Transformer heat wave

By TikTok

Shawn Tan, economist from the World Bank’s Finance, Competitiveness and Innovation Global Practice, said the digital economy is becoming more important, especially amid the pandemic. “Digital technologies allow businesses to better adapt to the Covid-19 shock,” he said.

Vietnam’s economic transition from a middle-income to high-income economy requires growth based on labor productivity. Digital technology will be a tool for Vietnam to speed up corporate productivity, improve adaptability and develop new businesses.

Digital technology reduces information and transaction costs and provides goods and services more efficiently, with better quality and a larger customer base and new markets.

“Vietnam has a lot of potential to use the recovery process as an inflection point towards a model of greener, inclusive and competitive growth driven by innovation,” said Shawn Tan.

A report from a World Bank survey in Vietnam shows that, in 2020, about 48% of Vietnamese businesses turned to digital platforms in response to the pandemic. This increased to 59% in October 2020. Meanwhile, only 5% of firms invested in digital solutions and 7% reorganized product combinations.

When surveying the application of technology in Vietnam, the World Bank’s indexes found that “the use of 4.0 technology in Vietnam is still in an early stage”.

Vietnam to quantify digital economy

At the seminar on digital economic measurement.

At the seminar on digital economic measurement held by the General Statistics Office of Vietnam and the World Bank last week, Nguyen Thu Huong, director general of the General Statistics Office, said that measuring and quantifying the digital economy has important implications for Vietnam.

Jaffar Al-Rikabi, World Bank economist, said that measuring the size of the digital economy faces many challenges: digital economy is a new concept with many different definitions; problems related to data quality; difficulty of measuring the consumption of digital products; the value of data investment in a modern economy is difficult to determine; measuring the sharing economy, and the challenges in understanding how the economy works when companies benefit from cross-border operations.

Experience in the world shows that the digital economy can be measured by production or the user (measured by supply – demand). When we want to know the size of the digital economy, we measure production from supply. The supply is often involved in digital economic production and trade, such as the value of investment, employment, research and development. To examine the economic impact of digitalization on the larger economy and society (e.g., productivity and wages), it is necessary to examine the application of digitalization in the digital economy.

After exchanging experiences from a number of countries around the world, officials of the General Statistics Office said that measuring the digital economy is a technical problem and very complicated, especially because identifying and collecting information is still a new thing.

In some developed countries as well as countries that have identified digital transformation as a key industry, they have invested in information gathering to make decisions as well as investment direction for digital infrastructure and digital economy for economic development.

“Vietnam is choosing the digital economy as one of the top priorities. Therefore, we would like to have advice to be able to make decisions, especially to agree on how to understand and identify the current and forward-looking digital economy,” Huong said.

Duy Vu

Vietnam’s medical waste autoclave system

Effectively replacing traditional technology

According to Tong Viet Dung, Deputy Director of the Environmental Equipment and Material Joint Stock Company (Urenco 13), the company handles about five tonnes of medical waste per day. Previously, it used traditional combustion technology that generates hazardous emissions.

Since 2016, the unit has received US-made medical waste autoclave technology from an international donor organization, which uses saturated steam at high temperatures to eliminate bacteria and harmful pathogens.

However, the cost of foreign technology, its maintenance and replacement parts was too high for many users. Two years ago, Urenco 13 met engineer Nguyen Van Binh and cooperated with NARIME on the research, design, manufacture and application of medical waste treatment using wet heat, with capacity of 4,000 to 4,500 kg of waste a day. Urenco 13 mastered the technology of the American system and adapted it to fit Vietnam’s environmental conditions, Dung emphasized.

Equivalent quality to US products

The system is made up of a 9,000-liter autoclave, a 480-liter boiler and a system control cabinet. Medical waste is first transferred to sterilization in the autoclave, where high temperature saturated steam helps eliminate all germs, bacteria, pathogens in the waste. This process does not cause odors and does not generate dioxins and furans, unlike conventional burning methods.

The whole process is operated automatically. Once the sterilization ends, the waste is cooled and crushed to a size of about 2-3 cm. The finished product after treatment is sterile waste, not harmful to the environment. When buried, the product does not take up much space and does not affect the soil and water environment, Binh emphasized.

After being installed and tested at Urenco 13 (in Hanoi’s Nam Tu Liem District) since November 2020, the results show that the new system has been operating stably. Microbiological tests of the waste following its treatment conform to the requirements of the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology (NIHE).

The treatment time is reduced and productivity increases about 15-20 percent compared to world-leading medical waste autoclave equipment, which costs about four times more than the system manufactured by a domestic unit, Binh added.

Dung also affirmed that the project’s products have the same quality level as GK-MOSS products imported from the US, saying the company as well as NARIME hopes that following additional trials, the technology can be replicated nationwide.

The project will be replicated by member units of URENCO, hospitals in Hanoi and some northern provinces and subsequently in hospitals in the southern and central provinces, Dung said.

Engineer Nguyen Van Binh said that having mastered the technology, the research team would continue to improve and perfect it in order to reduce costs and introduce it to other domestic waste treatment companies.

Quynh Nga

By Bich Ngoc

* Strong winds and high waves lashed the eastern Philippines on Monday as the strongest typhoon ever recorded in April barrelled past in the Pacific Ocean, killing one man and triggering flooding in lower-lying communities, disaster officials said.

* The Russian Foreign Ministry said Sunday that it is expelling 20 staffers of the Czech embassy in Moscow in response to the expulsion of 18 Russian diplomats from the Czech Republic.

* Nearly 192.13 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines had been administered across China as of Sunday, the National Health Commission said Monday. The Chinese mainland on Sunday reported 11 new imported COVID-19 cases, bringing the total number of confirmed cases to 90,510, according to the commission.

* The COVID-19 vaccination program in Laos is underway and the majority of people in target areas have had their first dose of the vaccine. The Lao government plans to vaccinate at least 150,000 people in the initial stages of the program.

* Cambodia on Monday predicted that international tourist arrivals to the kingdom this year would decline by another 70 percent due to the ongoing impact of COVID-19. The report of the Ministry of Tourism said the Southeast Asian country received 1.31 million international tourists in 2020, down 80 percent from 6.61 million in 2019.

* Malaysia started phase 2 of its national immunization program against COVID-19 on Monday, expanding to other high risk groups following the vaccination of the country’s frontliners.

* The COVID-19 cases in Indonesia rose by 4,952 within one day to 1,609,300, with the death toll adding by 143 to 43,567, the Health Ministry said on Monday.

* Brazil’s COVID-19 death toll on Sunday reached 373,335 after registering another 1,657 fatalities, the country’s ministry of health reported. According to the ministry, another 42,980 cases were registered, bringing the total number of cases in the country to 13,943,071.

* Just more than half of US adults have now received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose, data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed on Sunday, with nearly 130 million people aged 18 years or more having received their first shot.

* The European Union has exercised an option to acquire an additional 100 million doses of BioNTech and Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, the two companies said.

* Denmark’s health authority said it may be possible for people to choose to have the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine if they wish, Ritzau news agency reported.

* The number of coronavirus patients in intensive care units in France edged up on Sunday, amid a nationwide lockdown to try to stem a third wave of infections.

* British scientists launched a trial which will deliberately expose participants who have already had COVID-19 to the coronavirus again to examine immune responses and see if people get reinfected.

* Canada will present a budget with billions of dollars for pandemic recovery measures as COVID-19 infections skyrocket, CAD2 billion (US$1.6 billion) toward national childcare, and new taxes on luxury goods.

* The number of people heading out to shops across Britain jumped 87.8% in the week to April 17 versus the previous week as non-essential stores in England reopened after three months of COVID-19 lockdown, market researcher Springboard said.

* Spain will study the effects of mixing different coronavirus vaccines, government researchers said on Monday, responding to shifting guidelines on the safety of the AstraZeneca’s shot.

* Poland may be able to open up a significant part of the economy at the end of May or beginning of June, depending on progress with COVID-19 vaccinations, the prime minister said on Monday.

* NASA successfully launched its Mars helicopter Ingenuity from the surface of the Red Planet earlier on Monday, marking the first powered, controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet.

* The coronavirus variant discovered in South Africa can break through the protection provided by Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine to some extent, a real-world data study in Israel found.

* Vaccination against COVID-19 is a requirement to perform the Umra pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi state TV said on Sunday, citing a government official.