Day: August 17, 2020

South Africa, with the continent’s highest burden of COVID-19, has reached the peak of the pandemic, according to the president and top health officials.  President Cyril Ramaphosa announced a loosening of restrictions but said that he is not yet breathing a sigh of relief. A ray of hope for the Rainbow Nation, as the president announced that South Africa, with the continent’s heaviest known burden of the coronavirus, has passed its viral peak since reporting its first cases in early March.President Cyril Ramaphosa, speaking late Saturday, said that over the past three weeks, the number of new confirmed cases has dropped from an daily average of about 12,000 to around 5,000 per day.FILE – South African President Cyril Ramaphosa visits the COVID-19 treatment facilities at the NASREC Expo Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa, April 24, 2020.“A ray of light is visible now on the horizon,” said Ramaphosa. “Let us continue to exercise the greatest caution and care and remain ever vigilant.  Let us continue to stand united in our determination to defeat this virus.”  On the streets of Johannesburg Monday, residents had mixed feelings about the news.  Robert Etzinger said while he was happy that the restrictions have eased, he wants more.  “I feel as though it’s now lagging on too long. You know the rest of the economy needs to get back into the swing of things,” said Etzinger. “The sooner we get over level two down to one, the sooner we can get the economy going and restart again. That’s my feeling.”The chair of South Africa’s advisory committee on COVID-19, Dr. Salim Abdool Karim, credits the government’s swift lockdown measures.  He says the government gained about 6 to 8 weeks of precious time to prepare by declaring a state of disaster, closing schools, banning international travel and banning the sales of alcohol and tobacco.  “The period where we are now, just past the peak of the epidemic, we have been seeing a slowing down in the number of cases, so that we are now between 4,000 and 5,000 cases a day,” said Karim.  Ramaphosa also announced a loosening of restrictions, including allowing sales of tobacco and alcohol. “Guided by the advice of our health experts and medical advisory committee, and after consultation with provincial and local government, Cabinet has decided to place the entire country on alert level 2, with effect from midnight on Monday, the 17th of August 2020,”  said Ramaphosa.South Africa has at least 600,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the nation of nearly 60 million.   WHO Deploys Dozens of Experts to South Africa to Help Slow Coronavirus SpreadSouth Africa has nearly 530,000 casesIt is also at the forefront of coronavirus prevention, with scientists at the University of the Witwatersrand this week launching the nation’s second vaccine trial. Karim says the nation’s long history with other pandemics has prepared it for this challenge. “South Africa was able to build its capacity to undertake testing because of its TB and HIV epidemics,” said Karim. “It’s the same technology. The problem has been in South Africa that we can’t buy enough test kits, because we are trying to buy the same test kits everyone else is trying to buy, and so we were constrained for a substantial period, in just not being able to get enough kits.  As that problem has been solved, now we do have enough kits, we’ve been able to escalate our testing to around 40,000 to 50,000 tests per day.” The COVID-19 peak may have passed, says Karim, but the danger of a second surge remains.   To that end, he urges South Africans to remain cautious. Henry Ridgwell and Zaheer Cassim contributed to this report.
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Work began Monday to remove the two pieces of a grounded Japanese ship that leaked tons of oil into the protected coast of the Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius and broke apart.
Tug boats will pull the bow — the smaller part of the shipwrecked MV Wakashio — out to sea and allow it to sink, according to environmental experts on the island. The larger part of the ship will be dragged off the coral reef where it ran aground and towed away, possibly to India for salvage.
“When the ship split in two, there was further leakage of oil, but it appears most of that fuel was on the other side of the coral reef and was in the high seas,” Sunil Dowarkasing, an environmental consultant and former parliament member in Mauritius. “With the sea currents, we don’t know if the new leakage will stay outside the lagoon or not.”  
Oil barriers were in place and a skimmer ship to scoop up the fuel was nearby.
The Mauritius government has closed off the coastal area of the eastern part of the island, where thousands of civilian volunteers worked for days to try to minimize damage to the Mahebourg lagoon and protected marine wetlands polluted by the spilled fuel.  
Only officials and hired workers are permitted to work in the coastal area and the waters surrounding the grounded ship.
Experts from France, Japan and the United Nations are also involved in the clean-up work.  
“Now, we must rely on the government as our only source of information about the situation, so we are only getting one side of the story,” Dowarkasing said.
“We know that the damage to the area is substantial,” he told The Associated Press. “The mangroves are heavily impacted by the fuel. The extent of the damage to the coral reefs will only be known much later, but it is expected to be serious.”
The Wakasio ran aground a coral reef on July 25. After being pounded by heavy waves, the vessel cracked and it starting leaking oil on August 6. The damaged ship spilled more than 1,000 tons of its cargo of 4,000 tons of fuel into the turquoise waters of the Mahebourg Lagoon, one of the island’s most pristine coastal areas.
Most of the remaining 3,000 tons of fuel had been pumped off the ship in the past week as environmental groups warned that the damage to coral reefs could be irreversible.
The Mauritius government is under pressure to explain why immediate action wasn’t taken to empty the ship of its fuel before it began to leak. Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth earlier blamed bad weather for the slow response.
Owner Nagashiki Shipping has said “residual” amounts of fuel remained on the ship after pumping. It is investigating why the ship went off course. The ship was meant to stay at least 10 miles (16 kilometers) from shore. The company has sent experts to help clean up the damage.
The Mauritius government is seeking compensation from the company.
After the government declared an environmental emergency, thousands of volunteers rushed to the shore to create makeshift oil barriers from tunnels of fabric stuffed with sugar cane leaves and even human hair, with empty plastic bottles tucked in to keep them afloat.
The island nation of some 1.3 million people relies heavily on tourism and already had taken a severe hit due to travel restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic.
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The Trump administration announced on Monday it will further tighten restrictions on Huawei Technologies Co, aimed at cracking down on its access to commercially available chips.
The U.S. Commerce Department actions, first reported by Reuters, will expand restrictions announced in May aimed at preventing the Chinese telecommunications giant from obtaining semiconductors without a special license – including chips made by foreign firms that have been developed or produced with U.S. software or technology.
The administration will also add 38 Huawei affiliates in 21 countries to the U.S. government’s economic blacklist, the sources said, raising the total to 152 affiliates since Huawei was first added in May 2019.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told Fox Business the restrictions on Huawei-designed chips imposed in May “led them to do some evasive measures. They were going through third parties,” Ross said. “The new rule makes it clear that any use of American software or American fabrication equipment is banned and requires a license.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the rule change “will prevent Huawei from circumventing U.S. law through alternative chip production and provision of off-the-shelf chips.” He added in a statement “Huawei has continuously tried to evade” U.S. restrictions imposed in May.
Huawei did not immediately comment.
With U.S.-China relations at their worst in decades, Washington is pushing governments around to world to squeeze Huawei out, arguing it would hand over data to the Chinese government for spying. Huawei denies it spies for China.
The new actions, effective immediately, should prevent Huawei’s attempts to circumvent U.S. export controls, Commerce said.
It “makes clear that we’re covering off-the-shelf designs that Huawei may be seeking to purchase from a third-party design house,” one Commerce Department official told Reuters.
A new separate rule requires companies on the economic blacklist to obtain a license when a company like Huawei on the list acts “as a purchaser, intermediate consignee, ultimate consignee, or end user.”
The department also confirmed it will not extend a temporary general license that expired Friday for users of Huawei devices and telecommunication providers. Parties must now submit license applications for transactions previously authorized.
The Commerce Department is adopting a limited permanent authorization for Huawei entities to allow “ongoing security research critical to maintaining the integrity and reliability of existing” networks and equipment.
Existing U.S. restrictions have already had a heavy impact on Huawei and its suppliers. The May restrictions do not fully go into effect until Sept. 14.
On Aug. 8, financial magazine Caixin reported Huawei will stop making its flagship Kirin chipsets next month due to U.S. pressure on suppliers.
Huawei’s HiSilicon division has relied on software from U.S. companies such as Cadence Design Systems Inc and Synopsys Inc to design its chips and outsourced the production to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) , which uses equipment from U.S. companies.
TSMC has said it will not ship wafers to Huawei after Sept. 15.
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As the novel coronavirus began to spread through Minneapolis this spring, Health Commissioner Gretchen Musicant tore up her budget to find funds to combat the crisis. Money for test kits.
Money to administer tests. Money to hire contact tracers. And yet even more money for a service that helps tracers communicate with residents in dozens of languages.
While Musicant diverted workers from violence prevention and other core programs to the COVID-19 response, state officials debated how to distribute $1.87 billion Minnesota received in federal aid.
As she waited, the Minnesota Zoo got $6 million in federal money to continue operations, and a debt collection company outside Minneapolis received at least $5 million from the federal Paycheck Protection Program, according to federal data.
It was not until Aug. 5 — months after Congress approved aid for the pandemic — that Musicant’s department finally received $1.7 million, the equivalent of $4 per Minneapolis resident.
“It’s more a hope and a prayer that we’ll have enough money,” Musicant said.
Since the pandemic began, Congress has set aside trillions of dollars to ease the crisis. A joint Kaiser Health News and Associated Press investigation finds that many communities with big outbreaks have spent little of that federal money on local public health departments for work such as testing and contact tracing. Others, like in Minnesota, were slow to do so.
For example, the states, territories and 154 large cities and counties that received allotments from the $150 billion Coronavirus Relief Fund reported spending only 25% of it through June 30, according to reports that recipients submitted to the U.S. Treasury Department.
Many localities have deployed more money since that June 30 reporting deadline, and both Republican and Democratic governors say they need more to avoid layoffs and cuts to vital state services. Still, as cases in the U.S. top 5.4 million and confirmed deaths soar past 170,000, Republicans in Congress are pointing to the slow spending to argue against sending more money to state and local governments to help with their pandemic response.
“States and localities have only spent about a fourth of the money we already sent them in the springtime,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday. Congressional Democrats’ efforts to get more money for states, he said, “aren’t based on math. They aren’t based on the pandemic.”
Negotiations over a new pandemic relief bill broke down last week, in part because Democrats and Republicans could not agree on funding for state and local governments.
KHN and the AP requested detailed spending breakdowns from recipients of money from the Coronavirus Relief Fund — created in March as part of the $1.9 trillion CARES Act — and received responses from 23 states and 62 cities and counties. Those entities dedicated 23% of their spending from the fund through June to public health and 7% to public health and safety payroll.
An additional 22% was transferred to local governments, some of which will eventually pass it down to health departments. The rest went to other priorities, such as distance learning.
So little money has flowed to some local health departments for many reasons: Bureaucracy has bogged things down, politics have crept into the process, and understaffed departments have struggled to take time away from critical needs to navigate the red tape required to justify asking for extra dollars.
“It does not make sense to me how anyone thinks this is a way to do business,” said E. Oscar Alleyne, chief of programs and services at the National Association of County and City Health Officials. “We are never going to get ahead of the pandemic response if we are still handicapped.”
Last month, KHN and the AP detailed how state and local public health departments across the U.S. have been starved for decades. Over 38,000 public health worker jobs have been lost since 2008, and per capita spending on local health departments has been cut by 18% since 2010. That’s left them underfunded and without adequate resources to confront the coronavirus pandemic.
“Public health has been cut and cut and cut over the years, but we’re so valuable every time you turn on the television,” said Jan Morrow, the director and 41-year veteran of Ripley County health department in rural Missouri. “We are picking up all the pieces, but the money is not there. They’ve cut our budget until there’s nothing left.”Politics And Red Tape
Why did the Minneapolis health department have to wait so long for CARES Act money?
Congress mandated that the Coronavirus Relief Fund be distributed to states and local governments based on population. Minneapolis, with 430,000 residents, missed the threshold of 500,000 people that would have allowed it to receive money directly.
The state of Minnesota, however, received $1.87 billion, a portion of which was meant to be sent to local communities. Lawmakers initially sent some state money to tide communities over until the federal money came through — the Minneapolis health department got about $430,000 in state money to help pay for things like testing.
But when it came time to decide how to use the CARES Act money, lawmakers in Minnesota’s Republican-controlled Senate and Democratic-controlled House were at loggerheads.
Myron Frans, commissioner of Minnesota Management and Budget, said that disagreement, on top of the economic crisis and pandemic, left the legislature in turmoil.
Then following the police killing of George Floyd, the city erupted in protests over racial injustice, making a difficult situation even more challenging.
Democratic Gov. Tim Walz favored targeting some of the money to harder-hit communities, a move that might have helped Minneapolis, where cases have surged since mid-July. But lawmakers couldn’t agree. Negotiations dragged on, and a special session merely prolonged the standoff.
Finally, the governor divvied up the money using a population-based formula developed earlier by Republican and Democratic legislative leaders that did not take into account COVID-19 caseloads or racial disparities.
“We knew we needed to get it out the door,” Frans said.
The state then sent hundreds of millions of dollars to local communities. Still, even after the money got to Minneapolis a month ago, Musicant had to wait as city leaders made difficult choices about how to spend the money as the economy cratered and the list of needs grew.
“Even when it gets to the local government, you still have to figure out how to get it to local public health,” Musicant said.
Meanwhile, some in Minneapolis have noticed a lack of services. Dr. Jackie Kawiecki has been providing help to people at a volunteer medical station near the place where Floyd was killed — an area that at times has drawn hundreds or thousands of people per day. She said the city did not do enough free, easy-to-access testing in its neighborhoods this summer.
“I still don’t think that the amount of testing offered is adequate, from a public health standpoint,” Kawiecki said.
A coalition of groups that includes the National Governors Association has blamed the spending delays on the federal government, saying the final guidance on how states could spend the money came late in June, shortly before the reporting period ended. The coalition said state and local governments had moved “expeditiously and responsibly” to use the money as they deal with skyrocketing costs for health care, emergency response and other vital programs.
New York’s Nassau County was among six counties, cities and states that had spent at least 75% of its funds by June 30.
While most of the money was not spent before then, the National Association of State Budget Officers says a July 23 survey of 45 states and territories found they had allocated, or set aside, an average of 74% of the money.
But if they have, that money has been slow to make it to many local health departments.
As of mid-July in Missouri, at least 50 local health departments had yet to receive any of the federal money they requested, according to a state survey. The money must first flow through local county commissioners, some of whom aren’t keen on sending money to public health agencies.
“You closed their businesses down in order to save their people’s lives and so that hurt the economy,” said Larry Jones, executive director for the Missouri Center for Public Health Excellence, an organization of public health leaders. “So they’re mad at you and don’t want to give you money.”
The winding path federal money takes as it makes its way to states and cities also could exacerbate the stark economic and health inequalities in the U.S. if equity isn’t considered in decision-making, said Wizdom Powell, director of the University of Connecticut Health Disparities Institute.
“Problems are so vast you could unintentionally further entrench inequities just by how you distribute funds,” Powell said.’Everything Fell Behind’
The amounts eventually distributed can induce head-scratching.
Some cities received large federal grants, including Louisville, Kentucky, whose health department was given $42 million by April, more than doubling its annual budget. Because of the way the money was distributed, Louisville’s health department alone received more money from the CARES Act than the entire government of the city of Minneapolis.
Philadelphia’s health department was awarded $100 million from a separate fund from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Honolulu County, where cases have remained relatively low, received $124,454 for every positive COVID-19 case it had reported as of Aug. 9, while El Paso County in Texas got just $1,685 per case. Multnomah County, Oregon — with nearly a quarter of its state’s COVID-19 cases — landed only 2%, or $28 million, of the state’s $1.6 billion allotment.
Rural Saline County in Missouri received the same funding as counties of similar size, even though the virus hit the area particularly hard. In April, outbreaks began tearing through a Cargill meatpacking plant and a local factory. By late May, the health department confirmed 12 positive cases at the local jail.
Tara Brewer, Saline’s health department administrator, said phone lines were ringing off the hook, jamming the system. Eventually, several department employees handed out their personal cell phone numbers to take calls from residents looking to be tested or seeking care for coronavirus symptoms.
“Everything fell behind,” Brewer said.
The school vaccination clinic in April was canceled, and a staffer who works as a Spanish translator for the Women, Infants and Children nutritional program was enlisted to contact trace for additional coronavirus exposures. All food inspections stopped.
It was late July when $250,000 in federal CARES Act money finally reached the 11-person health department, Brewer said — four months after Congress approved the spending and three months after the county’s first outbreak.
That was far too late for Brewer to hire the army of contact tracers that might have helped slow the spread of the virus back in April. She said the money already has been spent on antibody testing and reimbursements for groceries and medical equipment the department had bought for quarantined residents.
Another problem: Some local health officials say that the laborious process required to qualify for some of the federal aid discourages overworked public health officials from even trying to secure more money and that funds can be uneven in arriving.
Lisa Macon Harrison, public health director for Granville Vance Public Health in rural Oxford, North Carolina, said it’s tough to watch major hospital systems — some of which are sitting on billions in reserves — receive direct deposits, while her department received only about $122,000 through three grants by the end of July. Her team filled out a 25-page application just to get one of them.
She is now waiting to receive an estimated $400,000 more. By contrast, the Duke University Hospital System, which includes a facility that serves Granville, already has received over $67.3 million from the federal Provider Relief Fund.
“I just don’t understand the extra layers of onus for the bureaucracy, especially if hundreds of millions of dollars are going to the hospitals and we have to be responsible to apply for 50 grants,” she said.
The money comes from dozens of funds, including several programs within the CARES Act. Nebraska alone received money from 76 federal COVID relief funding sources.
Robert Miller, director of health for the Eastern Highlands Health District in Connecticut, which covers 10 towns, received $29,596 of the $2.5 million the state distributed to local departments from the CDC fund and nothing from CARES. It was only enough to pay for some contact tracing and employee mileage.
Miller said that he could theoretically apply for a little more from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but that the reporting requirements — which include collecting every receipt — are extremely cumbersome for an already overburdened department.
So he wonders: “Is the squeeze worth the juice?”
Back in Minneapolis, Musicant said the new money from CARES allowed the department to run a free COVID-19 testing site Saturday, at a church that serves the Hispanic community about a mile from the site of Floyd’s killing.
It will take more money to do everything the community needs, she says, but with Congress deadlocked, she’s not sure they’ll get it anytime soon.
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Geoff Woolf gave his sons a love for literature. When he got sick with COVID-19, they turned to books to help him — and others.
 
The 73-year-old retired lawyer was hospitalized in London in March, and within days he was on a ventilator in intensive care. Unable to visit, his family could only watch from afar with frustration and dismay.
 
Then sons Nicky, a 33-year-old journalist, and Sam, a 28-year-old actor, had an idea: Maybe literature could help him and other patients.
 
“He always said if he was in hospital for a long time, he would be able to deal if he had a book,” Sam said.
 
The brothers loaded an e-reader with Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” — “his comfort read,” according to Sam — and played it for their unconscious father.
 
Doctors said, “‘We can’t tell you he’ll definitely hear it. But we also can’t tell you he won’t,’” Sam said. “There is power in hearing a voice.
 
The brothers set out to acquire more devices for other patients. As they came to terms with the likelihood of losing their father, they saw the project, which they named Books for Dad, as a legacy.
 
Nicky and Sam recruited a team of volunteers to load e-readers, donated by audiobooks company Audible, with content, including classic novels, thrillers and podcasts. They delivered an initial batch of 20 — disinfected and individually bagged — to the hospital treating their father, along with single-use headphones donated by British Airways. Soon they were distributing dozens more to other hospitals around the U.K.
 
Books for Dad is a boon to hospitals looking for ways to keep patients stimulated. Often patients are too sick to read a physical book, and some don’t have their own electronic devices. Even if they do, patchy WiFi can hamper audio and video streaming.
 
Lisa Anderton, head of patient experience at University College London Hospital, said the “brilliant” initiative can help both coronavirus and other patients.
 
Hospitalization is stressful even in the best of times, and the ability to “pop your headphones on and just listen to something that takes you somewhere else, I think really changes how people feel and how people cope with what can be an alien as well as a very busy environment,” Anderton said.  
 
From the initial donation, Books for Dad has kept growing, and the brothers plan to distribute 5,000 e-readers to British hospitals over the next six months and add books for children and young adults to their content.
 
As the project expanded, Geoff Woolf had secondary infections, organ failure and a major stroke. Doctors began to discuss the possibility of switching off life support.  
 
Then, after almost four months of hospitalization including 67 days on a ventilator, he began to improve. In late July he was discharged from Whittington Hospital, workers applauding as he was wheeled out of the ward en route to a specialized neurological hospital where his recovery continues.  
 
His sons know he has a long road ahead.
 
“But considering the place where he was, which was ‘Goodbye,’ it is remarkable that he has come back to a state where he is aware, he understands what’s going on,” Sam said. “Communication is very difficult. But he has comprehension, and with comprehension there’s the capacity for a life worth living.”
 
What the brothers once thought would be a project honoring a life cut short has now become a legacy of their love for their father, they said.
 
“And how much his love of literature meant to us,” Nicky added, “and how meaningful it was to be able to pass that on to other people.”
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Google is warning that Australians’ personal information could be “at risk” if the digital giant has to pay for news content. A proposed law would require firms like Google and Facebook to pay Australian news organizations for the content that appears on their websites. The law was drafted last month after months of negotiations between the Australian government and the two tech giants broke down. In an open letter posted online Monday, Melanie Silva, Google’s managing director for Australia and New Zealand, said Australians’ personal data could be turned over to big media firms if the law is enacted, which would help them automatically inflate their search ranking.  Silva also said the law would make such free services such as Google Search and YouTube “dramatically worse” and could lead to Australians paying for such services. Rod Sims, the chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, dismissed Google’s claims as “misinformation.”  He said the proposed law does not require Google to turn over user’s personal information, or charge for its search services.The open letter was published as Australian regulators begin the last week of gathering public consultations and comments on the proposed law.   Australian media companies have seen their advertising revenue increasingly siphoned off by firms like Google and Facebook in recent years. 
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A U.S. disease expert says COVID-19 survivors may expect to be immune from another case for as long as one year. Former Food and Drug Administration official Dr. Scott Gottleib appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday to talk about new findings by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that say a three-month immunity is a certainty.  “But it’s probably the case that you’re going to have a period of immunity that lasts anywhere from six to 12 months. It’s going to be highly variable. Some people will have less immunity, some people will have slightly more. But it’s good news that they’re able to document that people have really sterile immunity. They’re not going to get reinfected for at least three months and probably longer than that after infection.” But Gottlieb cautioned that the COVID-19 is called the novel (new) coronavirus for a reason – there is still much that doctors don’t know about it. With the U.S. closing in on 170,00 coronavirus deaths, experts at the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics predict that number will hit 186,000 by September 1 and more than 390,000 by December 1.  Health officials have not been able to convince enough people to wear masks and practice social distancing to slow the spread of the disease.A man wearing a face mask walks across the street in Los Angeles, Friday, Aug. 7, 2020.U.S. scientists say they have isolated infectious particles of the coronavirus as far as 4.8 meters away from hospitalized patients. The scientists said the widely accepted 2-meter social distancing advice provides a “false sense of security” and could result in large groups of people being exposed to the disease. The study, conducted at the university of Florida Health Shands Hospital, has not been peer reviewed.   The Italian cruise ship MSC Grandiosa will began a voyage to the Mediterranean on Sunday, after it and four sister cruise ships were idled by the coronavirus pandemic in Civitavecchia, one of the world’s busiest ports.  The five ships can hold a total of 26,000 people. The four other ships will also resume operations soon, positioning Italy as the epicenter of the effort to resume cruises worldwide.   
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