Daily COVID Tracker: Nigeria records zero death, and China to combine vaccines

China is considering mixing its COVID-19 vaccines to boost their efficacy. Here are five updates about the pandemic this Monday.

India bans exports of remdesivir as COVID-19 cases surge

India on Sunday banned the export of remdesivir, an antiviral drug used in treating COVID-19.

The country has witnessed a surge in the number of daily COVID-19 cases.

The government was said to have taken the move amid a sudden spike in demand for the injection.

“In light of the above, Government of India has prohibited the exports of Injection Remdesivir and Remdesivir Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API) till the situation improves,” Indian ministry of health said in a statement.

Nigeria records 57 fresh COVID infections

The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) says the country recorded 57 new cases of COVID-19 across seven states on Sunday.

This brings the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases to 163,793.

The federal capital territory (FCT) recorded 20 infections to top the list of states with positive samples, followed by Lagos with 19 and Bayelsa with 7.

Other states with fresh infections are Kaduna (4), Rivers (3), Osun (3) and Jigawa (1).

The agency said nine patients were discharged on Sunday after recovering from the virus, raising the total recovery count to 154,107.

No new death was reported on Sunday.

In Nigeria, a total of 2,060 persons have died of COVID complications.

Organisers of Tokyo Olympic plans 300 hotel rooms for athletes with COVID-19

The organising committee for the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics is planning plans to prepare 300 hotel rooms for athletes who test positive for COVID-19 but show no or minor symptoms, according to Kyodo news agency.

Citing several sources, the news outlet said athletes and Olympic staff members who do not need to be hospitalised will be quarantined in hotel rooms for 10 days in principle.

It added that the committee also plans to prepare up to 30 special vehicles, designed to protect drivers from infection, to transport COVID-19 patients to the hotel.

South African COVID-19 variant can evade protection from Pfizer vaccine

The South African COVID-19 variant can evade the protection provided by Pfizer/BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine to some extent, according to a study by Tel Aviv University and Clalit, Israel’s largest healthcare provider.

The study which was released on Saturday, compared about 400 people who had tested positive for COVID-19, 14 days or more after they received one or two doses of the vaccine, against the same number of unvaccinated patients with the virus.

“We found a disproportionately higher rate of the South African variant among people vaccinated with a second dose, compared to the unvaccinated group. This means that the South African variant is able, to some extent, to break through the vaccine’s protection,” the researchers said.

The researchers, however, cautioned that the study was conducted on a small sample size of people infected with the South African variant because of its rarity in Israel.

China to mix COVID-19 vaccines to boost efficacy

In what has been described as a rare admission, Gao Fu, director of China Centers for Disease Control, has reportedly said the country’s COVID-19 vaccines are weak and the government is considering mixing them to boost its efficacy.

China is said to have distributed millions of its COVID-19 doses abroad.

Gao was quoted as saying in a press conference on Saturday that Chinese vaccines “don’t have very high protection rates”.

“It’s now under formal consideration whether we should use different vaccines from different technical lines for the immunisation process,” Gao added.

The efficacy rate of the COVID-19 vaccine from Sinovac, a Chinese developer, has been found to be 50.4 percent by researchers in Brazil. But in comparison, Pfizer-BioNTech has been found to be 97 percent effective.

COVID-19 IN Nigeria