Month: March 2020

The Afghan government has criticized the Taliban for rejecting Kabul’s negotiating team for upcoming intra-Afghan peace talks aimed at ending the nearly 19-year war.Waheed Omar, President Ashraf Ghani’s adviser, told reporters in Kabul on March 29 that the Taliban “should not make excuses any more” to start the long-delayed negotiations.The talks were scheduled to begin on March 10, but were delayed due to political bickering in Kabul over the composition of the negotiating team.After weeks of delays, the government on March 27 announced a 21-member team — including five women — to take part in the talks, a key step in the U.S.-facilitated peace process.But the Taliban on March 28 rejected the negotiation team, saying the government had failed to put forward an “inclusive” team.Omar rejected the Taliban’s claim, saying the negotiating team represented “a united Afghanistan.”No major political party in Kabul has opposed the government’s team.There was no comment from U.S. officials.Under a deal signed by the United States and the Taliban in Doha on February 29, Taliban representatives agreed to commit to direct talks with the Afghan government.In return for the start of talks and a series of security commitments from the Taliban, all U.S. troops and other foreign coalition forces are meant to withdraw from Afghanistan by July 2021. 
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Coronavirus infections and deaths continue to creep up as the virus makes its way around the world.  There were over 680,000 confirmed cases worldwide early Sunday. As of Sunday morning, the United States, the current epicenter of the virus, has 124,686 cases. Italy, Europe’s most afflicted country, had 92,472. The global coronavirus pandemic death toll was nearly 31,000 Sunday, with the U.S. and France each posting more than 2,000 deaths in a single day, according to Johns Hopkins University statistics. Relatives attend the funeral of a woman who died from coronavirus disease (COVID-19), as Italy struggles to contain the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Seriate, March 28, 2020.Italy, which has seen more than 10,000 deaths, accounts for a third of the global total. In Wuhan, China, where the coronavirus outbreak began late last year, the city slowly began to reopen Saturday after months of near-total isolation. Thousands of people began arriving in the city in Hubei province. Britain has reported 17,315 cases of the virus and 1,019 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. “We know things will get worse before they get better,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in a letter being sent to British households about battling COVID-19. A paramedic walks amid ambulances outside London’s Excel Centre, while it is being prepared to become a hospital for the treatment of coronavirus patients, in London, Britain, March 28, 2020.Johnson, who is in isolation because he has the new coronavirus, also urged people to observe the lockdown and stay home, in an effort to prevent overwhelming the National Health Service and to “save lives.” Spain reported 838 deaths just in the past 24 hours, taking the country’s overall toll to more than 6,500. Alireza Vahabzadeh, an adviser to Iran’s health minister, tweeted on Sunday that then country’s death toll has risen to 2,640 and the number of infected people has reached 38,309. “In the past 24 hours, we had 123 deaths and 2,901 people have been infected, bringing the total number of infected people to 38,309,” Vahabsadeh said. In his monthly radio address Sunday, India’s prime minister asked for the country’s forgiveness for the 21-day lockdown he enforced last week on the entire South Asian nation in the battle against COVID-19. Daily wage workers and homeless people eat food inside a government-run night shelter during a 21-day nationwide lockdown to limit the spreading of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in the old quarters of Delhi, India, March 26, 2020.“I seek your forgiveness,” Narenda Modi said.  “I am sure you will forgive me that you had to undergo so much trouble . . . but these are special circumstances . . . this is a battle for life and death.”  Thousands of people fled their homes after Modi ordered a 21-day lockdown that began Wednesday. Most of them are day laborers who, along with millions of others in India, lost their jobs because of restrictions on activity. India has 987 confirmed COVID cases and 25 deaths.  New York, with more than 52,000 confirmed cases of the virus and more than 700 deaths, is the largest hot spot of COVID-19 activity in the U.S. Sorry, but your browser cannot support embedded video of this type, you can
download this video to view it offline. Embed” />CopyTo help ease the burden on New York City’s health care system, which is being overwhelmed by the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. Navy is sending a hospital ship to New York Harbor to help care for non-coronavirus patients.  President Donald Trump said he had been considering a quarantine of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, all being hard-hit by COVID-19. But he backed away from such a move, instead urging the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to consider a “strong travel advisory” for the tri-state area. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced the donation Saturday of 250,000 surplus protective masks to medical professionals in New York “who have been working courageously, selflessly, and tirelessly in response to the spread of COVID-19 across the boroughs, in the hope that they play some small role in saving lives.”      
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Wuhan, China, where the coronavirus epidemic emerged in December, resumed train services Saturday after months of lockdown.Authorities reduced the city’s virus risk evaluation from high to medium.Commuters riding on six metro lines in the Hubei provincial capital, with a population of 11 million people, were required to have their body temperatures checked before entering metro stations. They were also required to sit in between empty seats, Chinese state television reported.As of Saturday, China confirmed a total of 45 new cases of the coronavirus disease, 44 of whom were people coming from overseas, the National Health Commission said Sunday.A worker sprays disinfectant as a precaution against the new coronavirus at the Seoul Railway Station in Seoul, South Korea, March 29, 2020.Hubei reported five deaths and 28 new suspected infections Saturday, the commission said. No new confirmed case was reported in Wuhan.The overall number of confirmed cases in China reached 81,439 by Saturday, with 2,691 patients still being treated, 75,448 patients discharged upon recovery, and 3,300 people who died of the disease.Hong Kong confirmed 582 cases, including four deaths; Taiwan confirmed 283, including two deaths; and Macao reported 37 cases and no deaths.South Korea reported 146 more cases infected with the coronavirus, bringing the total number to 9,478 as of midnight Saturday. The death toll rose to 144.  More than 4,800 patients have fully recovered, and they were discharged from quarantine.The number of infections in Japan passed 1,500 and the death toll was more than 50 as of Friday night, with the capital Tokyo having the most cases of COVID-19 in the country.Thailand had 143 new coronavirus cases as of Sunday, bringing the overall cases to 1,388, a spokesman of the government’s Center for COVID-19 Situation Administration said at the latest daily briefing. The country also recorded one new death, for a total of seven, since the outbreak.New Zealand reported its first victim of the new coronavirus on Sunday, a woman in her 70s. 
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Taiwan’s invitation to American journalists harassed by China to locate here instead would free them from government pressure but distance them from Asia’s hub for international news.Foreign minister Joseph Wu tweeted the invitation Saturday. He mentioned three media organizations whose reporters had been thrown out of China, apparently in response to U.S. curbs against journalists working for state-run Chinese media in the United States.“He said as that as New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post journalists face intensifying hostility in China, I would like to welcome you to be stationed in Taiwan, a country that’s a beacon of freedom and democracy,” ministry spokeswoman Joanne Ou said, referring to Wu’s tweet.As Wall Street Journal reporters Julie Wernau embraces a colleague before her departure at Beijing Capital International Airport in Beijing, March 28, 2020.Unlike in China, in Taiwan foreign reporters are legally free to interview scholars, ordinary people and government officials without filing applications.Taiwan police seldom interrupt a journalist’s fieldwork, again unlike as in China, and the foreign ministry does not expel reporters over disagreements about their news coverage. China threw out three Wall Street Journal reporters in February because of the news organization’s headline calling China a “sick man of Asia” due to its COVID-19 outbreak.Those protections, typical of a democracy, however, come at the expense of distance from China, the epicenter for Asia news closely followed by American audiences. China was the source of COVID-19 in December. Over the past two years, it has captured attention for its role in the Sino-U.S. trade dispute.Americans, including those based in Taiwan, need visas every time they visit China unless transiting for three to six days in some of the larger cities. If discovered gathering news there without Chinese government permission, they could be expelled, and any China-based colleagues harassed.“It don’t think it’s easy for journalists to make their story if they are not on the ground in Beijing or Shanghai, but if Taipei can be an alternative choice when there’s a situation or scenario, that would be a good thing,” said Alexander Huang, strategic studies professor at Tamkang University in Taiwan.        
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Around the world, if someone tests positive for COVID-19, it is a confirmed case. But that is not always how it works in China.Official documents show that China does not count asymptomatic carriers of the virus in its tally of confirmed cases. That practice is not consistent with the World Health Organization’s guidance, and it skews the Chinese data that epidemiologists have relied on to model how the virus spreads.Changing definitions for who is infectedChina publicly changed the criteria for tracking infections a few times early on in the outbreak.In January, when the infections started surging exponentially, China’s Health Commission decided that people without symptoms should not be included in the confirmed case count.In the “Pneumonia Case Surveillance Program for New Coronavirus (Third Edition)” released by the commission on January 28, health officials outlined three categories of coronavirus cases: suspected cases, confirmed cases and positive diagnosis. Those classified with a positive diagnosis are not included in the country’s tally of infected people.A copy of the guidelines that VOA found on the commission’s website states, “Among those diagnosed as ‘mild cases’ and ‘Asymptomatic infection,’ uniformly select the ‘Positive Diagnosis’ category.”The day after the third edition was published, the National Health Commission subtracted more than 100 cases from the national count.The criteria for positive patients have been updated several times since then, but the classification of confirmed cases has been kept basically the same.The sixth edition of the guidelines, released March 7, reads (emphasis added), “Asymptomatic patients with clinical manifestations will be promptly amended as confirmed cases.”This approach puts China at odds with the WHO’s guidance. The Chinese version of the WHO’s guidelines reads: “The confirmed cases are those diagnosed with COVID-19 virus in the laboratory with or without clinical signs and symptoms.”Dr. Huang Yanzhong, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, told VOA that he has not heard of any other governments that use the same criteria for confirmed cases as China. “In other countries, asymptomatic carriers are indeed counted into confirmed cases as long as they test positive,” Huang said.The Wuhan caseMarch 19 was supposed to mark a milestone for China in its fight against the virus. On that day, no new locally transmitted cases were reported across the country for the first time since the pandemic began. But a public notice posted by local authorities outside a Wuhan community said there was a new confirmed case inside the residential compound.A photo of the notice went viral on social media. People asked why this case was not being recognized in Beijing’s official count. For critics who have long questioned Beijing’s figures, the reported Wuhan infection was further evidence that national authorities are minimizing the scope of the outbreak.Tao Zhengtai, a local party secretary, later confirmed that the announcement was indeed posted by the community authority. But he told the official Xinhua news agency last Sunday that it was a mistake. He said a 63-year old man surnamed Zhang in Wuhan’s Qiaokou district tested positive but had shown no symptoms. “Mr. Zhang is asymptomatic, not a confirmed case,” Tao said.The Qiaokou District Disease Control Command that posted the announcement also issued a statement saying that according to the sixth edition of the guidelines issued by the National Health Commission, even if Zhang’s nucleic acid test result was positive, “his case should not be classified a confirmed case.”“Until March 19, we didn’t know that asymptomatic patients were not counted as confirmed cases,” the CFR’s Dr. Huang said in a telephone interview with VOA on Thursday. “We didn’t realize that there was such a discrepancy in China’s tally.”Beijing downplays transmission riskThe number of known asymptomatic cases is classified information in China. Citing unpublished official documents, a recent report by South China Morning Post said that asymptomatic patients, or “silent carriers,” could constitute as much as one-third of those who test positive.What also remains unclear is how many asymptomatic cases remain undiagnosed. A paper by researchers at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology, published March 20 on the website of i, a top scientific journal, estimated that asymptomatic cases could represent 30 percent to 60 percent of all infections.While admitting that asymptomatic infections are a potential cause for concern and for transmission, China maintains those cases are not a problem. It emphasized that silent carriers are held in centralized quarantine for 14 days and observed to see if they become symptomatic.Liu Jiafa, the party chief of Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, assured the public Friday that it would not release asymptomatic carriers who are quarantined unless two consecutive samples of negative nucleic acid tests are negative.”The public need not worry too much,” Liu said.Besides assurances, China has not offered an explanation as to why it keeps the count of asymptomatic carriers, but the numbers are not included in the official public data.”It is odd that they are not counted in the officially reported confirmed cases in China,” the CFR’s Huang, who also directs the Global Health Governance roundtable series, said. “If the result of nucleic acid test is positive, that is a confirmed case. Period.”
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