Author: BigGuy

China partly shut the world’s third-busiest container port after a ONE worker became infected with COVID-19, threatening more damage to already fragile supply chains and global trade as a key shopping season nears. All inbound and outbound container services at Meishan terminal (worlds third largest) in Ningbo-Zhoushan port were halted Wednesday until further notice due to a “system disruption,” according to a statement from the port. An employee tested positive for coronavirus, the eastern Chinese city’s government said. The closed terminal accounts for about 25% of container cargo through the port, calculates security consultant GardaWorld, which said “the suspension could severely impact cargo handling and shipping.” Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd AG said there will be a delay in sailings. This is the second recent shutdown of a Chinese port due to the coronavirus, after the closure of Yantian port in Shenzhen from late May for about a month. The action led goods to back up in factories and storage yards and also likely lifted soaring freight rates, which are at record levels and a source of inflation.

The fear is that this new disruption will further strain shipping and supplies of goods, dampening growth and driving up prices. An extended shuttering at Ningbo could be especially painful for the world economy because seaborne trade usually rises toward the end of the year as companies ship Christmas and holiday products.

“There may be far-reaching downstream consequences going into Black Friday and holiday shopping seasons” and the next 24 hours will determine whether there is a large outbreak or not, said Josh Brazil, vice president of marketing at project44, a supply-chain intelligence firm. “One of the few givens in 2021 is endemic delays, and the fact that conditions can change almost overnight.” In addition to the closed terminal, containers for shipment through the other terminals in the port will likely slow. The port will now only accept containers within two days of a ship’s estimated arrival time, according to a statement from shipping and logistics firm CMA CGM SA. The biggest exports through Ningbo in the first half of this year were electronic goods, textiles and low and high-end manufactured goods, according to the city’s Customs Bureau. Top imports included crude oil, electronics, raw chemicals and agricultural products.

China on Friday rejected the World Health Organization’s calls for a renewed probe into the origins of Covid-19, saying it supported “scientific” over “political” efforts to find out how the virus started. Pressure is once more mounting on Beijing to consider a fresh probe into the origins of a pandemic which has killed more than four million people and paralysed economies worldwide since it first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. A delayed and heavily politicised visit by a WHO team of international experts went to Wuhan in January 2021 to produce a first phase report, which was written in conjunction with their Chinese counterparts. It failed to conclude how the virus began. On Thursday the WHO urged China to share raw data from the earliest Covid-19 cases to revive its probe into the origins of the disease. China hit back, Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu saying it has never rejected cooperation on tracing the origins of Covid-19, but rejects the politicisation of such a search, state media reported. “We oppose political tracing … and abandoning the joint report” issued after the WHO team’s Wuhan visit, Ma told reporters. “We support scientific tracing.” The joint report said the virus jumping from bats to humans via an intermediate animal was the most probable scenario, while a leak from Wuhan’s virology labs was “extremely unlikely”. Ma rejected suggestions of new lines of investigation. “The conclusions and recommendations of WHO and China joint report were recognised by the international community and the scientific community,” he said. “Future global traceability work should and can only be further carried out on the basis of this report, rather than starting a new one.” China is continuing to conduct “follow-up and supplementary” research into the origins of the novel coronavirus as specified in the joint report, Ma said. The WHO on Thursday called for all governments to cooperate to accelerate studies into the origins of the pandemic and “to depoliticise the situation”. In the face of China’s reluctance to open up to outside investigators, experts are increasingly open to considering the theory that the virus might have leaked from a lab, once dismissed as a conspiracy propagated by the US far right. Even WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said that the initial probe into Wuhan’s virology labs had not gone far enough, while US President Joe Biden in May ordered a separate investigation into the virus origins from the US intelligence community. A WHO call last month for the investigation’s second stage to include audits of the Wuhan labs infuriated Beijing, with Vice Health Minister Zeng Yixin saying the plan showed “disrespect for common sense and arrogance towards science”. Meanwhile, Danish scientist Peter Ben Embarek, who led the international mission to Wuhan, said a lab employee infected while taking samples in the field falls under one of the likely hypotheses as to how the virus passed from bats to humans.

HAVANA (Reuters) – Cuba is bringing back hundreds of doctors working abroad and converting hotels into isolation centers and hospitals in order to battle a COVID-19 crisis that is overwhelming healthcare and mortuary services in parts of the Caribbean island. The country, which managed to contain infections for most of last year, is now facing one of the worst outbreaks worldwide, fueled by the spread of the more-infectious Delta variant, even as it races to vaccinate its population. Cuba’s rolling seven-day average of confirmed COVID-19 cases has surged eightfold within two months to 5,639 per million inhabitants, ten times the world average. One in five tests are positive, four times the benchmark 5% positivity rate cited by the World Health Organization. The seven-day average for confirmed COVID-19 deaths is around 52 per million inhabitants, six times the world average, although the real number could be much higher accounting for potentially undiagnosed cases. The COVID-19 surge has come amid Cuba’s worst economic crisis in decades that had already resulted in medicine shortages and long queues for scarce goods that made implementing lockdowns tricky. The predicament has come as a shock to some in the Communist-run country where the right to public healthcare is considered sacrosanct. “I witnessed queues of more than 20 hours, people dying in the corridors (of the polyclinic),” wrote Ana Iris Diaz, a professor at the university of the central Cuban city of Santa Clara and self-professed “revolutionary”, in a Facebook post that went viral this week. “I saw an elderly woman die after several hours of waiting and four days without an antigen test or PCR. Simply put, I saw what I would have hoped to never see: the collapse of our health system.” Cuba’s Communist government did not reply to a request for comment. It has denounced the United States for tightening sanctions, saying this has also slowed down its vaccine rollout due to the difficulty of acquiring inputs. Critics blame more Cuba’s inefficient state-run economy. Deaths in Cuba since the start of the pandemic are still only a half of the global average, according to official data. The death toll is rising fast though. In the eastern province of Guantanamo, artist Daniel Ross said a 30-year-old friend of his who caught COVID-19 had recently died due to a lack of medicines and oxygen. “Here, we fight COVID-19 with Azitromicina, which costs 16 pesos usually in the pharmacy, but they haven’t had any for months now,” he said, adding that the cost had surged to 3600 pesos, equivalent to $150 on the black market. Also infected and struggling to breathe, he said he was doing inhalations with yagruma leaves but sometimes could not even heat water because of the power outages that have become more frequent lately. Ihosvany Fernandez, director of communal services in the province of Guantanamo, said on local television that total deaths there, from any cause, had surged at the start of the month to more than 60 per day from around 12 on average usually. Official data show no more than 10 COVID-19 death daily in Guantanamo for those days suggesting underreporting in deaths from the respiratory disease. One of the province’s incinerators had broken down due to overuse, said Fernandez, so they were installing another and using a variety of state vehicles to transport the corpses given insufficient hearses. So far, a quarter of Cuba’s 11.2 million inhabitants have been innoculated with its two most advanced vaccines that officials say have proven more than 90 % effective in phase three trials. In one bright spot, the case-fatality rate in Havana, where nearly two thirds of the population has now been fully innocculated, was just 0.69 % compared to 0.93% for the rest of the country in the first week of August, according to official data, suggesting the shots are working.

South Korea on Wednesday confirmed more new cases of COVID-19 in a single day than it has seen so far during this pandemic. Making matters even more concerning, experts say the coming weeks could be even worse. This is the first time that the country has logged more than 2-thousand Covid-19 infections in a single 24-hour period.
South Korea on Wednesday reported 2,223 new Covid-19 infections. The greater Seoul area saw the highest number of local infections yet, with the local caseload at 1,405.Health authorities say the Delta variant is driving up cases, with clusters erupting in workplaces, indoor sports facilities, churches, and at care hospitals.
But the worst is yet to come.

Experts last month have already projected that at the virus’ current reproductive rate,.. the nation will see 2,5-hundred to 3-thousand new cases a day by late August.

Experts are also worried about the enormous strain this will put on healthcare services, saying a sudden rise could overwhelm medical staff and supplies. In that case, what can be done – that hasn’t already been attempted – to try and curb the spread. Health authorities say that in order to protect our lives and the economy, we first need to decrease the risk of infection by cutting down on travel and social gatherings. But we can’t only rely on social distancing to fix the problem. Vaccinations are of the utmost importance as well. “We need to do our best to protect the most vulnerable people and facilities by curbing the infection spread through prevention methods, and also by raising the vaccination rates.” There will be a boost in the supply of Pfizer’s vaccines today, with six million additional doses arriving.

OKYO -Japan’s top health adviser said on Thursday he would request stricter emergency measures for about two weeks to tackle a spike in COVID-19 cases in Tokyo and other areas.

Shigeru Omi told reporters the contagion should treated as a natural disaster and he called on the government to increase testing to find and contain the spread.

A few days after the end of the Tokyo Olympics, the capital reported 4,989 new daily cases on Thursday, down slightly from record 5,042 last week. The new number of patients with serious symptoms increased to an all-time daily high of 218. There has been no evidence that the Olympics https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2021-08-07/olympics-tokyo-feared-games-would-spread-covid-numbers-suggest-that-didnt-happen directly increased case numbers in Japan, but health experts have warned that holding the Games could have encouraged people to relax infection controls. Japan is vaccinating more than 1 million people a day, but it still lags many major economies in inoculating its population. Tokyo is already under a state of emergency, the fourth so far in the pandemic, though some experts have said it should be expanded to cover the whole country. The western prefecture of Osaka reported a record 1,654 new cases on Thursday. Hospital beds are filling up rapidly, mainly with patients in their 40s and 50s, Omi said. To try to break the chain of infection, he said, authorities should try to reduce human mobility to about 50% of the average in July. His comments echoed those of a separate panel of experts who said on Thursday contagion in Tokyo had become uncontrollable.

“The number of new positive cases is rapidly increasing, making it impossible to control the situation,” Norio Ohmagari, a health adviser to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, told a panel chaired by Governor Yuriko Koike.

Koike urged residents to avoid travel and stay home to slow the transmission of COVID-19, which is causing hospitals to have to forego some standard medical care.

Alpha, beta, gamma, delta — there have been four COVID-19 variants of concern that have altered the course of the pandemic at different points in the past year and a half. First came the alpha variant, first detected in the United Kingdom, that was more transmissible and caused the surges behind the winter wave of the pandemic. The beta variant came next, triggering outbreaks in South Africa, along with gamma, the variant that took hold of Brazil in January. Now we have delta ― definitely more transmissible, potentially more virulent (though it’s hard to know for sure), and a huge problem for those who remain unvaccinated. Every day brings new concerning headlines about this variant or that mutation, which brings up the natural question: What’s next? To better understand what the next round of variants might look like, we need to take a look at what we’ve learned so far about how this coronavirus changes. Each time the virus infects a new cell, it starts to makes copies of itself — and as it copies, it makes random changes (known as mutations) all over the place. Most mutations aren’t useful and die out, but some can be tolerated and passed on, said Ben Neuman, chief virologist at Texas A&M University’s Global Health Research Complex. Coronaviruses are typically slow changers — they mutate, as any virus does, but they don’t evolve at an alarming rate.

What shocked scientists is the rate of evolution, or how quickly these variants of concern acquired new mutations, according to Nathan Grubaugh, an evolutionary virologist and associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health.

In general, the coronavirus acquires about one or two mutations a month. But the variants of concern have acquired many more mutations much more quickly. Alpha, for example, didn’t just acquire one or two mutations, it picked up 17. The leading hypothesis is that it took a prolonged infection ― probably in an immunocompromised person whose body had a tough time clearing out the virus ― to collect this many mutations so rapidly. From there, the virus spread to somebody else before taking off and shooting through entire communities. According to Grubaugh, the same sort of rapid increase in mutations was identified with the beta variant detected in South Africa and the gamma variant that popped up in Brazil. “This phenomenon that we’re watching, of these variants that arise very quickly, I think caught a lot of us off guard,” Grubaugh said. It’s impossible to predict exactly what future variants will look like, but it’s pretty undeniable that we are going to see new variants emerge. “We haven’t seen the end of variants and we certainly haven’t seen the end of variants that are more transmissible,” Grubaugh said. The development of new variants that rise to the level of concern is actually extremely rare. There have probably been hundreds of thousands of events where a host of new mutations have occurred, but those versions of the virus weren’t very fit so they died out before becoming a variant of concern. Just because the virus evolves, doesn’t mean it’s going to become a variant of concern.