South Sudan authorities have said the suspected cases of Ebola in the north-western region have tested negative. The ministry of health said the samples tested negative of Ebola and other forms of viral hemorrhagic fevers

The acting director for emergency preparedness and response, Dr Angelo Goup Thon, said samples collected from critically ill patients had returned negative and same test result had been sent to Uganda Virus Research Institute (UVRI) for toxicology analysis. Results are expected in two days.

Director-General for health preventive services, John Rumunu told reporters in the capital, Juba, that there is no Ebola virus in South Sudan and there is no reason to panic.

Last week, the health ministry received an alert from raja county in a western Bahr El-Ghazal state, after three persons died from an unknown disease in Timssa area, near Central African Republic (CAR).

The samples that tested negative were not of those who died from a yet to be established illness that sparked suspicions.

The head of emergencies at the World Health Organization (WHO) has on Monday said hundreds of millions of people may have already been infected with the new coronavirus, far more than the current tally of more than 35 million.

Mike Ryan, the WHO’s emergency operations chief, told the global health agency’s executive board on Monday “Our current best estimates tell us that about 10 percent of the global population may have been infected by this virus.”

Ryan said COVID-19 cases and deaths were surging across Europe, Southeast Asia and the eastern Mediterranean, while the situation in Africa and the Western Pacific “is currently rather more positive”.

India with more than 6.6 million COVID-19 cases has now crossed the grim milestone of 100,000 virus deaths, the third-highest in the world behind only the United States and Brazil.

On Monday, it registered a single-day spike of 74,442 new cases, while 903 virus deaths in the past 24 hours took the total fatalities up to 102,685.