Coronavirus: UAE reports 1,688 Covid-19 cases, 1,667 recoveries, no deaths
Coronavirus: UAE reports 1,688 Covid-19 cases, 1,667 recoveries, no deaths
The UAE Ministry of Health and Prevention on Thursday reported 1,688 cases of the Covid-19 coronavirus, along with 1,667 recoveries and no deaths.
Total active cases stand at 17,487.
The new cases were detected through 271,133 additional tests.
The total number of cases in UAE on July 7 are 958,070, while total recoveries stand at 938,261. The death toll now stands at 2,322.
A new sub-lineage BA.2.75 of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus has been detected in countries like India, and the World Health Organisation is following this, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
“On Covid-19, globally reported cases have increased nearly 30 per cent over the past two weeks. Four out of six of the WHO sub-regions saw cases increase in the last week,” Ghebreyesus said at a press briefing Wednesday.
“In Europe and America, BA.4 and BA.5 are driving waves. In countries like India, a new sub-lineage of BA.2.75 has also been detected, which we’re following,” he said.
On the emergence of the potential Omicron sub-variant BA.2.75, WHO Chief Scientist Soumya Swaminathan said in a video posted on Twitter that there has been an emergence of a sub-variant that is being called the BA.2.75 “first reported from India and then from about 10 other countries.”
She said there are still limited sequences available of the sub-variant to analyse, “but this sub-variant seems to have a few mutations on the receptor-binding domain of the spike protein. So obviously, that’s a key part of the virus that attaches itself to the human receptor. So we have to watch that. It’s still too early to know if this sub-variant has properties of additional immune evasion or indeed of being more clinically severe. We don’t know that. So we have to wait and see.”
She added that the WHO is tracking it and the WHO Technical Advisory Group on SARS-CoV-2 Virus Evolution (TAG-VE) is constantly looking at the data from around the world.
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A South Korean activist said Thursday he launched more huge balloons carrying Covid-19 relief items toward North Korea, days after the North vowed to sternly deal with such activities and made a highly questionable claim they were a source of the virus.
South Korean experts doubt North Korea’s moves to blame South Korean balloons and say the intent might be to incite anti-South Korea sentiments and ease public complaints over its handling of the outbreak. The coronavirus is spread by people in close contact who inhale airborne droplets, and the expert consensus is that the spread of the virus from surfaces is virtually impossible.
Park Sang-hak, a North Korean defector-turned-activist, said his group floated 20 balloons carrying 20,000 masks and tens of thousands of vitamin C and fever-reducing tablets from a South Korean border town on Wednesday. He said he sent similar aid items by balloon across the inter-Korean border twice last month.
Park previously flew balloons to distribute anti-North Korea propaganda leaflets, US one-dollar bills and USB sticks containing information about the outside world. But he said he’ll now focus on sending medical relief items because North Koreans urgently need them.
source: khaleejtimes
