The initial round of mass testing for the coronavirus has been completed in Shijiazhuang, a city of 11 million that was locked down Wednesday after 39 new cases of the virus surfaced, the city’s mayor said Saturday.Mayor Ma Yujun said at a news conference that a second round of testing would begin soon in the capital of Hebei province, which was sealed off as travel restrictions were imposed in the rest of the region of 76 million people that encircles Beijing.On Tuesday, Hebei authorities put the province into “wartime mode,” enabling authorities to launch a collaborative campaign involving contact tracing and distribution of medical supplies.The aggressive approach taken by Chinese authorities is being adopted in other parts of the Asia-Pacific region, in sharp contrast to the more deliberate virus containment efforts under way in the U.S. and Europe.The United States had more cases Saturday than anyplace else, with more than 22 million of the world’s nearly 90 million infections, according to Johns Hopkins University. India was second with more than 10.4 million cases.The U.S. reported more than 300,000 new COVID cases Friday, close to its January 2 record.FILE – People arrive at Jackson Memorial Hospital to receive the COVID-19 vaccine in Miami, Jan. 6, 2021.Vaccine releaseWith the virus surging in some U.S. states, President-elect Joe Biden said he backed the rapid release of COVID vaccines so that whoever wants it will have access to it. Biden’s office said Friday that it would limit the Trump administration’s practice of increasing inventories of vaccine doses to guarantee that people get the booster shot several weeks after the first inoculation.Infectious-disease expert Anthony Fauci said earlier this week he was hopeful that when Biden is in office, the U.S. will be able to deliver to the public “1 million vaccinations per day, as the president-elect has mentioned.”A surprising development, however, has emerged in some implausible locations. The Associated Press reports that some health care workers in hospitals and nursing homes are hesitant about being vaccinated. The AP said its investigation uncovered that in some places as much as 80% of the medical staff has declined the vaccinations.One doctor told the wire service he wanted to wait a few months to “see what the data show.” He said, “I don’t think anyone wants to be a guinea pig.”A nurse said she was delaying her vaccination because of the vaccine’s “unknown side effects.”Some medical personnel, however, are reversing their hesitancy. One medical director told AP that “the biggest thing that helped us to gain confidence in our staff was watching other staff members get vaccinated, be OK, walk out of the room, you know, not grow a third ear, and so that really is like an avalanche,” causing staff members to rethink how they view the inoculations.People line up to enter a grocery store before an impending lockdown due to an outbreak of the coronavirus disease in Brisbane, Australia, Jan. 8, 2021.Using cautionSome countries are also taking a wait-and-see attitude toward vaccines. The British newspaper The Guardian said Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea were among the countries that had decided to see what is happening in the rest of the world with the inoculations.Jennifer Martin, an Australian physician who is also on the advisory committee of the sole purchaser for pharmaceuticals in New Zealand, said, “Why would you put people at risk when if you wait a bit longer, you can get more information?”The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Friday urged the manufacturers of COVID-19 vaccines and the wealthier countries to make them available to poorer countries. He said most of the 42 countries rolling out coronavirus vaccines were high-income nations and a few were middle-income countries.Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has banned imports of COVID-19 vaccines from America’s Pfizer-BioNTech and Britain’s AstraZeneca, citing a mistrust of Western countries.“I really do not trust them,” Khamenei said Friday in a televised speech. “Sometimes they seek to try out their vaccines on other nations to see if it works or not,” he said. “I am not optimistic [about] France, either.”Khamenei said he continued to allow the import of vaccines from other “safe” places and still supported his country’s efforts to produce its own vaccine.Iran began human trials with its vaccines in December and officials hope they will be available in the country in a few months.Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz gets a dose of a coronavirus disease vaccine in Neom, Saudi Arabia, Jan. 8, 2021.Saudi king vaccinatedIn Saudi Arabia, the country’s 82-year-old monarch, King Salman, received a coronavirus vaccination, according to video published by state media Friday. Saudi health officials recorded just 97 new cases of the virus Friday and four deaths as infections in the country continued to decline.Israel’s health ministry said Saturday that four people had tested positive for the novel coronavirus strain first detected in South Africa. The British variant had already been reported in the country.Health experts say both strains are potentially more infectious than other variants.Persistently high caseloads forced Israel to tighten lockdown measures Friday after imposing a nationwide lockdown last month.Under Israel’s national vaccination program, 70% of its population older than 60 received initial vaccinations. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that he’d reached an agreement with Pfizer-BioNTech to provide enough vaccine to have all citizens older than 16 be vaccinated by the end of March.India said Saturday that it had recorded 18,222 new COVID cases in the past 24 hours. The health ministry also said it had recorded 90 cases of the British variant of the virus.
…
Day: January 9, 2021
The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Saturday that there are nearly 90 million global COVID-19 cases.The United States has more cases than anyplace else with almost 22 million infections. India comes in second with about half the infections of the U.S. — nearly 10.5 million cases.The U.S. reported more than 300,000 new COVID-19 cases Friday, a record-breaking number.With the virus surging in some U.S. states, President-elect Joe Biden says he believes in the rapid release of the COVID-19 vaccines so whoever wants it will have access to it. The second dose of the vaccine is given weeks later.Infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci said earlier this week he is hopeful that when Biden is in office, the U.S. will be able to deliver to the U.S. public “1 million vaccinations per day, as the president-elect has mentioned.”A surprising development, however, has emerged in some implausible locations. The Associated Press reports that some health care workers in hospitals and nursing homes are hesitant about being vaccinated. The AP said its investigation uncovered that in some places as much as 80% of the medical staff has declined the vaccinations.One doctor told the wire service he wanted to wait a few months to “see what the data show.” He said, “I don’t think anyone wants to be a guinea pig.”A nurse said she was delaying her vaccination because of the vaccine’s “unknown side effects.”A pedestrian wearing a face mask as a preventive measure against the COVID-19 coronavirus walks through a road in New Delhi on Jan. 9, 2021.Some medical personnel, however, are reversing their hesitancy. One medical director told AP that “The biggest thing that helped us to gain confidence in our staff was watching other staff members get vaccinated, be OK, walk out of the room, you know, not grow a third ear, and so that really is like an avalanche,” causing staff members to rethink how they view the inoculations.Some countries are also taking a wait-and-see attitude when it comes to vaccines. The British newspaper The Guardian reported that Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea are among the countries that have decided to see what is happening in the rest of the world with the inoculations.Jennifer Martin, an Australian physician who is also on the advisory committee of the sole purchaser for pharmaceuticals in New Zealand, said, “Why would you put people at risk when if you wait a bit longer, you can get more information?”The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Friday urged the manufacturers of COVID-19 vaccines and the wealthier countries to make them available to poorer countries. He said of the 42 countries that are rolling out coronavirus vaccines, most of them are high-income nations and a few are middle-income countries.Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has banned imports of COVID-19 vaccines from America’s Pfizer-BioNTech and Britain’s AstraZeneca, citing a mistrust of Western countries.“I really do not trust them,” Khamenei said Friday in a televised speech. “Sometimes they seek to try out their vaccines on other nations to see if it works or not,” he said. “I am not optimistic [about] France, either.”Khamenei said he continues to allow the import of vaccines from other “safe” places and still supports his country’s efforts to produce its own vaccine.Iran began human trials with its vaccines in December and officials hope they will be available in the country in a few months.In Saudi Arabia, the country’s 82-year-old monarch, King Salman, received the coronavirus vaccination, according to video published by state media Friday. Saudi health officials recorded just 97 new cases of the virus Friday and four deaths as infections in the country continue to decline.India said Saturday it has recorded 18,222 new COVID cases in the past 24 hours. The health ministry also said it has now recorded 90 cases of the British variant of the virus.
…
The desperately awaited vaccination drive against the coronavirus in the U.S. is running into resistance from an unlikely quarter: Surprising numbers of health care workers who have seen firsthand the death and misery inflicted by COVID-19 are refusing shots.It is happening in nursing homes and, to a lesser degree, in hospitals, with employees expressing what experts say are unfounded fears of side effects from vaccines that were developed at record speed. More than three weeks into the campaign, some places are seeing as much as 80% of the staff holding back.“I don’t think anyone wants to be a guinea pig,” said Dr. Stephen Noble, a 42-year-old cardiothoracic surgeon in Portland, Oregon, who is postponing getting vaccinated. “At the end of the day, as a man of science, I just want to see what the data show. And give me the full data.”Alarmed by the phenomenon, some administrators have dangled everything from free breakfasts at Waffle House to a raffle for a car to get employees to roll up their sleeves.Some states have threatened to let other people cut ahead of health care workers in the line for shots.“It’s far too low. It’s alarmingly low,” said Neil Pruitt, CEO of PruittHealth, which runs about 100 long-term care homes in the South, where fewer than 3 in 10 workers offered the vaccine so far have accepted it.Workers at Queen Anne Healthcare, a skilled nursing and rehabilitation facility in Seattle, Washington, wait in a hallway to receive shots of the Pfizer vaccination for COVID-19, Jan. 8, 2021.Many medical facilities from Florida to Washington state have boasted of near-universal acceptance of the shots, and workers have proudly plastered pictures of themselves on social media receiving the vaccine. Elsewhere, though, the drive has stumbled.While the federal government has released no data on how many people offered the vaccines have taken them, glimpses of resistance have emerged around the country.In Illinois, a big divide has opened at state-run veterans homes between residents and staff. The discrepancy was worst at the veterans home in Manteno, where 90% of residents were vaccinated but only 18% of the staff members.In rural Ashland, Alabama, about 90 of some 200 workers at Clay County Hospital have yet to agree to get vaccinated, even with the place so overrun with COVID-19 patients that oxygen is running low and beds have been added to the intensive care unit, divided by plastic sheeting.The pushback comes amid the most lethal phase in the outbreak yet, with the death toll at more than 350,000, and it could hinder the government’s effort to vaccinate somewhere between 70% and 85% of the U.S. population to achieve “herd immunity.”Administrators and public health officials have expressed hope that more health workers will opt to be vaccinated as they see their colleagues take the shots without problems.Oregon doctor Noble said he will wait until April or May to get the shots. He said it is vital for public health authorities not to overstate what they know about the vaccines.That is particularly important, he said, for Black people like him who are distrustful of government medical guidance because of past failures and abuses, such as the infamous Tuskegee experiment, in which medical treatment was withheld from Black syphilis patients in the U.S. so that researchers could track the progression of the disease.Medical journals have published extensive data on the vaccines, and the Food and Drug Administration has made its analysis public. But misinformation about the shots has spread wildly online, including falsehoods that they cause fertility problems.A worker at Queen Anne Healthcare, a skilled nursing and rehabilitation facility in Seattle, Washington, wears a celebratory sticker after receiving the Pfizer vaccination for COVID-19, Jan. 8, 2021.Stormy Tatom, 30, a hospital ICU nurse in Beaumont, Texas, said she decided against getting vaccinated for now “because of the unknown long-term side effects.”“I would say at least half of my coworkers feel the same way,” Tatom said.There have been no signs of widespread severe side effects from the vaccines, and scientists say the drugs have been rigorously tested on tens of thousands and vetted by independent experts.States have begun turning up the pressure. South Carolina’s governor gave health care workers until Jan. 15 to get a shot or “move to the back of the line.” Georgia’s top health official has allowed some vaccines to be diverted to other front-line workers, including firefighters and police, out of frustration with the slow uptake.“There’s vaccine available but it’s literally sitting in freezers,” said Public Health Commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey. “That’s unacceptable. We have lives to save.”Nursing homes were among the institutions given priority for the shots because the virus has cut a terrible swath through them. Long-term care residents and staff account for about 38% of the nation’s COVID-19 fatalities.In West Virginia, only about 55% of nursing home workers agreed to the shots when they were first offered last month, according to Martin Wright, who leads the West Virginia Health Care Association.“It’s a race against social media,” Wright said of battling falsehoods about the vaccines.Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said only 40% of the state’s nursing home workers have gotten shots. North Carolina’s top public health official estimated more than half were refusing the vaccine there.SavaSeniorCare has offered cash to the 169 long-term care homes in its 20-state network to pay for gift cards, socially distanced parties or other incentives. But so far, data from about a third of its homes shows that 55% of workers have refused the vaccine.Chain pharmacies CVS and Walgreens, which have been contracted by a majority of U.S. nursing homes to administer COVID-19 vaccinations, have not released specifics on the acceptance rate. CVS said that residents have agreed to be immunized at an “encouragingly high” rate but that “initial uptake among staff is low,” partly because of efforts to stagger when employees receive their shots.Some facilities have vaccinated workers in stages so that the staff is not sidelined all at once if they suffer minor side effects, which can include fever and aches.The hesitation isn’t surprising, given the mixed message from political leaders and misinformation online, said Dr. Wilbur Chen, a professor at the University of Maryland who specializes in the science of vaccines.He noted that health care workers represent a broad range of jobs and backgrounds and said they are not necessarily more informed than the general public.“They don’t know what to believe either,” Chen said. But he said he expects the hesitancy to subside as more people are vaccinated and public health officials get their message across.Some places have already seen turnarounds, such as Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.“The biggest thing that helped us to gain confidence in our staff was watching other staff members get vaccinated, be OK, walk out of the room, you know, not grow a third ear, and so that really is like an avalanche,” said Dr. Catherine O’Neal, chief medical officer.“The first few hundred that we had created another 300 that wanted the vaccine.”
…
U.S. tech giant Twitter took sharply different actions against the leaders of the U.S. and Iran on Friday, permanently banning President Donald Trump’s personal account while removing one tweet from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s apparent English account and suspending new posts on it.The greater severity of Twitter’s action against the @realdonaldtrump account, compared with the social media company’s treatment of Khamenei, prompted both critics and supporters of the U.S. president to post dozens of Twitter messages accusing the platform of double standards.Many of Twitter’s critics said the @Khamenei_IR account, which is not Twitter-verified but regularly shares his statements, has a history of posting comments against Israel, his regional enemy, that they view as more severe incitement to violence than recent Trump tweets deemed by the platform to violate its glorification of violence policy.The chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pal, tweeted screenshots of some of Khamenei’s most strongly worded anti-Israel posts in May, saying he believed they raise a “serious” question about potential glorification of violence.Serious question for @Twitter: Do these tweets from Supreme Leader of Iran @khamenei_ir violate “Twitter Rules about glorifying violence”? pic.twitter.com/oEkCC8UzFV— Ajit Pai (@AjitPaiFCC) May 29, 2020In a Friday message to VOA Persian, Jason Brodsky, policy director of U.S. advocacy group United Against Nuclear Iran, said: “Twitter accounts of Khamenei, other autocrats and their representatives include deeply hateful and dangerous content that incites violence against groups. We’ve seen Khamenei’s call for the elimination of Israel, which is incitement. So if Twitter has a policy against incitement of violence, it needs to be applied uniformly.”A Twitter spokesperson responded to the accusations of double standards in enforcing incitement prohibitions by telling VOA Persian that the platform has taken enforcement action against world leaders prior to Friday.The spokesperson said Twitter focused its Friday actions on what he called the “harm presented by [Trump’s personal] account specifically,” and shared a link to Twitter’s statement explaining why it believes Trump’s last tweets have the potential to incite further violence following Wednesday’s storming of the U.S. Capitol complex by some of his supporters.Asked what Twitter is doing to demonstrate that it is treating world leaders consistently, the spokesperson said the company’s policy of displaying a “government account” label for users affiliated with the five permanent member states of the U.N. Security Council will soon be expanded to include similar labeling for the officials of other nations. No further details were provided.Twitter’s action against the Khamenei account came hours before its banning of Trump.The Khamenei account had posted a Friday tweet in which the Iranian supreme leader called coronavirus vaccines produced by the U.S., Britain and France “completely untrustworthy” and accused the Western powers of trying to “contaminate” other nations by offering to send them the vaccines.I call on @Jack to suspend @khamenei_ir account for spreading dangerous lies about COVID-19. He has banned Iranians from @Twitter but spreads lies on the same platform about vaccines. His posts MUST have a warning label, at least. Please retweet this. pic.twitter.com/XCxDXK7qBw— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) January 8, 2021The Khamenei tweet prompted Iranian activists such as VOA Persian TV show host Masih Alinejad to urge Twitter to suspend his account for spreading misinformation about the vaccines. Twitter removed the tweet from public view after several hours.Twitter’s spokesperson told VOA the offending tweet violated the platform’s misleading information policy and the @Khamenei_IR owner would have to delete the post before regaining access to the account.It was the first time since February 2019 that Twitter had acted against the Iranian supreme leader’s main English account.That month, the @Khamenei_IR account posted a tweet endorsing a 1989 fatwa by his predecessor Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had condemned British author Salman Rushdie to death for writing a book that the ruling cleric deemed insulting to Islam, The Satanic Verses.Just a reminder that not only did Twitter remove this tweet by Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei for “threat of violence or physical harm” against Salman Rushdie last year, they also locked him out of his account for 24 hours until his account deleted the tweet. pic.twitter.com/T09y48Zo4S— Shayan Sardarizadeh (@Shayan86) October 28, 2020Twitter said the tweet about Rushdie constituted a threat of violence, removed it from public view and locked the @Khamenei_IR account for a day until the account owner deleted the post.In a Friday tweet, BBC Middle East correspondent Nafiseh Kohnavard said Twitter’s decisions to keep the Khamenei account visible and ban Trump have confounded many Iranians. Many Iranians users are asking Twitter how it closed down Mr. Trump’s account but Iran supreme leader Mr. Khamenei’s account is still active especially when Twitter is banned inside Iran and it’s needed VPN.— Nafiseh Kohnavard (@nafisehkBBC) January 9, 2021She said Twitter’s moves were especially perplexing to Iranians who resent Khamenei for blocking Twitter inside Iran and forcing them to access it via virtual private networks.The Trump administration has denounced Iran’s bans on Western social media platforms as suppression of legitimate forms of communication. Speaking in 2018, a State Department spokeswoman said: “When a nation clamps down on social media, we ask the question, ‘What are you afraid of?’”This article originated in VOA’s Persian Service.
…
A nightly gathering of thousands of birds called a “murmuration” has captured the attention of entertainment-starved people in Northern California. Matt Dibble has a look.
Camera: Matt Dibble Producer: Matt Dibble
…
Alphabet’s Google on Friday suspended the Parler social networking app from its Play Store until the app adds robust content moderation, while Apple gave the service 24 hours to submit a detailed moderation plan.Parler is a social network to which many supporters of President Donald Trump have migrated after being banned from services including Twitter, which on Friday permanently suspended Trump’s account.In a statement, Google cited continued posts in the Parler app that seek “to incite ongoing violence in the U.S.”Google said, “For us to distribute an app through Google Play, we do require that apps implement robust moderation for egregious content. In light of this ongoing and urgent public safety threat, we are suspending the app’s listings from the Play Store until it addresses these issues.”In a letter from Apple’s App Store review team to Parler seen by Reuters, Apple cited instances of participants using the service to make plans to descend on Washington with weapons after a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol building on Wednesday.”Content that threatens the well-being of others or is intended to incite violence or other lawless acts has never been acceptable on the App Store,” Apple said in the letter.Apple gave Parler 24 hours to “remove all objectionable content from your app … as well as any content referring to harm to people or attacks on government facilities now or at any future date.” The company also demanded that Parler submit a written plan “to moderate and filter this content” from the app.Apple declined to comment.
…
President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team said Friday the incoming administration will more quickly release coronavirus vaccines once it assumes power on January 20.Biden’s office said it would limit the Trump administration’s practice of increasing inventories of vaccine doses to guarantee that people get the booster shot several weeks after the first inoculation.Expectations were high when the vaccines were approved last month, but the vaccination campaign got off to a sluggish start. Only 5.9 million of the 29.4 million available doses in the U.S. have been distributed, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.In this file photo, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci speaks during an unscheduled briefing after a Coronavirus Task Force meeting at the White House on April 5, 2020, in Washington.Infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci told National Public Radio in an interview Thursday that he believes “things will get worse as we get into January.” This is a result, he said, of “the holiday season travel and the congregate settings that usually take place socially during that period of time.”Fauci also said that he believed that tide could be turned “if we really accelerate our public health measures during that period of time, we’ll be able to blunt that acceleration. But that’s going to really require people concentrating very, very intensively on doing the kinds of public health measures that we talk about all the time,” such as wearing masks, social distancing and being inoculated with the coronavirus vaccine.Fauci said he is hopeful that when Biden is in office, the U.S. will be able to deliver to the U.S. public “1 million vaccinations per day, as the president-elect has mentioned.”A supporter of President Donald Trump confronts police as Trump supporters demonstrate on the second floor of the U.S. Capitol near the entrance to the Senate after breaching security defenses, in Washington, Jan. 6, 2021.Health professionals and other scientists are concerned that Wednesday’s assault on the U.S. Capitol may have been a COVID-19 superspreader event.The shouting rioters that invaded the building were largely unmasked and not observing social distancing as they went through the halls of Congress and entered some lawmakers’ offices.Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told The New York Times that, “People yelling and screaming, chanting, exerting themselves — all of those things provide opportunity for the virus to spread, and this virus takes those opportunities.”Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center said late Thursday the virus killed a record 4,085 people in the U.S. Thursday.The U.S. has more COVID-19 cases than anyplace else in the world – 21.5 million of the globe’s more than 88 million infections, roughly one-fourth of the world’s cases.The U.S. has also suffered more COVID-19 deaths than any other country – more than 366,000 of the world’s nearly 2 million COVID-19 deaths.A woman receives an injection during the first trial phase of a locally-made Iranian vaccine for COVID-19 coronavirus disease in Iran’s capital Tehran on Dec. 29, 2020.Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has banned imports of COVID-19 vaccines from America’s Pfizer-BioNTech and Britain’s AstraZeneca, citing a mistrust of Western countries.“I really do not trust them,” Khamenei said Friday in a televised speech. “Sometimes they seek to try out their vaccines on other nations to see if it works or not,” he said. “I am not optimistic (about) France, either.”Khamenei said he continues to allow the import of vaccines from other “safe” places and still supports his country’s efforts to produce its own vaccine.Iran began human trials with its vaccines in December and hopes they will be available in the country this spring.Britain announced mandatory COVID-19 tests Thursday for all international arrivals to the country.Brazil surpassed 200,000 deaths from COVID-19 on Thursday, making it the country with the second-highest death toll in the world.A Brisbane City Council worker wears a mask along the Queen Street Mall in Brisbane on Jan. 8, 2021, as Australia’s third-largest city headed into lockdown.The Australian city of Brisbane began a three-day lockdown Friday night after a member of a hotel’s quarantine cleaning staff was found to have the highly contagious British mutation of the coronavirus.”Doing three days now could avoid doing 30 days in the future,” Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said Friday morning when she announced the move.The Sydney Morning Herald reports authorities are tracing the woman’s movements around the city. She is reported to be the first local person to have contracted the virus variant that has been reported in several people in hotel quarantine.Johns Hopkins reports that Australia has more than 28,500 COVID cases.Canada moved Thursday to keep elementary schools in the province of Ontario closed until at least January 25. Ontario officials said that the positivity rate among children under 13 was as high as 20%.Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has declared a state of emergency for Tokyo and three surrounding prefectures in response to a surge of new coronavirus cases in the capital city.The decree lasts until February 7. Residents in Tokyo, China, Kanagawa and Saitama prefectures are encouraged to stay home after 8 p.m., and restaurants and bars are also encouraged to close at the same time.
…