World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus spoke on the Delta variant of the coronavirus. “Compounded by more transmissible variants, like Delta, which is quickly becoming the dominant strain in many countries, we are in a very dangerous period of this pandemic,” Ghebreyesus said. “But no country is out of the woods yet.
The Delta variant is dangerous and is continuing to evolve and mutate, which requires constant evaluation and careful adjustment of the public health response,” he said. The Delta variant of the virus was first detected in India. Watch the full video for more details.
‘More transmissible delta variant found in 98 countries and continues to evolve’
GENEVA: The World Health Organisation has warned that the world is in “a
very dangerous period” of the coronavirus pandemic with the more
transmissible Delta variant detected in at least 98 countries.
WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Friday that the
variant, which was first reported in India, is dangerous as it continues
to evolve and mutate.
Therefore, it requires constant evaluation and careful adjustment of the public health response.
The “Delta (variant) has been detected in at least 98 countries and is
spreading quickly in countries with low and high vaccination coverage”,
he said.
“In those countries with low vaccination coverage, terrible scenes of
hospitals overflowing are again becoming the norm. But no country is out
of the woods yet.”
Governments around the world have raised the alarm over the spread of
the Delta variant even as they relax movement curbs and reopen their
borders in an effort to save their battered economies.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said nearly 25% of new
infections in America have been linked to the Delta variant, up from 6%
in early last month.
Public Health England reported that the variant accounts for 99% of
sequenced Covid-19 tests, while the European Centre for Disease
Prevention and Control has warned that the Delta variant is set to
account for 90% of cases in the bloc by the end of next month.
Tedros on Friday urged governments to vaccinate at least 10% of
their population, starting with frontliners and vulnerable groups.
This, he said, would end the acute stage of the pandemic and save a significant number of lives.
He also urged vaccine manufacturers, like Pfizer-BioTech and
Moderna, to share their technology as a way to accelerate new mRNA
vaccine manufacturing hubs.
“The sooner we start building more vaccine hubs and upping global
vaccine capacity, the sooner we can diminish surges,” he added.
Tedros said there are “two ways” to push back against the current surge in infections.
The first is to ensure that public health and social measures,
such as early case detection, surveillance, testing, isolate and
clinical care, are in place.
“This includes masking, physical distance, avoiding crowded places and keeping indoor areas well ventilated,” he said.
Second, the world must be open to sharing protective gear, oxygen, tests, treatments and vaccines.
Few Westerners see the irony of a supposedly closed China celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), when communism was born but essentially rejected in the West. What was it about Marx that resonated with Chinese civilisation that prided itself with its own ancient and enduring philosophy? (PIC: Chinese President Xi Jinping waves as he attends a gala in connection with the anniversary - AP)
"Globalisation is interpreted as universalisation of American or European values and standards. But the fact remains that these standards and rules were imposed historically by conquest, colonisation and force".
WHY is Marxism thriving in China and not in Marx’s place of birth? Why is Buddhism more practiced in East Asia than in India? Why has Islam more followers outside Saudi Arabia?
Ideas and religion spread through globalisation, but it was really their localisation that created more believers and followers.
What succeeded was not globalisation, but glocalisation, the internalisation of universal ideas and beliefs by the many, and not just the few.
Few Westerners see the irony of a supposedly closed China celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), when communism was born but essentially rejected in the West.
What was it about Marx that resonated with Chinese civilisation that prided itself with its own ancient and enduring philosophy?
London School of Economics Emeritus Professor Megnai Desai, writing on “Marx’s Revenge”, made the shrewd observation that the Chinese Revolution in the 20th century was very different from the French and American Revolutions in the 18th century.
The French Revolution was a domestic rebellion against the monarchy and the landed gentry, whilst the American Revolution was rebellion against British foreign domination
Both created republics and preached equality, liberty and freedom, but both went on to create empires, one by conquering lands from the native Indians and Mexico, and the other through Napoleon’s rampage in Europe.
The Chinese Revolution was different because it was simultaneously a struggle against foreign invasion (Japanese and earlier Eight Nations Alliance) as well as the Nationalist government that favoured the capitalist and landed classes.
The CCP won because it represented the rural peasantry, rather than adopting the Comintern strategy of starting the revolution from the cities. In short, the CCP localised universal Communism with Chinese characteristics. It was practical rather than ideological.
By the time of the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, Chinese thinkers struggled with what would replace the old order.
The country fell into warlordism. The Nationalist Party under Sun Yat-sen struggled to balance the conservative wing that represented the landlords and capitalists, and the left wing influenced by Communism and socialism.
Chinese revolutionaries followed closely the Russian Revolution in 1917, because it was then the most recent model of social transformation. The Chinese elite understood that the rebuilding of China from the collapse of the old order was a monumental task. The country was backward and the uneducated masses were unprepared for modernity, vulnerable to foreign conquest.
Even though they felt the burden of history, they also understood that there was no parallel in history on the scale of Chinese transformation.
The Chinese Left took to Marxian thinking because Marx gave both a historical and political economy perspective on how capitalism would evolve, as well as a philosophical tool in terms of Hegelian dialectics.
Marx used the profound insights of the Prussian philosopher Hegel that transformations come from contradictions of opposites, in which change will not happen in a smooth line, but through revolution or discontinuity.
Marx’s discovery of dialectic materialism – in everything, the contradiction and interaction between opposites lead to the destruction of the old and emergence of the new – was music to the ears of those who sought a path out for the New China.
Furthermore, the fundamental ideas of dialectics were very similar to the Chinese yin-yang philosophy of the I Ching and Dao Dejing. As Lenin put it, “dialectics is the study of the contradiction within the very essence of things. Development is the struggle of opposites.”
Having theory is one thing, but putting these ideas into practice is another. We can only appreciate China’s miraculous transformation from a backward economy to the second largest economy in the world by understanding that this was done through essentially three dictums: “seek truth from facts”, crossing the river by feeling the stones” and “it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”
In other words, make fact-based decisions, always try or test under uncertainty, and above all, be practical and have an open mind. Change is a process between conflicting contradictions. There is no absolute black and white.
Historian Ray Huang, one of the finest sinologists of his generation and a former Nationalist soldier, wrote in the Preface to his classic “China: A Macro-History”: “Chinese history differs from the history of other peoples and other parts of the world because of an important factor: its vast multitudes.
In the imperial period as well as in the very recent past, practical problems had to be translated into abstract notions in order to be disseminated.
In turn, at the local level the message had once again to be rendered into everyday language.”
It is the reduction of very complicated policies into simple language that the Chinese people had to understand and own that enabled them to buy into the transformation, despite the huge sacrifices at the individual and community levels. The people’s eyes are clearer than those of the elites.
The US-China rivalry has done the world a favour by contrasting very fundamental worldviews. When the West preaches a value and rules-based order, what is meant is that freedom, democracy and individual rights are absolute – essentially a zero-sum “my way or no way.”
Globalisation is interpreted as universalisation of American or European values and standards. But the fact remains that these standards and rules were imposed historically by conquest, colonisation and force.
When China, Russia, India or any other country deviates or disagrees with that, then they must be contained, confronted or sanctioned. Localisation or being different is almost seen as deviant rather than a celebration of diversity.
Civilisations reach their highest levels through tolerance and openness. When they become inward-looking, fundamentalist and mono-thinking, fragility and decay sets in.
The world is simultaneously becoming more global in inter-connectivity, even as regionalisation, fragmentation and localisation speeds up.
Glocalisation, the simultaneous contradiction between global and local, is to be welcomed, rather than feared.
The future will always be open, uncertain and contradictory. Such diversity is the nature of humanity.
Andrew Sheng comments on global affairs from an Asian perspective. The views expressed here are his own
The core of the Kylin computer operating system has been guarded as a national secret and its use in the country’s space programme has only just been officially confirmed.
Its main codes were written by Chinese military researchers, according to developer China Electronics Corporation (CEC), but it also includes elements of Unix-like software FREEBSD, parts from Linux, and a user interface similar to Windows.
It is a hybrid, like the mythical qilin dragon beast it is named after.
Speaking to state media, members of the Kylin development team revealed the role the operating system played in these missions, coordinating communication between artificial intelligence software, human controllers on the ground and all the hardware on board the spacecraft.
Until about a decade ago, China, like most other countries, relied on Linux and Windows to drive its space programmes, according to a paper published in domestic journal Space Industry Management last year.
From 2008, China’s space authorities started to replace Western software and hardware in satellites and spacecraft.
The process sped up after Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 about US hacking activities.
Kylin was one of the results – along with the Zhanxing, or Warring Star, system developed by the Chinese military’s space force, according to the paper.
Dan Jianqun, a lead scientist with CEC’S Kylin project, said China had no other choice but to develop its operating system.
“Using other people’s systems, to quote President Xi (Jinping), is like building a house on other people’s land.
“It can be large and beautiful, but it can also be destroyed overnight,” he said in an interview on state television.
The transition from western to home-made software was full of challenges, according to some of the software engineers involved.
Liu Jun, a software engineer on the Kylin team, said space missions required not only high security, but reliability and performance.
The Kylin OS system is used in China’s space programme. Photo: CCTV
Liu said Kylin was initially developed for computers on the ground.
To go to space, processing times on certain tasks had to be cut to less than a third, he told the state television.
“It was as difficult as compressing a packet of biscuits into a few grams without losing any nutrition,” Liu said.
The space mission sometimes also required the operating system to execute a specific task without being distracted by lower priorities, and many codes were written to meet these needs, said Liu.
Kylin’s first tests were demanding. No one had landed on the far side of the moon. And no country had put a rover on Mars without failure.
Liu Hongyu, another Kylin engineer, said the team was under extreme stress when these missions reached a critical stage. “We were just praying. When the spacecraft landed, the whole building rocked with applause,” he said. Kylin is now the most widely used operating system in the Chinese government and military, according to previous state media reports. When its first version was released in 2006, the system came under a lot of criticism for its poor user experience and its lack of compatible software.
But Kylin worked well with domestically developed computer chips such as the Loongson CPU. As the Chinese government began replacing Intel chips and Windows systems in the military, government, banks and other sensitive sectors, the Kylin user base grew rapidly.
But some challenges remained. One issue was hardware adaptability. China still used a lot of scientific equipment from the West and many devices were not compatible with Kylin. In addition, most software on the Kylin system is displayed in Chinese.
Any foreign astronauts planning to take up China’s offer to visit its space station will need to learn some Chinese or they will be confused by the characters on the screen of every Kylin device, including the tablets. – South China Morning Post
