(MENAFN- Khaleej Times)
Published: Thu 19 May 2022, 1:55 PM
Last updated: Thu 19 May 2022, 2:01 PM
The UAE Ministry of Health and Prevention on Thursday reported 349 cases of the Covid-19 coronavirus, along with 391 recoveries and no deaths.
Total active cases stand at 13,883.
The new cases were detected through 242,793 additional tests.
The total number of cases in UAE as on May 19 are 903,731, while total recoveries stand at 887,546. The death toll now stands at 2,302.
North Korea on Thursday reported 262,270 more cases of people with suspected symptoms of Covid-19 as its pandemic caseload neared 2 million — a week after the country acknowledged the outbreak and scrambled to slow the rate of infections despite a lack of health care resources.
The country is also trying to prevent its fragile economy from deteriorating, but the outbreak could be worse than officially reported because of scarce resources for virus testing and the possibility that North Korea could be deliberately underreporting deaths to soften the political impact on authoritarian leader Kim Jong Un.
North Korea's anti-virus headquarters reported a single death in the 24 hours to 6pm Wednesday to bring its death toll to 63, which experts have said is abnormally small compared to the suspected number of infections.
The official Korean Central News Agency reported that more than 1.98 million people have become sick with feverish symptoms since late April, which are mostly believed to be coronavirus Omicron variant infections, although the country has only confirmed a small number of infection cases because of the scarcity of tests. At least 740,160 people are in quarantine, the news agency reported.
Meanwhile, the world is no better prepared for a new pandemic than it was when coronavirus emerged in 2019 and may actually be in a worse place given the economic toll, according to a panel set up by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to evaluate the global response.
A lack of progress on reforms such as international health regulations means the world is as vulnerable as ever , the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response said in its report.
The authors, led by former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark and former president of Liberia Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, acknowledged some progress , including on more robust funding for the WHO, but said the process was going far too slowly.
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