Month: September 2021

MIAMI – Funeral director Wayne Bright has seen grief piled upon grief during the latest COVID-19 surge.

A woman died of the virus, and as her family was planning the funeral, her mother was struck down. An aunt took over arrangements for the double funeral, only to die of COVID-19 herself two weeks later.

“That was one of the most devastating things ever,” said Bright, who also arranged the funeral last week of one of his closest friends.

Florida is in the grip of its deadliest wave of COVID-19 since the pandemic began, a disaster driven by the highly contagious delta variant.

While Florida’s vaccination rate is slightly higher than the national average, the Sunshine State has an outsize population of elderly people, who are especially vulnerable to the virus; a vibrant party scene; and a Republican governor who has taken a hard line against mask requirements, vaccine passports and business shutdowns.

As of mid-August, the state was averaging 244 deaths per day, up from 23 a day in late June and eclipsing the previous peak of 227 during the summer of 2020. (Because of the way deaths are logged in Florida and lags in reporting, more recent figures on fatalities per day are incomplete.)

Hospitals have rented refrigerated trucks to store more bodies. Funeral homes have been overwhelmed.

‘Weird dream state’

Cristina Miles, a mother of five from Orange Park, is among those facing more than one loss at a time. Her husband died after contracting COVID-19, and less than two weeks later, her mother-in-law succumbed to the virus.

“I feel we are all kind of in a weird dream state,” she said, of herself and her three children.

Hospitals have been swamped with patients who, like Miles’ husband and mother-in-law, hadn’t gotten vaccinated.

In a positive sign, the number of people in the hospital with COVID-19 in Florida has dropped over the past two weeks from more than 17,000 to 14,200 on Friday, indicating the surge is easing.

Florida made an aggressive effort early on to vaccinate its senior citizens. But Dr. Kartik Cherabuddi, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Florida, said the raw number of those who have yet to get the shot is still large, given Florida’s elderly population of 4.6 million.

“Even 10% is still a very large number, and then folks living with them who come in contact with them are not vaccinated,” Cherabuddi said. “With delta, things spread very quickly.”

Cherabuddi said there is also a “huge difference” in attitudes toward masks in Florida this summer compared with last year. This summer, “if you traveled around the state, it was like we are not really in a surge,” he said.

DeSantis’ stances

Governor Ron DeSantis has strongly opposed certain mandatory measures to keep the virus in check, saying people should be trusted to make decisions for themselves. He has asserted, too, that the spike in cases is seasonal as Floridians spend more time indoors to escape the heat.

At his funeral home in Tampa, Bright is working weekdays and weekends, staying past midnight sometimes.

“Usually we serve between five and six families a week. Right now, we are probably seeing 12 to 13 new families every week,” he said. “It’s nonstop. We are just trying to keep up with the volume.”

He had to arrange the burial of one of his closest friends, a man he had entrusted with the security code to his house. They used to carpool each other’s kids to school, and their families would gather for birthday and Super Bowl parties.

“It is very, very difficult to go through this process for someone you love so dearly,” he said.

Pat Seemann, a nurse practitioner whose company has nearly 500 elderly, homebound patients in central Florida, had not lost a single patient to COVID-19. Then the variant she calls “the wrecking ball” hit.

In the past month, she lost seven patients in two weeks, including a husband and wife who died within days of each other.

“I cried all weekend. I was devastated, angry,” she said.

Elderly hit hardest

Overall, more than 46,300 people have died of COVID-19 in Florida, which ranks 17th in per capita deaths among the states.

The majority of the deaths this summer — like last summer — are among the elderly. Of the 2,345 people whose recent deaths were reported over the past week, 1,479 of them were 65 and older, or 63%.

“The focus needs to be on who’s dying and who’s ending up in the hospital,” Seeman said. “It’s still going after the elderly.”

But the proportion of under-65 people dying of COVID-19 has grown substantially, which health officials attribute to lower vaccination rates in those age groups.

Aaron Jaggi, 35, was trying to get healthy before he died of COVID-19, 12 hours after his older brother Free Jaggi, 41, lost his life to the virus. They were overweight, which increases the risk of severe COVID-19 illness, and on the fence about getting vaccinated, thinking the risk was minimal because they both worked from home, said Brittany Pequignot, who has lived with the family at various times and is like an adopted daughter.

After their death, the family found a whiteboard that belonged to Aaron. It listed his daily goals for sit-ups and push-ups.

“He was really trying,” Pequignot said.

Source: Voice of America

WASHINGTON – Top U.S. health officials have told the White House they will not have enough data for a broad COVID-19 booster rollout as President Joe Biden had anticipated, a source familiar with the discussions said Friday.

The source told Reuters that there was only sufficient data to weigh a booster dose from Pfizer Inc. and German partner BioNTech SE.

Data submitted by rival Moderna Inc. fell short of what was needed, putting it several weeks behind the September 20 rollout the Biden administration has targeted, if regulators approve the use of boosters, the source said.

Earlier, The New York Times reported that the officials told the White House on Thursday to scale back a plan to offer the booster shots to the general public later this month.

Dr. Janet Woodcock, the acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told White House COVID coordinator Jeffrey Zientz their agencies might be able recommend boosters by late September only for certain recipients of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the source familiar with the discussions confirmed.

“These things happen and are part of the process. … The booster plan and timeline was pulled together by the government doctors, including Janet and Rochelle,” the source said.

U.S. health officials had said in August that a third shot of the COVID-19 vaccine would be made widely available on September 20 to Americans who received two doses of either the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccine at least eight months earlier. They cited data showing diminishing protection from the initial vaccinations as infections rose from the Delta variant.

Biden said the government expected to give out 100 million booster shots for no out-of-pocket cost at around 80,000 locations nationwide. The administration has described its booster plan as an effort to get ahead of the virus, based on concerns that breakthrough infections can occur among people who are fully vaccinated.

The U.S. booster plan is dependent on the Food and Drug Administration determining that a third dose of the two-dose vaccines is safe and effective, and a favorable recommendation from CDC advisers.

Source: Voice of America

The African Union has announced that Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines assembled in South Africa will no longer be exported to Europe and will instead be distributed among African countries.

In addition, millions of J&J vaccines already shipped to Europe, but currently stored in warehouses, will be returned to South Africa, African Union COVID-19 envoy Strive Masiyiwa said Thursday.

The deal between J&J and Aspen Pharmacare, the South African facility manufacturing the J&J vaccines that were sent to Europe, had received harsh criticism as less than 3% of the population of the African continent has been inoculated, compared to richer regions of the world that have begun or will soon begin booster shot campaigns.

The World Health Organization has warned that the pandemic cannot be brought under control unless all the world’s regions are equitably vaccinated.

Meanwhile, WHO has listed a new coronavirus strain as a “variant of interest.” The Mu variant is responsible for nearly 40% of the COVID cases in Colombia where it was first identified.

Greek health care workers demonstrated Thursday against a COVID mandate that went into effect Wednesday.

Under the new regulation, workers will be suspended without pay if they have not been inoculated or recovered from the coronavirus in the last six months.

Musicals are back on Broadway, after an absence of more than a year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tony Award-winning Hadestown, a modern interpretation of the ancient Greek legend of lovers Orpheus and Eurydice, opened Thursday.

Also, the musical Waitress began a limited run Thursday, starring singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles.

Hamilton, The Lion King, and Wicked return to Broadway theaters Sept. 14.

The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center has recorded 219 million COVID infections and 4.5 million coronavirus deaths. The center said early Friday that 5.3 billion vaccines have been administered.

Some information for this report came from the Associated Press.

Source: Voice of America

MARSEILLE, FRANCE – The perilous state of the planet’s wildlife will be laid bare when the largest organization for the protection of nature meets Friday hoping to help galvanize action as the world faces intertwined biodiversity and climate crises.

Relentless habitat destruction, unsustainable agriculture, mining and a warming planet will dominate discussion at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) conference, hosted by France in the city of Marseille.

The meeting, delayed from 2020 by the pandemic, comes ahead of crucial United Nations summits on climate, food systems and biodiversity that could shape the planet’s foreseeable future.

“Our common goal is to put nature at the top of international priorities — because our destinies are intrinsically linked, planet, climate, nature and human communities,” said French President Emmanuel Macron in a statement ahead of the IUCN meeting.

He said the conference should lay the “initial foundations” for a global biodiversity strategy that will be the focus of UN deliberations in China in April next year.

The international community is grappling with a near set of goals to “live in harmony with nature” by 2050, with interim goals to be set for this decade.

Nutritious food, breathable air, clean water, nature-based medicines — humans are dependent on the health of the ecosystems they are destroying.

Previous IUCN congresses have paved the way for global treaties on biodiversity and the international trade in endangered species.

But efforts to halt extensive declines in numbers and diversity of animals and plants have so far failed to slow the destruction.

In 2019 the UN’s biodiversity experts warned that a million species are on the brink of extinction — raising the specter that the planet is on the verge of its sixth mass extinction event in half a billion years.

Interwoven threats

The nine-day IUCN meeting, which opens at 1500 GMT Friday, will include an update of its Red List of Threatened Species, measuring how close animal and plant species are to vanishing forever.

Experts have assessed nearly 135,000 species over the last half-century and nearly 28% are currently at risk of extinction, with habitat loss, overexploitation and illegal trade driving the loss.

Big cats, for example, have lost more than 90% of their historic range and population, with only 20,000 lions, 7,000 cheetahs, 4,000 tigers and a few dozen Amur leopards left in the wild.

The meeting is likely to hammer home the message that protecting wildlife is imperative for the healthy function of ecosystems and for humanity.

Loss of biodiversity, climate change, pollution, diseases spreading from the wild have become existential threats that cannot be “understood or addressed in isolation,” the IUCN said ahead of the meeting in a vision statement endorsed by its 1,400 members.

Motions on the table include protecting 80% of Amazonia by 2025, tackling plastic in the oceans, combatting wildlife crime and preventing pandemics.

The IUCN will also, for the first time in its seven-decade history, welcome indigenous peoples to share their deep knowledge on how best to heal the natural world as voting members.

Source: Voice of America