In mainland China residents are not required to wear masks outdoors, although authorities encourage them to do so in public indoor areas such as airports and train stations. Hong Kong’s move to scrap masks comes after its government this month launched a promotional campaign called “Hello Hong Kong” to bringContinue Reading
TOKYO: Japan is arranging to relax border control measures for visitors from China as early as this month, Japanese broadcaster FNN reported on Wednesday (Feb 8). Japan plans to end blanket testing for all travellers from China upon arrival, the broadcaster said. It will continue requiring negative COVID-19 tests beforeContinue Reading
TOKYO: Japan’s government will drop its recommendation to wear masks indoors and downgrade its medical classification for COVID-19, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on Friday (Jan 27). The changes, effective from early May, will classify the disease on the same level as the flu, down from its current status onContinue Reading
GENEVA: The World Health Organization’s (WHO) immunisation director praised China on Friday (Jan 20) for making quick progress on vaccinating older people with COVID-19 shots and boosters since lifting anti-virus controls last month. China’s population of 1.4 billion has been largely shielded from the disease since it emerged in theContinue Reading
The eastern city of Hangzhou on Thursday urged citizens to place medicine orders “rationally” based on their needs. “Do not blindly hoard medicines … Leave them to the people who really need them,” read a notice from the city’s market supervisory administration. One expert told AFP the bottleneck in suppliesContinue Reading
Officially, the Beijing government has announced seven deaths since opening up. However, health authorities say only coronavirus patients who die from respiratory failure, not other chronic illnesses, are counted as COVID-19 deaths. Doctors and the public have provided a different picture amid criticism the government was ill-prepared and should haveContinue Reading
Though living with COVID-19 has been the norm for most countries around the world this year, it marks an abrupt change for China, which spent most of 2022 trying to keep the virus at bay with harsh lockdowns and near-constant mass PCR testing. Positive cases and their close contacts wereContinue Reading
Data from the World Health Organization shows that bacterial infections have inched up in Japan, Korea, the US, France and Brazil in latest days. The government has inquired all states to make sure that samples of all good cases are sent to the 54 designated genome sequencing laboratories. Health MinisterContinue Reading
That number might increase sharply in the near future, with state-run Global Occasions citing a leading Chinese language respiratory expert forecasting a spike in severe cases within the capital over the arriving weeks. “We must move quickly and prepare temperature clinics, emergency plus severe treatment resources, ” Wang Guangfa, aContinue Reading
“At present after being infected with the Omicron variant, the main cause of death remains underlying diseases,” Wang Guiqiang of Peking University First Hospital told a press conference of the National Health Commission (NHC). “Old people have other underlying conditions, only a very small number die directly of respiratory failureContinue Reading