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FILE PHOTO: People sit in the arrivals section of the international terminal of Kingsford Smith International Airport in Sydney, Australia, March 21, 2020. REUTERS/Loren Elliott - 

Australia imposed new restrictions on Saturday (Nov 27) on people who have been to nine southern African countries, as the new Omicron variant of COVID-19 raises concerns about another wave of the pandemic.

The countries are South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini, the Seychelles, Malawi and Mozambique.

Effective immediately, the government will ban non-citizens who have been in those countries from entering and will require supervised 14-day quarantines for Australian citizens and their dependents returning from the countries, said Health Minister Greg Hunt.

These restrictions also apply to people such as international students and skilled migrants arriving from countries with which Australia has travel bubbles, who have been in any of the nine countries within the past 14 days.

"If the medical evidence shows that further actions are required, we will not hesitate to take them. And that may involve strengthening or expanding the restrictions," he said.

Anyone who has already arrived in Australia and who has been in any of those countries within the past 14 days must immediately isolate and be tested.

The Australian government will also suspend all flights from the nine southern African countries for two weeks.

Twenty travellers from South Africa are in quarantine in the Northern Territory's Howard Springs facility, 19 of whom have returned negative coronavirus tests. It is not yet known if the one positive test result is the Omicron variant, Hunt said.

The discovery of the variant - which has a spike protein dramatically different from the one that existing vaccines are based on - triggered global alarm on Friday as countries rushed to suspend travel from southern Africa and stock markets suffered their biggest falls in more than a year.

Australia early this month eased its international border restrictions for the first time during the pandemic allowing fully vaccinated residents to return to the country without quarantine after higher vaccination levels.

Australia had largely stamped out infections for most of this year until an outbreak of the highly infectious Delta variant in late June spread rapidly across its east. About 205,000 cases and 1,985 deaths have been recorded so far, lower than many other countries in the developed world//CNA

FILE PHOTO: A worker welds a bicycle steel rim at a factory manufacturing sports equipment in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, China September 2, 2019. China Daily via REUTERS/File Photo - 

Profits at China's industrial firms grew at a faster pace in October, the statistics bureau said on Saturday, providing a buffer for a faltering economy battered by soaring raw material prices.

Profits in October rose 24.6per cent from a year earlier to 818.7 billion yuan (US$128.1 billion), the official data showed, quickening from a 16.3per cent gain reported in September.

For the January-October period, industrial firms' profits rose 42.2per cent year-on-year to 7.2 trillion yuan, slower than a 44.7per cent rise in the first nine months of 2021.

The industrial profit data covers large firms with annual revenues of over 20 million yuan from their main operations.

Government efforts to ensure supply and stabilize prices helped companies mitigate difficulties, which in turned helped improve production conditions and profits, said Zhu Hong a senior statistician at the National Bureau of Statistics.

However, he said profit differentiation between upstream and downstream industries had not significantly improved, with downstream industries still facing pressures on their profitability.

Prices in China have surged amid a power crunch and Beijing has been trying to cool a red-hot market for coal, the country's main fuel for power generation.

However, an official from China's state planner said last Sunday that "energy prices including, coal prices have fallen significantly" and have pushed down prices for steel, aluminium, pulp, PVC and coal chemical products.

The world's second-largest economy staged an impressive rebound from last year's pandemic slump, but has since lost momentum as it grapples with a slowing manufacturing sector, debt problems in the property market and COVID-19 outbreaks.

China's industrial output grew faster than expected in October but remained the second lowest print this year.

On Friday, China's Ministry of Industry and Information (MIIT) Technology held a meeting with representatives from industry associations and companies including Aluminium Corp of China and China Minmetals Corp to discuss issues in the raw materials industry, it said in a Saturday statement. 

The development of the upstream and downstream should be better coordinated to ensure the stability of the supply chain, and the industry's risk response capabilities should be strengthened to prevent "grey rhino" and "black swan" incidents, it quoted MIIT vice minister Wang Jiangping as saying.

The industrial profit data covers large firms with annual revenues of over 20 million yuan from their main operations//CNA

FILE PHOTO: A sign of the 12th Ministerial Conference (MC12) is pictured at the World Trade Organization (WTO) headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, November 25, 2021. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse - 

The World Trade Organization (WTO) became the first major diplomatic casualty of the new coronavirus variant on Friday (Nov 26) when it postponed its first ministerial meeting in four years due to the deteriorating health situation.

Ministers from WTO members were due to have gathered next week for a meeting widely seen as a test of the WTO's relevance.

The WTO said that its members had agreed late on Friday to postpone the ministerial conference after the new variant outbreak led to travel restrictions that would have prevented many ministers from reaching Geneva.

No new date has been set for a rescheduled meeting.

The World Health Organisation has classified the B11529 variant detected in South Africa as a "variant of concern", saying it may spread more quickly than other forms of the virus. Scientists are also seeking to find out if it is vaccine-resistant.

Switzerland, home to the WTO, on Friday banned direct flights from South Africa and the surrounding region, and imposed test and quarantine requirements on travel from other countries, including Belgium, Hong Kong and Israel.

The Geneva-based trade body had planned a meeting in person, but the new restrictions meant delegations of large players such as South Africa and the Brussels-based European Commission would have been limited to a largely virtual presence.

Even before the postponement the prospects were not bright.

The WTO has only managed one update of its global rules in its near 27-year history, the red tape-cutting Trade Facilitation Agreement, and its 164 members looked far from agreement in its most active talks - on curbing fishing subsidies and spreading COVID-19 vaccines more widely.

India, South Africa and other developing countries are calling for a waiver of intellectual property (IP) rights for vaccines and other COVID-19 treatments. US President Joe Biden said on Friday he supported a waiver for vaccines.

WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said the postponement did not mean negotiations should stop.

"On the contrary, delegations in Geneva should be fully empowered to close as many gaps as possible. This new variant reminds us once again of the urgency of the work we are charged with," she said in a statement.

Santiago Wills, the Colombian WTO ambassador who chairs the fishing subsidy talks, said the news was "deflating, to say the least", but pledged to keep working towards an agreement to save global fish stocks//CNA

People pull shopping carts as they walk past an information board, amid the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COV Britain, June 16, 2021. REUTERS/Phil Noble - 

The discovery of a new coronavirus variant named Omicron triggered global alarm on Friday (Nov 26) as countries rushed to suspend travel from southern Africa and stock markets on both sides of the Atlantic suffered their biggest falls in more than a year.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) said Omicron may spread more quickly than other forms, and preliminary evidence suggested there is an increased risk of reinfection.

Epidemiologists warned travel curbs may be too late to stop Omicron from circulating globally. The new mutations were first discovered in South Africa and have since been detected in Belgium, Botswana, Israel and Hong Kong.

The United States will restrict travel from South Africa and neighbouring countries effective Monday, a senior Biden administration official said.

Going further, Canada said it was closing its borders to those countries, following bans on flights announced by Britain, the European Union and others.

But it could take weeks for scientists to fully understand the variant's mutations and whether existing vaccines and treatments are effective against it. Omicron is the fifth variant of concern designated by the WHO.

The variant has a spike protein that is dramatically different than the one in the original coronavirus that vaccines are based on, the UK Health Security Agency said, raising fears about how current vaccines will fare.

Scientists issued similar warnings.

"This new variant of the COVID-19 virus is very worrying. It is the most heavily mutated version of the virus we have seen to date," said Lawrence Young, a virologist at Britain's University of Warwick.

"Some of the mutations that are similar to changes we've seen in other variants of concern are associated with enhanced transmissibility and with partial resistance to immunity induced by vaccination or natural infection."

Those worries pummelled financial markets, especially stocks of airlines and others in the travel sector, and oil, which tumbled by about US$10 a barrel.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 2.5 per cent, its worst day since late October 2020, and European stocks had their worst day in 17 months.

Several other countries including India, Japan, Israel, Turkey, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates also toughened travel curbs.

In Geneva the WHO - whose experts on Friday discussed the risks that the variant, called B.1.1.529, presents - had earlier warned against travel curbs for now.

"It's really important that there are no knee-jerk responses here," said the WHO's emergencies director Mike Ryan, praising South Africa's public health institutions for picking up the new variant of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

Richard Lessells, a South Africa-based infectious disease expert, also expressed frustration at travel bans, saying the focus should be on getting more people vaccinated in places that have struggled to access sufficient shots.

"This is why we talked about the risk of vaccine apartheid. This virus can evolve in the absence of adequate levels of vaccination," he told Reuters.

Less than 7per cent of people in low-income countries have received their first COVID-19 shot, according to medical and human rights groups. Meanwhile, many developed nations are giving third-dose boosters.

The coronavirus has swept the world in the two years since it was first identified in central China, infecting 260 million people and killing 5.4 million.

One epidemiologist in Hong Kong said it may be too late to tighten travel curbs against the latest variant.

"Most likely this virus is already in other places. And so if we shut the door now, it's going to be probably too late," said Ben Cowling of the University of Hong Kong.

Brazilian health regulator Anvisa recommended that travel be restricted from some African countries, but President Jair Bolsonaro appeared to dismiss such measures.

Bolsonaro has been widely criticised by public health experts for his management of the pandemic, railing against lockdowns and choosing not to get vaccinated. Brazil has the world's second-highest death toll from the virus, behind only the United States.

Discovery of the new variant comes as Europe and the United States enter winter, with more people gathering indoors in the run-up to Christmas, providing a breeding ground for infection.

Friday also marked the start of the holiday shopping period in the United States, but stores were less crowded than in years past.

Realtor Kelsey Hupp, 36, was at the Macy's department store in downtown Chicago on Black Friday.

"Chicago is pretty safe and masked and vaccinated. I got my booster so I'm not too concerned about it," she said//CNA