The United States is considering sampling wastewater taken from international aircraft to track any emerging new Covid-19 variants as infections surge in China, as UK based health experts estimate that about 9,000 people a days are now dying of the disease in China. The proposed of testing wastewater by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would provide a better solution to tracking the virus and slowing its entry into the US than new travel restrictions announced this week, three infectious disease experts said. The US and a number…
Day: December 29, 2022
US Considers Airline Wastewater Testing as COVID Surges in China
CHICAGO/NEW YORK — As COVID-19 infections surge in China, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is considering sampling wastewater taken from international aircraft to track any emerging new variants, the agency told Reuters. Such a policy would offer a better solution to tracking the virus and slowing its entry into the United States than new travel restrictions announced this week by the U.S. and other countries, which require mandatory negative COVID tests for travelers from China, three infectious disease experts told Reuters. Travel restrictions, such as mandatory testing,…
Hong Kong ends 2022 with five listings, ending a tough year with a bang as IPOs trickle back
Executives of three of the five companies that listed for the first time today struck the ceremonial gong at the Hong Kong stock exchange on 30 December 2022 to mark their trading debut. From left: AustAsia Chairman Tan Yong Nan, AustAsia CEO Edgar Collins, Kingsoft Cloud’s Chief Financial Officer He Haijian, Senior Vice President Liu Tao, Super Hi’s Chairman Zhou Zhaocheng. Photo: Enoch Yiu South China Morning Post
China Shifts COVID Policy to Jump-Start Ailing Domestic Growth
washington — With a major shift in China’s COVID-19 policy, Beijing is putting the focus back on economic growth. To lessen the blow to the domestic economy from the surge of infected people, Chinese officials and companies are letting people who test positive for COVID-19 return to work, even though that could accelerate the spread of the virus. Industrial production in China is continuing to contract in the aftermath of strict coronavirus-related restrictions that disrupted factory activity and supply chains. According to data released by China’s National Bureau of Statistics…
Coronavirus: US screening policy for travellers from China sparks anger, questions on effectiveness
In this file photo taken on December 3, 2021, the flight crew from Air China arrive in hazmat suits in the international terminal at Los Angeles International Airport. The US will require negative Covid tests from all air travelers from China, saying Beijing is not sharing enough information about the surge in coronavirus cases there. Photo: AFP South China Morning Post
How Bad Is China’s Covid Outbreak? It’s a Scientific Guessing Game.
As Covid barrels through China, scientists around the world are searching for clues about an outbreak with sprawling consequences — for the health of hundreds of millions of Chinese people, the global economy and the future of the pandemic. But in the absence of credible information from the Chinese government, it is a big scientific guessing game to determine the size and severity of the surge in the world’s most populous country. In Hong Kong, one team of researchers pored over passenger data from five Beijing subway lines to determine…
Uyghurs make up most of 18 workers trapped in collapsed gold mine in Xinjiang
Most of the 18 miners trapped underground in a collapsed gold mine in China’s far-western Xinjiang region have been identified as Uyghur amid ongoing rescue operations five days after the disaster occurred, sources in the region told Radio Free Asia on Thursday. The mine in Qarayaghach town of Ghulja county, known as Yining in Chinese, and owned by West Gold Yili Co., collapsed at about 1:40 a.m. on Dec. 24. Of the 40 miners working underground at the time 22 were safely lifted from the mine, though 18 remained trapped…
Despite brutality, Myanmar regime retains access to a powerful arsenal
Last February, the United Nations official responsible for tracking human rights in Myanmar called for a global arms embargo against the ruling military junta, which was by then a year into a brutal crackdown on dissenters since its 2021 coup ousted the civilian government. In a 40-page report, Tom Andrews told the U.N. Human Rights Council that countries in the international body continued to sell arms to the junta, despite rising civilian casualties. “The choice between action and inaction is literally a matter of life and death,” he warned. This…
‘If you laugh in the face of oppression, then totalitarianism has no hold on you’
Hong Kong author Muk Yu never took part in the 2019 protest movement. But his debut book of eight short stories — titled “Smoke on the Streets” — set in the aftermath of mass resistance to the ongoing erosion of the city’s freedoms under Communist Party rule has already garnered a literary award on the democratic island of Taiwan. Muk won first prize in the fiction category at the 2023 Taipei International Book Exhibition Awards for the book, which the judges described as “a faithful portrait of Hong Kong in…
Chinese Jet Came Within 10 Feet of US Military Aircraft, Says US Military
washington — A Chinese military plane came within 3 meters of a U.S. Air Force aircraft in the contested South China Sea last week and forced it to take evasive maneuvers to avoid a collision in international airspace, the U.S. military said Thursday. The close encounter followed what the United States has called a recent trend of increasingly dangerous behavior by Chinese military aircraft. The incident, which involved a Chinese Navy J-11 fighter jet and a U.S. air force RC-135 aircraft, took place on December 21, the U.S. military said…