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People shop for the Lunar New Year festival in Thailand (Photo: Xinhua/VNA) Bangkok (VNA) – Thailand’s Public Health Ministry is concerned about possible COVID-19 transmission risks when families reunite to celebrate the upcoming Lunar New Year this week. Chawetsan Namwat, director of the country’s emergency disease and health hazards control division under the Department of Disease Control, stressed the importance of strict social distancing during family gatherings. The public would still have to comply with disease control measures until herd immunity is acquired, he said, adding that active case-finding would continue even though the number of COVID-19 cases has begun to drop. Thailand’s Centre for COVID-19 Situation Administration (CCSA) on February 7 reported a total of 237 new cases, bringing the national tally up to 23,371. Of the infections, 112 were detected from active case-finding in communities, 113 others were confirmed by hospitals, and 12 imported. Meanwhile, in Malaysia, family reunion dinners for Lunar New Year eve (February 11) are now permitted, as a result of a National Security Council technical meeting chaired by Defence Minister Datuk Seri Ismail Sabri Yaakob on February 7. In a statement on the same day, the country’s National Unity Ministry said the gatherings ought to be limited to 15 family members living within a 10km radius and must not involve interstate or inter-district travel. Also on February 7, Malaysia posted 3,731 new COVID-19 cases and 15 deaths from the disease. The number of positive cases nationwide stood at 51,241, creating a high pressure on the local medical system./. VNA …

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VietNamNet would like to introduce an article by Prof. Nguyen Thien Nhan, Head of the HCM City National Assembly delegation. Illustrative photo On December 31, 2019, China told the world about the first cases of respiratory infections caused by a strange virus. Seventy days later, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced a global epidemic on March 11, 2020. At that time, there were 1,488,405 infected people worldwide, 66,715 patients were being treated in medical facilities, and 4,635 people had died of Covid-19 in 117 countries and territories. Since then, the pandemic has affected over 200 countries. The number of infected people had hit more than 108 million as of February 13, 2021. The number of people under treatment has increased, reaching 25.4 million by February 13, 2021. The death toll was 2.347 million (an average of 311 deaths per 1 million people) by February 13, 2021. When the World Health Organization announced the global epidemic (March 11, 2020), only 9 of every 1 million people were being treated. This can be considered the threshold to distinguish between a world that has an epidemic (under 10 people under treatment for every 1 million people) and a global pandemic (over 10 people under treatment for every 1 million people). On October 17, 2020, this rate was 1,166 people under treatment per 1 million people, and the rate was 3,380 people per 1 million people on January 30, 2021, 116 and 338 times higher than the rate on the day the pandemic was announced, respectively. The question is: When will the level of global infection, measured in terms of the number of people under treatment at healthcare facilities, fall to less than 10 people per 1 million people, as the rate recorded before March 11, 2020? Optimistically, it can be estimated that since the outbreak on March 11, 2020 to its first peak on November 30, 2020 is 325 days, and the time to reduce to the level of less than 10 infected people per 1 …

[Read more...] about Vietnam’s third wave of Covid-19: when will it end?

All three sub-sectors, banking, insurance and financial services, enjoyed a boom, according to a report by financial data provider FiinGroup. Banking saw post-tax profits increase by 16.1 percent while the insurance and financial services industries, the latter mostly comprising stock brokerages, grew by 24.4 percent and 50.8 percent. Banks’ rising profits were due to an improvement in net interest margin (NIM) and lower provisioning for bad debts, while cutting operating costs helped the insurance industry navigate the pandemic, the report said. For securities companies, growth mostly came from increased liquidity thanks to a surge in the number of retail investors and margin lending. Nearly 393,659 trading accounts were opened, up 109 percent. With most banks capping deposit interest rates at around 5.6 percent, down from 7 percent in early 2020, investors turned to securities. The trend began last year when the benchmark VN-Index slumped in March after the first Covid-19 outbreak but recovered in the remaining months as the government imposed drastic measures to contain the pandemic and sustain economic growth. But companies in other sectors saw profits plunge by 22.2 percent, with eight out of 16 sectors witnessing a decline, said the report, which compiled data from 841 listed, non-banking companies that published their financial statements. The sharpest fall was 241.5 percent by the travel and leisure industry, followed by oil and gas and property. The remaining eight sectors posted growth, led by telecommunications (102.2 percent) and basic resources (82.8 percent). …

[Read more...] about Financial sector profits surge despite Covid-19: report