Japan and South Korea take it slow with vaccines
Japan’s biggest cities are under a state of emergency as coronavirus deaths rise, and South Korea is prohibiting gatherings of five or more people to keep a recent surge under control. Hong Kong imposed stringent lockdowns on some of its poorest neighborhoods to stop an uptick.
And yet none of these places have begun to carry out the only solution that would put the pandemic behind them: vaccinations.
While China, India, the U.S. and many European nations have begun inoculating their populations, Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong have proceeded much more slowly. Japan will not even begin to vaccinate medical workers until the end of February. The same is true in South Korea, and those over 65 will not get shots until May. Hong Kong, a semiautonomous territory of China, will begin vaccinating “high risk” groups in the middle of February.
While they have a luxury of time that countries with high caseloads do not have, delays could hamper efforts to protect the public, especially with new variants in the mix and the constant threat of surges. On the plus side, these places may be able to learn from the mistakes of others.
Here are the latest updates and maps of the pandemic.
In other developments:
■ A team of World Health Organization experts investigating the origin of the pandemic has started its mission in Wuhan by visiting some of the places first hit by the coronavirus: a live animal market, a hospital and a disease control center in the Chinese city.
■ The pharmaceutical company BioNTech announced that it would make 75 million more doses available in the coming months to the European Union, where vaccinations have been lagging.
■ President Biden is meeting on Monday with a group of Republican senators who are pushing for a much smaller alternative to his $1.9 trillion stimulus bill to address the toll of the pandemic in the U.S.
■ The police in China have broken up a counterfeiting ring that they say manufactured and sold more than 3,000 fake coronavirus vaccines across the country, Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency, reported.
The New York Times