ASEAN leaders meet online to tackle coronavirus
HANOI, Vietnam — Vietnam will urge Southeast Asian leaders to set up an emergency fund to tackle the coronavirus at a summit held online on Tuesday, as the pandemic ravages the region's tourism and export-reliant economies.
Hanoi is chairing an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meeting on COVID-19, with the country touting its success so far in containing the virus with extensive quarantines and social distancing.
Vietnam has 265 virus cases and no deaths, while Thailand has officially also kept its numbers relatively low at just over 2,500 cases with 40 deaths.
The situation is mixed elsewhere across the region, with fears that limited testing in Indonesia has played out into the low caseload -- and under 400 deaths -- for a country of 260 million.
Similarly, threadbare health systems from Myanmar to Laos are widely believed to be missing the true scale of infections, while a recent surge in cases in Singapore has raised fears the pandemic could rebound in places which had batted back the initial outbreak.
In opening remarks via videoconference, Vietnam's premier Nguyen Xuan Phuc hailed the work of ASEAN in fighting the virus so far.
But he warned COVID-19 "has badly impacted people's lives, their socio-economic situation... challenging stability and social security".
Vietnam will use the 10-member summit to propose funding to deal with the pandemic, building emergency medical stockpiles, sharing resources as well as continuing to stress-test ASEAN's responses to future outbreaks.
Hanoi will also call for an "exit strategy" for the battered economies of Southeast Asia, which rely on open borders to fuel tourism and feed supply chains for their exports.
Vietnam has been hit hard by the virus, which forced the cancellation of the country's first Formula 1 race.
Many of its factories are still running, but in a sign of the ongoing risks, dozens of workers at a Samsung unit in the north were ordered into quarantine after one tested positive for the virus.
The Thai economy, the second largest in ASEAN, is expected to shrink by 5.3 percent this year -- a 22-year low -- with millions left jobless in the politically febrile kingdom. Nearly 22 million people have registered for cash handouts to help ease the economic pain.
Leaders from China, Japan and South Korea are also joining the summit.
Follow this page for updates on a mysterious pneumonia outbreak that has struck dozens of people in China.
New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins says on Sunday that he had contracted COVID-19, testing positive at a key point in his flailing campaign for re-election.
Hipkins saYS on his official social media feed that he would need to isolate for up to five days -- less than two weeks before his country's general election.
The leader of the centre-left Labour Party said he started to experience cold symptoms on Saturday and had cancelled most of his weekend engagements. — AFP
The World Health Organization and US health authorities say Friday they are closely monitoring a new variant of COVID-19, although the potential impact of BA.2.86 is currently unknown.
The WHO classified the new variant as one under surveillance "due to the large number (more than 30) of spike gene mutations it carries", it wrote in a bulletin about the pandemic late Thursday.
So far, the variant has only been detected in Israel, Denmark and the United States. — AFP
The World Health Organization says on Friday that the number of new COVID-19 cases reported worldwide rose by 80% in the last month, days after designating a new "variant of interest".
The WHO declared in May that Covid is no longer a global health emergency, but has warned that the virus will continue to circulate and mutate, causing occasional spikes in infections, hospitalisations and deaths.
In its weekly update, the UN agency said that nations reported nearly 1.5 million new cases from July 10 to August 6, an 80% increase compared to the previous 28 days. — AFP
The head of US intelligence says that there was no evidence that the COVID-19 virus was created in the Chinese government's Wuhan research lab.
In a declassified report, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) says they had no information backing recent claims that three scientists at the lab were some of the very first infected with COVID-19 and may have created the virus themselves.
Drawing on intelligence collected by various member agencies of the US intelligence community (IC), the ODNI report says some scientists at the Wuhan lab had done genetic engineering of coronaviruses similar to COVID-19. — AFP
Boris Johnson deliberately misled MPs over Covid lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street when he was prime minister, a UK parliament committee ruled on Thursday.
The cross-party Privileges Committee said Johnson, 58, would have been suspended as an MP for 90 days for "repeated contempts (of parliament) and for seeking to undermine the parliamentary process".
But he avoided any formal sanction by his peers in the House of Commons by resigning as an MP last week.
In his resignation statement last Friday, Johnson pre-empted publication of the committee's conclusions, claiming a political stitch-up, even though the body has a majority from his own party.
He was unrepentant again on Thursday, accusing the committee of being "anti-democratic... to bring about what is intended to be the final knife-thrust in a protracted political assassination".
Calling it "beneath contempt", he said it was "for the people of this to decide who sits in parliament, not Harriet Harman", the veteran opposition Labour MP who chaired the seven-person committee. — AFP
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