Coronavirus Global Updates 08 August ::: Global Covid-19 Caseload Tops 202 Million, Deaths Over 4.28 Million

Sun Aug 8 13:30:18 CAT 2021

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Coronavirus Global Updates 08 August  ::: Global Covid-19 Caseload Tops 202 Million, Deaths Over 4.28 Million

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Zimbabwe COVID19 Update

COVID-19 update: As at 07 August 2021, Zimbabwe had 115 890 confirmed cases, including 87 416 recoveries and 3 826 deaths. To date, a total of 1 851 407 people have been vaccinated against COVID-19.

COVID-19: Saskatchewan reports 130 new cases, highest in over a month

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Saskatchewan health officials reported 130 new COVID-19 cases on Saturday, the highest since June 3 when 130 cases were also reported.

The new cases were reported in the far north west (14), far north central (3), far north east (13), north west (6), north central (14), north east (4), Saskatoon (38), central west (4), central east (5), Regina (9), south west (2), south central (4), and the south east zone (10).

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There is a total of 628 active cases in the province.

In hospital, 60 patients with COVID-19 are being cared for including 12 patients in the ICU.

No new deaths were reported on Sunday, the death toll remains at 582.

An additional 3,491 COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered since the province’s last report on Friday. Currently, there are 664,144 residents who are fully vaccinated in Saskatchewan.

Russian Deaths Near Record; U.S. Cases Rising: Virus Update
New Covid-19 cases in the U.S. are back to levels seen in last winter’s surge, with cases now above 100,000 a day on average. Germany continues on a trend of rising case numbers, as deaths in Russia and infections in Malaysia linger near record highs.

Global Covid-19 Caseload Tops 202 Million, Deaths Over 4.28 Million
The global coronavirus caseload has topped 202 million, while the deaths have surged to more than 4.28 million and vaccinations soared to over 4.37 billion, according to Johns Hopkins University.

In its latest update on Sunday morning, the University's Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) revealed that the current global caseload, the death toll stood and vaccination tally stood at 202,183,140, 4,285,440 and 4,376,808,997, respectively.

 <http://www.firstmutual.co.zw/> 

The US continues to be the worst-hit country with the world's highest number of cases and deaths at 35,738,154 and 616,713, respectively, according to the CSSE.

In terms of infections, India follows in second place with 31,895,385 cases.

The other worst countries with over 3 million cases are Brazil (20,151,779), France (6,350,899), Russia (6,340,370), the UK (6,070,873), Turkey (5,870,741), Argentina (5,012,754), Colombia (4,834,634), Spain (4,588,132), Italy (4,390,684), Iran (4,119,110), Germany (3,795,609) and Indonesia (3,639,616), the CSSE figures showed.

In terms of deaths, Brazil comes second with 562,752 fatalities.

Nations with a death toll of over 100,000 are India (427,371), Mexico (243,733), Peru (196,873), Russia (161,343), the UK (130,585), Italy (128,209), Colombia (122,277), France (112,379), Argentina (107,302) and Indonesia (100,636).

Indonesia's huge coronavirus outbreak could be the perfect breeding ground for the world's next variant

Experts fear Indonesia, considered one of the world's COVID-19 epicentres, is now a high-risk "hotspot" for the emergence of a new coronavirus "super strain".

An alarming second wave in the country has been largely fuelled by the highly infectious Delta variant, which was first identified in India's out-of-control outbreak.

And now experts are worried that a similar situation could occur in Indonesia, where the rampant spread of the virus may create the perfect breeding ground for another variant of concern.

"Uncontrolled epidemics are really bad hotspots for the evolution of variants," Aris Katzourakis, a professor of evolution and genomics at Oxford University in the UK, said.

"Two of the most challenging variants that we're facing – Alpha and Delta – are quite possibly connected to very poor public health interventions [in the UK and India].

"Controlling the epidemic [in Indonesia] is certainly a high priority for minimizing the risk of a new variant."

As a second wave of the coronavirus has swept through Indonesia's densely populated Java island and Bali in recent months, the hospital system buckled under the pressure of an influx of cases.

With medical resources stretched to their limits, desperate relatives have struggled to obtain oxygen tanks for family members struggling to breathe in hospital.

Others who have tested COVID-positive have been turned away from hospitals, having been asked in some cases to self-isolate in small, often crowded, homes.

The result has been a tragic loss of life, with the death toll in Indonesia surpassing 100,000 since the pandemic began. A staggering 40 per cent of them have been in the past five weeks alone.

Total infections in the fourth most populous country in the world have passed 3.5 million.

The closely watched Indonesian 'variant of concern'

Health authorities in Malaysia's Sarawak state last month identified seven new cases of the B.1.466.2 variant, which was first identified in Jakarta last November.

"Two cases of Beta variant and four Indonesian 'variants of concern' have been identified in Kuching, in Sibu (2) and one case in Bintulu," Dr David Perera, Director of the Institute of Health and Community Medicine at Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, said.

The head of Jakarta's Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology says the Indonesian variant is being closely monitored.

But he denies it is a "variant of concern" under World Health Organization terminology.

"Not VOC nor VOI (variant of interest)," Professor Amin Soebandrio told the ABC.

"However, we have to watch it carefully."

Could we see a 'super strain' emerge out of Indonesia?

While there could be thousands of different versions of the coronavirus currently circulating around the world, many of them won't rise to the level of the Delta variant or have much impact on raging outbreaks.

As quickly as they can emerge, some can just as quickly fade away.

But now and then a virus has a breakthrough and, in doing so, it can change the course of the pandemic.

"[Mutations] become the virus of the day because they take over, because they infect people more easily," public health epidemiologist Dr Emma Miller at Flinders University told the ABC.

"You'll find there have been other ones that have come before Delta — obviously from Alpha through the alphabet to Delta — but Delta has taken over because of its ability to escape, to get as many people affected as possible.

"And that's the raison d'être of the virus in a population."

Epidemiologist Dicky Budiman says the high positivity rate in Indonesia, or the percentage of people testing positive to COVID-19, as well as the uncontrolled nature of the pandemic, are signs that a new "super strain" could emerge in Indonesia.

"It's only a matter of time," Mr Budiman, who also advises the Indonesian government on its pandemic strategy, said.

Mr Budiman pointed to Indonesia's experience of bird flu in 2007 and 2008 — when the country had "the most dangerous strain in the world at that time" — as one example.

"It's not impossible. It might well happen in Indonesia," he said.

Professor Katzourakis agrees that it's "right to pick out Indonesia as a possible hotspot" and says it is "completely reasonable" to expect more virulent variants to arise over the coming year.

"If a new virulent strain arises in Indonesia, or arrives in Indonesia, it could challenge Delta," he said.

How vaccines present a challenge to coronavirus mutations

Epidemiologists and health experts agree that the more the virus spreads in a population, the more mutations will occur and the higher the risk of new variants emerging.

This is happening all the time and the majority are "meaningless," according to Dr Peter Drobac, a global public health specialist and Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship in the UK.

But only when a mutation gives the virus a competitive advantage against other variants, does it potentially take hold in the population and become a more dominant strain, like the Delta variant has done, he said.

Such an advantage could be a variant with more resistance to vaccines.

As more people within a country become immune, either through innoculations or catching and recovering from COVID-19, the more favourable it is for the virus to evolve and find ways around that immunity.

This is known as immune escape.

But for that to happen, experts say a higher level of the population would need to be immunised. Indonesia, with just 7.9 per cent of its population fully vaccinated, doesn't meet this threshold.

"Where you have a good chunk of the population who are vaccinated, and you have the virus spreading like wildfire in the unvaccinated population, those two things together probably create more ideal conditions for a potentially vaccine-resistant variant to emerge," Dr Drobac said.

"If we were particular about selecting for a vaccine-resistant variant, it's more likely to be in a place where a significant portion of the population is vaccinated, but you still have a lot of unvaccinated people getting infected.

"So what's happening in the UK right now might be sort of the most ideal conditions."

'Worst-case scenario' a vaccine-resistant variant

According to the CSIRO's COVID-19 Project Leader Professor Seshadri Vasan, at least one more variant of concern will be declared before the end of 2021, "and it could emerge anywhere".

The "worst-case scenario", in Dr Drobac's view, would be if a vaccine-resistant variant were to take hold.

"That doesn't mean 100 per cent vaccine resistant, but one that is able to bypass vaccines or immune protection much more than Delta.

"If that were the case, all of the vaccinated people who are relatively protected against other variants, would then be vulnerable hosts to a new variant."

But according to Dr Drobac's assessment, the chances of a new variant being more contagious than Delta are relatively low.

"Right now, Delta is so transmissible that it would be hard for a new variant to out-compete Delta on transmissibility, on spreading easily," he said.

"It would probably have to be another advantage."

What has also been promising is that newer vaccines have withstood all four variants of concern in tests at the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness, according to Professor Vasan.

"We don't yet have a SARS-CoV-2 variant of high consequence that significantly reduces the effectiveness of prevention or medical countermeasures," he said.

"My hope is that before we face that situation, we should get a majority of the world's population fully vaccinated.

One thing most health experts agree on is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 is not going to disappear.

"It's likely to become endemic, meaning it will be circulating through the world all the time, just like influenza is circulating all the time," says Dr Drobac.

"There are new strains that we need to think about each year. I'm not saying that's going to be the case for COVID-19, but it's likely that we will continue to be living with it.

"It will continue to mutate. And that means constant surveillance as well as constant updating of vaccines – and the potential for us needing to have periodic boosters that might address new variants – very likely."

India Sees Single-Day Rise Of 39,070 Covid Cases, 491 Deaths

Coronavirus live update: The active cases in the country have declined to 4,06,822 and comprises 1.27 per cent of the total infections

New Delhi/Srinagar: 

India recorded a single-day rise of 39,070 new coronavirus cases, taking the infection tally to 3,19,34,455, while the death count climbed to 4,27,862 with 491 fresh fatalities, the Union health ministry said on Sunday.

The active cases in the country have declined to 4,06,822 and comprises 1.27 per cent of the total infections, while the COVID-19 recovery rate was recorded at 97.39 per cent, the ministry data updated at 8 am showed.

The ministry also said that 17,22,221 tests were conducted during the same period, taking the total cumulative tests conducted so far for detection of COVID-19 to 48,00,39,185.

The daily positivity rate was recorded at 2.27 per cent. It has been less than 3 per cent for the last 13 days.

Weekly positivity rate was recorded at 2.38 per cent, according to the health ministry.

Kolkata Covid Patient 30 Years Old On Lung Support Machine For Second Month. It Costs ₹ 1.5 Lakh A Day
Covid has not just taken lives, it has devastated thousands of families financially as they struggled to pay for medical help for relatives hit by the virus.

Will Take Another Year To Vaccinate All Adults At Current Rate Of Vaccine Supply: Delhi Health Department
It will take another year to vaccinate all eligible beneficiaries aged above 18 in the national capital at "the present rate of COVID-19 vaccine supply," the health department has told the Delhi Disaster Management Authority (DDMA).

Coronavirus  Updates: Odisha Reports 69 COVID-19 Deaths, 1,243 Fresh Cases

Odisha's COVID-19 death count shot up to 6,435 on Sunday after 69 more patients succumbed to the virus, while 1,243 fresh cases raised the tally to 9,87,070. The coastal state now has 12,129 active cases and 9,68,453 people have so far recovered from the disease, including 1,525 since Saturday. The case fatality rate, however, stands at 0.65 per cent, one of the lowest in the country. The cumulative positivity rate stands at 5.96 per cent.

Delta Variant No Joke Young Mexicans Warn From Hospital
When Diego started going out again to meet friends he never expected to be among a growing number of young Mexicans hospitalized by a highly contagious Covid-19 variant driving another wave of infections.

Coronavirus  Updates: Arunachal Pradesh Reports 248 New COVID-19 Cases, 3 Deaths
Arunachal Pradesh's COVID-19 tally rose to 49,916 as 248 more people tested positive for the virus, while three new fatalities pushed the death count to 240. Of the 248 fresh cases, 226 were detected through rapid antigen test, 17 through RT-PCR and five by TrueNat method. Arunachal Pradesh currently has 2,873 active COVID-19 cases, while 46,803 patients have recovered from the disease, including 404 people on Saturday.

Australia's Most Populous States Struggle With Delta Variant Outbreaks
Australia's three most populous states of New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland reported a total of 282 COVID-19 new locally acquired infections on Sunday, with authorities struggling to quell outbreaks of the Delta variant.

UK Lifts Covid Travel Norms For Visitors From India
The UK on Sunday eased travel restrictions for India by moving the country from its "red" to "amber" list, which means fully vaccinated Indian passengers will no longer be subjected to a compulsory 10-day hotel quarantine on their arrival in Britain.

Aug 08, 2021 12:20 (IST)

More than 52.37 crores (52,37,50,890) vaccine doses have been provided to States/UTs so far, through all sources and a further 8,99,260 doses are in the pipeline: Union Health Ministry  

Coronavirus  Updates: Ladakh Reports 7 Fresh COVID-19 Cases
Seven people tested positive for COVID-19 in Ladakh, while an equal number of patients were cured, taking the overall infection tally in the Union territory to 20,385 and 65 active cases on Sunday. The UT has registered 207 Covid-related deaths -- 149 in Leh and 58 in Kargil -- since the outbreak of the pandemic last year.

Coronavirus  Updates: Beijing Imposes New Travel Restrictions To Curb COVID-19 Spread
The city of Beijing has rolled out a range of measures to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic by imposing restrictions on travellers from regions with relatively high virus transmission rates. According to Chinese state media Global Times, people from medium or high-risk regions who are planning to return to Beijing will be prevented from buying tickets for air and railway services.

Coronavirus  Updates: India's Cumulative Vaccine Coverage Exceeds 50.68 Crores
India's cumulative #COVID19 vaccination coverage has exceeded 50.68 Cr. A total of 55,91,657 vaccine doses were administered in the last 24 hours, as per the 7 am provisional report today: Union Health Ministry.

India Reports 39,070 Coronavirus Cases In A Day
India reported 39,070 new Covid cases in the past 24 hours, slightly higher than yesterday's 38,628, taking the total infections to over 3.19 crore. Active Covid cases have declined to 4.06 lakh in India. Active cases constitute 1.27 per cent of total infections. 43,910 patients recovered in the last 24 hours taking total recoveries so far to over 3.10 crore. The recovery rate has increased to 97.39 per cent. The daily positivity rate is at 2.27 per cent - less than 3 per cent for 13 straight days in a sign of relief.

Thousands Protest In France Against Covid Health Pass
Almost a quarter of a million people took to the streets across France on Saturday for the biggest protests yet against a coronavirus health pass needed to enter a cafe or travel on an inter-city train, two days before the new rules come into force.

Similar but smaller protests were held in Italy.

Championed by President Emmanuel Macron, the French regulations make it obligatory to have either a full course of vaccination against Covid-19, a negative test or be recently recovered from the virus to enjoy routine activities.

Non-Residents To Be Locked In On Return As Australia Toughens Border Curbs
Australia is making some of the world's toughest pandemic border curbs even tougher, by barring non-resident citizens who enter the country from leaving again to reduce pressure on a quarantine system that's being tested by the delta variant.

One of the few nations that banned citizens from leaving when the pandemic hit, Australia's government amended the border policy Thursday to close a loophole allowing expatriates to visit home and leave the country again without applying for an exemption from the ban.

Now, those hoping to return to their residences abroad will have to demonstrate to the Australian Border Force Commissioner a "compelling reason for needing to leave Australian territory."

COVID-19: Delhi Reports 72 New Cases, One Death In Last 24 Hours

The national capital recorded 72 fresh COVID-19 cases and one death due to the disease on Saturday, while the positivity rate rose to 0.10 per cent, according to data shared by the health department in New Delhi.

This is a marked increase in the number of daily cases, as 44 cases were reported in the city on Friday.

The coronavirus death count in the city has now risen to 25,066, according to the latest health bulletin.

On Friday, five deaths were also reported, while the positivity rate had stood at 0.06 per cent, according to official figures.

On Thursday, 61 cases with a positivity rate of 0.08 per cent, and two deaths were recorded.

INVESTORS DIARY 2021

Company

Event

Venue

Date & Time

Companies under Cautionary

ART

PPC

Dairibord

Starafrica

Fidelity

Turnall

Medtech

Zimre

Nampak Zimbabwe

DISCLAIMER: This report has been prepared by Bulls ‘n Bears, a division of Faith Capital (Pvt) Ltd for general information purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy or subscribe for any securities. The information contained in this report has been compiled from sources believed to be reliable, but no representation or warranty is made or guarantee given as to its accuracy or completeness. All opinions expressed and recommendations made are subject to change without notice. Securities or financial instruments mentioned herein may not be suitable for all investors. Securities of emerging and mid-size growth companies typically involve a higher degree of risk and more volatility than the securities of more established companies. Neither Faith Capital nor any other member of Bulls ‘n Bears nor any other person, accepts any liability whatsoever for any loss howsoever arising from any use of this report or its contents or otherwise arising in connection therewith. Recipients of this report shall be solely responsible for making their own independent investigation into the business, financial condition and future prospects of any companies referred to in this report. Other  Indices quoted herein are for guideline purposes only and sourced from third parties.

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