Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
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Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Within a week of reopening, India has seen a sharp spike in cases
India is roaring – rather than inching – back to life amid a record spike in Covid-19 infections. The BBC’s Aparna Alluri finds out why.
On Saturday, India’s government announced plans to end a national lockdown that began on 25 March.
This was expected – the roads, and even the skies, have been busy for the last 10 days since restrictions started to ease for the first time in two months. Many businesses and workplaces are already open, construction has re-started, markets are crowded and parks are filling up. Soon, hotels, restaurants, malls, places of worship, schools and colleges will also reopen.
But the pandemic continues to rage. When India went into lockdown, it had reported 519 confirmed cases and 10 deaths. Now, its case tally has crossed 173,000, with 4,971 deaths. It added nearly 8,000 new cases on Saturday alone – the latest in a slew of record single-day spikes.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Fast food chains like McDonald’s have begun reopening outlets in parts of India.
So, why the rush to reopen?
The lockdown is simply unaffordable
“It’s certainly time to lift the lockdown,” says Gautam Menon, a professor and researcher on models of infectious diseases.
“Beyond a point, it’s hard to sustain a lockdown that has gone on for so long – economically, socially and psychologically.”
From day one, India’s lockdown came at a huge cost, especially since so many of its people live on a daily wage or close to it. It put food supply chains at risk, cost millions their livelihood, and throttled every kind of business – from car manufacturers to high-end fashion to the corner shop selling tobacco. As the economy sputtered and unemployment rose, India’s growth forecast tumbled to a 30-year-low.
Raghuram Rajan, an economist and former central bank governor, said at the end of April that the country needed to open up quickly, and any further lockdowns would be “devastating”.
The opinion is shared by global consultant Mckinsey, whose report from earlier this month said India’s economy must be “managed alongside persistent infection risks”.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption As restrictions ease, Indians are slowly getting used to the new normal
“The original purpose of the lockdowns was to delay the spike so we can put health services and systems in place, so we are able handle the spike [when it comes],” says Dr N Devadasan, a public health expert. “That objective, to a large extent, has been met.”
In the last two months, India has turned stadia, schools and even train coaches into quarantine centres, added and expanded Covid-19 wards in hospitals, and ramped up testing as well as production of protective gear. While grave challenges remain and shortages persist, the consensus seems to be that the government has bought as much time as possible.
“We have used the lockdown period to prepare ourselves… Now is the time to revive the economy,” Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said last week.
The silver lining
For weeks, India’s relatively low Covid-19 numbers baffled experts everywhere. Despite the dense population, disease burden and underfunded public hospitals, there was no deluge of infections or fatalities. Low testing rates explain the former, but not the latter.
In fact, India made global headlines not for its caseload but for its botched handling of the lockdown – millions of informal workers, largely migrants, were left jobless overnight. Scared and unsure, many tried to return home, often desperate enough to walk, cycle or hitchhike across hundreds of kilometres.
Perhaps the choice – between a virus that didn’t appear to be wreaking havoc yet, and a lockdown that certainly was – seemed obvious to the government.
But that is changing quickly as cases shoot up. “I suspect we will keep finding more and more cases, but they will mostly be asymptomatic or will have mild symptoms,” Dr Devadasan says.
The hope – which is also encouraging the government to reopen – is that most of India’s undetected infections are not severe enough to require hospitalisation. And so far, except in Mumbai city, there has been no dearth of hospital beds.
The government, for instance, has been touting India’s mortality rate as a silver lining – at nearly 3%, it’s among the lowest in the world.
But some are unconvinced by that. Dr Jacob John, a prominent virologist, says India has never had, and still doesn’t have, a robust system for recording deaths – in his view, the government is certainly missing Covid-19 deaths because they have no way of knowing of every fatality.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Indians are venturing out again but it’s unclear how many of them are asymptomatic.
And, he says, “what we must aim for is flattening the mortality curve, not necessarily the epidemic curve”.
Dr John, like several other experts, also predicts a peak in July or August, and believes the country is reopening so quickly because the “government realised the futility of such leaky lockdowns”.
A shift in strategy
So is the government gearing up for another lockdown when the peak comes?
While Dr Menon believes the lockdown was well-timed, he says it was too focused on cases coming from abroad.
“There was a hope that by controlling that, we could prevent epidemic spread, but how effective was our screening [at airports]?”
Now, he adds, is the time for “localised lockdowns”.
Media caption Coronavirus: Death and despair for migrants on Indian roads
The federal government has left it to states to decide where, how and to what extent to lift the lockdown as the virus’ progression varies wildly across India.
Maharashtra alone accounts for more than a third of India’s active cases. Add Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Delhi, and that makes up 67% of the national total.
But other states – such as Bihar – are already seeing a sharp uptick as migrant workers return home.
“Initially, most of your cases were in the cities,” Dr Devadasan says. “But we kept the migrant workers in cities and didn’t allow them to go home. Now, we are sending them back. We have facilitated transporting the virus from urban areas to rural areas.”
While the government has said how many infections have been avoided – up to 300,000 – and lives saved – up to 71,000 – by the lockdown, there is no indication of what lies ahead.
There is only advice: The day the government began to ease restrictions, Mr Kejriwal tweeted, urging people to “follow discipline and control the coronavirus disease” as it was their “responsibility”.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Social distancing will prove to be India’s biggest post-lockdown challenge
Because the alternative – of curfews and constant policing – is unsustainable.
“My worry is more the circumstances of people – it’s not as though they have an option to practise social distancing,” Dr Menon says.
And they don’t – not in joint family homes or one-room hovels packed together in slums, not in crowded markets or busy streets where jostling is second nature, or in temples, mosques, weddings or religious processions where more is always merrier.
The overwhelming message is that the virus is here to stay, and we have to learn to live with it – and the only way to do that, it appears, is to let people live with it.
Members of Chinese medical team attend a ceremony at Jiangbei International Airport in southwest China’s Chongqing, May 13, 2020. The Chinese government will send a team of medical experts to Algeria to help the country fight the COVID-19 pandemic. These experts, specializing in areas including respiratory diseases, intensive care, infectious diseases, and laboratory testing, will fly to Algeria on early Thursday morning. (Xinhua/Liu Chan)
CHONGQING, May 13 (Xinhua) — The Chinese government will send a team of medical experts to Algeria to help the country fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
The team, organized by the National Health Commission, consists of 20 medical experts, including 15 from southwest China’s Chongqing Municipality and five from China’s Macao Special Administrative Region.
These experts, specializing in areas including respiratory diseases, intensive care, infectious diseases, and laboratory testing, will fly to Algeria on early Thursday morning.
Upon arrival, the team will exchange experience with their Algerian counterparts and offer training for medics on the prevention, control, diagnosis, and treatment of the COVID-19 virus.
The team will also carry urgently needed medical supplies donated by Chongqing, including medical masks and medical protective clothing.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption The Chinese city of Wuhan recently lifted its strict quarantine measures
The Chinese city of Wuhan, where the coronavirus originated last year, has raised its official Covid-19 death toll by 50%, adding 1,290 fatalities.
Wuhan officials attributed the new figure to updated reporting and deaths outside hospitals. China has insisted there was no cover-up.
It has been accused of downplaying the severity of its virus outbreak.
Wuhan’s 11 million residents spent months in strict lockdown conditions, which have only recently been eased.
The latest official figures bring the death toll in the city in China’s central Hubei province to 3,869, increasing the national total to more than 4,600.
China has confirmed nearly 84,000 coronavirus infections, the seventh-highest globally, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
What’s China’s explanation for the rise in deaths?
In a statement released on Friday, officials in Wuhan said the revised figures were the result of new data received from multiple sources, including records kept by funeral homes and prisons.
Deaths linked to the virus outside hospitals, such as people who died at home, had not previously been recorded.
Media caption Learn how Wuhan dealt with the lockdown
The “statistical verification” followed efforts by authorities to “ensure that information on the city’s Covid-19 epidemic is open, transparent and the data [is] accurate”, the statement said.
It added that health systems were initially overwhelmed and cases were “mistakenly reported” – in some instances counted more than once and in others missed entirely.
A shortage of testing capacity in the early stages meant that many infected patients were not accounted for, it said.
A spokesman for China’s National Health Commission, Mi Feng, said the new death count came from a “comprehensive review” of epidemic data.
In its daily news conference, the foreign ministry said accusations of a cover-up, which have been made most stridently on the world stage by US President Donald Trump, were unsubstantiated. “We’ll never allow any concealment,” a spokesman said.
Why are there concerns over China’s figures?
Friday’s revised figures come amid growing international concern that deaths in China have been under-reported. Questions have also been raised about Beijing’s handling of the epidemic, particularly in its early stages.
In December 2019, Chinese authorities launched an investigation into a mysterious viral pneumonia after cases began circulating in Wuhan.
China reported the cases to the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN’s global health agency, on 31 December.
But WHO experts were only allowed to visit China and investigate the outbreak on 10 February, by which time the country had more than 40,000 cases.
The mayor of Wuhan has previously admitted there was a lack of action between the start of January – when about 100 cases had been confirmed – and 23 January, when city-wide restrictions were enacted.
Around that time, a doctor who tried to warn his colleagues about an outbreak of a Sars-like virus was silenced by the authorities. Dr Li Wenliang later died from Covid-19.
Wuhan’s death toll increase of almost exactly 50% has left some analysts wondering if this is all a bit too neat.
For months questions have been asked about the veracity of China’s official coronavirus statistics.
The inference has been that some Chinese officials may have deliberately under-reported deaths and infections to give the impression that cities and towns were successfully managing the emergency.
If that was the case, Chinese officials were not to know just how bad this crisis would get in other countries, making its own figures now seem implausibly small.
The authorities in Wuhan, where the first cluster of this disease was reported, said there had been no deliberate misrepresentation of data, rather that a stabilisation in the emergency had allowed them time to revisit the reported cases and to add any previously missed.
That the new death toll was released at the same time as a press conference announcing a total collapse in China’s economic growth figures has led some to wonder whether this was a deliberate attempt to bury one or other of these stories.
Then again, it could also be a complete coincidence.
China has been pushing back against US suggestions that the coronavirus came from a laboratory studying infectious diseases in Wuhan, the BBC’s Barbara Plett Usher in Washington DC reports.
US President Donald Trump and some of his officials have been flirting with the outlier theory in the midst of a propaganda war with China over the origin and handling of the pandemic, our correspondent says.
Mr Trump this week halted funding for the World Health Organization (WHO), accusing it of making deadly mistakes and overly trusting China.
“Do you really believe those numbers in this vast country called China, and that they have a certain number of cases and a certain number of deaths; does anybody really believe that?” Mr Trump said at the White House on Wednesday.
On Thursday, UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said: “We’ll have to ask the hard questions about how [coronavirus] came about and how it couldn’t have been stopped earlier.”
But China has also been praised for its handling of the crisis and the unprecedented restrictions that it instituted to slow the spread of the virus.
Residents of nine regions, including Wuhan, Beijing and Shanghai, to be sampled using both nucleic acid and antibody tests, state media reports
Research ‘very important as it will help us to direct our countermeasures in the future’, molecular virologist says
China is using dual testing to determine how many people have been infected with Covid-19 but recovered without showing symptoms. Photo: AP
China has begun a major survey to determine how many people might have been infected with the coronavirus and then recovered without ever showing symptoms, while also assessing immunity levels within different communities, state media reported.
The research will be conducted in six provinces, including Hubei which was the focus of the initial outbreak, as well as Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing.
, the capital of Hubei and home to about 60 per cent of all infections reported in mainland China, is taking the lead in the study, which involves giving both nucleic acid and antibody tests to 11,000 of its 11 million residents, state news agency Xinhua reported on Wednesday.
Health workers collected throat swabs and blood samples from about 900 people randomly selected from eight subdistricts of the city on Tuesday, Ding Gangqiang, head of the Wuhan epidemiological survey team, was quoted as saying.
“The purpose is to learn about the immunity level in communities and provide scientific support on how we should adjust our disease control strategies,” he said.
Professor Lu Hongzhou, a specialist in infectious diseases who heads the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre where Covid-19 patients are being treated, said he supported the research though the collection of samples had yet to start in the city.
“We haven’t received notification from the top [to start],” he said. “The number of infections [in Shanghai] is not very big, but I think we’d better do this so as to have an idea of the scale of asymptomatic carriers.”
Professor Jin Dong-yan, a molecular virologist at the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong, said that the use of both nucleic acid and antibody tests would enable scientists to determine those people who had been infected but recovered without medical aid and without showing symptoms.
The study into asymptomatic infections got under way in Wuhan in Tuesday. Photo: Simon Song
If a person tested positive in a nucleic acid test, it meant they were carrying the virus, and if positive in an antibodies test, it meant that they had contracted the virus and had recovered, he told the South China Morning Post.
“This is very important as it will help us to direct our countermeasures in the future,” Jin said.
“If we find, say 60 per cent, of the population has acquired immunity, then lockdowns will no longer be meaningful. If it turns out that there are many people with a high viral load but without symptoms, then we should be on high alert and take stricter measures.
“For people in Hubei, the tests can also save them from discrimination when they get back to work – those who prove to have developed immunity are very unlikely to get infected [again] for at least a year,” he said.
Wuhan hotel owners say they’re on the brink of going bust
to the nation’s daily infections tally at the start of April amid concerns that such people could trigger a second outbreak once the widespread lockdowns in cities like Wuhan and elsewhere were lifted.
China reported 103 new coronavirus infections on Wednesday, of which 39 were imported. Of the total, 57 people had no symptoms, including three of the imported cases.
Since the outbreak began, China has reported 82,295 cases, of which 95 per cent have recovered and been discharged from hospital.
MUNICH (Reuters) – One January lunchtime in a car parts company, a worker turned to a colleague and asked to borrow the salt.
As well as the saltshaker, in that instant, they shared the new coronavirus, scientists have since concluded.
That their exchange was documented at all is the result of intense scrutiny, part of a rare success story in the global fight against the virus.
The co-workers were early links in what was to be the first documented chain of multiple human-to-human transmissions outside Asia of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
They are based in Stockdorf, a German town of 4,000 near Munich in Bavaria, and they work at car parts supplier Webasto Group. The company was thrust under a global microscope after it disclosed that one of its employees, a Chinese woman, caught the virus and brought it to Webasto headquarters. There, it was passed to colleagues – including, scientists would learn, a person lunching in the canteen with whom the Chinese patient had no contact.
The Jan. 22 canteen scene was one of dozens of mundane incidents that scientists have logged in a medical manhunt to trace, test and isolate infected workers so that the regional government of Bavaria could stop the virus from spreading.
That hunt has helped Germany win crucial time to build its COVID-19 defences.
The time Germany bought may have saved lives, scientists say. Its first outbreak of locally transmitted COVID-19 began earlier than Italy’s, but Germany has had many fewer deaths. Italy’s first detected local transmission was on Feb. 21. By then Germany had kicked off a health ministry information campaign and a government strategy to tackle the virus which would hinge on widespread testing. In Germany so far, more than 2,100 people have died of COVID-19. In Italy, with a smaller population, the total exceeds 17,600.
“We learned that we must meticulously trace chains of infection in order to interrupt them,” Clemens Wendtner, the doctor who treated the Munich patients, told Reuters.
Wendtner teamed up with some of Germany’s top scientists to tackle what became known as the ‘Munich cluster,’ and they advised the Bavarian government on how to respond. Bavaria led the way with the lockdowns, which went nationwide on March 22.
Scientists including England’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty have credited Germany’s early, widespread testing with slowing the spread of the virus. “‘We all know Germany got ahead in terms of its ability to do testing for the virus and there’s a lot to learn from that,’” he said on TV earlier this week.
Christian Drosten, the top virologist at Berlin’s Charite hospital, said Germany was helped by having a clear early cluster. “Because we had this Munich cohort right at the start … it became clear that with a big push we could inhibit this spreading further,” he said in a daily podcast for NDR radio on the coronavirus.
Drosten, who declined to be interviewed for this story, was one of more than 40 scientists involved in scrutiny of the cluster. Their work was documented in preliminary form in a working paper at the end of last month, intended for The Lancet. The paper, not yet peer-reviewed, was shared on the NDR site.
ELECTRONIC DIARIES
It was on Monday, Jan. 27, that Holger Engelmann, Webasto’s CEO, told the authorities that one of his employees had tested positive for the new coronavirus. The woman, who was based in Shanghai, had facilitated several days of workshops and attended meetings at Webasto’s HQ.
The woman’s parents, from Wuhan, had visited her before she travelled on Jan. 19 to Stockdorf, the paper said. While in Germany, she felt unusual chest and back aches and was tired for her whole stay. But she put the symptoms down to jet lag.
She became feverish on the return flight to China, tested positive after landing and was hospitalised. Her parents also later tested positive. She told her managers of the result and they emailed the CEO.
In Germany, Engelmann said he immediately set up a crisis team that alerted the medical authorities and started trying to trace staff members who had been in contact with their Chinese colleague.
The CEO himself was among them. “Just four or five days before I received the news, I had shaken hands with her,” he said.
Now known as Germany’s “Case #0,” the Shanghai patient is a “long-standing, proven employee from project management” who Engelmann knows personally, he told Reuters. The company has not revealed her identity or that of others involved, saying anonymity has encouraged staff to co-operate in Germany’s effort to contain the virus.
The task of finding who had contact with her was made easier by Webasto workers’ electronic calendars – for the most part, all the doctors needed was to look at staff appointments.
“It was a stroke of luck,” said Wendtner, the doctor who treated the Munich patients. “We got all the information we needed from the staff to reconstruct the chains of infection.”
For example, case #1 – the first person in Germany to be infected by the Chinese woman – sat next to her in a meeting in a small room on Jan. 20, the scientists wrote.
Where calendar data was incomplete, the scientists said, they were often able to use whole genome sequencing, which analyses differences in the genetic code of the virus from different patients, to map its spread.
By following all these links, they discovered that case #4 had been in contact several times with the Shanghai patient. Then case #4 sat back-to-back with a colleague in the canteen.
When that colleague turned to borrow the salt, the scientists deduced, the virus passed between them. The colleague became case #5.
Webasto said on Jan. 28 it was temporarily closing its Stockdorf site. Between Jan. 27 and Feb. 11, a total of 16 COVID-19 cases were identified in the Munich cluster. All but one were to develop symptoms.
All those who tested positive were sent to hospital so they could be observed and doctors could learn from the disease.
Bavaria closed down public life in mid-March. Germany has since closed schools, shops, restaurants, playgrounds and sports facilities, and many companies have shut to aid the cause.
HAMMER AND DANCE
This is not to say Germany has defeated COVID-19.
Its coronavirus death rate of 1.9%, based on data collated by Reuters, is the lowest among the countries most affected and compares with 12.6% in Italy. But experts say more deaths in Germany are inevitable.
“The death rate will rise,” said Lothar Wieler, president of Germany’s Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases.
The difference between Germany and Italy is partly statistical: Germany’s rate seems so much lower because it has tested widely. Germany has carried out more than 1.3 million tests, according to the Robert Koch Institute. It is now carrying out up to 500,000 tests a week, Drosten said. Italy has conducted more than 807,000 tests since Feb. 21, according to its Civil Protection Agency. With a few local exceptions, Italy only tests people taken to hospital with clear and severe symptoms.
Germany’s government is using the weeks gained by the Munich experience to double the number of intensive care beds from about 28,000. The country already has Europe’s highest number of critical care beds per head of the population, according to a 2012 study.
Even that may not be enough, however. An Interior Ministry paper sent to other government departments on March 22 included a worst-case scenario with more than 1 million deaths.
Another scenario saw 12,000 deaths – with more testing after partial relaxation of restrictions. That scenario was dubbed “hammer and dance,” a term coined by blogger Tomas Pueyo. It refers to the ‘hammer’ of quick aggressive measures for some weeks, including heavy social distancing, followed by the ‘dance’ of calibrating such measures depending on the transmission rate.
The German government paper argued that in the ‘hammer and dance’ scenario, the use of big data and location tracking is inevitable. Such monitoring is already proving controversial in Germany, where memories of the East German Stasi secret police and its informants are still fresh in the minds of many.
A subsequent draft action plan compiled by the government proposes the rapid tracing of infection chains, mandatory mask-wearing in public and limits on gatherings to help enable a phased return to normal life after Germany’s lockdown. The government is backing the development of a smartphone app to help trace infections.
Germany has said it will re-evaluate the lockdown after the Easter holiday; for the car parts maker at the heart of its first outbreak, the immediate crisis is over. Webasto’s office has reopened.
All 16 people who caught COVID-19 there have recovered.
The team is expected to provide technical advice on epidemic prevention and control as well as treatment protocols
The Southeast Asian nation on Tuesday recorded its largest daily increase in coronavirus deaths and infections
A fireman sprays disinfectant from the back of a fire truck to help curb the spread of the coronavirus during a localised quarantine in Manila. Photo: AP
on Tuesday recorded its largest daily increase in coronavirus deaths and infections, as it awaited the arrival of a Chinese medical team to support its embattled frontline health care workers.
Ten more people died from the Covid-19 disease, bringing the total to 88, while 538 new infections were reported for a total of 2,084.
Among those included in the latest count of positives is former senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, whose condition, according to his spokesman Victor Rodriguez, is now “stable” and “improving”.
Health undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said the ministry had opened new labs and run more than 15,000 tests, a five-fold jump from about 3,000 last week. She added that more hospitals were seeking government approval to function as testing centres.
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“We have six more laboratories to conduct tests,” Vergeire said. “We are also conducting contact tracing to find possibly infected persons.”
Philippine hospitals are struggling with a shortage of protective gear, manpower and testing capacity, as are medical facilities around the world. At least 13 doctors have died as of Tuesday and the Philippine Medical Association estimates that over 5 per cent of health workers are currently under quarantine due to Covid-19.
Police personnel in Manila hold up placards reminding people to stay at home. Photo: AFP
The country’s ambassador to China, Chito Sta Romana, confirmed a statement by the Chinese embassy in Manila that Beijing would send an expert team to the Philippines to provide technical advice on epidemic prevention and control as well as treatment protocols.
Sta Romana said the team was made of up of “experienced doctors and public health officials who specialise in infectious diseases”, but could not say when they would arrive.
An infectious disease doctor who spoke on condition of anonymity said the Chinese medical team would only give advice.
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“There was an offer to see patients but it was rebuffed because of local laws on practice,” he said, referring to a law that bans foreign doctors from practising medicine in the Southeast Asian nation.
Philippine foreign secretary Teodoro Locsin Jnr on Saturday tweeted that the Department of Health was “blocking their arrival”. His tweet, now deleted, had said “Don’t piss me off. Let them in.”
Health secretary Francisco Duque told local media that Locsin took down his tweet after hearing that the department was preparing hotel accommodation and translators for the expert team.
According to an ethnic Chinese businessman who is a member of a foundation involved in the visit, the team was supposed to have arrived on March 27. It will comprise doctors, nurses and researchers from hospitals and disease prevention agencies in Fujian province who specialise in areas such as infectious diseases, emergency medicine and integrated traditional Chinese and Western medicine.
An estimated 1.2 million ethnic Chinese call the Philippines – which has a population of 107 million people – home, with many tracing their ancestry to Fujian province.
The businessman, who declined to be named, showed This Week in Asia a screenshot of the team’s name list, which included an official from Fujian province’s United Work Front Department, the controversial Communist Party department responsible for promoting its influence around the world.
Beijing has dispatched teams of medical experts to countries struggling with a surge in Covid-19 cases, including Iran and Italy, and has also donated testing kits and other medical supplies.
The Philippine health department apologised over the weekend for comments made by undersecretary Vergeire that some of the kits donated by China had yielded only “40 per cent accuracy” and could not be used.
The Chinese embassy in Manila had rejected the suggestions, and shared a mobile text message supposedly from Duque to Ambassador Huang Xilian that thanked the Chinese government for the test kits.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte addresses the nation during a live broadcast on March 30. Photo: AP
Vergeire also issued a correction to her earlier statement, and said she was referring to “another brand” of test kits from China that a private foundation was going to donate.
Political risk analyst Ramon Casiple, who chairs the Institute for Political and Electoral Reforms, said at this point in the Philippines’ coronavirus fight “any help is welcome”.
He said he did not expect any negative political backlash towards the Chinese experts, even though on social media Filipinos have continued to blame China for failing to contain the outbreak in Hubei province, where cases first emerged.
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The Philippines has locked down its main island of Luzon – where about a third of the population lives, and where 70 per cent of economic activity takes place – for the past two weeks, resulting in supply chain disruptions and millions of poor families losing any source of income.
’s critics have questioned what he has done with emergency powers granted to him that came bundled with a 275 billion peso (US$5.4 billion) emergency fund. A report showed that Duterte, through the Department of Social Welfare and Development, had managed to deliver emergency food aid to only 4,753 of the 18 million targeted families.
On Tuesday, finance secretary Carlos Dominguez said the government was planning a stimulus package to help companies and the poorest households.
“This planned stimulus package is already being crafted and will be responsive to the uncertainties of the situation,” Dominguez said in a statement, without elaborating. “At this point, nobody knows how bad this pandemic will get or how long it will last.”
Senate defence committee chair Panfilo Lacson warned that some people “are eating corn fungus to stave off hunger” and “if the executive does not act with dispatch, we may have a serious social problem to face”.
Communist Party of the Philippines founding chairman Jose Maria Sison agreed with Lacson but added, “it is therefore just for the broad masses of the people to be outraged and demand collective action against Duterte, his servant generals and the Department of Health because of their incompetence, corruption and stupidity.”
However, Senate President Vicente Sotto urged the public to “cut [Duterte] some slack”.
BEIJING/SINGAPORE (Reuters) – China reported on Wednesday its smallest number of coronavirus cases since January, lending weight to a prediction by its top medical adviser for the outbreak to end by April, but a global infectious diseases expert warned of the spread elsewhere.
Financial markets took heart from the outlook of the Chinese official, epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan, who said on Tuesday the number of new cases was falling in some provinces, and forecast the epidemic would peak this month, even as the death toll in China rose to more than 1,100 people.
World stocks, which had seen rounds of sell-offs over the virus, surged to record highs on hopes of a peak in cases. The Dow industrials, S&P 500 and Nasdaq all hit new highs, and Asian shares nudged higher on Wednesday.
But the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that the epidemic poses a global threat akin to terrorism and one expert coordinating its response said while the outbreak may be peaking at its epicentre in China, it was likely to spread elsewhere in the world, where it had just begun.
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“It has spread to other places where it’s the beginning of the outbreak,” the official, Dale Fisher, head of the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network coordinated by the WHO, said in an interview in Singapore.
“In Singapore, we are at the beginning of the outbreak.”
Singapore has reported 47 cases and worry about the spread is growing. Its biggest bank, DBS (DBSM.SI), evacuated 300 staff from its head office on Wednesday after a confirmed coronavirus case in the building.
Hundreds of cases have been reported in dozens of other countries and territories around the world, but only two people have died outside mainland China – one in Hong Kong and another in the Philippines.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Tuesday the world had to “wake up and consider this enemy virus as public enemy number one” and the first vaccine was 18 months away.
In China, total infections have hit 44,653, health officials said, including 2,015 new confirmed cases on Tuesday. That was the lowest daily rise in new cases since Jan. 30.
The number of deaths on the mainland rose by 97 to 1,113 by the end of Tuesday.
But doubts have been aired on social media about how reliable the figures are, after the government last week amended guidelines on the classification of cases.
‘STAY HOPEFUL’
The biggest cluster of cases outside China is aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship quarantined off Japan’s port of Yokohama, with about 3,700 people on board. Japanese officials on Wednesday said 39 more people had tested positive for the virus, taking the total to 175.
One of the new cases was a quarantine officer.
Thailand said it was barring passengers from another cruise ship, MS Westerdam, from disembarking, the latest country to turn it away amid fears of the coronavirus, despite no confirmed infections on board.
“We try to stay hopeful,” American passenger Angela Jones told Reuters in a video recording. “But each day, that becomes a little bit more difficult, when country after country rejects us.”
Echoing the comparison with the fight against terrorism, China’s state news agency Xinhua said late on Tuesday the epidemic was a “battle that has no gunpowder smoke but must be won”.
The epidemic was a big test of China’s governance and capabilities and some officials were still “dropping the ball” in places where it was most severe, it said, adding: “This is a wake-up call.”
The government of Hubei, the central province at the outbreak’s epicentre, dismissed the provincial health commission’s Communist Party boss, state media said on Tuesday, amid mounting public anger over the crisis.
China’s censors had allowed criticism of local officials but have begun cracking down on reporting of the outbreak, issuing reprimands to tech firms that gave free rein to online speech, Chinese journalists said.
The pathogen has been named COVID-19 – CO for corona, VI for virus, D for disease and 19 for the year it emerged. It is suspected to have come from a market that illegally traded wildlife in Hubei’s capital of Wuhan in December.
The city of 11 million people remains under virtual lockdown as part of China’s unprecedented measures to seal infected regions and limit transmission routes.
Travel restrictions that have paralysed the world’s second-biggest economy have left Wuhan and other Chinese cities resembling ghost towns.
Even if the epidemic ends soon, it has taken a toll of China’s economy, with companies laying off workers and needing loans running into billions of dollars to stay afloat. Supply chains for makers of items from cars to smartphones have broken down.
ANZ Bank said China’s first-quarter growth would probably slow to 3.2% to 4.0%, down from a projection of 5.0%.
The likely slowdown in China could shave 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points off both euro zone and British growth this year, credit rating agency S&P Global estimated.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGES
Image copyright GETTY IMAGES
Image copyright GETTY IMAGES
Image copyright GETTY IMAGES
Image copyright GETTY IMAGES
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 