The novel coronavirus has been detected in one of the camps in southern Bangladesh that are home to more than one million Rohingya refugees, officials have said.
An ethnic Rohingya refugee and another person had tested positive for COVID-19, a senior Bangladeshi official and a UN spokeswoman said. It was the first confirmed case in the camps, which are more densely populated than most crowded cities on earth.
“Today they have been taken to an isolation centre after they tested positive,” Mahbub Alam Talukder, the Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner, told Reuters news agency by phone.
The other patient was from the “host population”, a term usually used to refer to locals living outside the camps, the UN spokeswoman said.
The Ethiopian Herald May 15/2020
Europe halts delivery of 10 million ‘poor quality’ Chinese masks
The European Commission said on Thursday it has suspended the delivery of 10 million Chinese masks to member states and the United Kingdom after two countries complained about the poor quality of the batches they received.
After the first batch of 1.5 million masks was shipped to 17 of the 27 member states and the UK, Poland’s Health Minister Lukasz Szumowski said the 600,000 items Polish authorities received did not have European certificates and failed to comply with the medical standards required for their distribution.
“We have decided to suspend future deliveries of these masks,” Commission health spokesman Stefan De Keersmaecker said. “We will then see what action needs to be taken if there is indeed a quality problem with these masks.”
The Ethiopian Herald May 15/2020
Antibody test approval is an ‘important breakthrough’: UK PM spokesman
Britain’s approval of a COVID-19 antibody test is an “important breakthrough” and might lead to Britons being able to use health certificates if antibodies are present, a spokesman for Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said.
The antibody tests – also known as serology tests – show who has been infected, although it is not yet clear whether the presence of antibodies to the new coronavirus confers permanent immunity.
“We’ve talked about in the future the potential for some kind of health certificate related to whether or not you have antibodies but we need a better understanding of the immune system response to the virus and the length and level of immunity following infection to better understand the potential of the test,” the spokesman told reporters.
The Ethiopian Herald May 15/2020
