Month: January 2021

Zimbabwe has reintroduced a 12-hour dusk-to-dawn curfew to contain rising COVID19 cases and combat citizens’ disregard of lockdown regulations. The World Health Organization is calling on Zimbabweans to abide by the new regulations. Public health experts and informal traders have concerns about the measures.  Announcing the 12-hour curfew Saturday night on national television, Vice President Constantino Chiwenga said the government was concerned by a spike in coronavirus cases in Zimbabwe.      “We have seen a surge in COVID-19 cases and deaths, almost double in two months, from 8,374 on 1 November to 14,084 to date. In light of the recent surge in COVID-19 cases the following stiff lockdown measures are being put in place with immediate effect,”  he said.   Sam Wadzai, who leads the activist group Vendors Initiative Social and Economic Transformation Zimbabwe, wants members get social protection so that they can survive during the lockdown, Jan. 3, 2021. (Columbus Mavhunga/VOA) ​Besides the curfew, other measures include limiting the number of mourners at funerals to 30 people, while all other gatherings at weddings, churches, bars, bottle stores, gyms and restaurants are banned. Chiwenga – who doubles as Zimbabwe’s health minister – said a review of the new measures would be done in 30 days.    Participants in the informal sector of Zimbabwe’s economy say the new measures will not work. Sam Wadzai leads the activist group Vendors Initiative Social and Economic Transformation Zimbabwe.  “Clearly the government has not drawn lessons from the first lockdown where [in] March [2020] they announced the existence of a …

India has granted emergency authorization to two vaccines for COVID-19, setting the stage for rolling out what could be the world’s largest immunization program.The two vaccines are the British-developed AstraZeneca vaccine that is being produced in India and another developed by an Indian pharmaceutical company, Bharat Biotech.In a brief statement, the Drugs Controller General of India, Venugopal G. Somani said that “the vaccines have been approved for restricted use in India.” He said both manufacturers had submitted data showing their vaccines were safe to use.India’s green signal to the AstraZeneca vaccines comes within days of approval granted in Britain.  An Indian company, the Serum Institute of India has already stockpiled 50 million doses of the vaccine that it made even before formal approvals had come.Prime Minister Narendra Modi called the vaccine approvals “a decisive turning point to strengthen a spirited fight.” He tweeted that “It would make every Indian proud that the two vaccines that have been given emergency use approval are made in India!”India, the world’s second worst-hit nation, plans to launch its immunization program sometime soon this month and has set the ambitious target of immunizing 300 million people by August. These will include health care workers, security personnel, those over 50 years and the clinically vulnerable.Reaching that goal will involve administering 600 million doses – the vaccines require to be taken in two doses.In recent weeks, authorities have raced to prepare cold storage facilities and have trained thousands of healthcare workers to administer the shots.  The delivery …

As richer countries race to distribute COVID-19 vaccines, Somalia remains the rare place where much of the population hasn’t taken the coronavirus seriously. Some fear that’s proven to be deadlier than anyone knows.“Certainly, our people don’t use any form of protective measures, neither masks nor social distancing,” Abdirizak Yusuf Hirabeh, the government’s COVID-19 incident manager, said in an interview. “If you move around the city (of Mogadishu) or countrywide, nobody even talks about it.” And yet infections are rising, he said.It is places like Somalia, the Horn of Africa nation torn apart by three decades of conflict, that will be last to see COVID-19 vaccines in any significant quantity. With part of the country still held by the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab extremist group, the risk of the virus becoming endemic in some hard-to-reach areas is strong — a fear for parts of Africa amid the slow arrival of vaccines.“There is no real or practical investigation into the matter,” said Hirabeh, who is also the director of the Martini hospital in Mogadishu, the largest treating COVID-19 patients, which saw seven new patients the day he spoke. He acknowledged that neither facilities nor equipment are adequate in Somalia to tackle the virus.Fewer than 27,000 tests for the virus have been conducted in Somalia, a country of more than 15 million people, one of the lowest rates in the world. Fewer than 4,800 cases have been confirmed, including at least 130 deaths.Some worry the virus will sink into the population as yet another poorly …

The U.S. continues its run at the top of the list as the country with the most COVID-19 infections, the disease caused by the coronavirus.  Early Sunday, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported the U.S. has 20.4 million of the world’s 84.3 million COVID infections.  India, the country with the second-largest number of cases has about half as many cases as the U.S. with 10.3 million.  Public health officials warn, however, that India’s caseload may be undercounted. The U.S. has recorded more than 350,000 deaths related to the coronavirus. Funeral homes across the country are finding it difficult to keep up with the demand for their services.   A surge of cases in the coming weeks is expected, following the holiday season, public health officials say. The CDC Data Tracker says more than 13 million coronavirus vaccines have been distributed in the U.S. but only 4.2 million people have been inoculated.  States have been overwhelmed by the process and have received little, if any, direction from the federal government about how best to deliver the vaccines to the public. Twenty-five prisons in California have individually recorded more than 1,000 coronavirus infections, according to a New York Times report, and none of the prisons with the high infection rate is scheduled to participate in the state’s prison vaccination program.  Avenal, the prison with the most infections, has reported more than 3,500 cases, according to The Times.  A spokeswoman for the court-appointed official who oversees California’s prison health told the newspaper that California was instead …

The news came during a hopeful time on the largest Native American reservation.Daily coronavirus cases were in the single digits, down from a springtime peak of 238 that made the Navajo Nation a U.S. hot spot. The tribe, wanting to ensure a COVID-19 vaccine would be effective for its people, said it would welcome Pfizer clinical trials on its reservation spanning Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.Right away, tribal members accused their government of allowing them to be guinea pigs, pointing to painful times in the past when Native Americans didn’t consent to medical testing or weren’t fully informed about procedures.A Navajo Nation review board gave the study quicker approval than normal after researchers with Johns Hopkins University’s Center for American Indian Health made the case for diversity. Without Native volunteers, how would they know if tribal members responded to vaccines the same as others?“Unfortunately, Native Americans have effectively been denied the opportunity to participate in these clinical trials because almost all of the study sites are in large, urban areas that have not done effective outreach to Native Americans,” said Dr. Laura Hammitt of Johns Hopkins.Suspicion and distrustAbout 460 Native Americans participated in the trials for the vaccine by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, including Navajos. The enrollment reflects a growing understanding of the role that people of color play in vaccine development and the push to rapidly deploy it to curb infections among populations that have been disproportionately affected by the virus.Yet, few of the country’s 574 federally …

India said Sunday it has given final approval for the emergency use of two coronavirus vaccines. One of the vaccines was developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University. Bharat Biotech, an Indian company, developed the other vaccine. Both vaccines are being produced in India.“It would make every Indian proud that the two vaccines that have been given emergency use approval are made in India!” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi posted on Twitter.The news of the approvals comes as India is poised to launch one of the world’s largest coronavirus vaccination programs. Nationwide drills, ahead of the launch, were staged Saturday.India’s approval of the British-developed vaccine follows Britain’s recent approval of the vaccine.India’s Drugs Controller General V.G. Somani said Sunday that the efficacy of the British-developed AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine is 70.42%.Somani, however, described the Indian-developed vaccine as “safe and provides a robust immune response.” He added that the Indian vaccine was approved “in public interest as an abundant precaution, in clinical trial mode, to have more options for vaccinations, especially in case of infection by mutant strains.”Only the United States surpasses India in the number of COVID-19 cases. The U.S. has 20.4 million infections, while India has 10.3 million.In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Saturday said the country had administered more than 4.2 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines nationwide and had distributed more than 13 million doses.The U.S. continues to lead the world with more than 350,000 COVID-19 deaths and 20 million infections, about one-fourth of the 84.5 …

The United States has passed the milestone of 350,000 COVID-19 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data, even as vaccinations against the coronavirus-caused disease get off to a slow start.As countries around the world tighten lockdowns, impose curfews, ban large get-togethers and even halt alcohol sales to tackle a surge in coronavirus cases, officials in India and the U.S. announced some progress toward expanded immunization campaigns as infections rates continued to climb on multiple continents.New Delhi staged nationwide drills Saturday to launch one of the world’s biggest coronavirus vaccination programs as the country’s drug regulator approved two vaccines — one developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University, the other by Bharat Biotech and the state-run Indian Council of Medical Research — for emergency use.India, the world’s second most populous country, has more than 10.3 million confirmed COVID-19 infections, second only to the United States. Reuters reported Friday that little was known about the clinical trials that informed the emergency use authorization and that Indian officials said approval of the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine was “subject to multiple regulatory conditionalities,” without providing details.In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Saturday said the country had administered more than 4.2 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines nationwide and had distributed more than 13 million doses.The U.S. continues to lead the world with more than 20 million infections, about one-fourth of the 84.5 million COVID-19 cases globally, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, which also reported a total of more than 350,000 deaths …

As countries around the world tighten lockdowns, impose curfews, ban large get-togethers and even halt alcohol sales to tackle a surge in coronavirus cases, officials in India and the U.S. announced some progress toward expanded immunization campaigns as infections rates continued to climb on multiple continents.New Delhi staged nationwide drills Saturday to launch one of the world’s biggest coronavirus vaccination programs as the country’s drug regulator approved two vaccines — one developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University, the other by Bharat Biotech and the state-run Indian Council of Medical Research — for emergency use.India, the world’s second most populous country, has more than 10.3 million confirmed COVID-19 infections, second only to the United States. Reuters reported Friday that little was known about the clinical trials that informed the emergency use authorization and that Indian officials said approval of the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine was “subject to multiple regulatory conditionalities,” without providing details.In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Saturday said the country had administered more than 4.2 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines nationwide and had distributed more than 13 million doses.The U.S. continues to lead the world with more than 20 million infections, about one-fourth of the 84.5 million COVID-19 cases globally, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, which also reported a total of nearly 350,000 deaths since the pandemic began.In Russia, Health Minister Mikhail Murashko said that more than 800,000 people had received the domestically produced Sputnik V vaccine and that 1.5 million doses had been …

As communities across the U.S. feel the pain of a surge in coronavirus cases, funeral homes in the hot spot of Southern California say they must turn away grieving families as they run out of space for bodies.The head of the state funeral directors association says mortuaries are being inundated as the United States nears a grim tally of 350,000 COVID-19 deaths. More than 20 million people in the country have been infected, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.”I’ve been in the funeral industry for 40 years and never in my life did I think that this could happen, that I’d have to tell a family, ‘No, we can’t take your family member,’” said Magda Maldonado, owner of Continental Funeral Home in Los Angeles.Continental is averaging about 30 body removals a day — six times its normal rate. Mortuary owners are calling one another to see whether anyone can handle overflow, and the answer is always the same: They’re full, too.In order to keep up with the flood of bodies, Maldonado has rented extra 15-meter refrigerators for two of the four facilities she runs in Los Angeles and surrounding counties. Continental has also been delaying pickups at hospitals for a day or two while they take care of residential clients.Bob Achermann, executive director of the California Funeral Directors Association, said that the whole process of burying and cremating bodies has slowed, including embalming bodies and obtaining death certificates. During normal times, cremation might happen within a day or …

From his newsstand at the bottom of two hilly streets in Rome, Armando Alviti has been dispensing newspapers, magazines and good cheer to locals from before dawn till after dusk nearly every day for more than a half-century.“Ciao, Armando,” his customers greet him as part of their daily routine. “Ciao, amore (love)” he calls back. Alviti chuckled as he recalled how, when he was a young boy, newspaper deliverers would drop off the day’s stacks at his parents’ newsstand, sit him in the emptied baskets of their motorbikes and take him for a spin.Since he turned 18, Alviti has operated the newsstand seven days a week, with a wool tweed cap to protect him from the Italian capital’s winter dampness and a tabletop fan to cool him during its torrid summers. A mighty battle therefore ensued when the coronavirus reached Italy and his two grown sons insisted that Alviti, who is 71 and diabetic, stay home while they took turns juggling their own jobs to keep the newsstand open.“They were afraid I would die. I know they love me crazy,” Alviti said.The world’s second-oldest populationThroughout the pandemic, health authorities around the world have stressed the need to protect the people most at risk of complications from COVID-19, a group which infection and mortality data quickly revealed included older adults. With 23% of its population age 65 or older, Italy has the world’s second-oldest population, after Japan, with 28%.The average age of Italy’s COVID-19 dead has hovered around 80, many of …

The United States topped 20 million coronavirus cases Friday as it began the New Year, according to data from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.The United States continued to surpass other countries in COVID-19 cases and accounts for nearly a quarter of the worldwide total, which now stands at more than 83.8 million. The country also leads the world in coronavirus deaths, totaling more than 347,000.The increasing numbers come as U.S. health officials struggle to vaccinate the population. The outgoing administration of President Donald Trump predicted in December that 20 million people would be inoculated by year’s end. However, health officials say only 2.8 million Americans have received their first dose of the vaccine.As of Wednesday, just 12.4 million doses had been distributed nationally, according to the country’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Republican Senator Mitt Romney of Utah on Friday sharply criticized the pace of the vaccinations and said more federal oversight of the process was necessary.”That comprehensive vaccination plans have not been developed at the federal level and sent to the states as models is as incomprehensible as it is inexcusable,” Romney said in a statement.The 2012 Republican presidential nominee called for the government to assemble a large number of medical workers to administer the vaccine, including retired medical professionals, veterinarians, combat medics, medical students and first responders.He also recommended using sites that are largely empty because of the pandemic, such as schools, to administer the vaccine and called for a clear order in which Americans would be vaccinated.Grim …

President Donald Trump vetoed a bill Friday that would have gradually ended the use of large-mesh drift gillnets deployed exclusively in federal waters off the coast of California, saying such legislation would increase reliance on imported seafood and worsen a multibillion-dollar seafood trade deficit. FILE – Democratic Senator from California Dianne Feinstein, June 3, 2020.Trump also said in his veto message to the Senate that the legislation sponsored by Senators Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., “will not achieve its purported conservation benefits.”The fishing bill’s sponsors said large-mesh drift gillnets, which measure between 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) and 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometers) long and can extend 200 feet (60.9 meters) below the surface of the ocean, are left in the waters overnight to catch swordfish and thresher sharks.FILE – Senator Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., Oct. 25, 2020.But they said at least 60 other marine species — including whales, dolphins and sea lions — can also become entangled in the nets, where they are injured or die. It is illegal to use these nets in U.S. territorial waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, and off the coasts of Washington state, Oregon, Alaska and Hawaii. They remain legal in federal waters off California’s coast. In 2018, California passed a four-year phase-out of large-mesh drift gillnets in state waters to protect marine life.  The bill Trump vetoed would have extended similar protections to federal waters off California’s shoreline within five years and authorized the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to …

Chinese supply of a COVID-19 vaccine to Indonesia and the Philippines is likely to strengthen Beijing’s image in those countries, despite current resentment of its expansion in the South China Sea, if the vaccines work, analysts say.Both countries have moved to order vaccines made by Sinovac Biotech, a Beijing-based pharmaceutical company, according to Asian media reports and the company’s website. China’s official Xinhua News Agency in October had called it “crucial” to distribute vaccines “around the world, not just the wealthy nations.”People in both countries resent Chinese expansion in the 3.5 million-square-kilometer South China Sea where sovereignty claims overlap. China, with Asia’s strongest military, has built up islands that the Philippines claims and passed ships through waters that Jakarta says fall within an Indonesian exclusive economic zone. The sea is prized for fisheries and undersea energy reserves.China, keen to be seen as a good neighbor abroad and to minimize U.S. geopolitical influence, could gain favor in Southeast Asia’s two biggest countries if the vaccines work, reach remote parts of each archipelago in due time and don’t cost too much, analysts say. Indonesia and the Philippines have a combined population of 375 million.“If it turns out to be good, effective, safe, affordable, then I guess that might change to a certain extent the perceptions here,” said Aaron Rabena, research fellow at the Asia-Pacific Pathways to Progress Foundation in Metro Manila. China, he said, wants to “make up for their distorted image.”Anti-China sentimentFilipinos, including some in the armed forces, have distrusted China …

The World Health Organization on Thursday approved the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine for emergency use, a move aimed at helping the developing world gain access to the vaccine sooner.The WHO set up its emergency use process to help countries without their own regulatory resources to approve vaccines, clearing the way for their use.”This is a very positive step towards ensuring global access to COVID-19 vaccines,” said Mariangela Simao, the WHO’s access to medicines program leader.However, the super-cold temperature the vaccine must be kept at — minus 70 degrees Celsius — makes shipping and storing it a challenge for developing countries.COVAX, a global effort backed by the WHO to buy and distribute vaccines to poorer countries, has commitments for 2 billion doses of vaccine so far and is in talks with Pfizer-BioNTech to buy some of its vaccine, which is 95% effective after two doses.FILE – A box for a COVID-19 vaccine is displayed at an exhibit by Chinese pharmaceutical firm Sinopharm at the China International Fair for Trade in Services in Beijing, China, Sept. 5, 2020.Another COVID-19 vaccine, this one developed by a Chinese drugmaker, on Thursday became the first to be granted official approval by China’s government.China’s National Medical Products Administration announced the conditional approval of a vaccine developed by Beijing Biological Products Institute, a subsidiary of state-owned Sinopharm. The regulatory agency granted the approval a day after Sinopharm said the vaccine had an efficacy rate of 79.3% against the coronavirus in a final large-scale clinical trial.However, outside experts have …