(Reuters) – Days after lifting its months-long lockdown, Shanghai will test most of its residents this weekend, while in Japan the country’s business community has sought to relax border controls amid easing restrictions.
DEATHS AND INFECTIONS
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ASIA-PACIFIC
* China’s commercial hub of Shanghai faces an unexpected round of mass COVID-19 testing for most residents this weekend — just 10 days after a city-wide lockdown was lifted — unsettling residents and raising concerns about the impact on business.
* Japan’s business community issued a joint statement seeking further relaxation of border controls, as the country begins a gradual easing of COVID-19 travel restrictions.
* The World Health Organization said its latest investigation into the origins of COVID-19 was inconclusive, largely because data from China is missing.
* North Korea reported 45,540 new people showing fever symptoms amid the isolated nation’s first confirmed COVID-19 outbreak, state media KCNA said. The media did not report whether there were any new deaths, however.
EUROPE
* Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Britain was out of sync with the other OECD countries’ growth cycles because the country emerged out of the pandemic first and had a faster recovery.
AMERICAS
* Pre-orders of vaccines for children under five years of age have been slow, but Biden administration senior officials say they are not alarmed and expect the pace to pick up after federal approvals later this month.
AFRICA & MIDDLE EAST
* COVID-19 vaccine maker BioNTech said construction of an mRNA vaccine factory to enable African nations to jump-start their own manufacturing network would start on June 23 in Rwanda.
MEDICAL DEVELOPMENTS
* Diabetes may increase the risk of long COVID, new analyses of seven previous studies have suggested.
ECONOMIC IMPACT
* Land demand from China’s developers mostly decreased in the first round of auctions held by major cities this year, with fewer cities seeing price gains, but sales in Shanghai rebounded following its exit from a lockdown.
(Compiled by Dina Kartit and Uttaresh.V; Edited by David Evans and Shounak Dasgupta)
