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  • Germany’s leader and top CEOs have arrived in Beijing. They need China more than ever | CNN Business

    Germany’s leader and top CEOs have arrived in Beijing. They need China more than ever | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong/London
    CNN Business
     — 

    German Chancellor Olaf Scholz arrived in China on Friday with a team of top executives and a clear message: business with the world’s second largest economy must continue.

    Scholz met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People after landing in the capital Friday morning, according to a Chinese state media account. The German chancellor is also expected to meet with Premier Li Keqiang.

    Joining Scholz for the whirl-wind one day visit is a delegation of 12 German industry titans, including the CEOs of Volkswagen

    (VLKAF)    , Deutsche Bank

    (DB)    , Siemens

    (SIEGY)     and chemicals giant BASF

    (BASFY)    , according to a person familiar with the matter. They are set to meet with Chinese companies behind closed doors.

    The group entered China without participating in the usual seven-day hotel quarantine. Images showed hazmat-clad medical workers greeting their jet at Beijing’s Capital International Airport to test the official delegation for Covid-19.

    During the Friday morning meeting between the two leaders, Xi called for Germany and China to work together amid a “complex and volatile” international situation, and said the visit would “enhance mutual understanding and trust, deepen pragmatic cooperation in various fields and plan for the next phase of Sino-German relations,” according to a readout from state broadcaster CCTV.

    Scholz’s visit — the first by a G7 leader to China in roughly three years — comes as Germany slides towards recession. But it has fired up concerns that the economic interests of Europe’s biggest economy are still too closely tied to those of Beijing.

    Since the invasion of Ukraine this year, Germany has been forced to ditch its long dependence on Russian energy. Now, some in Scholz’s coalition government are growing nervous about the country’s deepening ties with China. Beijing has declared its friendship with Russia has “no limits,” while China’s relations with the United States are deteriorating.

    The tension was highlighted recently by a fierce debate over a bid by Chinese state shipping giant Cosco to buy a 35% stake in the operator of one of the four terminals at the port of Hamburg. Under pressure from some members of the government, the size of the investment was limited to 24.9%.

    The potential deal has raised concerns in Germany that closer ties with China will leave critical infrastructure exposed to political pressure from Beijing, and disproportionately benefit Chinese companies.

    But Germany is hardly in a position to rock the boat with Beijing as it grapples with the challenge of reviving its struggling economy. Its consumers and companies have borne the brunt of Europe’s energy crisis, and a deep recession is looming.

    If the European Union and Germany were to decouple from China, it would lead to “large GDP losses” for the German economy, Lisandra Flach, director of the ifo Center for International Economics, told CNN Business.

    The Kiel Institute for the World Economy estimates that a major reduction in trade between the European Union and China would shave 1% off of Germany’s GDP.

    Germany needs to shore up its export markets as ties with Russia, once its main supplier of natural gas, continue to unravel.

    When it comes to China, Germany won’t want to “lose also this market, this economic partner,” said Rafal Ulatowski, an assistant professor of political science and international studies at the University of Warsaw.

    “They [will] try to keep these relations as long as it’s possible.”

    As Western countries have imposed swingeing economic sanctions on Russia, China has publicly maintained its “neutrality” in the war while ramping up its trade with Moscow.

    That has triggered a backlash in Europe, where some companies are already becoming wary of doing business in China because of its stringent “zero Covid” restrictions.

    Pressure on Berlin is also mounting over China’s human rights record. In an open letter Wednesday, a coalition of 70 civil rights groups urged Scholz to “rethink” his trip to Beijing.

    “The invitation of a German trade delegation to join your visit will be viewed as an indication that Germany is ready to deepen trade and economic links, at the cost of human rights and international law,” they wrote in the memo, published by the World Uyghur Congress. Based in Germany, the organization is run by Uyghurs raising awareness of allegations of genocide in China’s Xinjiang region.

    It suggested Berlin was “loosening economic dependence on one authoritarian power, only to deepen economic dependence on another.”

    In an op-ed published in a German newspaper on Wednesday, Scholz said he would use his visit to “address difficult issues,” including “respect for civil and political liberties and the rights of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang province.”

    A spokesperson for the German government addressed wider criticism last week, saying at a press conference that it had no intention of “decoupling” from its most important trading partner.

    “[The chancellor] has basically said again and again that he is not a friend of decoupling, or turning away, from China. But he also says: diversify and minimize risk,” the spokesperson said.

    Last year, China was Germany’s biggest trading partner for the sixth year in a row, with the value of trade up over 15% from 2020, according to official statistics. Together, Chinese imports from, and exports to, Germany were worth €245 billion ($242 billion) in 2021.

    Still, the furore surrounding the Hamburg port deal is a reminder of the tradeoffs Germany has to confront if it wants to maintain close ties with such a vital export market and supplier.

    A spokesperson for Hamburger Hafen und Logistik (HHLA), the company operating the port terminal, told CNN Business on Thursday that it was still negotiating the deal with Cosco.

    Flach, of the ifo Center for International Economics, said the deal warranted scrutiny because “there is no reciprocity: Germany cannot invest in Chinese ports, for instance.”

    A container ship from Cosco Shipping moored at the Tollerort Container Terminal owned by HHLA, in the harbor of Hamburg, Germany on Oct. 26.

    However, it is easy to overstate the impact of the potential agreement, said Alexander-Nikolai Sandkamp, assistant professor of economics at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

    “We’re not talking about a 25% stake in the Hamburg harbor, or even the operator of the harbor, but a 25% stake in the operator of a terminal,” he told CNN Business.

    Jürgen Matthes, head of global and regional markets at the German Economic Institute, told CNN Business that critics were no longer simply weighing the business benefits of Chinese investment in the country.

    “Politics and economics have to be looked at together and cannot be taken separately any longer,” he said. “When geopolitics comes into play, the view of China has very much declined and become much more negative.”

    China’s recent treatment of Lithuania has also deepened concerns that Beijing “does not hesitate to simply break trade rules,” Matthes added. The small, Eastern European nation claimed last year that Beijing had erected trade barriers in retaliation for its support for Taiwan.

    China has defended its downgrading of relations with Lithuania, saying it is acting in response to the European nation undermining its “sovereignty and territorial integrity.” This year, after a Lithuanian official visited Taiwan, Beijing also announced sanctions against her and vowed to “suspend all forms of exchange” with her ministry.

    As the German delegation touches down on Friday, they will be faced with another issue, which has become the single biggest headache for companies across China.

    “The biggest challenge for German businesses remains China’s zero-Covid policy,” said Maximilian Butek of the German Chamber of Commerce in China.

    “The restrictions are suffocating economic growth and heavily impact China’s attractiveness as a destination for foreign direct investment,” he told CNN Business.

    An aerial view of the urban landscape in Shanghai on Sept. 25. The city underwent a months-long Covid lockdown earlier this year.

    He said the broader restrictions were so stifling that some companies had moved their regional headquarters to other locations, such as Singapore. “Managing the whole region without being able to travel freely is almost impossible,” he added.

    In a brief statement, Volkswagen told CNN Business that its CEO was attending the trip since “there have been no direct meetings for almost three years” due to the coronavirus pandemic.

    “In view of the completely changed geopolitical and global economic situation, the trip to Beijing offers the opportunity for a personal exchange of views,” the automaker said.

    Despite Beijing’s Covid curbs and geopolitical tensions, Germany has every economic incentive to stay close to China.

    Its dependency on China can be seen across industries. While about 12% of total imports came from China last year, the country was responsible for 80% of imported laptops and 70% of mobile phones, Sandkamp said.

    The automobile, chemical and electrical industries are also reliant on Chinese trade.

    “If we were to stop trading with China, we would run into trouble,” Sandkamp added.

    China made up 40% of Volkswagen’s worldwide deliveries in the first three quarters of this year, and it’s also the top market for other automakers such as Mercedes.

    Wariness among some German officials over the country’s closeness with China could filter into a more restrictive trade policy, though economic cooperation is still in both parties’ interests.

    Last week, Germany’s economy minister Robert Habeck told Reuters that the government was efforting a new trade policy with China to reduce dependence on Chinese raw materials, batteries and semiconductors.

    Unidentified sources also told the news agency that the ministry was weighing new rules that would make business with China less attractive. The ministry did not respond to a request for comment from CNN Business.

    But “despite all odds and challenges, China remains unrivaled in terms of market size and market growth opportunities for many German companies,” said Butek, of the German Chamber.

    He predicted that “the large majority will stay committed to the Chinese market and is expecting to expand their business.”

    Companies appear to be toeing that line. Last week, BASF CEO Martin Brudermüller was quoted in Chinese state media as saying that Germans should “step away from China-bashing and look at ourselves a bit self-critically.”

    “We benefit from China’s policies of widening market access,” he said at a company event, according to state-run news agency Xinhua, pointing to the construction of a BASF chemical engineering site in southern China.

    — CNN’s Simone McCarthy, Chris Stern, Lauren Kent, Claudia Otto and Arnaud Siad contributed to this report.

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  • Death of boy in lockdown fuels backlash against China’s zero-Covid policy | CNN

    Death of boy in lockdown fuels backlash against China’s zero-Covid policy | CNN

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    The death of a 3-year-old boy following a suspected gas leak at a locked down residential compound in northwestern China has triggered a fresh wave of outrage at the country’s stringent zero-Covid policy.

    The boy’s father claimed in a social media post that Covid workers tried to prevent him from leaving their compound in Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province, to seek treatment for his child – causing a delay that he believes proved fatal.

    A social media post by the father on Wednesday about his son’s death was met with an outpouring of public anger and grief, with several related hashtags racking up hundreds of millions of views over the following day on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform.

    “Three years of pandemic was his entire life,” a popular comment read.

    It’s the latest tragedy to have fueled a growing backlash against China’s unrelenting zero-Covid policy, which continues to upend daily life with incessant lockdowns, quarantines and mass testing mandates even as the rest of the world moves on from the pandemic.

    Numerous similar cases have involved people dying after being denied prompt access to emergency medical care during lockdowns – despite the insistence of Chinese officials, including leader Xi Jinping, that the country’s Covid policies “put people and their lives first.”

    Large parts of Lanzhou, including the neighborhood where the boy’s family live, have been locked down since early October.

    The boy’s father said his wife and child both fell ill around noon on Tuesday, showing signs of gas poisoning. The mother’s condition improved after receiving CPR from the father, but the boy fell into a coma, according to the man’s social media post.

    The father said he made numerous attempts to call both an ambulance and the police but failed to get through. He said he then went to plead for help from Covid workers who were enforcing the lockdown at their compound, but was rejected and told to seek help from officials in his community or keep calling for an ambulance himself.

    He said the workers asked him to show a negative Covid test result, but he could not do so as no tests had been carried out at the compound in the previous 10 days.

    He grew desperate and eventually carried his son outside, where a “kind-hearted” resident called a taxi to take them to hospital, he wrote.

    However, it was too late by the time they arrived and the doctors failed to save his son.

    “My child might have been saved if he had been taken to the hospital sooner,” he wrote.

    According to online maps, the hospital is just 3 kilometers (1.86 miles) away from the boy’s home – a 10-minute drive.

    The father claimed in his social media post that the police did not show up until after he had taken his son to hospital. But the local police said in a statement late on Tuesday that they had immediately rushed to the scene after receiving a call for help from the public, and helped send two people, including the child, to hospital 14 minutes later.

    The police statement said the child had died of carbon monoxide poisoning and the mother remained in hospital in a stable condition – but it made no mention of whether lockdown measures had delayed their treatment.

    CNN contacted both Lanzhou officials and the boy’s father for comment. The father did not respond.

    On Thursday, Lanzhou authorities issued a statement expressing grief for the child’s death and condolences to his family. They vowed to “seriously deal with” officials and work units that had failed to facilitate a timely rescue for the boy.

    “We have learned a painful lesson from this incident … and will put people and their lives first in our work in the future,” the statement said.

    The boy’s death also ignited anger from local residents. Videos circulating on social media show residents taking to the streets to demand an answer from authorities.

    One shows a woman shouting at officials wrapped head to toe in hazmat suits. “Ask your leader to come here and tell us what happened today,” she shouts. In another, a man chants, “Give me back my freedom!”

    Other videos show several buses containing SWAT police officers arriving at the scene.

    One shows rows of officers in hazmat suits marching down the street; several others show residents in a standoff with uniformed police officers who are holding shields and wearing helmets and masks.

    CNN cannot independently verify the videos, but a resident who lives nearby confirmed to CNN he saw the SWAT team police moving in.

    “They shouted ‘one, two, one’ (when they marched down the street) so loudly they could be heard from 500 meters away,” the resident said.

    He lamented Lanzhou’s “excessive epidemic prevention and lockdowns” and what he said was increasingly stringent censorship.

    “Now, even knowing the truth has become an extravagant hope,” he said. “Who knows how many similar incidents have happened across the country?”

    In his social media post, the father said he was approached by someone who claimed to work for a “civil organization” and was offered 100,000 yuan (about $14,000) on the condition that he signed an agreement vowing not to seek accountability from the authorities.

    “I didn’t sign it. All I want is an explanation (for my son’s death),” he wrote. “I want (them) to tell me directly, why wouldn’t they let me go at the time?”

    The father’s posts on Weibo and Baidu, another online site, recounting the incident both disappeared late on Wednesday night.

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  • What you should know about getting a flu vaccine this year, according to an expert | CNN

    What you should know about getting a flu vaccine this year, according to an expert | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Welcome to this year’s flu season.

    This year’s flu strain has already begun spreading across the United States, according to new data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There have been at least 880,000 cases of influenza, nearly 7,000 hospitalizations and, tragically, 360 deaths from the flu this fall, including one pediatric death. Not since 2009, during the height of the H1N1 swine flu pandemic, have there been this many cases of influenza so early in the season.

    Despite these numbers, many people wonder if the flu is really that serious of an illness. What’s the benefit of the vaccine, especially if some people may still get the flu despite being vaccinated? Could you get the flu from the vaccine? If you get the Covid vaccine, do you still need the flu vaccine?

    To guide us through these questions and more, I spoke with CNN Medical Analyst Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician, public health expert and professor of health policy and management at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health. She is also the author of “Lifelines: A Doctor’s Journey in the Fight for Public Health.”

    CNN: Is the flu a serious illness? What symptoms do people experience?

    Dr. Leana Wen: It certainly can be serious. The CDC estimates that flu resulted between 9 million and 41 million illnesses, 140,000 to 710,000 hospitalizations, and 12,000 to 52,000 deaths annually across the US between 2010 and 2020.

    Symptoms of the flu include fever, muscle aches, headaches, fatigue, coughing and a runny nose. A lot of people recover within several days, but some may still be feeling unwell as long as 10 days to two weeks after the onset of their symptoms. Some will develop complications, including sinus and ear infections, pneumonia, and inflammation of the brain. The flu can also exacerbate underlying medical conditions — for example, people with chronic lung and heart diseases can see their conditions worsen due to the flu.

    Even generally healthy people can become very ill due to the flu. However, those particularly susceptible to severe outcomes include those 65 and older, young children under 2, pregnant people and people with underlying medical conditions.

    CNN: What’s the benefit of the vaccine, especially if some people may get the flu despite being vaccinated?

    Wen: The flu vaccine does two things. First and most importantly, it reduces your chance of severe illness — that is, of being hospitalized or dying. Second, it can also reduce your likelihood of getting sick from the flu at all.

    In a sense, this is not too different from the Covid-19 vaccine. The most important reason to get vaccinated against both the flu and the coronavirus is to prevent severe illness. New data released in the CDC’s latest morbidity and mortality report shows this year’s flu vaccine reduces the risk of hospitalization by about 50%. A 2018 study found that people vaccinated against the flu were 59% less likely to be admitted to the ICU due to influenza when compared with those who were unvaccinated.

    The vaccine’s effectiveness can vary depending on how well matched the vaccine is to circulating influenza strains. The CDC cites vaccine effectiveness against “medically attended illness” anywhere from 23% to 61% depending on the year and vaccine-to-strain match. It’s true, then, that you could get the flu vaccine and still contract the flu. But the vaccine does reduce your chance thereof — and, crucially, it reduces the likelihood that you could end up very ill.

    Another thing to consider is that there are a lot of other viruses that can cause flu-like symptoms. The flu vaccine helps protect against viral infections caused by influenza, but there are a lot of other causes of viral syndromes, including adenovirus, rhinovirus, parainfluenza and others. These other viruses spread easily, too, and there aren’t vaccines against them. I often hear patients say they once got the flu the same year they had a flu vaccine, and that’s why they don’t want to get vaccinated again. But when I ask them whether they were actually diagnosed with the flu or just had flu-like symptoms, they would say the latter.

    CNN: Should children and pregnant people also get the flu vaccine?

    Wen: Absolutely. These are groups particularly vulnerable to severe outcomes, so it’s very important they receive the flu vaccine.

    One study found the flu vaccine reduces children’s risk of severe life-threatening influenza by 75%. Another found it reduced flu-related emergency department visits in children by half.

    Similar results are found in people who are pregnant. Not only does the flu vaccine protect the pregnant person, if the vaccine is given during pregnancy it also helps protect their baby from the flu for the first few months of its life. That’s important, because the flu vaccine is not available to babies until they are 6 months or older.

    CNN: Could you get the flu from the vaccine?

    Wen: No. The flu vaccine is an inactivated vaccine, which means it does not contain the live virus and therefore cannot cause the flu. It is also a very well-tolerated vaccine, with the most common side effect being discomfort at the injection site that is gone after a day.

    CNN: If you got the Covid-19 vaccine, do you still need the flu vaccine?

    Wen: Yes. Different vaccines target different viruses. The Covid vaccine helps to protect against Covid, but does not protect against the flu, and vice versa. You can receive the Covid vaccine (or bivalent booster) at the same time as you receive the flu vaccine, just in a different injection site.

    CNN: Some people have been waiting until later in the flu season to get the flu vaccine. Is this a good idea?

    Wen: At this point, no, because it’s now clear this flu season is starting earlier than usual. Cases are already high, and it takes about two weeks to reach optimal immune protection after vaccination. I’d encourage people who have not yet received the flu vaccine to get it now.

    CNN: What should people know about treatments for the flu?

    Wen: Most cases of the flu can be treated symptomatically, meaning patients get rest, hydration and treatment for symptoms that come up — such as fever-reducing medicines like acetaminophen or ibuprofen. There are also antiviral treatments available. These are really important for people at high risk for severe influenza complications and/or who are very ill. The earlier such treatments are started, the better. An oral medication, oseltamivir (Tamiflu), can also be given to non-high-risk patients, too, within 48 hours of the start of their illness.

    I’d encourage everyone to have an influenza plan, the same way they should have a Covid plan. Ask your doctor in advance if you should receive Tamiflu or another antiviral treatment. Know how you can get testing and where you can access treatment, including after hours and on weekends.

    CNN: How can people prevent catching the flu?

    Wen: The flu is primarily spread through droplets — if an infected person coughs or sneezes, these droplets can land on someone else nearby. It’s also possible that the droplets land on a surface, from which someone gets infected after touching it and then touching their nose, mouth or eyes.

    We can help to reduce flu transmission by staying away from others while symptomatic. We should all cough or sneeze into our elbow or a tissue, and wash our hands frequently, including after touching high-contact surfaces. Individuals particularly vulnerable to severe outcomes should consider wearing a mask to reduce their chance of contracting viral illnesses like the flu. And, of course, get vaccinated!

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  • China is caught in a zero-Covid trap of its own making | CNN

    China is caught in a zero-Covid trap of its own making | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: A version of this story appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world. Sign up here.


    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    It’s been little more than a week since Chinese leader Xi Jinping began his norm-breaking third term in power with a ringing endorsement of his relentless zero-Covid policy.

    But the commitment to stick with it is already fueling scenes of chaos and misery across the country.

    In the northwestern city of Xining, residents spent last week pleading desperately for food as they suffered through the latest of the country’s stringent lockdowns; to the west, in Lhasa, the regional capital of Tibet, angry crowds have been protesting in the streets after more than 70 days of stay-home orders.

    In the central province of Henan, migrant workers have abandoned a locked-down Foxconn factory en masse, walking for miles to escape an outbreak at China’s largest iPhone assembling site. And, in the eastern financial hub of Shanghai, things are gloomy even at Disneyland – the park abruptly shut its gates on Monday to comply with Covid prevention measures, trapping visitors inside for compulsory testing.

    In many other parts of the country, lockdowns, mandatory quarantines, incessant mass testing edicts and travel restrictions continue to cripple businesses and daily life, even as the rest of the world moves on from the pandemic.

    Rather than relax Covid restrictions – as some had hoped for in the lead-up to the Communist Party’s five-yearly leadership reshuffle, Chinese authorities have ramped them up after Xi’s sweeping endorsement of the strategy.

    “The 20th Party Congress didn’t provide a timetable for moving away from zero-Covid. Instead it highlighted the importance of sticking to the existing approach,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

    The congress reinforced Xi as an unrivaled supreme leader, and saw him stack the Communist Party’s top ranks with staunch allies – including those who had loyally carried out his Covid policies.

    “The new political ecology also provided more incentive for local governments to impose more draconian Covid control measures,” Huang said.

    A renewed zeal for the policy can be seen most clearly in smaller cities. While metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai can draw on their experiences of major flareups to implement more targeted lockdown measures, smaller cities with no such know-how tend to pursue zero-Covid goals in a more aggressive and extensive manner, Huang said.

    The repeating cycle of lockdowns, quarantines and mass testing is taking a heavy toll on the economy and society. Public patience is wearing thin, and frustrations are building.

    On Monday in Baoding city, Hebei province, a father wielding a knife drove through a Covid checkpoint in a desperate bid to buy milk powder for his son. Video footage of the scene and his subsequent arrest sparked uproar online; the following day local police tried to soothe tempers by saying the man had been fined only 100 yuan ($13.75) and that his child’s “milk powder problem” had been “properly resolved.”

    On Tuesday, the death of a 3-year-old in Lanzhou, Gansu province, sparked another outcry, after the child’s family said lockdown measures had delayed emergency responders. Police said later the child had stopped breathing by the time officers arrived, but did not address the family’s accusations that an ambulance had been delayed. CNN has reached out to Lanzhou authorities for comment.

    In another sign of how sensitive the issue has become, Chinese stocks rallied on Wednesday following unverified social media rumors that China was forming a committee to prepare an exit from the zero-Covid policy.

    Those rumors were quashed, however, when the Foreign Ministry said it was “unaware” of any such plan.

    Meanwhile, experts say they see no signs of the Chinese government taking steps that would suggest it is rethinking its approach.

    Chinese health officials maintain that changing tack now would risk a huge surge in infections and deaths that could overwhelm the country’s fragile health care system.

    Beijing has so far refused to approve for use the mRNA vaccines developed in Western countries, which have been shown to be more potent than those made and used in China. Experts say China also lacks an emergency response plan to cope with surging infections.

    But Jin Dongyan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong, said such catastrophic scenarios could be avoided with proper preparation.

    Instead of spending vast amounts of time and resources on testing, contact tracing, quarantining and imposing lockdowns, authorities should introduce more effective vaccines and antiviral therapies and boost the vaccination rate among the elderly, Jin said.

    With boosted immunity, asymptomatic or mild cases could be allowed to recover at home – freeing up space at hospitals to treat more severe cases, he said.

    “Using lockdown and containment measures to deal with an infectious disease with such a low mortality rate and high transmissibility is no longer appropriate. The whole world has abandoned this approach – nobody can stand the cost, it’s simply not working,” he said.

    Another hurdle to pivoting from zero-Covid is a pervasive fear of the virus among large swaths of the public, instilled by the Chinese government to justify its harsh control measures, experts say.

    “Authorities have demonized Covid, exaggerating its severity and mortality rate and talking up long-Covid symptoms. Many ordinary people are still very afraid of the virus, with recovered Covid patients suffering from severe discrimination and stigmatization,” Jin said.

    It was partly such fears that drove thousands of migrant workers to flee in panic from the Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, he said.

    Videos of people traveling on foot, dragging their luggage on roads and across fields, went viral on Chinese social media over the weekend. Zhengzhou, a city of 12 million, imposed sweeping lockdown measures last month after identifying dozens of Covid-19 cases.

    The Foxconn facility has been racing to control an outbreak since mid-October, though the company has not disclosed the number of infections among its workers. On Wednesday, the Zhengzhou Airport Economy Zone, where the Foxconn plant is located, announced new lockdown measures.

    As the Foxconn exodus thrust the Zhengzhou outbreak into the spotlight, the city’s health authorities have tried to allay public fears. On Monday, the Zhengzhou municipal health commission published a WeChat article with the headline: “Covid is not that horrible, but preventable and treatable.”

    Huang, the expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said misconceptions about the virus would complicate matters if China did at some point decide to move away from zero Covid.

    “Even if in the future, China wants to change the narrative and play down the seriousness of the disease, some people might not buy into the new narrative,” he said.

    As the winter approaches, experts warn that China could be hit by a new wave of infections – and a new cycle of draconian lockdowns.

    China reported 2,755 local infections for Tuesday, the highest daily tally since August.

    “Judging from the situation in China, there will be a major outbreak sooner or later. China has deployed tremendous efforts and paid a heavy cost to prevent that from happening, but in the end, it won’t be able to stop such a highly infectious disease from spreading,” Jin said.

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  • Families of Halloween crush victims identify lost items as South Korean police admit mistakes | CNN

    Families of Halloween crush victims identify lost items as South Korean police admit mistakes | CNN

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    Seoul, South Korea
    CNN
     — 

    ln a cavernous Seoul gymnasium Tuesday, grieving families inspected neat rows of belongings left behind at the scene of the deadly street crush in Itaewon.

    Shoes, bags, glasses, notebooks, wallets, cardholders and colorful hats were laid out on makeshift tables and exercise mats along the polished floor – waiting to be claimed by the next of kin of 156 victims killed in Saturday night’s crowd surge.

    “Found it. I think this is the one,” said one woman, as she recognized a black coat, hugging it as she cried.

    The middle-aged woman, who had arrived with her husband, collapsed to the floor in tears after discovering a missing pair of knee-high boots. It was among rows of black boots, stilettos and sneakers. In many cases, there was just one shoe.

    Another younger woman, wearing a cast on her left arm, walked into the gymnasium to find her lost shoe. This woman, who didn’t want to be named, said she was in front of a bar in the alley when the crush happened.

    Stuck in the crowd, she said she passed out from asphyxiation “to the point I thought I was dead, but a foreigner shouted at me to wake up.” Her arm was badly bruised during the incident, and after she came to, the woman said she just held on until the crowd eased and she could be rescued.

    Family members walked into the gymnasium, one by one and in small groups, escorted by officials who hurriedly put on white gloves and showed them to the tables, so they could inspect and claim the carefully arranged possessions.

    South Korea is in deep mourning for the 156 people killed, including 26 foreigners, in the crowd crush on Saturday night when as many as 100,000 people crammed into the narrow streets of Itaewon to celebrate Halloween.

    Officials expected large numbers due to the popularity of the area for Halloween parties in pre-Covid years, but police have admitted they were unprepared for this year’s crowd.

    Alongside the shoes and bags were 156 miscellaneous items including hats and masks.

    Speaking to the media on Tuesday, Yoon Hee-keun, head of National Police Agency, bowed deeply as he began a press conference, admitting for the first time failings on the behalf of the police in the capital that night.

    Yoon said officers failed to adequately respond to the emergency calls that flooded into the police call center before the disaster.

    “The calls were about emergencies telling the danger and urgency of the situation that large crowds had gathered before the accident occurred,” Yoon said. “However, we think the police response to the 112 (emergency telephone number) calls was inadequate.”

    South Korean police received at least 11 calls from people in Itaewon about concerns of a possible crush as early as four hours before the incident occurred on Saturday night, records given to CNN by the National Police Agency show.

    The first call was made at 6:34 p.m. Saturday from a location near the Hamilton Hotel, which borders the alley where the deadly surge occurred, the records show.

    “People are going up and down the alley now, but it looks really dangerous. People can’t come down but people keep coming up (the alleyway), so I fear people might be crushed,” one caller said, according to the record.

    “I managed to get out, but it’s too crowded. I think you need to control this. Nobody is controlling (the crowd). I think police officers should be standing here and moving some people so that others can go through the alleyway. People cannot even go through but there are more people pouring down,” the caller added.

    Then at 8:09 p.m., another person in Itaewon reported that there were so many people in the area that they were falling over and getting hurt. The caller asked for traffic control, the record shows.

    The deadly crowd surge took place just after 10 p.m.

    The items included 258 articles of clothing.

    On Monday, Oh Seung-jin, director of the agency’s violent crime investigation division, said about 137 personnel had been deployed to Itaewon that night, compared to about 30 to 90 personnel in previous years before the pandemic.

    “For this time’s Halloween festival, because it was expected that many people would gather in Itaewon, I understand that it was prepared by putting in more police force than other years,” said Oh.

    However, police at the scene were tasked with cracking down on illegal activity such as drug taking and sexual abuse in the area “rather than on site control,” Oh said.

    Police walk among personal belongings retrieved from the scene of a fatal Halloween crowd surge.

    On Tuesday, South Korea’s Prime Minister Han Duck-soo said a “lack of institutional knowledge and consideration for crowd management” was partly to blame for the crowd crush.

    “One of the reasons was a lack of deep institutional knowledge and consideration for crowd management. However, the police are investigating,” Han said.

    “Even if more police were put in (to the site), there seems to have been a limit in the situation as we don’t have a crowd management system, but we’ll need to wait for the police investigation to find out the cause,” he added.

    screengrab will ripley walk and talk

    CNN reporter returns to Itaewon’s narrow alley one day after the Halloween disaster. See what’s it like

    At a Tuesday Cabinet meeting, President Yoon Suk Yeol urged the need to establish systems to prevent similar tragedies.

    “In addition to side streets where this time’s large disaster happened, (we) need to establish safety measures at stadiums, performance venues and etc. where crowds gather,” he said, adding that the government will hold a national safety system inspection meeting with relevant ministers and experts soon.

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  • Workers flee China’s biggest iPhone factory over Covid outbreak | CNN Business

    Workers flee China’s biggest iPhone factory over Covid outbreak | CNN Business

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    New Delhi
    CNN Business
     — 

    Foxconn, one of Apple’s largest suppliers, is wrestling with major disruption at its biggest iPhone assembly factory in China, as anxious workers reportedly flee the locked-down facility, according to social media videos.

    The Taiwanese company is racing to control a Covid outbreak at its campus in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou.

    The exodus is putting a tremendous strain on Foxconn just before the key holiday shopping season begins and highlights how the country’s stringent zero-Covid policy is hurting international business.

    “[We] fully understand your eagerness to go back home,” Foxconn told its employees over the weekend, according to a post on Zhengzhou government’s official WeChat account.

    “For employees who voluntarily stay in the company’s factory area, the port government and the company will jointly ensure everyone’s…health and safety,” it added.

    Analysts said the chaos at Zhengzhou could jeopardize Apple and Foxconn’s output in the coming weeks. Ivan Lam, senior research analyst at Counterpoint, estimated that between 10% and 30% of iPhone 14 production could be affected in the near term if the situation did not stabilize.

    The Zhengzhou campus is the world’s biggest iPhone factory and typically accounts for as much as 85% of iPhone assembly capacity, according to Lam’s estimates.

    A Foxconn spokesperson told Chinese state media that the company is trying to boost production at other sites.

    “At present, because now is the peak production season… [there is] a large demand for workers,” a Foxconn spokesperson told Henan Daily on Monday, adding that the company was “also coordinating back-up production capacity at other sites.”

    Foxconn and Apple did not respond to a request for comment from CNN.

    Shares in Foxconn, also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry, fell 2.6% on Tuesday.

    Videos of many people leaving Zhengzhou on foot have gone viral on Chinese social media in recent days. The city, which has a population of more than 12 million, imposed sweeping lockdown measures earlier last month after identifying dozens of Covid-19 cases.

    State media has said that many Foxconn workers are among those walking miles to escape the city. Calling it a “helpless move for some employees,” a Foxconn manager told media outlet Yicai that workers are panicking over the spread of the virus at the factory and lack of access to official information.

    Foxconn said it was organizing vehicles for employees wishing to return home, according to a post on Zhengzhou government’s official WeChat account over the weekend.

    The company has also quadrupled daily bonuses for workers at the plant this month, it said in a post on its official WeChat account on Tuesday.

    While these disruptions will impact iPhone production in the near term, analysts say it may not dent Apple’s iPhone shipments in the key holiday season.

    “I think in one to two weeks, things will get back to normal, given the current status,” Lam said.

    “They still have a lot of alternative production sites,” he said, adding that Foxconn had already begun shifting production to other facilities in China, such as in the southern province of Guangdong. “Things are under control now.”

    And, as Beijing shows few signs of moving away from its rigid Covid policies, Apple has started to boost production in other countries, including India, to reduce its dependence on China.

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  • By the next RSV season, the US may have its first vaccine | CNN

    By the next RSV season, the US may have its first vaccine | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    It’s shaping up to be a severe season for respiratory syncytial virus infections – one of the worst some doctors say they can remember. But even as babies struggling to breathe fill hospital beds across the United States, there may be a light ahead: After decades of disappointment, four new RSV vaccines may be nearing review by the US Food and Drug Administration, and more than a dozen others are in testing.

    There’s also hope around a promising long-acting injection designed to be given right after birth to protect infants from the virus for as long as six months. In a recent clinical trial, the antibody shot was 75% effective at heading off RSV infections that required medical attention.

    Experts say the therapies look so promising, they could end bad RSV seasons as we know them.

    And the relief could come soon: Dr. Ashish Jha, who leads the White House Covid-19 Response Task Force, told CNN that he’s “hopeful” there will be an RSV vaccine by next fall.

    Charlotte Brown jumped at the chance to enroll her own son, a squawky, active 10-month-old named James, in one of the vaccine trials this summer.

    “As soon as he qualified, we were like ‘absolutely, we are in,’ ” Brown said.

    Babies have to be at least 6 months old to enter the trial, which is testing a vaccine developed at the National Institutes of Health – the result of decades of scientific research.

    Brown is a pediatrician who cares for hospitalized children at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, and she sees the ravages of RSV firsthand. A recent patient was in the back of her mind when she was signing up James for the study.

    “I took care of a baby who was only a few months older than him and had had nine days of fever and was just absolutely pitiful and puny,” she said. Brown said his family felt helpless. “And I was like, ‘this is why we’re doing it. This single patient is why we’re doing this.’ “

    Even before this year’s surge, RSV was the leading cause of infant hospitalizations in the US. The virus infects the lower lungs, where it causes a hacking cough and may lead to severe complications like pneumonia and inflammation of the tiny airways in the lungs called bronchiolitis.

    Worldwide, RSV causes about 33 million infections in children under the age of 5 and hospitalizes 3.6 million annually. Nearly a quarter-million young children die each year from complications of their infections.

    RSV also preys on seniors, leading to an estimated 159,000 hospitalizations and about 10,000 deaths a year in adults 65 and over, a burden roughly on par with influenza.

    Despite this heavy toll, doctors haven’t had any new tools to head off RSV for more than two decades. The last therapy approved was in 1998. The monoclonal antibody, Synagis, is given monthly during RSV season to protect preemies and other high-risk babies.

    The hunt for an effective way to protect against RSV stalled for decades after two children died in a disastrous vaccine trial in the 1960s.

    That study tested a vaccine made with an RSV virus that had been chemically treated to render it inert and mixed with an ingredient called alum, to wake up the immune system and help it respond.

    It was tested at clinical trial sites in the US between 1966 and 1968.

    At first, everything looked good. The vaccine was tested in animals, who tolerated it well, and then given to children, who also appeared to respond well.

    “Unfortunately, that fall, when RSV season started, many of the children that were vaccinated required hospitalization and got more severe RSV disease than what would have normally occurred,” said Steven Varga, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Iowa, who has been studying RSV for more than 20 years and is developing a nanoparticle vaccine against the virus.

    A study published on the trial found that 80% of the vaccinated children who caught RSV later required hospitalization, compared with only 5% of the children who got a placebo. Two of the babies who had participated in the trial died.

    The outcomes of the trial were a seismic shock to vaccine science. Efforts to develop new vaccines and treatments against RSV halted as researchers tried to untangle what went so wrong.

    “The original vaccine studies were so devastatingly bad. They didn’t understand immunology well in those days, so everybody said ‘oh no, this ain’t gonna work.’ And it really was like it stopped things cold for 30, 40 years,” said Dr. Aaron Glatt, an infectious disease specialist at Mount Sinai South Nassau in New York.

    Regulators re-evaluated the guardrails around clinical trials, putting new safety measures into place.

    “It is in fact, in many ways, why we have some of the things that we have in place today to monitor vaccine safety,” Varga said.

    Researchers at the clinical trial sites didn’t communicate with each other, Varga said, and so the US Food and Drug Administration put the publicly accessible Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System into place. Now, when an adverse event is reported at one clinical trial site, other sites are notified.

    Another problem turned out to be how the vaccine was made.

    Proteins are three-dimensional structures. They are made of chains of building blocks called amino acids that fold into complex shapes, and their shapes determine how they work.

    In the failed RSV vaccine trial, the chemical the researchers used to deactivate the virus denatured its proteins – essentially flattening them.

    “Now you have a long sheet of acids but no more beautiful shapes,” said Ulla Buchholz, chief of the RNA Viruses Section at the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

    “Everything that the immune system needs to form neutralizing antibodies that can block and block attachment and entry of this virus to the cell had been destroyed in that vaccine,” said Buchholz, who designed the RSV vaccine for toddlers that’s being tested at Vanderbilt and other US sites.

    In the 1960s trial, the kids still made antibodies to the flattened viral proteins, but they were distorted. When the actual virus came along, these antibodies didn’t work as intended. Not only did they fail to recognize or block the virus, they triggered a powerful misdirected immune response that made the children much sicker, a phenomenon called antibody-dependent enhancement of disease.

    The investigators hadn’t spotted the enhancement in animal studies, Varga says, because the vaccinated animals weren’t later challenged with the live virus.

    “So of course, we require now extensive animal testing of new vaccines before they’re ever put into humans, again, for that very reason of making sure that there aren’t early signs that a vaccine will be problematic,” Varga said.

    About 10 years ago, a team of researchers at the NIH – some of the same investigators who developed the first Covid-19 vaccines – reported what would turn out to be a pivotal advance.

    They had isolated the structure of the virus’s F-protein, the site that lets it dock onto human cells. Normally, the F-protein flips back and forth, changing shapes after it attaches to a cell. The NIH researchers figured out to how freeze the F-protein into the shape it takes before it fuses with a cell.

    This protein, when locked into place, allows the immune system to recognize the virus in the form it’s in when it first enters the body – and develop strong antibodies against it.

    “The companies coming forward now, for the most part, are taking advantage of that discovery,” said Dr. Phil Dormitzer, a senior vice president of vaccine development at GlaxoSmithKline. “And now we have this new generation of vaccine candidates that perform far better than the old generation.”

    The first vaccines up for FDA review will be given to adults: seniors and pregnant woman. Vaccination in pregnancy is meant to ultimately protect newborns – a group particularly vulnerable to the virus – via antibodies that cross the placenta.

    Vaccines for children are a bit farther behind in development but moving through the pipeline, too.

    Four companies have RSV vaccines for adults in the final phases of human trials: Pfizer and GSK are testing vaccines for pregnant women as well as seniors. Janssen and Bavarian Nordic are developing shots for seniors.

    Pfizer and GSK use protein subunit vaccines, a more traditional kind of vaccine technology. Two other companies build on innovations made during the pandemic: Janssen – the vaccine division of Johnson & Johnson – relies on an adenoviral vector, the same kind of system that’s used in its Covid-19 vaccine, and Moderna has a vaccine for RSV in Phase 2 trials that uses mRNA technology.

    So far, early results shared by some companies are promising. Janssen, Pfizer and GSK each appear effective at preventing infections in adults for the first RSV season after the vaccine.

    In an August news release, Annaliesa Anderson, Pfizer’s chief scientific officer of Vaccine Research and Development, said she was “delighted” with the results. The company plans to submit its data to the FDA for approval this fall.

    GSK has also wrapped up its Phase 3 trial for seniors. It recently presented the results at a medical conference, but full data hasn’t been peer reviewed or published in a medical journal. Early results show that this vaccine is 83% effective at preventing disease in the lower lungs of adults 60 and older. It appears to be even more protective – 94% – for severe RSV disease in those over 70 and those with underlying medical conditions.

    “We are very pleased with these results,” Dormitzer told CNN. He said the company was moving “with all due haste” to get its results to the FDA for review.

    “We’re confident enough that we’ve started manufacturing the actual commercial launch materials. So we have the bulk vaccine actually in the refrigerator, ready to supply when we are licensed,” he said.

    Even as the company applies for licensure, GSK’s trial will continue for two more RSV seasons. Half the group getting the vaccine will be followed with no additional shots, while the other group will get annual boosters. The aim is to see which approach is most protective to guide future vaccination strategies.

    Janssen’s vaccine for older adults appears to be about 70% to 80% effective in clinical trials so far, the company announced in December.

    In a study on Pfizer’s vaccine for pregnant women published in the New England Journal of Medicine this year, the company reported that the mothers enrolled in the study made antibodies to the vaccine and that these antibodies crossed the placenta and were detected in umbilical cord blood just after birth.

    The vaccines for pregnant women are meant to get newborns through their first RSV season. But not all newborns will benefit from those. Most maternal antibodies are passed to baby in the third trimester, so preemies may not be protected, even if mom gets the vaccine.

    For vulnerable infants and those whose mothers decline to be vaccinated, Dr. Helen Chu, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Washington, says the long-acting antibody shot for newborns, called nirsevimab, should cover them for the first six months of life. She expects it to be a “game-changer.”

    That shot, which has been developed by AstraZeneca, was recently recommended for approval in the European Union. It has not yet been approved in the United States.

    The field is so close to a new approval that public health officials say they’ve been asked to study up on the data.

    Chu, who is also a member of an RSV study group of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a panel that advises the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on its vaccine recommendations, says her group has started to evaluate the new vaccines – a sign that an FDA review is just around the corner.

    No companies have yet announced that process is underway. FDA reviews can take several months, and then there are typically discussions and votes by FDA and CDC advisory groups before vaccines are made available.

    “We’ve been working on this for several months now to start reviewing the data,” Chu said. “So I think this is imminent.”

    Watching this year’s RSV season unfold, Brown, the pediatrician who enrolled her son in the vaccine trial for toddlers, says progress can’t come fast enough.

    “The hospital is surging. We’re not drowning the way some states are. I mean, Connecticut, South Carolina, North Carolina, they’re really drowning. But our numbers are huge, and our services are so busy,” she says.

    Brown says her son is mostly healthy. He doesn’t have any of the risks for severe RSV she sees with some of her patients, so she was happy to have a way to help others.

    And while it’s far too early to say whether the vaccine James is helping to test will prove to be effective, the trial was unblinded last week, and Brown learned that her son was in the group that got the active vaccine, not the placebo

    He has done well through this heavy season of illness, she says. The NIH-sponsored study they participated in is scheduled to be completed next year.

    The vaccine, which is made with a live but very weak version of virus, is given through a couple of squirts up the nose, so there are no needles. The hardest part for squirmy James, she said, was being held still.

    “If we can do anything to move science forward and help another child, like, sorry, James. You had to have your blood drawn, but it absolutely was worth it.”

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  • Time to treat North Korea’s nuclear program like Israel’s? | CNN

    Time to treat North Korea’s nuclear program like Israel’s? | CNN

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    Seoul, South Korea
    CNN
     — 

    As a statement of intent, it was about as blunt as they get.

    North Korea has developed nuclear weapons and will never give them up, its leader, Kim Jong Un, told the world last month.

    The move was “irreversible,” he said; the weapons represent the “dignity, body, and absolute power of the state” and Pyongyang will continue to develop them “as long as nuclear weapons exist on Earth.”

    Kim may be no stranger to colorful language, but it is worth taking his vow – which he signed into law – seriously. Bear in mind that this is a dictator who cannot be voted out of power and who generally does what he says he will do.

    Bear in mind too that North Korea has staged a record number of missile launches this year – more than 20; claims it is deploying tactical nuclear weapons to field units, something CNN cannot independently confirm; and is also believed to be ready for a seventh underground nuclear test.

    All this has prompted a growing number of experts to question whether now is the time to call a spade a spade and accept that North Korea is in fact a nuclear state. Doing so would entail giving up once and for all the optimistic – some might say delusional – hopes that Pyongyang’s program is somehow incomplete or that it might yet be persuaded to give it up voluntarily.

    As Ankit Panda, a Stanton senior fellow in the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, put it: “We simply have to treat North Korea as it is, rather than as we would like it to be.”

    From a purely factual point of view, North Korea has nuclear weapons, and few who follow events there closely dispute that.

    A recent Nuclear Notebook column from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists estimated that North Korea may have produced enough fissile material to build between 45 and 55 nuclear weapons. What’s more, the recent missile tests suggest it has a number of methods of delivering those weapons.

    Publicly acknowledging this reality is, however, fraught with peril for countries such as the United States.

    One of the most compelling reasons for Washington not to do so is its fears of sparking a nuclear arms race in Asia.

    South Korea, Japan and Taiwan are just a few of the neighbors that would likely want to match Pyongyang’s status.

    But some experts say that refusing to acknowledge North Korea’s nuclear prowess – in the face of increasingly obvious evidence to the contrary – does little to reassure these countries. Rather, the impression that allies have their heads in the sand may make them more nervous.

    “Let’s accept (it), North Korea is a nuclear arms state, and North Korea has all necessary delivery systems including pretty efficient ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles),” said Andrei Lankov, a professor at Kookmin University in Seoul and a preeminent academic authority on North Korea.

    A better approach, some suggest, might be to treat North Korea’s nuclear program in a similar way to Israel’s – with tacit acceptance.

    That’s the solution favored by Jeffrey Lewis, an adjunct professor at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey.

    “I think that the crucial step that (US President Joe) Biden needs to take is to make clear both to himself and to the US government that we are not going to get North Korea to disarm and that is fundamentally accepting North Korea as a nuclear state. You don’t necessarily need to legally recognize it,” Lewis said.

    Both Israel and India offer examples of what the US could aspire to in dealing with North Korea, he added.

    North Korea held what it called

    Israel, widely believed to have started its nuclear program in the 1960s, has always claimed nuclear ambiguity while refusing to be a party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while India embraced nuclear ambiguity for decades before abandoning that policy with its 1998 nuclear test.

    “In both of those cases, the US knew those countries had the bomb, but the deal was, if you don’t talk about it, if you don’t make an issue out of it, if you don’t cause political problems, then we’re not going to respond. I think that’s the same place we want to get to with North Korea,” Lewis said.

    At present though, Washington shows no signs of abandoning its approach of hoping to persuade Pyongyang to give up its nukes.

    Indeed, US Vice President Kamala Harris underlined it during a recent visit to the DMZ, the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.

    “Our shared goal – the United States and the Republic of Korea – is a complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” Harris said.

    That may be a worthy goal, but many experts see it as increasingly unrealistic.

    “Nobody disagrees that denuclearization would be a very desirable outcome on the Korean Peninsula, it’s simply not a tractable one,” Panda said.

    One problem standing in the way of denuclearization is that Kim’s likely biggest priority is ensuring the survival of his regime.

    And if he wasn’t paranoid enough already, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (in which a nuclear power has attacked a non-nuclear power) will have served as a timely reinforcement of his belief that “nuclear weapons are the only reliable guarantee of security,” said Lankov, from Kookmin University.

    A TV screen at a railway station in Seoul, South Korea, shows an image of a North Korean missile launch on October 10, 2022.

    Trying to convince Kim otherwise seems a non-starter, as Pyongyang has made clear it will not even consider engaging with a US administration that wants to talk about denuclearization.

    “If America wants to talk about denuclearization, (North Korea is) not going to talk and if the Americans are not talking, (North Korea) will launch more and more missiles and better and better missiles,” Lankov said. “It’s a simple choice.”

    There is also the problem that if North Korea’s increasingly concerned neighbors conclude Washington’s approach is going nowhere, this might itself bring about the arms race the US is so keen to avoid.

    Cheong Seong-chang, a senior researcher at the Sejong Institute, a Korean think tank, is among the growing number of conservative voices calling for South Korea to build its own nuclear weapons program to counter Pyongyang’s.

    Efforts to prevent North Korea developing nuclear weapons have “ended in failure,” he said, “and even now, pursuing denuclearization is like chasing a miracle.”

    Still, however remote the denuclearization dream seems, there are those who say the alternative – of accepting North Korea’s nuclear status, however subtly – would be a mistake.

    “We (would be) basically (saying to) Kim Jong Un, after all of this tug of war and rustling, (that) you’re just going to get what you want. The bigger question (then) of course is: where does that leave the entire region?” said Soo Kim, a former CIA officer who is now a researcher at US think tank RAND Corporation.

    That leaves one other option open to the Biden administration and its allies, though it’s one that may seem unlikely in the current climate.

    They could pursue a deal in which Pyongyang offers to freeze its arms development in return for sanctions relief.

    In other words, not a million miles away from the deal Kim offered then US President Donald Trump at their summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, in February 2019.

    This option has its backers. “A freeze is a really solid way to start things out. It’s very hard to get rid of weapons that exist, but what is possible … is to prevent things from getting worse. It takes some of the pressure off and it opens up space for other kinds of negotiations,” said Lewis of the James Martin Center.

    However, the Trump-era overtones might make this a non-starter. Asked if he thought President Biden might consider this tactic, Lewis smiled and said, “I’m a professor, so I specialize in giving advice that no one is ever going to take.”

    But even if the Biden administration was so inclined, that ship may have sailed; the Kim of 2019 was far more willing to engage than the Kim of 2022.

    And that, perhaps, is the biggest problem at the heart of all the options on the table: they rely on some form of engagement with North Korea – something entirely lacking at present.

    Kim is now focused on his five-year plan for military modernization announced in January 2021 and no offers of talks from the Biden administration or others have yet turned his head in the slightest.

    As Panda acknowledged, “There’s a set of cooperative options which would require the North Koreans being willing to sit down at the table and talk about some of those things with us. I don’t think that we are even close to sitting down with the North Koreans.”

    And, in fairness to Kim, the reticence is not all down to Pyongyang.

    “Big policy shifts in the US would require the President’s backing, and I really see no evidence that Joe Biden really sees the North Korean issue as deserving of tremendous political capital,” Panda said.

    He added what many experts believe – and what even some US and South Korean lawmakers admit behind closed doors: “We will be living with a nuclear armed North Korea probably for a few decades to come at least.”

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  • Selena Gomez cancels ‘Tonight Show’ appearance after catching Covid | CNN

    Selena Gomez cancels ‘Tonight Show’ appearance after catching Covid | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Selena Gomez is trying to keep her hands – and everything else – to herself for a while.

    The singer on Wednesday shared on Instagram that she has contracted Covid-19 and was forced to cancel a planned appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”

    “I’m not going to be on Fallon tonight,” she wrote on an Instagram story. “I ended up getting Covid but am resting and feeling ok.”

    Gomez shared the message along with a picture of herself cuddled up on a couch with her dog nearby.

    “A friendly reminder Covid is still out there. Get updated on your boosters,” she wrote. “I was actually scheduled to get mine this week.”

    Gomez is not alone.

    This week, President Joe Biden received his booster and urged other eligible Americans to do the same as the nation prepares for a winter case surge.

    Gomez was likely set to appear on Fallon’s show to promote her upcoming documentary “Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me,” which releases globally on Apple TV+ on November 4.

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  • Clorox recalls 37 million bottles of Pine-Sol that could contain bacteria | CNN Business

    Clorox recalls 37 million bottles of Pine-Sol that could contain bacteria | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN Business
     — 

    Roughly 37 million bottles of Pine-Sol products have been recalled because they could contain a potentially harmful bacteria.

    Clorox said some of the affected Pine-Sol products might contain a bacteria called Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which can harm people with compromised immune systems or people with external medical devices because they pose “a risk of serious infection that may require medical treatment,” according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

    Eight different versions of Pine-Sol have been recalled, including Pine-Sol scented multi-surface cleaners (lavender clean, sparkling wave and lemon fresh scents), CloroxPro Pine-Sol all purpose cleaners (lavender clean, sparkling wave, lemon fresh, and orange energy scents) and Clorox Professional Pine-Sol lemon fresh cleaner.

    The CPSC says no injuries have been reported.

    The affected Pine-Sol products were made between January 2021 and September 2022. The described products were made at Clorox’s Forest Park, Georgia, factory. They were sold on Amazon and at several national retailers such as Walmart, Target, Sam’s Club, Kroger and Dollar Tree.

    Recalled bottles have date codes beginning with the prefix “A4” followed by a five-digit number less than 22249. The products are sold in bottles of varying ounces, ranging from 28- to 175-fluid ounces.

    If someone has a recalled Pine-Sol bottle, the agency says to throw it away and contact Pine-Sol for a refund. A special website has been set up for refunds.

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  • RSV in children: Symptoms, treatment and what parents should know | CNN

    RSV in children: Symptoms, treatment and what parents should know | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    In September, an 8-month-old baby came into Dr. Juanita Mora’s office in Chicago with an infection the doctor hadn’t expected to see for another two months: RSV.

    Like her peers across the country, the allergist and immunologist has been treating little ones with this cold-like virus well before the season usually starts.

    “We’re seeing RSV infections going rampant all throughout the country,” Mora said.

    Almost all children catch RSV at some point before they turn 2, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. Most adults who catch it have a mild illness; for those who are elderly or who have chronic heart or lung disease or a weakened immune system, it can be dangerous. But RSV can be especially tricky for infants and kids.

    Mora, a volunteer medical spokesperson for the American Lung Association, says it’s important for parents, caregivers and daycare workers to know what to watch for with RSV, which stands for respiratory syncytial virus. That way, they know whether a sick child can be treated at home or needs to go to a hospital.

    “The emergency department is getting completely flooded with all these sick kids, so we want parents to know they can go to their pediatrician and get tested for RSV, influenza and even Covid-19,” Mora said.

    Here’s what else parents need to know amid the surge of respiratory illnesses.

    For many, RSV causes a mild illness that can be managed at home.

    On average, an infection lasts five days to a couple of weeks, and it will often go away on its own, the CDC says. Sometimes, the cough can linger for up to four weeks, pediatricians say.

    Symptoms may look like a common cold: a runny nose, a decreased appetite, coughing, sneezing, fever and wheezing. Young infants may seem only irritable or lethargic and have trouble breathing.

    Not every child will have every potential RSV symptom.

    “Fevers are really hit or miss with RSV infections, especially in young infants,” said Dr. Priya Soni, assistant professor of pediatric infectious diseases at Cedars Sinai Medical Center.

    Parents should watch for any changes in behavior, she said, including taking longer to eat or not being interested in food at all. The child can also develop a severe cough and some wheezing.

    It’s also important to watch for signs that your child is struggling to breathe or breathing with their ribs or belly – “symptoms which may kind of overlap with many of the other viruses that we’re seeing a resurgence of,” Soni added.

    Since it’s not easy for parents to tell the difference between respiratory illnesses like, say, RSV and flu, it’s good to take a sick child to a pediatrician, who can run tests to pinpoint the cause.

    “You may need to take your baby to be evaluated sooner rather than later,” Soni said.

    When it comes to RSV, parents should be especially cautious if their children are preemies, newborns, children with weakened immune systems or neuromuscular disorders, and those under age 2 with chronic lung and heart conditions, the CDC says.

    “Parents should be really astute to any changes, like in their activity and their appetite, and then pay particular attention to any signs of respiratory distress,” Soni said.

    Testing is important because treatment for things like flu and Covid-19 may differ.

    There’s no antiviral or specific treatment for RSV like there is for the flu, nor is there a vaccine. But if your child is sick, there are things you can do to help.

    Fever and pain can be managed with non-aspirin pain relievers like acetaminophen or ibuprofen. Also make sure your child drinks enough fluids.

    “RSV can make kids very dehydrated, especially when they’re not eating or drinking, especially when we’re talking infants,” Mora said. “Once they stop eating or their urine output has decreased, they’re not having as many wet diapers, this is a sign they may have to go to the pediatrician or emergency department.”

    Talk to your pediatrician before giving your child any over-the-counter cold medicines, which can sometimes contain ingredients that aren’t good for kids.

    Your pediatrician will check the child’s respiratory rate – how fast they’re breathing – and their oxygen levels. If your child is very sick or at high risk of severe illness, the doctor may want them to go to a hospital.

    “RSV can be super dangerous for some young infants and younger kids, particularly those that are less than 2 years of age,” Soni said.

    Mora said labored breathing is a sign that a child is having trouble with this virus. RSV can turn into more serious illnesses such as bronchiolitis or pneumonia, and that can lead to respiratory failure.

    If you see that a child’s chest is moving up and down when they breathe, if their cough won’t let them sleep or if it’s getting worse, “that might be a sign that they need to seek help from their pediatrician or take them to the emergency department, because then they might need a supplemental oxygen, or they may need a nebulization treatment.”

    CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen says this respiratory difficulty – including a bobbing head, a flaring nose or grunting – is one of two major trouble signs with any respiratory infection. The other is dehydration. “That particularly applies to babies with stuffy noses. They may not be feeding.”

    Much of the care provided by hospital staff will be to help with breathing.

    “We provide supportive measures for RSV and these kids with oxygen, IV fluids and respiratory therapies, including suctioning,” Soni said.

    A thin tube may need to be inserted into their lungs to remove mucus. A child can get extra oxygen through a mask or through a tube that attaches to their nose. Some children may need to use an oxygen tent. Those who are struggling a lot may need a ventilator.

    Some babies might also need to be fed by tube.

    The best ways to prevent RSV infections, doctors say, is to teach kids to cough and sneeze into a tissue or into their elbows rather than their hands. Also try to keep frequently touched surfaces clean.

    If a caregiver or older sibling is sick, Mora says, they should wear a mask around other people and wash their hands frequently.

    And most of all, if anyone is sick – child or adult – they should stay home so they don’t spread the illness.

    There is a monoclonal antibody treatment for children who are at highest risk for severe disease. It’s not available for everyone, but it can protect those who are most vulnerable. It comes in the form of a shot that a child can get every month during the typical RSV season. Talk to your doctor about whether your child qualifies.

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  • A dogwalker caught an alligator in rural Idaho | CNN

    A dogwalker caught an alligator in rural Idaho | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A person walking their dog in rural Idaho was in for quite a surprise when they encountered an alligator, hundreds of miles from the coast where the reptiles are usually found.

    Fish and Game Officer Brian Marek received a call Thursday evening from a person who was walking their dog in New Plymouth, Idaho, according to a statement from the Idaho Department of Fish and Game.

    “They spotted something moving in the brush and discovered the 3.5-foot alligator,” said the department in the statement.

    The resident apparently captured the gator, put it in a horse trailer, and called the department, which picked it up the next morning and moved it to a Fish and Game facility where it is currently being housed, according to the statement.

    The agency said it is investigating the alligator’s origins and urged anyone with information to contact the Idaho Fish and Game Southwest Regional Office.

    “In all likelihood, this alligator got loose from someone, and we are interested in finding the owner,” Regional Conservation Officer Matt O’Connell said in the statement.

    It is illegal to own alligators without a permit in Idaho or to release captive crocodilians – the family to which alligators belong – into the wild, according to the statement.

    Adult alligators can grow to be about 8 to 11 feet long on average. The large reptiles tend to be found in on the east and Gulf coasts, as far north as North Carolina and as far west as eastern Texas. Florida and Louisiana have the country’s two highest alligator populations, with over a million living in each state, according to Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries.

    The species are not found in the wild in Idaho, according to the Idaho Department of Fish and Game website.

    New Plymouth is about 50 miles northwest of Boise, Idaho and has a population of less than 2,000 people.

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  • CDC director tests positive for Covid-19 | CNN

    CDC director tests positive for Covid-19 | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tested positive for Covid-19 on Friday.

    Walensky is experiencing mild symptoms and is up to date on her Covid-19 vaccines, according to a statement released by the agency. Walensky received an updated Covid-19 booster in September.

    “Consistent with CDC guidelines, she is isolating at home and will participate in her planned meetings virtually,” the agency said. “CDC senior staff and close contacts have been informed of her positive test and are taking appropriate action to monitor their health.”

    Covid-19 cases have been falling as the United States moves into fall. However, experts say cases may begin to climb as they have during the past two pandemic winters – especially as several new coronavirus variants begin to gain traction.

    The CDC recommends that people who have recently recovered from a Covid-19 infection wait to get boosted at least until the illness has passed and a person is no longer contagious. The CDC says a person “may consider delaying your vaccine by 3 months from when your symptoms started.”

    Getting infected can act like a booster, and studies have shown that people have a relatively low risk of getting sick again for about three months after they recover.

    People may not want to wait as long as three months if Covid-19 levels are high in the community or they have a reduced immune function, CNN has reported.

    The CDC signed off on the updated booster shots from Pfizer and Moderna on September 1.

    Pfizer/BioNTech’s updated vaccine is a 30-microgram dose authorized for people 12 and older. Moderna’s updated vaccine is a 50-microgram dose authorized for people 18 and older.

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  • Opinion: Half-Earth Day is not a celebration, but a warning | CNN

    Opinion: Half-Earth Day is not a celebration, but a warning | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: Lydia Strohl is a freelance writer in Washington, DC. More of her work can be found here. The views expressed in this commentary belong to the author. View more opinion at CNN.



    CNN
     — 

    When I first learned that October 22 marks Half-Earth Day, I thought it was because the date is six months to Earth Day. (True.) But it’s got a message all its own.

    Half-Earth is the notion that for humans to survive, we must retain earth’s waning biodiversity by reserving half the planet for nature, stabilizing large swaths of ocean, prairie, rainforest and desert to house the birds, insects and ecosystems that affect the water we drink, the food we eat, the air we breathe. Not to mention the economies, cultures and past-times that sustain us.

    The Half-Earth Project was inspired by legendary Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, who died in 2021 at the age of 92. In “Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life,” Wilson wrote: “We would be wise to find our way as quickly as possible out of the fever swamp of dogmatic religious belief and inept philosophical thought through which we still wander. Unless humanity learns a great deal more about global biodiversity and moves quickly to protect it, we will soon lose most of the species composing life on Earth.”

    This means us, people, who Wilson calls a “lucky accident of primate evolution during the late Pleistocene.”

    Not a particularly happy accident, perhaps, for Planet Earth. Since 1970, the global population has doubled to nearly 8 billion. And in those five decades, monitored wildlife populations have declined by an average of 69%, warns the recent Living Planet Report, World Wildlife Fund’s study of the abundance of species worldwide (select vertebrate species; others are difficult to track). Freshwater populations have been hit the hardest, declining 83% over this time period. One million plant and animal species, out of the estimated 8 million out there, are in danger of extinction.

    It is time to change our ways, from using to stewarding earth’s resources. People cannot thrive at the expense of nature. Latin America has seen a whopping 94% decline in species populations. Meanwhile, deforestation for crops and cattle, legal and illegal mining and logging, development, and devastating wildfires have contributed to a 20% loss of the Amazon rainforest – an area the size of France. This doesn’t just affect the 350 indigenous communities and untold species of plants, animals and insects living there, but all of us, as the 400 billion trees that make up the Amazon rainforest produce an estimated 6% of earth’s oxygen.

    What makes humans more comfortable on earth now threatens the planet: energy, food production, growth in housing and commercial development. These are all systems Wilson believed we need to rethink. But just as the problem lies with us, so does the solution.

    To move people to action, Jennifer Morris, CEO of The Nature Conservancy, thinks it’s important to talk about what matters to them, citing health care, clean air and jobs. Morris spoke at a recent Half-Earth Day conference hosted by Smithsonian Institution and the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, bringing together government, community, corporate and conservation stakeholders like The Nature Conservancy, Audubon, and supporters like the Bezos Earth Fund. “Governments aren’t going to move until people move,” Morris said.

    The problems are thorny, however: even high-minded efforts can provoke Mother Nature. “The biggest threat to forests in Virginia is solar,” Morris said, referring to clean energy projects slated to take out thousands of acres of trees. “We can be smart where we put solar and wind … in a way that doesn’t undermine biodiversity,” Morris added.

    The Half-Earth Project looks at growth through the lens of nature, with tools that map richness and rarity in wildlife populations as well as human pressures and existing protections, hoping to inform both preservation and development. I dial their online map down to my community, close to the screaming orange urban mass of Washington, DC, but dotted with green conservation areas established by both public and private authorities.

    The E.O Wilson Biodiversity Laboratory – located in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, which was once decimated by civil war and other human ills – provides a blueprint not only for rebuilding biodiversity but also training new biologists and conservationists. The Half-Earth project also involves indigenous communities – which have traditionally balanced human needs with nature – in their programs, bringing together past and present, to work together towards a durable plan for our future.

    While the first Earth Day took place in 1970 to celebrate conservation efforts, Half-Earth Day is more of a caution. Whatever your beliefs on climate change, this much is clear. We’re losing whitetip sharks and harpy eagles, the inspiration for ‘Fawkes’ in the Harry Potter films. Gone are the Bramble Cay melomys, a small rodent whose habitat, food source and nesting sites were eradicated by storms and unprecedented flooding. You may never see a pink dolphin, but the interplay of plant, animal and insect species sustains us.

    Attacking a problem of this scale requires all of us – from those seated in governments and board rooms to our own kitchen tables – to come together. Too often, “solutions” whipsaw between administrations with their own political agendas. “Meanwhile, we thrash about, appallingly led, with no particular goal in mind other than economic growth, unfettered consumption, good health, and personal happiness,” Wilson wrote. He placed his faith in nature, and we should too.

    “We need to listen to what the birds are telling us. We’ve lost three billion birds in my lifetime,” says Audubon CEO Elizabeth Grey, who is in her 50s. “Birds are sentinels for healthy land and water – if birds are in trouble, people are too.”

    The canary is singing. Listen, before its voice is stilled.

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  • Rusty, DC’s famous fugitive red panda, has died | CNN

    Rusty, DC’s famous fugitive red panda, has died | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Rusty, the red panda who made headlines in 2013 following his successful escape from the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, DC, has died.

    Rusty escaped his enclosure at the National Zoo in June of 2013, as CNN reported at the time. City residents spotted the small panda wandering through DC’s trendy Adams Morgan neighborhood.

    He was safely returned to the facility but the escape puzzled zoo officials – no red panda had ever escaped the enclosure before, and Rusty’s companion stayed in the zoo while he escaped.


    After an in-depth investigation, zoo officials concluded that he likely escaped through the tree canopy in his enclosure. The trees were lower than usual due to rain, allowing Rusty to climb up – and out.

    Since his daring escape, Rusty had relocated to the Pueblo Zoo in Colorado. The zoo announced that he had died on its official Instagram account on Wednesday. Rusty was around 10 years old.

    The zoo described Rusty as “a curious but independent panda, often found stretched out over a log under the misters or munching on bamboo.”

    “I feel very lucky to have earned his trust and been able to work closely with him over the past years,” said his lead keeper Bethany in the Instagram post. “He was a great ambassador for his species and will be missed by staff and guests alike.”

    Rusty fathered twins Mogwai and Momo while at the Pueblo Zoo.

    Red pandas are an endangered species that are native to Nepal, Bhutan, China, Myanmar, India, and Tibet, according to the Smithsonian National Zoo. The species can live to be as old as 23 years old, says the zoo.

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  • The greatest risk to China’s Xi Jinping? Himself | CNN

    The greatest risk to China’s Xi Jinping? Himself | CNN

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    China’s economy is faltering. Unemployment is skyrocketing. Endless Covid lockdowns are wreaking havoc on businesses and people’s lives. The property sector is in crisis. Ties between Beijing and major global powers are under strain.

    The list of problems faced by the world’s second-largest economy goes on – and many of those long-term challenges have only worsened under a decade of Xi Jinping’s rule. Yet the Chinese leader’s grip on power is unwavering.

    In the past decade, Xi has consolidated control to an extent unseen since the era of Communist China’s strongman founder, Mao Zedong. He’s the head of the Chinese Communist Party, the state, the armed forces, and so many committees that he’s been dubbed “chairman of everything.” And now, he is poised to step into a norm-breaking third term in power, with the potential to rule for life.

    But absolute power can often mean absolute responsibility, and as problems mount, analysts warn Xi will have less room to avoid blame.

    “I think the worst enemy of Xi Jinping’s longevity in ruling China is Xi Jinping himself,” said Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London. “It is when he makes a huge policy mistake that causes havoc in China that could potentially start the process of unraveling Xi Jinping’s hold to power.”

    Mao’s rule from 1949 until 1976 was marked by rash policy decisions that led to tens of millions of deaths and destroyed the economy. After those decades of turmoil, the Communist Party developed a system of collective leadership designed to prevent the rise of another dictator who could make arbitrary and dangerous decisions.

    China’s next leader, Deng Xiaoping, set an unwritten rule and precedent that the Communist Party’s General Secretary – the role from which China’s leader derives true power – would step down after two terms.

    From Mao to Xi: A history of China’s leadership

    When Xi assumed power in 2012, China’s economy was booming as it integrated more closely with the rest of the world. Just four years before, China had stunned the world with the extravagant Beijing Summer Olympics. But to Xi, the party was in a state of crisis: overrun by corruption, infighting, and inefficiencies.

    Xi’s solution was to return to dictatorial and personalistic rule. He purged political enemies in a sweeping anti-corruption campaign, silenced internal dissent, abolished presidential term limits and enshrined “Xi Jinping Thought” into the party’s constitution.

    According to analysts, many dictatorships fall into a pattern of abuse of power and poor decision-making when a lack of critical advice reaches the leader. They point to Vladimir Putin’s increasingly costly war against Ukraine as a concern that Xi’s similarly unquestionable power to the Russian President could one day lead to equally disastrous consequences.

    Putin and Xi “suffer from the same strongman-syndrome problem, which is that they turned their policy advice circles into echo chambers, so people are no longer able to speak their mind freely,” Tsang said. “We are seeing big mistakes being made because that internal policy debate has been reduced or indeed eliminated in terms of its scope.”

    In recent history, no country has modernized as rapidly as China. The Communist Party claims its leadership helped lift hundreds of millions out of poverty, turning backwater villages into stunning megacities. But that growth miracle has slowed. And many longstanding challenges in China’s economy have only been exacerbated by Xi’s policies.

    Xi has made it his mission to strengthen the party and its control over business and society. He unleashed a crackdown on the once-vibrant private sector that’s led to mass layoffs. Beijing claims the tougher regulations restrict overly powerful corporations and protect consumers, but the measures have suffocated private businesses, sending chills through the economy and sparking fears about future innovation.

    screengrab bankrupt victims

    China’s once vibrant private sector suffocating under Xi’s crackdown

    Beijing started clamping down on easy credit for property firms in 2020, which led to cash crunches and defaults for many developers, including giant conglomerate Evergrande. Housing projects have stalled and desperate homebuyers across the country are refusing to pay mortgages on unfinished homes. Disruptions in the property sector have an outsized impact on China’s broader economy, as it accounts for as much as 30% of the country’s GDP.

    But during Xi’s leadership, nothing has rocked China’s economy and society as much as zero-Covid. In year three of the pandemic, China has clung to the harsh policy, which relies on mass testing, extensive quarantines and snap lockdowns to stamp out infections at all costs, even as the rest of the world has learned to live with the virus.

    The country continues to lock down entire cities over a handful of infections, while sending all positive cases and close contacts to government quarantine facilities. Lining up for Covid tests and scanning a tracking health code to enter any public space have become normalized. Beijing argues the policy has prevented China from spiraling into a health care disaster like the rest of the world, but zero-Covid is wielded at enormous and growing costs.

    china corona nyc

    Artist wears 27 hazmat suits to protest China’s policies

    Constant lockdowns have dramatically shrunk the pace of growth in China’s economy. Record youth unemployment has reached nearly 20%. Pocketbooks are shrinking. Heavily indebted local governments are forced to spend on mass Covid testing. Experts say resources would be better spent on increasing vaccination rates rather than building costly testing sites and quarantine facilities. China has still not approved any foreign mRNA vaccines proven to be more effective against the highly contagious Omicron variant than the inactivated vaccines used in China.

    At the start of the pandemic, Beijing censored – and in some cases punished – doctors, experts, and citizen journalists who tried to warn of a deadly in virus in Wuhan.

    Nearly three years on, as most international experts advise China to find a way to live with the virus, Beijing has doubled down. Earlier this year, Shanghai – a metropolis with a population more than three times that of New York City – was locked down for two months. People struggled to get enough food and basic necessities. Desperate residents broke out of home confinement and clashed with enforcement workers in rare street protests. Many patients were denied life-saving health care.

    When the World Health Organization criticized the zero-Covid policy as “not sustainable,” China censored the statement on social media.

    Susan Shirk, director of the 21st Century China Center and author of “Overreach,” a book on Xi’s leadership, says China’s leaders “compete with one another to prove how loyal they are to him because Xi promotes loyalists, not the most competent people.” That leads to subordinates going over the top in executing policies to try to please Xi, she said.

    Shirk said this has played out with zero-Covid, as Xi has directly tied his leadership to the strategy, so local officials have zealously followed it to show loyalty to the leader and protect their careers.

    “A lot of the pain in China’s economy has been self-inflicted by China’s leader,” Shirk said.

    “So what this suggests, and this is a pretty disturbing idea, is that the Chinese Communist Party no longer brands itself as a developmental party, putting economic development as its primary objective. But instead, it’s Xi Jinping’s hold on power.”

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  • Covid-19 vaccines will be on the 2023 vaccine schedule, but that doesn’t mean they’re required in schools | CNN

    Covid-19 vaccines will be on the 2023 vaccine schedule, but that doesn’t mean they’re required in schools | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Covid-19 vaccines will be part of recommended immunization schedules in 2023 for both children and adults, after a unanimous vote by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s independent Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

    That doesn’t make the vaccines mandatory for anyone, a point that was emphasized in a discussion before Thursday’s vote. The board members addressed concerns from the public that adding Covid-19 vaccinations to the schedule would force schools to require the shots.

    “We recognize that there is concern around this, but moving Covid-19 to the recommended immunization schedule does not impact what vaccines are required for school entrance, if any,” said Dr. Nirav Shah, a committee member and director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

    “Indeed, there are vaccines that are on the schedule right now that are not required for school attendance in many jurisdictions, such as seasonal influenza. Local control matters, and we honor that. The decision around school entrance for vaccines rests where it did before, which is with the state level, the county level and at the municipal level, if it exists at all. They are the arbiters of what vaccines are required, if any, for school entry. This discussion does not change that.”

    In fact, Covid-19 vaccines are explicitly banned from being included in school mandates in at least 20 states. Only California and the District of Columbia have announced that Covid-19 shots will be among mandated vaccinations for students, but those mandates were not implemented for this school year.

    It’s been nearly a year since eligibility for the Covid-19 vaccine was expanded to include everyone in the US 5 and older, but coverage among children still lags behind that of adults. Even as these vaccines and the related mandates have become highly politicized over the course of the pandemic, experts say vaccine hesitancy among parents isn’t new.

    Although the Covid-19 shot will not become mandatory for school, all 50 states do have laws requiring specific vaccines for students – most of which include shots for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR), diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTaP) and varicella.

    Uptake for these vaccines, mandated by schools long before Covid-19, fell during the pandemic.

    In the 2020-21 school year, vaccination coverage for kindergarteners fell to less than 94% – dropping below the overall target of 95% that was set as an objective by the US Department of Health and Human Services in the Healthy People project for the first time in six years.

    A CNN analysis of the latest CDC data suggests that students in states with stricter school vaccine requirements are more likely to have their shots.

    All school immunization laws grant exemptions to children for specific medical reasons. But 44 states and Washington, DC, also grant religious exemptions, and 15 states allow philosophical or moral exemptions for children, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

    According to the CNN analysis, states that were stricter with exemptions were much more likely to still meet the 95% coverage target. In the 2020-21 school year, an average of about 96% of kindergarten students had their MMR vaccine in states that allowed only medical exemptions, compared with 92% of students in states that also allowed philosophical or moral exemptions.

    The full effect of the pandemic on children’s routine vaccination rates isn’t clear: It will be another few months before the CDC shares national data for compliance rates for mandatory vaccinations in the 2021-22 school year, and schools are in the midst of outreach and programming to ensure that as many students as possible will continue through the 2022-23 school year up to date on their vaccines.

    Correcting the drop in vaccination coverage in students will probably depend more on better access to care, information and outreach – and school vaccine mandates can help.

    With many people who are hesitant, it’s “because of something they’ve heard or something they’ve read,” said Dr. Jesse Hackell, a pediatrician who co-authored a clinical report about countering vaccine hesitancy in 2016. “Most people [who are hesitant] have a very free-floating worry about vaccines. It’s not specific in most cases.”

    A small share of parents – about 2% or 3% – are adamantly opposed to vaccines, and that rate has stayed mostly consistent over the years, said Hackell, who is also chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Practice and Ambulatory Medicine.

    Overall vaccination coverage fell among kindergarteners in the 2020-21 school year, but the share of students who had an exemption also declined from 2.5% to 2.1%, according to CDC data. The rate has changed by less than 1 percentage point over the past 10 years.

    About 3% of kindergarteners in the US – about 120,000 students – were considered to be out of compliance with mandatory vaccines in the 2020-21 school year.

    “Mandates may not do anything to those people who would pull their kids out of public school,” Hackell said. “But the vast majority of parents are not opposed. They’re hesitant, or they’re uncertain. And when there’s pressure to do it for another reason, such as getting your kid into school, they come around.”

    Responsibility for enforcing vaccine mandates falls to the education system, and practices vary by state. Some students are ultimately turned away because they aren’t up to date, but most states offer provisional enrollment periods that allow kids to stay in school if they are in progress with at least one shot in a series or evidence of an upcoming appointment.

    According to the CDC, “school officials may prefer to keep students in school where they have access to education, safe supervision, nutrition, and social services while working with parents or guardians to get children vaccinated.”

    And many states do their best to help students stay up to date on their immunizations, with vaccination drives and direct followup with parents.

    “I think that the drop in the past year or two is partly pandemic-related,” Hackell said. “What we’re seeing, I think, is a little bit of a disparity between kids who have a medical home and have a private [doctor] versus kids who get their immunizations from a public source” like a school clinic.

    Mississippi is an impressive example of finding ways to keep child vaccination rates high, Hackell says. Public schools are the only option for many in the state, where poverty rates are higher than anywhere else in the US.

    Despite the large public need and additional resource struggles that the pandemic brought, 99% of kindergarteners in Mississippi met required vaccination coverage in the 2020-21 school year – better than any other state, according to the CDC.

    “They’ve done a tremendous job at that,” Hackell said, and it demonstrates the power of mandates. Mississippi is strict with exemptions – one of just six states allowing medical reasons only – and just 0.1% of kindergarteners were exempt in the 2020-21 school year.

    Hackell says he would be most concerned if he sees a sustained drop in vaccination rates for highly transmissible diseases, especially measles and polio. And he’s worried about pockets of low vaccination rates in certain communities.

    Schools are public spaces with a level of control, and 95% vaccination coverage is a goal with intent.

    “We know it’s never going to be 100% because there are some people who cannot medically be vaccinated. But if you have 95%, that means in any given school classroom of 30 kids, there might be one unvaccinated kid. And so if that child brings a case of something into the class, there’s nobody else to give it to,” he said. “It stops there with one case.”

    And when it comes to adding Covid-19 vaccines to the CDC’s recommended immunization schedule, the focus is still on public health – not on adding another requirement.

    “I’ve had parents who come in my office, and I say, ‘What are you here for?’ And they say, ‘Well, we’re here for vaccines so that our kids can go to school.’ And I’ve said, ‘OK, I understand that, but really I’m not vaccinating so you can go to school, I’m vaccinating because I want to prevent serious disease and death in your kids,’ ” Dr. Matthew Daley, an ACIP member and senior investigator with the Institute for Health Research at Kaiser Permanente Colorado, said at Thursday’s advisory meeting.

    “And the fact that there’s a school immunization requirement helps because it brought you into the office, but that’s not my goal. My goal is to prevent serious disease.”

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  • Under Xi Jinping, zero-Covid is accelerating China’s surveillance state | CNN

    Under Xi Jinping, zero-Covid is accelerating China’s surveillance state | CNN

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    As a new, deadly virus overtook the central city of Wuhan and spread throughout China in early 2020, the country’s ruling Communist Party and its leader Xi Jinping were faced with a crisis on a scale not seen in decades.

    In Wuhan, there was chaos. The city shut itself off from the outside world, while hospitals were overrun with the sick and dying – but it was too late to stop the virus’ advance. Huge swaths of China, too, locked down, grinding the country to a halt. Online, public outrage over apparent delays in the official release of information – and the silencing of whistleblowers – lit up social media faster than the censors could repress it.

    Outside China, observers watching the start of what would become the Covid-19 pandemic began to ask: could this be a catastrophe so big it calls into question the legitimacy of the Communist Party and its leader?

    Nearly three years later, however, Xi is poised to cement his place as China’s most powerful leader in decades, when he is anointed with a likely norm-breaking third term as the party chief on Sunday.

    In the months following that initial outbreak, Xi oversaw the assembly of a toolbox of brute-force lockdowns, enforced quarantines, and digital tracking. All that was used to bring the virus to heel and largely keep it outside China’s shuttered borders – an approach that initially appeared to earn broad public support as China lived largely virus-free and the pandemic raged overseas.

    But, now, as Xi steps into an expected new era of his rule, that system – known today as the “dynamic zero-Covid” policy – is facing both social and economic pushback.

    Public frustration – the true scale of which is difficult to gauge – appears to be rising over lockdowns that can shutter people in their homes for weeks on end with fleeting advance notice, digital health codes that dictate where people can move, and the constant threat of being sent to centralized quarantine. Meanwhile, the country’s economy is faltering, with both the IMF and World Bank recently downgrading China’s GDP growth forecasts, citing zero-Covid as one of the major drags.

    As China’s Communist Party National Congress meets this week to approve the party’s priorities for the next five years, many are watching for signs restrictions could be loosened. But with Xi having personally tied himself to the policy, any change would need to come straight from the top – and from a leader, who throughout his rule, has sought to extend, not curtail, the party’s control on daily life.

    China’s advanced online ecosystem – run on mobile phone superapps and ubiquitous QR codes – has offered arguably unrivaled convenience for consumers to shop, dine and travel. Now, those technologies play a role in constraining daily life.

    Mobile phone health codes are the backbone of a system designed to track citizens and designate whether they are cleared to enter various venues, upping state control on people’s movement to an extent never before seen in China.

    Across the country, basic activities like going to the grocery store, riding public transport, or entering an office building depend on holding an up-to-date, negative Covid test and not being flagged as a close contact of a patient – data points reflected by a color code.

    Going out in public can be a risk in itself, as being placed under quarantine or barricaded by authorities into a mall or office building as part of a snap lockdown could simply depend on whether someone in the general vicinity ends up testing positive.

    “(You see) all the flaws of big data when it has control over your daily life,” said one Shanghai resident surnamed Li, who spent a recent afternoon scrambling to prove he didn’t need to quarantine after a tracking system pinned his wife to a location near to where a positive case had been detected.

    Li, who’d been with his wife at the time but received no such message, said they were eventually able to reach a hotline and explain their situation, ultimately returning her health code to green.

    “If you don’t complain, the next step is your neighborhood committee seals up your door,” he said.

    The clear message from Beijing is that these steps are necessary to prevent large-scale loss of life and overwhelmed medical systems.

    “The essence of persisting with dynamic zero-Covid is putting people first and prioritizing life,” read a recent editorial in the People’s Daily – one of three along similar lines released by the party mouthpiece last week in an apparent bid to lower public expectation about any policy changes ahead of the Party Congress.

    But as local officials pursue Beijing’s edict of stopping the spread of the virus above all other considerations – the system too, over and over again, has led to human tragedy.

    The past year is marked by grim examples well-known across China: the expectant mother in Xi’an who miscarried after being denied treatment due to expired test results, the off-duty nurse who died from an asthma attack in Shanghai as a hospital branch was closed for Covid-19 disinfection, and, last month, the 27 passengers who died in a crash in the middle of the night as they were bussed into a different jurisdiction for compulsory quarantine.

    “What makes you think that you won’t be on that late-night bus one day?” read a viral comment, which garnered more than 250,000 likes before it was censored – one of a number of glimpses into rising frustration with the cost of the policy.

    Last week, a rare political protest in Beijing saw banners hung from a bridge along the capital’s busy Third Ring Road that zoned in on social controls under the policy.

    “Say no to Covid test, yes to food. No to lockdown, yes to freedom. No to lies, yes to dignity. No to cultural revolution, yes to reform. No to great leader, yes to vote. Don’t be a slave, be a citizen,” one banner read, while the other called for the removal of “dictator and national traitor Xi Jinping.”

    Speaking before some 2,300 mostly surgical-mask clad Communist Party members at the opening of the party’s five-yearly leadership reshuffle on Sunday, Xi gave a sweeping endorsement of China’s Covid controls, saying the party had “protected the people’s health and safety to the greatest extent possible” and “made tremendous, encouraging achievements in both epidemic and social development.”

    The impact of those controls is becoming sharper, as lockdowns – which have repeatedly left people struggling for access to food and medicine and grappling with lost income and a mental toll – have become more frequent.

    Last month, CNN counted more than 70 Chinese cities placed under full or partial Covid lockdowns in a period of a couple weeks, impacting more than 300 million people.

    In the run up to the Party Congress, controls amplified – as local authorities around the country sought to tamp down on outbreaks coinciding with the major political event.

    Chinese leader Xi Jinping meets with medical workers at Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan in March 2020.

    “Maintaining the zero-Covid strategy is now substantially more costly than it was a year ago, because the latest (viral) strains are so much more transmissible and outbreaks are occurring more frequently,” said epidemiologist Ben Cowling of the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health.

    “At the same time, the threat posed by Covid is reduced because of the higher vaccine coverage and the availability of antivirals. Taken together, I think the point has already been crossed where continuing zero-Covid could be considered a cost-effective strategy,” he said, adding that maintaining high vaccine coverage was key for a planned transition away from zero-Covid.

    Xi’s proclaimed success over the virus and China’s accompanying propaganda campaign is one reason why it may be difficult for China to change course.

    “The issue is Xi Jinping already associated himself with the ‘successful’ model of fighting Covid, so the zero-Covid policy now is a de facto Xi Jinping policy,” said Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, adding that China’s handling of the virus in comparison to other countries remains a point of national pride for many Chinese.

    And backing away from the policy will come with significant consequences. Allowing the virus to spread within the country of 1.4 billion would likely increase Covid-19 deaths to unseen levels in the country, experts say – and China so far has staked its policy around preventing those outcomes at all costs.

    Outside experts say that, since the virus will stay in circulation beyond China, keeping tight controls and closed borders is just delaying the inevitable, and the focus should be on preparing, for example through raising elderly vaccination rates and increasing ICU capacity, as well as getting or expanding access to the most effective vaccines and treatments.

    While China backed a massive vaccination campaign since early 2021, it has relied on homegrown shots, which produce lower levels of protective antibodies than mRNA vaccines developed in the West.

    So far, however, China has appeared most focused on bolstering the pillars of zero-Covid: mass testing capacity and mass quarantine facilities.

    “The vaccines take time, the ICU expansion takes time – and if you don’t see effort to prepare for the change, that implies that they are not planning to change the policy any time soon,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

    And while experts say it’s possible economic and other considerations could see China loosen certain controls in the coming year, an eventual end to zero-Covid may not see an end to all of its vestiges – especially as Xi, including in his Sunday address, has made clear his focus on increasing “security” in China.

    Already the health code system has been used to diffuse social protest – with petitioners who lost their savings in rural banks barred from protesting after their health codes inexplicably turned red.

    “One scenario is that (China) might drop the zero-Covid policy, but some of the key components of the policy might be retained and repurposed,” said Huang, pointing to Xi’s focus on maximizing security in China, including via high tech means.

    “Zero-Covid has provided a proof of concept – this actually works,” he said.

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  • How Covid prompted Asian startups to use tech in revolutionizing mental health support | CNN Business

    How Covid prompted Asian startups to use tech in revolutionizing mental health support | CNN Business

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    Singapore
    CNN Business
     — 

    Many Asian countries introduced tougher Covid-19 restrictions than in other continents, a reality that has caused concerns about elevated levels of stress, anxiety and isolation. Now, a number of young entrepreneurs are leveraging technology to provide greater access to mental healthcare there.

    In July, Singapore-based Intellect raised $20 million in its Series A funding, the largest amount raised by a mental health start-up in Asia.

    Founded in 2019, Intellect runs a mobile app that regularly checks in on users’ mood, provides rescue sessions and exercises that tailor to their needs, and allows them to connect with therapists in real time if needed.

    “The traditional form of therapy is in-person and on-on-one, and it is hard to scale,” said Theodoric Chew, the 26-year-old co-founder of Intellect. “When technology comes in, we can scale access to mental care to everyone.”

    The start-up now serves more than 3 million users across the Asia-Pacific region in 15 languages since services began in early 2020.

    Chew said he was inspired to try to popularize mental healthcare after battling a panic attack when he was 16 years old.

    “I saw first-hand how therapy and working with professionals helped me become better,” he said. “On the flip side, I saw a lot of people struggling across the region – not clinically, but not having the right tools or know-how to access care.”

    While Intellect was founded before the pandemic, it quickly grew in popularity as companies became aware of their employees’ mental health as Covid-19 related lockdown and quarantine measures were imposed.

    “A lot of people were thrown into an array of things – anxiety of the pandemic, being locked up, and getting stay-home notices,” he said. “What has changed fundamentally was that mental health is no longer just a nice-to-have element that companies should consider, it’s something that’s needed across the board today.”

    “It does benefit companies in very real ways … because if you’re not feeling well mentally, you tend to not perform as well,” he said.

    Justin Kim, CEO and co-founder of Ami, another digital mental healthcare start-up based in Singapore and Jakarta, agreed that there’s a need to scale mental health offerings.

    “Many companies are spending millions of dollars a year and paying for gym memberships. But why don’t people invest into their mental health the same way? It’s because there are no resources that are being offered to them, that’s just as accessible and affordable,” he added.

    Justin Kim is the CEO and co-founder of Ami. His start-up has received funding from Meta, the owner of Facebook.

    Since the start-up was founded in January this year, it has raised at least $3 million from a number of investors, including Meta, the owner of Facebook.

    Kim’s team has been working on developing an app that would allow users to text or call mental health coaches confidentially at any time – without having to make prior appointments. He said this allows users to seek professional help whenever they need it in the most efficient way.

    Both Chew and Kim are targeting employers in their business models – companies can pay for a subscription and workers will have unlimited access to their services, which are kept private from their bosses.

    Alistair Carmichael, an associate partner at McKinsey & Company, said employers will benefit from better mental health in their workforce. “The impacts of poor mental health outcomes are significant. … If we focus on the employment and organizational level, those impacts can be things like presenteeism, absenteeism, lost productivity, lost engagement and attrition,” he said.

    Depression and anxiety disorders have cost the global economy $1 trillion each year in lost productivity, the World Health Organization has estimated. And a report by the WHO in March showed the global prevalence of anxiety and depression increased by 25% during the first year of the pandemic.

    Chew said Intellect is attempting to close the gap by proactively safeguarding mental wellbeing before symptoms get worse. When employees open the app, the system asks them how they feel at the moment. Mini “rescue sessions” are also provided to users who are experiencing a rough time, while live therapy sessions are also available for those who require them.

    The app that Intellect developed proactively asks users how they feel at the moment. Mini

    The app features numerous learning programs for users to overcome mental roadblocks, such as self-esteem issues, depression or procrastination. A journal function guides users through writing what’s on their mind, while a “mood timeline” keeps track of their stress levels.

    Since launching the app, Intellect has served a number of high-profile corporate clients such as Dell, Foodpanda, and Singaporean communications conglomerate Singtel, Chew said, which allowed Intellect to expand from a team of two to 80.

    Kim, whose start-up has been building a prototype, said employers could also benefit by identifying trends and general concerns among their workforces.

    “With employees’ consent, we do share aggregated levels of data. And that offers employers a birds’ eye perspective of what their employees are actually struggling with, that they need to deep dive on,” he said.

    “But we never identify who said that, because we don’t want employees to feel like this isn’t a safe space where they can freely address concerns they have.”

    Karen Lau, a Hong Kong-based clinical psychologist with mental health initiative Mind HK, said addressing mental health in Asia comes with unique challenges.

    “In Asian contexts, many cultures tend to uphold values such as honor, pride, and a concept of face,” she said. “Mental illness is usually viewed and judged as a sign of weakness and a source of shame for the family.”

    “I think when it comes to mental health, just like your physical health, every issue is easier to prevent than fixed,” Kim said. “If people get out there and admit and celebrate the fact that they’re receiving coaching or services to invest in their mental health, it’s going to normalize the practice.”

    Chew said one of his goals is to break social stigma and build a new mental healthcare system for the Asia-Pacific region.

    “Mental health has long had a stigma across Asia, whereby traditionally we’ve seen it as a clinical issue, a crisis,” he said. “We see mental health just as important as physical health. You and I face things like stress, burnout, sleep issues, and relationship struggle as well. That’s where actually a lot of us should start working on our mental wellbeing.”

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  • Xi Jinping’s speech: yes to zero-Covid, no to market reforms? | CNN Business

    Xi Jinping’s speech: yes to zero-Covid, no to market reforms? | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong
    CNN Business
     — 

    Even though China’s economy is beset by problems ranging from a real estate crisis to youth unemployment, Xi Jinping did not offer any grand ideas to set the country back on track during his two-hour opening speech at the Communist Party Congress on Sunday.

    The Chinese leader is expected to secure an unprecedented third term in power at the week-long congress. Priorities presented at the political gathering of more than 2,000 party members will also set China’s trajectory for the next five years or even longer.

    In his speech Sunday, Xi struck a confident tone, highlighting China’s growing strength and rising influence under his first decade in power. He also repeatedly underscored the risks and challenges the country faces, including the Covid pandemic, Hong Kong and Taiwan — all of which he claimed China had come away from victorious.

    But experts are concerned that Xi offered no signs of moving away from the country’s rigid zero-Covid policy or its tight regulatory stance on various businesses, both of which have hampered growth in the world’s second-largest economy.

    “Yesterday’s speech confirms what many China watchers have long suspected — Xi has no intention of embracing market liberalization or relaxing China’s zero-Covid policies, at least not anytime soon,” said Craig Singleton, senior China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a DC-based think tank.

    “Instead, he intends to double down on policies geared towards security and self-reliance at the expense of China’s long-term economic growth.”

    China is the world’s last major economy still enforcing strict zero-Covid measures, which aim to stamp out chains of transmission through border restrictions, mass testing, extensive quarantines, and uncompromising snap lockdowns.

    And China’s economy is in bad shape. Growth has stalled, youth unemployment is at a record high, and the housing market is in shambles. Constant Covid lockdowns have not only wreaked havoc on the economy, but also sparked rising social discontent.

    Last week, two large banners were hung on an overpass of a major thoroughfare in Beijing, protesting against Xi’s Covid policy and authoritarian rule. It was a rare protest against the top leadership in the country, signaling the frustration and anger among the public.

    Many international organizations, including the IMF and World Bank, have recently downgraded China’s GDP growth forecasts for this year, citing zero-Covid as one of the major drags.

    Xi, however, praised the government’s adherence to zero-Covid, saying it has “achieved significant positive results.”

    Xi’s speech — a summary of the Communist Party’s work report, or action plan — was similarly short on concrete solutions to other challenges facing the economy in the near term.

    “We believe the ongoing Party Congress may not be an inflection point for major policy changes,” Goldman Sachs analysts said on Sunday, adding that they believe China may not loosen its Covid restrictions until at least the second quarter of 2023.

    On the property sector, Xi emphasized the need to provide affordable housing and dampen speculative demand — but there was no specific mention of the slump in real estate, which has mushroomed into a major crisis over the past few years, threatening both economic and social stability.

    “We maintain our view that a comprehensive solution to the beleaguered property sector might not be introduced until after March 2023, when the political reshuffle is fully completed,” said Nomura analysts on Monday.

    Nor did Xi mention record youth unemployment, which is mainly a result of his year-long crackdown on the tech industry set against the backdrop of punishing zero-Covid policies.

    In the full version of the official 20th Party Congress work report, which was published shortly after his speech, Xi emphasized the need to continue the party’s “anti-monopoly” crackdown and regulate “excessive incomes,” a sign that he will continue to get tough on big businesses and wealthy individuals.

    Beijing’s sweeping crackdown on the country’s private sector, under the banner of Xi’s “common prosperity” campaign, has pummeled several companies in sectors ranging from tech and finance to gaming and private education.

    The government has defended the campaign as necessary for “social fairness” and narrowing income gaps.

    In his speech, Xi also made clear that development was the “top priority” and stressed continued focus on “high-quality growth.”

    That may dispel some market concerns that the government no longer cared much about economic growth, UBS analysts said.

    However, to achieve Xi’s target of making China a “medium developed country” by 2035, the country’s annual real GDP growth needs to average around 4.7% a year from 2021 to 2035, the UBS analysts said. That could be “quite challenging,” they noted, adding they expect China’s potential growth to average between 4% to 4.5% a year this decade, and fall lower after 2030.

    Meantime, a comparison between this year’s speech and the last one delivered by Xi in 2017 at the 19th party congress revealed a potentially worrying trend.

    The frequency of words such as “security,” “people,” and “socialism” used in 2022 had increased compared to 2017, while that of “economy,” “market” and “reform” declined, Goldman analysts said.

    The change was also noticed by Nomura analysts, who said it could point to “a shift in the party’s mandate.”

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