Heena Sharma Blog

With coronavirus getting a tighter grip on the China and impacting world trade, most analysts have started lowering global growth forecasts as measured by the gross domestic product (GDP) for the first quarter of calendar year 2020 (Q1-2020). Those at UBS, for instance, expect this would be the weakest quarter for global growth since the global financial crisis (GFC) and on par with the Asian crisis in the late 1990s. Global GDP, according to Arend Kapteyn, global head of economic research at UBS, will take a serious knock and slip to 0.7 per cent in the January 2020 quarter (Q1-2020) from 3.2 per cent in the December 2019 quarter (Q4-2019). Though he expects growth to rebound in the April – June 2020 quarter, the impact could slow the overall 2020 GDP growth by 20 basis points (bps) to 2.9 per cent. The main channel of economic disruption at this stage, according to UBS, is largely via reduced tourism flows (in/out of China), reduced import demand from China — particularly o...

The number of deaths from China's new coronavirus epidemic jumped to 902 on Monday after the hardest-hit province of Hubei reported 91 new fatalities. In its daily update, Hubei's health commission also confirmed another 2,618 new cases in the central province, where the outbreak emerged in December. There are now more than 39,800 confirmed cases across China, based on previously released figures from the government. The new virus is believed to have emerged last year in a market that sells wild animals in Hubei's capital Wuhan, the city at the centre of the outbreak, before spreading across the country. The World Health Organization (WHO) said Saturday that the number of cases being reported daily in China was "stabilising", although the health body warned it was too early to say if the virus had peaked. A WHO "international expert mission" left late Sunday for China, the agency's director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on T...

As the deadly coronavirus has spread worldwide, it has carried with it xenophobia -- and Asian communities around the world are finding themselves subject to suspicion and fear. When a patient on Australia's Gold Coast refused to shake the hand of her surgeon Rhea Liang, citing the virus that has killed hundreds, the medic's first response was shock. But after tweeting about the incident and receiving a flood of responses, the respected doctor learned her experience was all too common. There has been a spike in reports of anti-Chinese rhetoric directed at people of Asian origin, regardless of whether they have ever visited the centre of the epidemic or been in contact with the virus. Chinese tourists have reportedly been spat at in the Italian city of Venice, a family in Turin was accused of carrying the disease, and mothers in Milan have used social media to call for children to be kept away from Chinese classmates. In Canada, a white man was filmed telling a C...

Air India's 423-seater jumbo B747 plane will depart from Delhi airport at 12.30 pm on Friday to Beijing to evacuate Indian nationals who are in China as the neighbouring country deals with novel Coronavirus outbreak. "The B747 plane is all set to depart from Delhi at 12.30 pm. It came from Mumbai on Friday morning only," said a senior airline official. The government has reached out to over 600 Indians living in China's Hubei province, the epicentre of the novel coronavirus outbreak, to ascertain their willingness to be brought back to India. The death toll in China's novel coronavirus outbreak on Friday climbed to 213 with the number of confirmed cases totalling to 9,692. Hubei province, the epicentre of the outbreak, reported 5,806 confirmed cases, including 204 deaths. Read More