With the City of London deserted once more, its streets only populated by the occasional Deliveroo driver or tumbleweed-seeking photographer, it seems a strange time to be completing the largest office building the capital has ever seen, not least because the very future of the workplace is now in question.
But, rising far above the Cheesegrater and the Walkie-Talkie, dwarfing the now fun-sized Gherkin and boasting the floor area of almost all three combined, 22 Bishopsgate stands as the mother of all office towers. It is the City’s menacing final boss, a glacial hulk that fills its plot to the very edges and rises directly up until it hits the flight path of passing jets. The building muscles into every panorama of London, its broad girth dominating the centre of the skyline and congealing the Square Mile’s distinctive individual silhouettes into one great, grey lump.
It is the absurdist conclusion of three decades of steroidal growth, the final product of superheated land values stretching loose planning rules to breaking point. And, just as the building is being handed over to its first tenants to fit out, it feels like a monument from another epoch. Remember when we used to commute to the office?
Young women in colourful traditional costumes, masks and white stoles braved cold weather in lines and sat seats apart from one another in Yokohama on Monday to mark Japan’s Coming of Age Day, even though the city is under a state of emergency, Reuters reports.
The ceremonies, typically full of kimono-clad women and smartly-dressed men, were cancelled in many cities and parties were discouraged to stem a rise in Covid-19 infections.
On the second Monday in January every year, people who have turned or are about to turn 20 take part in ceremonies in local event halls or other large-scale venues to celebrate the rite of passage to adulthood.
The occasion, which is observed with a national holiday, serves in effect as class reunions for some and represents one of the major child-rearing milestones for parents.
Of Tokyo’s 23 wards, all but one have cancelled or postponed the ceremonies, opting instead to offer mayors’ congratulatory remarks online. The government last week declared a state of emergency for the capital and three surrounding prefectures.
Yokohama city, south of Tokyo, went ahead with celebrations at Pacifico Yokohama North convention hall and Yokohama Arena event hall.
“I decided to carry out today’s ceremonies as I strongly hoped everyone takes part in celebrating this once-in-a-lifetime milestone,” said Mayor Fumiko Hayashi, in a message read out to attendees who had to abide with anti-infection measures.
Participants wore face masks, had their temperature checks and were asked just to listen to the national anthem, instead of singing it out loud.
Japan has seen coronavirus cases total around 289,000, with 4,067 fatalities, according to public broadcaster NHK.
India aims to begin vaccinating its 1.3 billion people against coronavirus from Saturday, a colossal and complex task compounded by safety worries, shaky infrastructure and public scepticism, AFP reports.
In one of the world’s biggest rollouts, the planet’s second-most populous nation hopes to inoculate 300 million people – equal almost to the entire US population – by July.
First to get one of two vaccines granted “emergency approval” will be 30 million health and other frontline workers, followed by around 270 million people aged over 50 or deemed high-risk all over the vast nation.
About 150,000 staff in 700 districts have been specially trained, and India has held several national dry runs involving mock transportation of vaccines and dummy injections.
Authorities will use the experience from holding elections in the world’s biggest democracy, and from regular child immunisation programmes for polio and tuberculosis.
But in an enormous, impoverished nation with often shoddy transport networks and one of the world’s worst-funded healthcare systems, the undertaking is still daunting.
Regular child inoculations are a “much smaller game” and vaccinating against Covid-19 will be “deeply challenging”, said Satyajit Rath from the National Institute of Immunology.
The two vaccines approved by India – AstraZeneca’s Covishield, made by local partner the Serum Institute, and Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin – need to be kept refrigerated at all times.
A total of 29,000 cold-chain points, 240 walk-in coolers, 70 walk-in freezers, 45,000 ice-lined refrigerators, 41,000 deep freezers and 300 solar refrigerators are at the ready.
In France, every child is now obliged to have 11 vaccinations. If parents want their children to attend school, or take part in many extracurricular activities, they must accept. There is no opt-out or concessions made to vaccine doubters.
On Monday France’s government and health authorities are speeding up the country’s Covid-19 vaccine drive – a process complicated by widespread scepticism about the inoculation that has encompassed the usual global conspiracy theories.
For weeks, polls have suggested up to 60% of the French population do not wish to be vaccinated. As the government’s vaccine operation enters its third week, official figures show that as of Saturday at least 93,000 people had been given the jab – a much lower number than elsewhere in Europe, including the UK, Germany and Italy:
One year ago, China announced the first death from a new virus in Wuhan – 12 months later, Covid-19 has claimed 1.9 million lives in an unrelenting march across the world.
AFP: But in the central Chinese city of 11 million where the first known outbreak started, the virus has been extinguished.
On Monday morning, the anniversary slipped by unmarked in Wuhan – commuters moved freely to work while parks and riverside promenades buzzed with walkers in a city determined to banish its tag as the coronavirus ground zero.
Helen Sullivan (@helenrsullivan)
Today marks a year since the first coronavirus death was reported in Wuhan. The global death toll just passed 1.9 million https://t.co/3GNFXBsLk6
January 11, 2021
In a sparse report on January 11, 2020, China confirmed its first death from an unknown virus – a 61-year-old man who was a regular at the now-notorious Wuhan wet market linked to many of the early cases.
The world would soon become grimly familiar with the disease that killed him as Covid-19.
Little is still known about the first victim, including his name, while the market where the first reported clusters of cases were traced back to has remained closed, surrounded by boarding.
Independent experts are yet to be granted access to the market or retrace in detail those early days of the virus in Wuhan.
Mainland China saw its biggest daily increase in Covid-19 cases in more than five months, the country’s national health authority said on Monday, as new infections in Hebei province surrounding Beijing continued to rise, Reuters reports.
A county in the northeastern Heilongjiang province on Monday moved into lockdown after reporting new novel coronavirus infections, state television also reported separately.
Hebei accounted for 82 of the 85 new local infections reported on Jan. 10, the National Health Commission (NHC) said in a statement, with Liaoning Province also reporting two new cases and Beijing reporting one new case. The country also saw 18 new imported infections from overseas.
The total number of new Covid-19 cases stood at 103, the highest since 127 cases were reported on July 30.
Though the new cases being reported in recent days remain a small fraction of what the country saw at the height of the outbreak in early 2020, authorities are moving aggressively to curb the spread of the disease and prevent another national wave of infections.
The NHC reported 76 new asymptomatic patients for all of mainland China, up from 27 a day earlier. China does not count these individuals, who are infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the disease but not exhibiting symptoms, as confirmed COVID-19 cases.
Total number of confirmed Covid-19 cases in mainland China now stands at 87,536, while the death toll remained unchanged at 4,634.
More now on the opposition to the Tokyo Olympics:
The Kyodo poll results show a hardening of opposition to the Olympics among the Japanese public, despite repeated claims by the organisers, the IOC and government officials that it will be possible to host a “Covid- safe” Games under plans to be released in the spring.
But with the vaccine rollout in Japan expected to start several months later than those in the US, Britain and other European countries, doubts are growing about the wisdom of allowing 11,000 athletes, as well as large numbers of officials and other Games-related staff to enter Japan. No decision has been made on whether to admit overseas sports fans.
Concern that the Games may have to be called off has spread to the organising committee itself, according to the Asahi Shimbun.
“The Tokyo Olympics could be canceled if the state of emergency is not lifted by March,” a Tokyo 2020 official told the newspaper. Another Olympic-related official cited the difficulty in winning over the public when medical workers are struggling to cope with an influx of Covid patients in the capital.
The IOC’s official line is that the Games will go ahead as planned, but last week, the organisation’s longest-serving member, Dick Pound, said he was uncertain about Tokyo 2020’s prospects. “I can’t be certain because the ongoing elephant in the room would be the surges in the virus,” Pound told the BBC.
About 80% of people in Japan are against holding the Tokyo 2020 Olympics this summer, amid a surge in coronavirus cases in the host city and other parts of Japan.
A weekend poll by the Kyodo news agency found that 35.3% wanted the Games to be cancelled, while 44.8% favoured another delay. Local organisers and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) have said that it will not be possible to postpone a second time.
The Games, which are due to open on 23 July, were delayed by a year due to the Covid pandemic.
The survey was conducted as experts warned that the recent rise in cases was putting hospitals under extreme pressure, forcing the prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, to bow to pressure from the governors of Tokyo and three neighbouring prefectures to declare a state of emergencythat will last until at least early February.
Suga’s handling of the pandemic since he took office four months ago has seen his approval ratings fall 9 percentage points since December to just 41.3%. The poll found that disapproval of Suga stood at 42.8%, with “lack of leadership” over the pandemic the most commonly cited reason.
The daily tally of infections in Japan exceeded 7,000 for the third day in a row on Saturday, although the country’s cumulative death toll, at just over 4,000, is much lower than those in many other countries.
Sorgente articolo:
Coronavirus live news: 80% of Japanese oppose Olympics, says poll; global cases pass 90m – The Guardian
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