Virus

Demand for regular supplies of affordable meat will create future pandemics that will make Covid-19 pandemic look like a "dress rehearsal", scientists are warning.  

Producing meat is creating the perfect breeding ground for diseases of the same kind to emerge, according to the South African academics.

"People who have been exposed to Covid-19 in Bulgaria are many times more than the official statistics reports. The real number of people who have had the disease is at least 2.5 million,"Dr. Trifon Valkov from the Infectious Diseases Hospital in Sofia stated in the morning program of Nova TV.

Ljubljana – The Jožef Stefan Institute (IJS) has noted that the Covid-19 epidemic in Slovenia is stagnating in terms of the number of positive tests, with the basic reproduction number standing at around one. It projects that the next, yellow phase of restrictions easing could be reached in mid-May.

The World Health Organization (WHO) regional director for Europe said yesterday he believes the coronavirus outbreak will end in early 2022, reported the Anadolu Agency.

Hans Kluge told Danish state broadcaster DR that Covid-19 will still be prevalent in 2021, but it will be more manageable than in 2020.

A scientist from the Department of Physics, University of Hamburg, told the German media that he had a total of 600 pieces of evidence gathered in 2019 and 2020.

Healthy, young volunteers will be infected with coronavirus to test vaccines and treatments in the world's first Covid-19 "human challenge" study, which will take place in the UK.

The study, which has received ethics approval, will start in the next few weeks and recruit 90 people aged 18-30.

The British version of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes the disease COVID-19) was found in 70 percent of the samples in Bulgaria, which were suspected to contain it, said the Center for Infectious and Parasitic Diseases.

More transmissible variants of COVID-19 are spreading in Turkey and have already been found in over 30 provinces, experts have warned, adding that the impacts of those variants are yet to be seen.

Infectious diseases expert Sotiris Tsiodras, one of the government's top scientific advisers on fighting Covid-19, on Friday held a telephone call with Prof. Nadir Arber, the Israeli inventor of a promising drug against the virus.

During his recent visit to Israel, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis offered to have a hospital in Greece take part in clinical trials.

Turkish authorities are considering measures, including possible new curbs, to respond to a spike in the number of COVID-19 cases as well as the presence of virus variants in the country.

As part of the possible precautionary actions, some region-specific restrictions may be introduced, said officials, without elaborating on what they might be.