Some experts believe that most countries are underreporting covid-19 fatalities, in part due to insufficient testing or to conceal the true extent of domestic outbreaks. Scientists at the University of Washington estimated last month that the actual global death toll from the pandemic was more than twice as high as officially reported.
Here are some significant developments:
Two men are charged with stealing 192 donated ventilators bound for El Salvador
It was the dead of night when a white tractor truck pulled off a palm-lined road into the quiet parking lot of a South Florida warehouse. It rolled in with nothing in tow, but about one hour later, the truck drove off hauling a 53-foot trailer, an eagle emblazoned on the cab’s side clearly visible on a security camera.
It was a seemingly innocuous scene. But that trailer — which was longer than a school bus — was loaded with $3 million worth of government-owned ventilators bound for El Salvador, a donation from the U.S. Agency for International Development to aid the Central American country’s pandemic response. And it had just been stolen.
The August heist set off a sprawling, multiagency investigation of one of the most unusual and audacious crimes of the coronavirus crisis, culminating late last week in the arrest of the second of two suspects.
A new national model? Barbershops offer coronavirus shots in addition to cuts and shaves.
Reginald Alston never expected to get a coronavirus vaccine and never expected anyone would change his mind about it.
But his best friend, a hair salon owner, kept telling him he was being shortsighted and maybe even a little bit selfish. What about his niece and her newborn who live with him? How would he feel if they became sick? Also, his job as a contractor and painter meant he was often going into other people’s homes. Didn’t he want to be protected?
By the time that friend, Katrina Randolph, told him about the nearby barbershop hosting a vaccination clinic, and offered to drive him there, Alston, 57, was far along on the journey to changing his mind.
“She really influenced me to get it,” he acknowledged, standing on the sidewalk outside the Hyattsville, Md., barbershop earlier this month after getting immunized. “I listen to Katrina. I know she wants me to be around.”
Turkey relaxes some coronavirus restrictions as infections decline
The government will relax nighttime and weekend curfews and allow gyms, cafes, restaurants and other businesses to open until 9 p.m., President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a televised address Monday.
A shorter nighttime curfew would remain in place, he said, as well as full lockdowns on Sunday to keep case numbers down. Most bars, clubs and concert venues will also stay closed and residents will be required to continue wearing masks.
Infections here surged in March and April as a more contagious variant first discovered in Britain — and renamed Alpha by the World Health Organization this week — tore through the population of about 82 million. The wave of new cases in spring marked the worst outbreak in Turkey since the pandemic began, reaching a record of more than 63,000 daily cases in April.
Authorities have reported more than 5.2 million infections and at least 47,000 deaths since March 2020. Some independent doctors, however, have accused the government of lying about the extent of the pandemic and say that both figures are massive undercounts.
Turkey’s vaccination rate also remains stubbornly low with just 15 percent of the population fully vaccinated despite a campaign that began in January.
The government bet big on the coronavirus vaccine developed by Sinovac — but not all of the promised doses have arrived. Turkey also signed a deal with Pfizer-BioNTech for 60 million vaccine doses, the health minister said, but it remained unclear when those shipments would land in the country.
Big U.S. travel surge during Memorial Day as millions take to the skies in first maskless holiday of pandemic
With half of American adults fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, millions are celebrating Memorial Day by taking to the skies, with authorities reporting a surge in air travel as many embark on their first maskless holiday since the pandemic began.
Nearly 2 million people passed through airport security checkpoints Friday, a new daily pandemic record, according to the Transportation Security Administration. About 6 million people were expected to go through airports this weekend, CBS News reported. Airports, including Los Angeles International, are breaking their 2021 records for daily passenger travel.
More than 37 million Americans are projected to travel 50 miles or more this holiday weekend, an increase of 60 percent compared with this time last year, which registered the lowest number of Memorial Day travelers on record, according to AAA. Just 23 million people traveled last year for the holiday, the company said.
Faced with a new variant and mounting cases, Vietnam scrambles for vaccines
Vietnam said Tuesday that it wanted to built a factory to supply vaccines to the Covax initiative that seeks to distribute doses equitably around the world, as its Health Ministry repeated a call for patents on coronavirus vaccines to be waived.
The Southeast Asian country has been a model of coronavirus containment since the start of the pandemic, but it is now struggling to control a small but fast-growing virus outbreak. Global concern grew Saturday, after Hanoi said it had detected a highly infectious new strand of the coronavirus that appeared to combine characteristics of two variants initially documented in Britain and India respectively.
“Vietnam would build the plant and would like to receive the patent so it could supply vaccines to Covax, to other countries as well as to Vietnam,” the ministry said in a statement, according to Reuters, after World Trade Organization talks on a possible waiver restarted Monday.
Many of the recent infections were located in two industrialized provinces in northern Vietnam, where brands such as Apple and Samsung have suppliers. Hanoi has sent around 400,000 doses to inoculate workers there, and it has asked international companies that manufacture in the Bac Ninh and Bac Giang provinces for help procuring vaccines, reported Bloomberg News.
Vietnam reported 161 new infections at noon on Tuesday. Roughly half of the nation’s 7,500 recorded cases were detected in the past month, and the number of infections remains relatively low by global standards. It has also registered just 47 covid-19 deaths. But only about 1 percent of the country, which has a population of around 100 million, has received at least one dose of a vaccine.
Vietnam’s health minister has also asked Covax to speed up deliveries. It is relying mainly on Oxford-AstraZeneca doses and has also approved the Russian-developed Sputnik V shot.
Goodbye to B.1.1.7, hello to ‘Alpha’ — WHO offers new names for coronavirus variants
Say goodbye to Googling when you see a reference to the B.1.1.7 or B.1.617.2 variants.
The World Health Organization on Monday unveiled a new naming system for coronavirus variants, so they are now labeled after letters of the Greek alphabet. The global health agency is recommending that the public refer to the B.1.1.7 strand, which was first detected in Britain, as the Alpha variant, while the B.1.617.2 variant that was initially documented in India should be designated Delta, and so forth.
The move comes shortly after India asked social media platforms to take down references to an “Indian variant” of the coronavirus. But the WHO had been working on a new labeling convention for some time and considered alternatives like the names of mythical Greek figures.
WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove told Stat that governments might be more willing to disclose the existence of newly detected variants if they’re sure it won’t be named for their country.
The Geneva-based body has long warned against naming infectious diseases after geographical locations. “This may seem like a trivial issue to some, but disease names really do matter to the people who are directly affected,” Keiji Fukuda, who was then a top WHO official, said in 2015.
“We’ve seen certain disease names provoke a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities, create unjustified barriers to travel, commerce and trade, and trigger needless slaughtering of food animals. This can have serious consequences for peoples’ lives and livelihoods.”
There have been numerous reports of abuse against people of Asian ethnicity since the start of the pandemic, which was first detected in China. South Asian people have also been harassed since the variant that the WHO now calls Delta started spreading around the world.
Number of ICE detainees testing positive for the coronavirus rises; advocates say agency needs robust vaccination program
Hundreds of immigrants in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers tested positive for the coronavirus in the past week, compared with just 60 inside the much-larger Bureau of Prisons, a stark discrepancy that comes as lawyers and lawmakers urge the Biden administration to swiftly vaccinate all detainees.
Infections in ICE detention rose from 370 in mid-March to nearly 1,500 in the past week because more migrants are crossing the U.S.-Mexico border and many are arriving infected, federal officials said. But the American Civil Liberties Union says ICE has not created the type of robust vaccination program that helped the Bureau of Prisons drive down infections, and it told the Department of Homeland Security in a letter Thursday that detention centers have been “among the most dangerous” places during the pandemic.
Peru now has world’s worst covid mortality per capita after adjusting toll
Peru on Monday announced that it was revising its official pandemic death toll to include more than 111,000 additional fatalities, an adjustment that would position the South American nation as having the worst covid-19 mortality rate per capita in the world.
Peruvian authorities had previously recorded 69,342 deaths attributed to covid-19, based solely on whether a patient tested positive for the coronavirus. But after convening an expert panel in April, which found that the death toll probably was a vast undercount, the government broadened the criteria for virus-related deaths.
Now, Peru is including “probable cases” with an “epidemiological link to a confirmed case,” as well as those people who were believed to be infected and also presented “a clinical picture compatible with the disease.”
The additions bring Peru’s total death toll between March 2020 and May 22 to 180,764. Peru’s population is roughly 33 million, meaning that it has suffered about 500 deaths per 100,000 people. Hungary previously had the world’s highest covid-19 mortality rate per capita at 300 deaths per 100,000 people.
Peru has reported approximately 1.9 million coronavirus cases since the pandemic began.
Without a full investigation of lab leak theory, the world will face ‘covid-26 and covid-32,’ says leading scientist
A prominent scientist on Sunday added his voice to the growing number of experts calling for a full investigation into the origins of the novel coronavirus, saying the future of public health is at stake.
“There’s going to be covid-26 and covid-32 unless we fully understand the origins of covid-19,” Peter Hotez, a professor of pediatrics and molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine and a leading expert on the virus, said Sunday on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.” He said coming to firm conclusions about how the virus emerged was “absolutely essential” in preventing future pandemics.
New reports suggest that China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology was at the center of the outbreak, not animal-to-human transmission elsewhere in Wuhan, which was the long-prevalent opinion.
WHO chief warns of ‘monumental error’ of thinking pandemic danger has passed
The director general of the World Health Organization warned that the pandemic remains a huge threat and more work needs to be done to prepare for the next crisis, despite dropping case numbers and increasing vaccinations.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus spoke Monday at the conclusion of the World Health Assembly, which has tackled the sluggish global response to the coronavirus outbreak and pushed the idea of a global pandemic treaty to coordinate responses for the next virus.
“It would be a monumental error for any country to think the danger has passed,” said Tedros, adding that the lack of global coordination to date means that “we will still face the same vulnerabilities that allowed a small outbreak to become a global pandemic.”
The body will begin discussing a pandemic treaty in November with the aim of eventually creating a global framework for political, financial, and technical cooperation to battle the next major outbreak.
“At present, pathogens have greater power than WHO. They are emerging more frequently in a planet out of balance,” said Tedros, encouraging member nations to use the interconnectedness that helped spread the virus to battle it.
“The defining characteristic of the pandemic is the lack of sharing: A treaty would foster improved sharing, trust and accountability,” he said.
Tedros also pleaded for more stable funding mechanisms for the organization, which often struggles to carry out its activities. “We cannot pay people with praise and WHO cannot grow stronger without sustainable financing.”
The WHO has been roundly blamed for its slow response to the pandemic but ultimately it is at the mercy of the desires of its member states. Critics say the WHO was reluctant to dispute China’s initially mild assessment of the threat of the virus that was first detected in Wuhan in late 2019.
Coronavirus ‘lab leak’ theory jumps from mocked to maybe as Biden orders intelligence review
In the spring of 2020, as the coronavirus ripped through U.S. cities on its way to claiming more than 592,000 American lives, a group of senior U.S. national security officials warily eyed a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology was well known in the scientific community for its research on coronaviruses to defend against outbreaks like the SARS epidemic, first identified in China in 2002. But to some of the officials, some of whom worked in the State Department and the White House, the lab’s location in the same city where the coronavirus pandemic began was a troubling coincidence.
Over the course of the pandemic, the officials joined forces, searching for information that might show whether the pandemic had been sparked by reckless or sloppy research in the lab, several of the now-former officials and others aware of their work said in interviews.
Authorities in Melbourne tread carefully as virulent strain spreads
SYDNEY — Authorities in Australia’s second-most populous state of Victoria say it is too soon to determine whether a seven-day lockdown will be enough to curb an outbreak of the fast-spreading variant of the coronavirus first detected in India that has since been dubbed “Delta” by the World Health Organization.
Nine new cases were reported Tuesday, bringing the total number of active local cases in the state to 63.
“There is every prospect that things might get worse before they get better,” Martin Foley, Victoria’s health minister, told reporters in the state capital, Melbourne. “This is a day-by-day and case-by-case proposition.”
Officials are especially concerned about several cases connected to nursing homes in the city, where private operators and the federal government have been criticized for allowing staff members to work across multiple sites.
Elderly people made up the majority of deaths in an outbreak last year that saw Melbourne residents endure one of the world’s longest lockdowns.
Under the lockdown, which runs until Thursday, the state’s 7 million residents are allowed to leave their homes only for essential work, health care, grocery shopping, exercise or to get a coronavirus vaccination.
Several infected contacts have visited crowded hot spots that included sports stadiums and one of the largest shopping centers in the country, raising concerns of a significant outbreak heading into winter in the Southern Hemisphere.
Separately, the federal court ruled Tuesday that a federal government ban on most Australian citizens leaving the country during the pandemic is lawful, rejecting a challenge by a libertarian group. The case is the latest failed legal challenge to Australia’s coronavirus restrictions.
Health officials said the Melbourne outbreak is the biggest, and the fastest-moving anywhere in Australia this year. Many of the encounters that have led to infections have been only fleeting: brushing against a contagious person in a small store or visiting a model home at the same time as an infectious person.
Sinovac gets boost from Brazilian study as vaccine nears WHO approval decision
A new study from Brazil suggests the China-developed Sinovac vaccine may be more effective at preventing symptomatic infection and death from covid-19 than expected.
Deaths fell by 95 percent in Serrana, a town in the covid-ravaged São Paulo state, in the five weeks after most of its adult residents were given Sinovac shots, according to a study by the Butantan Institute. Meanwhile, symptomatic infections in the town, which has a population of about 45,000, dropped by 80 percent and hospitalizations decreased by 86 percent.
The pandemic was not successfully managed in Serrana until the Sinovac doses were widely administered.
The death and case figures in neighboring localities were significantly higher, said Butantan Institute Director Dimas Covas, according to Bloomberg News. São Paulo has been badly affected by the coronavirus variant that emerged in Brazil, which the World Health Organization has since named “Gamma.”
Previous trials had given the vaccine an efficacy rate ranging from 50.4 percent in Brazil — barely above the 50 percent threshold that governments find usable — to over 80 percent in Turkey. Singapore has received doses of the vaccine but not approved it for use, citing limited data.
The vaccine is largely used by developing economies and the study will be a big boost to vaccination efforts in Brazil, which has the third-highest case rate in the world. On Sunday, it reported more than 43,000 new infections, taking its case total to about 16.5 million.
The new data arrives as the WHO nears a decision on whether to authorize the vaccine for emergency use. The prime minister of Thailand, which has approved Sinovac, had told reporters last week that he expected the WHO to authorize the vaccine by May 28. Other reports suggest a decision has been delayed until June.
117 staffers sue over Houston hospital’s vaccine mandate, saying they don’t want to be ‘guinea pigs’
A group of 117 unvaccinated staffers from Houston Methodist Hospital filed a lawsuit Friday seeking to avoid the hospital’s coronavirus vaccine mandate, saying it’s unlawful for bosses to require the shots.
The staffers join a growing list of employees challenging compulsory immunizations at businesses, colleges and other workplaces essential to the country’s reopening. Vaccine mandates have faced mounting resistance from anti-vaccination groups and some Republican politicians, even as health officials promote the proven safety of the vaccines and millions of Americans line up to get the shots every week.
The lawsuit against Houston Methodist was filed by Jared Woodfill, a Houston-area attorney and conservative activist. It appears to mirror a legal strategy used by a New York-based law firm, Siri & Glimstad, that is closely aligned with one of the country’s biggest anti-vaccination organizations but unaffiliated with the Houston litigation.
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