Netanyahu tries to soothe a rift with Biden as he plans to send a government delegation to Washington after earlier cancelling the trip
The UAE Ministry of Health and Prevention on Wednesday reported 427 cases of the Covid-19 coronavirus, along with 388 recoveries and 1 death.
Total active cases stand at 18,149.
The new cases were detected through 213,994 additional tests.
The total number of cases in UAE as on September 7 are 1,018,381, while total recoveries stand at 997,890. The death toll now stands at 2,342.
The United States is likely to start recommending Covid-19 vaccines annually, health officials said on Tuesday, as new boosters designed to fight currently circulating variants of the coronavirus roll out.
By the end of this week, 90 per cent of Americans will live within 8 km of sites carrying updated vaccines, US health secretary Xavier Becerra said at a White House briefing.
Officials said people could get the new boosters this fall or winter, alongside their regular annual flu shots.
President Joe Biden said separately in a statement that for most Americans, "that means one Covid-19 shot, once a year, each fall."
White House Covid-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha said in the briefing that for "a large majority of Americans, we are moving to a point where a single annual Covid shot should provide a high degree of protection against serious illness all year. That's an important milestone."
US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky said that even with the seven-day average of Covid hospitalisations down by 14 per cent to 4,500 per day, annual shots could save thousands of lives.
"Modeling projections show that an uptake of updated Covid-19 vaccine doses similar to an annual flu vaccine coverage early this fall could prevent as many as 100,000 hospitalisations and 9,000 deaths, and save billions of dollars in direct medical costs," she said.
Speaking about how long Covid-19 will be around, Jha said the virus will likely be with us for the rest of our lives.
Experts expect Covid-19 will someday become endemic, meaning it occurs regularly in certain areas according to established patterns. But they don’t think that will be very soon.
Still, living with Covid "should not necessarily be a scary or bad concept,” since people are getting better at fighting it, Jha said during a recent question-and-answer session with US Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. "Obviously if we take our foot off the gas — if we stop updating our vaccines, we stop getting new treatments — then we could slip backwards.”
Experts say Covid will keep causing serious illness in some people. The Covid-19 Scenario Modeling Hub made some pandemic projections spanning August 2022 to May 2023, assuming the new tweaked boosters adding protection for the newest omicron relatives would be available and a booster campaign would take place in fall and winter. In the most pessimistic scenario — a new variant and late boosters — they projected 1.3 million hospitalizations and 181,000 deaths during that period. In the most optimistic scenario — no new variant and early boosters — they projected a little more than half the number of hospitalizations and 111,000 deaths.
Eric Topol, head of Scripps Research Translational Institute, said the world is likely to keep seeing repetitive surges until “we do the things we have to do,” such as developing next generation vaccines and rolling them out equitably.
Topol said the virus “just has too many ways to work around our current strategies, and it’ll just keep finding people, finding them again, and self-perpetuating."
Netanyahu tries to soothe a rift with Biden as he plans to send a government delegation to Washington after earlier cancelling the trip
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