Coronavirus: UAE reports 1,032 Covid-19 cases, 965 recoveries, no deaths

The UAE Ministry of Health and Prevention on Tuesday reported 1,032 cases of the Covid-19 coronavirus, along with 965 recoveries and no deaths.

Over 177.7 million PCR tests have been conducted in the country so far.

Total active cases stand at 18,627.

The new cases were detected through 206,905 additional tests.

The total number of cases in UAE as on August 2 are 993,684, while total recoveries stand at 972,722. The death toll now stands at 2,335.

Spiez Laboratory, known for its detective work on chemical, biological and nuclear threats since World War Two, was tasked last year by the World Health Organization to be the first in a global network of high-security laboratories that will grow, store and share newly discovered microbes that could unleash the next pandemic.

The WHO's BioHub programme was, in part, born of frustration over the hurdles researchers faced in getting samples of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, first detected in China, to understand its dangers and develop tools to fight it.

But just over a year later, scientists involved in the effort have encountered hurdles.

These include securing guarantees needed to accept coronavirus variant samples from several countries, the first phase of the project. Some of the world's biggest countries might not cooperate. And there is no mechanism yet to share samples for developing vaccines, treatments or tests without running afoul of intellectual property protections.

"If we have another pandemic like coronavirus, the goal would be it stays wherever it starts," Isabel Hunger-Glaser, head of the BioHub project at Spiez, told Reuters in a rare media interview at the lab. Hence the need to get samples to the hub so it can help scientists worldwide assess the risk.

"We have realised it's much more difficult" than we had thought, she said.

Meanwhile, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared that the rapidly spreading monkeypox outbreak constitutes a global health emergency.

First identified in monkeys, the virus is transmitted chiefly through close contact with an infected person. Until this year, the viral disease has rarely spread outside Africa where it is endemic.

But reports of a handful of cases in the United Kingdom in early May signalled that the outbreak had moved into Europe.

Monkeypox is a virus than typically causes mild symptoms including fever, aches and pus-filled skin lesions. People tend to recover within two to four weeks, according to the WHO.

It is not as easily transmitted as the SARS-CoV-2 virus that spurred the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Covid is spread by respiratory route and is highly infectious. This doesn’t appear to be the case with the monkeypox,” said Dr Martin Hirsch of Massachusetts General Hospital.

The risk of monkeypox is moderate globally, except in the Europe, where the WHO has deemed the risk as high.