China will host the 14th BRICS Summit on Thursday in what analysts see as a chance for Beijing to promote its governance and development model at a time of global instability.Chinese President Xi Jinping will join with the leaders of Brazil, India, Russia and South Africa via video link to discuss issues of mutual concern as part of the summit themed around ushering in a “new era” for global development. Ahead of the summit in Beijing, Chinese state media have praised the BRICS – an

Treating high-risk COVID-19 patients with the antidepressant fluvoxamine may reduce the risk of prolonged hospitalisation by up to a third, a large-scale study showed Thursday.Authors said the research could help boost low-cost protection against severe sickness or death in countries that have yet to receive adequate vaccine doses during a grossly uneven rollout.Fluvoxamine is traditionally used to treat mental health conditions such as depression and obsessive-compulsive disorders and was se

One of Brazil’s biggest healthcare providers has been accused of covering up coronavirus deaths, pressuring doctors to prescribe ineffective treatments, and testing unproven drugs on elderly patients as part of ideologically charged efforts to help the Brazilian government resist a COVID lockdown.Prevent Senior, a health maintenance organization with a chain of hospitals and more than half a million members, is in the crosshairs of a congressional inquiry into Brazil’s coronavirus crisis and

China on Sunday announced it had administered its one-billionth shot in the world's biggest coronavirus inoculation drive as Brazil's death toll from the pandemic passed 500,000.The global death toll from COVID-19 is now more than 3.8 million and many nations are still battling outbreaks, but vaccine drives in some countries are allowing activities that were unthinkable a few months ago.China's vaccine milestone comes after the number of shots administered globally passed 2.5 b

“There are three kinds of lies,” Mark Twain famously wrote. “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Too often, the COVID-19 crisis has lent support to the suspicions Twain’s bon mot expresses. Data is critical to fighting the pandemic, but cross-country comparisons have focused too much on the wrong sort.

The first “tweaked” vaccine against the worrying coronavirus variants that emerged in South Africa and Brazil has successfully neutralised them in laboratory trials, the United States (US) company Moderna has said.The results of the small trial suggest that boosters against the variants will be feasible and could be rolled out this year to counter the threat from variants that have appeared around the world and are feared in some cases to be more transmissible or partially vaccine-resistant.L

International aid to alleviate India's dire oxygen shortage arrived in the South Asian nation on Sunday, as its coronavirus death toll climbed to a grim new record.The country of 1.3 billion reported 3,689 coronavirus deaths on Sunday – another grim daily record, with nearly 400,000 new cases of COVID-19 registered across India.Surges in Brazil and Canada have also highlighted the persistent threat of the pandemic, with the global death toll approaching 3.2 million even as many nations r

India on Friday posted another global record for daily coronavirus infections, pushing worldwide cases past 150 million as a pandemic that has killed almost 3.2 million worldwide continues to wreak devastation.The number of new daily cases has more than doubled since mid-February, an AFP tally showed, in an explosion in infections blamed in part on a new COVID-19 variant but also on failure to follow virus restrictions.The countries with the highest total number of cases are the United States

Fast-spreading coronavirus variants have ignited global concern over whether existing vaccines will be able to protect the world from a virus that is constantly mutating.Variants that have emerged in Britain, South Africa, Brazil and now India have all been the focus of fears of implications for the COVID-19 pandemic. Here's what we know.How Many Variants?Viruses continually mutate as tiny errors are introduced each time they replicate and cause new variants to appear.

The global COVID-19 death toll passed three million on Saturday as the pandemic speeds up despite vaccination campaigns, leading countries like India to impose new lockdowns to fight spiralling infection numbers. It is the latest grim milestone since the novel coronavirus first surfaced in central China in December 2019 and went on to infect more than 139 million people, leaving billions more under crippling lockdowns and ravaging the global economy.An average of more than 12,000 dea