COVID-19
Finding community at a COVID-19 quarantine centre in Myanmar
In another world, I could have been checking into a hotel. Only instead of staff, two fellow COVID-19 patients welcomed me at the door, with a plastic box filled with toiletries, snacks and masks, and showed me to a small room I would share with another ...
Reuters
Anti-Myanmar hate speech flares in Thailand over virus
“Wherever you see Myanmar people, shoot them down,” read one Thai comment on YouTube after a surge of coronavirus cases among workers from Myanmar. The outbreak, first detected at a seafood market near Bangkok, has prompted a flare-up in such online hate speech as well as ...
Reporting by Shoon Naing in Yangon; Writing by Matthew Tostevin; Editing by Sam Holmes
A New Surge of COVID-19 Infections is an Undesirable "New Outbreak": PM Prayut
The Public Health Ministry has conceded a new round of widespread Covid-19 outbreaks has occurred in the country now as Bangkok has come up with proactive measures against the possible widespread outbreak in the city PM Prayut Chan-o-cha has posted on his official Facebook Page this ...
B.Tribune
Myanmar’s Jade Center Suspends Most Mining Amid Coronavirus Spike
The Myanmar government has suspended large-scale jade-mining activities in Kachin state, home to the world’s largest jade mine and a magnet for poor scavengers, until early next year in the face of surging coronavirus infections, the state’s natural resources minister said. Large-scale mining in Hpakant township, ...
Elizabeth Jangma for RFA’s Myanmar Service. Translated by Ye Kaung Myint Maung. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
Cambodian education in the time of Covid: Ripping up the textbook
Open, close, open, close – not the instructions for a particularly fiddly front door, rather it is the pattern that schools in Cambodia have followed as the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic continues to throw the system into limbo, forcing educators to rip up the textbook and adapt ...
ALEXI DEMETRIADI
China Building Massive Myanmar Border Wall: Reports
Reports have emerged that the Chinese government is constructive a 2,000-kilometer reinforced fence along its coiling border with Myanmar, following a spike in COVID-19 cases in the latter country. According to a report in Radio Free Asia (RFA), the giant undertaking has been codenamed the “Southern Great Wall” ...
Sebastian Strangio
How have Thailand and Cambodia kept Covid cases so low?
When the coronavirus first began to spread rapidly in the Chinese city of Wuhan, Thailand appeared especially vulnerable. It was the first country outside China to report a case of Covid-19, when, on 13 January, a 61-year-old woman from Wuhan was confirmed to have tested positive in ...
Rebecca Ratcliffe
Myanmar COVID-19 Vaccination Expected from April
Myanmar plans to start providing COVID-19 vaccines to about 20 percent of its 54.4 million population in April under the global Covax affordable medicines program, according to health minister Dr. Myint Htwe. Myanmar on Dec. 7 submitted its request to the Covax program at the World ...
NYEIN NYEIN
Covid Infections, and Blame, Rise Along Southeast Asian Borders
The border between Thailand and Myanmar is more than 1,500 miles long, much of it thickly forested. Myanmar has suffered runaway transmission of the coronavirus. Thailand, so far, has not. But over the past couple of weeks, at least 19 Covid-19 cases in Thailand have been ...
Hannah Beech
Covid exposing weakness, inequality of Thai education: World Bank
A new World Bank report links declining student performances in reading and stagnation in maths and science scores to inequality and inefficiency of investment across Thai schools. School closures due to the Covid-19 pandemic may accelerate these trends, warns the report released on Wednesday (December 9). ...
Wichit Chaitrong