BEIJING: China's Brii Biosciences said on Sunday (Dec 12) lab studies showed that its COVID-19 antibody cocktail retained activity against the Omicron variant, although one of the antibodies showed a substantial drop in activity when tested alone.
Test details for the dual-antibody treatment, which last week became the first approved COVID-19 antibody cocktail in China, would not be available until publication in a scientific journal, but results from three independent labs showed similar pattern, Brii chief executive Hong Zhi said on Monday.
Although no purchase order for the treatment has been announced, the firm was able to secure manufacturing capacity of 1 million doses for 2022 and 2023 each, Hong said in an investor call, adding it already has about 80,000 doses available in its inventory.
Hong said the firm hoped to receive stockpiling orders for the antibody combination. "Those are very important for us as a small company to really manage our cash flow at the same time addressing a public pandemic."
The firm, yet to disclose any in-house production capacity for the drug, is partnering with WuXi Biologics for manufacturing.
SHANGHAI: More than a dozen Chinese-listed companies said they had suspended production in coronavirus-hit parts of China's eastern Zhejiang province in response to local government's tightened COVID-19 curbs, causing their share prices to plunge.
Zhejiang reported a total of 173 locally transmitted cases with confirmed symptoms during the Dec 6 to 12 period, official numbers showed on Monday (Dec 13), marking the province's first domestic cluster outbreak this year.
In October, the province reported just one local case.
A slew of companies, including Ningbo Homelink Eco-Itech, Zhejiang Zhongxin Fluoride Materials, Zhejiang Jingsheng Mechanical & Electrical and Zhejiang Fenglong Electric, announced the production suspension through exchange filings over the weekend.
Their shares fell sharply in early trading on Monday. Zhejiang Chunhui Intelligent Control and Zhejiang Yankon Group suffered the biggest losses, with their shares falling more than 7 per cent each.
China reported 80 new locally transmitted cases with symptoms on the mainland on Dec 12, including 74 identified in Zhejiang.
Ningbo Homelink, which makes plastic products, said in an exchange filing late on Sunday that it had halted production in its home city Ningbo at the request of local authorities, and is taking measures to minimise the negative impact on its business.
Zhejiang Jindun Fans, a Chinese maker of ventilation system equipment, said on Sunday that production at its subsidiary in Zhejiang's Shaoxing city had been suspended due to local government's anti-virus measures.
The company said there would be some delay in product deliveries and a hit to business this month, but that the fallout on this year's annual results would be limited.
All the companies that announced production halt vowed to fully cooperate with the local government, which will decide when production can be resumed.
SEOUL: South Korea will soon roll out a pilot project to use artificial intelligence, facial recognition and thousands of CCTV cameras to track the movement of people infected with the coronavirus, despite concerns about the invasion of privacy.
The nationally funded project in Bucheon, one of the country's most densely populated cities on the outskirts of Seoul, is due to become operational in January, a city official told Reuters.
The system uses a AI algorithms and facial recognition technology to analyse footage gathered by more than 10,820 CCTV cameras and track an infected person’s movements, anyone they had close contact with, and whether they were wearing a mask, according to a 110-page business plan from the city submitted to the Ministry of Science and ICT (Information and Communications Technology), and provided to Reuters by a parliamentary lawmaker critical of the project.
Governments around the world have turned to new technologies and expanded legal powers to try to stem the tide of COVID-19 infections.
China, Russia, India, Poland and Japan as well as several US states are among the governments to have rolled out or at least experimented with facial recognition systems for tracking COVID-19 patients, according to a March report by Columbia Law School in New York.
The Bucheon official said the system should reduce the strain on overworked tracing teams in a city with a population of more than 800,000 people, and help use the teams more efficiently and accurately.
South Korea already has an aggressive, high-tech contact tracing system that harvests credit card records, cellphone location data and CCTV footage, among other personal information.
It still relies, however, on a large number of epidemiological investigators, who often have to work 24-hour shifts, frantically tracing and contacting potential coronavirus cases.
In bidding for national funding for the pilot project in late 2020, Bucheon mayor Jang Deog-cheon argued that such a system would make tracing faster.
"It sometimes takes hours to analyse a single CCTV footage. Using visual recognition technology will enable that analysis in an instant," he said on Twitter.
The system is also designed to overcome the fact that tracing teams have to rely heavily on the testimony of COVID-19 patients, who aren't always truthful about their activities and whereabouts, the plan said.
The Ministry of Science and ICT said it has no current plans to expand the project to the national level. It said the purpose of the system was to digitise some of the manual labour that contact tracers currently have to carry out.
The Bucheon system can simultaneously track up to 10 people in five to 10 minutes, cutting the time spent on manual work that takes around half an hour to one hour to trace one person, the plan said.
The pilot plans call for a team of about 10 staff at one public health centre to use the AI-powered recognition system, the official said.
Bucheon received 1.6 billion won (US$1.36 million) from the Ministry of Science and ICT and injected 500 million won of the city budget into the project to build the system, the Bucheon official said.
"BIG BROTHER"
While there has been wide public support for existing invasive track and trace methods, human rights advocates and some South Korean lawmakers have expressed concerns that the government will retain and harness such data far beyond the needs of the pandemic.
"The government's plan to become a Big Brother on the pretext of COVID is a neo-totalitarian idea," Park Dae-chul, a lawmaker from the main opposition People Power Party, told Reuters.
"It is absolutely wrong to monitor and control the public via CCTV using taxpayers' money and without the consent from the public," said Park, who provided the city plan to Reuters.
The Bucheon official said there are no privacy concerns because the system places a mosaic over the faces of anyone who is not a subject.
“There is no privacy issue here as the system traces the confirmed patient based on the Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Act,” the official told Reuters. “Contact tracers stick to that rule so there is no risk of data spill or invasion of privacy.”
Rules say patients must give their consent for the facial recognition tracking to be used, but even if they don't consent, the system can still track them using their silhouette and clothes, the official said.
The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) said the use of such technology is lawful as long as it is used within the realm of the disease control and prevention law.
The plans for AI-powered facial recognition sweeps comes as the country experiments with other uses of the controversial technology, from detecting child abuse at day cares to providing police protection.
JERUSALEM (REUTERS) - Israeli researchers said on Saturday (Dec 11) they found that a three-shot course of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine provided significant protection against the new Omicron variant.
The findings were similar to those presented by BioNTech and Pfizer earlier in the week, which were an early signal that booster shots could be key to protection against infection from the newly identified variant.
The study, carried out by Sheba Medical Centre and the Health Ministry's Central Virology Laboratory, compared the blood of 20 people who had received two vaccine doses five to six months earlier to the same number of individuals who had received a booster a month before.
"People who received the second dose five or six months ago do not have any neutralisation ability against the Omicron, while they do have some against the Delta (strain)," Professor Gili Regev-Yochay, director of the Infectious Diseases Unit at Sheba, told reporters.
"The good news is that with the booster dose, it increases about a hundredfold. There is a significant protection of the booster dose. It is lower than the neutralisation ability against the Delta, about four times lower," she said.
The Israeli team said they worked with the actual virus while the companies used what is known as a pseudovirus, which was bio-engineered to have the hallmark mutations of Omicron.
KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia has charged Dyson supplier ATA IMS with four violations of labour law on accommodation for workers as it investigates complaints of forced labour, authorities said on Saturday (Dec 11).
The step comes after British home appliance maker Dyson said last month it was severing relations with ATA, and ending its contract within six months, after an independent audit of the company's labour practices and accusations by a whistleblower.
"The complaints were mainly on allegations of appalling working and living conditions and foreign workers being forced to work excessive overtime hours," Malaysia's labour department told Reuters in an email response.
"It is too early to make any conclusion on the allegations."
The department, which inspected the company in February, May and July, added that the four charges were for violations of minimum standards for worker accommodation.
The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the charges.
ATA, which makes parts for Dyson vacuum cleaners and air purifiers, has said all overtime was voluntary, and that it paid double for work on Sundays and triple on public holidays.
The company has taken steps to ensure no recurrence, it added, saying it had begun a policy of zero overtime on Sunday that led to the resignations of nearly 300 workers in the first week of December.
Police are also investigating ATA over claims that a former worker was beaten by police after being taken to a police station where he was questioned about sharing information on working conditions with activists.
ATA has dismissed the accusations by the worker, Dhan Kumar Limbu, as unsubstantiated and "unlikely to have taken place".
LONDON: Booster COVID-19 vaccine shots give an estimated 70 per cent to 75 per cent protection against mild disease from the new Omicron variant, the UK Health Security Agency said on Friday, citing initial findings from a real-world study.
The findings are some of the earliest data on the protection against Omicron outside of lab studies, which have shown reduced neutralising activity against Omicron.
The early real-world data suggest that while Omicron could greatly reduce the protection against mild disease from an initial two-dose vaccination course, boosters restored the protection to an extent.
"These early estimates should be treated with caution but they indicate that a few months after the second jab, there is a greater risk of catching the Omicron variant compared to Delta strain," said Dr Mary Ramsay, Head of Immunisation at the UKHSA, adding that protection against severe disease was expected to remain higher.
"The data suggest this risk is significantly reduced following a booster vaccine, so I urge everyone to take up their booster when eligible."
In an analysis of 581 people with confirmed Omicron, two doses of AstraZeneca and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines provided much lower levels of protection against symptomatic infection compared to what they provide against Delta.
However, when boosted with a dose of Pfizer vaccine, there was around 70 per cent protection against symptomatic infection for people who initially received AstraZeneca, and around 75 per cent protection for those who received Pfizer.
That compares to estimated protection against infection from Delta following a booster of around 90 per cent.
UKHSA said that, at current trends, Omicron would account for more that 50 per cent of all COVID-19 infections by mid-December, with Britain exceeding one million infections by the end of the month.
PENANGGAL, Indonesia, Dec 10 (Reuters) - In the wake of the deadly Semeru eruption on Indonesia's Java island, the entwined bodies of a mother and daughter encased in molten ash have come to symbolise what many living in the shadow of the volcano feel went wrong.
"There was no warning. If there had been, there wouldn't have been victims, right?" said Minah, of her cousin Rumini, who died clutching her elderly mother as their kitchen roof caved in. Like many Indonesians, they use only one name.
Nestled at the base of volcano, their village of Curah Kobokan was among the worst-hit when Semeru spectacularly erupted on Saturday, ejecting ash clouds and pyroclastic flows that killed at least 45 people and left dozens missing.
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The eruption of Java's tallest mountain has raised questions about the effectiveness of Indonesia's disaster warning system, and the dangers of rebuilding on the volcano's fertile but precarious slopes.
Officials said some messages were sent to local administrators but acknowledged they did not result in an evacuation order, in part because the volcano's activity is hard to predict.
Warnings to evacuate are normally relayed by the national disaster mitigation agency, such as in 2017 when it ordered 100,000 people living near Bali's rumbling Mt Agung to immediately leave the danger zone.
The national disaster mitigation agency did not immediately respond to Reuters' request for a comment.
In Javanese, the village's name Curah Kobokan means "pouring bowl", a reference to the river that snakes by it. Once a source of life, the river would also become the community's downfall.
When Semeru erupted, the river carried thick flows of lava and ash directly into Curah Kobokan, now a field of gray ash piled as high as the powerlines, a few triangular roofs jutting out of the newly formed disaster landscape.
Residents say the air grew blazing hot and pitch black in seconds. People screamed and fled in panic, some taking refuge in a prayer house, others huddled in a concrete drain.
Of eight residents Reuters interviewed, not one said they received warning of an impending eruption.
"If there had been warning, people would have evacuated. Instead in a matter of minutes, lava streamed down and a lot of people died," said 41-year-old Irawati, whose husband was knocked unconscious as they tried to escape.
'NO TIME TO RUN'
An archipelago of 270 million sitting atop the Pacific Ring of Fire, Indonesia is one of the most disaster-prone nations on earth. The devastation wreaked by Semeru can be ascribed to a deadly confluence of factors, for which no one wants to take the blame.
The head of Indonesia's geological agency, Eko Budi Lelono, says messages were sent to local officials warning of hot ash clouds. The river near Curah Kobokan, he said, was marked red on the map.
"In the future, we can't blame one another, but we need to synergise more," Eko says.
Dino Adalananto of the East Java disaster mitigation agency says the warnings were passed on to local resilience officers but there were no specific orders to evacuate. The head of Curah Kobokan could not be reached.
Experts say the nature of the eruption, a cave-in of the lava dome possibly triggered by external factors such as heavy rain, was also difficult to catch ahead of time.
"Whatever the actual trigger was, it was the instability of this lava dome at the summit that collapsed and those things are very hard to predict," said Heather Handley, a volcano scientist at Australia's Monash University.
Eruptions triggered by lava dome collapses account for about 6% of all volcanic eruptions, says Handley, with more research needed to understand the characteristics and causes.
Another causal factor for the tragedy is the reality of life on Semeru's slopes, where over the decades communities have become inured to volcanic activity, including the summit letting off steam.
As disaster officials survey the devastation, some 100,000 homes damaged or destroyed, there is growing talk about the danger of living so close to the mountain, with Indonesian President Joko Widodo saying at least 2,000 homes will be moved.
With 142 volcanoes, Indonesia has the largest population globally living in close range to a volcano, including 8.6 million within 10km (6.2 miles).
"What needs to be explained to people is the areas where the lava flows, our recommendation is don't live there anymore," said the geological agency's Eko.
"When they're there, there's no time to run."
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Reporting by Prasto Wardoyo in Penanggal; Kate Lamb in Sydney and Stanley Widianto in Jakarta; Additional reporting by Agustinus Beo Da Costa; Writing by Kate Lamb; Editing by Karishma Singh
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