The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) reported 1,303 new infections of COVID-19 Wednesday.
In a Twitter update via its verified handle, the government agency said there are now 126,160 confirmed cases of the disease caused by the novel coronavirus in Nigeria.
A total of 100,365 people it stated, have so far been discharged from hospital, while the number of deaths so far is 1,544.
As of Wednesday, more than 100.5 million cases of COVID-19 had been reported worldwide, with more than 55.6 million of the cases considered recovered or resolved, according to a tracking tool maintained by Johns Hopkins University. The global death toll stood at more than 2.1 million.
South Africa, according to the CBC, has approved AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use and is reviewing applications by rival manufacturers Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer, the medicines regulator said on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, AlJazeera reports that the head of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) has said more than one million people in the Americas have now died from complications due to COVID-19.
As many as 90,000 Americans are projected to die from the coronavirus in the next four weeks, the Biden administration has warned in its first science briefing on the pandemic.
The United Kingdom’s official coronavirus death toll has passed 100,000, as UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced hotel quarantines on international travellers to stop new virus variants from reaching the country.
Australia’s Lowy Institute has found New Zealand, Vietnam and Taiwan mounted the best response to the pandemic in the 36 weeks after reaching 100 confirmed cases of the virus.
New Zealand scored 94.4 to top the think tank’s performance ranking, followed by Vietnam on 90.8 and Taiwan with 86.4. Brazil was at the bottom of the ranking, with the United States fifth from bottom.
China was not included “due to a lack of publicly available data on testing,” the think tank said. It evaluated 98 countries and territories.
Vietnam’s health ministry has announced the country’s first two locally transmitted COVID-19 cases for nearly two months.
The two patients are a worker at Van Don international airport who was responsible for taking passengers arriving from abroad and diagnosed with COVID-19 to quarantine facilities, and a factory worker who had contact with a Vietnamese who tested positive on Wednesday for the UK variant after arriving in Japan.