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BEIJING: Multiple Chinese cities are adopting fresh COVID-19 curbs, from business halts to lockdowns, to rein in new infections, with the commercial hub of Shanghai bracing for another mass testing campaign after detecting the BA.5 omicron subvariant.
As China sticks to its “dynamic zero-COVID” policy of promptly stamping out all outbreaks, the strict curbs by local governments come despite low caseloads, at a time when much of the world co-exists with the virus.
The central government has said curbs must be as targeted as possible to reduce damage to the world’s No. 2 economy, after this year’s major disruptions clogged global supply chains and hit international trade.
The highly-transmissible BA.5, which is driving outbreaks in many countries outside China, has shown signs of greater ability to escape vaccine-triggered antibody reactions than some other omicron subvariants, health officials have said.
The discovery of one such infection in Shanghai raises the stakes of quickly limiting a nascent outbreak to avert more disruptive measures similar to the lockdown in April and May that roiled the global economy and markets.
China’s yuan currency eased against the dollar, with stocks weaker as well.
Data from China, including June trade figures on Wednesday and last month’s retail sales, industrial output and the April-June gross domestic product numbers on Friday, are likely to confirm the economy slowed down sharply in the second quarter amid coronavirus lockdowns in Shanghai and elsewhere.
Shanghai, China’s most populous city of 25 million, has told people in several districts to get tested twice in another round of mass screening from Tuesday to Thursday, similar to last week’s.
Its residents are already testing every few days to secure access to various locations and public transport.
Authorities, and some investors, hope such relentless testing will uncover infections early enough to keep them in check.
The risk of a prolonged major city lockdown had been reduced with early controls, UBS Global Wealth Management said.
“We expect COVID restrictions, mainly in the form of rolling mini-lockdowns for the rest of the year, which would be less disruptive to production or supply chains, along with the gradual rollout of more supportive policies,” it said in a note.
Daily counts of locally transmitted infections in Shanghai increased to several dozens since July 5, up from single digits earlier this month, but are still tiny by global standards.
Most of its recent cases have been among those already in quarantine.
Mainland China reported 352 new domestically transmitted COVID infections on July 10, 46 of these symptomatic and 306 asymptomatic, the National Health Commission said on Monday.
In the central province of Henan, the town of Qinyang has almost completely locked down its nearly 700,000 residents from Sunday, with one person from each household allowed out every two days to get groceries.
In some areas, people have been told not to leave home at all.
Four major districts in the northwestern city of Lanzhou, in Gansu province, and the southern cities of Danzhou and Haikou in Hainan province, are under temporary curbs for several days, with entertainment and cultural spaces shut.
About 6 million people in the three cities are affected by the rules.
The city of Nanchang in southern Jiangxi province, with 6.3 million residents, shut some entertainment venues on Saturday, although the duration of the curbs was not specified.
In the northwestern province of Qinghai, the city of Xining kicked off a mass testing campaign on Monday after one person tested positive on Sunday.
Several major districts in the southern metropolis of Guangzhou also began mass tests on Monday.
WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday denounced a new three-year sentence imposed on Myanmar’s ousted elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi and urged further pressure on the country’s junta. “We strongly condemn the Burma military regime’s unjust sentencing of Aung San Suu Kyi to three more years of prison, including hard labor,” Blinken said, using Myanmar’s former name. “We must work together to hold the regime accountable for its escalating violence and repression of democratically elected leaders in Burma.” The latest sentence, handed down behind closed doors, takes the total jail time the Nobel laureate and democracy figurehead is facing to two decades. The new sentence was over purported electoral fraud in 2020 polls that her party won by a landslide. The military deposed and detained her the following February, and has piled on a series of charges including corruption that her supporters say are trumped up. The United States and other Western nations have imposed a series of sanctions on Myanmar’s junta since the coup — but to little avail. The United States pledged further action after the junta executed four democracy activists in July, but has held back from the key step of sanctions on its oil and gas industry amid opposition from Thailand, which imports energy from its neighbor.
COCOA BEACH, United States: Up to 400,000 visitors are expected to flock to the Florida coast on Saturday, hoping to catch a glimpse — and hear the roar — of NASA’s rocket launch to the Moon. If the uncrewed Space Launch System (SLS) lifts off successfully, it will be not only awe-inspiring but historic for NASA, marking the first of its Artemis missions plotting a return to the Moon. The Kennedy Space Center will be closed to the public, but spectators on local beaches will be able to see the most powerful vehicle that NASA has ever launched climb into the sky. “I remember being a little kid and some of the (Apollo) lunar landings,” Alberto Tirado told AFP on Cocoa Beach, the day before the rocket’s scheduled launch. “So I want to feel that power and what they felt in the 1960s.”
On Monday, when a first launch attempt had to be scuttled at the last moment due to technical issues, local Brevard County authorities had expected between 100,000 and 200,000 visitors. Don Walker, the county’s communications director, says that though Monday’s numbers have yet to be finalized, they estimate “double that amount on Saturday.” “We are ‘guesstimating’ the launch viewing crowd to number between 200,000 to 400,000 people,” Walker told AFP. For comparison, SpaceX’s first manned launch in 2020 — amid the pandemic — drew 220,000 people. The fact that the launch is scheduled for a weekend, with Monday also a US holiday, means that the crowd is likely to be much larger, said Meagan Happel with the Space Coast Office of Tourism. As on Monday, traffic is expected to get heavy “three to four hours” before the launch, Happel told AFP. Liftoff is currently scheduled for 2:17 p.m. (18:17 GMT) on Saturday, with the potential for up to a two-hour delay if necessary. Hotels along the coast have been fully booked for several weeks, and there are only a limited number of parking spaces near the best viewpoints. Artemis 1 is a test flight without any astronauts on board. The Orion capsule, after separating from the SLS rocket, will spend about six weeks in space and travel at one point nearly 40,000 miles (64,000 km) past the Moon — farther than any human-grade vehicle has ever gone. It is the Orion that will then take future astronauts back to the Moon — including the first woman and the first person color to walk on its surface — in 2025 at the earliest.
CHICAGO: The World Health Organization is monitoring a cluster of 10 cases of pneumonia from an unknown cause in Argentina in an outbreak that so far has included three deaths. The cases are linked to a single private clinic in the city of San Miguel de Tucumán, located in the northwest part of the country, according to the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the regional office of the WHO. An initial report on Tuesday included five healthcare workers and a patient who was treated in the intensive care ward of the clinic, with symptoms emerging between Aug. 18-22. On Thursday, local health officials reported another three cases, bringing the total to 9, including three deaths. All three people who died had other health conditions. On Friday, Argentina reported an additional case. Symptoms have included fever, muscle and abdominal pain and shortness of breath. Several patients had pneumonia in both lungs. Tests for known respiratory viruses and other viral, bacterial and fungal agents were all negative, PAHO said. Biological samples have been sent to Argentina's National Administration of Laboratories and Health Institutes for additional testing, which will include an analysis for the presence of toxins. Dr. Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota, said given that the lungs are heavily involved, the cause is likely something the patients inhaled. He first suspected Legionnaires' disease, which is caused by inhaling droplets of water containing Legionella bacteria, but tests have ruled that out. PAHO and the WHO are monitoring the outbreak and assisting local health officials with the investigation. Osterholm said "mystery illnesses" do sometimes happen, and most often they can be explained by some local outbreak that does not have pandemic implications. Osterholm said he expects more definitive information from Argentine health officials in the next five to seven days.
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka: Sri Lanka’s former president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who fled the country in July after tens of thousands of protesters stormed his home and office in a display of anger over the country’s economic crisis, has returned to the country after seven weeks. Rajapaksa flew into Colombo’s Bandaranaike international airport around midnight Friday from Bangkok via Singapore. On being welcomed by lawmakers in his party, Rajapaksa left the airport in a motorcade heavily guarded by armed soldiers and reached a government-owned house allocated to him as a former president, at the center of the capital, Colombo. On July 13, the ousted leader, his wife and two bodyguards left aboard an air force plane for the Maldives, before traveling to Singapore from where he officially resigned. He flew to Thailand two weeks later. Rajapaksa has no court case or arrest warrant pending against him. The only court case he was facing for alleged corruption during his time as the secretary to the ministry of defense under his older brother’s presidency was withdrawn when he was elected president in 2019 because of constitutional immunity. For months, Sri Lanka has been in the grips of its worst economic crisis, which triggered extraordinary protests and unprecedented public rage that ultimately forced Rajapaksa and his brother, the former prime minister, to step down. The situation in the bankrupt country was made worse by global factors like the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but many hold the once-powerful Rajapaksa family as responsible for severely mismanaging the economy and tipping it into crisis. The economic meltdown has seen monthslong shortages of essentials such as fuel, medicine and cooking gas due to a severe shortage of foreign currency. Though cooking gas supplies were restored through World Bank support, shortages of fuel, critical medicines and some food items continue. The island nation has suspended repayment of nearly $7 billion in foreign debt due this year. The country’s total foreign debt amounts to more than $51 billion, of which $28 billion has to be repaid by 2027. On Tuesday, President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who took over after Rajapaksa resigned, and his administration reached a preliminary agreement with the International Monetary Fund for a $2.9 billion bailout package over four years to help the country recover. Rajapaksa, a former military officer, was elected on promises to uplift the country’s economy and ensure national security after Islamic State-inspired bomb attacks killed some 270 people in churches and hotels on Easter Sunday 2019. He relinquished his American citizenship when he contested the election because laws at the time made dual citizens ineligible from holding political office. As a top defense official he is accused of overseeing human rights violations by the military during the country’s three-decade civil war with the now-defeated Tamil Tiger rebels who fought for an independent state for the country’s ethnic minority Tamils. In April, protesters started camping outside the president’s office in the heart of Colombo and chanted “Gota, go home,” a demand for Rajapaksa to quit, which quickly became the rallying cry of the movement. The demonstrations dismantled the Rajapaksa family’s grip on politics. Before Rajapaksa resigned, his older brother stepped down as prime minister and three more close family members quit their Cabinet positions. But the country’s new president, Wickremesinghe, has since cracked down on protests. His first action as leader included dismantling the protest tents in the middle of the night as police forcibly removed demonstrators from the site and attacked them. There is genuine fear among people who want to protest now, said Bhavani Fonseksa, with the independent think tank Center for Policy Alternatives. “Whether people will take to the streets to demonstrate again is still to be seen, especially since there’s been so much repression since Ranil Wickremesinghe came to power. Several protesters have been arrested so there is genuine fear,” she said. Dayan Jayatilleka, a former diplomat and political analyst, said the ruling SLPP party will welcome him back, but didn’t think his return would spark people to flood the streets again. “They will be sour — it is still far too early for him to return,” he said. “There is no way Gotabaya will be forgiven for his transgressions but I think now there is more bitterness than public rage that awaits him,” Jayatilleka added. For Nazly Hameem, an organizer who helped lead the protest movement, the former president’s return isn’t an issue “as long as he is held accountable.” “He is a Sri Lankan citizen so no one can prevent him from coming back. But as someone who wants justice against the corrupt system, I would like to see action taken — there should be justice, they should file cases against him and hold him accountable for what he did to the country.” “Our slogan was ‘Gota, go home’ — we didn’t expect him to flee, we wanted him to resign. As long as he doesn’t involve himself in active politics, it won’t be a problem.”
WASHINGTON: The US State Department has approved a potential $1.1 billion sale of military equipment to Taiwan, including 60 anti-ship missiles and 100 air-to-air missiles, the Pentagon said on Friday, amid heightened tensions with China. The package was announced in the wake of China’s aggressive military drills around Taiwan following a visit to the island last month by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the highest-ranking US official to travel to Taipei in years. The sale includes Sidewinder missiles, which can be used for air-to-air and surface-attack missions, at a cost of some $85.6 million, Harpoon anti-ship missiles at an estimated $355 million cost and support for Taiwan’s surveillance radar program for an estimated $665.4 million, the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) said. The principal contractor for the Harpoon missiles is Boeing Co. Raytheon is the principal contractor for both the Sidewinders and the radar program. Reuters reported last month that President Joe Biden’s administration was planning new equipment for Taiwan but that the equipment would sustain Taiwan’s current military systems and fulfill existing orders, not offer new capabilities, despite the heightened tensions that followed Pelosi’s visit. The Pentagon said the equipment and support announced on Friday would not alter the basic military balance in the region. US officials said they did not reflect any change in policy toward Taiwan. “These proposed sales are routine cases to support Taiwan’s continuing efforts to modernize its armed forces and to maintain a credible defensive capability,” a US Department of State spokesperson said, requesting anonymity. Rupert Hammond-Chambers, president of the US-Taiwan Business Council, said his organization opposed what he termed a “limited approach” to arms sales to Taiwan. “As the (China’s) People’s Liberation Army (PLA) recently demonstrated in its mock blockade, the island faces a range of threats that require a range of capabilities. To deny the island the ability to mount a full defense will, over time, create new gaps in Taiwan’s defenses that the PLA can exploit,” Hammond-Chambers said in a statement. The order reflects continued US support for Taiwan as Taipei faces pressure from China, which claims Taiwan as its own territory and has never ruled out using force to bring the democratically ruled island under its control. The sales must be reviewed by Congress, but both Democratic and Republican congressional aides said they do not expect opposition. There have been at least two other visits to Taiwan by members of Congress from both parties since Pelosi’s visit, as well as by governors of US states, all condemned by Beijing. Taipei says the People’s Republic of China has never ruled the island and has no right to claim it.