COVID-19

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that Canada has signed a tentative agreement with US vaccine firm, Novavax, to produce millions of doses of its Covid-19 vaccine candidate at a facility in Montreal.

The Lancet international medical journal published a peer-reviewed late-stage trial results that stated Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine was almost 92% effective in fighting COVID-19.

Britain begins a door-to-door COVID-19 testing of 80,000 people on Tuesday in a bid to stem the spread of a new highly infectious so-called South African variant of the novel coronavirus.

Two people in southern England have tested positive for the South African variant of the coronavirus without having any links to people who have travelled recently, prompting “surge testing” to contain the outbreak.

South Africa has received the first batch of Coronavirus vaccines on Monday.

President Muhammadu Buhari has signed the COVID-19 Disease Health Protection 2021, a regulation which makes the use of face mask mandatory to curtail the spread of the coronavirus disease.

Germany is preparing entry bans for travellers from Britain, Portugal, Brazil and South Africa to limit the spread of the more contagious variants of the coronavirus raging in these countries, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said on Thursday.

Global coronavirus cases surpassed 100 million on Wednesday, according to a Reuters tally, as countries around the world struggle with new virus variants and vaccine shortfalls.

Moderna Inc said on Monday it believes its COVID-19 vaccine protects against new variants found in Britain and South Africa, although it will test a new booster shot aimed at the South African variant after concluding the antibody response could be diminished.

Bereaved relatives of the dead expressed anger at Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s handling of the Coronavirus crisis, as the United Kingdom’s COVID-19 death toll approaches 100,000.