Clinical trials

The legal requirement for self-isolation after infection with Covid-19 is expected to be dropped next week in England, Downing Street reported.

Turkey's Health Minister Fahrettin Koca has urged people to get Turkovac shots, the locally developed vaccine against COVICD-19, saying that it is already available in all 81 provinces of the county.

Turkey's three most populous cities, Istanbul, Ankara and İzmir, have seen increases in the weekly COVID-19 cases at varying rates.

The incidence rate, measuring the number of coronavirus infections per 100,000 people, rose slightly to around 895 in Istanbul, which is home to nearly 16 million residents, in the week of Jan. 29-Feb. 4 from 890 between Jan. 22 and Jan. 28.

China on Feb. 12 said it had given "conditional" approval for Pfizer's Covid-19 drug Paxlovid to treat adults with mild to moderate illness and a high risk of developing severe disease.

Pfizer reported its fourth-quarter and full-year results on Tuesday

The Greek Ministry of Health has announced that about 10,000 medics who have not received a booster dose of COVID-19 vaccine will have to take two rapid tests a week to work. This will be at their expense, Kathimerini reported.

Health Minister Thanos Plevris clarified that health workers who do not have a booster will not be removed, as is the case with the unvaccinated.

Health Minister Fahrettin Koca has called on the public to avoid complacency and believing that the Omicron variant of COVID-19 causes a milder disease, urging everyone to get their booster shots.

"We are fighting a variant of the virus that spreads rapidly and causes a milder course of the disease. This should not be passed onto you as complacency," Koca said on Twitter.

About 20,000 deaths from complications of Covid-19 were prevented by vaccination against the coronavirus infection, according to a new pre-published study by professors Sotiris Tsiodras and Theodoros Lytras, conducted during the period 11 January 2020 - 8 December 2021.

The green certificate for Bulgaria will be needed for another month. This was stated on Nova TV by Professor Radka Argirova, adviser to the Prime Minister on the pandemic of COVID-19.

Pfizer yesterday applied to the US Medicines Agency to allow the emergency use of the vaccine produced by the company to children aged 6 months to 4 years, AFP and Reuters reported.