Author: Himalaya Post

Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email [email protected] to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found here. China’s official figures for new coronavirus cases suggest transmission has all but ended in many regions, but local experts have warned that official numbers omit important categories of cases. Hubei, the province where the outbreak originated, has reported no more than one new case a day for more than a week, allowing the government to signal the end of the crisis period. Officials and disease control teams have been able to leave the area, and travel restrictions and quarantines have also been relaxed. But interviews with local medics and disease specialists reveal that the situation in Hubei’s capital Wuhan could be worse than the official figures make out, suggesting any declaration by Beijing of victory against the pandemic would be premature. Experts have highlighted the existence of unreported cases, as well as the large number of asymptomatic cases that the government refuses to publicise in its official tally. It is extremely worrying to continue to publicise ‘zero new cases’ Wuhan nurse Two nurses in Wuhan, who wished to remain...

Agency. Spain’s government on Thursday said a batch of faulty Covid-19 testing kits it had been forced to return had been acquired through a domestic supplier and not directly from an unlicensed Chinese company as the Asian nation’s embassy said. Spain’s efforts this week to roll out 640,000 rapid testing kits, mainly made by companies in China and South Korea, hit a setback when the first order of around 9,000 failed to meet specifications and had to be returned. The Chinese embassy said the Spanish government had purchased the items from an unlicensed company called Shenzhen Bioeasy Biotechnology. But the Spanish health ministry later released a statement saying the products had been supplied through a supplier in Spain, which had imported them from China. It said the products bore the CE mark, meaning they conformed with European Union standards. The statement said the order had not been part of the 432-million euro ($466m) contract with China that the Spanish government announced Wednesday, which would include the delivery of 5.5 million testing kits. The head of Spain’s public health emergency department Fernando Simon confirmed in his daily briefing that the first batch of kits delivered to the country had been sent back to the provider, although he did not name the company in question. The Spanish association of microbiologists (SEIMC) warned that the testing kits in this batch performed with...

(Agency) Netherlands government has ordered its hospitals to send back around 600,000 masks that had been imported from China, nearly half of the 1.3-million purchased consignment, after they failed to meet quality standards, the Dutch media has reported. The faulty masks had already been sent to several hospitals in the Netherlands managing the Covid-19 pandemic but have now been recalled. The rest of the masks have now been put on hold, said an NOS report Saturday. Netherlands had received the mask order from a Chinese manufacturer on 21 March. The masks were of the FFP2 grade, used as a respirator mask to filter out around 94 per cent of solid and liquid particulate matter in the air. However, the masks were found to have faulty filter membranes during inspection that would have been ineffective in filtering out particulate matter containing the novel coronavirus from entering through mouth or nose. Netherlands has seen over 1,800 coronavirus cases and a death toll of more than 600. It has now joined a host of countries that have said medical supplies from China have proven faulty, hence ineffective in battling the pandemic largely understood to have originated in China. According to a Fox News report, Spain is set to return 9,000 “quick result” test kits back to China due to substandard quality. The severely-affected country had purchased $467 million worth of medical supplies...