Current Affairs - WHO

According to a recent research paper published in the journal Science - China, which has now gone over a month without any locally transmitted Covid-19 cases, was able to contain Covid-19 due to its ability to manage the ‘serial interval’.

• On 15^th August, 2020, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a new method of testing for Covid-19 — processing saliva samples — and termed it “ground-breaking”.

Recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned against “vaccine nationalism”, cautioning richer countries that if they keep treatments to themselves they cannot expect to remain safe if poor nations remain exposed.

• Recently, the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have opened their borders to one another, creating a coronavirus "travel bubble".

• According to the World Health Organization (WHO), like HIV, the novel coronavirus could become endemic and “may never go away”, and urged for a “massive effort” to contain the spread of COVID-19.

• As countries around the world are struggling to lift lockdowns due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, policymakers are deliberating how to deal with future outbreaks as and when they emerge.

• Recently, there has been emerging evidence that a subset of the infected patients develop severe COVID-19 because of an overreaction of their immune systems, which triggers what is known as a “Cytokine Storm Syndrome” (CSS).

• With no specific treatment available for novel coronavirus disease and a vaccine, recently, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last week approved use convalescent plasma therapy to treat severely critical COVID-19 patients.

The outbreak of disease caused by the new coronavirus (COVID-19) has raised questions about a phenomenon known as "herd immunity" and whether it might play a role in how the pandemic progresses.

Recently, an outbreak of the Wuhan corona virus in China has caused global concern.