i_need_contribute
|
|
Total |
New |
Total |
|
Retrieved from: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/06/20/world/covid-vaccine-coronavirus-mask/indias-black-fungus-epidemic-spreads-in-the-wake-of-covid-crisis
By Andrew Carey and Abeer Salman, CNN
A health worker prepares a dose of the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine at Clalit Health Services in Jerusalem, in March.
Jerusalem (CNN)The Palestinian Authority has canceled an agreement with Israel that was to have seen at least 1 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine for Covid-19 transferred to the West Bank and Gaza.
The abrupt turnaround came after health officials in Ramallah inspected the first delivery of almost 90,000 doses Friday afternoon, the Palestinian Health Minister said.
''It was found that the doses did not conform to the technical specifications as previously agreed upon, and that their expiry date was close,'' minister Mai Alkaila said, according to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa.
''Hence, we reached out to Prime Minister Muhammad Shtayyeh, and a decision was made to cancel the deal," Alkaila added.
The move to transfer Israel's surplus stock of Pfizer vaccines to Palestinians in the occupied territories, an arrangement already in the works under the previous Netanyahu administration, according to Israeli media reports, was announced Friday morning by the Israeli government.
A government statement had acknowledged the vaccines "will expire soon" but it was not clear exactly how much time remained for Palestinian health authorities to administer the doses before expiration.
According to Reuters, Alkaila said Israel had told the PA the vaccines expired in July or August, but it turned out the true date was June.
As part of the agreed arrangement, a shipment of Pfizer vaccines intended for the PA later in the year was to have been transferred to Israel instead. The PA says it is now calling on Pfizer to speed up that shipment to Palestinians, as per the original contract.
Israel's leaders won considerable international acclaim for the country's highly successful rollout of Covid-19 vaccinations to its population of 9 million earlier in the year.
But they were criticized for failing to provide vaccines to cover Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, which under the Geneva Conventions Israel is obliged to do.
Israel argued that it was relieved of those obligations by the Oslo Accords, signed by Israeli and Palestinian leaders in the 1990s, which allocate responsibility for medical care provision to the Palestinian Authority.
Almost 450,000 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have received a Covid-19 vaccine so far, according to PA figures, of whom just over 270,000 have received two doses. The two territories have a population of between 4.5 million and 5 million people.
Retrieved from: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/19/middleeast/palestinians-pfizer-vaccine-israel-intl/index.html
The mucormycosis ward at Ahmedabad Civil Hospital in the Indian state of Gujarat this month.Credit...Atul Loke for The New York Times
The number of so-called black fungus cases in India shot up to more than 30,000 from negligible levels in just three weeks. The deadly disease has sickened former coronavirus patients across the country, and doctors believe that hospitals desperate to keep Covid-19 patients alive made choices that left them vulnerable.
Indian states have recorded more than 2,100 deaths, according to news reports. The federal health ministry in New Delhi, which is tracking nationwide cases to allot scarce and expensive antifungal medicine, has not released the number of fatalities.
The coronavirus pandemic has drawn stark lines between rich nations and poor, and the mucormycosis epidemic in India stands as the latest manifestation. During the second wave, which struck India in April, its creaky, underfunded medical system lacked beds, oxygen and other necessities as infections and deaths soared.
The mucormycosis epidemic adds even more urgency to the difficult task of protecting India’s 1.4 billion people, only a fraction of whom have been vaccinated against the coronavirus. They remain vulnerable to a third wave and the consequences that could follow.
“Mucormycosis will tail off and go back to baseline as the Covid cases subside,” said Dr. Dileep Mavalankar, an epidemiologist. “But it may come back in the third wave unless we find out why it is happening.”
Many doctors in India think they know why. The bone-and-tissue-eating fungus can attack the gastrointestinal tract, the lungs, the skin and the sinuses, where it often spreads to the eye socket and the brain if untreated. Treatment for the disease involves complex, often disfiguring surgery and an uncommon and expensive drug, contributing to a mortality rate above 50 percent.
Mucormycosis is not passed from person to person. It develops from commonplace spores that sometimes build up in homes and hospitals. Doctors believe India’s crowded hospitals, and their dire lack of medical oxygen, left the fungus an opening.
Without enough oxygen, doctors in many places injected patients with steroids, a standard treatment for doctors battling Covid globally. Steroids can reduce inflammation in the lungs and help Covid patients breathe more easily.
Many doctors prescribed steroids in quantities and for durations that far exceed World Health Organization recommendations, said Arunaloke Chakrabarti, a microbiologist and the co-author of a study examining the causes of India’s mucormycosis outbreak. Those steroids may have compromised patient immune systems and made Covid patients more susceptible to fungal spores.
The steroids may have also dangerously increased blood sugar levels, leaving people with diabetes vulnerable to mucormycosis. It could also increase the chance of blood clots, leading to malnourished tissue, which the “fungus attacks,” said Dr. Bela Prajapati, who oversees treatment for nearly 400 patients with mucormycosis.
Desperate doctors may not have had the chance to ask patients whether they had diabetes or other conditions before resorting to steroids.
“Doctors hardly had any time to do patient management,” Dr. Chakrabarti said. “They were all looking at how to take care of the respiratory tract.”
Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/06/20/world/covid-vaccine-coronavirus-mask/indias-black-fungus-epidemic-spreads-in-the-wake-of-covid-crisis
By Reed Abelson
A woman placed a rose in the sand on Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro on Sunday, in memory of Brazil’s 500,000 coronavirus deaths.Credit...Silvia Izquierdo/Associated Press
The Covid-19 death toll in Brazil has now surpassed 500,000, behind only the United States, which marked 600,000 deaths last week, and India, where deaths may range from 600,000 to as high as 4.2 million.
Nearly 18 million people have been infected so far, and the country is averaging almost 73,000 new cases and some 2,000 deaths a day, according to official data. But many experts believe the numbers understate the true scope of the country’s epidemic, as they do in India.
Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, has been heavily criticized for dismissing the threat posed by the virus, despite contracting it himself last year. On Saturday, thousands of people protested his response to the pandemic, including his resistance to mask-wearing edicts and the slow rollout of vaccines, according to Reuters. Only 11 percent of residents are believed to be fully vaccinated.
A severe drought has also gripped the country, the worst in at least 91 years, and experts say a terrible fire season may further complicate the country’s struggle to manage the virus. The smoke could even aggravate cases of Covid-19, by increasing the inflammation in the lungs.
“It’s a situation that’s dangerous,” said Dr. Aljerry Rêgo, a professor and director of a Covid facility in the Amazon state of Amapá. “And the biggest risk, of course, is overwhelming the public health system even further, which is already precarious in the Amazon.”
In recent testimony before a legislative committee, Brazil’s former health ministers described Mr. Bolsonaro’s befuddling belief that an anti-malaria drug was effective against Covid-19, and an executive at Pfizer said that the company offered millions of doses of its Covid-19 vaccine to Brazil last year — but received no response from the government for months.
Mr. Bolsonaro shrugged off the revelations. Last month, his government announced that Brazil would host the Copa America soccer tournament later this year, after Argentina decided it would be irresponsible to do so while the virus continued to spread.
On Friday, officials reported that 82 people connected with the tournament had contracted Covid-19, according to The Associated Press. Brazil’s health ministry said in a statement that 37 players and staffers of the 10 tournament teams infected, along with 45 workers.
Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/20/health/brazil-deaths-covid.html
Now that tens of millions of Americans are vaccinated against the coronavirus, many are wondering: Do I have enough antibodies to keep me safe?
For a vast majority of people, the answer is yes. That hasn’t stopped hordes from stampeding to the local doc-in-a-box for antibody testing. But to get a reliable answer from testing, vaccinated people have to get a specific kind of test, and at the right time.
Scientists would prefer that the average vaccinated person not get antibody testing at all, on the grounds that it’s unnecessary. In clinical trials, the vaccines authorized in the United States provoked a strong antibody response in virtually all of the participants.
“Most people shouldn’t even be worrying about this,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University.
But antibody tests can be crucial for people with weak immune systems or those who take certain medications — a broad category encompassing millions of people who are recipients of organ donations, have certain blood cancers, or who take steroids or other drugs that suppress the immune system. Mounting evidence suggests that a significant proportion of these people do not produce a sufficient antibody response after vaccination.
If you must get tested, or just want to, it’s essential to get the right kind of test. Early in the pandemic, many commercial tests were designed to look for antibodies to a coronavirus protein called the nucleocapsid, or just N, because after infection, those antibodies were plentiful in the blood.
But these antibodies are not as powerful as those required to prevent virus infection, nor do they last as long. More important, antibodies to the N protein are not produced by the vaccines authorized in the United States; instead, those vaccines provoke antibodies to another protein sitting on the surface of the virus, called the spike.
Rapid tests that are commonly available deliver a yes-no result, and may miss low levels of antibodies. A certain type of lab tests, called Elisa, may offer a semi-quantitative estimate of antibodies to the spike protein.
Many doctors are still unaware of the differences between antibody tests, or the fact that the tests measure just one form of immunity to the virus. In May, the Food and Drug Administration recommended against the use of antibody tests for assessing immunity — a decision that has drawn criticism from some scientists — and provided only bare-bones information about testing to health care providers.
It’s also important to wait to be tested at least two weeks after the second shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines, when antibody levels will have risen enough to be detectable. For some people receiving the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, that period may be as long as four weeks.
But antibodies are just one aspect of the immune system. The body also maintains so-called cellular immunity, a complex network of defenders that also responds to invaders.
“There’s a lot happening under the surface that antibody tests are not directly measuring,” said Dr. Dorry Segev, a transplant surgeon at Johns Hopkins University.
By Carl Zimmer and James Gorman
At a Senate hearing on efforts to combat Covid-19 last month, Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, asked Dr. Anthony S. Fauci whether the National Institutes of Health had funded “gain-of-function” research on coronaviruses in China.
“Gain-of-function research, as you know, is juicing up naturally occurring animal viruses to infect humans,” the senator said.
Dr. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, flatly rejected the claim: “Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect.”
This exchange, and the bit of scientific jargon at the heart of it, has gained traction in recent weeks — usually among people suggesting that the coronavirus was engineered, rather than having jumped from animals to humans, the explanation favored by most experts on coronaviruses.
The uproar has also drawn attention back to a decade-long debate among scientists over whether certain gain-of-function research is too risky to allow. The stakes of the debate could not be higher.
Too little research on emerging viruses will leave us unprepared for future pandemics. But too little attention to the safety risks will increase the chances that an experimental pathogen may escape a lab through an accident and cause an outbreak of its own.
Sorting out the balance of risks and benefits of the research has proved over the years to be immensely challenging. And now, the intensity of the politics and rhetoric over the lab leak theory — the unproven idea that the coronavirus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China — threatens to push detailed science policy discussions to the sidelines.
“It’s just going to make it harder to get back to a serious debate,” said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who has urged the government to be more transparent about its support of gain-of-function research.
There’s no question the new coronavirus will influence the shape of the debate. Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, said that before the pandemic, the idea of a new virus sweeping the world and causing millions of deaths felt hypothetically plausible. Now he has seen what such a virus can do.
“You have to think really carefully about any kind of research that could lead to that sort of mishap in the future,” Dr. Bloom said.
Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/06/20/world/covid-vaccine-coronavirus-mask/why-make-a-virus-more-transmissible-to-learn-how-to-fight-it
By Maahil Mohamed and Mike Ives
The Hulhumalé Medical Facility, shown in a photo provided by the Maldives government, was built for the treatment of Covid-19 but is facing a shortage of medical workers. Credit...Health Emergency Operations Center
The largest Covid-19 treatment facility in the Maldives has nearly 300 beds and a steady supply of oxygen. But as the country reported some of the world’s highest caseloads per capita last month, Covid wards ran low on another essential resource: employees.
The health care system in the Indian Ocean archipelago depends largely on doctors and nurses from India, a country that is facing its own crushing outbreak. With foreign health professionals unavailable, the Maldives’ only medical school — which opened in 2019 and has a total of 115 students — sent dozens of medical and nursing students to work in Covid wards in the capital, Malé. The government also called nurses out of retirement and drafted volunteers with no medical experience.
“We were always prepared for a possible surge, but a wave this sudden and massive was just unexpected,” said Nazla Musthafa, a health adviser to the government.
Though 59 percent of the Maldives’ approximately 540,000 people have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, the recent surge took a heavy toll. Nearly half of the country’s 200 Covid deaths during the entire pandemic were reported in May.
Many people in Malé now have someone in their extended families who has died, said Marjan Montazemi, the UNICEF representative to the Maldives. “Because the numbers are not the same as in other countries, it doesn’t attract that much attention,” she said. “But for the country, it has been quite difficult.”
Here are the other key developments from the last few hours:
· Mandatory mask-wearing outdoors is being lifted and an eight-month nightly coronavirus curfew is ending in France today. The unpopular curfew has been scrapped just in time to coincide with elections in France in which the government faces pressure from a resurgent far right.
· The UK is moving towards a situation where people who have been double-vaccinated could be exempt from quarantine, Public Health England’s chief Covid-19 adviser has said. Dr Susan Hopkins, one of the key government advisers on the response to the pandemic, said a decision would be made after the results of a study that uses daily lateral flow tests as an alternative to isolation for 10 days after coming into contact with a positive case.
· More than half of the new Covid-19 cases being reported in the Lisbon region are of the more infectious Delta coronavirus variant, preliminary data showed on Sunday. Ricardo Jorge, from the national health institute, said the Delta variant represented more than 60% of cases in the Lisbon area though still less than 15% in the northern half of Portugal.
· With Covid vaccination penetration in the US likely to fall short of Joe Biden’s 70% by Fourth of July target, pandemic analysts are warning that vaccine incentives are losing traction and that “two Americas” may emerge as the aggressive Delta variant becomes the dominant US strain.
· A member of Uganda’s Olympic team has tested positive for coronavirus and was barred entry into Japan, in the first detected infection among athletes arriving for the Tokyo Games, due to open in five weeks. The athletes, who arrived on Saturday night at Tokyo’s Narita airport, were all fully vaccinated with AstraZeneca and had negative PCR tests before boarding, the Asahi newspaper reported.
· Thousands of Brazilians returned to the streets on Saturday in protest against the response of Jair Bolsonaro’s administration to the pandemic, which has killed close on half a million people in the country – the most after the US. On the second day of demonstrations in less than a month, the anti-Bolsonaro mobilisation is gaining momentum amid an ascendant curve of Covid-19 infections, while only 11% of 212 million Brazilians have been fully vaccinated, according to local media.
Medicine
