(Reuters) – Cases of COVID-19 spiked in some areas of China and Japan, while a large mask-free public event was held in North Korea for the first time since May.
DEATHS AND INFECTIONS
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ASIA-PACIFIC
* China’s central metropolis of Wuhan temporarily shut some businesses and public transport in a district with almost a million people on Wednesday, as the city where the pandemic first emerged raised vigilance after several new infections.
* Toyota Motor suspended night shift operations at one production line of its Takaoka factory in central Japan because of a COVID-19 outbreak.
* North Korea held a large mask-free public event for the first time since declaring a COVID-19 emergency in May, honouring veterans of the 1950-53 Korean war just days after saying its coronavirus crisis was nearly over.
* New Zealand said new COVID-19 cases were trending down and it looked likely the country would avoid a feared worst-case scenario of 20,000 infections daily.
EUROPE
* British health agencies have secured funding to develop a standardised approach to test the performance of vaccines being used or in development against monkeypox, days after the WHO labelled the growing outbreak a global health emergency.
AMERICAS
* COVID-19 vaccine maker BioNTech said it and partner Pfizer have filed a complaint with the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, seeking a judgment that they did not infringe U.S. patents held by rival CureVac.
MEDICAL DEVELOPMENTS
* An experimental chewing gum that “traps” SARS-CoV-2 particles in saliva holds promise for curbing transmission of new variants of the virus, according to new data, as researchers prepare to launch the first human trial.
ECONOMIC IMPACT
* China’s gold consumption fell 12.84% to 476.82 tonnes in the first half of the year from the corresponding 2021 period as coronavirus outbreaks hit demand.
* North Korea’s economy shrank in 2021 for a second straight year after suffering its biggest contraction in more than two decades the previous year amid U.N. sanctions and COVID-19 lockdowns, South Korea’s central bank said on Wednesday.
(Compiled by Uttaresh.V and Krishna Chandra Eluri; Edited by Anil D’Silva and Shounak Dasgupta)
