Month: October 2020

Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Sunday that there are nearly 39.7 million COVID-19 infections worldwide and 1.1 million deaths from the virus.  The U.S. continues to lead the world in COVID cases, with 8.1 million infections. India said Sunday it had recorded more than 61,000 COVID-19 cases in the previous 24-hour period. India has almost 7.5 million COVID-19 cases, with more than 114,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins statistics.In Italy, where a new record for daily cases – 11,705 – was set Sunday, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has given mayors the power to close public squares and other places people gather after 9 p.m.”The situation is critical. The government is there but everyone must do their part,” he told a news conference. Conte’s government is trying to avoid another shutdown like the one imposed in March.Italy was one of the hardest hit countries in Europe, and as a second wave of the coronavirus has hit, it has ordered such measures as mandatory mask wearing in public, restricting the hours when restaurants can offer table service and banning festivals. Paris streets were deserted Saturday night as the city began a 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew, designed to help curb the spread of the coronavirus.At least seven other French cities, including Lyon, Grenoble, Aix-en-Provence, Montpellier, Lille, Rouen and Saint-Étienne are also under the nighttime curfew, scheduled to be in place for four weeks. Belgium will be placed under a 12 a.m. to 5 a.m. nationwide curfew Monday to combat the country’s rising COVID-19 caseload. In addition, Belgium has ordered all cafes, bars, and restaurants shuttered, starting Monday.Two European foreign ministers – Austria’s Alexander Schallenberg and Belgium’s Sophie Wilmès – have been infected with the coronavirus.  Both attended a European Union meeting in Luxembourg on Oct. 12.  The Dutch king and queen cut their vacation to Greece short amid criticism that they were doing the opposite of what the Dutch people have been advised to do during the pandemic – stay home as much as possible to flatten the spread of the virus.  King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima left The Hague Friday but returned Saturday. “We do not want to leave any doubts about it: in order to get the Covid-19 virus under control, it is necessary that the guidelines are followed,” the couple said in a royal statement.  “The debate over our holiday does not contribute to that.”
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After circling an ancient asteroid hundreds of millions of miles away for almost two years, a NASA spacecraft this week will attempt to descend to the treacherous, boulder-packed surface and snatch a handful of rubble.  The drama unfolds Tuesday as the U.S. takes its first crack at collecting asteroid samples for return to Earth, a feat accomplished so far only by Japan.Brimming with names inspired by Egyptian mythology, the Osiris-Rex mission is looking to bring back at least 2 ounces (60 grams) worth of asteroid Bennu, the biggest otherworldly haul from beyond the moon.  NASA Plans to Land First Woman on the Moon in 2024Lunar landing will be America’s first since 1972The van-sized spacecraft is aiming for the relatively flat middle of a tennis court-sized crater named Nightingale — a spot comparable to a few parking places here on Earth. Boulders as big as buildings loom over the targeted touchdown zone.  “So for some perspective, the next time you park your car in front of your house or in front of a coffee shop and walk inside, think about the challenge of navigating Osiris-Rex into one of these spots from 200 million miles away,” said NASA’s deputy project manager Mike Moreau.Once it drops out of its half-mile-high (0.75 kilometer-high) orbit around Bennu, the spacecraft will take a deliberate four hours to make it all the way down, to just above the surface.Then the action cranks up when Osiris-Rex’s 11-foot (3.4-meter) arm reaches out and touches Bennu. Contact should last five to 10 seconds, just long enough to shoot out pressurized nitrogen gas and suck up the churned dirt and gravel. Programmed in advance, the spacecraft will operate autonomously during the unprecedented touch-and-go maneuver. With an 18-minute lag in radio communication each way, ground controllers for spacecraft builder Lockheed Martin near Denver can’t intervene.If the first attempt doesn’t work, Osiris-Rex can try again. Any collected samples won’t reach Earth until 2023.  While NASA has brought back comet dust and solar wind particles, it’s never attempted to sample one of the nearly 1 million known asteroids lurking in our solar system until now. Japan, meanwhile, expects to get samples from asteroid Ryugu in December — in the milligrams at most — 10 years after bringing back specks from asteroid Itokawa.  Bennu is an asteroid picker’s paradise.The big, black, roundish, carbon-rich space rock — taller than New York’s Empire State Building — was around when our solar system was forming 4.5 billion years ago. Scientists consider it a time capsule full of pristine building blocks that could help explain how life formed on Earth and possibly elsewhere.”This is all about understanding our origins,” said the mission’s principal scientist, Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona.  There also are selfish reasons for getting to know Bennu better.  The solar-orbiting asteroid, which swings by Earth every six years, could take aim at us late in the next century. NASA puts the odds of an impact at 1-in-2,700. The more scientists know about potentially menacing asteroids like Bennu, the safer Earth will be.When Osiris-Rex blasted off in 2016 on the more than $800 million mission, scientists envisioned sandy stretches at Bennu. So the spacecraft was designed to ingest small pebbles less than an inch (2 centimeters) across.Scientists were stunned to find massive rocks and chunky gravel all over the place when the spacecraft arrived in 2018. And pebbles were occasionally seen shooting off the asteroid, falling back and sometimes ricocheting off again in a cosmic game of ping-pong.  With so much rough terrain, engineers scrambled to aim for a tighter spot than originally anticipated. Nightingale Crater, the prime target, appears to have the biggest abundance of fine grains, but boulders still abound, including one dubbed Mount Doom.  Then COVID-19 struck.The team fell behind and bumped the second and final touch-and-go dress rehearsal for the spacecraft to August. That pushed the sample grab to October.  “Returning a sample is hard,” said NASA’s science mission chief, Thomas Zurbuchen. “The COVID made it even harder.”Osiris-Rex has three bottles of nitrogen gas, which means it can touch down three times — no more.  The spacecraft automatically will back away if it encounters unexpected hazards like big rocks that could cause it to tip over. And there’s a chance it will touch down safely but fail to collect enough rubble.  In either case, the spacecraft would return to orbit around Bennu and try again in January at another location.With the first try finally here, Lauretta is worried, nervous, excited “and confident we have done everything possible to ensure a safe sampling.”
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Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Sunday that there are nearly 39.7 million COVID-19 infections worldwide and 1.1 million deaths from the virus.The U.S. continues to lead the world in COVID cases, with 8.1 million infections.India said Sunday it had recorded more than 61,000 COVID-19 cases in the previous 24-hour period. India has almost 7.5 million COVID-19 cases, with more than 114,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins statistics.Paris streets were deserted Saturday night as the city began a 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew, designed to help curb the spread of the coronavirus.At least seven other French cities, including Lyon, Grenoble, Aix-en-Provence, Montpellier, Lille, Rouen and Saint-Étienne are also under the nighttime curfew, scheduled to be in place for four weeks.Belgium will be placed under a midnight to 5 a.m. nationwide curfew Monday to combat the country’s rising COVID-19 caseload. In addition, Belgium has ordered all cafes, bars, and restaurants shuttered, starting Monday.Two European foreign ministers — Austria’s Alexander Schallenberg and Belgium’s Sophie Wilmès — have been infected with the coronavirus. Both attended a European Union meeting in Luxembourg on Monday.The Dutch king and queen cut their vacation to Greece short amid criticism that they were doing the opposite of what the Dutch people have been advised to do during the pandemic – stay home as much as possible to flatten the spread of the virus.King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima left The Hague on Friday but returned Saturday.”We do not want to leave any doubts about it: in order to get the COVID-19 virus under control, it is necessary that the guidelines are followed,” the couple said in a royal statement. “The debate over our holiday does not contribute to that.”
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Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Sunday that there are nearly 39.7 million COVID-19 infections worldwide and 1.1 million deaths from the virus.The U.S. continues to lead the world in COVID cases, with 8.1 million infections.India said Sunday it had recorded more than 61,000 COVID-19 cases in the previous 24-hour period. India has almost 7.5 million COVID-19 cases, with more than 114,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins statistics.Paris streets were deserted Saturday night as the city began a 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew, designed to help curb the spread of the coronavirus.At least seven other French cities, including Lyon, Grenoble, Aix-en-Provence, Montpellier, Lille, Rouen and Saint-Étienne are also under the nighttime curfew, scheduled to be in place for four weeks.Belgium will be placed under a midnight to 5 a.m. nationwide curfew Monday to combat the country’s rising COVID-19 caseload. In addition, Belgium has ordered all cafes, bars, and restaurants shuttered, starting Monday.Two European foreign ministers — Austria’s Alexander Schallenberg and Belgium’s Sophie Wilmès — have been infected with the coronavirus. Both attended a European Union meeting in Luxembourg on Monday.The Dutch king and queen cut their vacation to Greece short amid criticism that they were doing the opposite of what the Dutch people have been advised to do during the pandemic – stay home as much as possible to flatten the spread of the virus.King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima left The Hague on Friday but returned Saturday.”We do not want to leave any doubts about it: in order to get the COVID-19 virus under control, it is necessary that the guidelines are followed,” the couple said in a royal statement. “The debate over our holiday does not contribute to that.”
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Rural Jerauld County in South Dakota didn’t see a single case of the coronavirus for more than two months stretching from June to August. But over the last two weeks, its rate of new cases per person soared to one of the highest in the nation.”All of a sudden it hit, and as it does, it just exploded,” said Dr. Tom Dean, one of three doctors who work in the county.As the brunt of the virus has blown into the Upper Midwest and northern Plains, the severity of outbreaks in rural communities has come into focus. Doctors and health officials in small towns worry that infections may overwhelm communities with limited medical resources. And many say they are still running up against attitudes on wearing masks that have hardened along political lines and a false notion that rural areas are immune to widespread infections.Dean started writing a column in the local weekly newspaper, the True Dakotan, to offer his guidance. In recent weeks, he’s watched as one in roughly every 37 people in his county has tested positive for the virus.It ripped through the nursing home in Wessington Springs where both his parents lived, killing his father. The community’s six deaths may appear minimal compared with thousands who have died in cities, but they have propelled the county of about 2,000 people to a death rate roughly four times higher than the nationwide rate.High per capita toll Rural counties across Wisconsin, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana sit among the top in the nation for new cases per capita over the last two weeks, according to Johns Hopkins University researchers. In counties with just a few thousand people, the number of cases per capita can soar with even a small outbreak — and the toll hits close to home in tight-knit towns.”One or two people with infections can really cause a large impact when you have one grocery store or gas station,” said Misty Rudebusch, the medical director at a network of rural health clinics in South Dakota called Horizon Health Care. “There is such a ripple effect.”Wessington Springs is a hub for the generations of farmers and ranchers that work the surrounding land. Residents send their children to the same school they attended and have preserved cultural offerings like a Shakespeare garden and opera house.Dr. Tom Dean is pictured at his clinic in Wessington Springs, S.D., Oct. 16, 2020. Dean is one of three doctors in the county, which has seen one of the nation’s highest rates of coronavirus cases per person.They trust Dean, who for 42 years has tended to everything from broken bones to high blood pressure. When a patient needs a higher level of care, the family physician usually depends on a transfer to a hospital 130 miles (209 kilometers) away.As cases surge, hospitals in rural communities are having trouble finding beds. A recent request to transfer a “not desperately ill, but pretty” sick COVID-19 patient was denied for several days, until the patient’s condition had worsened, Dean said.’A struggle'”We’re proud of what we got, but it’s been a struggle,” he said of the 16-bed hospital.The outbreak that killed Dean’s dad forced Wessington Springs’ only nursing home to put out a statewide request for nurses.Thin resources and high death rates have plagued other small communities. Blair Tomsheck, interim director of the health department in Toole County, Montana, worried that the region’s small hospitals would need to start caring for serious COVID-19 patients after cases spiked to the nation’s highest per capita. One out of every 28 people in the county has tested positive in the last two weeks, according to Johns Hopkins researchers.”It’s very, very challenging when your resources are poor — living in a small, rural county,” she said.Children scramble for candy during a homecoming parade, Oct. 16, 2020, in Wessington Springs, S.D. The parade had to be postponed because of a coronavirus outbreak that killed five residents of the local nursing home.Infections can also spread quickly in places like Toole County, where most everyone shops at the same grocery store, attends the same school or worships at a handful of churches.”The Sunday family dinners are killing us,” Tomsheck said.Even as outbreaks threaten to spiral out of control, doctors and health officials said they are struggling to convince people of the seriousness of a virus that took months to arrive in force.”It’s kind of like getting a blizzard warning and then the blizzard doesn’t hit that week, so then the next time, people say they are not going to worry about it,” said Kathleen Taylor, a 67-year-old author who lives in Redfield, South Dakota.Mask dilemmaIn swaths of the country decorated by flags supporting President Donald Trump, people took their cues on wearing masks from his often-cavalier attitude toward the virus. Dean draws a direct connection between Trump’s approach and the lack of precautions in his town of 956 people.”There’s the foolish idea that mask-wearing or refusal is some kind of a political statement,” Dean said. “It has seriously interfered with our ability to get it under control.”Even amid the surge, Republican governors in the region have been reluctant to act. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum said recently, “We are caught in the middle of a COVID storm,” as he raised advisory risk levels in counties across the state. But he has refused to issue a mask mandate.FILE – South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem speaks in Pierre, S.D., in January 2019.South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who has carved out a reputation among conservatives by forgoing lockdowns, blamed the surge in cases on testing increases, even though the state has had the highest positivity rate in the nation over the last two weeks, according to the COVID Tracking Project. Positivity rates are an indication of how widespread infections are.In Wisconsin, conservative groups have sued over Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ mask mandate.A mask doubterWhether the requirement survives doesn’t matter to Jody Bierhals, a resident of Gillett who doubts the efficacy of wearing a mask. Her home county of Oconto, which stretches from the northern border of Green Bay into forests and farmland, has the state’s second-highest growth in coronavirus cases per person.Bierhals, a single mother with three kids, is more worried about the drop in business at her small salon. The region depends on tourists, but many have stayed away during the pandemic.”Do I want to keep the water on, or do I want to be able to put food on the table?” she asked. “It’s a difficult situation.”Bierhals said she thought the virus couldn’t be stopped and it would be best to let it run its course. But local attitudes like that have left the county’s health officer, Debra Koniter, desperate.Koniter warned that the uncontrolled spread of infections has overwhelmed the county’s health systems.”I’m just waiting to see if our community can change our behavior,” she said. “Otherwise, I don’t see the end in sight.” 
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Daily cases of COVID-19 have reached record highs around the world, particularly in Europe and the Americas, the World Health Organization said Friday.WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a briefing in Geneva that record-high numbers of cases were reported in each of the last four days.“We must remember that this is an uneven pandemic,” said Ghebreyesus. “Countries have responded differently, and countries have been affected differently. Almost 70% of all cases reported globally last week were from 10 countries, and almost half of all cases were from just three countries.”The United States had more new infections over a 24-hour period than any other country, with 63,610, increasing the country’s total Friday to a world-leading 8.03 million, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center.The U.S. also maintained its global lead in COVID-19 fatalities, with Hopkins reporting 820 new deaths, increasing the country’s total Friday to at least 218,000 dead.White plastic tombstone-shaped pieces are lined up as a temporary memorial to some of Miami’s victims of the coronavirus at Simonhoff Floral Park, Oct. 14, 2020, in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami.Surges in five statesUpticks in the U.S. were led by surging infection rates in the states of Texas, Illinois, Wisconsin, Florida and California, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins.India recorded 63,371 new cases Friday, according to Hopkins, while there were also sharp increases in the number of infections in France, Brazil and Britain.The WHO’s Maria Van Kerkhove told reporters Friday that 80% of the countries in Europe were experiencing spikes in COVID-19 cases.In Britain, where Johns Hopkins University reported nearly 19,000 new cases Friday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson threatened to force Greater Manchester to impose the country’s most stringent level of coronavirus restrictions after local officials refused to place restrictions on areas with high infection rates.On Saturday, France will begin a 9 p.m.-to-6 a.m. curfew for the region of Paris and at least seven other cities: Lyon, Grenoble, Aix-en-Provence, Montpellier, Lille, Rouen and Saint-Etienne. The curfew will remain in effect for at least four weeks.German restrictionsGerman Chancellor Angela Merkel and governors of the country’s 16 states have agreed to impose a new round of nationwide restrictions after seeing record-high new COVID-19 cases.  The restrictions include closing bars and restaurants early and limiting the number of people allowed to gather in public.Police with face masks control the coronavirus orders at the train station in Cologne, Germany, Oct. 15, 2020. The city exceeded the important warning level of 50 new infections per 100,000 inhabitants in seven days.Merkel said Friday that a planned European Union summit on the 27-nation bloc’s China policy in Berlin next month had been canceled because of the resurgent pandemic.Italy reported more than 10,000 new infections over the past 24 hours Friday, the highest daily number since the beginning of the country’s outbreak. Italy has the second-highest death toll in Europe after Britain, reporting more than 36,400 deaths since the beginning of the outbreak in February.As of midafternoon Friday, there were more than 39 million COVID-19 cases worldwide and more than 1.1 million global COVID-19 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) announced Friday that a sixth-month randomized trial of COVID-19 treatments found “conclusive evidence” that remdesivir, a drug used to treat U.S. President Donald Trump when he fell ill, has little or no effect on severe cases of the virus.
 
The WHO, in what they said was the world’s largest randomized control trial on COVID-19 therapeutics, tested remdesivir and three other drugs – hydroxychloroquine, lopinavir/ritonavir and interferon – as part the agency’s research to determine if existing drugs might be effective in treating COVID-19.
 
At a news briefing at WHO headquarters in Geneva Friday, a WHO spokesman said the results of the study, which was not peer-reviewed, “indicate that remdesivir hydroxychloroquine, lopinavir/ritonavir and interferon regimens appear to have little or no effect on 28-day mortality, or the in-hospital course of COVID-19 among hospitalized patients.”
 
The WHO said the study, which covered more than 30 countries, looked at the effects of the treatments on overall death rates, whether patients need breathing machines, and how much time patients spent recovering in hospitals.
 
Previous studies had already ruled out three of the drugs. But the findings run counter to a clinical trial of remdesivir by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) in April which indicated the drug accelerated the recovery rates of people with severe cases of COVID-19.
 
The company that makes remdesivir, Gilead Sciences, Inc., saw the price of its stock begin to fall as the news of the WHO study broke Friday. The company issued a statement saying data appeared inconsistent, the findings were premature and referenced the other studies, such as the one by the NIH, which had validated the drug’s benefits.
 
Remdesivir was among an array of drugs used to treat U.S. President Donald Trump when he contracted COVID-19 earlier this month.
 
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Finland’s prime minister Friday became the second European Union leader to leave a two-day summit as a precautionary measure, after contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19.  On Twitter, Sanna Marin wrote she was leaving the European Council meeting in Brussels and asked Sweden’s prime minister, Stefan Lofven, to represent Finland at the talks, where leaders were wearing face masks and keeping their distance amid a spike in COVID-19 infections across Europe. Marin had participated in a meeting Wednesday at the Finnish parliament in Helsinki with lawmaker Tom Packalen, who later tested positive for COVID-19 and had mild symptoms. Marin’s early departure follows a similar decision by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who left the meeting Thursday to self-isolate after learning one of her support staff members had tested positive.  FILE – European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen arrives for an EU summit at the European Council building in Brussels, Oct. 15, 2020.It was the second time this month Von der Leyen had to take such a precaution. She went into isolation Oct. 5 after a meeting in Portugal that included someone who later tested positive. It is unclear why the European Union chose to hold its October summit in person rather than virtually while the continent is facing a surge in new COVID-19 cases.  Marin gave a speech at the summit supporting videoconferences for meeting between EU leaders, saying there should be a higher threshold for holding in-person meetings during the pandemic. 
 
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YouTube is following the lead of Twitter and Facebook, saying that it is taking more steps to limit QAnon and other baseless conspiracy theories that can lead to real-world violence.
The Google-owned video platform said Thursday it will now prohibit material targeting a person or group with conspiracy theories that have been used to justify violence.  
One example would be videos that threaten or harass someone by suggesting they are complicit in a conspiracy such as QAnon, which paints President Donald Trump as a secret warrior against a supposed child-trafficking ring run by celebrities and “deep state” government officials.
Pizzagate is another internet conspiracy theory — essentially a predecessor to QAnon — that would fall in the banned category. Its promoters claimed children were being harmed at a pizza restaurant in Washington. D.C. A man who believed in the conspiracy entered the restaurant in December 2016 and fired an assault rifle. He was sentenced to prison in 2017.
YouTube is the third of the major social platforms to announce policies intended rein in QAnon, a conspiracy theory they all helped spread.  
Twitter announced in July a crackdown on QAnon, though it did not ban its supporters from its platform. It did ban thousands of accounts associated with QAnon content and blocked URLs associated with it from being shared. Twitter also said that it would stop highlighting and recommending tweets associated with QAnon.  
Facebook, meanwhile, announced last week that it was banning groups that openly support QAnon. It said it would remove pages, groups and Instagram accounts for representing QAnon — even if they don’t promote violence.  
The social network said it will consider a variety of factors in deciding whether a group meets its criteria for a ban. Those include the group’s name, its biography or “about” section, and discussions within the page or group on Facebook, or account on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.
Facebook’s move came two months after it announced softer crackdown, saying said it would stop promoting the group and its adherents. But that effort faltered due to spotty enforcement.  
YouTube said it had already removed tens of thousands of QAnon-videos and eliminated hundreds of channels under its existing policies — especially those that explicitly threaten violence or deny the existence of major violent events.  
“All of this work has been pivotal in curbing the reach of harmful conspiracies, but there’s even more we can do to address certain conspiracy theories that are used to justify real-world violence, like QAnon,” the company said in Thursday’s  blog post.  
Experts said the move shows that YouTube is taking threats around violent conspiracy theories seriously and recognizes the importance of limiting the spread of such conspiracies. But, with QAnon increasingly creeping into mainstream politics and U.S. life, they wonder if it is too late.  
“While this is an important change, for almost three years YouTube was a primary site for the spread of QAnon,” said Sophie Bjork-James, an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University who studies QAnon. “Without the platform Q would likely remain an obscure conspiracy. For years YouTube provided this radical group an international audience.”
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The Czech Republic’s health minister said Friday the country’s health system needs be ready for a “huge influx,” of COVID-19 patients over the next 10 days to two weeks, as the nation faces Europe’s fastest growing rate in new coronavirus cases.Health Minister Roman Prymula told reporters at a news briefing in Prague the nation is looking at perhaps as much as a three-week surge of COVID-19 patients.At a time when all of Europe is facing an increase in the COVID-19 pandemic, the Czech Republic has been hit perhaps the hardest.  The European Center for Disease Control and Prevention says the Czech Republic leads the continent in the rate of new infections over the past two weeks, with nearly 702 cases per 100,000 people in the past two weeks, and nearly 50,000 of its total of 149,010 cases registered last week alone. The country also leads Europe in rate of deaths from the virus over the same period, 5.2 per 100,000 people.The Czech health ministry’s figures show the day-to-day increase reached 9,721 on Thursday, 177 more than the previous record set a day earlier.Hospitals across the country have been postponing unnecessary operations to focus on the growing number of COVID-19 patients. While Prymula said the country has doubled patient capacity, he says facilities could be full by the end of October.The Czech military will start to build a field hospital for 500 patients at Prague’s exhibition center over the weekend. Neighboring Germany has offered to take in some overflow intensive care patients.Officials say of the Czech Republic’s 84,430 people currently ill with the virus, 2,920 need hospitalization, 242 more than the previous day, with 543 in serious condition. 
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A predicted spike in COVID-19 cases as the cold weather months approach in the Northern Hemisphere seems to be occurring.Daily global cases have climbed to 330,000 per day, with Europe and the U.S. experiencing a worrying uptick.In the U.S., the nation’s top infectious disease expert told Americans to rethink their Thanksgiving plans for late November when many people traditionally travel through teeming transportation centers, such as bus depots, train stations, and airports to be with their families.“If you have vulnerable people, the elderly or people that have underlying conditions, you better consider whether you want to do that now,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told ABC News. He suggested people perhaps delay plans and “just … wait” until the pandemic is under control.“We really have to be careful this time that each individual family evaluates the risk-benefit,” Fauci added.On Saturday, France will begin a 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew for the region of Paris and at least seven other cities, including Lyon, Grenoble, Aix-en-Provence, Montpellier, Lille, Rouen and Saint-Étienne. The curfew will remain in effect for at least four weeks.German Chancellor Angela Merkel and governors of the country’s 16 states have agreed to impose a new round of nationwide restrictions after seeing record-high new COVID-19 cases. The restrictions include the early closure of bars and restaurants and limiting the number of people allowed to gather in public.Northern Ireland has announced a nationwide four-week lockdown, with schools closed for two weeks and all pubs and restaurants closed for the full month, except for pickup and delivery of food.London is about to be put under the second level of the government’s new three-tiered coronavirus alert system, which designates areas as medium, high and very high risk. The city of Liverpool has been placed under the highest tier, leading officials to close all restaurants and bars.There are now nearly 39 million worldwide COVID-19 cases and more than a million people have died from the virus, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.
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Little Kurt looks like any other baby horse as he frolics playfully in his pen. He isn’t afraid to kick or head-butt an intruder who gets in his way and, when he’s hungry, he dashes over to his mother for milk.But 2-month-old Kurt differs from every other foal of his kind in one distinct way: He’s a clone.The rare, endangered Przewalski’s horse was created from cells taken from a stallion in 1980. They sat frozen at the San Diego Zoo for 40 years before they were fused with an egg from a domestic horse.With the egg’s nucleus removed, ensuring Kurt would be basically all Przewalski’s horse, they were implanted in the mare who would become his mom on Aug. 6.The result, officials say, was the world’s first cloned Przewalski’s horse.Scientists have cloned nearly two dozen kinds of mammals, including dogs, cats, pigs, cows and polo ponies. In 2018, researchers in China created monkeys for the first time using the cloning techniques that produced Dolly the sheep.The zoo sees Kurt’s birth as a milestone in efforts to restore the population of the horse also known as the Asiatic Wild Horse or Mongolian Wild Horse. The small, stocky animals (they stand only about 1.2 to 1.5 meters tall at the withers) are believed extinct in the wild and number only about 2,000 in zoos and wildlife habitats. Their limited gene pool puts them at a reproductive disadvantage.“This colt is expected to be one of the most genetically important individuals of his species,” Bob Wiese, chief life sciences officer at San Diego Zoo Global, which operates the zoo, said in a statement. “We are hopeful that he will bring back genetic variation important for the future of the Przewalski’s horse population.”Although only 2 months old, Kurt’s birth was made possible in 1980 when cells were taken from a 5-year-old stallion and put in deep freeze at San Diego’s Frozen Zoo facility. His father died in 1998.Kurt was named for Kurt Benirschke, who played a key role in founding the Frozen Zoo with its extensive research program and cell cultures.“A central tenet of the Frozen Zoo, when it was established by Dr. Benirschke, was that it would be used for purposes not possible at the time,” said Oliver Ryder, director of genetics at San Diego Zoo Global.The zoo worked in collaboration with the California conservation group Revive & Restore and the Texas-based company ViaGen Equine in creating Kurt.He was born at a veterinary facility in Texas, where he’ll continue to live with his mother for most likely another year.Eventually he’ll be integrated into the zoo’s Przewalski’s horse population, where it’s hoped that someday he’ll become a father himself.Przewalski’s horses take their official name from Russian explorer Nikolai Przewalski, who found a skull and hide of one and shared it with a Russian museum.At one time they ranged throughout Europe and Asia, according to the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Biology Conservation Institute. Encroaching human population and livestock eventually pushed them out of Europe and east to parts of Asia like the Gobi Desert. Outside of zoos, they exist today only in reintroduction sites in Mongolia, China, and Kazakhstan.According to the Smithsonian, they are the only true wild horses left in the world. The institute maintains wild horse herds in North America and Australia don’t count because they are the descendants of escaped domesticated horses.
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Having contained its first brush with the novel coronavirus even as infections in neighboring countries surged, Myanmar is now straining to check a soaring second wave with a health care system blighted by decades of neglect under military rule.In early August, the Southeast Asian country of 54 million was still going days without logging a single new COVID-19 infection and had only 374 total confirmed cases by the middle of the month. Cases have skyrocketed since then, however, to more than 31,000 as of Oct. 14, according to Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center in the U.S.Myanmar logged 2,158 cases on Oct. 10, its highest daily count to date. COVID-related deaths have also jumped, from just six as of Sept. 3 to 732.Local reports say monasteries, schools and government offices are being repurposed as quarantine facilities to help share the load with a creaking public health care system, and that patients who have tested positive for the virus have been forced to share rooms with those who have not.World Health Organization country representative Dr. Stephan Jost called this an “emergency period” for Myanmar.’Turning point’Critics have accused authorities of being slow to take the virus seriously. Well into March, government spokesperson Zaw Htay told reporters the country was still case-free because of people’s lifestyle and diet.But Jost insisted Myanmar was on top of the pandemic starting in early January, banning flights from Wuhan, China, where it began, by the end of the month, canceling visas-on-arrival for visitors from all of China on Feb. 1, and setting up a powerful committee — later led by State Councilor Aung San Suu Kyi — to coordinate the government’s response.He said the “turning point” came in mid-August when a communal transmission case was detected in Sittwe, capital of the far western state of Rakhine, which borders Bangladesh, where major outbreaks were well underway.”And it’s really from then on that this second wave was, if you like, culminating into a very big challenge for the country, which it continues to be,” said Jost.Confirmation took a few days, he added, which “means that there was transmission happening a few days before that. And this also showed that with the continuing communication, say, by domestic flights, the potential of spread from Sittwe to practically every other part of Myanmar via Yangon [Myanmar’s commercial hub] is obviously there. And that is borne out by the transmission pattern that we have been seeing since.”Cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed in the capital, Naypyitaw, and 13 of the country’s 14 states and regions.Jost said Myanmar’s success keeping the first wave relatively small may have lulled authorities into lowering their guard, making way for the second. Lockdown orders on Yangon and elsewhere were lifted by the end of June.”Perhaps some of the measures were relaxed a little early, like we’ve seen in other places, without the virus actually having gone away,” he said.Given how infectious the novel coronavirus is, though, and how threadbare the public health care system Myanmar had to meet it with, Jost said the latest wave was to some degree “almost inevitable.”Myanmar is one of the poorest countries in the region. The WHO ranked its heath care system the worst in the world overall in 2000, the last time the U.N. agency published a global index. For the next decade the military junta spent less than 2% of Myanmar’s gross domestic product on health care per year on average, World Bank Figures show. Spending on health care only began to rise after the country started transforming into a quasi-democracy in 2011.LockdownEven so, the second wave might have been smaller had the government locked down Rakhine sooner than it did, said Joshua Poole, country director for Catholic Relief Services, a U.S.-based charity.Within a week of detecting the communal transmission case in mid-August, the government had locked down Sittwe, followed by a few more townships and the entire state by the end of the month.”It just wasn’t fast enough,” said Poole, who is also a member of the steering committee of Myanmar’s International Non-Governmental Organization Forum, which has been working with the government in responding to the pandemic.He believes a quicker return of stay-at-home orders in Yangon, which came in late September, would likely have helped even more.Most COVID-19 cases are now being found in greater Yangon, Myanmar’s most populous region, with more than 8 million residents, and also its most densely packed.”It took a while to get back to the point where there was the stay-at-home orders, and I think that’s really what caused the cases to blow up in Yangon,” said Poole.Considering that the population has been following authorities’ diktats fairly closely, he added, “if the government would have done that a week or two earlier then, you know, I think that would have helped quite a bit.”On the whole, though, Jost and Poole have been impressed with the government’s response to the pandemic, given the budget and health care staff it has to work with, and said the outbreak was not yet out of control.Jost has been especially impressed by the rapid rate at which Myanmar has been ramping up its testing capacity, from “literally zero” at the start to between 10,000 and 15,000 a day now, one reason for the rising infection numbers.That may not yet be enough, though. Poole said the government was reporting positivity rates of between 15% and 19%, suggesting that transmission was also high and that many infections were still not being caught. Countries that have managed to test a much larger share of their populations and started to bring their own outbreaks under control tend to report positivity rates of around 5% or less.Eyes on RakhinePoole said more and faster testing will be key for Myanmar to turn the corner. That’s tough enough in Yangon. It will be harder still in Rakhine, where the second wave started and infections are also mounting.Intense fighting between the military and Arakan Army, an ethnic armed group that wants autonomy for Rakhine, has consumed the north of the state since late 2019, killing hundreds and displacing many thousands into dangerously crowded camps.The International Crisis Group, a global research and advocacy nonprofit, warned that the conflict was a “potential health disaster” in May. Richard Horsey, a senior advisor to the group based in Myanmar, said the fighting has only picked up since then, putting added strain on the local health system and making it all the harder to test and see how the virus is spreading.”It just isn’t possible to roll out the kind of public health measures and responses that you need to do in a context of conflict,” he said.”Although Yangon is currently the focus of a lot of effort because of the large number of cases there, it’s very important that the public health authorities and the government don’t take their eye off Rakhine state,” he added.Myanmar’s Health and Sports Ministry did not reply to VOA’s repeated requests for an interview.
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The decision by Twitter to block the dissemination of a story on its site about Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, has added to an already heated discussion in the U.S. about whether internet companies have too much power and are making decisions that could affect the U.S. elections.Some have applauded Twitter’s move as a stand against misinformation. Others have criticized Twitter’s decision as biased, curtailing speech in a way that could affect the outcome of the U.S. election.In recent weeks, Twitter, Facebook and Google, the owner of YouTube, have increasingly taken steps to restrict the spread of what they describe as misinformation and extremist speech on their sites. After the 2016 U.S. election, internet companies were criticized for not doing enough to stop misinformation on their services.This week, Twitter blocked certain accounts on its site as they tried to share a story by the New York Post that cited supposed email exchanges between Hunter Biden and a Ukrainian official about setting up a meeting with Hunter Biden’s father when Joe Biden was the U.S. vice president. The story claimed to rely on records from a computer drive that was allegedly abandoned by Hunter Biden. Rudy Giuliani, lawyer to President Donald Trump, reportedly gave the drive to the Post.No meeting, campaign saysThe Biden campaign said it had “reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.””Investigations by the press, during impeachment, and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as ‘not legitimate’ and political by a GOP colleague, have all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official U.S. policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing,” said Andrew Bates, a spokesman for Biden.FILE – President Donald Trump holds up a copy of the New York Post as he speaks before signing an executive order aimed at curbing protections for social media giants, in the Oval Office of the White House, May 28, 2020.No tweeting, no sharingCiting the firm’s hacked-materials policy, Twitter blocked the Post’s ability to tweet about the story from its Twitter account. It also blocked the Trump campaign and other accounts from sharing the story.Facebook said it reduced the reach of the post, pending fact checking from third party fact-checkers.For Lisa Kaplan, chief executive of the Alethea Group, which tracks misinformation and online threats, Twitter’s recent decisions to block some posts are a good sign.“I do applaud Twitter’s efforts and the stances they have taken to address disinformation, making it so that people can’t share a link known to be false that could have potential implications on the election,” she said. “It’s an important step if they are truly going to be a source of accurate information for their users.”GOP respondsThe reaction from Republicans over the Post story has been swift. Senate Republicans said Thursday that they would subpoena Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, to testify next week. Dorsey should “explain why Twitter is abusing their corporate power to silence the press,” said Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican.Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, said he had sent a letter to Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, asking them to testify at a committee hearing.The companies’ decision about the Post stories throws fuel on an issue that has gained traction over the past year: whether companies are publishers, making editorial decisions, or “platforms,” places where people share information but with the companies providing little oversight of what’s said.FILE – FCC Chairman Ajit Pai testifies at a House subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Dec. 5, 2019.Protections weighedCongressional leaders of both parties are considering whether to strip the companies of some of their legal protections that say they aren’t responsible for the speech on their sites. On Thursday, Republican Ajit Pai, chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, said the agency would consider weakening the legal protections the companies enjoy.Some Democrats as well have called for stripping the internet firms of some of their legal protections.With the decision about the Post story, Ken Paulson, director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, says the internet firms have not moved closer to being publishers.“If you have a business and the last thing you want is untruthful stories, then you can say, ‘We’re uncomfortable to share this with millions of people globally.’ That’s your right,” Paulson said. “I don’t think we want to mistake Facebook or Twitter for a public utility. And I don’t think a simple ban on content you believe to be unreliable and fraudulent makes you a publisher.“A company has a right to decide what it stands for, and that’s where we are now with Twitter and Facebook,” he said.One thing is certain: With the internet firms making decisions almost daily about curtailing or blocking posts, lawmakers and regulators will have more fodder to point to for changing the rules.
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Hunger and malnutrition are worsening in parts of the African continent because of the coronavirus pandemic, especially in low-income communities or those already stricken by continued conflict, according to a survey of 2,400 people in 10 African countries by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
The survey, conducted from June to August, shows the pandemic has caused job losses and curtailed people’s ability to farm or access markets.
“The risk is that as food prices rise and people’s income plummets, we could see a rise in malnutrition because families can’t afford enough food, or that the foods they can afford are less nutrient-rich,” said ICRC’s economic security analyst for Africa, Pablo Lozano.
Since the start of the pandemic, 94% of respondents reported that prices for food and other essentials in their local markets had increased, while 82% said they had lost income or revenue. Only 7% said they had enough savings to cope with a prolonged crisis.
Lozano said the survey shows people are struggling financially “in the communities in which we work, especially true among those who relied on day labor to get by or small business owners, as well as communities that were already struggling with food insecurity due to conflict or violence.”Students of Rising Sun Children School wear face masks as a preventive measure to curb the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus in their classroom in Yaba, Lagos, on Oct. 12, 2020.
In Western Africa, in Nigeria’s conflict-stricken northeast, the number of children treated by the outpatient nutrition program grew by 20%, while the number of severe malnutrition cases grew by 10% compared with the same period last year.
The increase in patients was recorded even though ICRC’s community outreach program has been on hold due to COVID-19. The ICRC said it is worried about the increase and predicts even more patients once work resumes.
“We are very concerned by the trend, especially in Maiduguri,” said Thomas Ndambu, ICRC nutritionist, who is “certain that when Nigerian Red Cross volunteers resume their community outreach, the number of malnutrition cases will surge.”
In nearby Burkina Faso, unabated violence despite the pandemic has displaced about 2.8 million people. These forcibly displaced people are now estimated to face crisis levels of food insecurity or worse, representing an increase of more than 200% from the same period a year ago, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification System.Children sit in their classroom on the first day of the new school year, in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, on Oct.1, 2020.Mathew Kenyanjui, economic security coordinator of the ICRC in Burkina Faso, cautioned that the level of hunger is “rising dangerously due to violence, lack of access to arable land, fragile adaptation strategies, such as sales of household assets and livestock.” This situation has been compounded by the cyclical droughts and the flooding this year, he added.
UNICEF and the World Food Program reported that a survey conducted in August in 11 municipalities in Burkina Faso found 11% of children under the age of 5, and pregnant and breastfeeding women, to be suffering from moderate acute malnutrition, and 3% suffering from severe acute malnutrition.
The trend is no different in the easternmost part of the continent in Somalia. Seventeen-thousand malnourished children under the age of 5, and pregnant and breastfeeding women, were assisted in the first six months of 2020, compared with 11,900 in all of 2019. Here, too, the number is expected to climb by year-end because of a combination of violence, conflict, floods, locusts and COVID-19 complications.Sudanese refugees children pose for photographs, in the Treguine camp, in Hadjer Hadid, in the Ouaddaï region of eastern Chad, on March 24, 2019.In Chad, the situation has deteriorated dramatically in 2020 because of the highly volatile security situation in parts of the country that has forced people from their homes, often more than once. Exacerbating the situation is COVID-19 and climate shocks including droughts and floods. In the Lake Chad region, 65% of families in the country are estimated to live on just $2 a day.
Flooding also has compounded already staggering food insecurity and malnutrition levels in South Sudan, where more than half of the country’s 11 million people are estimated to face severe food insecurity. That is combined with protracted conflict and armed violence, which has affected livelihoods for decades and forced millions of people to flee their homes and abandon their crops. Additionally, markets often are destroyed in armed clashes, disrupting people’s access to food.
Additionally, the ICRC is concerned that if borders are closed due to COVID-19, South Sudan would face dramatic consequences and the level of food insecurity would rise significantly, given that much of the country’s food is imported.
The ICRC survey was also conducted in countries where the ICRC continues to work, including Mauritania, Niger, Cameroon, Libya, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo. 
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Senate Republicans said Thursday they will subpoena Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey over the decision to block a news report critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. “This is election interference and we’re 19 days out from an election,” Senator Ted Cruz said, a day after the social network blocked links to the article by the New York Post alleging corruption by Biden in Ukraine. Cruz said the Senate Judiciary Committee would vote next Tuesday to subpoena Dorsey to testify at the end of next week and “explain why Twitter is abusing their corporate power to silence the press.” “The Senate Judiciary Committee wants to know what the hell is going on,” he said. “Twitter and Facebook and big tech millionaires don’t get to censor political speech and actively interfere in the election. That’s what they are doing right now.” Republican Senator Josh Hawley announced separately that he had sent letters to Dorsey and Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg asking them to appear before his Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism. The hearing will “consider potential campaign law violations” in support of Biden with the blocking of the article.  The Post’s story purported to expose corrupt dealings by Biden and his son Hunter Biden in Ukraine. The newspaper claimed that the former vice president, who was in charge of U.S. policy toward Ukraine, took actions to help his son, who in 2014-2017 sat on the board of controversial Ukraine energy company Burisma. But the newspaper’s source for the information raised questions. It cited records on a drive allegedly copied from a computer said to have been abandoned by Hunter Biden, that Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani gave to the Post. The report also made claims about Joe Biden’s actions in Ukraine, which were contrary to the record.   Wary of “fake news” campaigns, both Facebook and Twitter said they took action out of caution over the article and its sourcing. “This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation,” said Facebook spokesman Andy Stone. The role of Giuliani, who has repeatedly advanced unproven and poorly sourced conspiracy theories about the Bidens and Ukraine, also raised flags. The Biden campaign rejected the assertions of corruption in the report but has not denied the veracity of the underlying materials, mostly emails between Hunter Biden and business partners. Trump, who trails Biden in polls 19 days before the presidential election, blasted the two social media giants on Wednesday. “So terrible that Facebook and Twitter took down the story of ‘Smoking Gun’ emails related to Sleepy Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in the @NYPost,” Trump posted on Twitter. 
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The head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies warns Sudan’s fragile political stability could be at risk if the desperate needs of hundreds of thousands of flood victims are not urgently addressed. Severe floods have affected nearly 900,000 Sudanese, reportedly killing more than 120, rendering thousands of families homeless, and destroying farmlands and livelihoods.International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies Secretary General Jagan Chapagain attends a ceremony in Geneva on July 22, 2020.Secretary-General Jagan Chapagain has just returned from a four-day assessment mission to Sudan. He said the impact of the worst floods in three decades is far beyond anything he had expected.“I visited an area called Algamayer on the outskirts of Khartoum. Homes, infrastructure and crops have been destroyed,”  Chapagain said. “The conditions are simply appalling. It is boiling hot — more than 40 degrees, and there is no shade. The camp we visited is surrounded by stagnant water, and mosquitoes are rife.”Chapagain said the only access to clean water or sanitary toilets is at the neighboring school, which is closed at night. He said people also lack sufficient shelter, toilets and mosquito nets, which means malaria is rampant and the risk of cholera and other diseases is high.He said children comprise about half of the flood victims and are particularly vulnerable. This humanitarian crisis, he said, also is taking a heavy toll on pregnant and lactating women, the elderly and disabled.He told VOA he is very concerned by the level of anger and frustration he encountered and its potential impact on the country’s stability.“There was a locust infestation in the beginning of the year,” Chapagain said. “There has been, of course, impact of the COVID. And, of course, with the political change, the expectations of the population on the government are very, very high — actually extremely high … I do believe that the pressure on the government could be very significantly increasing in coming months if these desperate needs are not addressed.”Sudan’s transitional government, which took office last year after long-time leader Omar al-Bashir was ousted, is struggling to build a stable political system and end political violence in the impoverished country.The International Red Cross has received just 15% of the $13 million appeal it launched in September to provide health care, shelter, water and sanitation and other essential relief for 200,000 Sudanese flood victims.Secretary-General Chapagain says it is urgent to act now. He warns the failure of the international community to support this life-saving operation will have fearful consequences for many thousands of people. 
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