Covid News Live Updates: No easy way to get Pfizer's Covid drug Paxlovid in China

Chinese authorities have acknowledged that supplies of Paxlovid are still insufficient to meet demand, even as Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said last week that thousands of courses of the treatment were shipped to the country last year and in the past couple of weeks millions more were shipped. Paxlovid - a combination of two anti viral drugs - is one of the few foreign oral treatments approved by Beijing and a clinical trial has found it to have reduced hospitalisations in high-risk patients by around 90%. Having been approved in February last year, Paxlovid was scarcely used in China until December when the government started lifting its strict containment policy, and wave of COVID infections began to build.

A group representing major U.S. airlines said Tuesday it does not foresee a return of significant international passenger air travel demand from either China or Japan before the end of March and sought an extension of a waiver of some U.S. COVID-19 international route requirements. Airlines for America, a trade group representing major U.S. carriers, told the U.S. Transportation Department (USDOT) that airlines "do not foresee significant and certain international passenger growth in either China or Japan before" the expiration of a current USDOT waiver. The group added ticket sales for the U.S.-China market as of December remained 88% below 2019 levels, adding passenger demand for both markets remains "severely depressed."

The first weekend after COVID-19 restrictions ended last month, dozens of young Chinese jostled in the dark at a heavy-metal concert in a tiny Shanghai music venue that reeked of sweat and hard liquor. It was the kind of freedom young Chinese had demanded in late November in protests against the zero-COVID policy that became the biggest outpouring of public anger in mainland China since President Xi Jinping took power a decade ago. After three years of lockdowns, testing, economic hardship and isolation, many of China's Generation Z — the 280 million born between 1995 and 2010 — had found a new political voice, repudiating their stereotypes as either nationalist keyboard warriors or apolitical loafers.

After nearly a month with no reported deaths, the city has recorded a fatality due to Covid-19. The BMC announced that a 68-year-old man has passed away, marking the first reported Covid death in the city this year. The previously recorded death in Mumbai was on December 22.

The SARS-CoV-2, better known as COVID-19 is mired under controversy about whether it was a man-made disaster or a natural pandemic, writes Thu Dao, a Hanoi-based journalist and worked as a content manager and strategist at Foreign Affairs Newsdesk in Tuoi Tre in Indo-Pacific Center for Strategic Communications (IPCSC). There are good reasons to be concerned about Chinese work in biotechnology that could be unethical and alarming. Although Beijing has never admitted to a developed bio-weapons programme, in the past China has reportedly produced biological weapons that include weaponized ricin, botulinum toxins and causative agents for anthrax, cholera, plague and tularaemia in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 that declares the development, production, and stockpiling of bio-weapons a war crime, reported IPCSC.

Mexico has registered 12 straight weeks of an increase in Covid-19 cases, with a "slight rise" in deaths and hospitalisations, Undersecretary of Prevention and Health Promotion Hugo Lopez-Gatell said. There was a "big contrast" between the number of infections and the number of deaths, he stressed on Tuesday, thanks to a nationwide vaccination campaign against Covid-19 launched at the end of 2020. "The good news throughout this recent wave and the previous one is that there is a big contrast between the increase in cases and the slight rise in hospitalisations and deaths," Lopez-Gatell told the media.

Nearly 26,000 child Covid-19 cases were reported in the US in the week ending January 12, according to the latest report by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Children's Hospital Association. This is a decrease from the previous week, but likely an undercount that increased during the holidays and in 2023, according to the report. Nearly 15.3 million children in the country have tested positive for Covid-19 since the onset of the pandemic. More than 140,000 of these cases have been added in the past four weeks, Xinhua news agency reported.