Johnson.
The pharma giant has been awarded about $1.45 billion in US funding under Operation Warp Speed, championed by President Donald Trump, who is keen for a political boost ahead of the November election with a coronavirus breakthrough.
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