KAKAMMPI News

Agence France-Presse HONG KONG, China - Hong Kong authorities said Sunday that one of 77 hamsters handed in by pet owners for a Covid cull has tested positive, as thousands of city residents remain under lockdown to combat an outbreak. The financial services hub adheres to mainland China's strict "zero-Covid" policy under which even the slightest sign of the virus is stamped out with contact tracing, targeted lockdowns and long quarantines. More than 2,000 hamsters have been culled after some imported from the Netherlands by a local pet shop were found to be Covid-positive, raising fears of animal-to-human transmission. The risk of transmission from animals "remains low", the World Health Organization has said, but is a possibility. It comes as Hong Kong battles an Omicron cluster that has infected more than 170 people in a single public housing estate in recent days. Pet owners who bought a hamster after December 22 were urged last Tuesday to surrender th...

Agence France-Presse COPENHAGEN, Denmark - The Omicron variant has moved the Covid-19 pandemic into a new phase and could bring it to an end in Europe, the WHO Europe director said Sunday. "It's plausible that the region is moving towards a kind of pandemic endgame," Hans Kluge told AFP in an interview, adding that Omicron could infect 60 percent of Europeans by March. Once the current surge of Omicron currently sweeping across Europe subsides, "there will be for quite some weeks and months a global immunity, either thanks to the vaccine or because people have immunity due to the infection, and also lowering seasonality." "So we anticipate that there will be a period of quiet before Covid-19 may come back towards the end of the year, but not necessarily the pandemic coming back," Kluge said. The Omicron variant, which studies have shown generally leads to less severe infection among vaccinated people than Delta, has raised long-awaited hopes that ...

Reuters JERUSALEM - A fourth dose of COVID-19 vaccine given to people over 60 in Israel made them three times more resistant to serious illness than thrice-vaccinated people in the same age group, Israel's Health Ministry said on Sunday. The ministry also said the fourth dose, or second booster, doubled resistance against infection compared with those in the age group who received only three shots of the vaccine. Israel began offering a fourth dose of the Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine to people over 60 earlier this month. (Reporting by Jeffrey Heller; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)

Kyodo News Posted at Jan 24 2022 04:24 PM A record 327 daycare centers have been temporarily shut down in Japan as the coronavirus resurgence grips the country, the health ministry said Monday. The number of such facilities suspending services as of last Thursday, excluding privately operated or locally licensed ones, increased fourfold in a week along with the spike in COVID-19 cases and well exceeded the previous high of 185 in September, according to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. Japan's confirmed daily coronavirus cases topped 50,000 on Saturday in the wake of the spread of the highly transmissible Omicron variant, renewing the record for a fifth straight day.

Danny Mok, South China Morning Post Posted at Jan 24 2022 12:58 PM Hong Kong police have launched an investigation after a man was caught on camera spitting on residents’ doors in a block of flats. The five-second clip, apparently taken by a security camera, was posted on Sunday evening on a Kwai Chung community Facebook page and shows a man in his 30s dressed in black jeans and hooded top walking along the corridor of a housing block. The man, who has what appears to be a bottle of tea in his hand, pulls down his black surgical mask and spits on the metal gates and doorbells of two flats before disappearing out of view. A message from the Facebook user who posted the video urged group members in Kwai Chung Estate – the site of a growing coronavirus outbreak – to keep an eye out for the spitter, saying similar incidents had occurred at three blocks there, although no proof was provided. More than 170 Covid-19 infections have been reported on the huge 16-block estate, with two bui...

Kyodo News Posted at Jan 24 2022 04:34 PM Japan will expand a quasi-state of emergency to over 30 of the country's 47 prefectures to curb the rapid spread of coronavirus infections after 16 more prefectures asked to be included under the measure, senior government officials said Monday. The government will formalize the decision Tuesday after consulting with an advisory panel of experts over its plan to adopt restrictions on restaurants and bars in more areas, in addition to Tokyo and 15 prefectures which already have been put under the restrictions. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will hold talks with related Cabinet ministers later Monday over the addition of more regions while discussing the duration of the measure after the nation's confirmed daily COVID cases hit a record 54,576 Saturday, driven by the highly transmissible Omicron variant. "We will respond with well-balanced measures based on the nature of the Omicron strain by enhancing the procedural flow of preve...

The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) on Wednesday said the exemption of the United Kingdom (UK) from the 7,000 deployment cap of healthcare workers abroad this year is a matter of “fortune”. In an ANC interview, Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III explained that the UK was able to request for an exemption for the deployment cap prior to its implementation on January 1, 2021. The government imposed the deployment ban to ensure the safety of Filipino healthcare workers and beef up the Philippines’ medical manpower amid the COVID-19 pandemic. “I think it’s just a question of fortune. Because even before we were running out of healthcare workers, the United Kingdom government requested for an exemption. At that time, we were in a position to deploy as many healthcare workers that we want,” Bello said. After that, Bello said, they realized that they needed to set a limit on the number of the health workers being deployed as there might come a time that the Philippines would lac...