Coronavirus Travel Restrictions Widen to Include South Korea

These Countries Just Restricted Travel From South Korea
By Kyunghee Park
24 February 2020, 10:52 GMT+7
Fourteen countries and a U.S. territory placed tighter entry restrictions on people traveling from South Korea after a sharp jump in coronavirus cases prompted the government in Seoul to raise its infectious-disease alert to the highest level.

Measures include banning entry for people who have been in South Korea in the past 14 days and mandatory health checks, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The number of infections in South Korea rose to 763 as of 9 a.m. local time, up from 602 Sunday, the most for anywhere outside mainland China. Seven people have died in the country from the virus.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... ases-climb

Japan shares slump as Asia reacts to global sell-off
10 minutes ago

Shares in Japan fell as much as 4.5% on Tuesday morning as investors worried about the spread of the coronavirus.

The slump followed a global stock market plunge on Monday with Wall Street and London suffering big drops.

Japan's Nikkei 225 index dropped sharply when it re-opened following a public holiday.

Overnight, Wall Street saw its sharpest daily declines since 2018, with the Dow Jones falling 3.5%.

Shares across Asia's other major stock markets traded cautiously on Tuesday morning.

Hong Kong's Hang Seng index dipped slightly, while South Korea's Kospi edged up.

But many analysts still expect the spread of the coronavirus to peak in the first quarter with a rebound in the second quarter.

"Those who expect the virus to kick off a global recession might be disappointed, as the impact is likely to be temporary," said Margaret Yang, an analyst with CMC Markets. "Central banks around the globe are ready to inject liquidity and cut down interest rates to cushion the headwind."

She added that the coronavirus is proving to be less deadly than SARS, just more contagious.

In China, the Shanghai Composite index was down nearly 1% amid mixed reports about efforts to contain the virus.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51624003

Mekong Tourism Forum mulls new dates
By TTR WEEKLY - February 24, 2020

BANGKOK, 24 February 2020: Final dates for the annual Mekong Tourism Forum are up in the air, and it is now confirmed the forum will not be held during the last week of April as earlier announced by the Mekong Tourism Coordinating Office.

In an email post to Mekong tourism stakeholders, the MTCO executive director Jens Thraenhart said: “We would like to inform you that due to the Coronavirus, we are waiting to hear the final dates of the Mekong Tourism Forum. MTF 2020 will take place in the UNESCO World Heritage town of Bagan in Myanmar, later this year. Stay tuned for upcoming developments.”

While acknowledging MTF 2020 should take place “later this year”, Thraenhart may have firm dates once he meets with Myanmar’s tourism officials at ITB Berlin during the first week of March.

The forum that represents the interests of six Mekong Region nations (Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam) was scheduled for 28 to 29 April after being moved a week forward from its traditional time slot in May to avoid the onset of the monsoon season.

Now another rescheduling is in the pipeline, and it is now possible the event could be hosted either in September or October.
https://www.ttrweekly.com/site/2020/02/ ... new-dates/

I wonder how "the government will pay taxes instead of the business owners" as HE says...

Hotels in Siem Reap exempted from tax for 4 months to tackle tourist slowdown caused by COVID-19 outbreak

The government has decided to exempt all kinds of monthly taxes for hotel owners, and guesthouses in Siem Reap for four months, from February to May 2020, as a counter policy to the tourist slowdown caused by COVID-19 outbreak.

Announcing the measure at a press conference on the morning of 24 February 2020, Prime Minister Samdech HE addressed the issue of COVID-19 affecting tourism businesses in Siem Reap province; with the tax exemption policy providing relief for the tourism business to survive.

“The exemption applies to Siem Reap province only, and the government will pay taxes instead of the business owners,” said Samdech HE.
However, hotel and guesthouse owners still have the right to file their tax reports and use the online system as usual during the exemption period.

During the COVID-19 outbreak in China, the number of foreign tourists in Cambodia dropped by more than 60% while Chinese tourists fell by more than 90% in February 2020.

Source:
https://www.construction-property.com/h ... -4-months/

CDC Says Americans Should Brace for Significant Disruptions
Wednesday, 26 February 2020, 10:07 am
Article: Common Dreams

Public health experts on Tuesday began publicly discussing the coronavirus as a disease which is expected to spread across much of the world population, including throughout the United States.

The CDC issued a warning Tuesday that it expects the illness to spread in the U.S. and that Americans should prepare themselves for "significant disruption in their daily lives."

"Ultimately we expect we will see community spread in the United States," Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC told reporters. "It's not a question of if this will happen but when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illnesses. We are asking the American public to prepare for the expectation that this might be bad."

The warning came a day after The Atlantic published an article in which one scientist at Harvard University said Monday that containing coronavirus—which is officially known as COVID-19 and has infected more than 80,000 people and killed nearly 3,000 since it originated in Wuhan, China in December—may not be possible.

Although medical teams in China, Iran, Italy, and other countries where the virus has spread have worked for weeks to identify people with the respiratory illness, quarantine them, and stop them from spreading it to family members and friends, the virus could ultimately infect between 40 and 70% of the world population by the end of the year.

"I think the likely outcome is that it will ultimately not be containable," Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist, told The Atlantic.

Lipsitch emphasized that the disease is expected to spread in part because mild cases won't prevent people from going about their daily business, making it likely that they'll spread it. As with the current reported cases, many are expected to be asymptomatic.

The infection of up to 70% of humanity would still mean the likely deaths of millions of people, however, as Nils Gilman of the Berggruen Institute, an independent think tank, tweeted.

If 40-70% of humanity ends infected with covid-19 (of which 30-70% are asymptomatic), and the death rate (for the symptomatic) is 1-3%, then the total fatalities worldwide for coronavirus will be between 10m and 100m, and between 400k and 5m in the United States. https://t.co/j98Gk1dQtv
— Nils Gilman (@nils_gilman) February 22, 2020

Many of the people who have died of COVID-19 have been elderly or had underlying health conditions, but a number of people who have died in China were healthcare workers, including several who were young and otherwise healthy.

Thirty five COVID-19 cases have been reported in the U.S. as of Tuesday. Lipsitch estimated to The Atlantic that between 100 and 200 people in the country could actually be infected.

"That's all it would take to seed the disease widely," he told the outlet. "The rate of spread would depend on how contagious the disease is in milder cases."

The CDC plans to begin working with public health laboratories to screen people in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, and New York City, according to The Hill.

Meanwhile, climate campaigners linked the rapid and likely persistent spread of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases to the climate crisis and the heating of the planet.

"A warming climate will exacerbate the emergence of other novel infectious diseases in the future," wrote Wendell Chan, program officer for Friends of the Earth, in the South China Morning Post on Monday. "Rising global temperatures will shorten winter seasons—in 2019, Hong Kong experienced only three days when temperatures dropped to 12 degrees Celsius or below. Certain infectious diseases like dengue and malaria thrive better in warm temperatures."

"So long as people live close together and global travel is easy, disease outbreaks are unavoidable," Chan wrote. "The emergence and re-emergence of infectious disease is, however, just one of the many health risks that climate change will bring about."

Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO2002/ ... ptions.htm

Dow falls more than 4% amid coronavirus stock rout

3 hours ago

Financial markets suffered a sixth day of losses on Thursday, as traders dumped shares on fears that the spread of coronavirus will hobble the global economy.

In the US, the Dow Jones plunged nearly 1,200 points to lose 4.4%. It was the sharpest points-drop in history.

The S&P 500 ended 4.4% lower, while the Nasdaq dropped 4.6%.

Earlier, London's FTSE 100 finished 3.5% lower, while Japan's Nikkei 225 led Asian losses, falling more than 2%.

The string of declines has pushed indexes in Europe and the US down more than 10% from their recent highs - sending them into so-called "correction" territory.

The tumult comes as the coronavirus, which started in China, spreads rapidly around the world, restricting travel, upending global supply chains and prompting shoppers in some countries to stay home.

"Markets move sharply when fear and uncertainty are prevalent, and there is plenty of both right now," said Greg McBride, chief financial analyst for Bankrate.com.

Indexes in the US and London were poised for their the biggest weekly losses since the 2008 financial crisis, as the Dow retreated to levels last seen in August.

Investors rushed into less risky investments, such as government debt, sending bond yields to record lows.

Globally, the share price declines of the last six days have wiped out more than $3.6tn (£2.8tn) in value.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51664652

Im in Pattaya now and there is nobody lining up to take a boat trip , only one or two parasailing not hundreds, the locals must be feeling it.