Month: May 2021

Tens of thousands of people were evacuated Tuesday in low-lying areas of two Indian states and moved to cyclone shelters to escape a powerful storm barreling toward the eastern coast. Cyclone Yaas is set to turn into a “very severe cyclonic storm” with sustained wind speeds of up to 177 kilometers per hour (110 miles per hour), the India Meteorological Department said. The cyclone is expected to make landfall early Wednesday in Odisha and West Bengal states. The cyclone coming amid a devastating coronavirus surge complicates India’s efforts to deal with both just 10 days after Cyclone Tauktae hit India’s west coast and killed more than 140 people. Thousands of emergency personnel have been deployed in coastal regions of the two states for evacuation and any possible rescue operations, said S.N. Pradhan, director of India’s National Disaster Response Force. India’s air force and navy were also on standby to carry out relief work. Fishing trawlers and boats have been told to take shelter until further notice as forecasters warned of high tidal waves. In West Bengal, authorities were scrambling to move tens of thousands of people to cyclone shelters. Officials said at least 20 districts in the state will feel the brunt of the storm. Last May, nearly 100 people died in Cyclone Amphan, the most powerful storm in more than a decade to hit eastern India, including West Bengal state. It flattened villages, destroyed farms and left millions without power in eastern India and Bangladesh. “We haven’t been able to fix the damage to our home from the last cyclone. Now another cyclone is coming, how will we stay here?” said Samitri, who uses only one name. In Odisha, a state already battered by coronavirus infections, authorities evacuated nearly 15,000 people living along the coast and moved them to cyclone shelters, senior officer Pradeep Jena said. In a televised address Monday, the state’s chief minister, Naveen Patnaik, appealed to people being moved to cyclone shelters to wear double masks and maintain social distancing. He asked authorities to distribute masks to the evacuated people. “We have to face both the challenges simultaneously,” Patnaik said. 
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Indian police officials say they visited Twitter’s Delhi and Gurgaon offices to serve notice to the company’s managing director concerning an investigation into the company tagging some government official’s tweets as “manipulated media.”Several leaders of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) shared parts of a document they said was created by their main political opposition, Congress, which allegedly showed how it planned to hinder the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.Some have been critical of the government’s handling of the pandemic. The BJP has blamed state governments for the slow response and ignoring warnings by Modi of a second wave.Congress said the documents were fake and complained to Twitter, which tagged the posts as manipulated.Twitter tags posts as “manipulated media” “that include media (videos, audio, and images) that have been deceptively altered or fabricated.”Twitter has not commented on this case.Modi’s administration has reportedly ordered Twitter to take down posts critical of its handling of the coronavirus in recent months. It has also complained when those orders were not followed.India has been hit hard by a second wave of the pandemic in recent months. The country has reported nearly 27 million cases and over 300,000 deaths.The latest dispute between the Indian government and U.S. social media giants Twitter and Facebook come as a deadline nears for the platforms to comply with new government takedown requests.Officials have warned both companies that failure to comply with the new rules “could lead to loss of status and protections as intermediaries.”
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Ahead of what is forecast to be an above-normal hurricane season in the Atlantic Basin, the U.S. government is doubling funding to prepare communities for such storms or other extreme weather events.  “We have to be ready when disaster strikes,” President Joe Biden said on a visit to Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) headquarters Monday afternoon.  “Today’s briefing is a critical reminder that we don’t have a moment to lose in preparing for 2021,” the president said at FEMA, just prior to being briefed on this year’s hurricane season.  Biden also noted the risks from wildfires in California and other Western states.  “I’m here today to make it clear that I want nothing less than readiness for all these challenges,” the president said.  FEMA employees listen to President Joe Biden talk at FEMA headquarters, in Washington, May 24, 2021. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is predicting a 60% chance of an above-normal Atlantic storm season with six to 10 likely hurricanes.  Last year was a record hurricane season in the United States with 30 named storms — five of those making landfall just in the state of Louisiana.   In all, according to government officials, 22 separate weather and climate-related disasters caused nearly $100 billion worth of damage.  “FEMA will provide $1 billion in 2021 for the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, a portion of which will be targeted to disadvantaged communities,” according to the White House statement announcing the funding.  Earlier in the day, the White House also announced the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is to collect more sophisticated climate data as part of a new mission concept for an Earth system observatory.  “NASA’s Earth system observatory will be a new architecture of advanced spaceborne Earth observation systems, providing the world with an unprecedented understanding of the critical interactions between Earth’s atmosphere, land, ocean and ice processes. These processes determine how the changing climate will play out at regional and local levels, on near and long-term time scales,” the White House statement said.  Biden last week ordered federal agencies to identify and disclose hazards from climate change. The executive order also requires suppliers to the federal government to reveal their own risks associated with climate change.  
 
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The World Health Organization chief opened the agency’s annual World Health Assembly in Geneva Monday by paying tribute to the 115,000 health care workers around the world who lost their lives fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. In his comments to the WHO decision-making body, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the world’s health and care workers have stood in the breach between life and death for nearly 18 months. He said they have saved countless lives and fought for others who, despite their best efforts, slipped away.  Tedros said he was pleased numbers of new cases and deaths had fallen for three straight weeks, but cautioned the world remains in a very dangerous situation. He said, “We must be very clear: the pandemic is not over, and it will not be over until and unless transmission is controlled in every last country.” The WHO chief again criticized the world’s wealthiest nations for what he called the “scandalous inequity” in the delivery of COVID-19 vaccines that is “perpetuating the pandemic.” He noted more than 75 percent of all vaccine doses have been administered in just 10 countries.  He called on member nations to support a massive push to vaccinate at least 10 percent of the population of every country by September, and a “drive to December” to vaccinate at least 30 percent by the end of the year.  Taiwan criticize WHO ‘indifference’Earlier, Taiwan criticized what it calls the “indifference” of the WHO to the health rights of the island’s people. Taiwan was not invited to the World Health Assembly because it says the WHO has given into pressure from China.  In a joint statement, Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu and Health Minister Chen Shih-chung said “As a professional international health body, the World Health Organization should serve the health and welfare of all humanity and not capitulate to the political interests of a certain member.” Taiwan is excluded from most international organizations like the WHO because of objections from China, which considers the self-governing island to be part its territory and not an independent country.  On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that three scientists from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, in Wuhan, China were admitted to the hospital in November 2019 — a month before China confirmed its first coronavirus case. The news will likely add fuel to the theory that the virus may have escaped a Chinese laboratory. India at over 300,000 deathsIndia became the third country Monday to surpass 300,000 deaths related to COVID-19, after the health ministry reported more than 4,000 COVID-19 deaths in the previous 24 hours. The U.S. has recorded nearly 590,000 deaths, while Brazil is approaching 450,000. The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reports 3.4 million global COVID-19 deaths.  Also Monday, India reported 222,315 new COVID-19 cases in the past 24-hour period, a significant drop for the South Asian nation that was experiencing more than 400,000 new daily infections just a few weeks ago. However, public health officials believe that India’s toll is likely undercounted because of limited testing resources.  Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Monday 167 million global COVID-19 infections. The U.S. has more infections than any other country at 33 million cases. India is next with 26.7 million, while Brazil is ranked third with 16 million.   
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For the family of the retired diplomat, the terror struck as they tried desperately to get him past the entrance doors of a private hospital. For the New Delhi family, it came when they had to create a hospital room in their ground-floor apartment. For the son of an illiterate woman who raised her three children by scavenging human hair, it came as his mother waited days for an ICU bed, insisting she’d be fine.
Three families in a nation of 1.3 billion. Seven cases of COVID-19 in a country facing an unparalleled surge, with more than 300,000 people testing positive every day.
When the pandemic exploded here in early April, each of these families found themselves struggling to keep relatives alive as the medical system neared collapse and the government was left unprepared.
Across India, families scour cities for coronavirus tests, medicine, ambulances, oxygen and hospital beds. When none of that works, some have to deal with loved ones zippered into body bags.
The desperation comes in waves. New Delhi was hit at the start of April, with the worst coming near the end of the month. The southern city of Bengaluru was hit about two weeks later. The surge is at its peak now in many small towns and villages, and just reaching others.
But when a pandemic wave hits, everyone is on their own. The poor. The rich. The well-connected bureaucrats who hold immense sway here, and the people who clean the sewers. Wealthy businessmen fight for hospital beds, and powerful government officials send tweets begging for oxygen. Middle-class families scrounge wood for funeral pyres, and in places where there is no wood to be found, hundreds of families have been forced to dump their relatives’ bodies into the Ganges River.
The rich and well-connected, of course, still have money and contacts to smooth the search for ICU beds and oxygen tanks. But rich and poor alike have been left gasping for breath outside overflowing hospitals.
“This has now become normal,” said Abhimanyu Chakravorty, 34, whose extended New Delhi family frantically tried to arrange his father’s medical care at home. “Everyone is running helter-skelter, doing whatever they can to save their loved ones.”
But every day, thousands more people die.Chakravorty family, New Delhi
COVID-19 tests. That is all the family wanted after a niggling cough had spread from relative to relative. But in a city where the virus had descended like a whirlwind, even that had become difficult.
First, they called the city’s top diagnostic labs. Then the smaller ones. They called for days.
The ground-floor apartment, in an affluent neighborhood with a tiny, well-tended garden and a spreading hibiscus tree in bloom, has been home to the Chakravorty family for more than 40 years. There’s 73-year-old Prabir, the family patriarch and widower, a construction executive who has long ignored his family’s pleas to stop working, and his two sons, Prateek and Abhimanyu.
Prateek, who runs an air-conditioning company, shares a room with his wife, Shweta, and their seven-year-old son Agastya. Rounding out the clan is Prabir’s sister, Taposhi, and her adult son, Protim.
They tried to isolate as best they could, seven of them retreating to various corners of the three-bedroom apartment, and kept calling testing centers.
It was not supposed to be like this.
In January, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared victory over COVID-19. In March, the health minister claimed the country was in the pandemic’s “endgame.”
By then, medical experts had been warning for weeks of an approaching viral wave. The government ignored the warnings, allowing the immense Kumbh Mela religious festival to go forward, with millions of Hindu devotees gathering shoulder-to-shoulder along the Ganges River. Hundreds of thousands also turned out for state election rallies.
The Chakravorty family, like most Indians, hadn’t expected things to grow so bad. Certainly not in the capital, which has much better medical care than most of the country, and where those with money have access to private hospitals.
Finally, Shweta found a lab to administer tests. A man arrived in head-to-toe in protective clothing to swab everyone. It seemed, he told them wearily, as if everyone in this city of 29 million people needed coronavirus tests.
The family had their first scare the next day, when a weakened Prabir nearly fell and his sons had to carry him to bed. Stomach problems and a raging fever kept him there.
“He was visibly shaking,” said Abhimanyu, a 34-year-old news editor.
They got the results three days later. Four members of the family tested positive, with a few losing their senses of taste and smell. But it was far worse for Prabir.
Prateek struggled to find a doctor for his father. One wouldn’t answer the phone, another had his own emergency. Finally, a relative in Thailand contacted a friend, a New Delhi doctor, who said the 73-year-old needed a chest CT scan.
Prateek ventured out on April 28 to find a lab in a scarred city, with roads empty except for ambulances and oxygen tankers. The scan confirmed their fears: Prabir had pneumonia. Doctors warned the family to be very watchful.
Their worries deepened every night, when Prabir coughed relentlessly and his blood oxygen levels dropped dangerously.
“It was an alarm bell,” said Abhimanyu.Padmavathi’s Family, Bengaluru
In a small community of homemade huts, a short walk from one of Bengaluru’s wealthiest neighborhoods, one woman’s sore throat was turning into breathing problems.
The people here are at the bottom of India’s caste ladder, “rag pickers” who support themselves by collecting the city’s waste and selling it to recyclers.
Shunned by most Indians, they are an informal – but pivotal – part of the urban infrastructure. India is among the world’s largest waste producers, and a city like Bengaluru, the Silicon Valley of India, would drown in its own trash if not for them. Yet when vaccines began to be distributed, with essential workers at the front of the line, they were left off that list.
Some people collect newspapers in the little community. Some pick through dumps. Some specialize in metal. Padmavathi, who uses one name, collected hair, taking it from women’s combs and hairbrushes to later be used for wigs. She earned about $50 a month.
It is a life along the fringes, but Padmavathi, who never went to school and whose name translates from Sanskrit as “She who emerged from the lotus,” made it work.
“She was very pushy about our education,” said her son, Gangaiah, a community health worker for a non-profit group.
But her oldest daughter had to drop out in sixth grade, when Padmavathi ran out of money. Gangaiah only made it to seventh. She succeeded with her youngest, a seventh-grade daughter who earned a scholarship and now lives in a private school dormitory across town.
Padmavathi shares a one-room hut made from bamboo and plastic sheeting with Gangaiah, his wife and their two children.
Gangaiah’s work meant he could quickly get Padmavathi tested when her symptoms started May 1. It meant he had access to an oximeter to test his mother’s blood oxygen level.
But when those levels began to drop, he could not get her into a hospital. Working with colleagues in the non-profit, he began calling. Again and again, he was told every bed was taken.
By the fifth day, with Padmavathi’s oxygen levels dangerously low and her breathing sometimes coming in gasps, Gangaiah’s colleagues finally found a bed.
She left the neighborhood unworried.
“I’ll be back soon. Don’t worry,” she told her neighbors.
The hospital had oxygen, but everyone said she needed to be in an ICU on a ventilator. That was impossible.
“It was sheer helplessness,” said Gangaiah.Amrohi Family, Gurgaon
Ashok Amrohi thought it was just a cold when he began coughing on April 21. After all, the retired diplomat and his wife had both been fully vaccinated against coronavirus.
A medical doctor before joining the diplomatic corps, Ashok had traveled the world. He had been ambassador to Algeria, Mozambique and Brunei, and had retired to Gurgaon, a city just outside the capital, and a life of golf and piano lessons. He was a respected, highly educated member of the upper-middle class.
He was someone who, in normal times, could easily get a bed in the best hospitals.
His fever soon disappeared. But his breathing became labored and his oxygen levels dropped. It appeared to be COVID-19. His wife, Yamini, reached out for help. A sister who lived nearby found an oxygen cylinder.
The situation seemed manageable at first, and they treated Ashok at home.
“I was always with him,” said Yamini.
But his oxygen levels kept dropping.
If things worsened even a little more, his family would have no idea how to respond.Chakravorty Family, New Delhi
Reluctantly, as Prabir’s condition also worsened, the Chakravorty family decided he needed to be hospitalized.
First, they tried a government-run mobile app showing the city’s available beds. It was not functioning. So Prateek went searching.
The first three hospitals he visited — private, costly hospitals, built for India’s growing population of new money — were full.
Then he went to the massive 1,200-bed public field hospital built last June in a leafy New Delhi neighborhood. The hospital had been closed in February when cases fell in north India, and frantically reopened in late April as cases surged.
Outside the hospital entrance, Prateek found dozens of people begging staff to admit sick family members. Some were openly offering bribes to cut the line, others slumped on the floor breathing from oxygen bottles.
Worried families were waiting under a nearby canopy for news – any news – about loved ones inside. Some hadn’t seen their relatives in weeks.
“You know nothing,” one person told him.
The army doctors running the facility, who were refusing the bribes, were working frantically. They had little time for patient comfort, let alone worried relatives.
Prateek was stunned at the scene: “My body trembled.”
Beneath the canopy, he met a sobbing young man whose father had died and been taken away for cremation. But in the chaos, ID numbers attached to some corpses had been mixed up, and the wrong body was carted off for cremation.
His father’s body was now lost inside the complex, where death had become mundane.
At that moment, Prateek decided: “We will do what we can at home, this wasn’t an option.”
Padmavathi’s Family, Bengaluru
Late on the night of May 5, an ICU bed finally opened up for Padmavathi, whose condition was clearly deteriorating.
“She kept telling other people that she’d soon be fine,” said Gangaih.
Padmavathi was a fighter and knew how hard India could be on the least fortunate. She had grown up in a family so poor they often did not have enough food and was a traveling laborer by the time she was seven. She married at 14 and raised three children alone after her husband abandoned her.
“She was a sad person, but she would hide her melancholy from us,” said Gangaiah. She buried her sadness in more work: “She sacrificed everything she had for us. Her struggle to feed us and raise us consumed all her time.”
Joy only came when her oldest daughter and Gangaiah had children.
“She was so happy. Perhaps the only time we saw her happy in a real sense,” he said.
She was also a force in the neighborhood, helping other women with their troubles, and fighting to ban the cheap and sometimes poisonous home-made liquor that kills hundreds of India’s poor every year.
But in the hospital that night, none of that mattered.
A few hours after being transferred to the ICU, amid the noise of medical machinery, Padmavathi died. She was 48 years old.
Gangaiah was waiting outside when it happened.
“I cried bitterly,” he said. “I had hardly seen my father’s love and care. She was both my parents.”
He is furious.
“We also knew from experience that the government is for rich people and the upper castes. But we always nurtured this belief that at least hospitals will cater to us in our time of need,” he said. “It turned out to be an utterly fake belief, a lie.”Amrohi Family, Gurgaon
At the Amrohi apartment, the former ambassador’s family was calling his medical school classmates for help. One eventually arranged a bed at a nearby hospital.
It was April 26. The brutal north Indian summer was coming on. Temperatures that day reached nearly 105 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius).
His wife, Yamini, and their adult son Anupam put him into the family’s compact SUV.
They arrived about 7:30 p.m. and parked in front of the main doors, thinking Ashok would be rushed inside. They were wrong. Admission paperwork had to be completed first, and the staff was swamped.
So, they waited.
Anupam stood in line while Yamini stayed in the car with Ashok, who was breathing bottled oxygen. She blasted the air-conditioning, trying to keep him cool.
An hour passed. Two hours. Someone came to swab Ashok for a coronavirus test. It came back positive. His breathing had grown difficult.
“I went thrice to the hospital reception for help. I begged, pleaded and shouted at the officials,” she said. “But nobody budged.”
At one point, their daughter called from London, where she lives with her family. With everyone on a video call, their four-year-old grandson asked to talk to Ashok.
“I love you, Poppy,” he said.
Ashok pulled off his oxygen mask: “Hello. Poppy loves you too.”
Three hours.
Four hours.
Anupam returned regularly to the car to check on his father.
“It’s almost done,” he would tell him each time. “Everything is going to be alright. Please stay with us!”
Five hours.
A little after midnight, Ashok grew agitated, pulling off the oxygen mask and gasping. His chest heaved. Then he went still.
“In a second he was no more,” Yamini said. “He was dead in my arms.”
Yamini went to the reception desk: “You are murderers,” she told them.Chakravorty Family, New Delhi
Prateek Chakravorty returned from the field hospital and told his family about the nightmare there. All agreed Prabir would be treated at home.
The brothers grew up in this pink three-story building. It is where they returned to after evenings playing soccer. It is where they spent India’s harsh, months-long lockdown last year, glad to be together.
Now it was where they had to help their father breathe.
For rich countries, oxygen is a basic medical need, like running water. Last year, Indian authorities ordered most of the country’s industrial oxygen production to switch to medical oxygen.
But it was nowhere near enough for the surge’s ferocity. Hospitals went on social media, begging the federal government for more oxygen. The government responded to social media criticism by ordering Twitter to take down dozens of tweets.
The Chakravorty family decided their best bet was an oxygen concentrator. Unaffordable to most Indians, with prices reaching $5,500, concentrators remove nitrogen from the air and deliver a stream of concentrated oxygen.
They reached out to friends, relatives, business colleagues – anyone they could think of – trying to find one.
It is how things work now in India. With the formal medical system barely functioning, tight networks of family, friends and colleagues, and sometimes the generosity of complete strangers, would save many. Informal volunteer networks have germinated to reuse medical equipment and look for hospital beds. The black market thrives, charging astronomical prices.
A friend responded to their SOS. Sougata Roy knew someone in Chandigarh, a city in the Himalayan foothills about a five-hour drive away, who had a machine and was not using it. He offered to get it.
Roy arrived April 27 with the machine and instructions.
On April 29, the family found someone to care for their father. He was not a trained nurse, but had experience treating COVID-19 patients at home.
Prabir’s signs of improvement were slow, but the family grasped at them, overjoyed when he could eat a little boiled chicken. They celebrated quietly each time his oxygen levels were good, knowing they were lucky to have the resources to treat him at home.
“It was hell,” said Prateek, remembering the worst two weeks. Slowly, though, their optimism grew.
May 7 was Prateek’s birthday. Prabir looked brighter, and the relieved family decided to celebrate. They ordered chocolate cake from a nearby bakery.
Prabir did not want any. But for the first time in weeks, he was craving something sweet.
He settled for a cookie.Amrohi Family, Gurgaon
The horror did not end with the ambassador’s death.
Ashok’s body, sealed in a plastic bag, was taken by ambulance the next morning to an outdoor cremation ground.
Cremations are deeply important in Hinduism, a way to free a person’s soul so it can be reborn elsewhere. A priest normally oversees the rites. Family and friends gather. The eldest son traditionally lights the funeral pyre.
But when the Amrohis got to the cremation ground, a long line of ambulances was in front of them. Beyond the gate, nine funeral pyres were blazing.
Finally, Anupam was called to light his father’s pyre.
Normally, families wait as the fire burns down, paying their respects and waiting for the ashes. But immense fires burned around the Amrohi family. The heat was crushing. Ashes filled the air.
“I have never seen a scene like that,” said Yamini. “We couldn’t stand it.”
They returned to their car, waited until they were told the body had been cremated, and drove away.
Anupam returned the next morning to collect his father’s ashes.
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The Australian government is being urged to offer citizens cash and lottery tickets as incentives to boost slow rates of COVID-19 vaccinations. Public health and advertising experts say more needs to be done to counter mounting hesitancy and confusion about a mass inoculation program. Research commissioned by two Australian newspapers found a third of respondents don’t intend to get vaccinated soon. There are community-wide doubts about potential side effects of vaccines. The survey has also shown that many Australians believe there is no rush to receive a dose while the country’s international borders remain closed. Demand for injections has been far lower than expected. At the current pace of about 500,000 doses a week, Australia’s adult population would not be fully vaccinated until October 2022. But the authorities are warning that “complacency can kill,” pointing to the “resurgence of this deadly virus in countries like Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea” which, like Australia, had appeared to have suppressed community spread of COVID-19.A new mass COVID-19 vaccination hub opens in Sydney, May 10, 2021.Australia’s federal government recently responded to hesitancy about the vaccines with a new public health campaign. Experts believe that offering Australians lottery tickets or cash after being vaccinated could boost injection rates. Similar measures, along with free beer and donuts, have been used in other countries, including the United States, where critics said vaccine payments might “unfairly exploit” people who have lost jobs during the pandemic. A major incentive for Australians could be linked to overseas travel. Officials have said the reopening of international borders, which have been closed for more than a year, could be dependent on high rates of coronavirus vaccinations. Julian Savulescu is a bioethicist at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne. He says Australians need to be actively encouraged to get the jab. “You can provide them with things that clearly are benefits to them such as cash or kind. So, kind being, you know, greater ability to travel, not having to wear masks in certain situations. So, the U.S. has dropped mask requirements for people who have been vaccinated or provide them with cash, you know, and money does talk and it may well influence significant numbers of people,” Savulescu said.Tough border control measures, strict lockdowns and mass testing have helped Australia to contain COVID-19. Cases of community transmission are now rare, but on Monday, state health authorities in Victoria reported two “likely positive cases” in the city of Melbourne. Australia has diagnosed over 30,000 coronavirus infections since the pandemic began, and 910 have died, according to the latest government statistics. Regulators have so far approved two vaccines for use in Australia; the Pfizer/BioNTech treatment and the Oxford/AstraZeneca drug. 
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India is nearing 300,000 recorded deaths from the coronavirus, after adding more than 3,700 deaths in the last 24 hours.
 
The country reported more than 240,000 new infections Sunday – a number that many believe is an undercount because of limited testing resources.
 
The Indian government said Saturday that while COVID-19 infections remain high as they spread to overburdened rural areas, the infections are stabilizing in some parts of the country.
 
While a new variant of the virus first found in India has raised alarm around the world, a new study found Saturday that vaccines by Pfizer and AstraZeneca are effective against it after two doses.
 
The study by Public Health England found that Pfizer’s vaccine is 88% effective against B.1.617.2, or the Indian variant, and 93% effective against B.1.1.7, now known as the Kent variant. AstraZeneca’s vaccine is 60% effective against the Indian variant and 66% effective against the English variant.
 
In both cases, the effectiveness was measured two weeks after the second shot and against symptomatic disease. Both vaccines had limited effectiveness after just one dose.  
 
The Kent variant is the dominant strain in England, but health officials fear the Indian strain may outpace it.
 
On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that three scientists from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, in Wuhan, China were admitted to the hospital in November 2019 – a month before China confirmed its first coronavirus case.
 
The news, which cites a U.S. intelligence report, came a day before the decision-making body of the World Health Organization is scheduled to meet to discuss the pandemic and will likely add fuel to the theory that the virus may have escaped the laboratory.  
 
The report is not the first to cite the possibility that China had earlier knowledge of the virus. Near the end of the Trump administration, a fact sheet released by the State Department said that “the U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.”
 
The World Health Assembly will begin Monday and last until June 1. 
 
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Ending the COVID-19 pandemic and preventing future pandemics is expected to dominate discussions during this week’s 74th World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the World Health Organization.  The session will also address other pressing global health issues.The 2021 World Health Assembly will be held virtually, from tomorrow (May 24) through June 1. This in and of itself is aimed at sending a strong message that it still is not safe for large groups of people to gather physically. More than 2,750 people so far have registered to attend the virtual event. WHO declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic and a global International public health emergency on March 11, 2020. Since then, COVID-19 cases have increased fortyfold to 162 million, including more than 3.3 million deaths. Discussions on a so-called pandemic treaty to better prepare for and prevent global infectious outbreaks is expected to take center stage at the global assembly. WHO chief legal officer Steven Solomon says drafting a treaty would be a long process. He says delegates have not decided whether negotiations on a treaty should be started. He says a legally binding pandemic convention would cover both substantive issues, which include equitable sharing of materials such as vaccines and diagnoses, and structural ones. “Structurally, the elements that often come up are issues of enforcement mechanisms, compliance mechanisms, monitoring mechanisms, incentives and disincentives. There are clearly issues of governance and how that would work under treaty institutions, and financing,” he said.The assembly will face the largest agenda ever over the coming eight days, with more than 72 global health issues under examination. Questions of vaccine equity will be central to these discussions — wealthy countries are making great strides in vaccinating their populations and returning to a semblance of normal life but poor countries are not. WHO warns vaccine inequity threatens ending the pandemic and global recovery from the pandemic. As in previous years, the issue of granting Taiwan observer status at the WHA will come up for debate at the opening session. China claims Taiwan as one of its provinces and has blocked Taiwan’s participation since 2016. Under Beijing’s “One China Policy,” the Chinese Communist Party asserts sovereignty over Taiwan.  This year, 13 WHO member states, including the United States, have called for Taiwan to be allowed to take part in proceedings. They say Taiwan has great insight on tackling the pandemic and would have a lot to contribute. Other significant issues to be addressed include the eradication of polio, speeding action on antimicrobial resistance, and considering WHO’s global strategy on health, environment and climate change. 
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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it is investigating reports  that young people have developed myocarditis, or heart inflammation, after being inoculated with a COVID-19 vaccine.The agency’s vaccine safety group said in a recent report that there have been “relatively few reports“ of the heart inflammation, but most tended to occur in male teenagers and young adults, usually after a second vaccine dose.“Most cases appear to be mild, and follow-up of cases is ongoing,” the safety group said.In another development, two doses of the COVID-19 vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech or AstraZeneca are about as effective against the coronavirus variant first found in India as they are against the variant first found in England, according to a study by Public Health England announced Saturday.The study found that Pfizer’s vaccine is 88% effective against B.1.617.2, or the Indian variant, and 93% effective against B.1.1.7, now known as the Kent variant. AstraZeneca’s vaccine is 60% against the Indian variant and 66% effective against the English variant.In both cases, the effectiveness was measured two weeks after the second shot and against symptomatic disease. The Kent variant is the dominant strain in England but health officials fear the Indian strain may outpace it.In England, health authorities have stretched the time between the two doses to as much as three months in order to get more people vaccinated and stop the coronavirus in its tracks. Against the variants, though, two shots are better than one, so for clinically vulnerable people or those older than 50, the period between the two shots will be cut to eight weeks.“I’m increasingly confident that we’re on track for the road map [to reopening], because this data shows that the vaccine, after two doses, works just as effectively [against the Indian variant],” Health Secretary Matt Hancock told broadcasters.Kaiser Health News reported that during the pandemic many older people have become “physically and cognitively debilitated and less able to take care of themselves.”While no large-scale study has recorded the extent of the problem, Kaiser said doctors and physical therapists are reporting that seniors are losing muscle mass and strength, resulting in problems with mobility and balance.“What I’d love to see is a national effort, maybe by the CDC, focused on helping older people overcome these kinds of impairments,” Linda Teodosio, a physical therapist and division rehabilitation manager in Bayada Home Healthcare’s Towson, Maryland, office told Kaiser.India casesOn Sunday, India’s health ministry reported 240,842 new COVID infections and nearly 4,000 deaths from the virus in the previous 24-hour period.The Indian government said Saturday that while COVID-19 infections remain high as they spread to overburdened rural areas, the infections are stabilizing in some parts of the country.As India struggles with a faltering health care system and vaccine shortages, experts have warned of a third wave of infections in coming months.Johns Hopkins University said early Sunday there are 166.7 million global COVID-19 infections. The U.S. has 33.1 million, followed by India with 26 million.  Brazil is ranked third with 16 million. 
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Yuan Longping, a Chinese scientist who developed higher-yield rice varieties that helped feed people around the world, died Saturday at a hospital in the southern city of Changsha, the Xinhua News agency reported. He was 91.Yuan spent his life researching rice and was a household name in China, known by the nickname “Father of Hybrid Rice.” Worldwide, a fifth of all rice now comes from species created by hybrid rice following Yuan’s breakthrough discoveries, according to the website of the World Food Prize, which he won in 2004.On Saturday afternoon, large crowds honored the scientist by marching past the hospital in Hunan province where he died, local media reported, calling out phrases such as: “Grandpa Ye, have a good journey!”In the 1970s, Yuan achieved the breakthroughs that would make him famous. He developed a hybrid strain of rice that recorded an annual yield 20% higher than existing varieties — meaning it could feed an extra 70 million people a year, according to Xinhua.His work helped transform China from “food deficiency to food security” within three decades, according to the World Food Prize, which was created by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaug in 1986 to recognize scientists and others who have improved the quality and availability of food.Yuan and his team worked with dozens of countries around the world to address issues of food security as well as malnutrition.In his later years, Yuan did not stop researching. In 2017, working with a Hunan agricultural school, he helped create a strain of low-cadmium indica rice for areas suffering from heavy metal pollution, reducing the amount of cadmium in rice by more than 90%.
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Virgin Galactic on Saturday made its first rocket-powered flight from New Mexico to the fringe of space in a manned shuttle, as the company forges toward offering tourist flights to the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere.High above the desert in a cloudless sky, VSS Unity ignited its rocket to hurtle the ship and two pilots toward space. A live feed by NASASpaceFlight.com showed the ship accelerating upward and confirmed a landing later via radar.Virgin Galactic announced that the shuttle achieved a speed equal to three times the speed of sound and an altitude of just more than 89 kilometers (55 miles) above sea level before making its gliding return through the atmosphere.British billionaire and Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson said the flight and landing brought the roughly 15-year-old venture tantalizingly close to commercial flights for tourists. Virgin Galactic said those flights could begin next year.’They all worked'”Today was just an incredible step in the right direction,” Branson told The Associated Press shortly after the flight landing. “It tested a lot of new systems that the teams have been building and they all worked.”Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said at least two more undated test flights lie ahead — the next with four mission specialist passengers in the cabin. Pending trials also include a flight that will take Branson to the edge of space.”The flight today was elegant, beautiful,” Colglazier said. “We’re going to analyze all the data that we gather on these flights, but watching from the ground and speaking with our pilots, it was magnificent. So now it’s time for us to do this again.”Virgin Galactic said the flight provided an assessment of upgrades to a horizontal stabilizer, other flight controls and a suite of cabin cameras designed to provide live images of flight to people on the ground. The shuttle also carried a scientific payload in cooperation with NASA’s Flight Opportunities Program.Preparations for the latest flight included a maintenance review of the special carrier plane that flies the six-passenger spacecraft to a high altitude, where it is released so it can fire its rocket motor and make the final push to space.Several delaysThe first powered test of the rocket ship in New Mexico from Spaceport America was delayed repeatedly before Saturday’s launch. In December 2020, computer trouble caused by electromagnetic interference prevented the spaceship’s rocket from firing properly. Instead of soaring toward space, the ship and its two pilots were forced to make an immediate landing.While Virgin Galactic’s stock price ticked up this week with the announcement of the latest test being scheduled for Saturday, it wasn’t enough to overcome the losses seen since a peak in February. Some analysts have cautioned that it could be a while before the company sees profits as the exact start of commercial operations is still up in the air.Virgin Galactic is one of a few companies looking to cash in on customers with an interest in space.Elon Musk’s SpaceX will launch a billionaire and his sweepstakes winners in September. That should be followed in January 2022 by a flight by three businessmen to the International Space Station.Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin launched a new capsule in January as part of testing as it aims to get its program for tourists, scientists and professional astronauts off the ground. It’s planning for liftoff of its first crewed flight on July 20, the date of the Apollo 11 moon landing.Virgin Galactic has reached space twice before. The first time was from California in December 2018.New Mexico taxpayers have invested more than $200 million in the Spaceport America hangar and launch facility, near Truth or Consequences, after Branson and then-Governor Bill Richardson, a Democrat, pitched the plan for the facility, with Virgin Galactic as the anchor tenant.Richardson watched Saturday’s flight from the ground below and later thanked residents of local counties that committed early on to a sales tax increase to support the venture.
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