Ap and Afp
Newspaper La Jornada
Wednesday, September 7, 2022, p. 13
Beijing. The authorities of the city of Chengdu, southwest China, kept its 21 million inhabitants under strict confinement due to covid-19, despite a powerful earthquake that caused at least 65 deaths and 16 missing in the periphery.
Buildings in the city and parts of the west of the country were shaken by the tremor, but no damage was reported in the city. The earthquake hit a mountainous area in Luding County, on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, some 200 kilometers from Chengdu, where two tectonic plates meet.
Despite only a handful of coronavirus positives, Chengdu’s lockdown is the country’s harshest since the one in Shanghai over the summer, which sparked protests in the streets and online.
China yesterday reported 1,499 new cases of local transmission, most of them asymptomatic. Of them, 138 were registered in Sichuan.
India yesterday approved its first nasal, needle-free vaccine against covid-19 for emergency use, the Indian health minister announced.
On Sunday, China approved the world’s first inhalable vaccine, administered as an emergency booster. It was manufactured by the Chinese group CanSino Biologics.
This stage will further strengthen our collective fight against the pandemic
Indian Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya said on Twitter. Bharat Biotech conducted its third phase trials at 14 sites in India and found its safety to be highly comparable
to that of other vaccines, the Indian pharmaceutical company said in a statement. The vaccine was approved by the medicines authority for emergency use, but it has not been specified when it will be available to the public.
The balance of the pandemic so far is 606 million 76 thousand 392 confirmed cases and 6 million 505 thousand 342 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.
