UAE: 22,616 Covid vaccine doses administered in 24 hours

Dubai - The total doses administered now stand at 20.8 million

The UAE has administered 22,616 doses of the Covid-19 vaccine in the past 24 hours.

The country's Ministry of Health and Prevention (MoHAP) said the total doses administered now stand at 20.8 million.

This takes the rate of doses to 210.55 per 100 people.

Can new variants of the coronavirus keep emerging? Yes, as long as the virus, that caused the pandemic, keeps infecting people. But that doesn’t mean new variants will keep emerging as regularly, or that they’ll be more dangerous.

With more than half the world still not vaccinated, the virus will likely keep finding people to infect and replicating inside them for several months or years to come. And each time a virus makes a copy of itself, a small mutation could occur. Those changes could help the virus survive, becoming new variants.

But that doesn’t mean the virus will keep evolving in the same way since it emerged in late 2019.

Authorities in China cancelled hundreds of flights, closed schools and ramped up mass testing on Thursday to try and stamp out a new Covid-19 outbreak linked to a group of tourists.

Beijing has maintained a relentless zero-Covid approach with strict border closures and targeted lockdowns, even as other countries tentatively try to ease restrictions. Domestic outbreaks have largely been eliminated, but as China logged a fifth straight day of new cases — mostly in northern and northwestern areas — authorities beefed up coronavirus controls.