Enlarge / WHO's COVID-19 technical lead, Maria Van Kerkhove, looks on during a press conference at the World Health Organization's headquarters in Geneva, on December 14, 2022. (credit: Getty | FABRICE COFFRINI )

While the World Health Organization says it's continuing to urge China to share data and cooperate with investigations into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the United Nations' health agency is calling out another country for lack of transparency—the United States.

WHO officials on Friday said that the US has not shared reports or data from federal agencies that have assessed how the COVID-19 pandemic began. That includes the latest report by the Department of Energy , which determined with "low confidence" that the pandemic likely began due to a laboratory accident.

"As of right now, we don't have access to those reports or the data that is underlying how those reports were generated," Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO's technical lead on COVID-19, said in a press briefing Friday. "Again, we reiterate, that any agency that has information on this, it remains vital that that information is shared so that scientific debate, that this discussion, can move forward. Without that, we are not able to move forward in our understanding."

Enlarge / A World Health Organisation (WHO) alert team takes out a body in Nganakamana village near Uige on April 26, 2005. In outbreaks of viral haemorrhagic fevers, including Marburg, unprotected exposure to dead bodies is a significant cause of further spread. (credit: Getty | Christopher Black )

Health officials are racing to stamp out a rare and concerning outbreak of the deadly Marburg virus in Equatorial Guinea, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.

The outbreak, first confirmed Monday , is the country's first ever from Marburg. The virus is a relative of Ebola and has similar transmission (via direct contact and bodily fluids), hemorrhagic disease symptoms, and alarmingly high fatality rates.

So far, there have been nine deaths linked to the outbreak, which stretches back to January. One of the deaths has been confirmed as being from Marburg virus disease, while eight others are considered suspected. They appear to be in the same transmission chain, but officials were unable to obtain samples to confirm the infections.

Enlarge / People queue for clean water on February 9, 2023, in Hatay, Turkey. (credit: Getty | Burak Kara )

Deaths from the massive earthquake and aftershocks that violently struck parts of southern Turkey and northern Syria in the early hours of Monday have now surpassed 20,000—a staggering toll of devastation.

As of Thursday, Turkey’s national emergency management agency reported more than 17,000 deaths, as well as over 70,000 injured. Syrian Ministry of Health, meanwhile, reported 1,347 deaths and 2,295 injured. Rescuers in rebel-held northwest areas of the country reported at least 2,030 deaths and at least 2,950 injured.

As heroic rescue crews continue sifting through the rubble of collapsed structures, concern is growing for those tens of thousands injured and countless others made more vulnerable by the crisis.

Enlarge / US President Joe Biden speaks to members of the media on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Monday, Jan. 30, 2023. (credit: Getty | Chris Kleponis/Bloomberg )

President Joe Biden plans to end two national emergency declarations over the COVID-19 pandemic on May 11, which will trigger a restructuring of the federal response to the deadly coronavirus and will end most federal support for COVID-19 vaccinations, testing, and hospital care.

The plan was revealed in a statement to Congress opposing House Republicans' efforts to end the emergency declarations immediately.

“An abrupt end to the emergency declarations would create wide-ranging chaos and uncertainty throughout the health care system—for states, for hospitals and doctors’ offices, and, most importantly, for tens of millions of Americans,” the Office of Management and Budget wrote in a Statement of Administration Policy.

Enlarge / World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. (credit: Getty | Fabrice Cof )

The World Health Organization on Monday renewed its declaration that the COVID-19 pandemic constitutes a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC)—the agency's highest level of alert—but acknowledged that the 3-year-old crisis may be nearing an "inflection point," after which the virus could be downgraded to a less dire but permanent fixture in the gamut of human pathogens.

On Friday, the agency convened its emergency committee for the 14th time to assess the global status of the pandemic coronavirus. The week marked the three-year anniversary of the agency's initial COVID-19 PHEIC declaration.

"As we enter the fourth year of the pandemic, we are certainly in a much better position now than we were a year ago, when the omicron wave was at its peak, and more than 70,000 deaths were being reported to WHO each week," WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in opening remarks to Friday's committee meeting.

Colorized scanning electron micrograph of Neisseria gonorrhoeae bacteria, which causes gonorrhea. (credit: NIAID )

The most highly drug-resistant cases of gonorrhea detected in the US to date appeared in two unrelated people in Massachusetts, state health officials announced Thursday.

The cases mark the first time that US isolates of the gonorrhea-causing bacterium, Neisseria gonorrhoeae , have shown complete resistance or reduced susceptibility to all drugs that are recommended for treatment.

Fortunately, both cases were successfully cured with potent injections of the antibiotic ceftriaxone, despite the bacterial isolates demonstrating reduced susceptibility to the drug. Ceftriaxone is currently the frontline recommended treatment for the sexually transmitted infection.

Enlarge / Passengers wearing face masks wait to board a high-speed railway train in Guangzhou South railway station on January 15, 2023, in Guangzhou, China. China is currently experiencing Spring Festival travel season, where millions of Chinese travel around the country before celebrating the Chinese or Lunar New Year. (credit: Getty | Vernon Yuen/NurPhoto )

China is now reporting that nearly 60,000 people had died of COVID-19 since early December when the country abruptly abandoned its zero-COVID policy and omicron subvariants began ripping through its population. The new death toll is a stark revision from China's previously reported figure for that period, which was just 37. But experts remain skeptical that the new, much larger tally is a complete accounting, and the World Health Organization continues to press the country to release more data.

In a Saturday press conference in Beijing, the Medical Administration Director of China's National Health Commission (NHC), Jiao Yahui, told reporters that the country recorded 59,938 COVID-related deaths between December 8 and January 12. Of those, 5,503 deaths were specifically linked to respiratory failure, and 54,435 were associated with underlying conditions, such as cancer and cardiovascular disease.

The new figures double the country's tally of COVID-19 deaths due specifically to COVID-19 respiratory failure, bringing the pandemic total to 10,775. Previously, those deaths—the ones due to COVID-19 respiratory failure or pneumonia—were the only deaths that China counted as caused by COVID-19, which drew criticism from WHO officials, who called the classification "too narrow."

Enlarge / A CDC COVID-19 variant testing site inside Tom Bradley International Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport on Monday. The airport testing is part of the government's early warning system for detecting new variants, which began expanding recently in the wake of a COVID-19 surge in China. (credit: Getty | Jill Connelly/Bloomberg )

Amid a winter wave of COVID-19 in the US, the latest coronavirus omicron subvariant, XBB.1.5, has grabbed headlines due to its swift rise, raising fears of another towering spike in the disease. But the spotlight is revealing more questions than answers in the early days of the subvariant, which has ominously been described as one of the most immune-evasive omicron subvariants to date.

Last week, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quietly downgraded estimates of its prevalence. As Ars and other outlets reported, the CDC previously estimated that XBB.1.5 accounted for 40.5 percent of COVID-19 cases throughout the country in the week ending on December 31, with the highest prevalence in the Northeast. But last Friday, the agency updated the estimates with a backlog of sequencing data from over the holidays, which indicated XBB.1.5 accounted for 18 percent of cases nationwide that week—not 40.5 percent. Currently, the CDC estimates that XBB.1.5 accounted for 27.6 percent of cases nationwide in the week ending on January 7. But the 95 percent prediction interval is wide, spanning 14 percent to 46.5 percent).

The updated estimate still indicates that the variant, first detected in New York in October, is on the rise. But the uncertainty throws a wrench in estimates of its transmission advantage over other omicron subvarianty, BQ.1.1 is still the most prevalent omicron subvariant, accounting for an estimated 34 percent of cases in the US.

Enlarge / An elderly female patient with COVID-19 is treated at No. 2 People's Hospital of Fuyang City in China. (credit: Getty | Sheldon Cooper/SOPA Images/LightRocke )

With China's zero-COVID policy abruptly scrapped last month, the pandemic virus is now ripping through the country's population, and health experts are bracing for a wave of devastation as peak transmission shifts from urban centers to more vulnerable rural communities. The dire situation is expected to be "dramatically enhanced" by mass travel later this month for celebrations of the Lunar New Year on January 22.

Multiple modeling studies have suggested that China could see around 1 million deaths in the coming weeks as the country reopens amid a raging outbreak. Last month, modeling by The Economist estimated that 96 percent of China's 1.4 billion people could catch the virus within the next three months, resulting in 1.5 million deaths . Of those deaths, 90 percent would be among people aged 60 and over.  Another modeling study, partly funded by China's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also estimated that 957,600 would die in the coming weeks if the country doesn't swiftly roll out fourth-dose COVID-19 vaccines.

Because China was previously able to keep COVID-19 waves at bay with its zero-tolerance policies, most of the country's immune protection derives from vaccination rather than prior infection or hybrid protection. Around 90 percent of China's population has had two shots of COVID-19 vaccines, but fewer than 60 percent have received a third shot as a booster dose. And even for those who have gotten a third dose, many of those doses were taken months ago, and peak protection has passed. Vaccination coverage among the elderly is particularly worrying. About 30 percent of people aged 60 and over have not gotten a third dose, and for people aged 80 and over, a startling 60 percent have not gotten a third dose.