July 27
US President Joe Biden celebrated his recovery from COVID-19 on Wednesday with an appeal to Americans to get vaccinated and a comparison of his mild symptoms and work-from-home performance to the more serious case experienced by his predecessor.
DEATHS AND INFECTIONS
ASIA-PACIFIC
* China needs to rethink its zero-COVID policy to avoid more harm to the economy, as well as come up with a long-term solution to the crisis in the real estate sector, a senior IMF official said.
* Authorities in Macau reported no new COVID-19 infections on Wednesday for the first time since mid-June.
* A district in China's financial hub of Shanghai has ordered a three-day lockdown of some of its steel warehouses from July 26 after a residential neighborhood in the district was classified as high risk following the detection of a coronavirus case there.
* Toyota Motor suspended night shift operations at one production line of its Takaoka factory in central Japan because of a COVID-19 outbreak.
* New Zealand said new COVID-19 cases were trending down and it looked likely the country would avoid a feared worst-case scenario of 20,000 infections daily.
EUROPE
* British employers are their most pessimistic about hiring and investment since the depths of the coronavirus pandemic crisis due to surging inflation and an acute shortage of workers to fill jobs, a survey showed.
AMERICAS
* The U.S. Treasury said on Wednesday it will allow state, local and tribal governments more flexibility to use COVID-19 rescue funds to boost the supply of affordable housing, including permission to issue direct long-term project loans.
* The Pan American Health Organization said that nearly 5,300 monkeypox cases have so far been reported across 18 countries and territories in the Americas, with the majority in the United States, Canada and Brazil.
AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST
* The World Health Organization has confirmed two more cases of Marburg virus in Ghana, a senior WHO official said, two weeks after the country reported its first outbreak of the highly infectious Ebola-like disease.
MEDICAL DEVELOPMENTS
* Pfizer Inc PFE.N and its German partner BioNTech SE 22UAy.DE said they had started a mid-stage study of a modified COVID-19 vaccine which targets both the original as well as the BA.2 Omicron subvariant.
ECONOMIC IMPACT
* U.S. equities added sharply to gains while the dollar lost ground as investors bet that the Federal Reserve would slow interest rate hikes soon after it announced an increase in rates in line with expectations on Wednesday.
* The U.S. Treasury said that it will allow state, local and tribal governments more flexibility to use COVID-19 rescue funds to boost the supply of affordable housing.
* Thailand's economy improved in June and the momentum should continue into the second half thanks to increased tourism and domestic consumption as pandemic curbs ease.
