The city government here will open this week intermediate care rooms at the East Central Integrated School quarantine facility in Barangay Mayombo that will cater to moderate and severe coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) cases. In a video message on Tuesday, Mayor Marc Brian Lim said the facility will provide oxygen support and intravenous fluid while patients wait to be accommodated in hospitals. The facility has six rooms with six beds each to raise the quarantine facility’s capacity to 114 beds. Volunteer doctors and nurses will man the step-up facility. The city has seven quarantine facilities, including the East Central School.

The World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Europe has called on health authorities to take urgent action to counter both an accelerated transmission of the coronavirus and a clear stagnation in vaccination rates across the region. “The high transmission is deeply worrying particularly in the light of low vaccination uptake in priority populations in a number of countries. Several countries are starting to observe an increased burden on hospitals and more deaths,” WHO Regional Director for Europe Hans Kluge said during an online press conference Monday. Kluge said alarm bells are already ringing in 33 of the 53 states

Residents of San Juan City’s 21 villages will receive the 17th wave of food packs this week from the local government. The relief items were repacked from donations of celebrities, entrepreneurs, non-governmental organizations, and other business companies that responded to the city’s call to help alleviate the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. “We are now preparing 45,000 food packs,” Mayor Francis Zamora posted on Facebook on Tuesday. The distribution will be conducted house-to-house to avoid crowding. Each food pack contains rice, noodles, canned goods, milk, coffee, energy drink, and other food items. “Bilang isang mayor, gusto ko sabihin ng bawat

Scientists in South Africa have sounded the alarm after detecting a new Covid-19 variant, known as C.1.2, in all nine provinces across the country, though at a relatively low rate. “While the C.1.2 lineage shares a few common mutations with the Beta and Delta variants, the new lineage has a number of additional mutations,” the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD), said in a statement late on Monday. The NICD revealed that the C.1.2 variant was first detected in the country in May 2021 and research into the lineage had been ongoing since then, drawing scientists’ attention as it had