Coronavirus News Live: Downtown Beijing goes quiet as zero-Covid policy smothers capital
Downtown Beijing goes quiet as zero-Covid policy smothers capital
Millions of people in Beijing stayed home on Monday as China's capital tries to fend off a Covid-19 outbreak with creeping restrictions on movement.
Beijing residents fear they may soon find themselves in the grip of the same draconian measures that have trapped most of Shanghai's 25 million people at home for several weeks.
Officials there have said the eastern powerhouse is winning its battle against the country's worst outbreak since the pandemic began.
Yet the Shanghai lockdown has intensified, causing outrage and rare protest in the last major economy still glued to a zero-Covid policy. - AFP.
Why Covid-19 has a devastating effect on elderly
Covid-19 deaths among elderly may be due to predetermined genetic limits on cell division, finds a new study.
Human immune system's ability to combat Covid, like any infection, largely depends on its ability to replicate the immune cells effective at destroying the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the disease.
These cloned immune cells cannot be infinitely created. Researchers at the University of Washington hypothesised that the body's ability to create these cloned cells falls off significantly in old age.
This genetically predetermined limit on your immune system may be the key to why Covid-19 has such a devastating effect on the elderly, said research professor James Anderson, in the paper published in The Lancet eBioMedicine detailing a model linking ageing, Covid and mortality.
"When DNA splits in cell division, the end cap, called a telomere, gets a little shorter with each division," explained Anderson.
What does a serosurvey look for?
When you’re infected by or vaccinated against a pathogen, like the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19, your body produces antibodies to fight it. Some types of antibodies remain in your blood long after you’ve recovered. During a serosurvey, researchers look in blood samples for these long-lasting antibodies. They act as markers of past exposure to the pathogen.
The power of this type of study is that it can reveal whether someone was previously infected with a particular pathogen, even if they didn’t have symptoms or take a test. Having specific antibodies in your blood can also mean you’re immune to a certain disease – scientists are still investigating what the markers of protection against Covid-19 might be, though.
If they test enough blood samples – ideally through a random sample of the population – researchers can use a serosurvey to estimate the proportion of a population that has been previously infected or vaccinated, and in some cases estimate the proportion of the population that is immune to a particular disease.
Asian stocks fell on Monday as investors remained anxious over inflation and the ongoing impact of China's Covid lockdown policies, despite an initial Wall Street bounce thanks to a solid US jobs report.
Millions of people in Beijing stayed home on Monday as China's capital tries to fend off a Covid-19 outbreak with creeping restrictions on movement.
Beijing residents fear they may soon find themselves in the grip of the same draconian measures that have trapped most of Shanghai's 25 million people at home for several weeks.
Officials there have said the eastern powerhouse is winning its battle against the country's worst outbreak since the pandemic began.
Yet the Shanghai lockdown has intensified, causing outrage and rare protest in the last major economy still glued to a zero-Covid policy.
That policy has winded an economy which just months ago had shown China was bouncing back from the pandemic.
Customs data released Monday said exports in April slumped to their lowest monthly rate since June 2020, as key supply chains became knotted by restrictions.