BEIJING, FEBRUARY 18 (Xinhua) – The following are the updates on the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.
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MOSCOW – Russia registered 13,447 more COVID-19 cases in the last 24 hours, up from 12,828 a day earlier, the country’s COVID-19 response center said on Thursday.
The national number has thus increased to 4,125,598 with 81,926 deaths and 3,661,312 recoveries, the center said.
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KUALA LUMPUR – Malaysia reported 2,712 new COVID-19 infections, the Ministry of Health said on Thursday, bringing the national total to 274,875.
The director general of the Ministry of Health, Noor Hisham Abdullah, said in a press release that four of the new cases are being imported and 2,708 are local transfers.
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KABUL – Afghanistan’s Ministry of Public Health reported 18 new COVID-19 cases on Thursday, increasing the total nationwide infections to 55,575, including 4,347 active cases.
The ministry said in a statement that 2029 COVID-19 tests were conducted across the country in the last day.
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ADDIS ABABA – A total of 3,783,214 cases of COVID-19 have been reported on the African continent as of Thursday morning, says the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC).
At the same time, the number of deaths related to the pandemic in Africa rose to 99,840, says the Africa CDC, adding that a total of 3,332,632 COVID-19 patients have recovered.
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KATHMANDU – Nepal has approved the COVID-19 vaccine developed by China’s Beijing Institute of Biological Products Co. Ltd, under Sinopharm, for emergency use in Nepal, says the country’s drug authority.
It is the second COVID-19 vaccine to receive approval from the Department of Drug Administration, the Nepalese Medicines Agency, after the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and the pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca received such approval a month ago.
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STOCKHOLM – Sweden is planning for its mass vaccination under the sign that mutated strains of COVID-19 are spreading across the country, local media reported on Thursday.
“We hope to be able to start this on a certain scale from April onwards,” says Magnus Thyberg, vaccine coordinator in the capital region of Stockholm, to Swedish TV on Thursday.
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TEHRAN – Iranian authorities announced that they will close borders with Iraq in the southwestern province of Khuzestan due to the transmission risks with a new variant of COVID-19, the Iranian student news agency reported on Thursday.
“As of Saturday, Iran will close its borders to Shalamcheh and Chazzabeh for a week for passenger entry,” Khuzestan province governor Qassem Soleimani Dashtaki was quoted as saying.
Source: sn.dk