Although the World Health Organization (WHO) acknowledged COVID-19 is spreading, they say it has not yet reached pandemic disease status. The statement did little to comfort the nerves of investors Feb. 24 as they exited global markets big time in the wake of an eruption of new infections in Italy, Iran and South Korea.

Paris-based Sanofi SA, responding to increasing medicine shortages and drugmakers' heavy reliance on active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) sourced from Asia, said it plans to create a major new API manufacturer headquartered in France.

LONDON – Six weeks on from the initial alert, “the window of opportunity” to control the COVID-19 epidemic is “narrowing,” according to the latest assessment from World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

BEIJING – Multiple China-based clinical trials have been put on hold as the country concentrates on its fight against COVID-19. To curb the spread of the novel coronavirus that has infected over 72,000 people and killed nearly 2,000, China has imposed travel and transport restrictions, making trips difficult or even impossible for patients and physicians.

SEATTLE – Tracing the family tree of COVID-19 through its evolving DNA sequence makes it possible to disprove many false claims circulating on social media about the novel coronavirus, and, in particular, that it was generated in a covert biological weapons program. “From everything I’ve looked at, there is zero evidence for genetic engineering; it looks like normal evolution,” said Trevor Bedford, a computational biologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, who has been using genomes sequences taken from patient samples to track the spread of the virus since Jan. 11.