16 new Covid cases reported in country

Sixteen more COVID-19 cases were reported across the country during the last 24 hours as of Tuesday morning. According to the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), a total of 308 samples were tested across the country, for a positivity rate of 5.19 per cent. The country’s total fatalities remained unchanged at

Covid takes one more life this year

Bangladesh witnessed another death from COVID-19 during the last 24 hours as of Sunday morning, raising the number of fatalities to two this year. As a result, total deaths of the country reached 29,479 so far after the new death case. According to the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), 21 people

From Covid To Cancer High hopes for Nobel mRNA vaccines

The coronavirus pandemic brought global renown to the mRNA technology that underpins vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, and on Monday earned a Nobel Prize for two scientists who have been key to its development. Katalin Kariko of Hungary and Drew Weissman of the United States won the Nobel Medicine Prize for

Post-Covid learning poverty, A renewed call to action

On the third anniversary of the pandemic, not enough has been done to tackle learning poverty i.e. the inability of children to read at the end of primary school. Because of being out of school for an extended period during the pandemic, learning poverty became catastrophic. While school systems reopened,

China kicks off Lunar New Year as COVID fears loom

The Lunar New Year holiday kicks off in China this weekend, with hopes running high that it will kick-start economic growth stuck at four-decade lows, but fears of a COVID-19 explosion loom over the festivities. Many people are focused on reuniting with relatives they have not seen in years, rather than

WHO panel discusses Covid emergency status

The World Health Organization's emergency committee on Covid-19 had a meeting Friday to discuss whether the pandemic still merits the highest level of global alert. Before the meeting, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus suggested that the emergency phase of the pandemic is not over, pointing to the more than 170,000

The mind-boggling challenge of long COVID

Padma Priya first got COVID-19 in April 2020. The journalist living in Hyderabad, India, recovered a few weeks later. But not completely. “I was experiencing a lot of fatigue. But … everyone kept saying, ‘oh, you know, after a bad viral or any flu you do get that sort of fatigue.’

China suspends social media accounts of COVID policy critics

China has suspended or closed the social media accounts of more than 1,000 critics of the government's policies on the COVID-19 outbreak, as the country moves to further open up.The popular Sina Weibo social media platform said it had addressed 12,854 violations including attacks on experts, scholars and medical workers

Living another year dangerously

Anis Chowdhury 2022 has been a year of great uncertainty when it seemed the world perilously reached the brink of self-destruction – be it human-induced climate change or military conflict. Welcoming 2022, we had enough reasons to be optimistic; but it was another ‘year of living dangerously’ – Tahun vivere pericoloso

China targets seniors in COVID reopening push

China is loosening curbs in the wake of mass protests over its zero-COVID policy, but exiting the controversial strategy hinges on a key stumbling block: vaccinating more seniors. Thousands hit the streets nationwide last week in an unprecedented challenge to almost three years of some of the world's strictest virus measures,