There was excitement in Shanghai on Tuesday after officials said they would take some important steps on Wednesday to reopen and end the two-month blockade of COVID-19 in China’s largest city that has kept most residents confined to his house.
The full bus and subway service will be restored, as well as basic rail connections with the rest of China, Deputy Mayor Zong Ming said at a daily municipal press conference on the outbreak on Tuesday, the Associated Press reported.
Schools will partially reopen voluntarily for students, and shopping malls, supermarkets, drugstores and convenience stores will continue to gradually reopen to no more than 75% of capacity. Cinemas and gyms will be closed.
Shanghai on Monday only counted 29 new cases of COVID, well below the roughly 20,000 newspapers it recorded in April. Li Qiang, the top official of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai, said at a meeting Monday that the city had achieved great success in fighting the outbreak through continuous struggle.
Despite censorship, online video sharing shows growing despair and anger over Covid-19’s prolonged confinements in China’s economic capital, Shanghai, where officials are trying to resolve issues such as food shortages. , while reducing the country’s strict pandemic policy. Photographic composition: Emily Siu
The news was well received by investors, who raised oil prices by 3.7% in the expectation that the reopening would help restart the local economy. Shanghai is a major manufacturing hub.
In the United States, cases may be stabilizing after rising steadily since late March thanks to the highly infectious omicron variant and its subvariants.
The United States has an average of 109,105 cases a day, up 14% from two weeks ago, according to a New York Times tracker. But cases are spreading to the northeastern states that were recent hot spots, such as New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island. However, they are increasing in the south and southwest and have more than doubled in Arizona, South Carolina and West Virginia over the past two weeks.
The country has an average of 26,781 hospitalizations a day, 20% more than two weeks ago, but well below the January omicron peak of more than 150,000. The daily death toll stands at 368 on average, 22% more than two weeks ago.
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Other news about COVID-19 you should know:
• Nasal vaccines as protection against COVID-19 are being studied in seven clinical trials, according to Mayuresh Abhyankar, a researcher at the University of Virginia, who explains that vaccinating someone right where the coronavirus is likely to start involves many immune benefits. Intranasal vaccines are best suited to protect against nasal pathogens, such as the flu or coronavirus caused by COVID-19. By mimicking the first step of natural exposure to a pathogen in the air, these vaccines help train a person’s immune system at the potential site of infection.
• The governing body of the World Health Organization agreed on Monday to form a new committee to help speed up its response to health emergencies such as COVID-19, Reuters reported. The agency has faced criticism for its management of the pandemic, including delays in the early days of the crisis. Some disease experts say that governments and the WHO should avoid repeating mistakes as early as other outbreaks such as smallpox. The resolution, approved unanimously at the annual meeting of the 34-member executive board, will form a new Standing Committee on Health Emergency Prevention, Preparedness and Response to help address perceived deficiencies.
North Korea faces rising fever after reporting its first local Covid-19 infection in mid-May. WSJ examines Kim Jong Un’s strategy to fight the pandemic in the impoverished country, which has little probation and an unvaccinated population. Photos: KCTV; STR / AFP
• The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, has been criticized again after text messages leaked over the weekend suggested that he and his wife met two friends in his flat on June 19, 2020, for Prime Minister’s birthday, when socializing was banned inside, the Guardian reported. The social event was not considered by the recent investigation into non-compliance with COVID rules by Johnson and his fellow Conservatives, a scandal dubbed “partygate”, which has led to Johnson’s resignation.
• A Beijing man has quarantined thousands of his neighbors after ignoring orders to stay home and then tested positive for COVID-19, prompting a police investigation, CBS News reported. The 40-year-old Sun man failed to meet the isolation requirement of visiting a high-risk mall. Sun and his wife later tested positive, prompting authorities to lock up 5,000 of their neighbors and send 250 to a government quarantine center.
That’s what the numbers say
The overall number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 exceeded 529.5 million on Tuesday, while the number of deaths exceeded 6.28 million, according to data added by Johns Hopkins University.
The United States leads the world with 84 million cases and 1,004,782 fatalities.
Monitoring by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that 221.1 million people living in the U.S. are fully vaccinated, equivalent to 66.6% of the total population. But only 103.2 million have had a first reinforcement, equivalent to 46.7% of the vaccinated population.
Only 13.5 million people aged 50 and over who are entitled to a second reinforcement have had one, equivalent to 21.5% of those who had a first reinforcement.