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A World Health Organization official on Tuesday expressed concern about reduced testing and surveillance of the coronavirus in countries around the world, saying monitoring remains critical. “We need to be strategic about this, but we cannot abandon it,” said WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove during an online question-and-answer session. “And what we do not want to see is the dismantling of these surveillance systems that have been put in place for covid-19.” (Cheng, Timsit and Shammas, 2/22)

The number of new coronavirus cases around the world fell 21% in the last week, marking the third consecutive week that COVID-19 cases have dropped, the World Health Organization said Tuesday. In the U.N. health agency’s weekly pandemic report, WHO said there were more than 12 million new coronavirus infections last week. The number of new COVID-19 deaths fell 8% to about 67,000 worldwide, the first time that weekly deaths have fallen since early January. (2/22)

The Omicron BA.2 sub-variant should continue to be considered a variant of concern (VOC) and remain classed as part of the Omicron family of variants, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said.BA.2 has been the subject of interest and concern after it started spreading rapidly in some countries earlier this year, despite of the wider Omicron wave. (Browne, 2/23)

The global project to share COVID-19 vaccines is struggling to place more than 300 million doses in the latest sign the problem with vaccinating the world is now more about demand than supply. Last year, wealthy nations snapped most of the available shots to inoculate their own citizens first, meaning less than a third of people in low-income countries have been vaccinated so far compared with more than 70% in richer nations. As supply and donations have ramped up, however, poorer nations are facing hurdles such as gaps in cold-chain shortage, vaccine hesitancy and a lack of money to support distribution networks, public health officials told Reuters. (Guarascio and Rigby, 2/23)

The Africa CDC will ask that all Covid-19 vaccine donations be paused until the third or fourth quarter of this year, the director of the agency told POLITICO. John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, said the primary challenge for vaccinating the continent is no longer supply shortages but logistics challenges and vaccine hesitancy — leading the agency and the African Vaccine Acquisition Trust to seek the delay. (Payne, 2/22)

Moderna Inc. has signed a deal with a Uruguayan pharmaceutical company in a bid to expand its reach across Latin America. The Covid-19 vaccine maker announced the distribution deal Tuesday with Adium Pharma SA to market the shots in 18 countries in the region including Brazil and Mexico. The shots will be supplied from Moderna’s plants in the U.S. and Europe, said Roman Saglio, head of commercial alliances for Latin America. (Navarro, 2/22)

The government has said that it is ending the remainder of virus restrictions to help the country shift to more of an approach of living with the virus. But some critics say the move is premature and overlooks those who are most clinically vulnerable, especially the hundreds of thousands who are immunocompromised. In the United States, many immunocompromised and higher-risk people have also felt left behind by the flurry of lifted restrictions. “What happened yesterday has been very concerning for the people we work with,” said Gemma Peters, the chief executive of Blood Cancer UK, a charity that funds research into blood cancer. (Bubola, 2/22)

While at-home COVID-19 tests are considered safe and effective when used properly, a chemical found in some popular kits is leading to an increase in calls to poison control centers. Sodium azide is potentially deadly in large amounts, but only small quantities are present in testing kits — enough to cause low blood pressure, heart palpitations, headache and dizziness if ingested, or burning and irritation to exposed skin, experts say. (Willetts, 2/22)