As Monica Harvey watched, crowds flocked to a Sam’s Club in northern Arizona where she works, picking shelves clean of toilet paper and canned goods. Native American seniors couldn’t move fast enough, and Harvey saw their faces fall when they reached empty shelves.The Navajo woman wanted to help tribal elders get household staples without leaving their homes and risking exposure to COVID-19, so she started Defend Our Community, a group that delivers supplies.Tribes across the nation are working to protect elder members who serve as honored links to customs passed from one generation to the next. The efforts to deliver protective gear, meals and vaccines are about more than saving lives. Tribal elders often possess unique knowledge of language and history that is all the more valuable because tribes commonly pass down their traditions orally. That means losing elders to the coronavirus could wipe out irreplaceable pieces of culture.”When you lose an elder, you lose a part of yourself,” said Harvey, who lives in Leupp, Arizona, east of Flagstaff. “You lose a connection to history, our stories, our culture, our traditions.”Harvey remembers her own grandfather explaining the stories behind Navajo songs and teaching her Navajo words from the songs. She often listened to her grandparents speaking Navajo while she practiced the words under her breath.In Oklahoma, the Cherokee Nation has increased food distributions to elders and offered financial aid to those who were struggling to pay rent or utilities. Concern for elders is also apparent in the tribe’s COVID-19 vaccine distribution plans. Participants and workers in the tribe’s elder program are first in line for the shots, along with hospital workers and first responders. Next are those whose first language is Cherokee and others considered “tribal treasures,” an honor given to members who keep Cherokee art, language and other culture alive through their work.An effort among the Blackfeet in Montana is helping the tribe’s 600-plus members connect with elders who need support. Connecticut’s Mashantucket Pequot Nation is providing its citizens with masks and telemedicine, delivering meals to their doors and organizing home visits to give flu vaccines.”Elders are like libraries. Losing one is like a library burning down,” said Loren Racine, creator of a Facebook page offering help in the Blackfeet community.FILE – A sign on a door warns people to wear face coverings, at the Kayenta Health Center on the Navajo reservation in Kayenta, Arizona, April 18, 2020.Roy Boney, Jr., who manages a Cherokee language program, said the majority of Cherokee speakers are elders. They make up a small pool of people the program relies on to teach the language he calls the “beating heart” of Cherokee identity.”For decades our language has been taken from us through forced assimilation,” Boney said. “Elders hold our history and culture but also our language…Our elders are precious.”Almost half of the Cherokee who received care from the tribe’s health services but died from the coronavirus were fluent Cherokee speakers. Losing even a handful of speakers can be devastating for language preservation and other cultural practices, Boney said.”With them goes so much information in terms of language knowledge, dialect, specialized knowledge of medicine and traditional practices,” he said. “All these things we’re trying to revitalize and save, they’re the heart of all of it.”Mashantucket Pequot elders shifted to a virtual format for the intergenerational gatherings where they tell traditional stories. An elders council also helps to organize Pequot language bingo nights and Schemitzun, the annual Festival of the Green Corn.”When we heard how COVID-19 was spreading, we were immediately concerned for our elders and how losing them would affect the tribe, so we immediately started working to protect them,” said the tribe’s chief medical officer, Setu Vora.The tribe has no known COVID-19 deaths.Pequot elders play an important role in the effort to revive the tribe’s language, which is no longer widely spoken. Elders still remember relatives who spoke the language and can verify the definitions and context of certain words. A handful of the tribe’s 2,000 members are becoming somewhat proficient in Pequot as they research and reclaim new words, Vora said.Karen Ketcher was among 28 Cherokee Nation elders who have died from the coronavirus. She was weeks shy of her 71st birthday and had decades of experience working for the tribe and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. Her knowledge was unmatched and invaluable, said her granddaughter, Taryn King.”There’s so much at stake when this virus hits our communities,” said King, 31, of Stilwell, Oklahoma. She described elders as “the glue that holds our communities together.”At work, Ketcher was affectionately called “Granny.” She was the go-to person for questions about Cherokee policies, tribal governance and how to apply for grants. She also was the first stop for snacks, help mending holes in sweaters or questions about community relations.One co-worker, Kamisha Hair, went into Ketcher’s office shortly before the tribe temporarily closed it in March because of the pandemic. She assured Ketcher things would be OK and implored her to pray.The two hugged and said they loved each other. Ketcher died in April.Relatives held a small outdoor service for her. When they returned to town, other Cherokees had lined the streets to pay their respects.”Losing an elder like Granny is like losing a piece of your identity,” Hair said. “It dies with them, and you can never get it back.”
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Day: December 27, 2020
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert, said Sunday that the country is “really at a critical time” in confronting the coronavirus pandemic, as the number of new cases is soaring even as the first 1.9 million Americans have been vaccinated. Fauci, who was vaccinated last week, told CNN on Sunday that it is “very tough” for people to not socialize over the holidays even though health experts have strongly advised against it. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, prepares to receive his first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Md., Dec. 22, 2020.Authorities say 85 million Americans are traveling to visit relatives and friends, which they fear will lead to even more infections in the United States. For several weeks now, the U.S. has been recording 200,000 new cases a day. Fauci said people are “crowded in airports, a mixing of households. As much as we advise against it, it happens.” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984 and named as the chief medical adviser to the incoming Biden administration, unequivocally urged Americans to get inoculated. Fauci said he hopes that 75% to 80% of the 209 million adult Americans will be vaccinated in the coming months, a figure that might be sufficient for herd immunity to take hold in the country to end the pandemic. FILE – Staff members receive the COVID-19 vaccine at Holy Name Medical Center in Teaneck, N.J., Dec. 17, 2020.He said that with inoculations over the next several months, the U.S. could “reach a critical number of vaccinated” people by the “middle to the end of summer” next August. That would by then, he said, allow the country to “return to some form of normality.” The U.S. has started inoculating primary health care workers and elderly residents of nursing homes, with front-line essential workers and those 75 and older set to be next in line for the shots in the next few weeks. U.S. health experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defined front-line essential workers as emergency responders, teachers and other education workers, including day care personnel, food and agriculture workers, correctional facility staff members, postal workers, public transit workers, and people who work in manufacturing and in grocery stores. Fauci said U.S. health authorities are monitoring mutant strains that have shown up in Britain and South Africa. Officials in those two countries say that the vaccines developed by drug makers Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna will protect against the new strains, but Fauci said that U.S. researchers will be doing their own tests to make sure. The U.S. has recorded more than 332,000 deaths from the coronavirus and nearly 19 million infections, with both figures more than in any other country, according to the Johns Hopkins University.
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The World Health Organization is urging nations to prepare for inevitable future pandemics, as it marks the first International Day of Epidemic Preparedness.“If we fail to prepare, we are preparing to fail. … Last year, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board published its first report, which concluded, the world remains dangerously unprepared for a global pandemic,” said WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.In a video statement to launch the International Day of Epidemic Preparedness, Tedros warns nations against lurching from one outbreak to another while doing nothing to prepare and prevent this from happening. He calls this dangerously shortsighted.A year after being detected in Wuhan, China, the coronavirus has spread widely. The impact on the world’s health and economic well-being has been devastating.Latest World Health Organization figures put the number of global infections at more than 80 million cases, including over 1.7 million deaths.Despite these grim statistics, the development of efficacious and safe vaccines is raising hopes the COVID-19 pandemic will be relegated to the history books in the coming months. While Tedros shares these hopes, he advises people to temper their optimism.“History tells us that this will not be the last pandemic and epidemics are a fact of life …All countries must invest in preparedness capacities to prevent, detect and mitigate emergencies of all kinds—whether they be natural occurring epidemics or deliberate events,” he said.The WHO chief said the only way to defeat the current outbreak and prepare for the next is for all countries to work together in a spirit of solidarity. This, he adds, means involving and respecting the needs of all nations — rich and poor alike.
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European Union gave approval on Dec. 21 for the COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer Inc and BioNTech SE, the latest regulatory go-ahead for the shot, while the United States authorised Moderna Inc’s vaccine on Dec. 19, the second for the country and the first for the company worldwide. The following is what we know about the race to deliver vaccines to help end the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 1.7 million people worldwide: Who is furthers along? U.S. drugmaker Pfizer and German partner BioNTech are the COVID-19 vaccine trailblazers. On Nov. 18, they became the first in the world to release full late-stage trial data. Britain was the first to approve the shot for emergency use on Dec. 3, followed by Canada on Dec. 9 and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Dec. 11. Several other countries including Saudi Arabia and Mexico have also approved it. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) approved the shot on Dec. 21 and India is accelerating its review. The World Health Organization could decide whether to give its emergency use approval for the Pfizer candidate by the end of the year as part of its COVAX programme aimed at providing shots for poor — and middle-income countries. Who will approve Moderna next? Moderna became a close second to Pfizer in many countries after it released a full data analysis for a late-stage trial on Nov. 30 showing a 94.1% efficacy rate for its vaccine. Canada approved the shot on Dec. 23 and the EMA will do so on Jan. 6. Who else is in the running? Britain’s AstraZeneca is seeking approval for its vaccine in Britain after announcing interim late-stage trial data on Nov. 23. It had an average efficacy rate of 70% and as much as 90% for a subgroup of trial participants who got a half dose first, followed by a full dose. However, it is not clear how the regulator will deal with the different dosages in the efficacy data in its assessment. While India is conducting an accelerated review, it has asked for more data. AstraZeneca is also in discussions with the EMA, which is conducting a rolling review of the vaccine. India is expected to make a decision on whether to approve for the two full-dose regimen of the shot, which was shown to tbe 62% effective in late-stage trials, soon. Its review does not include the more effective dosage, with 90% efficacy which was given to a small subgroup of volunteers in the trials. U.S. drugmaker Johnson & Johnson plans to deliver trial data in January 2021, teeing it up for U.S. authorization in February if its shot is effective. It reduced the enrolment target for its clinical trial to 40,000 volunteers from 60,000 on Dec. 9, potentially speeding results which are tied to how quickly participants become infected. U.S. firm Novavax is running a late-stage trial in Britain with data due in the first quarter of 2021. It expects to start a large-scale trial in the United States this month. France’s Sanofi and Britain’s GlaxoSmithKline , however, announced a setback on Dec. 11 in their attempts to develop a vaccine. The drugmakers said it showed an insufficient immune response in older people in mid-stage trials and that they would start a new study in February. What happens in the trials? The companies typically test their vaccines against a placebo – typically saline solution – in healthy volunteers to see if the rate of COVID-19 infection among those who got the vaccine is significantly lower than in those who received the dummy shot. How are volunteers infected? The trials rely on subjects becoming naturally infected with COVID-19, so how long it takes to generate results largely depends on how pervasive the virus is where trials are being conducted. Each drugmaker has targeted a specific number of infections to trigger a first analysis of their data. How well are the vaccines supposed to work? The World Health Organization ideally wants to see at least 70% efficacy. The FDA wants at least 50% – which means there must be at least twice as many infections among volunteers who received a placebo as among those in the vaccine group. The EMA has said it may accept a lower efficacy level. What about Russia and China? While Pfizer’s shot was the first to be rolled out following the publication of full Phase III trial data, Russia and China have been inoculating their citizens for months with several different vaccines still undergoing late-stage trials. Russia said on Nov. 24 its Sputnik V vaccine, developed by the Gamaleya Institute, was 91.4% effective based on interim late-stage trial results. It started vaccinations in August and has inoculated more than 100,000 people so far. India plans to make 300 million of the shots next year and Argentina has given the greenlight for emergency use of the shot, with some 300,000 doses arriving in the country on Dec. 24. China launched an emergency use programme in July aimed at essential workers and others at high risk of infection. It has vaccinated about one million people as of mid-November using at least three shots – two developed by the state-backed China National Biotec Group (CNBG) and one by Sinovac Biotech. Trial data on a COVID-19 vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech has varied: interim data from a late-stage trial in Turkey showed its CoronaVac shot is 91.25% effective, while researchers in Brazil say the shot was more than 50% effective. The United Arab Emirates, meanwhile, said on Dec. 9 that one of the CNBG vaccines was 86% effective based on interim results from a late-stage trial in the Gulf Arab state.
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Several European Union countries began vaccinating against COVID-19 Sunday.In Italy, a nurse, a university professor and a doctor were the first people to receive the initial vaccine dose at Rome’s Lazzaro Spallanzani hospital.In Spain, the vaccination began at Los Olmos nursing home in Guadalajara.In the Czech Republic, Prime Minister Andrej Babis was among the first people inoculated, as vaccinations began nationwide.In Germany Saturday, 101-year-old Edith Kwoizalla, who lives in a retirement home, received the first of her two shots.In Hungary, it was a doctor, Arienne Kertesz from South Pest.In Slovakia, an infectious disease specialist was the first in line.The first shipments of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were limited to 10,000 doses in most EU countries. Each nation decides its own vaccination program, but all are vaccinating the most vulnerable first.European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called it “a touching moment of unity” in a video celebrating the beginning of the rollout of the vaccine to nearly 450 million people.The vaccination in EU countries began as a new coronavirus variant, more contagious and more dangerous, spread internationally, adding emphasis to the World Health Organization’s warning that the current pandemic will not be the last.The warning came in a video message on Sunday by WHO’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.The world must learn from COVID-19 and address “the intimate links between the health of humans, animals and the planet,” Tedros said in his remarks for the first International Day of Epidemic Preparedness.“For too long the world has operated on a cycle of panic and neglect,” he said. “We throw money at one epidemic and when it’s over, we forget about it and do nothing to prevent the next one.”Tedros said every country needs to invest in what he called the supply of care: the ability to avoid, detect and mitigate all kinds of emergencies.The new virus strain is 50% to 74% more contagious than its predecessors, according to a study from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, raising fears of more hospitalizations and deaths in 2021 than in 2020.Effective Monday, U.S. authorities said passengers arriving from Britain must test negative for COVID-19 before departure.
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Italians began to receive COVID-19 vaccines Sunday after the first batch of nearly 10,000 doses arrived. Italians hope that the massive vaccination campaign will soon bring an end to lockdowns and return them to their normal lives.A 29-year-old nurse was the first to receive the vaccine at Rome’s Lazzaro Spallanzani National Institute for Infectious Diseases. Health workers at hospitals across the country were next.The government’s plan is for health staff and workers and elderly residents in nursing homes to be the first in line. Those over 80 will follow, then 60- to 70-year-olds, and those who suffer from chronic illnesses.Next will be the general population, starting with school staff, police forces and prison workers. With more than 50% of Italians now saying that they will get inoculated, and that number on the rise, the hope is that in nine months, Italy will reach herd immunity with 70% of the population vaccinated, a total of 42 million people.The country’s first allocated 9,750 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine arrived at the Salvo D’Acquisto military base late on Christmas night. A van with the first batch of vaccines was escorted by police cars to the Spallanzani hospital in Rome.Italian soldiers loaded other boxes of the vaccine onto military cargo planes for distribution all over the country. Five planes took off from the military base of Pratica di Mare, near Rome.Domenico Arcuri, Italy’s special commissioner for the COVID-19 emergency, said that with the arrival of the first batch of the vaccine, Sunday would be a symbolic and emotional day.Arcuri said the first doses arrived after a long night. He said Italians are seeing the first ray of light, but the road is still a long one before day arrives. It is important, he added, for this symbolic vaccination to begin and this campaign will continue over the next months to lead the country out of this emergency.Italy is planning to set up pavilions in its artistic squares to dispense vaccines. The primrose-shaped pavilions were designed by architect Stefano Boeri who said his team had picked the flower, which heralds the arrival of spring, as the symbol of the campaign, whose slogan is “Italy is reborn with a flower.”There will be around 300 distribution sites in Italy, rising to 1,500 once the vaccination campaign is at its peak.Boeri, famous for designing Milan’s Vertical Forest skyscraper, said the pavilions would be powered with solar energy and built with recyclable materials such as timber and fabric. He did not charge for his work.More than 71,000 people have died in Italy since the start of the outbreak in February.
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Barry Lopez, an award-winning writer who tried to tighten the bonds between people and place by describing the landscapes he saw in 50 years of travel, has died. He was 75.Lopez died in Eugene, Oregon, on Friday after a years-long struggle with prostate cancer, his family said.Longtime friend Kim Stafford, former Oregon poet laureate, said Lopez’s books “are landmarks that define a region, a time, a cause. He also exemplifies a life of devotion to craft and learning, to being humble in the face of wisdom of all kinds.”An author of nearly 20 books on natural history studies, along with essay and short story collections, Lopez was awarded the National Book Award in 1986 for Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape. It was the result of almost five years of traveling the Arctic.His final work was Horizon, an autobiography that recalls a lifetime of travel in more than 70 countries.’Desire simply to go away’Born in 1945 in Port Chester, New York, Lopez grew up in California’s San Fernando Valley and, after his mother remarried, New York City. In Horizon, he wrote that in those formative years, he developed “a desire simply to go away. To find what the skyline has cordoned off.”His later years were spent with his wife, Debra Gwartney, in a wooded area along the McKenzie River east of Eugene. After years of writing about the natural world and humans’ effect on climate change, he mourned the loss of acres of timber, not to mention personal papers, in the September 2020 Holiday Farm fire.The wildfire damaged Lopez’s home so badly that he couldn’t live in it. The blaze also destroyed a building that stored his original manuscripts, personal letters, photos and a typewriter he used to write his books. The IBM Selectric III was quickly replaced with an identical model by his friends.”Just an incredible body of work and memories,” said his stepdaughter Stephanie Woodruff. “Very meticulously kept and organized. That [loss] was devastating, certainly. He wrote every single book on a typewriter.”In 2013, Lopez wrote the essay Sliver of Sky, revealing he had been sexually abused by a family friend for several years starting when he was 7. Lopez said the essay was an attempt at catharsis.Crowning achievementWoodruff said the essay possibly helped lead to Horizon, a book more than two decades in the making. In a 2019 review, The Associated Press said the book felt like the crowning achievement of Lopez’s illustrious career, describing it as part travel journal, part history, part science lecture, part autobiography and completely unique.”I do think that [the essay] released something in him to really ground and round out and complete ‘Horizon,’ ” Woodruff said. “Everything he wrote was personal, of course.”In a statement Saturday, his family encouraged financial support for the McKenzie River Trust, with which Lopez had worked on conservation efforts.Lopez is survived by his wife, four stepdaughters and an older brother. A younger brother died in 2017.
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The pandemic caused by the coronavirus “will not be the last pandemic, and epidemics are a fact of life,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a video message Sunday.The world must learn from COVID-19 and address “the intimate links between the health of humans, animals and the planet,” Tedros said in his remarks for the first International Day of Epidemic Preparedness.“For too long the world has operated on a cycle of panic and neglect,” he said. “We throw money at one epidemic and when it’s over, we forget about it and do nothing to prevent the next one.”Tedros said every country needs to invest in what he called the supply of care: the ability to avoid, detect and mitigate all kinds of emergencies.The WHO chief’s warning came as the first doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine against the coronavirus arrived in European Union countries, with the first shots going into arms Saturday.In Germany, 101-year-old Edith Kwoizalla, who lives in a retirement home, received the first of her two shots. In Hungary, it was a doctor, Arienne Kertesz from South Pest. In Slovakia, an infectious disease specialist was the first in line.The first shipments were limited to 10,000 doses in most EU countries. Each decides its own vaccination program, but all are vaccinating the most vulnerable first.European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called it “a touching moment of unity” in a video celebrating the beginning of the rollout of the vaccine to nearly 450 million people.“Today, we start turning the page on a difficult year. The COVID-19 vaccine has been delivered to all EU countries. Vaccination will begin tomorrow across the EU,” she said.Other countries, including Russia, which said on Saturday that it had passed 3 million cases, the United Kingdom, the United States and Mexico started vaccinating people in early December. Russia approved its main coronavirus vaccine, Sputnik V, for use in people older than 60, Russian media quoted the health ministry as saying.As those vaccinations were ramping up, several countries Saturday confirmed cases of the British variant of the coronavirus. Canada reported a couple from southern Ontario with no travel history, exposure or high-risk contact had tested positive for the variant. Italy, Sweden, Spain and Japan joined France, Germany, Lebanon and Denmark in reporting cases of the new strain of the coronavirus.The new strain is 50% to 74% more contagious than its predecessors, according to a study from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, raising fears of more hospitalizations and deaths in 2021 than in 2020.Effective Monday, U.S. authorities said, passengers arriving from Britain must test negative for COVID-19 before departure.
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