MELBOURNE: Australia will effectively seal off the state of Victoria from the rest of the country, authorities said Monday (Jul 6), announcing unprecedented measures to tackle a worrying surge in coronavirus cases.
For the first time since the pandemic began, the border between Australia's two most populous states - Victoria and New South Wales - will be closed from 11.59pm local time on Tuesday, officials from both states said.
Victoria - home to more than 6.6 million people - announced a record 127 new cases Monday, as the virus spread through Melbourne, including a cluster in several densely populated apartment blocks.
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews described the decision to close off the state as "the smart call, the right call at this time, given the significant challenges we face in containing this virus".
Plans to reopen Victoria's border with South Australia have already been put on ice.
After weeks of easing virus restrictions, Melbourne has seen a huge spike in community transmission, leading health officials to effectively shut off some neighbourhoods to the rest of the city until the end of this month.
Sixteen of the new cases were detected in nine high-rise public housing towers, where 3,000 residents were locked in their homes on Saturday in Australia's strictest COVID-19 response to date.
So far, just 53 cases have been recorded in the buildings - which are home to a large number of vulnerable migrants - but there are concerns the virus could spread rapidly, with one health official likening the crowded conditions inside to "vertical cruise ships".
Cruise ships emerged as early coronavirus hotspots, with passengers and crew at high risk of infection - often packed in small cabins.
Community leaders have raised concerns about the targeted nature of the "hard lockdown", which saw hundreds of police officers deployed with almost no warning that reportedly left some residents unable to stock up on essentials.
Andrews said food and toys had been delivered to families while mental health and other medical support was being provided as officials sought to test every resident over the coming days.
"This is a massive task and the message to everybody in the towers... (is) those staff -- thousands of them -- are doing the very, very best they can and they will continue to do everything they can to support those who are impacted by this lockdown," he said.
Australia has recorded more than 8,500 cases of COVID-19 and 105 deaths from the virus.
The bulk of new daily cases are now being detected in Melbourne, while most other regions are enjoying relaxed restrictions after largely curbing the virus spread.
NEW DELHI: Indian soldiers who died in close combat with Chinese troops last month were unarmed and surrounded by a larger force on a steep ridge, Indian government sources, two soldiers deployed in the area and families of the fallen men said.
One of the Indian soldiers had his throat slit with metal nails in the darkness, his father told Reuters, saying he had been told by a fellow soldier who was there.
Others fell to their deaths in the freezing waters of the Galwan river in the western Himalayas, relatives have learned from witnesses.
Twenty Indian soldiers died in the Jun 15 clash on the de facto border separating the two armies. The soldiers all belonged to the 16th Bihar Regiment deployed in the Galwan region.
No shots were fired, but it was the biggest loss of life in combat between the nuclear-armed neighbours since 1967, when the simmering border dispute flared into deadly battles.
Reuters spoke to relatives of 13 of the men who were killed, and in five cases they produced death certificates listing horrific injuries suffered during the six-hour night-time clash at 4,267m amid remote, barren mountains.
Reuters contacted the military hospital in India's Ladakh region where the bodies were brought. The hospital declined to comment on the cause of death and said that the bodies were sent to the families along with the death certificates.
Reuters also spoke to two soldiers of the Bihar Regiment deployed in the area, who were among those who accompanied the bodies of fallen colleagues to their homes in the area. They were not directly involved in the melee.
Indian Army vehicles drive on a road near Chang La high mountain pass in northern India's Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir state near the border with China on Jun 17, 2020. (Photo: STR/AFP)
The soldiers cannot be named because of military rules and all the families asked for anonymity because they said they were not supposed to speak about military matters.
The Indian defence ministry did not respond to a request for comment on the fighting on Jun 15.
In response to a Reuters query, a China foreign ministry spokesperson repeated previous statements blaming the Indian side for crossing the de facto border and provoking the Chinese.
"When Chinese officers and soldiers went there to negotiate, they were suddenly and violently attacked by the Indian troops," the spokesperson said. "The rights and wrongs of the incident are very clear. The responsibility absolutely does not lie with the Chinese."
China has not provided evidence of Indian aggression. China's defence ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
"ARTERIES RUPTURED"
Three of the dead men had their "arteries ruptured in the neck" and two sustained head injuries caused by "sharp or pointed objects", the death certificates seen by Reuters said.
There were visible marks on the neck and forehead, all five documents said.
"It was a free-for-all, they fought with whatever they could lay their hands on – rods, sticks, and even with their bare hands," said a government official in Delhi briefed on the clash.
The Indian government has said that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) acted in a premeditated manner, but it has not provided a full account of the clash that stunned the country and stoked popular anger against China.
China has dismissed an Indian government minister's claim that China had lost 40 soldiers from the PLA's western theatre command deployed in Galwan.
Its envoy to Delhi suggested in remarks to local media and posted on the embassy website that there had been losses on both sides.
"The Indian army suddenly and violently attacked the Chinese officers and soldiers who went for negotiation, causing fierce physical conflicts and casualties between the two sides," Sun Weidong said.
Indian government officials have told Reuters that the conflict began when the commanding officer of the Bihar regiment led a small party to Patrol Point 14 to verify whether the Chinese had made good their promise to withdraw from the disputed site and dismantle structures they had built there.
But instead they came under attack by Chinese soldiers using iron rods and wooden clubs with nails studded in them on a narrow ledge barely 4m wide overlooking the Galwan river.
BODIES FOUND IN RIVER
In recent weeks the world's two most populous countries have mobilised more forces along the 3,488km Line of Actual Control, and the renewed hostilities have triggered a diplomatic and commercial spat that threatens to escalate, experts including former Indian military officers say.
FILE PHOTO: Demonstrators shout slogans as they burn an effigy depicting Chinese President Xi Jinping during a protest against China, in Kolkata, India. REUTERS/Rupak De Chowdhuri
The possibility that unarmed Indian soldiers were overrun by a larger force could further fuel resentment against China and raise questions about why Indian soldiers were sent to a tense frontline without being armed.
"How dare China kill our unarmed soldiers. Why were our soldiers sent unarmed to martyrdom?" Rahul Gandhi, leader of the main opposition Congress party wrote in a tweet, demanding the government provide a full account.
A relative of one of the soldiers who accompanied Colonel Santosh Babu, the commanding officer, to the site of two tents erected by the Chinese troops told Reuters that members of the Indian patrol were unarmed.
They were confronted by a small group of Chinese soldiers and an argument ensued over the tents and a small observation tower the relative said, on the basis of conversations with two other soldiers who were present.
Reuters was unable to establish all of the details of what happened, but government officials in New Delhi briefed on the incident said that at some point Indian troops took down the observation post and the tents because they were on India's side of the Line of Actual Control.
Soon after the Indian side came under attack from a large Chinese force that pelted them with stones and attacked them with sharp-edged weapons, according to the families of three dead Indian soldiers, based on conversations they had with survivors.
Some soldiers retreated to safety on the ridge line in the darkness, but when they could not find the commanding officer, they re-emerged and came under fresh attack, four family members said.
Babu was among those killed in the fighting, the Indian government said. One of the soldiers deployed in the area that Reuters spoke to said the Indian patrol was outnumbered by the PLA.
"The Chinese side overwhelmed our people by sheer numbers," said the soldier, who overheard radio messages seeking reinforcements being sent to regional headquarters in Ladakh.
Three of the Indian families said they had been told by soldiers who were commissioned to bring the bodies back to them that some combatants pushed each other into the fast-flowing Galwan river.
The government official in Delhi also said bodies of some soldiers were fished out of the river the next morning. Some had succumbed to hypothermia, the official added.
WASHINGTON: Rising coronavirus cases in 39 US states cast a shadow over the nation's Jul 4 celebrations as health experts worried that holiday parties will cause a further spike in infections that could overwhelm hospitals.
After towns and cities across the country cancelled annual fireworks displays to avoid large crowds gathering, many Americans launched bottle rockets and roman candles from streets and suburban backyards to commemorate Independence Day.
In the first four days of July alone, 15 states have reported record increases in new cases of COVID-19, which has infected nearly 3 million Americans and killed about 130,000, according to a Reuters tally.
Florida's cases have risen by over 10,000 for three out of the last four days, including climbing by 10,059 on Sunday (Jul 5), surpassing the highest daily tally reported by any European country during the height of the coronavirus outbreak there.
Cases are also soaring in Arizona, California and Texas and trending upwards in Midwest states that once had infections declining such as Iowa, Ohio and Michigan, according to a Reuters analysis of how much cases rose in the past two weeks compared with the prior two weeks.
In Phoenix, Arizona, people gathered on Saturday without masks or social distancing to listen to a speaker at a rally against restrictions to prevent the spread of the virus. Many in the crowd wore red, white and blue, and some held signs saying, "Capitalism makes sense. Socialism doesn't. Go Trump 2020."
"We opened way too early in Arizona," Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego said on ABC. She said the city was in a "crisis related to testing," with people waiting in eight-hour lines in their cars to find out if they were infected.
During an Independence Day speech at the White House on Saturday, US President Donald Trump claimed without evidence that 99 per cent of coronavirus cases in the United States were "totally harmless."
In Texas alone, the number of COVID-19 patients currently hospitalised rose to a record 7,890 on Saturday compared with 3,247 just two weeks ago. The Democratic mayor of Austin, Texas, warned during an interview with CNN that his city's hospitals could reach capacity in two weeks and run out of intensive care unit (ICU) beds in 10 days. In Arizona, about 90 per cent of ICU beds are full.
"NO ROOM TO EXPERIMENT"
Trump, a Republican, has refused to wear a mask in public and has been reluctant to encourage Americans to do so, saying it was a personal choice. A Jul 4 celebration he attended at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota was "mask-optional" and had no social distancing.
Mixed messaging from governments has been a major factor in people not following coronavirus mitigation recommendations in Miami Beach, said its Democratic mayor, Dan Gelber.
Miami Beach's coronavirus hospitalisations have doubled in the last 14 days and hospitals now have 158 people on ventilators, up from 64 two weeks ago, he told CNN.
"We're spreading it because of this incredible activity, and too many people obviously are not taking seriously all of these admonishments to socially distance to wear masks," he said.
In addition to rising cases, an alarming percentage of tests are coming back positive. The World Health Organization considers a positivity rate above 5 per cent to be cause for concern because it suggests there are more cases in the community that have yet to be uncovered.
Ten states averaged double-digit positivity rates over the past week: Arizona (26 per cent), Florida (18 per cent), South Carolina (17 per cent), Nevada (14 per cent), Alabama (14 per cent), Texas (14 per cent), Mississippi (13 per cent), Georgia (13 per cent), Idaho (11 per cent) and Kansas (10 per cent), according to The COVID Tracking Project.
Judge Lina Hidalgo of Harris County, a hard-hit county in Texas that includes Houston, said officials must be proactive in getting ahead of the virus and advocated a stay-at-home order. "We don't have room to experiment. We don't have room for incrementalism when we're seeing these kinds of numbers," she told ABC.
Per capita, Japan has more elderly than any other country in the world
Why haven't more people in Japan died from Covid-19? It is a macabre question that has spawned dozens of theories, from Japanese manners to claims that the Japanese have superior immunity.
Japan does not have the lowest death rate for Covid-19 - in the region, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Vietnam can all boast lower mortality.
But in the early part of 2020, Japan saw fewer deaths than average. This is despite the fact that in April, Tokyo saw about 1,000 "excess deaths' - perhaps due to Covid. Yet, for the year as a whole, it is possible that overall deaths will be down on 2019.
This is particularly striking because Japan has many of the conditions that make it vulnerable to Covid-19, but it never adopted the energetic approach to tackling the virus that some of its neighbours did.
Deaths
What happened in Japan?
At the height of the outbreak in Wuhan in February, when the city's hospitals were overwhelmed and the world put up walls to Chinese travellers, Japan kept borders open.
As the virus spread, it quickly became clear that Covid is a disease that primarily kills the elderly and is massively amplified by crowds or prolonged close contact. Per capita, Japan has more elderly than any other country. Japan's population is also densely packed into huge cities.
Greater Tokyo has a mind-boggling 37 million people and for most of them, the only way to get around is on the city's notoriously packed trains.
Then there is Japan's refusal to heed the advice of the World Health Organization (WHO) to "test, test, test". Even now, total PCR tests stand at just 348,000, or 0.27% of Japan's population.
Nor has Japan had a lockdown on the scale or severity of Europe. In early April, the government ordered a state of emergency. But the stay-at-home request was voluntary. Non-essential businesses were asked to close, but there was no legal penalty for refusing.
Many paragons of Covid strategy, such as New Zealand and Vietnam, used tough measures including closing borders, tight lockdowns, large-scale testing and strict quarantines - but Japan did none of that.
Yet, five months after the first Covid case was reported here, Japan has fewer than 20,000 confirmed cases and fewer than 1,000 deaths. The state of emergency has been lifted, and life is rapidly returning to normal.
Japan has had a relatively low testing rate compared to places like South Korea
There is also growing scientific evidence that Japan really has contained the spread of the disease - so far.
Telecom giant Softbank carried out antibody testing on 40,000 employees, which showed that just 0.24% had been exposed to the virus. Randomised testing of 8,000 people in Tokyo and two other prefectures has shown even lower levels of exposure. In Tokyo just 0.1% came back positive.
As he announced the lifting of the state of emergency late last month, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe spoke proudly of the "Japan Model", intimating that other countries should learn from Japan.
Is there something special about Japan?
If you were to listen to Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso, it is down to the "superior quality" of Japanese people. In a now notorious comment, Mr Aso said he had been asked by leaders of other countries to explain Japan's success.
"I told these people: 'Between your country and our country, mindo (the level of people) is different.' And that made them speechless and quiet."
Excess deaths
Literally translated, mindo means "people's level", although some have translated it as meaning "cultural level".
It is a concept dating back to Japan's imperial era and denotes a sense of racial superiority and cultural chauvinism. Mr Aso has been roundly condemned for using it.
But there is no doubt that many Japanese, and some scientists, think there is something about Japan that is different - a so called "Factor X" that is protecting the population from Covid-19.
It is possibly relevant that some aspects of Japanese mores - few hugs and kisses on greeting - have in-built social distancing, but nobody thinks that is the answer.
Does Japan have special immunity?
Tokyo University professor Tatsuhiko Kodama - who studies how Japanese patients react to the virus - believes Japan may have had Covid before. Not Covid-19, but something similar that could have left behind "historical immunity".
This is how he explains it: When a virus enters the human body, the immune system produces antibodies that attack the invading pathogen.
There are two types of antibody - IGM and IGG. How they respond can show whether someone has been exposed to the virus before, or something similar.
"In a primary (novel) viral infection the IGM response usually comes first," he tells me. "Then the IGG response appears later. But in secondary cases (previous exposure) the lymphocyte already has memory, and so only the IGG response increases rapidly."
So, what happened with his patients?
"When we looked at the tests we were astonished... in all patients the IGG response came quickly, and the IGM response was later and weak. It looked like they had been previously exposed to a very similar virus."
He thinks it is possible a Sars-like virus has circulated in the region before, which may account for the low death rate, not just in Japan, but in much of China, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South East Asia.
Activities like karaoke - which have been branded high-risk - were popular in Japan
This has been met with some scepticism.
"I am not sure how such a virus could be restricted to Asia," says Professor Kenji Shibuya, director of Public Health at Kings College, London and a former senior adviser to the government.
Professor Shibuya does not discount the possibility of regional differences in immunity or genetic susceptibility to Covid. But he is suspicious of the idea of a "Factor X" that explains the mortality differences.
He thinks countries that have done well in the fight against Covid, have done so for the same reason - they succeeded in dramatically reducing transmission.
Japanese people began wearing face masks more than 100 years ago during the 1919 flu pandemic and they've never really stopped. If you get a cough or a cold here it is expected that you will don a mask to protect those around you.
"I think it (a mask) acts as a physical barrier. But it also serves as a reminder to everybody to be mindful. That we still have to be careful around each other," says Keiji Fukuda, an influenza specialist and director of the School of Public Health at Hong Kong University.
Japan's track and trace system also goes back to the 1950s when it battled a wave of tuberculosis. The government set up a nationwide network of public health centres to identify new infections and report them to the health ministry.
If community transmission is suspected, a specialist team is dispatched to track the infections, relying on meticulous human contact tracing and isolation.
Japan discovered the Three Cs early
Japan also discovered two significant patterns early in the pandemic.
Dr Kazuaki Jindai, a medical researcher at Kyoto university and member of the cluster-suppression taskforce, said data showed over a third of infections originated in very similar places.
"Our figures... showed many infected people had visited music venues where there is screaming and singing... we knew that those were the places people needed to avoid."
The team identified "heavy breathing in close proximity" including "singing at karaoke parlours, parties, cheering at clubs, conversations in bars and exercising in gyms" as the highest-risk activities.
Second, the team found that the infection's spread was down to a small percentage of those carrying the virus.
An early study found around 80% of those with Sars-CoV-2 did not infect others - while 20% were highly infectious.
The state of emergency did not make staying home compulsory, but rather encouraged
These discoveries led to the government launching a nationwide campaign warning people to avoid the "Three Cs".
Enclosed spaces with poor ventilation
Crowded places with many people
Close contact settings such as face-to-face conversations.
"I think that probably worked better than just telling people to stay at home," Dr Jindai says.
Although workplaces were left off the list, it was hoped the "Three Cs" campaign would slow the spread enough to avoid lockdown - and fewer infections means fewer deaths.
For a while it did - but then in mid-March infections in Tokyo jumped and the city looked like it was on the path to exponential growth, like Milan, London and New York.
At this point Japan either got smart or got lucky. The jury is still out on which.
Timing, timing
Professor Kenji Shibuya thinks the lessons from Japan are not so different from elsewhere: "To me, it was a timing lesson."
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ordered a - non-enforceable - state of emergency on 7 April, asking people to stay at home "if possible".
"If such measures were delayed, we might have experienced a similar situation like New York or London. The death rate (in Japan) is low.
"But a recent study by Columbia University suggests that if New York had implemented lockdown measure two weeks earlier, it would have prevented tens of thousands of deaths," Prof Shibuya notes.
A recent report by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found people with underlying medical conditions such as heart disease, obesity and diabetes are six times more likely to be hospitalised if they get Covid-19 and 12 times more likely to die.
Japan has the lowest rates of coronary heart disease and obesity in the developed world. Still, scientists insist such vital signs do not explain everything.
"Those kinds of physical differences may have some effect but I think the other areas are more important. We've learned from Covid that there is no simple explanation for any of the phenomena that we're seeing. It's a lot of factors contributing to the final outcome," says Prof Fukuda.
The government asked, people listened
To go back to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's boast of the "Japan Model" - is there a lesson to be learned?
Does the fact that Japan has, so far, succeeded in keeping infections and deaths low, without shutting down or ordering people to stay at home, show a way forward? The answer is yes and no.
There is no "Factor X" - like everywhere else it has depended on the same thing - breaking the chain of transmission. In Japan, though, the government can count on the public to comply.
Despite not ordering people to stay at home, on the whole, they did.
"It was lucky but also surprising," Prof Shibuya says. "Japan's mild lockdowns seems to have had a real lockdown effect. Japanese people complied despite the lack of draconian measures."
Much of Japan has now re-opened
"How do you reduce contact between infected and uninfected people...? You need a certain kind of response from the public, which I don't think is going to be so easily replicated in other countries," adds Prof Fukuda.
Japan asked people to take care, stay away from crowded places, wear masks and wash their hands - and by and large, that is exactly what most people have done.
