Day: February 19, 2022

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 stop the protests. Legislators had been due to debate those temporary powers on Friday but the House of Commons suspended its session, citing police activity.

After the protest crowds swelled on the three previous weekend, police set up 100 road blocks around the downtown core on Friday to deny people access and prevent food and fuel from getting in. Police said they had towed 21 vehicles on Friday.

As police cleared protesters from the streets, at least a dozen tow trucks came in to remove trucks and other protest vehicles still parked downtown.

Source: Voice of America

The U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF, is assisting Malawi’s students to continue their education in areas affected by a recent tropical storm.

Students in the country’s 17 flooded districts are taking their lessons outdoors, in the shade of trees, after Tropical Storm Ana ravaged the region, affecting over 900,000 people, destroying school blocks and washing away learning materials.

The government is still assessing the damage as the flooding continues three weeks after Ana passed.

In Chikwawa district, one of the hardest hit districts, education experts say partial assessment shows the storm which also hit parts of Madagascar , Mozambique and Zimbabwe, has destroyed over 50 school buildings.

Mac Shades Dakamau, chief education officer for Chikwawa district, says the damage is unprecedented.

“We are hit very, very hard with [Tropical Storm] Ana. For example, classrooms have been damaged, toilets have collapsed, and we had mud in all affected classrooms. And for the first time, we have a very big number of schools affected,” he said.

According to Dakamau, poor learning conditions forced over half of students to be absent from schools.

“Some of the learners have lost their uniform, the textbooks, and pens, name it. So it hit very hard in Chikwawa,” he added.

Teachers at Sekeni Primary School in Chikwawa district say the floods damaged the school and washed away textbooks and other learning materials.

However to solve the problem, UNICEF, under its School in a Box initiative, has provided learning materials, which include notebooks, pens, face coverings and footballs.

“I was very happy that we are able to hand over some learning materials and also some recreational material at that school which also by the way had water supply provided by UNICEF for hand washing and lucky that did not get damaged during the floods,” said Rudolf Schwenk, country director for UNICEF in Malawi.

He said the U.N. children’s agency is also considering providing temporary learning shelters for affected schools and evacuation camps.

“Because it’s important for their psycho-social development if they continue learning. So I think that is of critical importance also to look after the children in the camps who are not yet able to go back to their schools,” Schwenk said.

Minister of Education Agness Nyalonje said in parliament this week that the government has also established an education in emergency plan, which aims to ensure continued learning for children in times of natural disasters.

However, Nyalonje ruled out plans to relocate schools from flood-prone areas, saying doing so would inconvenience students living there.

Source: Voice Of America

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 more than 70% of people in the United States are now either vaccinated or have recovered from a coronavirus infection, Sawyer says. She adds that an extra bonus for those who get an actual infection is that they develop much more sophisticated systems of immunity against that virus.

A pandemic is generally considered “over” when a virus becomes endemic.

“When viruses become predictable — in their patterns, in their seasonality and in the number of people that they might infect and the number of deaths that they might cause — we say that a virus has become endemic,” Sawyer says. “That means it has settled down into a long-term existence with the human population.”

And while COVID-19 might never completely go away, future variants are not expected to be as severe as past ones.

“If you were infected with one variant, and I was infected with another variant, and I ended up in the emergency room the next day, and you had just a tickle in your throat and went to your son’s baseball game, in the grocery store and to a birthday party, whose variant is going to spread better?” Sawyer says. “Your variant is going to spread better. We know from the history of viral evolution, viruses are snaking their way toward being less deadly and more transmissible. … Viruses become more transmissible when they don’t make people as sick.”

But the danger of calling the pandemic over before it’s really over remains.

“I think, socially, most people are leaning toward this pandemic being over when, epidemiologically, it’s not,” Navarro says. “There is essentially no going back. And the fear that I have today is that if we have another variant of concern that pops up, I don’t know if we’re going to get people to go back to masking, if we’re going to be able to implement any sort of structured closure orders if we need to.”

During the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed up to 50 million people worldwide, Americans got tired of being constrained and prematurely gave up on flu prevention measures. Two more waves of the flu pandemic hit the United States, resulting in more deaths.

While some parallels can be drawn between COVID-19 and the 1918 flu pandemic, looking to the past isn’t always a good barometer for when this pandemic might end because of the advanced knowledge and technology that exists today.

“We know exactly what we’re supposed to do, and this is an advantage that people of the past did not necessarily have,” says Nükhet Varlik, associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark. “We have the vaccines. We have the public health regulations in place. We have the medical expertise, so we actually know what to do. So we’re actually at an unprecedented advantage when we compare ourselves to past societies. We can actually do the right things. Whether we do the right things, that’s another question.”

Varlik says asking when the pandemic might end is misleading, fueling false hopes rather than focusing on trying to control and mitigate the pandemic.

“It will become endemic, but that doesn’t mean that it cannot become pandemic again. So, it’s kind of like a dance … it can be pandemic or epidemic or endemic, and it can change over time,” Varlik says. “I am pretty confident that COVID will continue to be epidemic in one part of the world for the foreseeable future … and, of course, with travel and other means, it can spill over to other places, to other countries. Until it’s eliminated in the entire world, there is really no way of feeling safe from this disease.”

When epidemiologists will declare the pandemic over has a lot to do with how much disease a society is willing to accept and put up with, Navarro says. COVID-19 could become like the flu, killing tens of thousands of Americans every year, predominantly those in vulnerable medical categories.

“At some point, you just have to say to yourself, ‘You know, I live in the world. There are dangers in my world, infectious disease, car accidents.’ But you can’t let that cripple you. Those things have always been there,” biology professor Sawyer says. “I certainly would never want to send a message that this is now yet another thing that people need to worry and have anxiety about once this becomes endemic. Instead, get your vaccine, get your flu vaccine, protect yourself and then go on with your life.”

Source: Voice of America