Hospitals

Five Bay Area counties, San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Santa Clara and the City of Berkeley, said Friday in a joint announcement that they will adopt the state's stay-at-home order ahead of the state mandate in hopes to curb the further spread of Covid-19 and numbers of hospitalizations.

"The virus is spreading rapidly throughout the city like never before. We need to move fast, keeping ahead of this virus as much as possible," so Dr Grant Colfax, San Francisco’s director of public health, during a news briefing Friday afternoon, warning that at the current rate San Francisco's hospitals will run out f hospital beds the day after Christmas.

All 876 beds certified by the Swiss Society for Intensive Medicine (SGI) for adults and thus recognized as intensive care beds in Switzerland are now occupied in the course of Covid-19 treatment - with this statement, the Society appealed on Tuesday to the public's sense of responsibility

Patients should consider whether they would like to have life-prolonging measures in the event of a serious illness as "this will help their own relatives as well as the teams of intensive care units in the decision-making process, so that treatment can take place in the best possible way and according to the individual patient's will,".

Switzerland has also updated its triage guidelines in order to assist medical professionals with the decision which patients to treat.

The FBI and two other federal agencies have warned that the US healthcare system is facing an “increased and imminent” threat of cyberattacks, including data theft and extortion attempts to lock up hospital information systems, and that there is "credible information of an increased and imminent cybercrime threat to US hospitals and healthcare providers."

"We are experiencing the most significant cyber security threat we’ve ever seen in the United States,” so Charles Carmakal, chief technical officer of the cybersecurity firm Mandiant.

A woman in Germany died during a ransomware attack on the Düsseldorf University Hospital, in what may be the first death directly linked to a cyberattack on a hospital. The hospital couldn’t accept emergency patients because of the attack, and the woman was sent to a health care facility around 20 miles away.

It could be the first death directly linked to a cybersecurity attack.

Zimbabwe is facing a shortage of health care workers, basic drugs and medical equipment. Medical staff reports of being overburdened, overworked and underpaid. Amid rising Coronavirus cases and health care crisis, the capital Harare reports seven stillbirths in one week.

On Saturday, 10107 new Coronavirus cases were reported in South Africa. This brings the total of Coronavirus cases of the country to over half a million, confirmed by health minister Zwelini Mkhize.

28000 additional hospital beds were made available but the country does not have enough doctors and medical staff.

France will spend €8 billion in pay rise to health care workers. This results in an average monthly pay increase of €183. The deal was signed by trade unions and both Prime Minister Jean Castex and Health Minister Olivier Véran. Castex called this deal a "historic moment for our health system".