Chinese City Orders Locals Guard Border With Burma to Curb COVID-19
The Chinese regime ordered local people to guard the border with Burma in the southeastern city of Ruili to curb the city’s COVID-19 outbreak, with locals complaining that the measures are ineffective.
“We don’t have any tool even to defend ourselves,” Li Liang (pseudonym), a resident at Mengmao town in Ruili, Yunnan province, told the Chinese-language Epoch Times on April 1. “A large number of people enter [China by crossing the border illegally] every day … We don’t have the capability to stop them.”
Li said the Burmese and Chinese people dig underground channels and cut the barbed wire to cross the border back and forth to do business.
US Jobless Claims Rise to 719,000 as Lockdowns Still Force Layoffs
WASHINGTON The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits rose by 61,000 last week to 719,000, signaling that many employers are still cutting jobs even as more businesses reopen, vaccines are increasingly administered, and federal aid spreads through the economy.
The Labor Department said Thursday that the number of claims increased from 658,000 the week before. Though the pace of applications has dropped sharply since early this year, they remain high by historical standards: Before the pandemic and related lockdowns flattened the economy a year ago, jobless claims typically ran below 220,000 a week.
UK Study Finds Low Adherence to COVID-19 Self-Isolation Rules
A major study has found that adherence to COVID-19 self-isolation rules is low in the UK, raising concerns about the effectiveness of the government’s test-and-trace system.
The study, published in the British Medical Journal, was based on 37 nationally representative surveys involving 53,880 participants in the UK, conducted between March 2, 2020, to Jan. 27, 2021.
It found that only 51.5 percent of the respondents could identify the main symptoms of COVID-19, which is caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.
Just 18 percent of those with the symptoms said they had requested a test, while 42.5 percent with symptoms in the previous seven days adhered to full self-isolation.
Moderna Begins COVID-19 Vaccine Trials for Infants and Children
Pharmaceutical company Moderna says that the first dose of its CCP virus vaccine has been given to children aged six months to 11 years in a trial called the KidCOVE study.
“This pediatric study will help us assess the potential safety and immunogenicity of our COVID-19 vaccine candidate in this important younger age population,” said Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel in a press release on Monday.
The trial conducted in collaboration with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority plans to enroll around 6,750 children in the United States and Canada to test the effectiveness and safety of the mRNA-1273 vaccine that is being given to adults around the world.
Updates on CCP Virus: Up to 50 Percent of Illegal Immigrants Estimated to Have COVID-19: National Sheriff’s Association
As concerns over the surge of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border grows, the National Sheriffs Association is calling on the Biden administration to secure the border and protect Americans.
“We are already seeing strains to the public health system of border communities. The suspension of deportations has led to the release of undocumented persons into border communities. We then have an affirmative responsibility to provide medical care for them if they are infected with COVID,” the statement reads. “This at a time when our communities are already grappling with this public health emergency and desperately trying to roll out the vaccines. We now face a serious potential public health crisis along the border.”