Thailand to increase border patrol following new case cluster
Thailand will deploy drones and increase military patrols along its border with Myanmar following a small cluster of cases linked to people crossing undetected into the country.
At least 19 cases of the coronavirus have been linked to people passing over the border without undergoing mandatory quarantine. Health workers have raced to trace hundreds of contacts, while some schools have also been closed as a precaution.
Thailand – which has recorded 4,126 cases and 60 deaths – has been praised by the World Health Organisation for its success in handling the outbreak, including its contact tracing efforts and strict lockdown earlier in the year.
The country has been mostly shut to foreign tourists since March but it shares a porous, 1,500 mile border with neighbouring Myanmar – which has struggled to control virus cases.
The border, which stretches through dense forest and mountainous terrain, is difficult to monitor and there is concern that migrant workers who may have crossed the border illegally will be afraid to seek help if they do develop symptoms.
Prime minister Prayuth Chan-ocha has said border surveillance will be increased and called for calm, saying that the country is not facing a second wave.
Separately, four local cases were detected among medical staff working in quarantine facilities and a private hospital.
US passes 15m cases
US coronavirus cases crossed the 15 million mark on Tuesday as regulators moved a step closer to approving a Covid-19 vaccine and Britain started inoculating people, offering hope of slowing a pandemic that killed 15,000 Americans in the last week alone.
Record cases in at least three states – Arizona, Alabama and Ohio – pushed the cumulative case load to over 15 million, according to a Reuters tally of state and county data. With the virus showing no sign of abating, leading health officials are once again sounding the alarm of further spread when people gather for the year-end holidays.
“We*re in for a very challenging period,” top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci told a virtual summit on Tuesday.
In a bit of welcome news, Pfizer Inc cleared another hurdle on Tuesday when the US Food and Drug Administration released documents that raised no new red flags over the safety or efficacy of the vaccine it developed with Germany’s BioNTech SE.
The documents were prepared ahead of a meeting of a panel of outside advisers on Thursday to discuss whether to recommend FDA emergency use authorisation of the Pfizer vaccine.
That could eventually provide relief to hospitals buckling under a record 101,498 Covid-19 patients as of Monday, up 16% in a week. Healthcare workers are expected to be among the first to receive the vaccine it if receives an EUA.
North Korea lashes out at South Korea over zero cases doubt
The sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has slammed the South’s foreign minister as “impudent” for casting doubt over Pyongyang’s claim that the country has no coronavirus cases, state media reported Wednesday.
Nuclear-armed Pyongyang closed its borders in January, sealing itself off from the outside world in an effort to avoid contamination, and has long insisted that it has had no cases.
Kim himself reiterated the claim at a huge military parade in October.
Experts suggest it is unlikely, given that the virus first emerged in neighbouring China, its main provider of trade and aid.
South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha told a forum in Bahrain on Saturday that it was “hard to believe” that the North had no coronavirus cases, adding that Pyongyang had been unresponsive to Seoul’s offers to help tackle the disease.
The pandemic “in fact has made North Korea more North Korea – ie more closed, very top-down decision-making process where there is very little debate on their measures dealing with Covid-19”, Kang said.
“All signs are that the regime is very intensely focused on controlling the disease that they say they don’t have.”
Kim Yo Jong, sister and key adviser to the North Korean leader, condemned Kang in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency on Wednesday, calling her comments “impudent” and accusing her of seeking to worsen the already strained inter-Korean relationship.
“It can be seen from the reckless remarks made by her without any consideration of the consequences that she is too eager to further chill the frozen relations between the north and south of Korea,” Kim said.
“We will never forget her words and she might have to pay dearly for it.”
Indonesia pushed forward with holding previously postponed regional elections on Wednesday despite concerns about doing so amid the ongoing pandemic.
AP: At least 105 million people were eligible to vote in elections being held to choose nine governors, 37 mayors and 224 district chiefs across 270 regions. The polls were originally supposed to be held in September but were delayed because of the virus and the number of organisers who got sick.
The vote comes just days after Indonesia recorded its highest daily increase in new virus cases since the pandemic began — more than 8,000.
The pandemic was impacting the logistics of voting. Masks were required for voters and poll workers. Polling stations opened earlier than usual and each voter was given a scheduled hour during which they could vote.
Mexico’s health ministry on Tuesday reported 11,006 new confirmed cases of coronavirus infection and 800 additional fatalities, bringing the total in the country to 1,193,255 cases and 110,874 deaths.
The government says the real number of infected people is likely significantly higher than the confirmed cases.
In the UK, for many years the word “destitution” felt like a throwback to some dimly lit Victorian past. No one was destitute in modern Britain, at least those who were eligible for social security. You might be poor, but it was rare to be regularly hungry, cold, ill-clothed, and entirely dependent on the kindness of charity.
All that started to change less than a decade ago. While headline relative poverty rates seemed to change very little, researchers noticed that the proportion of those below the breadline experiencing extreme poverty was growing. Food bank volunteers saw people going for days without eating. Debt charities helped people mired in mountains of debt over unpaid rent and utility bills.
Three years ago the veteran anti-poverty campaigner and former MP Frank Field suggested what was being witnessed day in day out in the food banks and church halls of the UK’s poorest neighbourhoods went far beyond the quotidian shock of poverty numbers. Destitution was real and growing alarmingly, he said. “Clearly something unique and horrendous is happening to the bottom end of our society.”
A passenger on board a “cruise-to-nowhere” from Singapore has tested positive for Covid-19, the operator Royal Caribbean said on Wednesday.
Singapore has been trialling the trips which are open only to the city-state’s residents, make no stops and sail in waters close by. At 2.45 am on Wednesday morning, the captain of the Quantum of the Seas informed the 2,000 passengers that the ship was to return to dock a day early and that they should stay in their rooms, the Straits Times reports.
At 8.10 the captain confirmed that a passenger had tested positive. Breakfast would be served to passengers in their rooms, he said.
“It’s important that you know that you are safe on board and we have a good plan in place to maintain your health, safety and comfort.”
Destitution levels in Great Britain are expected to double in the wake of the pandemic with an estimated 2 million families, including a million children, likely to struggle to afford to feed themselves, stay warm, or keep clean as the recession deepens, according to a study.
The estimates, carried out for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), described “increasing, intensifying” levels of extreme poverty experienced by some of the country’s poorest households in recent years, and highlight a social security system increasingly failing to protect society’s most vulnerable:
The British government has been urged to launch a one-off wealth tax on millionaire households to raise up to £260bn in response to the coronavirus pandemic, as the crisis damages Britain’s public finances and exacerbates inequality.
The Wealth Tax Commission – a group of leading tax experts and economists brought together by the London School of Economics and Warwick University to examine the case for a levy on assets – said targeting the richest in society would be the fairest and most efficient way to raise taxes in response to the pandemic.
In a highly anticipated report, the group, which has drawn attention from the Commons Treasury committee and the former head of the civil service, Sir Gus O’Donnell, said its proposals would be preferable to a broad-based tax raid on workers’ incomes and consumer spending:
