China may be able to launch a vaccine against SARS-Cov-2 by the end of the year, a Chinese government agency announced on social media on Saturday.
The vaccine - developed by the Beijing Institute of Biological Products and the Institute of Virology - was administered to more than 2,000 people in phase 2 clinical trials, the Public Asset Management and Supervision Commission (SASAC) said.
According to a message dated May 29, broadcast on the Chinese social network WeChat, the vaccine could be marketed as early as the end of this year or at the beginning of 2021.
The two institutes that developed the vaccine have links to the Sinopharm pharmaceutical group, which in turn is controlled by SASAC.
According to SASAC, the Beijing Institute of Biological Products is able to produce 100-120 million doses per year.
Five vaccines are currently being tested on humans in China.
A small island nation in the Indian Ocean, Comoros, has given China a gift of €100 to help in the fight against the coronavirus. While Dr Ahamada Msa M'liva, who leads the delegation acknowledged that this might not be enough, he argues that every little helps.
“We know the capacities and the means of China, but by this gesture, the association wanted to show to the Chinese people how much the Comorians feel concerned,” Dr M'liva said.
He also praised the Chinese authorities for the communication and cooperation with international organizations fighting the coronavirus outbreak, which he described as a “complex and painful ordeal.”
The gift-giving ceremony took place in the country’s capital Moroni in early January but has only been reported to media in recent days.
The coronavirus death toll in China have passed the mark of 1,300, with roughly 43,000 people infected worldwide. So far, most of the deaths took place in Mainland China and no cure has been found. There are reports that many travelers are canceling their trip to Asia following the outbreak and a number of companies have pulled out of the biggest Mobile Wold Conference.
Chinese authorities have announced the end of the coronavirus epidemic in the country. This was announced at a briefing by the official representative of the State Committee for Health of the People's Republic of China, Mi Feng.
Feng said that as of March 28, the number of confirmed cases of infection throughout the country was less than three thousand. Thus, the spread of infection in China was stopped.
According to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University (USA), the total number of cases of coronavirus infection in China is just over 82 thousand. 75.5 thousand people recovered, 3.3 thousand died. Now in the first place in the world in the number of cases of coronavirus - the United States. Almost 125 thousand infected were detected there.
On March 22, it was reported that several tens of thousands of coronavirus infected in China were not included in official statistics due to the absence of symptoms. This was written by the local press with reference to closed government data. Thus, according to reporters, the number of cases in China can reach 125 thousand.
In the rest in the world, the number of infections are growing day by day, reaching over 700.000 cases with 32,144 deaths. Out of those infected, 25,423 are in either serious or critical condition. Italy has been the worst country affected, with 10,023 confirmed deaths followed by Spain, with 6,528 cases.
Italy is one of the most affected countries in the world by COVID-19, with 17,660 confirmed cases and 1,266 deaths, according to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University. That's the largest outbreak that is still happening outside of China.
Italy is under national lockdown until April 3, on Wednesday evening, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said that supermarkets and pharmacies would be the only retailers to remain open in Italy, while everything else is closed.
Even in such situation, people don’t give up. Neighbors singing a patriotic folk song in Siena, a city in central Italy's Tuscany region, motivated the rest of the country to start singing and dancing so spreading a positive thought and health wishes.
Videos of Italian citizens singing and dancing from various cities and towns made a boom on the social media, in videos are show people singing from balconies and windows in attempt to boost morale, confidence and stay strong during this hard times.
Four months after the first cases of coronavirus were recorded and three months after total quarantine was declared in Wuhan, the Chinese authorities changed the status of the city from closed to open to the public. However, the metropolis, apparently, it will take more time for the city to return to normal life - consumer activity is at zero, and there will probably be no foreign investors for several more years.
In Wuhan, a Chinese metropolis with a population of 12 million people, where coronavirus cases were first recorded in December 2019, quarantine is officially canceled on Wednesday, April 8. Trains will start to run from the city and it will be possible to fly by plane, intercity automobile communication will be restored. But this will not mean a return to normal, Bloomberg reports.
Despite the fact that now the number of new infections per day does not exceed 30 compared to several thousand in February, the shock from the epidemic still persists, and the fear of the second wave does not allow businesses to resume work at “pre-virus” levels. Fears are fueled by the fact that cases of infection in people who do not have symptoms of the disease are still being detected in the city. It is such asymptomatic cases that played a huge role in the spread of the epidemic. “Silent carriers,” up to a third of those whose tests tested positive for coronavirus, wrote the South China Morning Post in late March, citing Chinese government data. At the same time, Chinese doctors claim that an asymptomatic patient can infect a maximum of one person.
"Before and after"
Wuhan is the center of one of the most important industrial regions of China, Hubei Province. Before the outbreak, the provincial GDP was expected to grow by 7.5–7.8% in 2020. The city’s attractiveness for doing business has grown rapidly - according to the report of the Milken Institute for 2019, Wuhan ranked 9th in terms of aggregate economic indicators among all Chinese cities, rising seven lines in a year. Business in the city ranged from biomedicine and chip manufacturing to auto parts. Coronavirus delivered a painful blow to all of this.
In February alone, Hubei’s domestic regional product fell by at least 50%, and budget lost about $ 1 billion, estimates Chen Bo, an economics professor at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan.
New life
Shopping centers in Wuhan reopened, but they are mostly empty, most people are still too scared to go shopping for non-essential items. “I'm happy if no one comes in,” admits sales assistant at Calvin Klein's store at Wuhan International Plaza. “It's safer.” Typically, customers left 20,000 yuan (about $ 3,000) in the store over the weekend, and there were only two purchases in the week that passed since the store opened after the outbreak on March 30.
Such sentiments are ubiquitous. For example, in order to maintain a distance between sellers in shops and buyers, real walls are build in the city - 2 meters in height.
The movement of residents remains under tight control, and officials are on high alert for an outbreak. The Chinese government tracks residents through QR codes embedded in Alipay payment system and Wechat social network. Each application user automatically receives their health status at midnight - green, yellow or red - depending on their location, basic health information and travel history. Only those with a green code can leave their apartments and go to work. It is easy to lose the color of the code necessary for movement: it is enough to visit a shopping center, where later a case of infection with coronavirus will be revealed — then the green color turns yellow and implies self-isolation of the house.
Xiaomi Corp. employees who return to work are instructed not to enter the office elevator for more than five people each. At the same time, you can only stand in the elevator in accordance with special marks on the floor.
Five-star hotels are up and running again, but the buffet has been reduced to a few basic dishes, packed in individual disposable containers.
Li Jing, 33, who provides visitors with apartments, admits that Wuhan is now “clearly not the place people choose to visit first.” To lure guests, before each check-in, Lee will carry out a three-hour disinfection and expand the menu of services for guests. However, he admits that his apartments may be vacant for several weeks and even months.
Investors will not come
Officially, the plants in Wuhan can already resume work, but people are not in a hurry to return to jobs, and the supply chain must now be reorganized. One of the largest factories in Wuhan is the joint production of Peugeot cars by the PSA Group and the Chinese Dongfeng Motor Group. Machine assembly has resumed, but employees indicate that supply chains are intermittent. According to one of the plant’s managers, Mei Yunfeng, many of the company's suppliers have not yet returned to the same level as business as ussual.
“The outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic destroyed Wuhan’s plans to integrate more tightly into the global supply chain,” said Professor Chen from Huazhong University. The implications for tourism and foreign investment will continue for a long time. Chen points out that after the outbreak of SARS in 2003, foreign direct investment in Guangdong, where the epidemic began, stopped for two to three years. “The same thing will happen to Wuhan,” he is pessimistic. “Investors will be careful, fearing new outbreaks of the disease, in addition, it will seem to them that the city is poorly managed.”
