Worldwide COVID news at a glance

Indonesia battles high child fatality rate

Indonesia is seeing a surge in child fatalities due to Covid-19, as the world’s fourth-most populous nation grapples with an overall spike in hospital admissions and deaths, reports showed.

The Indonesian Pediatric society reported that 100 children have died of coronavirus each week during the month of July. Children now make up 12.5 per cent of total infections, with many of them under 5, the society told the New York Times. The Indonesian Covid-19 Task Force’s recorded more than 700 deaths among children up to mid-July since the start of the pandemic.

The new data emerged amid a sweeping overall surge in Covid-19 death, which nudged Indonesia this month to overtake India and Brazil as the global epicentre of the pandemic with the highest number of daily infections.

Brazil: daily average COVID deaths drop

Brazil’s seven-day average of coronavirus-related deaths has dropped below 1,000 for the first time since January, when a brutal second wave of the pandemic was taking hold of the South American nation.

The country has registered more than 19.8 million COVID-19 cases and more than 555,400 deaths since the crisis began, according to data from Johns Hopkins University – the second-highest death toll in the world after the United States.

While COVID-19 deaths and infections have dropped in recent weeks, and the rate of vaccinations has increased, health experts are warning that a new surge could be on the way in part due to the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant.

Israel concerned waning COVID Vaccine Immunity

/ Dr.  Sharon Alroy-Preis, Israel’s director of public health services

Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis, Israel’s director of public health services, said Sunday that evidence points to the waning immunity in the COVID-19 vaccine, saying her two biggest concerns with the delta variant relate to its level of infectiousness and the rising rate of vaccinated individuals testing positive.

She added that 50 percent of the current infections are vaccinated individuals. “Previously we thought that fully vaccinated individuals are protected, but we now see that vaccine effectiveness is roughly 40 percent.” She noted that while effectiveness remains high for severe disease, Israel is seeing diminished protection, particularly for those who have been vaccinated longer.

Cambodia to mix vaccines as booster shots

Cambodia will begin offering a booster shot against Covid-19, switching between the AstraZeneca and Chinese COVID-19 vaccines in an effort to fight the spread of the coronavirus in the Southeast Asian country.

Prime Minister Hun Sen, launching the vaccination campaign for 12-17 years old, said on Sunday that the third dose will be offered to between 500,000 to one million frontline workers as a priority.

Hun Sen also said the country will purchase more AstraZeneca vaccines through Covax for the booster shots and the recent U.S funded Johnson & Johnson vaccines will be used to vaccinate indigenous peoples in northeastern Cambodia.

Delta surge covid cases in China again

China’s worst outbreak of coronavirus this year has reached at least eight provinces, as authorities scramble to trace and control the country’s first widespread appearance of the Delta variant.

The National Health Commission reported 55 locally transmitted symptomatic infections on Monday, taking the total number of infections linked with a cluster found last month in Nanjing city, the capital of eastern Jiangsu province, to more than 250.

Although small compared with daily case counts in many other countries, climbing infections by the more transmissible Delta variant of Covid-19 is a fresh challenge for Beijing’s bid to fully eradicate the virus within its borders.

The U.S study shows Delta is a game changer

The Delta variant of the coronavirus is as contagious as chickenpox and could cause severe illness, according to an internal document at the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), The New York Times reported on Friday. The US report said that the variant was also more likely to break through protections afforded by the vaccines.

The study identified 469 people with COVID-19, 74 percent of whom were fully vaccinated, following large public events in the state’s Barnstable County. Testing identified the Delta variant in 90 percent of virus specimens from 133 people.

The viral load was similar in people who were fully vaccinated and those who were unvaccinated, the CDC said. High viral loads suggest an increased risk of transmission and raised concern that, unlike with other variants, vaccinated people infected with Delta can transmit the virus, it said.