Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
aims to alert you to the threats and opportunities that China and India present. China and India require serious attention; case of ‘hidden dragon and crouching tiger’.
Without this attention, governments, businesses and, indeed, individuals may find themselves at a great disadvantage sooner rather than later.
The POSTs (front webpages) are mainly 'cuttings' from reliable sources, updated continuously.
The PAGEs (see Tabs, above) attempt to make the information more meaningful by putting some structure to the information we have researched and assembled since 2006.
BEIJING (Reuters) – China reported on Saturday a rise in new coronavirus cases, as authorities try to head off a second wave of infections, particularly from imported and asymptomatic cases, as curbs on cities and travel are lifted.
The National Health Commission said 46 new cases were reported on Friday, including 42 involving travellers from abroad, up from 42 cases a day earlier.
In its statement the commission added that 34 new asymptomatic cases were reported, down from 47 the previous day.
Mainland China’s tally of infections now stands at 81,953. The death toll rose by three to 3,339.
Tough curbs imposed since January helped rein in infections sharply from the height of the pandemic in February. But policymakers fear a second wave triggered by arrivals from overseas or asymptomatic patients.
Northeastern Heilongjiang recently reported a spike in new cases because of Chinese nationals entering the province from Russia, which has seen a surge of cases.
Provincial health officials said it had 22 new imported cases on Friday, all Chinese nationals coming from Russia, and one new local case, in its capital of Harbin.
Inner Mongolia had a daily tally of 27 new imported cases by Saturday morning, all from Russia, the region’s health authority said.
The central province of Hubei, where the virus emerged late last year, reported no new cases for a seventh successive day.
A rise in virus infections has prompted authorities in Guangzhou to step up scrutiny of foreigners, ordering bars and restaurants not to serve clients who appear to be of African origin, the U.S. consulate in the southern city said.
Anyone with “African contacts” faces mandatory virus tests followed by quarantine, regardless of recent travel history or previous isolation, it said in a statement.
It advised African-Americans or those who feel they might be suspected of contact with nationals of African origin to avoid the city.
Since the epidemic broke out in the provincial capital of Wuhan, it has spread around the world, infecting 1.6 million people and killing more than 100,000.
BEIJING, April 9 (Xinhua) — Chinese Vice Premier Hu Chunhua held a phone conversation on Thursday with British Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak on advancing bilateral cooperation on epidemic prevention and economic development.
Hu, who leads the Chinese delegation to the China-UK Economic and Financial Dialogue (EFD), noted that Chinese President Xi Jinping and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently held two phone conversations and reached important consensus on jointly dealing with the pandemic and developing China-UK relations.
The Chinese side stands ready to work with the British side to implement the consensus reached by the two leaders, deepen practical cooperation in such fields as epidemic prevention and finance, and provide Britain with support and assistance within its capabilities in medical supplies and other fields, Hu said.
The vice premier expressed hope that the two sides will further strengthen cooperation under the framework of the United Nations and the Group of 20, promote macroeconomic policy coordination, cut tariff, remove barriers, and facilitate the flow of trade, so as to maintain the stability of the global industrial supply chain and promote sustainable growth of the world economy.
For his part, Sunak thanked China for its support and assistance, adding that Britain stands ready to strengthen bilateral cooperation in epidemic prevention, economy and finance through channels like the China-UK EFD, so as to continuously advance bilateral relations.
Malfunction happened during third stage of launch after earlier stages were completed successfully, state media says
Failed mission is second in less than a month after Long March-7A encountered problems after lift-off on March 16
A Long March-3B carrier rocket blasts off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in Sichuan province in November. A similar launch on Thursday ended in failure. Photo: Xinhua
China’s space programme suffered another setback on Thursday night with its second rocket launch failure in less than a month.
Officials are investigating what caused a malfunction during the third stage of the Long March-3B launch after lift-off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in southwest Sichuan province at 7.46pm with an Indonesian Palapa-N1 satellite, Xinhua reported.
“The first and second stages of the rocket performed well, but the third stage malfunctioned,” the report said.
“Debris from the third stage of the rocket and the satellite fell [to the ground]. The launch mission failed.”
Debris from the failed mission rained down over Guam on Thursday night. Photo: Twitter
China’s state media did not say where the rocket landed, but the office of Guam Homeland Security and Civil Defence said “a fiery object over the Marianas sky” observed on Thursday evening was likely connected to the failed launch.
Video footage of the burning debris falling from the sky was widely circulated on social media.
The setback follows another failed launch on March 16, when China’s new Long March-7A, a three-stage, medium-lift, liquid-fuel rocket, encountered an “abnormality” minutes after lifting off from its launch site in the southern island province of Hainan.
China’s BeiDou system one satellite closer to full operation
11 Mar 2020
The satellite lost on Thursday – the Nusantara 2 – was built in China for Indonesian telecommunication companies Pasifik Satelit Nusantara and Indosat Ooredoo. It was intended to replace an older satellite to provide internet and broadcasting services in Indonesia and across the Asia-Pacific region to Australia, The Jakarta Post reported earlier this month.
It is not known if the failed launch will have an impact on other Long March-3B satellite launches planned for later in the year.
Introduced in 1996, the Long March-3B – also known as the CZ-3B or LM-3B – has been the main orbital carrier rocket of China’s space programme. It was used to carry many of the satellites that make up China’s BeiDou navigation system, with the latest addition being in March.
For that launch, engineers used parachutes to control where the rocket’s boosters would land after being discarded after lift-off so as to minimise the impact on people living below, state media reported.
The latest version of the Long March-3B entered service in 2007 and is dedicated to launching heavy communications satellites of up to 5.5 tonnes into geostationary transfer orbits.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Indore is a bustling commercial city
In early March, 40-year-old Ravi Dosi, a chest specialist in India, saw a baffling surge in patients with respiratory problems at outpatient clinics.
“There was almost a 50% jump in patients with upper respiratory issues and sore throat. They were not responding to antibiotics. Testing was still low and we didn’t really know what was going on,” Dr Dosi, who works at Sri Aurobindo Institute of Medical Sciences, a 1,156-bed private medical college in the central city of Indore, told me.
Less than a fortnight later, Dr Dosi began seeing an uptick in admissions of Covid-19 patients. Around the end of March, the hospital was receiving 28 infected patients every day.
They had dry cough, fever, and difficulty breathing. Their blood oxygen levels were low. They were reporting loss of taste and smell.
In the first wave of patients, nearly a dozen came from far-flung districts, more than 150km (93 miles) from Indore, a bustling commercial city in Madhya Pradesh state. The state has now become a hotspot, with nearly 400 confirmed infections out of the more than 6,400 infections and nearly 200 deaths across the country so far.
By the second week of April, Dr Dosi and his team of 100 doctors and nearly an equal number of nursing staff working 24/7 in three shifts, were treating 144 Covid-19 patients. (Thirty-one had been treated and sent home already.)
A total of 38 patients were in intensive care. Twenty-one of them were critical. There had been seven deaths. “We are handling the largest number of Covid-19 patients in India,” Vinod Bhandari, a surgeon and chairman of the hospital, told me.
Doctors now believe that the infection was spreading in the community long before the government admitted to it, and testing slowly ramped up. Until two weeks ago, Indian health authorities had been denying community transmission.
Image caption The hospital in Indore has more than 140 patients
Now a new study by Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) using surveillance data from 41 labs in the country has hinted at community transmission: 52 districts in 20 states and union territories reported Covid-19 patients. Some 40% of the cases did not report any history of international travel or contact with a known case. (The survey was based on swabs collected from nearly 6,000 patients who tested positive between 15 February and 19 March.)
Back in the hospital in Indore, the doctors are battling the surge in infections.
Three isolation wards spread over two floors floors are stacked with patients. (The hospital has earmarked 525 beds for Covid-19 patients.) Isolation wards have younger patients with mild infection, while elderly patients with more severe symptoms are in intensive care. The oldest patient is a 95-year-old man, and the youngest is a four-month-old boy.
The team of doctors handling patients includes chest specialists, anaesthetists, microbiologists, and dermatologists. There are patients with a lot of underlying medical conditions – diabetes, hypertension, even cancer – so all the specialists have been called in to help with the treatment.
Dr Dosi wakes up early, puts on protective gear – scrubs, face masks and shields, N95 masks, gowns, double gloves and shoe covers – before going on his rounds of the patients. Doctors say they are not facing a shortage of gear yet.
They are using 22 ventilators to help the critical patients breathe, and also providing oxygen supplies to others using nasal cannulas (nose prongs).
In the isolation wards, patients are given oral medication – antibiotics and hydroxychloroquine (commonly known as HCQ), an anti-malarial drug – and directed to maintain social distancing and wash their hands regularly.
Image caption The isolation wards are packed with patients
“I have never seen a challenge and crisis like this in my career. I have heard stories about an outbreak of plague in Surat [in 1994]. But this seems to be much bigger. The biggest challenge is to keep hopes alive and be positive,” says Dr Dosi.
Keeping hopes up for patients in isolation can be taxing. Three tests, say doctors, are being done for the infection – if the first test comes out positive, the patient remains in isolation for two weeks, and is tested twice on two days after the quarantine period. If the last two tests come back negative, the patient is discharged. If not, the patient has to stay in isolation for another two weeks. “It is a tough grind, mentally,” says one doctor.
For the last three weeks, Dr Dosi has been living in the hospital, away from his wife, two sons and parents. His father is a retired pathologist. They communicate via hurried video calls, between his frantic trips to the isolation wards and intensive care.
I ask him when does he expect this to “get over”, so that he can go home.
“In a couple of weeks,” he says. “The lockdown should have helped to slow down the infection.”
Dr Dosi is alluding to the strict 21-day lockdown India imposed on 24 March to halt the spread of the infection.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Health officials have been denying community transmission
Things are getting better, he says.
“I am getting 10 patients for admission in isolation wards, and two patients severe enough for intensive care every day now. Earlier this week, it was 50:50.”
It is possibly too early to hazard a guess about when admissions will slow down to single digits. As more people are tested, the number of patients can easily rise again.
It’s been unrelenting, Dr Dosi says.
Early, on Friday, I sent him a text to find out what was going on.
BEIJING (Reuters) – China will promote the sales of export products in domestic markets, as foreign trade faces unprecedented challenges due to the coronavirus pandemic, an assistant commerce minister said on Friday.
As the coronavirus spreads to almost all of China’s trading partners, the world’s second-largest economy is set to reach a grim milestone for full year growth, with the pace of expansion likely to be the slowest since the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976. And, the export sector is facing millions of job losses and factory shutdowns.
“Due to the rapid spread of the epidemic in the world, foreign demand has slumped and the biggest difficulty facing foreign trade companies is the plunge in orders,” said Ren Hongbin, the assistant minister at the Ministry of Commerce.
He said firms across the board have had their orders cancelled or delayed, and new orders are “very hard to sign”.
“The uncertainty about the pandemic has become the biggest uncertainty for foreign trade development.”
Forecasters expect China’s 2020 growth could be nearer the 2.0% mark – the slowest in over 40 years – due to the sweeping impact of the pandemic both at home and overseas. The economy grew 6.1% last year.
China’s overseas shipments fell 17.2% in January-February from the same period a year earlier, marking the steepest fall since February 2019. Imports sank 4% from a year earlier.
Among the government measures to support the sector, China is accelerating efforts to build online trade fairs and guiding exporters to work with e-commerce retailers for sales in domestic markets and coordinating with its trading partners to stabilise supply chains, said Ren.
The Canton Fair, China’s oldest and biggest trade fair due to take place online, will feature live-streaming services for participants, Li Xingqian, another commerce ministry official, told the same briefing. The fair was originally scheduled to begin on April 15, but was postponed due to the coronavirus outbreak.
China is willing to boost trade relations with other countries, including the United States, under the new circumstances, said Ren, adding that Beijing hopes to work together with Washington to promote bilateral trade.
Both countries have been engaged in a near two-year long trade war with tit-for-tat tariffs on each other’s goods, before negotiators called a truce with an interim trade deal in January.
BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s factory gate prices fell the most in five months in March, with deflation deepening and set to worsen in coming months as the economic damage wrought by the coronavirus outbreak at home and worldwide shuts down many countries.
The world’s second-largest economy is trying to restart its engines after weeks of near paralysis to contain the pandemic that had severely restricted business activity, flow of goods and the daily life of people.
Friday’s data from the National Bureau of Statistics suggested a durable recovery was some way off, with China’s producer price index (PPI) falling 1.5% from a year earlier, the biggest decline since October last year. It compared with a median forecast of a 1.1% fall tipped by a Reuters poll of analysts and a 0.4% drop in February.
Headline consumer inflation also eased somewhat last month, partly led by government control measures, while core prices remained benign, leaving more room for monetary easing, some analysts said.
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The overall decline in the factory gate gauge was exacerbated by a slump in global oil and commodities prices, which filtered through to crude oil, steel and non-ferrous metal industries, the statistics bureau said in a statement accompanying the data.
“The issue of having more supply than demand, and persistently low oil prices, will intensify deflationary pressures,” said Yang Yewei, a Beijing-based analyst with Southwest Securities.
“Work resumptions on the production side are faster than the repair in demand. Downstream demand is recovering slowly and still remains weak,” he said.
The oil and gas extraction sector had the biggest year-on-year price fall of 21.7%, among the 40 major industrial sectors surveyed, deteriorating sharply from a 0.4% drop in the previous month.
The stringent travel and transport curbs have now been lifted across much of the country including Wuhan, the epicentre of the outbreak where the virus first emerged in late 2019. So far the virus has killed more than 3,300 and infected over 81,000 people in the country.
Analysts expect a deep first-quarter economic contraction in China and have grown increasingly pessimistic about the country’s prospects for 2020 due to the pandemic’s sweeping global impact.
Many economists and policymakers are forecasting a steep global recession this year as numerous countries are forced into lockdowns to contain the spread of the coronavirus, severely curtailing business activity in a major blow to jobs and incomes.
Worldwide, the virus has killed around 95,000 people and infected more than 1.5 million. Policymakers globally have responded to the crisis by launching an unprecedented package of stimulus measures, injecting trillions of dollars to backstop their economies that have been brought to a virtual standstill.
Beijing has also rolled out a series of fiscal and monetary support steps, and sources have told Reuters that policymakers are readying more stimulus in the coming months to stabilise growth and prevent mass unemployment.
China’s consumer prices rose 4.3% from a year earlier in March, compared with a 4.8% gain tipped by a Reuters poll and a 5.2% increase in February, as logistics and transport conditions improved and government price control measures kicked in.
But food prices still rose over 18% from a year earlier, led by a 116.4% jump in pork prices, the data showed. The virus outbreak has pushed up prices of some food items, such as pork and vegetables.
Core inflation – which excludes food and energy prices – remained benign last month at 1.2%，but it still edged up from 1% in February.
BEIJING, April 9 (Xinhua) — The third China International Import Expo (CIIE) plans to double the size of its medicine and medical equipment section from that of last year’s event, and nearly 60 Fortune 500 companies and industry giants have signed up for the section, an official said Thursday.
Over 80 percent of the planned area for this section has been booked, Gao Feng, spokesperson of the Ministry of Commerce, told a press briefing.
The section will display items such as drugs, medical equipment, elderly care, health food and medical services. A few companies will present epidemic control products including extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machines, invasive and non-invasive ventilators, thermometers and protective face masks, said Gao.
More than 1,000 exhibitors worldwide have signed up for the third CIIE scheduled to be held in Shanghai from Nov. 5 to 10, occupying 60 percent of the exhibit space.
BEIJING, April 9 (Xinhua) — Chinese political advisors on Thursday attended a voluntary tree-planting activity in Beijing, as part of their efforts to contribute to building a Beautiful China.
The event was held at the Xishan National Forest Park in Beijing’s Haidian District, during which over 400 saplings of different types of trees were planted.
It was attended by vice chairpersons of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and more than 100 staff members of the working organs of the CPPCC National Committee.
The CPPCC National Committee working organs have consistently organized voluntary tree-planting activities in spring for years.
NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Indian and Pakistani troops in disputed Kashmir are engaged in their most frequent cross-border fighting of at least two years, official data shows, even as both nuclear-armed rivals battle surging coronavirus outbreaks.
Kashmir has long been a flashpoint between the neighbours but tension was renewed after New Delhi withdrew the autonomy of the Himalayan region last August and split it into federally-administered territories.
Both countries claim the region in full, but rule only parts, and often accuse each other of breaching a 2003 ceasefire pact by shelling and firing across the Line of Control (LoC), an informal border in Kashmir, and of killing dozens every year.
Indian Army data reviewed by Reuters shows 411 ceasefire violations by Pakistan’s military in March, the highest number in a single month since at least 2018. That compares with 267 violations in March last year recorded by the Indian Army.
“(The) Pakistan Army never initiates ceasefire violations along LoC, but it has always responded befittingly to Indian Army’s unprovoked firing,” said Major-General Babar Iftikhar, of the public relations wing of the Pakistan Army.
Iftikhar said Pakistan’s military had recorded 705 ceasefire violations by the Indian Army since the beginning of the year.
The Indian Army data showed 1,197 Pakistani violations during the same period.
Reuters is not in a position to independently verify the competing claims.
Four Indian army officials said the heightened border activity was a cover to help militants from Pakistan-backed groups infiltrate into Indian Kashmir, as some troops help to run health camps and hand out food in the battle on the virus.
“The increase in ceasefire violations is an indication that Pakistan is trying to push militants into the Kashmir valley,” said one of the officials, who all sought anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to media.
India has 5,734 infections, including 166 deaths, while Pakistan has reported 4,072 cases and 58 deaths, with the military of each helping its government’s efforts against the virus.
As summer approaches, infiltration into Kashmir typically picks up. An Indian security official said between 250 and 300 militants were estimated to be ready to cross over from Pakistan, citing intelligence reports.
“This is the time when our (border) fence is the weakest,” with damage caused by winter snows, said the official, who sought anonymity.
On Monday, the Indian Army said in a statement it killed five Pakistan-backed militants at the LoC during a firefight in heavy snow, with five of its special forces soldiers also killed.
Pakistan denies giving material support to militants in Kashmir but says it provides moral and diplomatic backing for the self-determination of Kashmiri people.
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.
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 