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Eco/Invest/Demography

Difficult to predict if India will witness second wave of Covid-19:ICMR DG

“SARS-CoV-2 is a novel virus. There is still a lot we don’t know about it. We have also seen immense variations in the spread of infection and mortality rates in different geographies and across different demographics around the world. So, it is difficult to predict whether or not India will see a second wave of infections. There is also a wide variation in disease distribution in specific states – so one size cannot fit all,” ICMR chief Dr Balram Bhargava said.

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Anxious WHO implores world to ‘do it all’ in long war on COVID-19

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and WHO emergencies head Mike Ryan exhorted nations to rigorously enforce health measures such as mask-wearing, social distancing, hand-washing and testing.
“There are concerns that we may not have a vaccine that may work, or its protection could be for just a few months, not more. But until we finish the clinical trials, we will not know,” he said

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Virgin seeks to revive supersonic commercial flight — but faster

The aircraft’s draft design showed a plane with a triangular “delta wing” carrying between nine and 19 passengers at an altitude of more than 60,000 feet, or 18,000 meters — about twice as high as normal commercial flight.

The plane would take off and land at existing airport runways.

Virgin Galactic said its team would “work to address key challenges in thermal management, maintenance, noise, emissions, and economics that routine high speed commercial flights would entail.”

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COVID-19 long-term toll signals billions in healthcare costs ahead

Bruce Lee of the City University of New York (CUNY) Public School of Health estimated that if 20% of the U.S. population contracts the virus, the one-year post-hospitalization costs would be at least $50 billion, before factoring in longer-term care for lingering health problems. Without a vaccine, if 80% of the population became infected, that cost would balloon to $204 billion.

Some countries hit hard by the new coronavirus – including the United States, Britain and Italy – are considering whether these long-term effects can be considered a “post-COVID syndrome,” according to Reuters interviews with about a dozen doctors and health economists.

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AstraZeneca to be exempt from coronavirus vaccine liability claims in most countries

With 25 companies testing their vaccine candidates on humans and getting ready to immunize hundred millions of people once the products are shown to work, the question of who pays for any claims for damages in case of side effects has been a tricky point in supply negotiations.“This is a unique situation where we as a company simply cannot take the risk if in … four years the vaccine is showing side effects,” Ruud Dobber, a member of Astra’s senior executive team, told Reuters.

“In the contracts we have in place, we are asking for indemnification. For most countries it is acceptable to take that risk on their shoulders because it is in their national interest,” he said, adding that Astra and regulators were making safety and tolerability a top priority.

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Chinese artificial intelligence company files $1.4 bn lawsuit against Apple In patent fight

The company is calling for 10 billion yuan ($1.4 billion) in damages and demands that Apple cease “manufacturing, using, promising to sell, selling, and importing” products that infringe on the patent, it said in a social media post.In the lawsuit filed in a local Chinese court, Xiao-i argued that Apple’s voice-recognition technology Siri infringes on a patent that it applied for in 2004 and was granted in 2009.

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