Coronavirus live news: WHO warns Covid ‘not tired of us’ as top UK scientist says

The US Food and Drug Administration on Monday authorised emergency use of Eli Lilly and Co’s experimental Covid-19 antibody treatment for non-hospitalised patients older than 65 or who have certain chronic medical conditions.

The FDA said its emergency use authorisation (EUA) was based on clinical trials showing that the treatment, bamlanivimab, reduced the need for hospitalisation or emergency room visits in COVID-19 patients at high risk of disease progression.

It can now be used for treating mild-to-moderate COVID-19 in adults and pediatric patients over the age of 12, the FDA said.

The antibody is not authorised for patients who are hospitalised due to Covid-19 or require oxygen therapy due to Covid-19. The FDA said the drug, which U.S. President Donald Trump has praised, had not been shown to benefit such patients and could worsen their clinical status.

A US government-sponsored study of the treatment in hospitalised Covid-19 patients was recently abandoned because the treatment was not shown to be helping.

It was supposed to be a scene of celebration.

Instead, the Trump campaign’s election night watch party held in the White House East Room – with few masks and no social distancing – is being eyed as a potential coronavirus super-spreading event and yet another symbol of Donald Trump’s cavalier attitude toward a virus that is infecting more than 100,000 Americans a day.

Ben Carson, the secretary for housing and urban development, is the latest attendee to test positive, a department spokesman confirmed. The event has been under scrutiny since another attendee, the president’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, contracted the virus, which has now killed more than 237,000 people in the US alone.

Carson’s deputy chief of staff, Coalter Baker, said the secretary “is in good spirits” and “feels fortunate to have access to effective therapeutics which aid and markedly speed his recovery”.

The latest White House cluster comes just a month after Trump’s own diagnosis and hospitalization, and two weeks after several aides to the vice-president, Mike Pence, including his chief of staff, tested positive for the virus.

And it is not the first potential super-spreader event to take place at the White House – a crowded Rose Garden ceremony, at which Trump announced the supreme court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, also came under scrutiny in October after at least seven attendees tested positive:

Noticeably absent from this week’s resumed World Health Assembly (WHA) was Taiwan, which said Chinese “obstruction” had prevented it from attending and accused the WHO of prioritising politics over health, AFP reports.

The self-ruled island of 23 million has seen remarkable success in combating the pandemic – with only seven deaths and fewer than 600 confirmed cases.

But it is frozen out of the WHO by Beijing, which regards Taiwan as its own territory – not even allowed…