Tag Archives: global pandemic

Michael Snyder: A world of chaos and 50 things that you should stock up on

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Important Takeaways:

  • Are you getting prepared? Right now, millions of Americans are stockpiling food and supplies in anticipation of what they believe is coming.  People are on edge due to the approaching election, the rapidly escalating war in the Middle East, the alarming natural disasters that we have been witnessing all around the world, and the potential for another great global pandemic.  In all my years, I have never seen more concern about the next 12 months as I am seeing at this moment.  There is a growing consensus that major history changing events are about to happen, and there are lots and lots of people that want to be well prepared.  In fact, Newsweek has reported that “doomsday prepping” has become a 2.46 billion dollar industry…
  • If you really want to be well prepared, you should consider everything that you will need if there is no power and you can no longer get anything from the stores because supply chains have completely broken down.
  • I have shared a list of 50 basic things that I believe that everyone should be stockpiling in a couple of my books, and today I would like to share that list with all of you…
  • #1 A Conventional Generator And A Solar Generator
  • #2 A Berkey Water Filter
  • #3 A Rainwater Collection System If You Do Not Have A Natural Supply Of Water Near Your Home
  • #4 A Large Emergency Medical Kit
  • #5 Rice
  • #6 Pasta
  • #7 Canned Soup
  • #8 Canned Vegetables
  • #9 Canned Fruit
  • #10 Canned Chicken
  • #11 Jars Of Peanut Butter
  • #12 Salt
  • #13 Sugar
  • #14 Powdered Milk
  • #15 Bags Of Flour
  • #16 Yeast
  • #17 Lots Of Extra Coffee (If You Drink It)
  • #18 Buckets Of Long-Term Storable Food
  • #19 Lots Of Extra Vitamins
  • #20 Lighters Or Matches
  • #21 Candles
  • #22 Flashlights Or Lanterns
  • #23 Plenty Of Wood To Burn
  • #24 Extra Blankets
  • #25 Extra Sleeping Bags
  • #26 Ammunition
  • #27 Extra Fans If You Live In A Hot Climate
  • #28 Hand Sanitizer
  • #29 Toilet Paper
  • #30 Extra Soap And Shampoo
  • #31 Extra Toothpaste
  • #32 Extra Razors
  • #33 Bottles Of Bleach
  • #34 A Battery-Powered Radio
  • #35 Extra Batteries
  • #36 Solar Chargers
  • #37 Trash Bags
  • #38 Tarps
  • #39 A Pocket Knife
  • #40 A Hammer
  • #41 An Axe
  • #42 A Shovel
  • #43 Work Gloves
  • #44 Lots Of Warm Socks
  • #45 Seeds For A Garden
  • #46 Canning Jars
  • #47 Extra Supplies For Your Pets
  • #48 A Substantial Emergency Supply Of Cash
  • #49 Bibles For Every Member Of Your Family
  • #50 A “Bug Out Bag” For Every Member Of Your Family

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WHO Pushes to Seal Global Pandemic Treaty

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Important Takeaways:

  • The World Health Organization’s (W.H.O.) drive to seal a global pandemic treaty will conclude Friday after weeks of closed-door talks in Geneva, Switzerland.
  • Critics have already accused the organization of bureaucratic overreach in pushing to seize control of how the world responds to any future pandemic along the lines of the coronavirus outbreak.
  • The main disputes revolve around issues of access and equity: access to pathogens detected within countries, and access to pandemic-fighting products such as vaccines derived from that knowledge.
  • Other tricky topics are sustainable financing, pathogen surveillance, supply chains, and the equitable distribution of not only tests, treatments and jabs, but also the means to produce them.

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Michele Bachmann gives a time table of the Process of Nation-states giving over sovereignty to the World Health Organization

Luke 21:11 There will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences. And there will be terrors and great signs from heaven.

Important Takeaways:

  • Michele Bachmann reports directly from WHO World Health Assembly in Geneva: ‘No dissent registered by any nation thus far to proposed amendments nor to global pandemic treaty’
  • Former Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann is in Geneva this week as part of a small team of prayer warriors interceding for the very serious situation in which the world finds itself. We are on the brink of a major historical event in which power is in the process of shifting from nation-states to international bodies affiliated with the United Nations. It’s that process and how to accomplish it that’s being discussed right now at the 76th annual World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland.
  • Bachmann will be monitoring the proceedings regarding major amendments to the International Health Regulations (last amended in 2005) as well as an all-new pandemic accord that would shift massive amounts of power from national governments over to the United Nations World Health Organization and its director general.
  • Bachmann stated in a text message that the WHO’s 194 member nations will take a final vote on whether to hand over their sovereignty to the WHO one year from today at the 77th World Health Assembly in May 2024.
  • “That vote will be on the package of 300 amendments supplanting (changing) the current International Health Rules,” she said. “The delegates will also vote on the global pandemic health treaty/accord.”
  • Those two documents will be synthesized and coordinated and will be voted on at the same event in Geneva in May 2024, Bachmann explained.
  • “There was no dissent registered by any nation thus far at the World Health Assembly 2023 to either the proposed 300 amendments nor to the global pandemic treaty,” she said. “It is a unified voice of support for passage of the amendments and the proposed pandemic treaty.”
  • She further stated that a U.S. delegate to the Assembly (there are many alternates listed) spoke today, May 23, in favor of passing the package of proposed international health amendments and the global pandemic accords.
  • Barring intervention, the timetable and agenda are in place for passage in May 2024.
  • “Nations will negotiate and will discuss the proposed 300 amendments and pandemic treaty in New York City at the UN General Assembly meeting in September 2023,” Bachmann said. “The final package of amendments will be presented to the UN in January 2024, meaning the amendments and treaty will not be altered after that date.”
  • She further stated that, “The delegates plan to return to Geneva in February 2024 to discuss and finalize their plans before the final vote one year from now at the 77th World Health Assembly at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, May 2024.”

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Austria locks down, Merkel says new steps needed, as Europe faces COVID freeze

By Francois Murphy and Maria Sheahan

VIENNA/BERLIN (Reuters) -Austria became on Monday the first country in western Europe to reimpose lockdown since vaccines were rolled out, shutting non-essential shops, bars and cafes as surging caseloads raised the prospect of a third winter in deep freeze for the continent.

Germany will also need tighter restrictions to control a record-setting wave of infections, outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel was quoted as saying, remarks that erased gains on European stock markets and sent bond yields down.

With Europe once again the epicenter of the global pandemic, new restrictions and vaccine mandates are expected to spread nearly two years after the first COVID-19 case was identified in China.

“We are in a highly dramatic situation. What is in place now is not sufficient,” Merkel told leaders of her German CDU party in a meeting, according to two participants, confirming comments first reported by Bloomberg.

Austria told people to work from home if they can, and shut cafes, restaurants, bars, theatres and non-essential shops for 10 days. People may leave home for a limited number of reasons, such as going to workplaces, buying essentials or taking a walk.

The Austrian government has also announced it will make it compulsory to get inoculated as of Feb. 1. Many Austrians are skeptical about vaccinations, a view encouraged by the far-right Freedom Party, the third biggest in parliament.

“It’s like a luxury prison. It’s definitely limited freedom and for me it’s not great psychologically,” said Sascha Iamkovyi, a 43-year-old entrepreneur in the food sector, describing his return to lockdown on a chilly, overcast day in an unusually quiet Vienna.

“People were promised that if they got vaccinated they would be able to lead a normal life, but now that’s not true.”

The return of severe government restrictions in Austria had already brought about 40,000 protesters to Vienna’s streets on Saturday, and protests turned to violence in Brussels and across the Netherlands over the weekend.

The Czech Republic and Slovakia banned unvaccinated people from services including pubs from Monday.

Around a third of Austrians are unvaccinated, one of the highest rates in western Europe, and authorities mainly blame the unvaccinated for the current COVID wave, though protection from vaccines given early this year is also waning. Inoculation greatly reduces the risk of serious illness or death, and reduces but does not prevent viral transmission or re-infection.

Austria’s conservative-led government imposed a lockdown on the unvaccinated last week, but daily infections kept rising far above the previous peak, requiring this week’s full lockdown.

In many parts of Germany, including its capital Berlin, Christmas markets opened for the first time in two years on Monday. But states bordering Austria and the Czech Republic that have Germany’s highest case numbers have introduced stricter rules, cancelling Christmas markets, barring the unvaccinated from restaurants and bars and imposing curfews at night.

WATER CANNON AND TEAR GAS

Eastern European countries where vaccination rates are even lower have been experiencing some of the highest death tolls per capita in the world, with hospitals becoming overrun in countries such as Bulgaria and Romania.

In cities across the Netherlands, riots broke out as police clashed with mobs of angry youths who set fires and threw rocks to protest at COVID-19 restrictions. More than 100 people were arrested during three nights of violence, which saw police open fire at rioters in Rotterdam on Friday.

Police and protesters clashed in the streets of Brussels on Sunday, with officers firing water cannon and tear gas at demonstrators throwing rocks and smoke bombs.

In France, proof of vaccination or a recent negative test is required to go to restaurants and cinemas. President Emmanuel Macron said last week more lockdowns were not needed.

But violence erupted last week in the French Caribbean region of Guadeloupe amid protests over COVID-19 restrictions such as the mandatory vaccines for health workers.

Police have arrested at least 38 people and dozens of stores have been looted. Macron said on Monday the protests had created a “very explosive” situation as a general strike entered a second week on Monday and many stores remained shuttered.

(Additonal reporting by Jason Hovet and Jan Lopatka; Writing by Nick MacfieEditing by Alison Williams, Mark Heinrich and Peter Graff)

Data withheld from WHO team probing COVID-19 origins in China: Tedros

By Stephanie Nebehay and John Miller

GENEVA/ZURICH (Reuters) – Data was withheld from World Health Organization investigators who travelled to China to research the origins of the coronavirus epidemic, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Tuesday.

The United States, the European Union and other Western countries immediately called for China to give “full access” to independent experts to all data about the original outbreak in late 2019.

In its final report, written jointly with Chinese scientists, a WHO-led team that spent four weeks in and around Wuhan in January and February said the virus had probably been transmitted from bats to humans through another animal, and that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely” as a cause.

One of the team’s investigators has already said China refused to give raw data on early COVID-19 cases to the WHO-led team, potentially complicating efforts to understand how the global pandemic began.

“In my discussions with the team, they expressed the difficulties they encountered in accessing raw data,” Tedros said. “I expect future collaborative studies to include more timely and comprehensive data sharing.”

The inability of the WHO mission to conclude yet where or how the virus began spreading in people means that tensions will continue over how the pandemic started – and whether China has helped efforts to find out or, as the United States has alleged, hindered them.

“The international expert study on the source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was significantly delayed and lacked access to complete, original data and samples,” Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Israel, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Korea, Slovenia, Britain, the United States and the European Union said in a joint statement.

“NOT EXTENSIVE ENOUGH”

Although the team concluded that a leak from a Wuhan laboratory was the least likely hypothesis for the virus that causes COVID-19, Tedros said the issue required further investigation, potentially with more missions to China.

“I do not believe that this assessment was extensive enough,” he told member states in remarks released by the WHO. “Further data and studies will be needed to reach more robust conclusions.”

The WHO team’s leader, Peter Ben Embarek, told a press briefing it was “perfectly possible” the virus had been circulating in November or October 2019 around Wuhan, and so potentially spreading abroad earlier than documented so far.

“We got access to quite a lot of data in many different areas, but of course there were areas where we had difficulties getting down to the raw data and there are many good reasons for that,” he said, citing privacy laws and other restrictions.

Second phase studies were required, Ben Embarek added.

He said the team had felt political pressure, including from outside China, but that he had never been pressed to remove anything from its final report.

Dominic Dwyer, an Australian expert on the mission, said he was satisfied there was “no obvious evidence” of a problem at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The European Union called the study “an important first step” but renewed criticisms that the origin study had begun too late, that experts had been kept out of China for too long, and that access to data and early samples had fallen short.

In a statement, Walter Stevens, EU ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, called for further study with “timely access to relevant locations and to all relevant human, animal and environmental data available”.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay, John Miller and Emma Farge; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Kevin Liffey)

Exclusive: Regular booster vaccines are the future in battle with COVID-19 virus, top genome expert says

By Guy Faulconbridge

CAMBRIDGE, England (Reuters) – Regular booster vaccines against the novel coronavirus will be needed because of mutations that make it more transmissible and better able to evade human immunity, the head of Britain’s effort to sequence the virus’s genomes told Reuters.

The novel coronavirus, which has killed 2.65 million people globally since it emerged in China in late 2019, mutates around once every two weeks, slower than influenza or HIV, but enough to require tweaks to vaccines.

Sharon Peacock, who heads COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) which has sequenced nearly half of all the novel coronavirus genomes so far mapped globally, said international cooperation was needed in the “cat and mouse” battle with the virus.

“We have to appreciate that we were always going to have to have booster doses; immunity to coronavirus doesn’t last forever,” Peacock told Reuters at the non-profit Wellcome Sanger Institute’s 55-acre campus outside Cambridge.

“We already are tweaking the vaccines to deal with what the virus is doing in terms of evolution – so there are variants arising that have a combination of increased transmissibility and an ability to partially evade our immune response,” she said.

Peacock said she was confident regular booster shots – such as for influenza – would be needed to deal with future variants but that the speed of vaccine innovation meant those shots could be developed at pace and rolled out to the population.

COG-UK was set up by Peacock, a professor at Cambridge, exactly a year ago with the help of the British’s government’s chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, as the virus spread across the globe to Britain.

The consortium of public health and academic institutions is now the world’s deepest pool of knowledge about the virus’s genetics: At sites across Britain, it has sequenced 349,205 genomes of the virus out of a global effort of around 778,000 genomes.

On the intellectual frontline at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, hundreds of scientists – many with PhDs, many working on a voluntary basis and some listening to heavy metal or electronic beats – work seven days a week to map the virus’s growing family tree for patterns of concern.

Wellcome Sanger Institute has sequenced over half of the UK total sequenced genomes of the virus after processing 19 million samples from PCR tests in a year. COG-UK is sequencing around 30,000 genomes per week – more than the UK used to do in a year.

MUTATION LEADERBOARD

Three main coronavirus variants – which were first identified in Britain (known as B.1.1.7), Brazil (known as P1) and South Africa (known as B.1.351) – are under particular scrutiny.

Peacock said she was most worried about B.1.351.

“It is more transmissible, but it also has a change in a gene mutation, which we refer to as E484K, which is associated with reduced immunity – so our immunity is reduced against that virus,” Peacock said.

With 120 million cases of COVID-19 around the world, it is getting hard to keep track of all the alphabet soup of variants, so Peacock’s teams are thinking in terms of “constellations of mutations”.

“So a constellation of mutations would be like a leaderboard if you like – which mutations in the genome that we’re particularly concerned about, the E484K is must be one of the top of the leaderboard,” she said.

“So we’re developing our thinking around that leaderboard to think, regardless of the background and lineage, about what mutations or constellation of mutations are going to be important biologically and different combinations that may have slightly different biological effects.”

Peacock, though, warned of humility in the face of a virus that has brought so much death and economic destruction.

“One of the things that the virus has taught me is that I can be wrong quite regularly – I have to be quite humble in the face of a virus that we know very little about still,” she said.

“There may be a variant out there that we haven’t even discovered yet.”

There will, though, be future pandemics.

“I think its inevitable that we will have another virus emerge that is of concern. What I hope is that having learned what we have in this global pandemic, that we will be better prepared to detect it and contain it.”

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Kate Holton and Philippa Fletcher)

Global coronavirus deaths top half a million

By Jane Wardell and Cate Cadell

SYDNEY/BEIJING (Reuters) – The death toll from COVID-19 surpassed half a million people on Sunday, according to a Reuters tally, a grim milestone for the global pandemic that seems to be resurgent in some countries even as other regions are still grappling with the first wave.

The respiratory illness caused by the new coronavirus has been particularly dangerous for the elderly, although other adults and children are also among the 501,000 fatalities and 10.1 million reported cases.

While the overall rate of death has flattened in recent weeks, health experts have expressed concerns about record numbers of new cases in countries like the United States, India and Brazil, as well as new outbreaks in parts of Asia.

More than 4,700 people are dying every 24 hours from COVID-19-linked illness, according to Reuters calculations based on an average from June 1 to 27.

That equates to 196 people per hour, or one person every 18 seconds.

About one-quarter of all the deaths so far have been in the United States, the Reuters data shows. The recent surge in cases has been most pronounced in a handful of Southern and Western states that reopened earlier and more aggressively. U.S. officials on Sunday reported around 44,700 new cases and 508 additional deaths.

Case numbers are also growing swiftly in Latin America, on Sunday surpassing those diagnosed in Europe, making the region the second most affected by the pandemic, after North America.

On the other side of the world, Australian officials were considering reimposing social distancing measures in some regions on Monday after reporting the biggest one-day rise in infections in more than two months.

The first recorded death from the new virus was on Jan. 9, a 61-year-old man from the Chinese city of Wuhan who was a regular shopper at a wet market that has been identified as the source of the outbreak.

In just five months, the COVID-19 death toll has overtaken the number of people who die annually from malaria, one of the most deadly infectious diseases.

The death rate averages out to 78,000 per month, compared with 64,000 AIDS-related deaths and 36,000 malaria deaths, according to 2018 figures from the World Health Organization.

CHANGING BURIAL RITES

The high number of deaths has led to changes to traditional and religious burial rites around the world, with morgues and funeral businesses overwhelmed and loved ones often barred from bidding farewell in person.

In Israel, the custom of washing the bodies of Muslim deceased is not permitted, and instead of being shrouded in cloth, they must be wrapped in a plastic body bag. The Jewish tradition of Shiva where people go to the home of mourning relatives for seven days has also been disrupted.

In Italy, Catholics have been buried without funerals or a blessing from a priest. In New York, city crematories were at one point working overtime, burning bodies into the night as officials scouted for temporary interment sites.

In Iraq, former militiamen have dropped their guns to instead dig graves for coronavirus victims at a specially created cemetery. They have learned how to conduct Christian, as well as Muslim, burials.

ELDERLY AT RISK

Public health experts are looking at how demographics affect the death rates in different regions. Some European countries with older populations have reported higher fatality rates, for instance.

An April report by the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control looked at more than 300,000 cases in 20 countries and found that about 46% of all fatalities were over the age of 80.

In Indonesia, hundreds of children are believed to have died, a development health officials have attributed to malnutrition, anemia and inadequate child health facilities.

Health experts caution that the official data likely does not tell the full story, with many believing that both cases and deaths have likely been under reported in some countries.

(Reporting by Jane Wardell in Sydney and Cate Cadell in Beijing; Editing by Tiffany Wu and Daniel Wallis)

U.S. coronavirus deaths exceed 75,000: Reuters tally

By Lisa Shumaker

(Reuters) – U.S. deaths from the novel coronavirus topped 75,000 deaths on Thursday, according to a Reuters tally, after the White House shelved a step-by-step guide prepared by health officials to help states safely reopen.

Deaths in the United States, the epicenter of the global pandemic, have averaged 2,000 a day since mid-April despite efforts to slow the outbreak.

The death toll is higher than any fatalities from the seasonal flu going back to 1967 and represents more U.S. deaths than during the first 10 years of the AIDS epidemic, from 1981 to 1991.

U.S. cases are over 1.25 million as new infections continue to rise in many states, including Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin, according to a Reuters tally and an analysis of historical data from the COVID Tracking Project. New York and New Jersey, the two states with the highest number of cases, have been experiencing declines in new positive cases in recent weeks.

Some health experts are predicting a resurgence in deaths later this summer as U.S. states lift stay-at-home orders and Americans begin eating out at restaurants and going to gyms again.

A University of Washington research model often cited by White House officials earlier this week nearly doubled its projected U.S. death toll to over 134,000 by Aug. 4.

An internal Trump administration forecast predicted a surge in fatalities to 3,000 a day by the end of May.

States are eager to reopen due to surging unemployment rates. About 33.5 million people have filed claims for unemployment benefits since March 21, roughly 22.1% of the working-age population.

A 17-page document prepared by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was shelved to avoid giving “overly prescriptive” guidance, said a member of President Donald Trump’s White House task force.

(Writing by Lisa Shumaker; Additional reporting by Christine Chan in New York; Editing by Howard Goller)

A day in the life of an Amazon courier on the frontlines of the U.S. pandemic

By Nathan Frandino and Shannon Stapleton

DUBLIN, Calif. (Reuters) – Excelso Sabulao delivers groceries for Amazon.com Inc in California so he can help provide his parents an income. Now, with endless interactions at stores and at homes during a pandemic, he worries his work will kill them.

“I’m just putting my faith in God that, you know, somehow while doing this, I’m going to be spared,” he said. “Once I get it, I’m going to spread it at home. And you know, it’s like bringing (a) death sentence to my parents.”

Sabulao, 35, is one of countless Amazon contractors shuttling food and staples that consumers depend on to their doorsteps, with nearly all of the U.S. population under government stay-at-home orders. Yet he and other drivers say they feel short-changed by Amazon for not giving them more pay or protections, as frontline workers in a global pandemic.

On Monday morning, Sabulao commuted about an hour to Dublin, a city in the San Francisco Bay Area, to pick up grocery orders from Amazon-owned Whole Foods. He lives in Stockton with his mother, who suffered a mild stroke three years ago, and his father, who is on a virus-related leave from Walmart Inc. For Sabulao, taking care of his parents – vulnerable to the effects of the coronavirus, he said – is part of Filipino culture.

Donning a white face mask, Sabulao towed two shopping carts overflowing with brown paper bags that were stamped with a logo for Amazon’s loyalty club Prime. He started loading his car in a parking spot for Amazon Flex, a program that lets contractors like himself sign up for delivery times with their own vehicles. He quickly filled up the trunk and began lining bags and other packages along the back seat of his car.

The harrowing part of the shift was over. What Sabulao had feared most, he said, was having to fetch those orders from the Whole Foods staging area where other drivers stood side by side, disregarding health officials’ recommendation to stay 6 feet (1.8 meters) apart. Sabulao had to open the same storage coolers that they did, and he generally has no time to use a wipe, he said.

“It’s making me paranoid,” said Sabulao. “You’re handling stuff that other people already put their hands into, and maybe if they have coughed – I don’t know.”

Amazon said gloves, masks and sanitizer are available at the Dublin Whole Foods store and across its facilities. “We remain committed to keeping our teams healthy and safe,” the company said, adding that it was requiring social distancing among staff and telling delivery workers to stay further apart from customers.

Sabulao took off his mask and started driving. At his destination, he scanned a code on grocery packages using his smartphone and took those to the shopper’s doorstep.

He has wanted to minimize customer contact as much as possible. Amazon’s app lets him text shoppers to inquire where to leave the items and share his estimated time of arrival.

Still, across 21 deliveries Monday, there was no avoiding face time. One woman was in her driveway when Sabulao arrived, so he put the groceries down next to her car. At another home, a customer opened the door, got on her knees and started wiping down the items she had ordered.

The work at times has been worth the trouble. Sabulao recalled how around the start of the pandemic, one shopper’s generous tip bumped his $10 pay up to $83 for a delivery that lasted less than 30 minutes. He earned $289 in over seven hours Monday, more than half of which came from tips. Earning $200 is typical for that amount of time, he said.

Increasingly he feels the reward is changing. Now rare surge pay for warehouse deliveries means he may make less than before, and he fears his personal supply of wipes will run out. He wishes Amazon would give him and other contractors sanitizer.

“We’re risking our lives, literally, risking our life delivering packages,” he said. But quitting is not an option.

“I have bills to pay. That’s it,” he said.

(Reporting by Nathan Frandino and Shannon Stapleton in Dublin, California; Writing and additional reporting by Jeffrey Dastin; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

Virus fight at risk as world’s medical glove capital struggles with lockdown

By Liz Lee and Krishna N. Das

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) – Disposable rubber gloves are indispensable in the global fight against the new coronavirus, yet a month’s lockdown in stricken Malaysia where three of every five gloves are made has upended the supply chain and threatens to hamstring hospitals worldwide.

The world’s biggest maker of medical gloves by volume, Top Glove Corp Bhd, has the capacity to make 200 million gloves a day, but a supplier shutdown has left it with only two weeks’ worth of boxes to ship them in, its founder told Reuters.

“We can’t get our gloves to hospitals without cartons,” Executive Chairman Lim Wee Chai said in an interview. “Hospitals need our gloves. We can’t just supply 50% of their requirement.”

The virus, which emerged in China at the end of last year, has left Malaysia with the highest number of infections in Southeast Asia at nearly 1,800 cases, with 17 deaths. To halt transmission, the government has ordered people to stay home from March 18 to April 14.

Glove makers and others eligible for exemption can operate half-staffed provided they meet strict safety conditions. Still, the Malaysian Rubber Glove Manufacturers Association (MARGMA) said it was lobbying “almost every hour” to return the industry to full strength to minimize risk to the global fight.

“We’re shut down,” said Evonna Lim, managing director at packaging supplier Etheos Imprint Technology. “We fall under an exempted category but still need approval.”

Dr Celine Gounder, an infectious diseases specialist at the New York University School of Medicine, said she was using up to six times as many gloves as normal each day due to the number of patients with COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus.

“If we get to the point where there is a shortage of gloves, that’s going to be a huge problem because then we cannot draw blood safely, we cannot do many medical procedures safely.”

GLOBAL CALL

With glove supplies dwindling, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on its website this month said some gloves could be used beyond their designated shelf life. On Tuesday, the United States lifted a ban on imports from Malaysian glove maker WRP Asia Pacific who it had previously accused of using forced labor.

Britain’s Department of Health & Social Care has urged Malaysian authorities to prioritize the production and shipment of gloves that are of “utmost criticality for fighting COVID-19,” showed a letter dated March 20 to glove maker Supermax Corp and shared with Reuters.

MARGMA is considering rationing due to the “extremely high demand,” its president Denis Low told Reuters. “You can produce as many gloves as you can but then there’s nothing to pack them into.”

Under normal circumstances, Top Glove can meet less than 40% of its own packaging needs. For the remainder, it said just 23% of suppliers have gained approval to operate at half strength.

“We are lobbying almost every hour, we are putting in a lot of letters to the ministry,” said Low. “We are lobbying hard for the chemical suppliers and we want to ensure that the printers are also being given approval and any other supporting services, even transportation.”

In a statement, MARGMA said that as they were having to rely on half of their staff to work overtime during the lockdown, costs would rise by up to 30% and that buyers had agreed to bear that.

Malaysia’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry on Tuesday said it had received masses of applications to operate through the lockdown, and that it was seeking cooperation from industries to give way to those producing essential goods.

AUTOMATION

Developed economies are home to only a fifth of the world’s population yet account for nearly 70% medical glove demand due to stringent medical standards. At 150, U.S. glove consumption per-capita is 20 times that of China, latest MARGMA data showed.

MARGMA expects demand to jump 16% to 345 billion gloves this year, with Malaysia’s market share rising two percentage points to 65%. Thailand usually follows at about 18% and China at 9%.

Top Glove said orders have doubled since February and it sees sales rising by a fifth in the next six months. Its stock, with a market value of about $3.5 billion, has risen by a third this year versus a fall of 16% in the wider market.

The company, with customers in 195 economies, registered the highest net money inflow last week among listed Malaysian firms, along with peer Hartalega Holdings Bhd, showed MIDF Research data. Other glove makers include Kossan Rubber Industries Bhd and Careplus Group Bhd.

“We are fortunate enough to be in essential goods,” said Lim. “These few months and at least the next six months will be an all-time high in terms of sales volume, revenue and profit.”

With more than 80% of its 44 factories worldwide automated, Top Glove itself is less impacted by the lockdown than its more labor-intensive domestic suppliers. Packaging woes aside, however, ramping up production could turn under-supply into over-supply when the coronavirus outbreak finally subsides.

“This outbreak will create awareness and make humankind healthier,” said Lim. “People will pay more attention, they will invest more, they will buy more so demand will be more.”

(Reporting by Liz Lee and Krishna N. Das; Additional reporting by Ebrahim Harris and Daveena Kaur; Editing by Christopher Cushing)