Odicci Alexander became an overnight sensation at the Women’s College World Series.James Madison’s dynamic, endearingly humble pitcher was well-known among die-hard softball fans, but she introduced herself to a national audience by throwing a complete game to help her unseeded squad stun tournament favorite Oklahoma in the opening game earlier this month. She threw another complete game the next day in a victory over Oklahoma State and a star was born.As her team was being eliminated in the semifinals, Alexander drew a standing ovation when she left the field. Fans watching on TV and streaming devices were sorry to see her go — and so was ESPN, which has been broadcasting the WCWS since 2000.Nick Dawson, ESPN’s vice president of programming for college sports, called her emergence and her battles with Oklahoma “the overarching story of the event,” and said she set the tone for a memorable week.”It just so worked out that she, as a dominant pitcher, ended up paired against arguably the greatest offensive softball team in the history of the sport in the opening game of the Women’s College World Series,” Dawson said. In the spotlightCoverage of Division I women’s sports has been in a particularly bright spotlight in 2021 and the record-setting WCWS was just the latest example of growing interest — and growing demands for a more equitable playing field when compared with men’s events.ESPN has been experimenting in recent years with showing more women’s sports on its various platforms, and good numbers have led the network to become more aggressive. Television viewership was up significantly compared with that of 2019 in the four most popular women’s college sports — basketball, softball, gymnastics and volleyball. The network expanded its volleyball coverage this year to include every match of the championship on an ESPN platform.The Walt Disney Co. owns ABC and ESPN, and Dawson said ESPN is pushing to get more sports programming onto Saturday afternoon spots on ABC. This year, ABC broadcast women’s basketball games and a women’s softball game for the first time.The women’s gymnastics final on ABC averaged 808,000 viewers, a 510% increase over the 2019 final on ESPNU.Ripples of the increased exposure are being felt. According to the Social Blade social media analytics site, Alexander gained more than 50,000 Instagram followers within a week of her win over Oklahoma. She has since signed a professional contract with the USSSA Pride.’Pentetrated the culture'”There were enough places where that story was told this time around that she’s reached a certain critical mass,” said Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture. “She’s penetrated the culture. That is the important part of that story.”Alexander’s story resonated on various levels. She’s a Black player in a largely white sport who knocked off the eventual national champion while playing for an upstart school.”I’m sure there have been great stories filled with all of these great narrative flourishes like hers that have been going on in women’s sports for years,” Thompson said, “but people who would have loved those stories never hear them because there hasn’t been a lot of space given.”FILE – Oklahoma players celebrate with the trophy after defeating Florida State in the final game of the NCAA Women’s College World Series softball championship in Oklahoma City, June 10, 2021.The average number of viewers for the three championship final games between Oklahoma and Florida State was a record 1,840,000, up 15% over 2019. The average for the 17-game WCWS was 1,203,000, up 10% over 2019 and numbers comparable to those from the men’s College World Series in 2019.”Finally, there is this recognition that if you show it, people will watch it,” Thompson said. “And there’s been a lot of resistance to that to women’s sports, probably because a lot of the people managing the media outlets, a lot of the people managing the various sports venues and so forth just assumed they couldn’t get the kinds of numbers that they wanted.”As the viewership numbers climbed, coaches used the broader platform to speak up.Oklahoma coach Patty Gasso said changes were needed to make sure the sport makes positive strides as its popularity grows. She pointed out issues she had with the WCWS format, saying adding off days, eliminating doubleheaders and ensuring that games end at reasonable times should be among the changes considered. Though ESPN and the NCAA converse on those issues, the NCAA Division I Softball Committee oversees the format and scheduling for the event.Basketball, tooRatings also were high for the women’s basketball Final Four. The championship game drew more than 4 million viewers — the highest total since 2014 and up 9% from 2019. The semifinals averaged 2.8 million viewers, the best numbers since 2012 and a 20% jump from 2019. The Final Four weekend numbers overall were up 14%.The volleyball championship match between Kentucky and Texas averaged 696,000 viewers, up 28% from 2019. Kentucky’s victory was the most viewed telecast on ESPN2 for the month of April.The growth includes the number of sports getting exposure. ESPN added ice hockey, field hockey and cross country to the women’s sports championship schedule in the spring, bringing the total number of women’s championships the network broadcasts to 15.Dawson said ESPN would remain aggressive about expanding programming opportunities for women’s sports. Thompson said that made sense.”For women’s sports, there is lots and lots and lots of room for lots and lots and lots of growth,” he said. “If I were looking to invest in a genre of futures of American entertainment, women’s sports would be close to the top of my list.”
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Day: June 19, 2021
The World Health Organization officially announced Saturday the end of Guinea’s second Ebola outbreak, which was declared in February and claimed 12 lives.At 16 confirmed cases and seven probable infections, according to WHO figures, the limited size of the flare-up has been credited to experience from the 2013-16 epidemic, which killed more than 11,300 people, mostly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.”I have the honor of declaring the end of Ebola” in Guinea, WHO official Alfred Ki-Zerbo said at a ceremony in the southeastern Nzerekore region, where the disease surfaced at the end of January.International rules meant that Guinea had to wait 42 days — twice the virus’s incubation period — without a new case before declaring the epidemic over.That wait was over Friday, weeks after the last person was declared cured on May 8, a senior health ministry official told AFP.Health Minister Remy Lamah also declared the outbreak finished “in the name of the head of state,” President Alpha Conde.Saturday’s event in a health ministry building was attended by around 200 people, including local religious and community leaders.”We must also thank the communities who pitched in to overcome the disease,” the WHO’s Ki-Zerbo said.Previous resistanceDuring last decade’s outbreak, reluctance and outright hostility toward anti-Ebola infection control measures led some people in Guinea’s forested southeast to attack and even kill government employees.”Community engagement, effective public health measures and the equitable use of vaccines” had this time been key to overcoming Ebola, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.The U.N. body said it had delivered about 24,000 vaccine doses to Guinea and that 11,000 people at high risk had received shots, including more than 2,800 frontline workers.”We’ve beaten Ebola but let’s remain vigilant” read a banner unfurled at Saturday’s ceremony.”We must stay alert for a possible resurgence and ensure the expertise in Ebola expands to other health threats such as COVID-19,” WHO Africa director Matshidiso Moeti said.The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in a statement that genetic sequencing showed links between the previous outbreak and the latest epidemic.This year’s outbreak could have been caused by “persistent infection in a survivor from the West Africa outbreak” back then, the CDC said, emphasizing “the necessity for strong and ongoing survivor programs,” as well as more research.Ebola causes severe fever and, in the worst cases, unstoppable bleeding. It is transmitted through close contact with bodily fluids, and people who live with or care for patients are most at risk.
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Hundreds of sickle cell disease patients in Cameroon are using World Sickle Cell Day, June 19, to teach their neighbors that people with the disease can live longer, contrary to popular beliefs and stigma that label them as witches who must die before the age of 24. Cameroon says 20% of its 25 million people are carriers of the gene primarily seen in people of African descent. The government is also telling hesitant sickle cell patients to accept vaccinations against COVID-19.At least 300 sickle cell patients and their family members turned out at the Cameroon Baptist Convention hospital at Etoug-Ebe, a neighborhood in Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé. Hospital officials said hundreds of other sickle cell patients came out in the coastal city Douala and the English-speaking western towns of Buea, Bamenda, Kumba and Kumbo to observe the 2021 World Sickle Cell Day.Fifty-five-year-old Ashu Egbe was diagnosed with sickle cell when he was seven months old. He says he is living proof that people can live long with the disorder, in which red blood cells contain an abnormal type of hemoglobin. ‘I am a sickle cell sufferer, I usually tell people that I am a sickle cell warrior because we go through the challenges of life, the pains and we think that we are warriors, we are overcomers,” Egbe said. “The younger ones should be courageous, avoid extreme colds or extreme heat and drink plenty of nonalcoholic fluids. You have a normal diet of good vegetables and then you have continuous follow up. You can live a good life.”Egbe said he created Ashu Egbe Foundation to educate sickle cell patients on their rights and encourage people to consider sickle cell patients normal citizens. Gene-editing Treatment Shows Promise for Sickle Cell, Other Blood DiseaseDoctors hope one-time treatment, which involves permanently altering DNA in blood cells with tool called CRISPR, may treat, possibly cure sickle cell disease, beta thalassemiaCameroon’s health ministry reports that 20% of the country’s 25 million people are carriers of the gene primarily seen in people of African descent.Cameroon says patients suffer stigma, including superstitious beliefs that sickle cell is divine punishment for wrongdoing. There are beliefs that people with the disease die before they reach 25 years because they are witches and wizards. Couples with sickle cell children are forced by their families to divorce.Twenty-seven-year-old Somo Francis Glenn lives with sickle cell. He says communities should stop abusing the rights of sickle cell patients. He says the government should ask hospitals to pay more attention to patients.”At times we are sick, but we are afraid to go to the hospital because if you get to the hospital at 7 a.m., you shall be received at 10 [a.m.],” Somo said. “Imagine the pain you go through. Doctors will tell you that you are not the first person to have pain. Those are the things that make us go psychologically mad. I am begging the minister of health to create a hematology center only for sickle cell patients in Cameroon. Our immune system is first of all weak. COVID-19 and sickle cell are a whole lot of problems.”Somo said the government could help eradicate the disease by asking people to have medical consultations before marriage and before having children.Cameroon’s health minister, Manaouda Malachie, said special services exist in all hospitals in the central African state to treat sickle cell patients. He said patients should not fear going to hospitals for fear of being infected by COVID-19.Lydie Ze Meka is president of Cameroon’s National Association for the Protection of Sickle Cell Patients. She says the association she leads is encouraging all sickle cell patients to be vaccinated against COVID-19.She says sickle cell patients are reluctant to be vaccinated against COVID-19. She says the coronavirus attacks lungs and sickle cell patients have fragile lungs which are constantly exposed to pulmonary infections that can cause deaths. She says on this year’s World Sickle Cell Day, she is pleading with reticent patients to voluntarily agree to be vaccinated against COVID-19 to save their lives. The United Nations reports that sickle cell is common in most of sub-Saharan Africa, affecting close to 3% of births in some African countries.The U.N. recognizes June 19 as World Sickle Cell Day to raise awareness of the disease, which they say has not been eradicated due to ignorance. The U.N. encourages couples to have medical consultations before marriage and before having children.
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Every year, Hollywood inevitably comes under criticism for its lack of racial diversity. But another lesser-known yet still pervasive problem also resurfaces: the lack of diversity in skin tone.It happened again with “In the Heights,” a big-budget film based on the musical created by Lin-Manuel Miranda, which was called out this week for its dearth of dark-skinned, Black Latinos in leading roles. Colorism — or discrimination against darker-skinned people within their same ethnic group — lurks deep among pretty much all communities with varying levels of melanin. But it doesn’t get talked about, and that could be a setback for the racial justice efforts that intensified after the police killing of George Floyd last year.Avoiding the conversation will hinder the battle for racial justice because the two are “fully and inextricably linked,” said Ellis P. Monk, Jr., a sociology professor at Harvard University who has been researching colorism for years. Monk says the issue is prevalent in all communities of color and has been taboo in part because it’s uncomfortable to talk about internal strife while also fighting against broader discrimination based on race and ethnicity. “In a way, colorism and skin tone stratification is an even more difficult problem to fix because you could make the argument that everyone is involved in the system of colorism,” Monk said. “If we think about race and racial inequality without taking these skin tone differences seriously, then we’re actually missing how this system of racial inequality works.”Miranda, best known as the creator of the Broadway musical “Hamilton” and a longtime champion of including Latinos in the arts, recognized his own short-sightedness in addressing colorism and issued an apology. “I can hear the hurt and frustration, of feeling still unseen in the feedback,” Miranda wrote. “I hear that without sufficient dark-skinned Afro-Latino representation, the work feels extractive of the community we wanted so much to represent with pride and joy.”The legendary Rita Moreno likewise turned introspective on colorism after she faced backlash in her defense of Miranda when she implied that Latinos should be grateful they’re being represented in any fashion. She has since apologized.There is little data that tracks discrimination based on skin tone, and therefore it is hard to quantify just how pervasive colorism is. But the studies that do exist show that people with darker skin have higher incarceration rates, lower access to health care and education and live in poorer neighborhoods, several experts say. Nayeli Chavez, a clinical psychologist and faculty at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, has spent a decade looking into racial differences between ethnic groups. “We have been socialized from childhood to look down on darker skin, on indigenous features,” Chavez said.As a psychologist who has dedicated her career to helping people heal from racial trauma, Chavez sees how avoiding the topic of colorism is detrimental and says there is a false assumption in Latin America that because those places were colonized and its people are of mixed races, there is no racism. The key to changing behavior is by teaching history accurately and admitting that those biases exist. “Racial justice begins with our own community. It literally begins in our own families,” Chavez said. “This is an area that there’s so little about. We are barely like touching the tip of the iceberg.”Nancy López, a professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico, said one way Latinos and other communities of color can begin to address colorism is by asking themselves a simple question: what is your “street race?” Street race refers to the race someone assumes you are when you’re walking down the street and they know nothing else about you. Take former President Barack Obama, who is half-white. Someone who saw him in the street would likely see him as Black — his street race. López, who also directs and co-founded the Institute for the Study of “Race” and Social Justice at UNM, said the concept of street race affects family dynamics, too. Two siblings from the same parents may have different skin tones and therefore different experiences in how they’re perceived and treated, López said. “Reflecting on your street race is one way of practicing solidarity with those siblings, cousins, partners, relatives who may be racialized very differently than you, may be experiencing racializing in a very different way,” she said.While some may find calling attention to colorism divisive, López says it’s the opposite. If communities don’t talk about it, they’re not in total solidarity, she said.
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Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center has reported 177.8 million global COVID-19 cases and 3.8 million deaths. The U.S. remains the country with the most infections at 33.5 million, followed closely by India with 29.8 million.German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron urged European Union countries Friday to be vigilant against the spread of new coronavirus variants and called for the bloc to coordinate its COVID-19 border reopening policies.”Caution is still necessary so that we have a summer of many freedoms, if not all freedoms,” Merkel told a joint news conference in Berlin before the two leaders held a working dinner.”Some countries have reopened their borders earlier for tourist industry reasons, but we must be careful not to reimport new variants,” Macron said.Macron noted the situation in Britain, while Merkel pointed to Portugal to show how things can quickly change.Britain this week delayed a relaxation of pandemic restrictions because of the prevalence of the delta variant, which was first identified in India, while Portuguese authorities on Thursday banned travel in and out of the capital, Lisbon, because of the variant.In other developments Friday, Israel’s new government, which was sworn in Sunday, said it would transfer up to 1.4 million doses of soon-to-expire Pfizer coronavirus vaccine to the Palestinian Authority in exchange for about the same number of doses the authority anticipates receiving later this year.The authority canceled the deal later Friday, however. Its health minister, Mai Alkaila, told reporters that the expiration date for the vaccine was in June, which would not give the authority enough time to use the doses.Israel has been criticized for not sharing vaccine with the more than 4 million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.Uganda announced Friday that it is tightening lockdown measures to stop a rise in coronavirus cases. Public and private vehicles are banned on roads except for those vehicles carrying cargo, essential workers or the sick.In the United States, President Joe Biden announced Friday that 300 million COVID-19 vaccine doses had been administered in the United States since he took office Jan. 20.However, Biden’s plan to have 70% of Americans at least partially vaccinated by Independence Day, July 4, may fall short because of a sharp decline in the number of vaccinations that began about two months ago.Vice President Kamala Harris visited the southeastern city of Atlanta, Georgia, on Friday to encourage people to get vaccinated against the coronavirus.About 36% of Georgians have been vaccinated, a rate lower than those of most U.S. states.Canada announced Friday that border restrictions on nonessential travel with the United States will be extended until July 21.Bruce Springsteen’s Broadway show is set to open June 26. Proof of COVID vaccination must be provided, but the venue will not recognize the AstraZeneca shot, which has not been approved for use in the United States but has been accepted in Canada and other countries.Also, children 16 and younger must present proof of a recent negative COVID test and must be accompanied at the Saint James Theater by a fully vaccinated adult.
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Thailand has begun human trials with two of four homegrown vaccine candidates local scientists are developing against COVID-19, as the country scrambles to secure shots from abroad amid its worst wave of infections since the pandemic began.The homegrown vaccines will not be ready for mass production in time to help Thailand fight off the latest wave. Officials and developers are hoping, though, that they will arrive in time to give Thailand — and maybe its neighbors — booster shots tailored to the main variants of the novel coronavirus by next year.“The vaccine will be against the variants like the South African variant and the Indian variant and others, so that will be our strategy,” said Kiat Ruxrungtham, who is spearheading development of one of the most anticipated candidates at Chulalongkorn University’s Vaccine Research Center in Bangkok.A shot in the armFor now, Thailand is relying on a mix of vaccines from foreign drugmakers to reach herd immunity by the end of the year.Having kept infection rates low through 2020 with tight border controls and strict social distancing, Thailand secured relatively few doses early in the pandemic. It bought a few million shots from China’s Sinovac for the most vulnerable and struck a deal with AstraZeneca that lets local drugmaker SiamBioscience manufacture its COVID-19 vaccine in the country.Then came the third wave in April, sending death and infection rates to record highs, and authorities on a vaccine shopping spree, striking deals with Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and Sinopharm. The government says it has now locked in 105.5 million doses, enough to cover over 70% of Thailand’s 69 million people, and is looking for more.Thai authorities and developers, though, still see a crucial role for the homegrown vaccines.Tanarak Plipat, deputy director-general of disease control at the Public Health Ministry, said the new vaccines will help keep Thailand safe once the effects of the first full round of doses start wearing off.“There [is] growing evidence that very soon we may need the booster dose of the vaccine, I mean the third or the fourth or the fifth. We don’t exactly know about that, and we don’t know how frequent we need to boost the antibodies,” he said.“So in the long run, I think we are going to need a constant supply,” he said.He said some of the vaccines Thailand is developing may also prove better at fending off infection from some of the more contagious variants sweeping the globe. The alpha variant, first identified in Britain, is already the dominant strain in Thailand. The Health Ministry’s medical sciences department recently warned that the even more contagious delta variant, first found in India, could soon take over.Self-relianceTanarak said the difficulties most countries have had securing not just vaccines, but masks and ventilators as well, have taught Thailand that it still needs to try to rely on itself for what it needs when it needs it.“To secure [the] health for our people, we need to be able to rely on ourselves in the time of [the] pandemic,” he said. “No matter how much money you have, we are not going to get the most important supplies of medical device or medicine or vaccines if you are not being able to produce it yourself.”If all goes well, he said Thai laboratories could be producing tens of millions of doses of the country’s own COVID-19 vaccines by around the middle of next year.The Government Pharmaceutical Organization, a state drugmaker, started Phase 1 human trials in March of its candidate using an inactive Newcastle disease virus, which mainly infects birds, and has moved on to Phase 2 with more volunteers.Chulalongkorn’s Vaccine Research Center started Phase 1 human trials on Monday with what could be the first vaccine against COVID-19 developed in Southeast Asia using messenger RNA, the same technique pioneered by U.S. drugmakers Pfizer and Moderna.BioNet-Asia, an established local drugmaker, and Baiya Phytopharm, a startup, have yet to begin human trials with their own vaccine candidates.The Vaccine Research Center had been hoping to start human trials in late 2020. Instead, it says, it had to wait for slots to open at the U.S. labs making their vaccine for the trials, and that government funding — while generous — took longer to arrive than expected.With human trials of their first-generation vaccine now under way, Kiat and his team are already making plans to do the same in a few months with a second-generation candidate targeting the virus’s variants, a relatively simpler feat with the mRNA technique than with others.“The same technology, the same formulation, you just change the [gene] sequence,” he said. “If you have more data [from] the first generation, you can use that data to support your second generation. So, second generation we don’t have to [try] too many doses because we learn from the first generation what dose will be the best.”In the neighborhoodIf and when approved, Kiat said BioNet-Asia was lined up to start making 50 million to 80 million shots per year.Beyond targeting the dominant global variants of the novel coronavirus, mastering the mRNA technique could also let Thailand quickly tailor vaccines to strains, or combinations of strains, specific to the region or the country, said Lorenz von Seidlein, a vaccine expert at Thailand’s Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit.“So, if there’s a combination of strains which is particular to Thailand, there would be probably a niche then for them to say, this new variant — which we don’t know yet but may pop up next year — we quickly can address this in combination with the variants that were here before,” he said.The benefits could spill over to Thailand’s neighbors, some of which are also battling their worst waves of infection since the start of the pandemic, including Malaysia, Cambodia and Vietnam.Kiat said a few other Southeast Asian countries have expressed interest in joining late-stage Phase 2 human trials of his team’s vaccines if the results from Phase 1 are promising. He said they were especially interested in the second-generation vaccines they are working on and may consider placing orders.“Our intention is that if we have efficient production and good-quality vaccine … we should be able to supply neighborhood countries either through COVAX or whatever,” he said, referring to an international plan for supplying poorer countries with free or subsidized COVID-19 shots.
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A prominent Namibian traditional leader, Vekuii Rukoro, the paramount chief of the OvaHererero people who led international legal battles to bring Germany to pay reparations for its genocide in the southern African country, has died of COVID-19.Rukoro died early Friday, secretary-general of the Ovaherero/OvaMbanderu and Nama Council, Mutjinde Katjiua, told The Associated Press.Rukoro, who was elected Paramount Chief of the OvaHerero in 2014, represented both ethnic groups in the international legal cases.Rukoro and other traditional chiefs have accepted Germany’s offer of compensation but said it should be improved through further negotiations, while some other traditional leaders have rejected it.Last month the German government apologized for the colonial-era massacres and agreed to pay 1.1 billion euros ($1.3 billion) to Namibia over a 30-year period.In what is now acknowledged to be the first genocide of the 20th century, the mass killings of the OvaHerero and Nama people were perpetrated by German colonial forces between 1904 and 1908.Namibia is currently experiencing a surge of COVID-19. The country’s seven-day rolling average of daily new cases has more than doubled over the past two weeks from 17.31 new cases per 100,000 people on June 3 to 49.13 new cases per 100,000 people on June 17, according to Johns Hopkins University.Namibia, a country of 2.5 million people, has a cumulative total of just over 70,000 confirmed cases, including 112 deaths, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The current surge has brought the government to restrict movement into and out of the capital, Windhoek, as well as restrict public gatherings to 10 people.Six tourists from South Africa recently died of COVID-19 while on a bus tour of Namibia in which 37 of the 40 people on the tour became ill with the disease.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron urged European Union countries Friday to be vigilant against the spread of new coronavirus variants and called for the bloc to coordinate its COVID-19 border reopening policies.”Caution is still necessary so that we have a summer of many freedoms, if not all freedoms,” Merkel told a joint news conference in Berlin before the two leaders held a working dinner.”Some countries have reopened their borders earlier for tourist industry reasons, but we must be careful not to reimport new variants,” Macron said.Macron noted the situation in Britain while Merkel pointed to Portugal to show how things can quickly change.Britain this week delayed a relaxation of pandemic restrictions because of the prevalence of the delta variant, which was first identified in India, while Portuguese authorities on Thursday banned travel in and out of the capital, Lisbon, because of the variant.FILE – A Sri Lankan man rests in a vegetable market closed to curb the spread of the coronavirus in Colombo, Sri Lanka, June 16, 2021.In other developments Friday:— The delta variant was detected in Sri Lanka, a neighbor to India.”It is the worst we could have imagined at such a time,” Dr. Chandima Jeewandara, director of the Allergy, Immunity and Cell Biology Unit at Sri Jayewardenepura University, told The Hindu newspaper. “We are already dealing with a spike in cases with the alpha variant. Delta poses a greater risk because our vaccine coverage is low, and among those who are vaccinated a majority have got only one dose.”According to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center, Sri Lanka, a nation of about 22 million people, has more than 235,000 COVID-19 cases.— Israel’s new government, sworn in Sunday, said it would transfer up to 1.4 million doses of soon-to-expire Pfizer coronavirus vaccine to the Palestinian Authority in exchange for about the same number of doses the authority expects to receive later this year. The Palestinian Authority canceled the deal later, however. PA Health Minister Mai Alkaila told reporters that the expiration date for the vaccine was in June, which would not give the Palestinian government enough time to use the doses.Israel has been criticized for not sharing vaccine with the more than 4 million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.FILE – Bottles of hand sanitizer are displayed for use at a park in Goyang, South Korea, June 15, 2021. The banner reads “Must wear masks.”— In South Korea, a delay in the delivery of COVID-19 vaccines has pushed the government to offer its residents mixed doses. People who received the AstraZeneca vaccine as a first dose will now be offered the Pfizer vaccine for the second.— A panel of health care experts said India would likely experience a third surge of coronavirus cases in October. “It will be more controlled” than previous surges because some people have been inoculated, said Dr. Randeep Guleria, director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences.India reported more than 62,000 new COVID-19 cases in the previous 24-hour period. The nation also reported 1,587 COVID-19 deaths, the country’s lowest death toll in 60 days.FILE – A woman receives a coronavirus vaccination at the Kololo airstrip in Kampala, Uganda, May 31, 2021.— Uganda’s government announced that it was tightening lockdown measures to stop a rise in coronavirus cases. Public and private vehicles are banned on roads except for those vehicles carrying cargo, essential workers or the sick.— In the United States, President Joe Biden announced that 300 million COVID-19 vaccine doses had been administered in the United States since he took office January 20.But Biden’s plan to have 70% of Americans at least partially vaccinated by Independence Day, July 4, may fall short because of a sharp decline in the number of vaccinations that began about two months ago.Vice President Kamala Harris visited the southeastern city of Atlanta, Georgia, to encourage people to get vaccinated against the coronavirus.About 36% of Georgians have been vaccinated, a rate lower than those of most other U.S. states.— Canada’s government announced that border restrictions on nonessential travel with the United States would be extended until July 21.By late Friday evening EDT, Johns Hopkins had recorded 177.8 million global COVID-19 cases. The U.S. led the world in the number of cases, with 33.5 million, followed by India with 29.8 million and Brazil with 17.8 million.Worldwide deaths from the disease have topped 3.8 million, Johns Hopkins said, and 2.5 billion vaccine doses have been administered.
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President Joe Biden announced Friday that 300 million COVID-19 vaccine doses had been administered in the United States since he took office January 20.But Biden’s plan to have 70% of Americans at least partially vaccinated by July 4 may fall short because of a sharp decline in the number of vaccinations that began about two months ago.As of early Friday, according to the website of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 377.9 million vaccine doses had been distributed in the U.S. and 316.0 million had been administered.The site said 176.3 million people, or 53.1 percent of the total U.S. population, had received at least one dose of the vaccine and 148.5 million, or 44.7 percent, had been fully vaccinated. COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths have fallen to their lowest levels in more than a year, but the vaccination drive has flagged because of a lack of urgency on the part of some people to get the shots, especially in the South and Midwest.On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris encouraged people to get vaccinated as she took a tour of a pop-up COVID-19 vaccination site at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, where Martin Luther King Jr. served as pastor until his 1968 assassination.
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