In the first report of its kind, the World Meteorological Organization examines the close link between air quality and climate change and how measures stemming from COVID-19 influenced air quality patterns in 2020.Government-imposed lockdown measures and travel restrictions to control the spread of COVID-19 resulted in a marked improvement in air quality in many parts of the world. For example, the WMO said Southeast Asia experienced a 40% reduction in air particles in 2020.However, the chief of the WMO’s Atmospheric Environment Research Division, Oksana Tarasova, said the dramatic fall in emissions of key air pollutants was short-lived. She said city dwellers who reveled in seeing blue skies during periods of lockdown inactivity, had to again endure living under a pollution cloud once the cars started rolling again.WMO Chief of atmospheric and environment research division Oksana Tarasova attends a press conference Nov. 25, 2019 in Geneva.“As soon as mobility has increased, we are back to business as usual,” Tarasova said. “So, those improvements were not very long lasting. And that is why we always stress that the extreme measures which were taken under lockdown is not a substitute for long term policies.”During this same period, the WMO said extreme weather events fueled by climate and environmental change triggered unprecedented sand and dust storms and wildfires that affected air quality.In parallel with the human-induced experiment on lockdowns and travel restrictions, Tarasova said those, and other natural phenomena also were controlling air quality around the world.“There were several very strong events that happened in 2020 related to bio-mass burning where the smoke pollution from this burning bio-mass impacted air quality in large parts of Siberia, the United States,” Tarasova said. “Early in the year, there was an episode in Australia that caused dramatic deterioration of air quality in those parts of the world.”Smoke from wildfires is seen east of Hobart in the Australian island state of Tasmania Jan. 4, 2013.The episode Tarasova refers is to Australian wildfires.The WMO says changes in climate can influence pollution levels directly. It says the increased frequency and intensity of heatwaves may lead to greater accumulation of pollutants close to the surface. It notes the intense wildfires breaking out in many parts of the world and huge dust and sandstorms also worsen air pollution.The weather agency warns air pollution has significant impacts on human health. That is borne out by estimates from the latest Global Burden of Disease assessment. The data show global mortality from pollution nearly doubled from 2.3 million in 1990 to 4.5 million in 2019 — most due to particulate matter.
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Day: September 3, 2021
One of the most important tasks Alice Greenwald has as president and CEO of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum is to educate and inspire a younger generation and make sure the heroism and sacrifices made that day in 2001 are never forgotten.
“If you think about 20 years, it is the span of a generation and there are tens of millions of young people, college age and younger, who were born after 2001. [Others] were toddlers, they were infants when 9/11 happened,” she said.
“For those of us who witnessed 9/11 20 years ago, it’s seared into our consciousness. We cannot ever not remember what our eyes saw. But for this generation, it’s history to be learned,” Greenwald told Reuters.
Ahead of this year’s anniversary, the Museum and Memorial launched a new campaign and fundraiser called The Never Forget Fund, which will support educational initiatives to teach young people about the attack and the global aftermath.
Greenwald said the museum – located in lower Manhattan, close to where the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11, 2001 after being struck by two planes hijacked by Islamic militants – offers an important lesson to the younger generation about overcoming extraordinary hardship.
“This memorial, this museum tells a story about the best of human nature in response to the worst. And we need to remind this generation that they have the capacity for unity, for hope and for resilience when faced with challenges that you couldn’t imagine and aren’t yet prepared to deal with.”
She added, “But you will rise to the occasion and if you come together, you will meet adversity and prevail.”
“This was a seminal event in American and global history that happened here,” said Greenwald. “And we can’t renege on our promise of two decades ago. We will never forget.”
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Technological advances in prosthetics have vastly improved the lives of many U.S. veterans and service members over the past 20 years. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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Amid the latest wave of COVID-19 infections, less than 1% of people in Africa’s most populated country, Nigeria, have been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus. Nigerian authorities are scrambling for more vaccines but say misinformation and myths are discouraging uptake. Timothy Obiezu looks at efforts to dispel the rumors in this report from the capital, Abuja.
Camera: Emeka Gibson Producer: Jason Godman
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The African Union has announced that Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines assembled in South Africa will no longer be exported to Europe and will instead be distributed among African countries.In addition, millions of J&J vaccines already shipped to Europe, but currently stored in warehouses, will be returned to South Africa, African Union COVID-19 envoy Strive Masiyiwa said Thursday.The deal between J&J and Aspen Pharmacare, the South African facility manufacturing the J&J vaccines that were sent to Europe, had received harsh criticism as less than 3% of the population of the African continent has been inoculated, compared to richer regions of the world that have begun or will soon begin booster shot campaigns.The World Health Organization has warned that the pandemic cannot be brought under control unless all the world’s regions are equitably vaccinated.Meanwhile, WHO has listed a new coronavirus strain as a “variant of interest.” The Mu variant is responsible for nearly 40% of the COVID cases in Colombia where it was first identified.Greek health care workers demonstrated Thursday against a COVID mandate that went into effect Wednesday.Under the new regulation, workers will be suspended without pay if they have not been inoculated or recovered from the coronavirus in the last six months.Musicals are back on Broadway, after an absence of more than a year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tony Award-winning Hadestown, a modern interpretation of the ancient Greek legend of lovers Orpheus and Eurydice, opened Thursday.Also, the musical Waitress began a limited run Thursday, starring singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles.Hamilton, The Lion King, and Wicked return to Broadway theaters Sept. 14.The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center has recorded 219 million COVID infections and 4.5 million coronavirus deaths. The center said early Friday that 5.3 billion vaccines have been administered. Some information for this report came from the Associated Press.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has created a nurse staffing crisis that is forcing many U.S. hospitals to pay top dollar to get the help they need to handle the crush of patients this summer.The problem, health leaders say, is twofold: Nurses are quitting or retiring, exhausted or demoralized by the crisis. And many are leaving for lucrative temporary jobs with traveling-nurse agencies that can pay $5,000 or more a week.It’s gotten to the point where doctors are saying, “Maybe I should quit being a doctor and go be a nurse,” said Dr. Phillip Coule, chief medical officer at Georgia’s Augusta University Medical Center, which has on occasion seen 20 to 30 resignations in a week from nurses taking traveling jobs.“And then we have to pay premium rates to get staff from another state to come to our state,” Coule said.The average pay for a traveling nurse has soared from roughly $1,000 to $2,000 per week before the pandemic to $3,000 to $5,000 now, said Sophia Morris, a vice president at San Diego-based health care staffing firm Aya Healthcare. She said Aya has 48,000 openings for traveling nurses to fill.At competitor SimpliFi, President James Quick said the hospitals his company works with are seeing unprecedented levels of vacancies.“Small to medium-sized hospitals generally have dozens of full-time openings, and the large health systems have hundreds of full-time openings,” he said.The explosion in pay has made it hard on hospitals without deep enough pockets.Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly lamented recently that the state’s hospitals risk being outbid for nurses by other states that pay a “fortune.” She said Wednesday that several hospitals, including one in Topeka, had open beds but no nurses to staff them.In Kansas City, Missouri, Truman Medical Centers has lost about 10 nurses to travel jobs in recent days and is looking for travelers to replace them, said CEO Charlie Shields.He said it is hard to compete with the travel agencies, which are charging hospitals $165 to $170 an hour per nurse. He said the agencies take a big cut of that, but he estimated that nurses are still clearing $70 to $90 an hour, which is two to three times what the hospital pays its staff nurses.“I think clearly people are taking advantage of the demand that is out there,” Shields said. “I hate to use ‘gouged’ as a description, but we are clearly paying a premium and allowing people to have fairly high profit margins.”In Texas, more than 6,000 travel nurses have flooded the state to help with the surge through a state-supported program. But on the same day that 19 of them went to work at a hospital in the northern part of the state, 20 other nurses at the same place gave notice that they would be leaving for a traveling contract, said Carrie Kroll, a vice president at the Texas Hospital Association.FILE – In this Aug. 18, 2021, photo, a poster honoring medical and frontline workers hangs on a nursing station of an intensive care unit at the Willis-Knighton Medical Center in Shreveport, La.“The nurses who haven’t left, who have stayed with their facilities, they are seeing these other people come in now who are making more money. It provides a tense working environment,” Kroll said.The pandemic was in its early stages when Kim Davis, 36, decided to quit her job at an Arkansas hospital and become a travel nurse. She said she has roughly doubled her income in the 14 months that she has been treating patients in intensive care units in Phoenix; San Bernardino, California; and Tampa, Florida.“Since I’ve been traveling, I’ve paid off all my debt. I paid off about $50,000 in student loans,” she said.Davis said many of her colleagues are following the same path.“They’re leaving to go travel because why would you do the same job for half the pay?” she said. “If they’re going to risk their lives, they should be compensated.”Health leaders say nurses are bone-tired and frustrated from being asked to work overtime, from getting screamed at and second-guessed by members of the community, and from dealing with people who chose not to get vaccinated or wear a mask.“Imagine going to work every day and working the hardest that you have worked and stepping out of work and what you see every day is denied in the public,” said Julie Hoff, chief nurse executive at OU Health in Oklahoma. “The death that you see every day is not honored or recognized.”Meanwhile, hospitals are getting squeezed by the revolving door of departures and new hires from traveling agencies.Coule cited a recent example in which his hospital in Georgia hired a respiratory therapist through an agency to replace a staff member who had decided to accept a traveling gig. The replacement came from the same hospital where his respiratory therapist had just gone to work.“Essentially we swapped personnel but at double the cost,” he said.Patricia Pittman, director of the Fitzhugh Mullan Institute for Health Workforce Equity at George Washington University, said many nurses still harbor resentment toward their employers from the early stages of the pandemic, in part from being forced to work without adequate protective gear.“The nurses say, ‘Hey, if I am not going to be treated with respect, I might as well go be a travel nurse,’” she said. “‘That way I can go work in a hellhole for 13 weeks, but then I can take off a couple months or three months and go do whatever.’”
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