Month: February 2022

As expected, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on Monday the end of all domestic COVID-19 restrictions as of November 24, even self-isolation for those testing positive for the infection.  Speaking before Parliament, Johnson said the nation will still encourage those who test positive or experience symptoms to stay home — at least until April 1, when the government will simply encourage people with a positive test or symptoms “to exercise personal responsibility.” On that day, the government will also stop paying for COVID-19 testing.  Johnson announced the scrapping of the restrictions even as he wished Queen Elizabeth I well after she tested positive for COVID-19 on Sunday. The prime minister said the queen’s positive test is a reminder the pandemic is not over.  Scientists, along with some opposition politicians, have warned that ending all testing and tracking will weaken the ability to track the disease and respond to any new surges of infection.   Jordan That news comes as a Jordanian government spokesman said Prime Minister Bishr al-Khasawneh tested positive for COVID-19 on Monday while visiting Egypt. They say he has no visible symptoms. The prime minister is in Cairo leading his country’s delegation in cooperation talks with Egyptian officials. He arrived on Thursday.   Jordan’s government spokesman said al-Khasawneh’s meeting with President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi was canceled and that the prime minister will be isolated upon his return to Amman.  Australia Elsewhere, in Australia Monday, New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrotte said, “Today we rejoined the world,” as …

The Biden administration has released a screening tool to help identify disadvantaged communities long plagued by environmental hazards, but it won’t include race as a factor in deciding where to devote resources. Administration officials told reporters Friday that excluding race will make projects less likely to draw legal challenges and will be easier to defend, even as they acknowledged that race has been a major factor in terms of who experiences environmental injustice. The decision was harshly challenged by members of the environmental justice community. “It’s a major disappointment and it’s a major flaw in trying to identify those communities that have been hit hardest by pollution,” said Robert Bullard, a professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University in Houston and a member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. President Joe Biden has made combating climate change a priority of his administration and pledged in a sweeping executive order to “deliver environmental justice in communities all across America.” The order, signed his first week in office, sets a goal that the 40% of overall benefits from climate and environment investments would go to disadvantaged communities. The tool is a key component for carrying out that so-called Justice40 Initiative. Brenda Mallory, chair of the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality, said the tool will help direct federal investments in climate, clean energy and environmental improvements to communities “that have been left out and left behind for far too long.” Catherine Coleman Flowers, a member of …

 Sparked by global warming and other forms of climate change, tropical butterflies are starting to arrive in Hong Kong and Taiwan in greater numbers, while temperate-zone species like the monarch appear to be dwindling in the region, conservationists told RFA. “Seven new butterfly species were discovered in Hong Kong in 2021, including swallowtails, gray butterflies, and nymphs; most of them were tropical species,” Gary Chan, project officer at Hong Kong’s Fengyuan Butterfly Reserve, told RFA. “Breeding records were found in Hong Kong for several of these species, which indicates that these weren’t just strays arriving in Hong Kong with horticultural imports or the monsoon,” Chan said. According to Chan, Neptis cartica and Ancema blanka were both found in Hong Kong for the first time in 2021, along with Zeltus amasa, which is usually native to Malaysia, Thailand, India, Myanmar, Borneo and other points south of Hong Kong. Meanwhile, tropical migrants are also being spotted in Taiwan, according to Hsu Yu-feng, a butterfly expert at Taiwan National Normal University. Between 1985 and 2008, at least seven new species of tropical butterfly were found to have settled on the island, including Appias olfern peducaea, which traveled north from the Philippines to settle in the southern port city of Kaohsiung in 2000. Even butterflies once found only in southern Taiwan are now found across the island, Hsu told RFA. “When I was an undergraduate student in the 1980s, I went to Kenting [on the southern coast] to see Graphium agamemnon,” Hsu recalled. “Then, …

America’s national bird is more beleaguered than previously believed, with nearly half of bald eagles tested across the U.S. showing signs of chronic lead exposure, according to a study published Thursday. While the bald eagle population has rebounded from the brink of extinction since the U.S. banned the pesticide DDT in 1972, harmful levels of toxic lead were found in the bones of 46% of bald eagles sampled in 38 states from California to Florida, researchers reported in the journal Science. Similar rates of lead exposure were found in golden eagles, which scientists say means the raptors likely consumed carrion or prey contaminated by lead from ammunition or fishing tackle. The blood, bones, feathers and liver tissue of 1,210 eagles sampled from 2010 to 2018 were examined to assess chronic and acute lead exposure. “This is the first time for any wildlife species that we’ve been able to evaluate lead exposure and population level consequences at a continental scale,” said study co-author Todd Katzner, a wildlife biologist at U.S. Geological Survey in Boise, Idaho. “It’s sort of stunning that nearly 50% of them are getting repeatedly exposed to lead.” Lead is a neurotoxin that even in low doses impairs an eagle’s balance and stamina, reducing its ability to fly, hunt and reproduce. In high doses, lead causes seizures, breathing difficulty and death. The study estimated that lead exposure reduced the annual population growth of bald eagles by 4% and golden eagles by 1%. Bald eagles are one of America’s most …

It’s a question many have been asking for almost two years: when will the coronavirus pandemic end? “Epidemiologically speaking, we don’t know. Perhaps in another month or two — if there’s no other variants of concern that pop up, at least here in United States,” says J. Alexander Navarro, assistant director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan. “Socially, I think we’re kind of already at the point where the pandemic has ended. Many states are removing the vestiges of their mask mandates. We see people essentially moving on with their lives.” As of February 16, 2022, about 78 million people in the United States have contracted COVID-19 and 923,067 of them have died. Seventy-six percent of the U.S. population has received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Sara Sawyer, a professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at the University of Colorado Boulder, agrees the end might finally be in sight, in part thanks to Omicron, a COVID-19 variant that emerged in November 2021. “It is essentially vaccinating many people who were resistant to getting vaccinated because a lot of those people got infected in this wave,” Sawyer says. “And so, that’s just going to make it really hard for viruses to spread through in these giant waves like Omicron anymore because we have so many people with resistance that they’ve acquired through previous infection or a vaccine.” Experts predict that …

Canadian police on Saturday worked to restore normality to the capital after trucks and demonstrators occupied the downtown core of Ottawa for more than three weeks to protest against pandemic restrictions. The push to clear the city began Friday and continued into the night. Four of the main organizers have already been taken into custody and more than 100 protesters have been arrested as hundreds of officers, including some on horseback, formed lines and slowly pushed them away from their vehicles. There were many tense moments on Friday. Some protesters were dragged from their vehicles, and others who resisted the police advance were thrown to the ground and had their hands zip-tied behind their backs. The protesters showed “assaultive behavior,” forcing mounted police to move in “to create critical space” in the late afternoon, according to a police statement. As this happened, police said, one person threw a bicycle at a horse and was arrested for harming a police service animal. The protesters initially wanted an end to cross-border COVID-19 vaccine mandates for truck drivers, but the blockade has gradually turned into an anti-government and anti-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau demonstration. “Our demands aren’t ridiculous. We want mandates and lockdowns dropped,” said Gord from Manitoba, a truck driver who said he cannot work anymore because of cross-border vaccine mandates. On Friday, he vowed to stay parked in front of parliament and said he was waiting to be arrested. Trudeau on Monday invoked emergency powers to give his government wider authority to …

Hong Kong health experts on Friday said the city needs to change its pandemic strategies to cope with the rapidly increasing number of COVID-19 cases.  In recent weeks Hong Kong has been hit hard by a fifth wave of cases caused by the omicron variant, which is increasing pressure on the city’s already overburdened health system.  Since the pandemic began, the Hong Kong government has remained defiant, directing all positive cases to hospitals regardless of symptomatic severity. Omicron’s sharp rise in recent weeks, however, has triggered a deluge of cases, flooding the city’s hospitals.  Some health experts say a new direction is needed.  “We need to immediately pivot to a strategy that promotes home isolation for mild and asymptomatic cases,” said Dr. Karen Grepin, associate professor at the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health. “The strategy should be risk-based to determine who is and who is not a good candidate for home isolation.”    But determining who can safely choose to do home isolation with mild symptoms must include careful vetting, Grepin told VOA.   “It will need to be accompanied by dedicated facilities for people who are not good candidates or who are unable to isolate at home,” she said.    Data show the omicron variant has an incubation period of about five days, is highly transmissible and causes less severe symptoms than some other coronavirus variants. But Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated cities in the world, with a population of 7.5 million, adding to concerns …

Health authorities in Malawi say a 3-year-old girl is paralyzed after contracting polio, the first known case in Africa in more than five years and the first in Malawi in three decades. Authorities say the child was infected by a strain of poliovirus that matches a strain found in Pakistan. Until this week, Malawi had last reported a polio case in 1992. The southern African country was declared polio-free in 2005 — 15 years before the whole continent achieved the same status. Dr. Charles Mwansambo, secretary for health in Malawi, told local radio Friday that the poliovirus strain detected in Malawi came from abroad. “This patient is Malawian but the strain of poliovirus she has is not Malawian. It was first identified in Pakistan. So, this is an imported strain.” So far, the girl, who lives in the capital, Lilongwe, is the only identified case of polio in the country. Mwansambo said all those who came into contact with the girl have tested negative for the poliovirus. However, the Ministry of Health said in a statement Thursday evening that it has intensified surveillance for the disease, especially among children up to fifteen years of age. President Lazarus Chakwera has declared a national health emergency. Polio is a contagious and life-threatening disease. The poliovirus can infect a person’s spinal cord, leaving them partially or fully paralyzed. Dr. Janet Kayita, the country representative for the World Health Organization in Malawi, says the alarm is justified. “Because as long as there is polio …

Lam Foon, 98, sits propped up and swaddled in soggy woolen blankets in a hospital bed just outside the entrance to Hong Kong’s Caritas Medical Centre, waiting for tests to confirm her preliminary positive result for COVID-19. “I don’t feel so good,” she told Reuters through a surgical mask, next to a similarly wrapped patient wearing a mask and face shield. Lam was one of dozens of patients lying in the parking lot of Caritas on Thursday, after there was no more room inside the hospital that serves 400,000 people in the working-class district of Cheung Sha Wan on the Kowloon peninsula. Temperatures dipped to 15 degrees Celsius amid some rain. Medical staff were unable to say how long Lam would have to wait. People who test preliminarily positive for COVID have to take further tests before treatment. This and similar scenes across the global financial hub are signs of a public healthcare system under severe strain as COVID-19 cases surge, with more than 95% of all hospital beds full. Once largely insulated from the coronavirus pandemic, Hong Kong is facing a citywide outbreak, with businesses buckling and some losing patience with the government’s “zero COVID” policies. In the cluster of working-class districts in nearby Sham Shui Po, some residential blocks and public housing estates have been sealed off, crowds in malls and street markets have thinned, and once teeming diners known as dai pai dongs and stalls selling knickknacks are quieter after dark. Trevor Chung, 29, a medic at …

A Chinese rocket, according to astronomers, is expected to crash into the moon on March 4. It is the latest example of China’s presence in space. News of the predicted crash comes after Beijing released a development blueprint for satellite improvements, deep-space exploration and putting more people in orbit. Analysts expect Beijing to reach many of the goals outlined in its five-year plan for the development of outer space despite the odd mishap, according to experts. China’s space program stands to rival those of Russia and the United States, especially in terms of commercializing space technology, they add. “China is something to look at seriously in terms of increasing competitiveness,” said Marco Caceres, director of space studies at the Teal Group market analysis firm. “Part of that is that the U.S. was ahead by so much that countries like China, where their economies are growing faster, they’re simply catching up.” Past meets future China launched its first satellite in 1970 and put its first human in space in 2003, becoming the world’s third nation, after Russia and the United States, to reach that milestone. In 2019, China’s spacecraft made a historic landing on the far side of the moon. Beijing is in the process of adding onto its Tiangong space station later this year. China is excluded from the International Space Station, a cooperative operation among Europe, the United States, Russia, Canada and Japan, due to U.S. national security concerns. Over the next five years, Beijing’s space program will place …

Hundreds of truckers clogging Canada’s capital stood their ground and defiantly blasted their horns Thursday, even as police arrested two protest leaders and threatened to break up the nearly three-week protest against the country’s COVID-19 restrictions. Busloads of police arrived near Ottawa’s Parliament Hill, and workers put up extra fences around government buildings. Police also essentially began sealing off much of the downtown area to outsiders to prevent them from coming to the aid of the protesters. “The action is imminent,” said interim Ottawa Police Chief Steve Bell. “We absolutely are committed to end this unlawful demonstration.” Police arrested organizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber around Parliament Hill, but officers were not moving in force on the demonstrators. Police took Lich into custody late Thursday. Police continued negotiating with the protesters and trying to persuade them to go home, Bell said. “We want this demonstration to end peacefully,” he said, but added: “If they do not peacefully leave, we have plans.” Many of the truckers in the self-styled Freedom Convoy appeared unmoved by days of warnings from police and the government that they were risking arrest and could see their rigs seized and bank accounts frozen. “I’m prepared to sit on my ass and watch them hit me with pepper spray,” said one of their leaders, Pat King. As for the trucks parked bumper-to-bumper, he said: “There’s no tow trucks in Canada that will touch them.” King later told truckers to lock their doors. Amid the rising tensions, truckers outside …

California Governor Gavin Newsom on Thursday announced the first shift by a state to an endemic approach to the coronavirus pandemic. He said it emphasizes prevention and quick reactions to outbreaks over mandates, a milestone nearly two years in the making that harkens to a return to a more normal existence.  Newsom said the approach, which includes pushing back against false claims and other misinformation, means maintaining a wary watchfulness attuned to warning signs of the next deadly new surge or variant.  “This disease is not going away,” he told The Associated Press in advance of his formal announcement. “It’s not the end of the ‘war.’ ”  A disease reaches the endemic stage when the virus still exists in a community but becomes manageable as immunity builds. But there will be no definitive turn of the switch, the Democratic governor said, unlike the case with Wednesday’s lifting of the state’s indoor masking requirements or an announcement coming February 28 of when the school mask-wearing mandate will end.  And there will be no immediate lifting of the dozens of remaining executive emergency orders that have helped run the state since Newsom imposed the nation’s first statewide stay-home order in March 2020.  The World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic on March 11, 2020, and with omicron fading in many parts of the world some countries have begun planning for the endemic stage. Newsom’s administration came up with a shorthand acronym to capsulize key elements of its new approach: SMARTER. …

Microsoft co-founder turned philanthropist Bill Gates met with Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan on Thursday in Pakistan to acknowledge the country’s progress against polio. During the trip, his first to Pakistan, Gates also stressed the need to curb virus transmissions in neighboring Afghanistan and preserve global gains. Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries where wild polio virus continues to paralyze children, although not a single infection has been reported in Pakistan for more than a year. Gates told reporters in Islamabad at the end of his visit that the South Asian nation, where the disease crippled approximately 20,000 Pakistani children a year in the early 1990s, has an opportunity to eliminate polio. “We’re not done, but we’re certainly in by far the best situation we have ever been in. We’ve never had a year without zero cases,” he said. But Gates cautioned that the polio virus was detected as recently as December in sewage samples in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which borders Afghanistan, stressing the need for Pakistan to keep up the momentum and stay vigilant. “I think that the steps taken in Pakistan during 2022 will probably set us up to finish polio eradication,” Gates said while speaking alongside Faisal Sultan, the special assistant to Khan on health affairs. Gates co-chairs the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is part of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative project between governments and international organizations. In a televised ceremony, Pakistani President Arif Alvi conferred the Hilal-e-Pakistan, the country’s second-highest civilian award, …

NASA celebrates an anniversary on the Martian surface while a space-travel startup tumbles back to Earth. Russia helps refuel the International Space Station, and how a recent volcanic eruption could lead to faster tsunami warnings in the future. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space. …

Experts from nine countries are planning to collect and combine aquatic animal sounds for a global library. Scientists in Australia believe an undersea chorus of mammals, fish and some invertebrates will help them gauge the health of marine ecosystems. Songs by bearded seals and the “boing” of a minke whale are part of a global collection being put together for the first time by a team of international researchers. The samples are stored in the individual libraries of various institutions, but never before have they been curated in a single collection. All marine mammals, including the humpback whale, are thought to emit sounds, along with many fish and invertebrates. A new data bank aims to use these recordings to measure biodiversity and the health of ecosystems. Miles Parsons, a researcher at the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the lead author of a report on the databank, says animal sounds can indicate the health of an ecosystem. “When you are talking about things like soundscapes, there is a lot of work recently that has been done to tease out the acoustic characteristics of a soundscape to be able to identify the type of habitat that it is and even start to look at the quality of the habitat. There has been some work recently where they have looked at the difference between degraded coral reefs and healthy coral reefs and the differences in the soundscapes that you have between those. There’s lots of different applications that you can get from …

After two years, the COVID-19 pandemic seems to be taking a toll on Americans’ mental health, with a growing number of people suffering from a wide array of issues, from anxiety to depression. Lesia Bakalets has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. …

A study released Tuesday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that infants are less likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 if their mothers are vaccinated during their pregnancy. The study found that babies whose mothers received two doses of an mRNA vaccine while pregnant were about 60% less likely to be hospitalized for the virus during their first six months of life. The odds are strengthened if the mother is vaccinated after the first 20 weeks of pregnancy.   The agency has urged all women who are pregnant, breastfeeding or planning to get pregnant to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, which it says increases the risk of a variety of complications, including premature birth and stillbirth. The CDC researchers based their conclusions from monitoring 379 infants who had been hospitalized at 20 pediatric hospitals across the U.S. between last July and January of this year, including 176 who tested positive for COVID-19. In another vaccine-related development, Britain’s Health Security Agency says the results of several studies suggests a COVID-19 vaccine reduces the chances of someone suffering from the lingering effects of a COVID-19 infection, a condition commonly known as “long COVID,” according to The Guardian newspaper. The agency came to its conclusion after examining data from 15 studies conducted at home and abroad, half of which looked at whether the vaccine could protect someone from developing long COVID if they had not been infected, with the others focusing on the effect of vaccination among people who were …

The United States is expected to experience as much sea level rise by the year 2050 as the country has witnessed in the past century, according to a report led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and released Tuesday.   “Sea levels continue to rise at a very alarming rate, and it’s endangering communities around the world,” Bill Nelson, administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), told reporters during an online briefing. “And that means it’s past time to take action on this climate crisis.”   Man-made carbon emissions, however, cannot be totally blamed for the inevitable rise, according to Richard Spinrad, NOAA administrator.  “Current and future emissions matter, but this will happen no matter what we do about emissions,” Spinrad said. “If emissions continue at their current pace, it is likely we will see at least two feet (61 centimeters) of sea-level rise by the end of this century along the U.S. coastlines.”    With the forecast of an average sea level rise of 10-12 inches (25.4 cm to 30.5 cm) by 2050, about 140,000 homes would be at risk of being flooded about every other week, according to the report.   Forty percent of the U.S. population lives within about 100 kilometers of a coastline.   The sea level rise will intensify high tides, storm surges, coastal erosion and loss of wetlands.   “Communities now dealing with nuisance flooding will be facing more damaging floods in just 30 years’ time,” said Nicole LeBoeuf, director …

Pollution by states and companies is contributing to more deaths globally than COVID-19, a U.N. environmental report published on Tuesday said, calling for “immediate and ambitious action” to ban some toxic chemicals. The report said pollution from pesticides, plastics and electronic waste is causing widespread human rights violations and at least 9 million premature deaths a year, and that the issue is largely being overlooked. The coronavirus pandemic has caused close to 5.9 million deaths, according to data aggregator Worldometer. “Current approaches to managing the risks posed by pollution and toxic substances are clearly failing, resulting in widespread violations of the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment,” the report’s author, U.N. Special Rapporteur David Boyd, concluded. “I think we have an ethical and now a legal obligation to do better by these people,” he told Reuters later in an interview. Due to be presented next month to the U.N. Human Rights Council, which has declared a clean environment a human right, the document was posted on the Council’s website on Tuesday. It urges a ban on polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl, man-made substances used in household products such as non-stick cookware that have been linked to cancer and dubbed “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down easily. It also seeks the clean-up of polluted sites and, in extreme cases, the possible relocations of affected communities – many of them poor, marginalized and indigenous – from so-called “sacrifice zones”. That term, originally used to describe nuclear test zones, was expanded in …