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The Omicron coronavirus variant has been discovered for the first time on mainland China, according to health authorities, piling pressure on officials already contending with an outbreak in one of the country’s most important manufacturing hubs.
Officials and state media said the Omicron case was “imported” by an arrival in the port city of Tianjin, south-east of Beijing, where travellers are quarantined before they are allowed to continue on to the Chinese capital.
Later on Tuesday, state television reported that a second Omicron case had been discovered in the southern city of Guangzhou. It involved a local resident who had returned to China last month and spent two weeks in quarantine in Shanghai without the virus being detected.
President Xi Jinping’s administration is pursuing a “zero Covid” policy across the world’s most populous nation, in part because of concerns about the relatively low efficacy of China’s homemade vaccines and the potential death toll if Covid-19 spreads freely among the country’s 1.4bn people.
Meanwhile, two doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine provide 70 per cent protection against being admitted to hospital with the Omicron variant, according to the first real-world analysis of protection against severe disease with the new strain in South Africa.
But the defence offered against Omicron is lower than the 93 per cent protection provided against the Delta variant, the report from Discovery Health, the largest private healthcare provider in South Africa found.
Explainer: Why do Covid boosters offer greater protection against Omicron?
What changes are you making in your life, if any, owing to the Omicron variant? Share your thoughts with me at firstft@ft.com. Thanks for reading FirstFT Asia. Here’s the rest of today’s news — Emily
Five more stories in the news
1. Goldman and JPMorgan plan bumper bonuses The US banks are preparing to pay out bumper bonuses to their investment bankers following a record year for deal activity. Goldman is considering increasing its bonus pool by about 40-50 per cent compared with last year, while at JPMorgan the pool could be as much as 40 per cent larger, according to people briefed on the matter.
2. Top Trump aide faces contempt vote The US House of Representatives is poised to vote to hold Donald Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows in criminal contempt, as newly revealed text messages provide fresh detail about what was happening inside the Trump White House during the January 6 Capitol riot.
3. Blinken blasts ‘aggressive’ China US secretary of state Antony Blinken has criticised “Beijing’s aggressive actions” against its neighbours on his first visit to south-east Asia since taking office. In a speech in Jakarta, Blinken said President Joe Biden planned to host regional leaders in the coming months as he tries to rebuild credibility following Donald Trump’s administration.
4. Toyota to spend $35bn on electric push The Japanese carmaker said it will pour $35bn into a shift towards electric vehicles as the world’s biggest carmaker sets itself up for direct rivalry with Tesla and joins other groups in a push for carbon neutrality.
5. Men urged Japan’s first female trade union head to turn down job
Male colleagues of Tomoko Yoshino, the first woman to head Japan’s largest trade union association, begged her to turn the job down because they believed her gender made her incapable of fighting corporate Japan for higher wages, she said in an interview with the Financial Times.
Coronavirus digest
Hong Kong is preparing to resume quarantine-free travel. Meanwhile,
Hong Kong’s central bank is sending care packages to bankers in quarantine.The UK will remove all 11 countries from England’s coronavirus travel “red list”, as ministers accept that the Omicron variant can no longer be contained.
Pfizer’s Covid-19 antiviral pill cuts the risk of hospitalisation or death by up to 89 per cent in high-risk patients, according to final trial results.
Developing countries in Asia will grow at a slower pace than anticipated this year and next, the Asian Development Bank said.
Science editor Clive Cookson explains why the human immune system finds it so hard to detect the new variant.
The day ahead
Australia loosens travel restrictions The country will reopen to foreign visa holders and vaccinated tourists from South Korea and Japan. (Sky News)
UK inflation figures Data released today are expected to show inflation having risen to about 4.5 per cent in the November. Even with these signals of economic strength, the Bank of England is unlikely to raise rates, as it weighs the potential impact of Omicron.
Federal Reserve policy-setting meeting The end of the Fed’s two-day meeting will conclude with a press conference, a new set of economic projections and an updated “dot plot” of individual interest rate projections. US producer prices rose at the fastest pace on record in November, piling pressure on the Fed to dial down pandemic emergency policy settings.
Has inflation pushed up prices where you live? Tell us in our latest poll. And follow along with our inflation tracker for the latest figures.
What else we’re reading
The US is not responsible for China’s rise The west struggles to understand that the rest of the world has agency of its own, writes Janan Ganesh. While the west might have postponed China’s arrival at the top table, at some cost, preventing it outright was never in its power.
Crunch time for the ECB The European Central Bank has sounded more dovish than most central banks but, scarred by past criticism of having raised interest rates too soon, it is reluctant to wind back its support after struggling for years with low inflation and sluggish growth.
Gaming needs to end its stereotyping of the Arab world Once the stock villains of war games were Nazis, but today, following 9/11 and the war on terror, they are jihadis, faceless terrorists with robes and beards that exist only to hate the west and soak up bullets. Solving the problem of Arab stereotypes in games requires two discrete approaches, writes Tom Faber.
Related read: Need relief from screen time? There’s an app for that, writes Elaine Moore.
Ghislaine Maxwell trial shines light on class divide Class is threaded through the story of Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender. At its centre was Maxwell, an Oxford-educated socialite, who witnesses said lured them when they were young and poor into a world beyond their imaginations.
Why the Indian farmers’ movement is a lesson in democracy Their victory suggests the cure to democratic backsliding is more political participation from citizens, writes Mukulika Banerjee, author of Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India.
Cinema
Film critic Danny Leigh reviews the best films that take you to Hong Kong. “Paris has romance and New York has the skyline. Hong Kong has heartache, mystery — and . . . a wealth of stylised, site-specific, vastly influential action and crime movies,” he writes as part of the FT Globetrotter guide to the territory.
Source: Economy - ft.com
