Closely monitoring India-China situation, says US

Langkawi, Jan 20: Malaysia will not take retaliatory trade action against India over its boycott of palm oil purchases amid a political row between the two countries, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said on Monday.

India, the world’s largest edible oil buyer, this month effectively halted imports from its largest supplier and the world’s second-biggest producer in response to comments from Mahathir attacking India’s domestic policies.

“We are too small to take retaliatory action,” Mahathir told reporters in Langkawi, a resort island off the western coast of Malaysia. “We have to find ways and means to overcome that,” he added.

The 94-year-old premier of Muslim-majority Malaysia has criticised New Delhi’s new religion-based citizenship law and also accused India of invading the disputed region of Kashmir.

Mahathir again criticised India’s citizenship law on Monday, saying he believed it was “grossly unfair”.

India has been Malaysia’s largest palm oil market for the past five years, presenting the Southeast Asian country with a major challenge in finding new buyers for its palm oil.

Benchmark Malaysian palm futures fell nearly 10% last week, their biggest weekly decline in more than 11 years.

New Delhi is also unhappy with Malaysia’s refusal to revoke permanent resident status for controversial Indian Islamic preacher Zakir Naik, who has lived in Malaysia for about three years and faces charges of money laundering and hate speech in India.

Mahathir said even if the Indian government guarantees a fair trial, Naik faces the real threat of vigilante action and that Malaysia will only relocate the preacher if it can find a third country where he would be safe.

“If we can find a place for him, we will send him out.”

Feb 22: A 20-year-old Chinese woman from Wuhan, the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak, travelled 400 miles(675 km) north to Anyang where she infected five relatives, without ever showing signs of infection, Chinese scientists reported on Friday, offering new evidence that the virus can be spread asymptomatically.

The case study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, offered clues about how the coronavirus is spreading, and suggested why it may be difficult to stop.

"Scientists have been asking if you can have this infection and not be ill? The answer is apparently, yes," said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who was not involved in the study.

China has reported a total of 75,567 cases of the virus known as COVID-19 to the World Health Organization (WHO) including 2,239 deaths, and the virus has already spread to 26 countries and territories outside of mainland China.

Researchers have reported sporadic accounts of individuals without any symptoms spreading the virus. What's different in this study is that it offers a natural lab experiment of sorts, Schaffner said.

"You had this patient from Wuhan where the virus is, travelling to where the virus wasn't. She remained asymptomatic and infected a bunch of family members and you had a group of physicians who immediately seized on the moment and tested everyone."

According to the report by Dr Meiyun Wang of the People's Hospital of Zhengzhou University and colleagues, the woman travelled from Wuhan to Anyang on Jan. 10 and visited several relatives. When they started getting sick, doctors isolated the woman and tested her for coronavirus. Initially, the young woman tested negative for the virus, but a follow-up test was positive.

All five of her relatives developed COVID-19 pneumonia, but as of Feb. 11, the young woman still had not developed any symptoms, her chest CT remained normal and she had no fever, stomach or respiratory symptoms, such as cough or sore throat.

Scientists in the study said if the findings are replicated, "the prevention of COVID-19 infection could prove challenging."

Key questions now, Schaffner said, are how often does this kind of transmission occur and when during the asymptomatic period does a person test positive for the virus.

Washington, Jun 6: US President Donald Trump has said that countries like India and China would have much more coronavirus cases than America, the worst-hit country in the world, if they conduct more tests.

Trump, in his remarks at Puritan Medical Products in Maine, said that the US has carried out 20 million tests.

Compared to the US, Germany is at four million and much talked about South Korea is about three million tests, he said on Friday.

According to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, the US has reported nearly 1.9 million cases and over 1,09,000 deaths, making America the worst affected country, while the total number of coronavirus cases in India and China stand at 2,36,184 and 84,177 respectively.

India has so far conducted over 4 million coronavirus tests, according to the health ministry.

Commenting on the COVID-19 tests in the US, Trump said: "We will be well over 20 million tests. Remember this, when you test more, you have more cases.

"I say to my people every time we test; you find cases because we do more testing. If we have more cases, if we wanted to do testing in China or in India or other places, I promise you there would be more cases... you are doing a fantastic job in getting out the swabs".

Puritan is one of the only manufacturers in the world producing the high-quality medical swabs that are crucial for rapid testing.

"And every swab you make at Puritan is proudly stamped with the beautiful phrase made in the USA."

"Thanks to the testing capacity that you are making possible, our country is reopening and our economy is recovering like nobody would've thought possible," he said.

Referring to the latest monthly employment numbers, Trump said that the economy is now back on track.

"We absolutely shattered expectations, and this is the largest monthly jobs increase in American history, think of that; that's a long time.

"I think it's more than double or about double of what our highest was before so this is the largest monthly job increase in American history. And we're going to have a phenomenal next year. We're going to have a tremendous couple of months prior to the election on November 3 very, very important date," the president said.

Seeking re-election for his second consecutive term, Trump is pitted against Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in November 3 presidential elections. Most of the opinion polls shows that Biden is several points ahead of Trump.

"It's going to be a very important election because the only thing that can screw it up is if you get the wrong president and they raise your taxes, and they open up your borders so that everybody pours into our country," Trump said.

Reiterating that he has built a strong economy in the last three years, Trump vowed to bring the economy back on track, which has been badly hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

Describing the fight against coronavirus as the greatest national and industrial mobilisation since the World War II, Trump said that his administration has marshaled the full power of the US government and US industry to defeat the invisible enemy.

"It is indeed an enemy. It came from China, should have been stopped in China. They didn't do that," he alleged.

The administration, he said, has delivered over 1.5 billion pieces of personal protective equipment to doctors and nurses on the front lines. "We slashed the red tape to speed up the development of vaccines. And vaccines are coming along incredibly well, wait till you see, and therapeutics. And we partnered at private sector leaders such as Puritan to build the largest and most advanced testing capacity on the face of the earth, like this one," he said.

The Puritan factory in Maine, he said, quickly ramped up the production to produce nearly 20 million foam tipped swabs each month.

"Then in April, my administration invoked the Defence Production Act to help you scale up even more. Under a USD 75 million public-private partnership, Puritan will soon double production to 40 million swabs per month," Trump added.