Bloomberg Businessweek-Asia Edition December 27, 2021

● Global coronavirus cases have topped 276 million, almost 5.4m people have died, and more than 8.8 billion vaccine doses have been given. ① In the U.S., the highly infectious omicron variant accounts for more than 73% of all new cases. ② The timing of this latest surge is quite bad for holiday travel: Scientists estimate air passengers are at least twice as susceptible to transmission. ③ The good news: A South African study showed there’s a much lower risk of hospitalization with the variant. ④ Nonetheless, January’s World Economic Forum in Davos has been canceled for a second year. It will now take place in early summer. ⑤ The Biden administration will get 4 million courses of Covid treatments by Jan. 31, including an antiviral from Pfizer that regulators just gave emergency authorization and…

Tempers flared the week before Christmas over “Build Back Better,” the Democrats’ stalled tax-and-spending plan, as talks between Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and President Joe Biden appeared to break down. After Manchin told Fox News on Dec. 19 that, despite numerous revisions intended to accommodate him, he still couldn’t support the measure, the White House said Manchin had reversed himself and insinuated that he wasn’t to be trusted. Now negotiations seem to have resumed, albeit with an added dose of acrimony. Manchin’s support is indispensable in a 50-50 Senate, with Republicans united against the legislation. Anyone who’s run a business knows that calling someone a liar isn’t a productive tactic during a difficult negotiation. (Experienced politicians should know that, too.) Yet despite this glitch, agreement remains feasible—and the right kind of…

A year into the Covid-19 vaccination campaign, the U.S. government still faces data shortcomings that cloud its vision of who’s getting vaccinated and at what rate. The record-time development of the shots was a (mostly) American triumph. Now vaccines are plentiful in the U.S. and offer meaningful protection for those who get them. But in another way the U.S. has lagged. America’s public-health authorities have struggled to monitor the rollout of vaccines and to track how effective they are. The most recent example: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been overcounting the number of Americans who’ve received at least one dose of vaccine. The agency’s data are far off from what many states have been reporting on their own, meaning there are millions more unvaccinated than its numbers show. That issue…

To his 80,000 YouTube subscribers, Indiana college student Carson Miller is a content creator who reviews drones. As the U.S. government sees it, Miller and thousands of other Americans who purchase drones built by Shenzhen-based SZ DJI Technology Co., may be unwittingly aiding Chinese intelligence agencies. Miller, who bought his first DJI model in 2016 for $500 and now owns six of them, illustrates why the Chinese company is the world’s leading dronemaker and controls more than half of the U.S. market. “If tomorrow DJI were completely banned,” Miller says, “I would be pretty frightened because I don’t know too many other great options.” Critics of DJI warn that the dronemaker may be channeling reams of sensitive data to Chinese intelligence agencies on everything from critical infrastructure like bridges and dams…

Since the beginning of the pandemic two years ago, global production of face masks has rocketed to 129 billion a month from just an estimated 8 billion in all of 2019. While they’ve helped protect humans from Covid-19, the masks—which today are mostly made from plastic fibers that can take hundreds of years to disintegrate—are a threat for creatures that dwell in streams, rivers, and oceans. Almost 1.6 billion of the face coverings likely ended up in the seas in 2020, based on a conservative assumption by the marine conservation nonprofit OceansAsia, which estimates about 3% of masks made that year ended up as litter. Out in the open, their fibers break up into microplastics that are impossible to collect far more quickly than plastic bags, making them a bigger…

Robot 509 from Starship Technologies is both patient and skittish. The autonomous machine, which resembles a Yeti cooler crossed with a Waymo minivan, moves around like a mammal near the bottom of the food chain. It freezes up in crowds and, even when utterly alone, scoots forward in halting spurts, seemingly suspicious of fallen leaves. A few days after Thanksgiving, Robot 509 ferries some cargo across the campus of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va. It stops on a deserted road, waiting for about a minute before finally scooting across, then trundles over a stretch of pavement and some railroad track before coming to a full stop. Rachael Haberstroh, a James Madison administrator whose office is a long walk from most of the campus’s cafes, comes over and taps on her phone.…