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Nepal battles worst forest fires in years as air quality drops

A senior official of Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority said that wildfires were burning in at least 60 places across 22 of Nepal’s 77 administrative districts. 
The air quality index (AQI) in Kathmandu was at an unhealthy level of 174 on Friday, according to data published on iqair.com, a site that monitors air quality. An AQI level below 50 is considered good.

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Mutants, sluggish vaccine drive, carelessness: Add them and you get Covid surge, say top scientists.

“A new double mutant has emerged in India and is reported in 15-20 per cent of cases analysed from Maharashtra. If this percentage goes up further, it would be a clear indication of its role in the Maharashtra surge,” said the virologist.

In India, variants first identified in the UK, South Africa and Brazil have been found.

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Covid-19 vaccine shortages hit 60 poor countries in ‘shocking imbalance’

On Friday, the head of the World Health Organization slammed the “shocking imbalance” in global COVID-19 vaccination. WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysus said that while one in four people in rich countries had received a vaccine, only one in 500 people in poorer countries had gotten a dose

The vaccine shortage stems mostly from India’s decision to stop exporting vaccines from its Serum Institute factory, which produces the overwhelming majority of the AstraZeneca doses that COVAX counted on to supply around a third of the global population at a time coronavirus is spiking worldwide.

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Richer countries administer most of world’s vaccinations

As of Thursday, 40 per cent of the Covid-19 vaccines administered globally have gone to people in 27 wealthy nations that represent 11 per cent of the global population.

Countries making up the least-wealthy 11 per cent have gotten just 1.6 per cent of Covid-19 vaccines administered so far, according to an analysis of data collected by the Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker.

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