COVID-19

An explosion of Covid-19 cases in China as the country lifts its zero-Covid measures could create a "potential breeding ground" for new variants to emerge, health experts warn.

Italy on Thursday urged the rest of the European Union to follow its lead and test travellers from China for COVID, but others said they saw no need to do so for now or were waiting for a common stance across the largely border-less bloc.

The UK's health system is under huge pressure, with very high pre-COVID waiting times having been exacerbated during the pandemic.

Beginning on Jan. 5, all air passengers 2 years old and older will require a negative result from a test no more than two days before departure from China, Hong Kong or Macao.

Doctors working despite being infected, beds filled with dozens of elderly straining to breathe -- on the front lines of China's worst-ever Covid outbreak, hospitals are struggling.

Reinventing himself as a brewer at age 62 would never have occurred to Poul Erik Vestergaard, but Denmark's controversial cull of the country's minks over Covid fears forced him to change course.

Oil prices fell on Wednesday as concerns about an upsurge in COVID-19 cases in China, the world's top oil importer, outweighed expectations easing pandemic restrictions would lead to economic recovery and growth in demand for fuel.

Chinese people, cut off from the rest of the world for three years by stringent COVID-19 curbs, flocked to travel sites on Tuesday ahead of borders reopening next month, even as rising infections strained the health system and roiled the economy.

In more than three decades of emergency medicine, Beijing-based doctor Howard Bernstein said, he has never seen anything like this.

Chinese President Xi Jinping urged officials on Monday to take steps to protect lives in his first public remarks on Covid-19 since Beijing dramatically loosened hardline containment measures this month.

Beijing last week admitted the scale of the outbreak has become "impossible" to track following the end of mandatory mass testing.

Millions of elderly people across China are still not fully vaccinated, raising concerns that the virus may kill the most vulnerable citizens in huge numbers.

Beijing faces a surge in severe COVID-19 cases over the next two weeks, a respiratory expert said, amid global concerns over possible mutations and knock-on effects for the world economy after the surprise ditching of China's tough virus policies.

The UK has been seeing a significant rise in Covid-19 cases over the last few weeks.

The United States hopes that China can address the current COVID-19 outbreak as the toll of the virus is a global concern due to the size of the Chinese economy, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said on Monday.

Nearly 650 million confirmed Covid cases and more than 6.6 million deaths have been reported to the WHO

The authorities have put UK medical staff on alert for signs of the deadly camel flu as people return from Qatar after watching the FIFA World Cup.

Malaria-related deaths fell slightly in 2021 after a significant increase in the first year of COVID-19, but remained higher than the pre-pandemic estimated toll, according to a World Health Organization (WHO) report on Thursday.

A recent survey has revealed that more than half of older teenagers and young adults in the UK have "possible problems with eating."

Twitter said it has stopped enforcing a policy intended to prevent the spread of Covid misinformation, as new owner Elon Musk -- who has clashed previously with US officials over pandemic safety rules -- continues to remake its content moderation policies.

Chinese protesters have turned to blank sheets of paper to express their anger over COVID-19 restrictions in a rare, widespread outpouring of public dissent that has gone beyond social media to some of China's streets and top universities.

AFP saw multiple people arrested as officers told demonstrators to leave the area.

The culinary tourism business of Brian Bergey and his wife Ruixi Hu has persevered in China through three years of harsh COVID-19 restrictions.

Sterling slipped against a strengthening U.S. dollar on Monday as global risk sentiment was dented by rising COVID-19 cases in China, which led to new restrictions in the world's second largest economy.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a disastrous impact on people's mental health, and it is still continuing to affect thousands of students in the UK.

Germany's vaccine advisory panel on Thursday recommended that Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine for children from six months to four years should only be given routinely to those at risk of severe disease from the infection.

Oil prices fell for a second day in early Asian trade on Thursday as concerns over geopolitical tensions eased and rising numbers of COVID-19 cases in China added to demand worries in the world's largest crude importer.

The British government said on Monday it would contribute 1 billion pounds ($1.18 billion) to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, more than six weeks after other countries made their commitments.

The fund's major donors include the United States, Britain, India, China, France, Canada, Australia and Japan.

AstraZeneca on Thursday raised its full-year adjusted earnings forecast after third-quarter profit and revenue topped analysts' expectations, helped by sales of its key cancer drugs.