Myanmar confirms first coronavirus cases
YANGON, Myanmar — Myanmar confirmed its first cases of of the deadly novel coronavirus late Monday after weeks of increasing scepticism over the under-developed southeast Asian nation's claims to be free of the disease.
The country of 54 million people had been the world's largest country by population not to report a single case of the pandemic that has confined more than 1.7 billion to their homes.
With only 214 people tested by late Monday, medical experts and rights groups have urged Myanmar to stand up and face the pending crisis.
Myanmar's health ministry late Monday confirmed a 36-year-old Myanmar man travelling back from the United States and a 26-year-old Myanmar man returning from Britain had both tested positive.
"We will investigate all the people who were in close contact with these two men," the statement said.
Late night panic buying
The announcement immediately sparked panic-buying at one 24-hour supermarket in commercial capital Yangon, where hours before life had largely continued as normal.
The Myanmar government had claimed the country's "lifestyle and diet" -- including the lack of physical contact and the use of cash, rather than credit cards -- offered protection to the nation.
The country shares a porous 2,100 kilometre border with China, where the virus was first found.
Phil Robertson from Human Rights Watch last week branded the government's attitude as "irresponsible", saying it served only to give people a false sense of security.
Some public spaces were closed down in recent days, from schools and cinemas to karaoke bars and massage parlours.
The country also took the unprecedented step of cancelling the planned street celebrations and huge water fights that normally mark the country's New Year in April.
On Monday thousands of Myanmar migrant workers flooded back over the border from Thailand before the planned closure of land border points.
Foreigners have left the country in droves, heeding warnings from various embassies about being trapped in a nation with what Yangon-based analyst Richard Horsey described as "one of the weakest public health systems in the world".
"It also has almost no social safety net, so the poorest and most vulnerable will bear the brunt of the health and economic crisis," he told AFP.
One doctor in provincial town Pathein, even took to Facebook to plea for resources, saying his hospital had just seven beds in the isolation ward and only one ventilator and were "no way" ready for the virus.
"If we have more than seven patients, where shall we put them?" hospital head Dr. Than Min Htut wrote.
Humanitarian groups fear for Myanmar's hundreds of thousands of displaced people, confined to camps in conflict-ridden corners of the country.
The government, parliament and many other institutions are also largely led by elderly men - the demographic most vulnerable to COVID-19, Horsey warned.
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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