Category:

International News

Global coronavirus cases surpass the 40 million milestone

Since the pandemic started, over 1.1 million people have died due to COVID-19, with the global fatality rate hovering around 2.8% of the total cases.

An official at the World Health Organization has said the global death toll from COVID-19 could double to 2 million before a successful vaccine is widely used and could be even higher without concerted action to curb the pandemic.
The United States, India, and Brazil remain the worst affected countries in the world. COVID-19 cases in North, Central, and South America represent about 47.27% or nearly half of global cases.

Around 247 cases are seen per 10,000 people in the United States. For India and Brazil, those numbers stand at 55 cases and 248 cases per 10,000 people respectivel

read more

China’s economic recovery quickens as consumption returns

Policymakers globally are pinning their hopes on a robust recovery in China to help restart demand as economies struggle with heavy lockdowns and a second wave of coronavirus infections.China has partially emerged from a record slump caused by coronavirus shutdowns in the first months of the year.The world’s second-largest economy grew 0.7% in the first nine months from a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said.

read more

Airlines’ coronavirus safety analysis challenged by expert

Airlines and planemakers are anxious to restart international travel, even as a second wave of infections and restrictions take hold in many countries.

“With only 44 identified potential cases of flight-related transmission among 1.2 billion travellers, that’s one case for every 27 million,” IATA medical adviser Dr David Powell said in a news release, echoed in comments during the event.

IATA said its findings “align with the low numbers reported in a recently published peer-reviewed study by Freedman and Wilder-Smith”.

But Freedman, who co-authored the paper in the Journal of Travel Medicine with Dr Annelies Wilder-Smith of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said he took issue with IATA’s risk calculation because the reported count bore no direct relation to the unknown real number of infections.

read more

Bank of England says company disclosures on climate risks will be mandatory

“Disclosing your plans can improve your credit rating, broaden your investor base, reduce your cost of finance, and economize on the fixed costs of meeting increasingly vocal investor requests for information,” the BoE’s executive director for markets, Andrew Hauser, told an Investment Association online event on Friday.

read more

British Airways hit with UK data watchdog’s biggest-ever fine

Other major cyber incidents in the recent past include another London-listed airline, easyJet EZJ.L, which earlier this year said hackers had accessed the email and travel details of around 9 million customers.

U.S. hotel operator Marriott International MAR.O in March suffered its second data incident in less than two years, with information of about 5.2 million its hotel guests suffering a breach.

read more

Hurricane Delta to cost insurers between $2bn – $3.5bn:RMS 

“The overlapping nature of Delta and Laura will create a complicated claims management and loss attribution process for the industry. Using an innovative combination of high-resolution aerial imagery and machine-learning techniques, the modeling teams at RMS assessed the competing impacts of Hurricane Laura on Hurricane Delta losses. We determined that more than half of the impacted postal codes were also impacted by Laura, representing more than 90% of loss in this event. While Delta caused higher than expected damage to many structures due to pre-existing damage from Laura, reduced overall exposure-at-risk in the overlapping region after Laura means losses attributed to Delta will end up being lower than if Laura had never happened,” said Jeff Waters, senior product manager, RMS North Atlantic Hurricane Models. 

read more

Second sovereign downgrade wave coming, major nations at risk: S&P Global

The rating agency has already downgraded or cut the outlooks on nearly 60 countries this year, but only relatively few have been higher-rated richer nations.

With some though piling on 15-20 points of debt as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) – amounts that would normally take four or five years to accumulate – and locked into higher spending for the next 3-5 years, that could be about to change.

read more