‘WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence opens in Berlin backed by initial US$100 million from Germany. It aims to pool global disease data, and produce tools to predict outbreaks – but is reliant on countries taking part.’
Read here (South China Morning Post, Sept 3, 2021)
‘Foreign Minister Wang Yi pledges more technology transfers and production agreements to get vaccines to developing countries. The UN estimates 11 billion more doses are needed to vaccinate 70 per cent of the world’s population against the disease.’
Read here (South China Morning Post, August 6, 2021)
‘A team of US scientists working under the US Department of Defense has unveiled a chip that it said can detect signs of the new coronavirus in human bodies within minutes when it is implanted under the skin. Retired Colonel Matt Hepburn said that the implant invented by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a Pentagon unit that develops emerging technologies for military use, can continuously test blood.’
Read here (South China Morning Post, Apr 18, 2021)
‘All told, the decline in gross domestic product last year was the biggest since the Great Depression. The International Labour Organization estimates it cost the equivalent of 255 million people full-time jobs. Researchers at the Pew Research Centre reckon the global middle class shrank for the first time since the 1990s.
‘The costs will fall unevenly. A scorecard of 31 metrics across 162 nations devised by Oxford Economics Ltd. highlighted the Philippines, Peru, Colombia and Spain as the economies most vulnerable to long-term scarring. Australia, Japan, Norway, Germany and Switzerland were seen as best placed.’
Read here (South China Morning Post, Apr 18, 2021)
‘China is giving priority to coronavirus inoculation campaigns at home but will still be able to honour promises of vaccines for other countries, according to a senior official in charge of producing the doses. Tian Yulong, chief engineer with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said domestic needs had taken precedence but with expanded production of four approved vaccines, he was confident that China would be able to meet the combined demand of domestic inoculation, foreign aid and exports.
“We have successfully met demand to give out more than 64 million doses at home. We have also had good feedback about our exports and foreign aid,” Tian said in Beijing on Monday.
Read here (South China Morning Post, Mar 15, 2021)
‘The US fiscal deficit rose from 6.4 per cent of GDP in 2019 to 17.5 per cent in 2020. This is an increase of 11.1 percentage points in GDP fiscal support to defend a decline of 5.8 percentage points in GDP growth...
‘The Biden administration is betting that the largest US stimulus package since World War II will restore American competitiveness and heal the nation. But much of this is not funded by domestic savings, such as taxing the rich, but by borrowing on the US dollar.
‘The rest of the world will not fund the dollar forever, certainly not at near-zero interest rates. And if interest rates rise, the fiscal costs would be substantially higher. So bet on the Fed doing more to keep rates low. The truth of US debt is that it is not debt, but the rest of the world’s equity. America is the world’s too-big-to-fail borrower. If Biden fails, we will lose.’
Read here (South China Morning Post, Mar 13, 2021)
‘It takes persistent probing, detective work for 200 volunteers to track down patients’ contacts. Anxious to avoid quarantine, some clam up and refuse to admit they were with Covid-19 patients.’
Read here (South China Morning Post, Feb 21, 2021)
‘The ambush-style lockdowns in Hong Kong are being criticised as a violation of human rights. However, such sudden lockdowns may remain the most efficient way for the city to control the spread of Covid-19 (“Hong Kong’s latest lockdowns uncover four Covid-19 cases in three buildings”, February 8).
‘To know the reason for this, we must know the answer to two questions: why a lockdown, and why ambush-style... (1) Lockdowns are the most effective way known for tracing or eliminating the virus infection chain... (2) As for the ambush style adopted, the lack of notice is the only way to ensure that no one can escape the lockdown...’
Read here (South China Morning Post, Feb 9, 2021)
‘Covid-19 has exposed global deficiencies in the response to dangerous infectious diseases and the international system will need to be strengthened to raise alerts and deal with future outbreaks, according to Helen Clark, co-head of an international panel investigating the pandemic.
‘Despite the novel coronavirus emerging in a world with rapid communication services, it was notable how slow the global response to the outbreak was after it was first detected in China, said Clark, a former prime minister of New Zealand and one-time head of the United Nations Development Programme.
“Every day counts if you are trying to stop an infectious disease of unknown origin,” she said in an interview with the South China Morning Post. “There just doesn’t seem to be enough happening quickly enough, from the time of first awareness of the cluster onwards, and here we are.
“The WHO didn’t have all the information it needed, and – let’s be fair here, we are still discovering things about Covid-19 every day, we are on a very steep learning curve – but all the more reason, I would think, for applying a precautionary principle. If it smells bad, it may well be bad,” she said, referring to the early days of the pandemic.’
Read here (South China Morning Post, Feb 1, 2021)
‘Taiwan is becoming increasingly attractive for expats, with the number of foreigners obtaining residency permits and entrepreneur visas climbing in recent years. The island is tempting international professionals with its successful handling of the pandemic, its media freedoms and ‘gold card’ scheme for skilled workers.’
Read here (South China Morning Post, Jan 12, 2021)
‘Most patients who received hospital treatment for Covid-19 developed long-term health problems, according to a large-scale study from China. Researchers found that 76 per cent of those discharged from one hospital in Wuhan, the city at the centre of the outbreak, still showed at least one symptom associated with the disease six months later.
“Fatigue and sleep difficulties, which occurred in 63 per cent and 26 per cent of the patients respectively, were the most common problems. To the surprise of the researchers, over a third of the patients showed signs of kidney malfunction, which led to problems such as an increase in bodily waste in the blood and increased the risk of sexual dysfunction.’
Read here (South China Morning Post, Jan 10, 2021)
‘Masks, the must-have accessory of 2020, historically served as a theatrical tool in Greek theatre. Employed to magnify actors’ emotions and allow easy multitasking between different roles, the stage props were heavy on drama and often depicted exaggerated visages. Way before Covid-19, creative names like Alexander McQueen, Thom Browne, Viktor & Rolf, Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton and Japan’s Anrealage all offered interpretations of this theatrical tradition in their fashion collections.
‘As masks have become the new normal in 2020, designers and fashionistas alike are incorporating the accessory into daily fashion ensembles; think of Lady Gaga’s rivet-embellished pink mask. Here in our latest shoot, we blend the whimsy of the accessory’s past with the season’s newest high fashion to reveal a real style statement...’
Read here (South China Morning Post, Dec 15, 2020)
‘The World Health Organization is looking into controversial research suggesting the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 was circulating in Italy months before it was first detected in China, the health body said on Friday, while cautioning against using such data to speculate about the disease’s origins.
‘The WHO plans to run tests with the Italian researchers who made waves earlier this month for their peer-reviewed findings based on tests of blood samples from a cancer screening carried out starting before the pathogen was detected in China.’
Read here (South China Morning Post, Nov 27, 2020)
‘Paper by Chinese researchers says a strain can be traced to eight countries from four continents before the Wuhan outbreak. First human transmission may have occurred on the Indian subcontinent, it says – but other scientists question the finding.’
Read here (South China Morning Post, Nov 27, 2020)
‘Wang Hui, an intellectual leader of the so-called New Left movement, offers an interesting alternative explanation [on China's Covid response]... Wang, by the way, is quite well-known among China specialists in the West. Harvard University Press is scheduled to publish an English edition of his multivolume The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought.
‘...he argued that Beijing utilised the old Maoist-Leninist models of the people’s war and total war, to mobilise the entire nation – horizontally across the medical and scientific professions, and up and down the ranks from the top Chinese leadership to humblest local neighbourhood units. Everything was put on hold, even the all-important economy, while the nation’s resources were devoted to a single task.’
Read here (South China Morning Post, Nov 13, 2020)
‘Among the work laid out is further investigation into wild animals traded at Wuhan’s Huanan market, where a number of the first known patients worked and shopped. The virus is believed to have originated in bats before passing to humans, likely through an intermediary animal, but it remains unclear whether this crossover happened at the market or outside it, according to the WHO. So far that market has proved a dead-end for animal clues: of the 336 samples from “frozen animal carcasses” that were tested in the market, none were positive for the virus, according to the November 5 report, which updated known figures on animal sampling.
‘Other research will involve looking back before December 2019 to review hospital records, death registers and disease surveillance data, and test stored blood samples to find any cases that appeared before those that are already known. Unpublished government records obtained by the South China Morning Post indicated that Covid-19 cases were identified in Hubei province as early as November 17.’
Read here (South China Morning Post, Nov 13, 2020)
‘A Japanese start-up has created a face covering that allows people to have a conversation while keeping up to 10 metres apart – and also acts as a translator. A Singaporean face mask has sensors that monitor temperature and blood oxygen levels, while a company in South Korea has made an air purifier mask.’
Read here (South China Morning Post, Oct 23, 2020)
‘A Lowy Institute report reviewing such trends [the systematic dismantling of science, expertise and rule of law] concluded that “the concept of a rules-based international order has been stripped of meaning, while liberalism faces its greatest crisis in decades”. If these writers and many more are correct that Western “democracies” have trashed core components of democracy, it is only fair to ask what Western statesmen mean when they castigate others for failing to adopt democracy...’
Read here (South China Morning Post, Oct 4, 2020)
‘US President Donald Trump remained in a military hospital on Sunday for a third day amid conflicting reports about his condition even as doctors reported steady progress adding that he could be released as soon as Monday... Doctors added that Trump was on the second day of a planned five-day course of Remdesivir, an antiviral medicine, and is being treated with the powerful steroid dexamethasone amid indications that his lungs may have suffered some damage.’
Read here (South China Morning Post, Oct 4, 2020)
‘Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte says he has extended a state of calamity in the entire Philippines by a year to allow the government to draw emergency funds faster to fight the Covid-19 pandemic and harness the police and military to maintain law and order. Duterte first placed the country under a state of calamity in March when the number of confirmed infections was approaching 200 with about a dozen deaths. The country now has more than 290,000 confirmed cases, the highest in Southeast Asia, with nearly 5,000 deaths.
‘State of calamity allows officials to draw emergency funds quickly anywhere in the country, and to control the prices of basic commodities like rice and cooking oil. President Duterte also signalled that the country remains at the mercy of a vaccine, which is unlikely to be developed and distributed until the second quarter of 2021.’
Read here (South China Morning Post, Sept 22, 2020)