Heena Sharma Blog

  Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged 2 billion doses of Chinese vaccines would be supplied to the world through this year, an increase that would add to country's efforts as the largest global exporter of COVID-19 vaccines . Xi's announcement was delivered at the International Forum on COVID-19 Vaccine Cooperation, state media reported Wednesday, which China hosted virtually. That figure likely includes the 770 million doses China has already donated or exported already since September last year, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Most of the Chinese shots have been exported under bilateral deals. It is unclear if the figure also includes the agreements with the COVAX mechanism where two Chinese vaccine manufacturers will provide up to 550 million doses. Xi also promised to donate $100 million to the UN-backed COVAX program, which aims to distribute vaccines to low- and middle-income countries, the official Xinhua News Agency said Wednesday night. Vaccine

  Vietnam has received a fresh batch of China's Sinopharm Covid-19 vaccines as part of the country's efforts to fight the worst wave of the pandemic. A brief handover ceremony was held at the Noi Bai International Airport here on Sunday, which was attended by Vietnam's Minister of Health Nguyen Thanh Long and Chinese Ambassador to Hanoi Xiong Bo, reports Xinhua news agency. Vietnam pledges to quickly and safely administer the vaccines to those in need, Long said. In his speech, Xiong said: "I believe this batch of vaccines will help both Vietnam's epidemic prevention and control and its socioeconomic development." The handover of the vaccine came after Vietnam's Ministry of Health announced the approval of the jab for emergency use in the country on June 4. The new wave began in Vietnam in late April. Read More

  Nearly 75 million doses of the vaccine against the novel coronavirus have been administered across China, a spokesman for the National Health Commission said. "Overall, the Covid-19 response in China has been conducted soundly," Xinhua news agency quoted spokesman Mi Feng as saying at a press conference on Sunday. "However, more accurate and effective epidemic prevention and control measures are still needed to ensure that there are no large-scale rebounds in cases." China's annual vaccine production can fully meet the whole country's needs, as judged by the existing production arrangements, Mao Jun Feng, an official from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said at the same press conference. China has authorized five Covid-19 vaccines for conditional marketing or emergency use. Read More

  Following a 12-day visit to China to probe the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan, a team of World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday dismissed the theory of a 'lab leak' of the virus. According to Washington Post, Peter Ben Embarek, the Danish WHO food safety expert leading the international team, said his group will not recommend further investigation into the theory that the virus accidentally leaked from labs conducting coronavirus research. Embarek told reporters that the judgment was based on "long, frank, open discussions with researchers and management" at institutions including the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). "They're the best ones to dismiss the claims and provide answers to all the questions," he said. "Our initial findings suggest that introduction through an intermediary host species is the most likely passway and one that will require more studies and more specific targeted research ... The findings suggest that a labora

  A total of 1.8 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine made by the Chinese biopharmaceutical company Sinovac Biotech arrived in Indonesia on Thursday, according to Indonesian government officials. Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said this is the second batch of the Sinovac vaccine delivery for Indonesia, and the first batch of 1.2 million doses arrived on December 6, the Xinhua news agency reported. "With this arrival, it means that there are already 3 million doses of Sinovac vaccine in Indonesia," Marsudi told a virtual press conference. Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin said vaccination is one of Indonesia's main strategies to fight the Covid-19 pandemic, adding, "It would take more than 12 months to complete the vaccination program, so we always keep up to health protocols." Indonesia is planning to vaccinate 181.5 million of its population in 2021 in order to achieve herd immunity and break the chain of coronavirus transmissions. Read More

  The Chinese city of Wuhan, where the novel coronavirus emerged a year ago before it became a pandemic and upended life across the globe, has started the emergency COVID-19 vaccination on some key groups, a senior health official said on Tuesday, even as China is yet to officially certify its multiple vaccines. The vaccination, available at 48 designated clinics in 15 districts, began on December 24, targeting certain groups of people aged between 18 and 59 years, He Zhenyu, deputy director of the centre for disease control and prevention in Wuhan, told the media in Wuhan. Those receiving the vaccine need to take two shots with an interval of four weeks, the state-run Xinhua news agency quoted He as saying. As per the official Chinese time-line, the first cases of coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, on December 31 last year. The city of 11 million people went into lockdown from January 23, followed by the entire Hubei province. Read More

  Tesla Inc has obtained permission to start selling its Shanghai-made Model Y sports utility vehicle in China. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology published the approval on its website on Monday. Tesla, now sells its Model 3 electric cars in China and has been building new car manufacturing capacity in Shanghai to make its Model Y SUVs. It applied for the Shanghai-made Model Y SUV sales permission earlier this month. It started delivering vehicles made in its Shanghai factory last December and sold more than 13,000 vehicles in China in October. The company has started exporting China-made Model 3 cars to Europe and said last week it plans to also start making electric vehicle chargers in China in 2021. Read More

  BEIJING (Reuters) - China resolutely opposes India's measures to ban more Chinese mobile applications over national security concerns, its embassy in the South Asian nation said on Wednesday. India banned 43 of the apps on Tuesday, including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd's e-commerce app Aliexpress, in a new wave of web sanctions targeting China after the neighbours' months-long standoff on their Himalayan border. Read More

  The final-stage trial of a Chinese frontrunner vaccine candidate has been halted in Brazil due to a serious adverse event, the first time that any of the Asian nation’s rapidly developed Covid-19 shots have met with such a setback. Testing of Sinovac Biotech Ltd.’s vaccine, called Coronavac, has been halted in Brazil after an event that occurred on Oct. 29, said the Brazil Health Agency on Tuesday, without giving any further detail on what happened. The study is interrupted in accordance with regulations while the agency analyses if the study should continue, it said. Sao Paulo’s Instituto Butantan, which partnered with Sinovac to produce the vaccine locally, said in a statement it was surprised by the decision and is looking into details of what happened in the study. Director Dimas Covas said in a TV interview that one volunteer in the trial has died, but that the death is not related to the vaccine. Read More

  Authorities in China's financial hub of Shanghai have quarantined 186 people and conducted coronavirus tests on more than 8,000 after a freight handler at the city's main international airport tested positive for the virus. No additional cases have been found, the city government said on its microblog Tuesday. It remains unclear how the 51-year-old man contracted the virus, which has largely spared the sprawling metropolis despite its dense population and strong international links. In the northern port city of Tianjin, more than 77,000 people have been tested after a locally transmitted case was reported there on Monday. That case was believed to be linked to a cold storage warehouse, reinforcing suspicions that the virus may be spreading to victims from frozen food packaging. Read More

Asymptomatic COVID-19 patients are as virulent and infective as symptomatic ones and those having no clinical symptoms but tested positive for new coronavirus can infect several healthy people, according to new studies. Reported by Global Times, those silent virus carriers (asymptomatic patients) have been controversial regarding their infectivity but the news of a woman in Henan Province in China has further triggered public concerns". The woman in Central China's Henan Province was confirmed to be infected with COVID-19 after coming into contact with an asymptomatic patient, who also got the virus from another asymptomatic patient. "A recent study showed the infectivity of asymptomatic patients (having no clinical symptoms but testing positive for COVID-19) could be nearly the same as confirmed cases," the report said on Sunday. Read More

Financial firms operating in Singapore and Hong Kong are delaying hiring as the coronavirus outbreak disrupts their businesses. Both domestic and foreign institutions have slowed recruitment, according to headhunters in the financial hubs. They’ve been impacted by quarantines, restrictions on travel to and from China, remote working arrangements and decisions not to conduct face-to-face interviews. It’s another aspect of the fallout from the virus, which has also caused factory closures, disrupted supply chains and initiated the world’s largest work-from-home experiment. Recruiting has become less of a priority as firms including DBS Group Holdings Ltd. have highlighted the revenue impact of worsening business conditions. “ Everybody is distracted,” said Gurj Sandhu, a managing director at Morgan McKinley Group Ltd. in Singapore. Hiring is falling down the “pecking order,” he said, while adding that nobody is canceling roles yet. Read More

A day after the city government of Wuhan locked down all of its public transportation to keep the coronavirus outbreak that began in the city from spreading further, three nurses found themselves stranded outside Hankou train station. They had returned early from the Lunar New Year holiday to go back to work at Tongji hospital, just five kilometres away, but laden with luggage and food from concerned relatives, they had no way to reach there. Seeing their request for help online, 53-year-old Wuhan resident Chen Hui donned a face mask and went to pick them up at the station, which is just down the street from the seafood market believed to be where the coronavirus emerged. Wuhan, where 11 million people live, has been paralyzed by containment efforts by health authorities. With public transit shut down and taxis and ride-hailing operations also suspended, ordinary citizens are risking their health to ferry medical staff to and from work and getting key supplies such as food

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 sitution becomes grim over the novel- Coronavirus outbreak, the Bureau of Immigration has said that foreign national who have visited China on or before January 15 will not be allowed entry into India. The move follows similar decision by Australia, Singapore, US and a few other countries as China imposes travel ban. According to the bureau, foreigners who visited the China in second fortnight of January will not be allowed by air, sea or through land borders. Airline crew however are exempted from this rule. Chinese citizens and foreigners living in China have already been restricted from travelling to India. Indian and Chinese carriers too are suspending flights between the two countries following the travel curbs. These restrictions are however not applicable to Chinese passport holders of Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. Read More

A day after the Kerala government declared the novel coronavirus as a ' state calamity ', Tourism Minister Kadakampally Surendran on Tuesday said the epidemic outbreak had begun affecting the tourism sector as hotel bookings have suffered mass cancellations. After the Nipah virus and deadly floods, the coronavirus outbreak has also adversely impacted the holiday industry as hotel bookings during the February-March months have been cancelled widely across the state, he said in the state Assembly during the question hour. Three students, including a woman medico, from the state who studied in Wuhan university in China had tested positive for the virus in Thrissur, Alappuzha and Kasaragod districts in the last few days, following which the LDF government declared the epidemic as a 'state calamity' on Monday night. The negative propaganda during the time of Nipah had cost the tourism industry dearly, the minister noted. Read More

India confirmed on Thursday its first patient of coronavirus infection , isolating a male patient in the southern state of Kerala. The patient studied in a university in Wuhan, the Chinese city from where the virus infection spread, and he "his stable at the moment and is being closely monitored," said a government press release. The total number of confirmed deaths from the coronavirus in China climbed to 170 as of late Wednesday and the number of infected patients soared to 7,711. Infections have been reported in at least 15 other countries with 104 confirmed cases. But no deaths have occurred outside China. Read More

Hong Kong stocks plunged Wednesday as investors in the city returned from their Lunar New Year break to a global panic over the deadly coronavirus , though most other Asian markets were lifted by bargain-buying after recent losses. Healthy US data reinforced hopes for the global economic outlook and supported a rally across US and European markets, which provided a strong lead for Asia, while a record earnings report from Apple also helped the mood. Still, the focus remains on developments in the virus outbreak -- which has now killed at least 132 people and infected more people in China than SARS did 17 years ago -- and concerns about the impact on the world economy. Among the worst-hit sectors on global trading floors are firms linked to travel and tourism, as big-spending Chinese tourists stay at home with Beijing clamping down on people's movement. The outbreak carries echoes of the SARS crisis, which paralysed regional travel and battered local economies. Chinese

At least fifteen people were killed and nine others injured in a coal mine gas explosion in north China's Shanxi Province, local authorities said on Tuesday. The incident happened on Monday when 35 miners were working underground at the coal mine in Pingyao County when the blast happened, the Shanxi Administration of Coal Mine Safety said. Authorities said that 15 people were killed in the blast. "Eleven miners managed to escape," the state-run Xinhua news agency reported. Read More