Covid-19 News Highlights: Health expert believes 6 months gap between COVID vaccine and precautionary dose better for immunity

China on Friday announced plans to permit the return of “some" Indian students stranded in India for over two years following the visa and flight restrictions imposed by Beijing due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a media briefing here that “China attaches high importance to Indian students' concerns about returning to China for studies. We have shared with the Indian sides the procedures and experience of other countries' students returning to China”. (PTI)

The union territory of Puducherry reported three fresh COVID-19 cases pushing the overall caseload to 1,65,788 while no fresh fatalities were recorded in the last 24 hours, a senior Department of Health official said on Friday. The three fresh infections were detected after the examination of 263 samples, Director of Health G Sriramulu said in a release. The cumulative caseload went up to 1,65,788 with the addition of the three cases while the total recoveries remained at 1,63,815. (PTI)

South Africa may be entering a fifth COVID wave earlier than expected after a sustained rise in infections over the past 14 days that seems to be driven by the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron sub-variants, health officials and scientists said on Friday. The country that has recorded the most coronavirus cases and deaths on the African continent only exited a fourth wave around January and had predicted a fifth wave could start in May or June, early in the southern hemisphere winter. Health Minister Joe Phaahla told a briefing that although hospitalisations were picking up there was so far no dramatic change in admissions to intensive care units or deaths. (Reuters)

GlaxoSmithKline's (GSK) COVID-19 vaccine candidate developed with SK bioscience has been submitted for regulatory approval in South Korea after positive positive Phase III clinical data, the British drugmaker said on Friday. GSK said that SK bioscience will also apply to the World Health Organization (WHO) for emergency use listing and seek authorisations at individual regulatory agencies around the world. The company said an extended clinical trial is planned to test the vaccine's effectiveness against the Omicron variant of the virus. (Reuters)

A senior scientist at South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) said on Friday there was no sign so far that new sub-lineages of the Omicron coronavirus variant were causing significantly more severe disease. The NICD's Waasila Jassat said there was no pressure on hospital beds or oxygen in South Africa currently, after the health minister said the country could be entering a fifth COVID-19 infection wave. (Reuters)

Delhi’s fresh Covid-19 cases rose by nearly nine per cent in last 24 hours as the city recorded 1,490 infections on Thursday and two deaths. The positivity rate stood at 4.62 per cent. It was the seventh consecutive day that the national capital recorded over 1,000 daily new cases. The total tally in the national capital rose to 18,79,948 and the death toll was 26,172, the bulletin stated.

When 23-year-old Norwegian Anastasia Johansen and her boyfriend were planning their first vacation in two years, they considered going to Thailand but chose nearby Vietnam instead, for its simpler entry rules on the coronavirus. "The regulations to enter Thailand ... were complicated to me and we had to pay for the hefty PCR test," Johansen said. Thailand, one of the world's tourism destinations before the pandemic, was among the first nations in Asia to reopen its borders to vaccinated visitors last year with limited quarantine norms, hailed at the time as a model for re-opening. But as regional peers have eased entry requirements, Thailand has clung to a cumbersome process. (Reuters)

As many as 12.38 million Shanghai residents, nearly half the population of China's financial hub, are now in lower-risk areas, meaning they can leave their homes, the government said on Friday. Shanghai, battling China's biggest-ever COVID-19 outbreak, put the entire city into lockdown at the beginning of the month, though it has cautiously lifted some restrictions on residential areas that have gone two weeks without a positive case. The city classifies each housing unit according to three levels of risk, designating those that have not seen a COVID-19 positive case for 14 days as "prevention zones", allowing residents to go out for "appropriate" activities. (Reuters)

The official data suggests that the active cases comprise 0.04 per cent of the total infections, while the national COVID-19 recovery rate was recorded at 98.74 per cent. An increase of 821 cases has been recorded in the active COVID-19 caseload in a span of 24 hours.