Month: December 2022

Hong Kong is forecast to grow economically next year after the city’s leader announced the removal of nearly all COVID-19 restrictions on international arrivals and said it would reopen its border with China. But experts say the coronavirus pandemic and geopolitics have hampered Hong Kong’s international status after nearly three years of global isolation. Last week, Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee announced that people arriving in Hong Kong are free from COVID-19 restrictions. International passengers can now travel freely upon arrival. Previous requirements meant arrivals were not allowed to enter places such as restaurants and bars for the first three days, monitoring their health as a precaution against catching the coronavirus. The government also scrapped its COVID-19 tracking media app that granted users access to venues such as restaurants, gyms and salons, although some designated venues will still require vaccination records for those who wish to enter. Gary Bowerman, a tourism analyst based in Kuala Lumpur, said Hong Kong’s arrivals could still be hesitant to enter. “Removing most entry restrictions is a big step forward, but as experience proved in Southeast Asia and South Korea, it is not until on-arrival testing is eliminated that confidence will return for inbound travel,” Bowerman told VOA. “Hong Kong is on a holding pattern, where travelers will likely wait until testing is removed before committing to travel to Hong Kong.” COVID-19 background — China reopening Arrivals must still be subject to a mandatory COVID-19 PCR test on arrival and one on Day Two, …

Shanghai authorities urged residents to stay at home this weekend, seeking a toned-down Christmas in the nation’s most populous city as COVID-19 rages nationwide after tough curbs were lifted. A branch of the Shanghai Municipal Health Commission on Saturday urged young people in particular to avoid crowded gatherings, due to the ease of spreading the coronavirus and low temperatures. Christmas is not traditionally celebrated in China, but it is common for young couples and some families to spend the holiday together. The omicron variant is surging weeks after the authorities abruptly ended their zero-COVID policy, lifting strict testing requirements and travel restrictions as China becomes the last major country to move toward living with the virus. While many have welcomed the easing, families and the health system were unprepared for the resulting surge of infections. Hospitals are scrambling for beds and blood, pharmacies for drugs and authorities are racing to build clinics. Shanghai typically hosts a large Christmas-themed market in a luxury shopping area along Nanjing West Road, and restaurants and retailers offer promotions to drum up business. But the spread of Omicron is dampening celebrations. Many Shanghai restaurants have canceled Christmas parties normally held for regulars, while hotels have capped reservations due to staff shortages, said Jacqueline Mocatta, who works in the hospitality industry. “There’s only a certain amount of customers we can accept given our manpower, with a majority of team members who are unwell at the moment,” she said. Skepticism about official data People lamented on social …

Half a million people in a single Chinese city are being infected with COVID-19 every day, a senior health official has said, in a rare and quickly censored acknowledgement that the country’s wave of infections is not being reflected in official statistics. China this month has rapidly dismantled key pillars of its zero-COVID strategy, doing away with snap lockdowns, lengthy quarantines and travel curbs in a jarring reversal of its hallmark containment strategy. Cities across the country have struggled to cope as surging infections have emptied pharmacy shelves, filled hospital wards and appeared to cause backlogs at crematoriums and funeral homes. But the end of strict testing mandates has made caseloads virtually impossible to track, while authorities have narrowed the medical definition of a COVID death in a move experts have said will suppress the number of fatalities attributable to the virus. A news outlet operated by the ruling Communist Party in Qingdao on Friday reported the municipal health chief as saying that the eastern city was seeing “between 490,000 and 530,000” new COVID cases a day. The coastal city of around 10 million people was “in a period of rapid transmission ahead of an approaching peak,” Bo Tao reportedly said, adding that the infection rate would accelerate by another 10% over the weekend. The report was shared by several other news outlets but appeared to have been edited by Saturday morning to remove the case figures. China’s National Health Commission said Saturday that 4,103 new domestic infections were recorded …

The combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and high levels of opioid overdose deaths drove life expectancy in the United States down for the second consecutive year in 2021, with a child born in that year expected to live 76.4 years, the lowest figure since 1996, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By comparison, Americans born in 2019, the year before the pandemic took hold, could expect to live 78.8 years. In 2019, the U.S. experienced 715.2 deaths per 100,000 people. In 2021, that rate had climbed by 23%, to 897.7. While most countries in the world experienced a decrease in life expectancy during the pandemic, it was particularly pronounced in the U.S. And while many advanced economies, including France, Belgium, Switzerland and Sweden saw their life expectancy rates recover to pre-pandemic levels in 2021, death rates in the U.S. continued to climb. Heart disease, cancer and COVID-19 remained the top three causes of death in 2021, unchanged from the preceding year. In 2021, the U.S. also recorded 106,699 deaths attributed to drug overdoses, or more than 30 per 100,000 people. Since 2001, when the rate was below 10 per 100,000, the rate has increased every year. Overdose deaths have an outsized effect on average life expectancy because victims are disproportionately young. Differences by gender, race Women in the U.S. have a higher life expectancy than men, on average. In 2021, a girl born in the U.S. could expect to live 79.3 years, while a …

Canada’s Western Hudson Bay polar bear population has fallen 27% in just five years, according to a government report released this week, suggesting climate change is affecting the animals. Every autumn, the bears living along the western edge of the Bay pass through the sub-Arctic tourist town of Churchill, Manitoba, as they return to the sea ice. This has made the population not only the best-studied group in the world, but also the most famous, with the local bear-viewing economy valued at $5.30 million annually. However, Nunavut’s government assessment finds that just 618 bears remained in 2021 — a roughly 50% drop from the 1980s. “In some ways, it’s totally shocking,” said John Whiteman, chief research scientist at conservation nonprofit Polar Bears International. “What’s really sobering is that these kinds of declines are the kind that unless sea ice loss is halted, are predicted to eventually cause … extinction.” Polar bears depend on the sea ice to hunt, staking out over seal breathing holes. But the Arctic is now warming about four times faster than the rest of the world. Around Hudson Bay, seasonal sea ice is melting out earlier in the spring, and forming later in the fall, forcing bears to go for longer without food. Scientists cautioned that a direct link between the population decline and sea ice loss in Hudson Bay wasn’t yet clear, as four of the past five years have seen moderately good ice conditions. Instead, they said, climate-caused changes in the local seal population …

Virtual reality, an immersive technology embraced by gamers, has moved into medicine, where it is used for stress relief, physical therapy, pain management and other applications. Mike O’Sullivan has more.   …

City officials and outreach workers across the United States were rushing to get people off the streets this week, turning sites such as libraries and arenas into shelters to mitigate a humanitarian crisis caused by freezing weather and an influx of migrants. Chicago’s Department of Family and Support Services opened libraries and police stations as warming stations, while shelters in cities as far south as Baton Rouge, Louisiana, expanded hours and bed capacity as temperatures were expected to sink to the teens in Fahrenheit (below -10 degrees Celsius) Friday night. Officials in Denver, Colorado, where the temperature of minus 24 degrees Fahrenheit (-31 degrees Celsius) Thursday became the second coldest in the city’s history, opened the Coliseum as a shelter this week. Officials prepared the indoor arena to house 225 people but increased its capacity to 359 Wednesday night. “I feel good about being here because I don’t have to worry about sleeping out in the cold, I don’t have to worry about going from place to place,” said Laphonse McMillan, one of the people seeking shelter at the Coliseum this week. Denver officials also opened the municipal Wellington Webb Building on Thursday night. The building is a workplace for more than 1,000 city employees and, according to the city’s emergency operations center, it is the first time it has been used as a shelter. Cities across the United States have been struggling to address homelessness. A U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development report this week showed nearly 600,000 …

The highly contagious omicron subvariant XBB has surged to more than 50% of COVID-19 cases in the northeastern United States and risks spreading fast as millions of Americans began holiday travel on Friday.   It’s estimated that at week’s end, XBB will account for 18.3% of the COVID-19 cases in the United States, up from 11.2% in the previous week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday.   The subvariant is currently dominant in the Northeast, but it accounts for less than 10% of infections in many other parts of the country, the CDC said.  Andrew Pekosz, a virologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, said holiday travel in the United States could speed up the XBB subvariant’s spread across the country.   The American Automobile Association had estimated that 112.7 million people planned to travel 50 miles (80 km) or more from home between Friday and January 2, up 3.6 million travelers over last year and closing in on pre-pandemic numbers.   But that number was likely to be diminished by the treacherous weather complicating air and road travel going into the weekend.  “Anytime a new variant moves to a different geographic area, it does run the risk of sort of spawning a mini-outbreak in that area,” Pekosz said.   Still, Pekosz said he did not see the XBB subvariant driving the kind of massive surges seen last winter from the original omicron variant.  Top U.S. infectious-disease expert Anthony Fauci said in November that updated COVID-19 …

The United Nations says high food prices in 2022 led to a crisis of affordability that has pushed millions more people into hunger. VOA U.N. Correspondent Margaret Besheer talks to experts about the situation and what to expect in 2023. …

One of the world’s largest marine citizen science projects has surveyed its 500th section of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef since the effort began in 2020. This year’s Great Reef Census, which runs from September to December, has revealed severe damage to the coral, while other parts of the 2,300-kilometer World Heritage site are thriving. The Great Barrier Reef is made up of about 3,000 individual reefs, making it the world’s largest coral system. The annual reconnaissance of the Great Barrier Reef off northeastern Australia has produced tens of thousands of images. They have been taken by divers and snorkelers onboard more than 60 dive boats, tourism vessels, sailing boats, super-yachts and tugboats, who are surveying the far reaches of the world’s largest coral system. They have visited 500 individual reefs during the past three years. The photographs paint a picture of the health of the world’s largest coral system, providing data on the types of coral and their coverage at each reef. “Reaching 500 reefs through the Great Reef Census is a massive achievement for the community,” said Andy Ridley, chief executive officer of Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef, which organizes the survey. “It just goes to prove how a motley flotilla of all sorts of vessels can reach such an enormous amount of area bearing in mind the Great Barrier Reef is the same size of Germany. We have reached about 15% of the reefs, which is amazing.” Early results from the survey have shown some parts of …

Russia’s space agency said it is considering a plan to send an empty spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) to bring home three crew members ahead of schedule, after their Soyuz capsule sprang a coolant leak while docked to the orbiting outpost. Roscosmos and NASA officials said at a news conference Thursday they continue to investigate how the coolant line of the capsule’s external radiator sustained a tiny puncture last week, just as two cosmonauts were preparing for a routine spacewalk. No final decision has been made about the precise means of flying the capsule’s three crew members back to Earth, whether by launching another Soyuz to retrieve them or by the seemingly less likely option of sending them home in the leaky capsule without most of its coolant. Last week, Sergei Krikalev, Russia’s chief of crewed space programs, said the leak could have been caused by a micrometeoroid strike. But he and his NASA counterparts have left open the possibility of other culprits, such as a hardware failure or an impact by a tiny piece of space debris. The Dec. 14 leak prompted mission controllers in Moscow to call off the spacewalk as a live NASA webcast showed what appeared to be a flurry of snowflake-like particles spewing from the rear of the Soyuz spacecraft. The leak lasted for hours and emptied the radiator of coolant used to regulate temperatures inside the crew compartment of the spacecraft. NASA has said that none of the ISS crew was ever …

A former judge of the Supreme People’s Court, the highest court in China, is calling for the suspension or revocation of cases against some 80 people found guilty of violating “zero-COVID” policy regulations since the advent of omicron, a less deadly variant that began spreading in December 2021. China implemented the zero-COVID policy in January 2020, the month after the virus was first detected in humans in Wuhan. Anyone convicted of obstructing the prevention and control of COVID-19 faced a prison sentence of three to seven years, according to regulations set forth by the National Health and Medical Commission of China on January 20, 2020. Offenses included leaving home during lockdown The offenses included violations such as leaving home during a lockdown without official authorization and concealing travel plans. Both made it difficult for authorities to trace contacts and contain the virus. Other offenses included avoiding quarantine, concealing close contact history and refusing to perform duties related to COVID containment. Huang Yingsheng, the former judge, posted on December 10 on the Chinese blogging platform Baidu Baijiahao that because Beijing has relaxed its zero-COVID policy, it is no longer appropriate to prosecute, convict and punish people for violating containment regulations. He posted on the topic again on Monday. In an interview published Tuesday in the Economic Observer Network, a weekly government-run newspaper, Huang emphasized that since COVID mutated into the less deadly omicron strain in November 2021, “cases where people have been criminally or administratively punished for spreading the virus should …

French authorities plan to use an AI-assisted crowd control system to monitor people during the 2024 Paris Olympics, according to a draft law seen by AFP on Thursday. The system is intended to allow the security services to detect disturbances and potential problems more easily, but will not use facial recognition technology, the bill says. The technology could be particularly useful during the highly ambitious open-air opening ceremony  with Olympians sailing down the river Seine in front of a crowd of 600,000 people. French police and sports authorities faced severe criticism in May after shambolic scenes during the Champions League final in Paris when football fans were caught in a crowd crush and teargassed. The draft law, which was presented to the cabinet on Thursday, proposes other security measures including the use of full-body scanners and increases the sentences for hooliganism. Organizers and Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin have both argued in favor of using so-called “intelligent” security camera software that scans images for suspect or dangerous behavior. The use of such a system during the Olympics is an “experimentation”, the draft law says, but could be applied for future public events which face terrorism-related or crowd control risks. “No biometric data is used, nor facial recognition technology and it does not enable any link or interconnection or automatic flagging with any other personal data system,” the bill states. The games’ organizing committee said on November 21 that it needed to lift its budget estimate by 10 per cent from 3.98 …

Uganda on Thursday received two more potential vaccines for a trial against the Sudan strain of the deadly Ebola virus. Uganda has recorded 142 confirmed cases and 55 deaths since the September outbreak but has had no new cases since late November. While having no active cases is welcomed, it also means the trial will have to be revamped to test the vaccines’ effectiveness. The World Health Organization handed Ugandan officials more than 4,000 doses of Ebola trial vaccines on Thursday — 2,000 of the Indian Serum Institute’s Oxford vaccine and just over 2,000 from U.S. manufacturer Merck. It brings the total number of Ebola vaccine doses available in Uganda to more than 5,000 after an initial 1,000 from the U.S.’s Sabin Vaccine Institute were received last week. The vaccines were sent for use in a trial against an outbreak of the Sudan strain of the virus that since September killed 55 people.   But Uganda has not recorded any new Ebola infections since November 27. While that success in halting the outbreak has been welcomed, Uganda’s Health Minister Jane Ruth Aceng said it also means plans will have to be changed to test the vaccines on people who had contact with those infected. “There are no more cases and no more contacts,” she said. “So, the scientists are evaluating alternative research designs to assess the usefulness of these vaccines in protecting people against Ebola infection.” The principal investigator of the Ebola vaccine trial, Dr. Bruce Kirenga, said his team is …

As farmers in the United States are coping with rising input costs, some are turning to environmentally beneficial methods to curb expenses and make money while sequestering a driver of climate change. VOA’s Kane Farabaugh has more from Glasgow, Illinois. …

The World Health Organization is concerned about a spike in COVID-19 infections in China and is supporting the government to focus its efforts on vaccinating people at the highest risk across the country, the head of the U.N. agency said on Wednesday. Infections have recently spiked in the world’s second-largest economy and projections have suggested China could face an explosion of cases and more than a million deaths next year. “The WHO is very concerned over the evolving situation in China, with increasing reports of severe disease,” Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters. Tedros said the agency needed more detailed information on disease severity, hospital admissions and requirements for intensive care units support for a comprehensive assessment of the situation. The comment comes as the German government confirmed it has sent its first batch of BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines to China to be administered initially to German expatriates. …

It could be the end of the red dusty line for NASA’s InSight lander, which has fallen silent after four years on Mars. The lander’s power levels have been dwindling for months because of all the dust coating its solar panels. Ground controllers at California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory knew the end was near, but NASA reported that InSight unexpectedly didn’t respond to communications from Earth on Sunday. “It’s assumed InSight may have reached the end of its operations,” NASA said late Monday, adding that its last communication was Thursday. “It’s unknown what prompted the change in its energy.” The team will keep trying to contact InSight, just in case. InSight landed on Mars in 2018 and was the first spacecraft to document a marsquake. It detected more than 1,300 quakes with its French-built seismometer, including several caused by meteoroid strikes. The most recent marsquake sensed by InSight, earlier this year, left the ground shaking for at least six hours, according to NASA. The seismometer readings shed light on Mars’ interior. Just last week, scientists revealed that InSight scored another first, capturing a Martian dust devil not just in pictures, but in sound as well. In a stroke of luck, the whirling column of dust blew directly over the lander in 2021 when its microphone was on. The lander’s other main instrument, however, encountered nothing but trouble. A German digging device — meant to measure the temperature of Mars’ interior — never made it deeper than half a meter (a couple …

Negotiators reached a historic deal at a U.N. biodiversity conference early Monday that would represent the most significant effort to protect the world’s lands and oceans and provide critical financing to save biodiversity in the developing world. The global framework comes on the day the United Nations Biodiversity Conference, or COP15, is set to end in Montreal. China, which holds the presidency at this conference, released a new draft on Sunday that gave the sometimes-contentious talks much-needed momentum. “We have in our hands a package which I think can guide us as we all work together to halt and reverse biodiversity loss and put biodiversity on the path to recovery for the benefit of all people in the world,” Chinese Environment Minister Huang Runqiu told delegates before the package was adopted to rapturous applause just before dawn. “We can be truly proud.” The most significant part of the agreement is a commitment to protect 30% of land and water considered important for biodiversity by 2030, known as 30 by 30. Currently, 17% of terrestrial and 10% of marine areas are protected. The deal also calls for raising $200 billion by 2030 for biodiversity from a range of sources and working to phase out or reform subsidies that could provide another $500 billion for nature. As part of the financing package, the framework asks for increasing to at least $20 billion annually by 2025 the money that goes to poor countries. That number would increase to $30 billion each year by …

Scientists have uncovered new clues about a curious fossil site in Nevada, a graveyard for dozens of giant marine reptiles. Instead of the site of a massive die-off as suspected, it might have been an ancient maternity ward where the creatures came to give birth. The site is famous for its fossils from giant ichthyosaurs — reptiles that dominated the ancient seas and could grow up to the size of a school bus. The creatures — the name means fish lizard — were underwater predators with large paddle-shaped flippers and long jaws full of teeth. Since the ichthyosaur bones in Nevada were excavated in the 1950s, many paleontologists have investigated how all these creatures could have died together. Now, researchers have proposed a different theory in a study published Monday in the journal Current Biology. “Several lines of evidence all kind of point towards one argument here: That this was a place where giant ichthyosaurs came to give birth,” said co-author Nicholas Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Once a tropical sea, the site — part of Nevada’s Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park — now sits in a dry, dusty landscape near an abandoned mining town, said lead author Randy Irmis, a paleontologist at the University of Utah. To get a better look at the massive skeletons, which boast vertebrae the size of dinner plates and bones from their flippers as thick as boulders, researchers used 3D scanning to create a detailed digital model, …