Health Alerts

It is almost six months to the day since the WHO declared a public health emergency (PHEIC) over COVID-19 and the global total has soared to more than 16.6 million with 657,686 deaths. Currently five countries in the Americas rank in the top 10 for confirmed cases (US, Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Chile) – Mexico has moved into second place after Brazil for overall case totals in Latin America. Outbreaks in India (ranking 3rd globally) and South Africa (#5) are accelerating. Read More

Authorities in Vietnam have announced the first cases of COVID-19 community transmission detected since April - 22 cases in the central resort city of Da Nang. Tourists in the area, most of whom are local, are being evacuated and social distancing precautions have been restored. While a major humanitarian network has urged Indonesians to ‘exercise greater caution’ as the country became ‘the hardest hit in South East Asia’. And in Hong Kong, a third wave of infections has led to a new swathe of public health measures to start today. News reports out of Papua New Guinea shed light on the local situation, saying on July 27 that ‘80% of PNG’s Covid cases have been recorded in the past 10 days’, amid shortages of PPE and concerns over the capacity to respond. More news in the latest CIDRAP summary and the July 28 WHO sitrep’.

In other related news, most members of an expert panel with the UN World Tourism Organization ‘expect international tourism to recover by the second half of 2021’. Read more