KUALA LUMPUR: More than 210 people were injured after two LRT trains collided in Kuala Lumpur on Monday (May 24) evening.
Videos and photos of the incident on social media showed broken glass panels and several commuters bleeding.
Federal Territories Minister Annuar Musa tweeted that early reports indicated that an LRT carrying passengers collided with another LRT that was "empty", resulting in passengers being "thrown" and "falling".
He added that the train with passengers was travelling from Ampang station.
Malaysian civil defence officers evacuating injured commuters following a collision between two LRT trains. (Photo: Twitter/Bernama)
Malaysian fire and rescue personnel evacuating injured commuters following a collision between two LRT trains. (Photo: Twitter/Bernama)
"The incident happened underground of KLCC building. It is understood there are no deaths but there are those who are injured," he wrote.
Operator for the Kelana Jaya Line, AskRapidKL, tweeted that there was an incident on the line, involving train numbers 40 and 81.
"All injured passengers have been evacuated to platform. Emergency aid and rescue is ongoing," the operator added.
In an interview with media, Kuala Lumpur Fire and Rescue Department chief Nordin Md Pauzi confirmed that 47 passengers were seriously injured while 166 people suffered light injuries.
Malaysian fire and rescue personnel evacuating injured commuters following a collision between two LRT trains. (Photo: Twitter/Bernama)
Malaysian fire and rescue personnel evacuating injured commuters following a collision between two LRT trains. (Photo: Twitter/Bernama)
Dang Wangi OCPD Assistant Commissioner Mohamad Zainal added that the incident may have occurred "due to a miscommunication at the operations centre" of the LRT line.
"We will investigate further if the cause of the breakdown is ... the result of carelessness or something else, because it involves public safety and many people were injured," he said.
He added that that the train carrying passengers was operated manually by a driver but the oncoming empty train was operated automatically.
KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia on Monday (May 24) said it was investigating allegations that some recipients of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine were not injected with the correct dosage.
At least two recipients have said in recent days that they were given less than the required amount, posting videos on social media of the jab being administered to support their claim.
The health ministry did not say whether the recipients of the vaccines were underdosed, but said it took serious note of the allegations and announced new rules for medical personnel administering the jab.
The injector should show the syringe filled with the right amount of vaccine to the recipient before the jab and the emptied one after, the ministry said.
About 2 million people in Malaysia have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine so far. The government is aiming to achieve herd immunity among the country's 32 million people by the end of the year.
Critics have said the inoculation programme is slow.
The allegations of underdosing come as Malaysia fights a spike in COVID-19 infections that has seen restrictions tightened and new records set for infections and death numbers.
It reported 6,509 cases on Monday, close to a record-high toll of 6,976 reported the previous day, and 61 new deaths - the highest number of fatalities in a day. It has recorded 518,600 coronavirus cases overall.
GENEVA: At least 115,000 healthcare workers have died from COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic, the World Health Organization's (WHO) chief said on Monday (May 24), calling for a dramatic scale-up of vaccination in all countries.
At the opening of the WHO's main annual assembly, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus hailed the sacrifices made by healthcare workers around the world to battle the pandemic.
"For almost 18 months, health and care workers all over the world have stood in the breach between life and death," he said.
"They have saved countless lives and fought for others who, despite their best efforts, slipped away.
"Many have themselves become infected, and while reporting is scant, we estimate that at least 115,000 health and care workers have paid the ultimate price in the service of others."
He said since the start of the crisis, many healthcare workers have felt "frustrated, helpless and unprotected, with a lack of access to personal protective equipment and vaccines".
And they are not alone. He described the overall inequity in access to vaccines as "scandalous", warning it was "perpetuating the pandemic".
More than 75 per cent of all COVID-19 vaccines have gone to just 10 countries.
"The number of doses administered globally so far would have been enough to cover all health workers and older people if they had been distributed equitably," he said.
"There is no diplomatic way to say it: That small group of countries that make and buy the majority of the world's vaccines control the fate of the rest of the world."
He urged those countries that have large stocks of vaccines to share them, and greater cooperation to scale up production and distribution of the jabs.
The WHO and others have created COVAX, a global vaccine-sharing programme, but it remains severely underfunded and has faced significant supply shortages, delaying efforts to roll out jabs in poorer countries.
"We have shipped every single one of the 72 million doses we have been able to get our hands on so far to 125 countries and economies," Tedros said.
But he lamented that those doses were only enough to barely cover 1 per cent of the combined populations in those countries.
The WHO chief stressed the need to urgently fix the imbalance.
"Today, I'm calling on member states to support a massive push to vaccinate at least 10 per cent of the population of every country by September," he said, calling for the coverage to be expanded to 30 per cent by the end of the year.
OSAKA, Japan: Hospitals in Japan's second largest city of Osaka are buckling under a huge wave of new COVID-19 infections, running out of beds and ventilators as exhausted doctors warn of a "system collapse", and advise against holding the Olympics this summer.
Japan's western region home to 9 million people is suffering the brunt of the fourth wave of the pandemic, accounting for a third of the nation's death toll in May, although it constitutes just 7 per cent of its population.
The speed at which Osaka's healthcare system was overwhelmed underscores the challenges of hosting a major global sports event in two months' time, particularly as only about half of Japan's medical staff have completed inoculations.
"Simply put, this is a collapse of the medical system," said Yuji Tohda, the director of Kindai University Hospital in Osaka.
"The highly infectious British variant and slipping alertness have led to this explosive growth in the number of patients."
Japan has avoided the large infections suffered by other nations, but the fourth pandemic wave took Osaka prefecture by storm, with 3,849 new positive tests in the week to Thursday.
That represents a more than five-fold jump over the corresponding period three months ago.
Just 14 per cent of the prefecture's 13,770 COVID-19 patients have been hospitalised, leaving the majority to fend for themselves. Tokyo's latest hospitalisation rate, in comparison, is 37 per cent.
Medical workers at Osaka Medical and Pharmaceutical University Hospital work in the operation wing of the hospital, amid the COVID-19 outbreak, in Takatsuki, Osaka prefecture, Japan, May 17, 2021. (Photo: REUTERS/Akira Tomoshige)
A government advisory panel sees rates of less than 25 per cent as a trigger to consider imposition of a state of emergency.
By Thursday, 96 per cent of the 348 hospital beds Osaka reserves for serious virus cases were in use. Since March, 17 people have died from the disease outside the prefecture's hospitals, officials said this month.
The variant can make even young people very sick quickly, and once seriously ill, patients find it tough to make a recovery, said Toshiaki Minami, director of the Osaka Medical and Pharmaceutical University Hospital (OMPUH).
"I believe that until now many young people thought they were invincible. But that can't be the case this time around. Everyone is equally bearing the risk."
BREAKING POINT
Minami said a supplier recently told him that stocks of propofol, a key drug used to sedate intubated patients, are running very low, while Tohda's hospital is running short of the ventilators vital for severely ill COVID-19 patients.
Caring for critically ill patients in the face of infection risk has taken a serious toll on staff, said Satsuki Nakayama, the head of the nursing department at OMPUH.
"I've got some intensive care unit staff saying they have reached a breaking point," she added. "I need to think of personnel change to bring in people from other hospital wings."
About 500 doctors and 950 nurses work at OMPUH, which manages 832 beds. Ten of its 16 ICU beds have been dedicated to virus patients. Twenty of the roughly 140 serious patients taken in by the hospital died in the ICU.
Yasunori Komatsu, who heads a union of regional government employees, said conditions were dire as well for public health nurses at local health centres, who liaison between patients and medical institutions.
"Some of them are racking up 100, 150, 200 hours of overtime, and that has been going on for a year now ... when on duty, they sometimes go home at 1am or 2am in the morning, and go to bed only to be awakened by a phone call at 3am or 4am."
A medical worker at Osaka Medical and Pharmaceutical University Hospital enters the intensive care unit of the hospital amid the COVID-19 pandemic, in Takatsuki, Osaka prefecture, Japan, May 17, 2021. (Photo: REUTERS/Akira Tomoshige)
Medical professionals with firsthand experience of Osaka's struggle with the pandemic take a negative view on holding the Tokyo Games, set to run from Jul 23 to Aug 8.
"The Olympics should be stopped, because we already have failed to stop the flow of new variants from England, and next might be an inflow of Indian variants," said Akira Takasu, the head of emergency medicine at OMPUH.
He was referring to a variant first found in India that the World Health Organization (WHO) designated as being of concern after initial studies showed it spread more easily.
"In the Olympics, 70,000 or 80,000 athletes and the people will come to this country from around the world. This may be a trigger for another disaster in the summer."
WASHINGTON: Three researchers from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) sought hospital care in November 2019, months before China disclosed the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday (May 23), citing a previously undisclosed US intelligence report.
The newspaper said the report - which provides fresh details on the number of researchers affected, the timing of their illnesses, and their hospital visits - may add weight to calls for a broader probe of whether the COVID-19 virus could have escaped from the laboratory.
The report came on the eve of a meeting of the World Health Organization's (WHO) decision-making body, which is expected to discuss the next phase of an investigation into the origins of COVID-19.
A National Security Council spokeswoman had no comment on the Journal's report but said the Biden administration continued to have "serious questions about the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, including its origins within the People's Republic of China".
She said the US government was working with the WHO and other member states to support an expert-driven evaluation of the pandemic's origins "that is free from interference or politicisation".
"We're not going to make pronouncements that prejudge an ongoing WHO study into the source of SARS-CoV-2, but we've been clear that sound and technically credible theories should be thoroughly evaluated by international experts," she said.
The Journal said current and former officials familiar with the intelligence about the lab researchers expressed a range of views about the strength of the report's supporting evidence, with one unnamed person saying it needed "further investigation and additional corroboration".
The United States, Norway, Canada, Britain and other countries in March expressed concerns about the WHO-led COVID-19 origins study, and called for further investigation and full access to all pertinent human, animal and other data about the early stages of the outbreak.
Washington is keen to ensure greater cooperation and transparency by China, according to a source familiar with the effort.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday.
On Sunday, China's foreign ministry noted that a WHO-led team had concluded a lab leak was extremely unlikely after a visit in February to the virology institute.
"The US continues to hype the lab leak theory," the ministry said in response to a request for comment by the Journal. "Is it actually concerned about tracing the source or trying to divert attention?"
The Trump administration had said it suspected the virus may have escaped from a Chinese lab, which Beijing denies.
A State Department fact sheet released near the end of the Trump administration had said "the US government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses". It did not say how many researchers.
China refused to give raw data on early COVID-19 cases to the WHO-led team probing the origins of the pandemic, according to one of the team’s investigators, Reuters reported in February, potentially complicating efforts to understand how the outbreak began.
TAIPEI: Taiwan's government slammed the World Health Organization's (WHO) "indifference" to the health rights of Taiwanese people and for capitulating to China on Monday (May 24) after failing to get invited to a meeting of its decision-making body.
Taiwan is excluded from most global organisations such as the WHO because of the objections of China, which considers the island one of its provinces and not a country.
Taiwan, with the strong backing of major Western powers, had been lobbying for access to the WHO's World Health Assembly, which opens on Monday, as an observer.
In a joint statement by Foreign Minister Joseph Wu and Health Minister Chen Shih-chung, Taiwan's government said that they would continue to seek participation.
"As a professional international health body, the WHO should serve the health and welfare of all humanity and not capitulate to the political interests of a certain member," Chen said, referring to China.
Wu expressed regret at the "WHO Secretariat's continued indifference to the health rights of Taiwan's 23.5 million people".
China says Taiwan can only take part if it accepts it is part of "one China", which Taipei will not do, and that only Beijing has a right to speak for Taiwan on the international stage. It says Taiwan has in any case been given the access it needs during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Taiwan's statement said China was falsely claiming that appropriate arrangements have been made for Taiwan's WHO participation, adding that only the island's democratically elected government can speak for its people.
Taiwan urges the WHO to "maintain a professional and neutral stance, reject China's political interference, and allow Taiwan to join WHO meetings, mechanisms, and activities in order to protect the welfare of humanity and jointly combat disease".
While the WHO cooperates with Taiwan's technical experts on COVID-19, it is up to member states whether to invite Taiwan to observe the WHO meeting, the WHO's principal legal officer Steve Solomon said last week.
