A tragic covid error and more: June 17 news round up

Children rejoice as vacations schools banned: Here’s a 3-min round-up of today’s news. 

[TRANSCRIPT 2m 51s]

Good news in the Hong Kong Standard today: Hong Kong people will soon be able to fly to Europe with minimal covid restrictions. That’s because Hong Kong will be placed on the “white list”. The Standard also has a QR code that leads to a list of perks and prizes for people who have been vaccinated – very useful and interesting.

Good news for kids: China has passed a law banning tutorial colleges and vacation schools [during holidays]. The idea is to ieve pressure on children and families. Hopefully that trend will spread to Hong Kong and elsewhere. 

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Sad news from the New York Times. More than 600,000 people have now died of Covid in that country. About four and half thousand people die every week.

That compares with about four and half thousand who died in China over the whole epidemic in the whole country.

What went wrong in the United States? One of the problems was the failure to report how China managed to achieved zero covid in some of the world’s greatest covid hotspots.

By sharing that information, many lives could have been saved. Instead, the media just played the blame game, constantly looking for mistakes made at the beginning of the process, and trying to focus on “the source of Covid”. 

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The South China Morning Post reports that America will build an alliance at the UN to counter the “malign” influence of China and investigate the source of Covid-19.

There you go. That’s the problem. Again the blame game, instead of trying to solve the problem.

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In overseas news, a survey showed that half of all Australians believe their country should ban Tiktok. Why? Because it is owned by Chinese people. 

Four out of ten Australians believe that “Australians of Chinese origin can be mobilised by the Chinese government to undermine Australia’s interests and social cohesion.” 

There! They really think that all people of Chinese race are like bad guys or spies! It’s amazing.

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And 20000 pairs of sports shoes have been recycled to create a sports court on top of a building in Kwai Chung. There’s great pictures which go with a report in the Standard.

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Main pic shows Covid memorial wall at a London hospital: picture by Ehimetalor Akhere/Unsplash