Category Archives: Corona Virus

Compared with some other countries, along with high numbers of Covid cases and deaths, the UK has relatively relaxed Covid restrictions, with no mandatory vaccine passports, no social distancing measures, and no mask mandate in England.

Four people from the UK and in Europe share their views on the countrys approach to Covid restrictions compared with others they are visiting or living in.

Liz, 60, who is in Turkey, said people there are excellent at wearing masks, which makes her feel safer than in the UK. I was on the Metro in Newcastle before I left and I was a nervous wreck because people werent wearing them, she said.

Liz, who is retired and lives in the north-east of England and is in Turkey to help look after an ill friend, said people wear masks nearly all the time indoors and around 50% do so outdoors.

A lot of the older generations here live with their families so I think people are more aware of not taking germs home to their parents and grandparents.

She feels a lot of the complacency in the UK comes from the example set by the government and that the message given to the public is not clear and consistent.

I get the impression that the government policy is deliberate and is about herd immunity. I also think its partly cultural. British people seem to think, It wont happen to me, we know best, like theyre invincible. Sadly, I think its been proven to not be the case.

When Jimmy, 40, a video producer from Leeds, spent four days watching the Paris Roubaix cycling race in France earlier this month, the difference in peoples attitudes to Covid from those in the UK was immediately apparent, he said.

When you go to a bar or restaurant, you have to show your vaccine pass and you wear a mask, said Jimmy. In the UK, everything is just a free-for-all. If restrictions here were a bit more strict, I think it would reduce the impact on us all.

Jimmy believes the UK should follow Frances example, with tighter restrictions in the short term. I fear that if we carry on as we are, Covid will continue to disrupt our daily lives. Im having to work extra hours this week as my colleagues are self-isolating.

The UK government likes to think theyre giving people a choice, and people are embracing this idea of free thinking. But I think theres nothing wrong with having some basic public health rules. Its not inhibiting peoples freedom of thought, its just sensible, isnt it?

Luca, who is in Zaragoza, Spain, looking after her 90-year-old mother, said she feels the government has failed people in the UK. Im clinically extremely vulnerable and feel totally restricted in what I do and where I go because people dont consider it important to protect themselves and others, said the semi-retired 60-year-old.

Normally living in London, Luca said shes in no hurry to return to the UK. I havent done it yet, but I was planning to see a film, and when I looked at booking online, I saw that once you book your seat, the ones next to you get booked up too, so theyre empty.

She feels there is no rejection of face masks in Spain and that theyre seen as protection, not an imposition. In contrast, she believes the image the UK government projects when they have meetings without face masks tells people they dont need to wear them. From the beginning of the pandemic, I feel the government has given people a false idea of freedom instead of showing precautions as something positive.

In Milan, Italy, Nigel I Ross, a university lecturer, said restrictions are still very much in place, with green passes needed to enter public buildings. From today, all employees will also need a pass to enter their workplaces.

Its far from perfect, but its going extremely well, said Ross, who is British and has lived in Italy for more than 30 years. There are around 2,000 new cases a day, which is in part due to us having some of the strictest restrictions in Europe.

He believes that its the message from the top that reflects the blase approach to Covid in the UK. My sister works in a school and with some family members extremely susceptible to infection, its like living in semi-terror in some ways. It feels like people are dying unnecessarily, and its no wonder Britain is seen as the sick man of Europe. I was there this summer for a couple of weeks and I really noticed the difference. Its a real contradiction because we have more restrictions, but I feel so much freer here.

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Why are Britons so much more relaxed about Covid than Europeans? - The Guardian

FILE - In this March 2, 2021, file photo, socially distanced and with protective partitions students work on an art project during class at the Sinaloa Middle School in Novato, Calif. Public schools have struggled for years with teacher shortages, particularly in math, science, special education and languages. But the pandemic has exacerbated the problem. The stresses of teaching in the COVID-era caused a spike in teacher retirements and resignations. Now that California schools have welcomed students back to in-person learning, they face a new challenge: A shortage of teachers and all other staff, the likes of which some districts say they've never seen. (AP Photo/Haven Daley, File)

by: Dr. Mary Gillis, D.Ed.

Posted: Oct 15, 2021 / 06:24 PM EST / Updated: Oct 15, 2021 / 07:42 PM EST

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) Limiting close contact is an important way to help reduce the spread of COVID-19, researchers say.

But, what is really considered close contact?

Researchers consider close contact as being less than 6 feet away from a potentially infected person for 15 minutes.

But its not just 15 minutes in one sitting. Dr. Christopher Doehring, at Franciscan Health, says theres more to it.

One of the criteria for close contact is a total of 15 minutes of time, either in close contact for that duration or cumulative throughout the day. So, if youre just passing someone or in reasonably close proximity, but its for a brief period of time there shouldnt be much of a concern, Doehring said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention echoes Doehrings statement and considers close contact as anyone who was within 6 feet of an infected person for a total of 15 minutes or more over a 24-hour period. For example, three individual five-minute exposures for a total of 15 minutes.

The agency also says a person is still considered in close contact if one or both people were wearing masks during the times they were together.

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In the time of COVID-19, here's what 'close contact' really means - WISHTV.com

Fivemore Mainers have died as health officials on Thursday reported another 799coronavirus cases across the state.

Thursdays report brings the total number of coronavirus cases in Maine to 96,632,according to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Thats up from 95,833 on Wednesday.

Of those, 68,891have been confirmed positive, while 27,741were classified as probable cases, the Maine CDC reported.

Four women and a man have succumbed to the virus, bringing the statewide death toll to 1,088.

Of those, three were in their 80s or older and two in their 70s. Two were from Penobscot County, while the other three came from Kennebec, Piscataquis and Somerset counties.

The number of coronavirus cases diagnosed in the past 14 days statewide is 6,643. This is an estimation of the current number of active cases in the state, as the Maine CDC is no longer tracking recoveries for all patients. Thats down from 6,769 on Wednesday.

The new case rate statewide Thursday was 5.97 cases per 10,000 residents, and the total case rate statewide was 721.99.

Maines seven-day average for new coronavirus cases is 400.4, up from 382 the day before, down from 554.4 a week ago and down from 443.9 a month ago. That average peaked on Jan. 14 at 625.3.

The most cases have been detected in Mainers younger than 20, while Mainers over 80 years old make up the majority of deaths. More cases have been recorded in women and more deaths in men.

So far, 2,631 Mainers have been hospitalized at some point with COVID-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus. Of those, 167 are currently hospitalized, with 57 in critical care and 29 on a ventilator. Overall, 57 out of 340 critical care beds and 207 out of 304 ventilators are available.

The total statewide hospitalization rate on Thursday was 19.66 patients per 10,000 residents.

Cases have been reported in Androscoggin (10,253), Aroostook (3,605), Cumberland (21,083), Franklin (2,065), Hancock (2,536), Kennebec (9,212), Knox (1,817), Lincoln (1,697), Oxford (4,740), Penobscot (11,465), Piscataquis (1,236), Sagadahoc (1,879), Somerset (3,925), Waldo (2,243), Washington (1,660) and York (17,216) counties.

An additional 2,022 vaccine doses were administered in the previous 24 hours. As of Thursday, 890,172 Mainers are fully vaccinated, or about 75.2 percent of eligible Mainers, according to the Maine CDC.

New Hampshire reported 544 new cases on Thursday and two deaths. Vermont reported 327 new cases and one death, while Massachusetts reported 1,763 new cases and 19 deaths.

As of Thursday morning, the coronavirus had sickened 44,694.149 people in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands, as well as caused 719,760 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University of Medicine.

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5 more Mainers have died and another 799 coronavirus cases reported across the state - Bangor Daily News

Newer variants of the coronavirus like Alpha and Delta are highly contagious, infecting far more people than the original virus. Two new studies offer a possible explanation: The virus is evolving to spread more efficiently through air.

The realization that the coronavirus is airborne indoors transformed efforts to contain the pandemic last year, igniting fiery debates about masks, social distancing and ventilation in public spaces.

Most researchers now agree that the coronavirus is mostly transmitted through large droplets that quickly sink to the floor and through much smaller ones, called aerosols, that can float over longer distances indoors and settle directly into the lungs, where the virus is most harmful.

The new studies dont fundamentally change that view. But the findings signal the need for better masks in some situations, and indicate that the virus is changing in ways that make it more formidable.

This is not an Armageddon scenario, said Vincent Munster, a virologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who led one of the new studies. It is like a modification of the virus to more efficient transmission, which is something I think we all kind of expected, and we now see it happening in real time.

Dr. Munsters team showed that small aerosols traveled much longer distances than larger droplets and the Alpha variant was much more likely to cause new infections via aerosol transmission. The second study found that people infected with Alpha exhaled about 43 times more virus into tiny aerosols than those infected with older variants.

The studies compared the Alpha variant with the original virus or other older variants. But the results may also explain why the Delta variant is so contagious and why it displaced all other versions of the virus.

It really indicates that the virus is evolving to become more efficient at transmitting through the air, said Linsey Marr, an expert in airborne viruses at Virginia Tech who was not involved in either study. I wouldnt be surprised if, with Delta, that factor were even higher.

The ultratransmissibility of the variants may come down to a mix of factors. It may be that lower doses of the variants are required for infection, or that the variants replicate faster, or that more of the variant virus is exhaled into aerosols or all three.

The Alpha variant proved to be twice as transmissible as the original virus, and the Delta variant has mutations that turbocharged its contagiousness even more. As the virus continues to change, newer variants may turn out to be even more transmissible, experts said.

But the tools at our disposal all still work well to halt the spread. Even loosefitting cloth and surgical masks block about half of the fine aerosols containing virus, according to the study of people infected with variants, published this month in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

Still, at least in some crowded spaces, people may want to consider switching to more protective masks, said Don Milton, an aerosol expert at the University of Maryland who led the research.

Given that it seems to be evolving towards generating aerosols better, then we need better containment and better personal protection, Dr. Milton said of the virus. We are recommending people move to tighter-fitting masks.

Oct. 2, 2021, 4:30 p.m. ET

To compare how different variants spread through the air, his team asked participants with mild or asymptomatic infections to recite the alphabet, sing Happy Birthday loudly or shout out the University of Maryland slogan, Go Terps!

People infected with the Alpha variant had copious amounts of virus in their nose and throat, much more than those infected with the original virus. But even after adjusting for that difference, those infected with the variant released about 18 times as much virus into the smallest aerosols.

But the researchers examined only four people infected with Alpha, and 45 with older variants. That could skew the observed differences between the variants, said Seema Lakdawala, a respiratory virus expert at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in either new study.

Infected people can pass the virus along to many, many others or to none at all. How much virus they expel may depend on where in the respiratory tract it is replicating, the nature of the mucus in its environment, and what other microbes it may hitch a ride with.

We have really no idea why some individuals are superspreaders and others are not, Dr. Lakdawala said. Theres a lot of heterogeneity between individuals.

Data from a greater number of participants would be more convincing, but the two studies together do suggest that enhanced transport through aerosols at least partly contributes to the variants contagiousness, she said.

Dr. Munsters study did not involve people at all, but Syrian hamsters. Using the animals allowed the team to control the experimental conditions tightly and focus only on the movement of aerosols, Dr. Munster said.

The researchers separated pairs of hamsters with tubes of different lengths that allowed airflow but no physical contact. They looked at how well the different variants traveled from infected donor hamsters to uninfected sentinel hamsters.

When the cages were more than two meters apart, only the smallest aerosols particles smaller than 5 microns were shown to infect the sentinel hamsters. And the team found, as expected, that the Alpha variant outcompeted the original virus in infecting the sentinel hamsters.

The results were posted on bioRxiv, a website that features papers before they have been published in a scientific journal.

The researchers are now testing the Delta variant and expect to find that it is even more efficient, Dr. Munster said.

Together, the new findings underscore the importance of masks for vaccinated people, especially in crowded spaces, experts said. Although people with breakthrough infections after vaccination are much less likely to spread the virus than unvaccinated people, the contagiousness of the variants raises the probability.

With billions of people worldwide vaccinated, and billions still unvaccinated, the virus may still change in unexpected ways, Dr. Munster said: There might be additional evolutionary pressures, shaping the evolutionary direction of this virus.

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Is the Coronavirus Getting Better at Airborne Transmission? - The New York Times

Nursing coordinator Beth Springer looks into a patient's room in a COVID-19 ward at the Willis-Knighton Medical Center in Shreveport, La., in August. Despite a decline in COVID-19 cases in the United States over the last several weeks the country's total deaths are close to 700,000. Gerald Herbert/AP hide caption

Nursing coordinator Beth Springer looks into a patient's room in a COVID-19 ward at the Willis-Knighton Medical Center in Shreveport, La., in August. Despite a decline in COVID-19 cases in the United States over the last several weeks the country's total deaths are close to 700,000.

MINNEAPOLIS The United States reached its latest heartbreaking pandemic milestone Friday, eclipsing 700,000 deaths from COVID-19 just as the surge from the delta variant is starting to slow down and give overwhelmed hospitals some relief.

It took 3 months for the U.S. to go from 600,000 to 700,000 deaths, driven by the variant's rampant spread through unvaccinated Americans. The death toll is larger than the population of Boston.

The latest milestone is deeply frustrating to public health leaders and medical professionals on the front lines because vaccines have been available to all eligible Americans for nearly six months and the shots overwhelmingly protect against hospitalizations and death. An estimated 70 million eligible Americans remain unvaccinated, providing kindling for the variant.

Health experts say the fourth wave of the pandemic has peaked overall in the U.S., particularly in the Deep South, where hospitals were stretched to the limit weeks ago. But many Northern states are still struggling with rising cases, and what's ahead for winter is far less clear.

Unknowns include how flu season may strain already depleted hospital staffs and whether those who have refused to get vaccinated will change their minds.

An estimated 70 million eligible Americans remain unvaccinated, providing kindling for the highly contagious delta variant.

"If you're not vaccinated or have protection from natural infection, this virus will find you," warned Mike Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.

Registered nurse Noleen Nobleza inoculates Julio Quinones with a COVID-19 vaccine in Orange, Calif. Jae C. Hong/AP hide caption

Registered nurse Noleen Nobleza inoculates Julio Quinones with a COVID-19 vaccine in Orange, Calif.

Nationwide, the number of people now in the hospital with COVID-19 has fallen to somewhere around 75,000 from over 93,000 in early September. New cases are on the downswing at about 112,000 per day on average, a drop of about one-third over the past 2 1/2 weeks.

Deaths, too, appear to be declining, averaging about 1,900 a day versus more than 2,000 about a week ago, though on Friday the U.S. reached the heartbreaking milestone of 700,000 dead overall since the pandemic began.

The easing of the summer surge has been attributed to more mask wearing and more people getting vaccinated. The decrease in case numbers could also be due to the virus having burned through susceptible people and running out of fuel in some places.

In another promising development, Merck said Friday its experimental pill for people sick with COVID-19 reduced hospitalizations and deaths by half. If it wins authorization from regulators, it will be the first pill for treating COVID-19 and an important, easy-to-use new weapon in the arsenal against the pandemic.

All treatments now authorized in the U.S. against the coronavirus require an IV or injection.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government's top infectious disease specialist, warned on Friday that some may see the encouraging trends as a reason to remain unvaccinated.

"It's good news we're starting to see the curves" coming down, he said. "That is not an excuse to walk away from the issue of needing to get vaccinated."

Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, began seeing a surge of COVID-19 hospitalizations in mid-July, and by the first week of August, the place was beyond capacity. It stopped elective surgeries and brought in military doctors and nurses to help care for patients.

With cases now down, the military team is scheduled to leave at the end of October.

Still, the hospital's chief medical officer, Dr. Catherine O'Neal, said the rate of hospitalizations isn't decreasing as quickly as cases in the community because the delta variant is affecting more young people who are otherwise healthy and are living much longer in the intensive care unit on ventilators.

"It creates a lot of ICU patients that don't move anywhere," she said. And many of the patients aren't going home at all. In the last few weeks, the hospital saw several days with more than five COVID-19 deaths daily, including one day when there were 10 deaths.

"We lost another dad in his 40s just a few days ago," O'Neal said. "It's continuing to happen. And that's what the tragedy of COVID is."

As for where the outbreak goes from here, "I have to tell you, my crystal ball has broken multiple times in the last two years," she said. But she added that the hospital has to be prepared for another surge at the end of November, as flu season also ramps up.

Dr. Sandra Kemmerly, system medical director for hospital quality at Ochsner Health in Louisiana, said this fourth surge of the pandemic has been harder. "It's just frustrating for people to die of vaccine-preventable illnesses," she said.

At the peak of this most recent wave, Ochsner hospitals had 1,074 COVID-19 patients on Aug. 9. That had dropped to 208 as of Thursday.

Other hospitals are seeing decreases as well. The University of Mississippi Medical Center had 146 hospitalized COVID-19 patients at its mid-August peak. That was down to 39 on Friday. Lexington Medical Center in West Columbia, South Carolina, had more than 190 in early September but just 49 on Friday.

But Kemmerly doesn't expect the decrease to last. "I fully expect to see more hospitalizations due to COVID," she said.

Like many other health professionals, Natalie Dean, a professor of biostatistics at Emory University, is taking a cautious view about the winter.

It is unclear if the coronavirus will take on the seasonal pattern of the flu, with predictable peaks in the winter as people gather indoors for the holidays. Simply because of the nation's size and diversity, there will be places that have outbreaks and surges, she said.

What's more, the uncertainties of human behavior complicate the picture. People react to risk by taking precautions, which slows viral transmission. Then, feeling safer, people mingle more freely, sparking a new wave of contagion.

"Infectious disease models are different from weather models," Dean said. "A hurricane doesn't change its course because of what the model said."

One influential model, from the University of Washington, projects new cases will bump up again this fall, but vaccine protection and infection-induced immunity will prevent the virus from taking as many lives as it did last winter.

Still, the model predicts about 90,000 more Americans will die by Jan. 1 for an overall death toll of 788,000 by that date. The model calculates that about half of those deaths could be averted if almost everyone wore masks in public.

"Mask wearing is already heading in the wrong direction," said Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at the university. "We need to make sure we are ready for winter because our hospitals are exhausted."

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U.S. hits 700000 COVID deaths just as cases begin to fall - NPR

BUCHAREST, Oct 2 (Reuters) - Thousands of people demonstrated in the main squares of the Romanian capital on Saturday against new coronavirus restrictions announced by the government this week to fight a steep rise in infections.

Protesters, mostly not wearing face masks, gathered in University and Victory squares outside government offices, holding Romanian flags, blowing vuvuzelas and shouting: "Freedom, freedom without certificates," and "Down with the government."

Local media put the number of demonstrators at 15,000.

The new measures due to take effect on Sunday include restricting entry to public spaces such as theatres, cinemas, restaurants and gyms to people who can present a digital certificate proving they are fully vaccinated or have had the illness.

The number of new COVID-19 infections reached a record high of 12,590 on Saturday and authorities said intensive care units were running out of space. Romania has the second lowest vaccination rate in the European Union, just ahead of Bulgaria.

Weekend curfews have been introduced for unvaccinated and the government plans to make inoculations mandatory for healthcare sector's workers, doctors and nurses. read more

The government has also made face masks mandatory in all public spaces in places where the case incidence exceeds 6.0 per thousand people. Bucharest reached a record of 8.28 per thousand new infections over the past two weeks, among the country's steepest rates.

Among the protest organisers was an ultranationalist parliamentary grouping that is hoping, together with other opposition parties, to topple the centrist government on Oct. 5, when a parliamentary vote of no-confidence is scheduled. read more

The AUR said on its website: "If they don't see us, they can't hear us."

Just over a third of Romania's adult population is fully vaccinated so far, amid widespread distrust in state institutions and misinformation campaigns.

Reporting by Radu MarinasEditing by Frances Kerry

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Thousands rally in Romania against coronavirus restrictions - Reuters

The Covid-19 death toll in the US has now surpassed 700,000, despite the Covid-19 vaccines wide availability, in what one expert called a tragic and completely avoidable milestone.

Data from Johns Hopkins University shows that the US went just past 700,000 deaths on Friday; the US had previously reached 600,000 deaths in June. The country has had a total of 43.6m confirmed cases of Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins.

Over the last few months, the overwhelming majority of people who died from Covid were unvaccinated. A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published last month found that after the Delta variant became the most common variant in the US over the summer, unvaccinated Americans were 10 times more likely to be hospitalised and die because of the virus compared with vaccinated Americans.

In a statement on Saturday, Joe Biden said: To heal we must remember, and as our nation mourns the painful milestone of 700,000 American deaths we must not become numb to the sorrow. On this day, and every day, we remember all those we have lost to this pandemic and we pray for their loved ones left behind who are missing a piece of their soul.

As we do, the astonishing death toll is yet another reminder of just how important it is to get vaccinated.

Recent deaths have primarily been in southern states that have lagging vaccine rates, including Florida, Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana. Nationally, about 65% of people 12 and older who are eligible to receive the vaccine have been fully vaccinated, according to the CDC.

With a slight majority of the population fully vaccinated, the Covid death rate has significantly decreased compared with the death rate during previous surges of the virus, when the vaccine was unavailable. Following the surge in cases seen last winter, 100,000 people died in a 34-day period between January and February. Comparatively, it took over three months for the US to see another 100,000 deaths this summer.

Public health experts attribute the slowed death rate to the effectiveness of the vaccine but say that the milestone could have been avoided altogether with a higher vaccination rate.

Reaching 700,000 deaths is a tragic and completely avoidable milestone. We had the knowledge and the tools to prevent this from happening, and unfortunately politics, lack of urgency and mistrust in science got us here, John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Boston childrens hospital, told ABC News.

Experts are hoping that hospitalizations and deaths will decrease as the surge in cases due to the Delta variant seems to be decreasing and vaccine mandates are starting to roll out.

Without a winter surge, which experts say is still possible, statistical modeling has shown that the Covid-19 cases can continue to decline into 2022, providing some much-needed relief to hospital systems across the country that have been overwhelmed by Covid-19 cases.

One hospital in rural Washington state is still dealing with a surge of patients, with 15 of its 20 intensive-care unit beds being occupied by Covid patients. The hospital has had to delay more than two dozen heart surgeries because of its shortage of ICU beds.

Weve got a backup of like 30 cases that need to be done, Jackie Whited, director of intensive care at Central Washington hospital in Wenatchee, Washington, told the Seattle Times. I have no beds, I will have one clean bed in the ICU.

In an effort to get more people inoculated, vaccine mandates have been rolling out across the country, to some success.

Major health systems in California, where healthcare workers have been required to get vaccinated, have reported an uptick in vaccination rates among staff members. New York, which has a similar mandate, has seen similar results with thousands of healthcare workers getting vaccinated before the states vaccination deadline.

United Airlines had said it would fire the nearly 600 employees out of its workforce of about 67,000 employees who refused to be vaccinated. On Thursday, the company said that nearly 250 of those employees ultimately decided to get vaccinated.

Our vaccine policy continues to prove requirements work in less than 48 hours, the number of unvaccinated employees who began the process of being separated from the company has been cut almost in half, dropping from 592 to 320, the company said in a statement.

Adding to further optimism that the viruss hold on the country is waning was the drug manufacturer Mercks announcement on Friday that research found its Covid-19 treatment pill reduced hospitalizations and death to the virus by half. The company said it was seeking emergency use authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for distribution of the pill.

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Tragic and completely avoidable: US hits 700,000 Covid-19 deaths - The Guardian

A progress report detailing controversial U.S.-funded research into bat coronaviruses in China was filed more than two years after it was due and long after the corresponding grant had concluded. The U.S.-based nonprofit the EcoHealth Alliance submitted the report to its funder, the National Institutes of Health, in September 2020, while the group was engulfed in controversy surrounding its work with partners in China. The Intercept obtained the report, along with the grant proposal and other documents, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Scientists consulted by The Intercept described the late date as highly unusual and said it merited an explanation, given the controversy surrounding the EcoHealth Alliances work at the time that the report was submitted. The scientists spoke under the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic with the NIH, the worlds leading funder of biomedical research.

The annual report described the groups work from June 2017 to May 2018, which involved creating new viruses using different parts of existing bat coronaviruses and inserting them into humanized mice in a lab in Wuhan, China. The work was overseen by the NIHs National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is headed by Anthony Fauci.

Neither the NIH nor the EcoHealth Alliance offered an explanation for the date of the report or responded to questions from The Intercept about whether another version of the report had been submitted on time and, if so, in what ways that version may have been altered.

The Intercept is seeking any missing progress reports, among other documents, through ongoing litigation against the NIH.

The agency has been criticized for withholding information that might relate to the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, which is now responsible for more than 4.5 million deaths around the world. NIH has a public responsibility to be fully transparent on why it gave funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, whether it considered the potential of a possible accidental leak of dangerous bat viruses, and the ethics of approving the study, said Lawrence Gostin, a professor at Georgetown Universitys school of law and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. Overall, it is important to fund good basic research on bat viruses, but the project has been shrouded in uncertainty and lacks full transparency.

The progress report and other documents were released by the NIH over a year after The Intercept and others requested them. What [the NIH] really needs to do is not just react to FOIA requests. They need to be proactive and say, OK, heres the process, and heres the outcome. And they havent done that, said Gregory Koblentz, director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University. That just raises questions about why theyre dragging their heels. They should have provided all relevant information months ago.

The EcoHealth Alliance and its longtime partner the Wuhan Institute of Virology have come under intense scrutiny in the search for the pandemics origins. The two groups are at the center of the lab-origin hypothesis, the idea that the coronavirus could have emerged through a lab accident,the collection and storage of thousands of bat coronavirus samples, or through divisive research that makes viruses more transmissible in order to study how they evolve.

There has been no shortage of unsubstantiated ideas in circulation about SARS-CoV-2,the coronavirus that causes the respiratory illness Covid-19, several of which continue to be used as political wedges by former President Donald Trump and the far right. But EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak helped organize scientists to tar any discussion of a possible lab origin, even if it was science-based, as a conspiracy theory.

In February 2020, the medical journal The Lancet published a statement decrying the spread of rumours and misinformation around the origins of the pandemic. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin, read the letter. Daszak was not among its 27 signatories, but emails later obtained by U.S. Right to Know showed that he had orchestrated the effort. Daszak has also served on two international committees tasked with investigating the origins of the pandemic, despite having a clear conflict of interest. (Last weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that one of these committees, a task force convened by The Lancet, would be disbanded.)

For months, Daszak continued to push the notion that a lab origin was preposterous. Theyre coming at this with the belief system that theres a cabal of mysterious international folks who are trying to kill people, he said in an online seminar in October 2020, of those who believe its possible that the virus that causes Covid-19 emerged from a lab. They come at it with a belief system. So logic jumps out the window.

The unusually dated EcoHealth Alliance progress report adds to a string of missing, incomplete, or disappeared information that could be relevant to the origins of the pandemic.

The report describes work done in year four of the five-year, $3.1 million NIH grant Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence. It was due in April 2018. The version released by the NIH was submitted over two years later, after The Intercept had filed a public records request seeking the bat coronavirus and other NIH grants to the EcoHealth Alliance.

The NIH sends out automatic reminders ahead of key due dates and makes the distribution of new funding contingent upon receipt of the previous years annual reports. According to an NIH instruction manual, submission dates are automatically generated, meaning that the date could not be a typo.

Adding to the evidence that the annual update was submitted in 2020 are references to studies that were published after 2018, when the update was due. NIH progress reports include a section in which researchers list any papers that have been published or accepted for publication. In the EcoHealth Alliance progress report, the section lists papers published in 2019 and 2020.

Many researchers say the experiment that involved infecting humanized mice with altered bat coronaviruses described in the annual report qualifies as gain-of-function research of concern. None of the viruses described in the experiment are related to SARS-CoV-2 closely enough to have evolved into it. But scientists said the odd submission date raises questions about whether information in an earlier draft of the report had been altered or omitted amid controversy over the EcoHealth Alliances work in Wuhan.

Early on, several groups, media outlets, and individuals requested the grant documents and communications surrounding them, an effort that apparently irked Daszak. Conspiracy-theory outlets and politically motivated organizations have made Freedom of Information Act requests on our grants and all of our letters and e-mails to the NIH, he told Nature in August 2020. We dont think its fair that we should have to reveal everything we do.

The Intercept requested the grant documents from the NIH on September 3 of that year. The anomalous progress report was submitted less than two weeks later, on September 16.

The documents released to The Intercept are also missing a year-five progress report, covering the crucial period of June 2018 to May 2019, which was due in September 2019, according to NIH guidelines. Scientists said that NIH program officers sometimes overlook reports for the final reporting period, but taken together with the odd date on the year-four report, the omission raises questions that the agency should answer.

Federal funding documents are routinely released under the Freedom of Information Act. In this case, public interest in the origins of the pandemic should have led to a timely and full release of documents, transparency experts say. The presumption of disclosure is all the more crucial when dealing with documents that are squarely in the public interest, said Gunita Singh, a staff attorney with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. And records about how the pandemic may have originated and where our taxpayer dollars have been spent are clearly worthy of public observation and scrutiny and debate.

Records about how the pandemic may have originated and where our taxpayer dollars have been spent are clearly worthy of public observation and scrutiny and debate.

The origins of the pandemic remain hotly debated. In August, President Joe Biden announced that a three-month inquiry into the matter by U.S. intelligence agencies was inconclusive. Many scientists lean toward a natural origin, but in recent months an increasing number of prominent researchers have gone on record as saying that a lab origin deserves thorough investigation.

The progress report is just one of many missing puzzle pieces that could shed light on the question. In June, evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom reported that key data from Wuhan had been deleted from an NIH database, a move allowed by NIH rules but that is nonetheless unusual. From a Google Cloud server, he recovered 13 partial viral sequences collected from people in the city in the early days of the pandemic. These added to evidence that the coronavirus was circulating in the city long before the December 2019 outbreak at the citys Huanan seafood market, which was a major focus of the recent WHO report on the origins of the pandemic. It turned out that researchers from Wuhan University had emailed the NIH in June 2020 to request that the sequences be deleted.

Then in July, after the Washington Post reported on other discrepancies in early WHO data, the WHO changed the virus sequence IDs associated with three early patients described in the joint report.

There are also important gaps in what we know about the history of RaTG13, a relative of SARS-CoV-2, which was sequenced and written about by scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Last summer, Shi Zhengli,director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases of the Wuhan Institute of Virology,admitted to Science magazine that RaTG13 was a renamed version of a virus found in a Chinese mineshaft where miners fell ill in 2012. But that admission only came following pressure from independent scientists.

Also unresolved are questions about revisions made to public databases of viruses that infect pangolins and about a database that the Wuhan Institute of Virology took offline in September 2019, claiming that it had been hacked.

In 2019, the NIH renewed the EcoHealth Alliance bat coronavirus grant for a second five-year period. The Trump administration suspended funding in April 2020. (The NIH reinstated the grant in July 2020, under strict terms that Daszak said his group could not meet.) It is unclear whether the EcoHealth Alliance would have been required to file a progress report for the final year of the grant, given that it was terminated.

Originally posted here:

NIH Bat Coronavirus Grant Report Was Submitted More Than Two Years Late - The Intercept

A mother has warned that anyone can die from COVID-19, even young people, after her teenage daughter died just days after contracting the virus.

Jorja Halliday, 15, from Portsmouth, died at the Queen Alexandra Hospital on 28 September after she tested positive for the coronavirus four days earlier.

Her mother, Tracy Halliday, 40, said: "Some children are sort of a bit blas about, the say 'it's not going to happen to me, I'm going to be fine'. I just want people to know that it can happen to anybody, at any age, at any time. Even if you're young and healthy."

Mrs Halliday described her daughter, who was studying her GCSEs at The Portsmouth Academy, as a "loving girl" and "beautiful young lady", who was a talented kickboxer and aspiring musician.

"I'm still too shocked for words, I can't actually comprehend what's happened. It's almost like I'm beyond belief, even though I was there with her, my mind's still not believing it," Mrs Halliday told Sky News.

"I want definite answers as to why this has happened to a young, healthy 15-year-old girl.

"It was hard, but I also understood they were doing their best they could to save her. It was heartbreaking to see and to witness but I never would have forgiven myself if I wasn't there.

"Now I just want her to live on in our hearts, memories and minds forever."

Jorja's mother told Sky News that her daughter died from COVID myocarditis, which is inflammation of the heart caused by the virus.

She said: "One of the registrars at the hospital was saying to me they seem to be seeing it in teenagers around that age, that COVID symptoms are causing inflammation in the body.

"In Jorja's case it turned into inflammation of the heart and that's why when they put her on the ventilator her heart couldn't take the strain."

She said her daughter first developed flu-like symptoms before she underwent the PCR test which gave a positive result, leading to her isolating at their home.

Mrs Halliday added that she was struggling to eat on Sunday but by 27 September she could not eat at all due to her throat hurting and she contacted a doctor who prescribed antibiotics.

But when Jorja's condition worsened, she was seen by a doctor who said her heart rate was double what it should be and she was taken to hospital.

Mrs Halliday said that when the doctors realised how serious her daughter's condition was, they allowed her to spend time with her in the hospital.

"They realised how serious it was and I was still allowed to touch her, hold her hand, hug her and everything else. I was with her the whole time," she said.

Mrs Halliday said that Jorja did not have any known underlying medical conditions and added: "She was going to have the jab on Tuesday.

"But because she tested positive on Saturday she was isolating. When her isolation period was over she was going to get it.

"The day that she passed away was the day that she would have had it done."

Read this article:

COVID-19: Mother warns coronavirus 'can happen to anybody' after teenage daughter dies on day she was to get vaccine - Sky News

Confirmed cases of COVID-19 have passed 233.7 million globally, according to Johns Hopkins University. The number of confirmed deaths stands at more than 4.78 million. More than 6.24 billion vaccination doses have been administered globally, according to Our World in Data.

From 4 October, primary school pupils in areas of France with a low COVID-19 infection rate will no longer need to wear protective face masks.

Pre-print research, due to be published in the Lancet, suggests that it's safe to give a COVID-19 vaccine and a flu shot at the same time.

Malaysia has given conditional approval for the Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine to be used for young people aged between 12 and 17.

Malaysia has also announced that it will be mandatory for all federal government employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 - with the only exemptions on health grounds.

Somalia's first public oxygen plant has opened offering hope for a country where life-saving treatment for COVID-19 patients has been largely unavailable.

Greece will introduce a nighttime curfew and ban music at bars, cafes and restaurants in its second-biggest city, Thessaloniki. The move comes after an increase in COVID-19 cases.

Egypt has received 1.6 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 from the United States through the COVAX vaccine-sharing facility.

New daily confirmed COVID-19 cases in Ukraine rose to nearly 12,000 for the first time since April, health ministry data has shown.

Singapore has recorded its highest one-day increase in confirmed COVID-19 cases since the start of the pandemic - 2,478.

Daily new confirmed COVID-19 cases per million people in selected countries.

Image: Our World in Data

Each of our Top 50 social enterprise last mile responders and multi-stakeholder initiatives is working across four priority areas of need: Prevention and protection; COVID-19 treatment and relief; inclusive vaccine access; and securing livelihoods. The list was curated jointly with regional hosts Catalyst 2030s NASE and Aavishkaar Group. Their profiles can be found on http://www.wef.ch/lastmiletop50india.

Top Last Mile Partnership Initiatives to collaborate with:

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has announced that an 18-month ban on Australians travelling abroad will be lifted from October. The ban has been in place since March 2020, with only a limited number of people permitted to leave for critical business or humanitarian reasons.

Reopening the international border for citizens and permanent residents will be linked to the establishment of home quarantine in Australia's eight states and territories, Morrison said, meaning that some parts of the country will reopen sooner than others.

"It's time to give Australians their lives back. We've saved lives," Morrison said during a televised media conference. "We've saved livelihoods, but we must work together to ensure that Australians can reclaim the lives that they once had in this country."

Further changes are expected to allow foreign travellers to enter Australia.

Only 15 of Africa's 54 nations have fully vaccinated 10% of their populations against COVID-19 and many frontline health workers remain at risk, the World Health Organization and International Council of Nurses (ICN) said yesterday.

The two organizations called for the distribution of doses to those at risk to be sped up.

The WHO had called for vaccinating at least 10% of health workers in every country by September 30 - a target met by nearly 90% of high-income countries, the United Nations health agency said.

"Despite the promises, we are not seeing the delivery. And this is a health and a human rights crisis," the chief executive officer of the ICN, Howard Catton, said. "Today nurses and health workers are still going to work knowing that they are at higher risk, but not having the protection of vaccine."

Meanwhile, some rich countries were already administering booster shots and vaccines to youth, he said.

COVID-19 vaccine doses administered by continent.

Image: Our World in Data

Written by

Joe Myers, Writer, Formative Content

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

Read more:

COVID-19: What you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic on 1 October - World Economic Forum