The Indian capital reintroduced public mask mandates on Thursday as COVID-19 cases continue to rise across the country.
The New Delhi government reinstituted a fine of 500 rupees ($6) for anyone caught not wearing a mask or face covering in public.
India’s Health Ministry said 16,299 new cases were recorded in the past 24 hours nationwide, with a positivity rate of 4.58%. Nearly 2,150 infections were reported in New Delhi.
On Wednesday, New Delhi reported eight deaths due to the coronavirus, the highest in nearly six months. People in most parts of the country began discarding face masks as infections dropped following two devastating earlier waves of COVID-19.
New Delhi’s top elected official, Arvind Kejriwal, said that COVID-19 cases were on the rise but there was no need to panic because most of the new cases were mild.
India started vaccinating people in January 2021 and has administered over 2.04 billion doses, including first, second and booster doses. More than 94% of the eligible population (12 years and older) has received at least one shot, and 86% are fully vaccinated.
Most experts believe India’s official death toll of more than 414,000 is a vast undercount, but the government has dismissed those concerns as exaggerated and misleading.
The number of coronavirus deaths fell by 9% in the last week while new cases remained relatively stable, according to the latest weekly pandemic report released by the World Health Organization Wednesday.
The U.N. health agency said there were more than 14,000 COVID-19 deaths in the last week and nearly 7 million new infections. The Western Pacific reported a 30% jump in cases while Africa reported a 46% drop. Cases also fell by more than 20% in the Americas and the Middle East.
The number of new deaths rose by 19% in the Middle East, while dropping by more than 70% in Africa, 15% in Europe and 10% in the Americas.
The WHO said that the omicron subvariant BA.5 remains dominant globally, accounting for nearly 70% of all virus sequences shared with the world’s biggest publicly available virus database. The agency said other omicron subvariants, including BA.4 and BA.2, appear to be decreasing in prevalence as BA.5 takes over.
The WHO cautioned that its assessment of COVID-19 trends remains compromised by countries dropping many of their testing, surveillance and sequencing efforts as most countries have relaxed pandemic controls.
Still, Chinese authorities have announced new restrictions this week, after finding COVID-19 cases in the tourist island of Hainan and in Tibet. Earlier this week, the Chinese government shut down Lhasa’s Potala Palace, the traditional home of the Dalai Lama, and also locked down Haikou, the capital of Hainan, in addition to several other cities including the beach resort Sanya.
About 80,000 tourists were stranded this week in Sanya after Chinese officials declared it a COVID-19 hot spot and required people to test negative five times within a week before being allowed to leave.
On Tuesday, the Chinese government sent a first planeload of 125 tourists out of Sanya and said other flights would be organized to fly out tourists in batches once they fulfilled the criteria to leave.
Chinese authorities have closed Tibet’s famed Potala Palace after a minor outbreak of COVID-19 was reported in the Himalayan region.
The action underscores China’s continued adherence to its “zero-COVID” policy, mandating lockdowns, routine testing, quarantines and travel restrictions, even while most other countries have reopened.
A notice on the palace’s Weixin social media site said the palace that was the traditional home of Tibet’s Buddhist leaders would be closed from Tuesday, with a reopening date to be announced later.
Tibet’s economy is heavily dependent on tourism and the Potala is a key draw.
China says its hard-line policy has been successful in preventing large-scale hospitalizations and deaths, while critics including the World Health Organization have decried its impact on the economy and society and said it is out of step with the changing nature of the virus and new methods of prevention and treatment.
China announced 828 new cases of domestic transmission on Tuesday, 22 of them in Tibet. The majority of those cases showed no symptoms.
Meanwhile, more than 80,000 travelers remain stranded on the southern resort island of Hainan under requirements that they consistently test negative for the virus in coming days before being allowed to leave.
BioNTech, which teamed with Pfizer to develop a powerful COVID-19 vaccine, has reported higher revenue and net profit in the first half of the year and expects demand to grow as it releases updated vaccines to target new omicron strains.
The German pharmaceutical company said Monday that revenue hit about 9.57 billion euros ($9.76 billion) in the first six months of 2022, up from nearly 7.36 billion euros in the same period a year earlier. But revenue dropped to about 3.2 billion euros in the second quarter from 5.31 billion euros in April through June of last year.
BioNTech said the dynamic nature of the pandemic has led to changes in orders and revenue but that it expects a strong end to the year. It said it plans to release revamped vaccines tailored to the latest omicron variants as early as October, which could lead to a fall booster campaign.
“With our initiatives around variant-adapted COVID-19 vaccine candidates, we expect an uptake in demand in our key markets in the fourth quarter of 2022, subject to regulatory approval,” Jens Holstein, chief financial officer of BioNTech, said in a press release.
BioNTech expects to report revenue of 13 billion to 17 billion euros from COVID-19 vaccines this year.
The German company’s net profit also was higher for the first half of the year compared with the same period of 2021 — 5.37 billion euros vs. 3.92 billion euros — and lower for the second quarter — 1.67 billion euros vs. 2.79 billion euros.
For partner Pfizer, sales of COVID-19 vaccine and treatment in the second quarter propelled the pharmaceutical giant to the largest quarterly sales in its history. It said last month that it earned $9.9 billion from April through June.
Another 259 COVID-19 cases have been reported in the southern Chinese island province of Hainan, where some 80,000 tourists have been stranded by pandemic restrictions.
Authorities declared Hainan’s beach resort city Sanya a COVID-19 hot spot Saturday and imposed a lockdown, confining Chinese citizens and expatriates to their hotels on what they had hoped would be a holiday from tight restrictions around much of China. Tourists wanting to depart Sanya have to test negative for the coronavirus on five PCR tests over seven days.
Overall, China on Monday reported 324 new locally transmitted cases, along with 483 asymptomatic cases, which China classifies separately.
China has stuck steadfastly to a “zero-COVID” policy, despite the economic and social costs. It has credited that approach with keeping hospitalization and death rates lower than in other countries that have opened up amid high vaccination rates, more effective treatments and the emergence of the more contagious but less lethal strain of the virus.
Hong Kong will reduce the mandatory hotel quarantine for overseas arrivals to three days from a week, the city’s leader said Monday.
The southern Chinese city remains one of the few places in the world, together with mainland China, to require a quarantine to guard against travelers spreading COVID-19 to the local population. The policy taking effect Friday will be Hong Kong’s shortest quarantine for arrivals since the pandemic began.
Hong Kong leader John Lee said arriving travelers must quarantine three days in a designated hotel, then undergo four days of medical surveillance during which their movements will be restricted via the use of a health code system.
Lee said that the new policy of just three days in quarantine was made after scientific evidence and data had been analyzed to control the risk factors.
“We also have to balance the risks against the economic activities and the social lives of (people in) Hong Kong,” Lee said.
“(The data) gives us the indication that the risk factor of people who have finished three days quarantine in a designated hotel … is actually no more than the risk level of transmission in society,” he said.
The changes to COVID-19 policies come in spite of an increase in daily infections, which city health officials warn could double to 8,000 in the coming weeks.
During their week of quarantine and surveillance, travelers will also have to test regularly for COVID-19 and those who are infected must stay in isolation.
Those who test negative can use public transit and enter malls and markets, but they can’t enter bars and amusement parks or visit elderly homes, schools and certain medical facilities.
For most of the pandemic, Hong Kong has imposed some of the world’s strictest COVID-19 entry restrictions. At one point, Hong Kong required up to 21 days of compulsory hotel quarantine for travelers and a “circuit breaker” mechanism that would ban flights from certain airlines into the city if they import too many COVID-19 cases.
These measures have devastated the city’s tourism industry and disrupted business travel in a city known for being an international financial center and a business hub.
Since the pandemic began, hundreds of thousands of residents have left Hong Kong. Many companies have also relocated to countries like Singapore where quarantine-free travel has resumed.
