Category: General

Millions of Beijing residents queued up for another round of COVID-19 tests Sunday as China’s capital seeks to trace and isolate every infection to contain a small but stubborn outbreak — and avoid a Shanghai-type prolonged lockdown.

Strict COVID curbs in Beijing, Shanghai and dozens of other major cities across China are taking a psychological toll on its people, weighing on the world’s second-largest economy and disrupting global supply chains and international trade.

But Chinese authorities are unwavering in their commitment to stamp out the coronavirus, rather than live with COVID like many countries that are easing or ditching virus measures. Last week the authorities threatened action against critics of the zero-COVID policy.

Most of the 25 million people in the commercial hub of Shanghai, China’s most populous city, had been confined to their housing compounds for more than a month. Many complain of not being able to get food or to access emergency health care or other basic services.

Parts of Shanghai have seen their risk levels officially downgraded to the point where government rules would in theory allow them to leave their residences.

But while some were allowed out for brief walks or grocery trips, most were still stuck behind the locked gates of their compounds, causing widespread frustration and occasionally leading to rare altercations with hazmat-suited authorities.

Beijing was desperate to avoid such drama, relentlessly working to track and isolate infections.

On Sunday, residents lined up for another round of tests in the Chaoyang, Fangshan and Fengtai districts and small parts of others where infections had been detected over the past two weeks.

It has become an almost daily routine in the capital. Even if they are not subject to the mass tests, many still need to show a recent negative result to get to work or enter various venues.

Health app ‘abnormalities’

Beijing has closed gyms and entertainment venues, banned dine-in services at restaurants and shut scores of bus routes and almost 15% of its sprawling subway system.

The streets were less hectic than usual, with many not wanting to risk any activity that could classify them as close contacts of COVID patients, forcing them into quarantine.

Businesses that remained open were suffering.

A barber who asked to be identified only by his surname, Song, said his salon at a high-end shopping mall in Chaoyang has seen far fewer clients since the outbreak.

“They’re afraid of getting abnormalities in their health apps,” Song said, referring to the mobile monitoring software all residents must use. “North of us are malls and offices that have been sealed, and their apps might mark them as close contacts if they came.”

Song said his salon will try to stay open for as long as possible, but he was not sure for how long.

Beijing’s daily COVID cases are in the dozens, much lower than Shanghai’s at this point in its own outbreak, when infections were in the triple digits and rising.

Shanghai’s cases fell for a ninth day, Sunday data showed, but remained in the thousands.

Like other cities in China, Shanghai is building thousands of permanent PCR testing stations. With most residents still indoors, this seems to anticipate a gradual return to normal life when people are back out on the streets.

But authorities have warned that remains far off.

Top Chinese leaders meeting last week said the nation would fight any comment or action that distorted, doubted or repudiated its COVID policy. Shanghai party and city officials have also warned against complacency.

Source: Voice of America

Doug Lambrecht was among the first of the nearly 1 million Americans to die from COVID-19. His demographic profile — an older white male with chronic health problems — mirrors the faces of many who would be lost over the next two years.

The 71-year-old retired physician was recovering from a fall at a nursing home near Seattle when the new coronavirus swept through in early 2020. He died March 1, an early victim in a devastating outbreak that gave a first glimpse of the price older Americans would pay.

The pandemic has generated gigabytes of data that make clear which U.S. groups have been hit the hardest. More than 700,000 people 65 and older died. Men died at higher rates than women.

White people made up most of the deaths overall, yet an unequal burden fell on Black, Hispanic and Native American people considering the younger average age of minority communities. Racial gaps narrowed between surges then widened again with each new wave.

With 1 million deaths in sight, Doug’s son Nathan Lambrecht reflected on the toll.

“I’m afraid that as the numbers get bigger, people are going to care less and less,” he said. “I just hope people who didn’t know them and didn’t have the same sort of loss in their lives due to COVID, I just hope that they don’t forget and they remember to care.”

Elders hit hard

Three out of every four deaths were people 65 and older, according to U.S. data analyzed by The Associated Press.

About 255,000 people 85 and older died; 257,000 were 75 to 84 years old; and about 229,000 were 65 to 74.

“A million things went wrong and most of them were preventable,” said elder care expert Charlene Harrington of the University of California, San Francisco. Harrington, 80, hopes the lessons of the pandemic lead U.S. health officials to adopt minimum staffing requirements for nursing homes, “then maybe I can retire.”

Spouses left behind

In nearly every 10-year age group, more men have died from COVID-19 than women.

Men have shorter life expectancies than women, so it’s not surprising that the only age group where deaths in women outpaced those in men is the oldest: 85 and older.

For some families who lost breadwinners, economic hardships have added to their grief, said Rima Samman, who coordinates a COVID-19 memorial project that began as a tribute to her brother, Rami, who died in May 2020 at age 40.

“A widow is losing her home, or she’s losing the car she drove the kids to school with, because her husband died,” Samman said. “Little by little, you’re getting pulled down from middle class to lower class.”

Race, ethnicity and age

White people made up 65% of the total deaths, the largest proportion of any race by far.

This isn’t that surprising because there are more white people in the U.S. than any other race. American Indians, Pacific Islanders and Black people had higher death rates when looking at COVID-19 deaths per capita.

Death rates per capita still leave out a characteristic that is crucial to understanding which groups were disproportionately affected — COVID-19 is more deadly for the elderly.

In the U.S. there are many more elderly white people than elderly people of other races. To evaluate which race has been disproportionately affected, it’s necessary to adjust the per-capita death rate, calculating the rates as if each race had the same age breakdown.

After the share of COVID-19 deaths are age-adjusted in this way, we can compare that with the race’s share of the total population. If the age-adjusted share of COVID-19 deaths is higher than the share of the U.S. population, that race has been disproportionately affected.

When considering age, it’s apparent that Black, Hispanic, Pacific Islander and Native American people suffered disproportionately more from COVID-19 deaths than other groups in the U.S.

Looking at deaths per capita, Mississippi had the highest rate of any state.

“We’ve lost so many people to COVID,” said Joyee Washington, a community health educator in Hattiesburg. “The hard thing in Mississippi was having to grieve with no time to heal. You’re facing trauma after trauma after trauma. … Normal is gone as far as I’m concerned.”

Communities pulled together. Churches set up testing sites, school buses took meals to students when classrooms were closed, her city’s mayor used social media to provide reliable information. “Even in the midst of turmoil you can still find joy, you can still find light,” she said. “The possibilities are there if you look for them.”

Native Americans experienced higher death rates than all other groups during two waves of the pandemic. For Mary Francis, a 41-year-old Navajo woman from Page, Arizona, the deaths reinforce a long-held value of self-sufficiency.

“It goes back to the teachings of our elders,” said Francis, who helps get vaccines and care packages to Navajo and Hopi families. “Try to be self-sufficient, how to take care of ourselves and how to not rely so much on the government (and) other sources that may or may not have our interests at heart.”

Rural vs urban

The surge that began in late 2020 was particularly rough for rural America.

Americans living in rural areas have been less likely to get vaccinated than city dwellers, more likely to be infected and more likely to die.

“I’ve had multiple people in my ambulance, in their 80s and dying,” said paramedic Mark Kennedy in Nauvoo, Illinois. “Some did die, and when you ask if they’ve been vaccinated, they say, ‘I don’t trust it.'”

Surges swamped the thin resources of rural hospitals. During the delta surge, Kennedy transferred patients to hospitals in Springfield, which is 130 miles away, and Chicago, 270 miles away.

“Every day you had multiple transfers three and four hours away in full protective gear,” Kennedy said.

The recent omicron wave felt even harder to David Schreiner, CEO of Katherine Shaw Bethea Hospital in Dixon, Illinois.

“In the first wave, there were signs throughout the community about our health care heroes. … People loved us the first time around,” Schreiner said. But by this past winter, people had COVID-19 fatigue.

“Our people have been through so much. And then we would get a patient or a family member who would come to the hospital and refuse to put a mask on,” Schreiner said. “It’s a little bit hard to take.”

Source: Voice of America

India’s government has rejected a new World Health Organization report that says the country’s death toll from COVID-19 is about 10 times higher than the official count, and the highest in the world.

How many lives were lost in India due to the pandemic has been a hotly contested subject. The study by WHO puts India’s COVID-19 death toll at 4.7 million through the end of 2021, while the government’s tally puts the number at 481,000.

Other studies, including one by the medical journal Lancet, released last month, have said that India’s fatalities have been undercounted. They estimated the death toll at six to seven times higher than the official number.

The WHO’s estimate includes people who died either directly from COVID-19 or indirectly through the pandemic’s wider impact on health systems.

But the government has slammed the methodology used and said that the WHO has published the excess mortality estimates “without adequately addressing India’s concerns” or taking into account “authentic” data submitted by India.

The health and family welfare ministry said in a statement that the country’s size, diversity and population of 1.3 billion meant the ‘one size fits all’ approach and model used by the United Nations body may not be applicable to India.

Experts however say the study should be taken seriously because the WHO numbers are more or less in line with independent estimates of undercounting in India.

“The modelling systems used for these studies are fairly standard and if the Indian government had a rebuttal, they should provide their argument for rejecting them,” says Gautam Menon, professor of Biology and Physics at India’s Ashoka University and a mathematical modelling expert. “They have not been very specific but only said that the country’s mechanisms for recording deaths are very good.”

Others point out that even recent data made public by the Indian government suggests a higher death toll compared to official numbers. This week the government released data showing 8.1 million excess deaths in 2020 — that is 6% higher or about half a million more deaths compared to the previous year. In 2020, India counted 149,000 deaths due to COVID-19.

Excess deaths are a measure of how many more people died than expected compared with previous years.

The government has however said the higher numbers of deaths in 2020 could not be attributed to the pandemic. “There is a public narrative in the media, based on various modelling estimates, that India’s COVID-19 deaths are many times the reported figure – that’s not the case in reality,” V.K. Paul, a top health official spearheading India’s fight against the pandemic, told state television. He said modelling can lead to “overestimation, absurd estimation.”

Indian health officials have consistently maintained that the country’s total infections and death toll as a proportion of its massive population were lower than those in many countries, including developed nations and said that this underlined the country’s success in battling the pandemic.

But experts underline the need to estimate accurate numbers.

“I don’t know why they are so exceptionally stubborn and are digging their heels in on the question of deaths due to the pandemic,” says Prabhat Jha, director of the Centre for Global Health Research in Toronto, and a member of the expert working group supporting the WHO’s excess death calculation. “Every government does not want bad news. But India has done very well in areas such as its vaccination program. Accurate mortality data would only help judge how this program has helped reduce mortality.”

Through April 2022, India has reported 524,000 COVID-19 deaths and 43 million infections — the highest numbers after the United States and Brazil.

India is not the only country where the death toll was underestimated, according to the WHO report. It says countries such as Indonesia and Egypt had the same problem.

“There is information that was collated from government data itself of a large number of excess deaths particularly during the deadly Delta [variant] wave last year,” points out Menon. “This suggests there may have been similar undercounting throughout the pandemic.”

As the health system in many parts of the country buckled during the Delta wave, there had been reports of mass cremations as crematoriums overflowed with COVID victims and bodies washing up in the Ganges River, which local media reports said could be people who died after getting the virus.

Menon however cautions that there could be a margin of error in the studies on India’s death toll – he estimates the number may have been closer to 3 million.

Experts point out that India’s issue with counting deaths from COVID-19 is partly rooted in a longstanding problem – the cause of many of the deaths in India is often not accurately classified. For example, a death caused by respiratory problems after contracting the infection may not be attributed to the virus.

Two-thirds of the more than 1.3 billion people live in villages where there are few hospitals and health systems are inadequate.

But proper mortality data, say experts, would only help in framing policies to improve health care systems.

“Counting the dead due to the pandemic would help the living. It’s a social responsibility to know where we are going with this health crisis,” says Jha. “Why should we battle COVID blindfolded?”

Source: Voice of America

A sharp sell-off left the Dow Jones Industrial Average more than 1,000 points lower Thursday, wiping out the gains from Wall Street’s biggest rally in two years, as worries grow that the higher interest rates the Federal Reserve is using in its fight against inflation will derail the economy.

The benchmark S&P 500 fell 3.6%, marking its biggest loss in nearly two years, a day after it posted its biggest gain since May 2020. The Nasdaq slumped 5%, its worst drop since June 2020. The losses by the Dow and the other indexes offset the gains from a day earlier.

“Yesterday’s sharp rally was not rooted in reality, and today’s dramatic selloff is a reversal of that misplaced exuberance,” said Ben Kirby, co-head of investments at Thornburg Investment Management.

Wall Street’s breakneck day-to-day reversal reflects the degree of investors’ uncertainty and unease over the array of threats the economy is facing, starting with inflation running at the highest level in four decades, and how effective the Federal Reserve’s bid to tame higher prices by jacking up interest rates will be.

On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve announced a widely expected half-percentage point increase in its short-term interest rate. Stocks bounced around following the move but then sharply rose as bond yields fell after Fed Chair Jerome Powell reassured investors by saying the central bank wasn’t considering shifting to more aggressive, three-quarter point rate hikes as the Fed continues with further rate increases in coming months.

But whatever relief Powell’s remarks gave stock investors vanished Thursday. Stocks slumped and bond yields climbed. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 3.04%. Rising yields are sure to put upward pressure on mortgage rates, which are at their highest level since 2009.

Investors remain uneasy about whether the Fed can do enough to tame inflation without tipping the economy, which is showing signs of slowing, into a recession. In addition to high inflation and rising interest rates, investors are grappling with uncertainty over lingering supply chain disruptions and geopolitical tensions.

“The biggest issue is there are just a lot of moving parts and the unanswered question is to what extent as the Fed attempts to tame inflation will that result in economic slowing, and perhaps, a recession,” said Terry Sandven, chief equity strategist at U.S. Bank Wealth Management.

The S&P 500 fell 153.30 points to 4,146.87, while the Nasdaq slid 647.16 points to 12,317.69. The Dow briefly skidded 1,375 points before closing down 1,063.09 points, or 3.1%, to 32,997.97.

Smaller company stocks also fell sharply. The Russell 2000 fell 78.77 points, or 4%, to 1,871.15.

Source: Voice of America

U.S. regulators on Thursday strictly limited who can receive Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine because of the ongoing risk of rare but serious blood clots.

The Food and Drug Administration said the shot should only be given to adults who cannot receive a different vaccine or specifically request J&J’s vaccine. U.S. authorities for months have recommended that Americans get Pfizer or Moderna shots instead of J&J’s vaccine.

FDA’s vaccine chief Dr. Peter Marks said the agency decided to restrict the vaccine after taking another look at the data on the risks of life-threatening blood clots and concluding that they are limited to J&J’s vaccine.

“If there’s an alternative that appears to be equally effective in preventing severe outcomes from COVID-19, we’d rather see people opting for that,” Marks said. “But we’ve been careful to say that — compared to no vaccine — this is still a better option.”

The problem occurs in the first two weeks after vaccination, he added: “So if you had the vaccine six months ago you can sleep soundly tonight knowing this isn’t an issue.”

The FDA authorized J&J’s shot in February 2021 for adults 18 and older.

The vaccine was initially considered an important tool in fighting the pandemic because it required only one shot. But the single-dose option proved less effective than two doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

In December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended Moderna and Pfizer shots over J&J’s because of its safety issues.

As of mid-March, federal scientists had identified 60 cases of the side effect, including nine that were fatal. That amounts to 3.23 blood clot cases per 1 million J&J shots. The problem is more common in women younger than 50, where the death rate was roughly 1 per million shots, according to Marks.

Marks said the FDA spent extra time analyzing the problem to be sure it wasn’t connected to a separate issue, such as women taking birth control medications that raise their risk of clotting.

The J&J vaccine will carry a starker warning about potential “long-term and debilitating health consequences” of the side effect.

Under the new FDA instructions, J&J’s vaccine could still be given to people who had a severe allergic reaction to one of the other vaccines and can’t receive an additional dose. J&J’s shot could also be an option for people who refuse to receive the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, and therefore would otherwise remain unvaccinated, the agency said.

A J&J spokesman said in an emailed statement: “Data continue to support a favorable benefit-risk profile for the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine in adults, when compared with no vaccine.”

The clotting problems first came up last spring, with the J&J shot in the U.S. and with a similar vaccine made by AstraZeneca that is used in other countries. At that time, U.S. regulators decided the benefits of J&J’s one-and-done vaccine outweighed what was considered a very rare risk — as long as recipients were warned.

COVID-19 causes deadly blood clots, too. But the vaccine-linked kind is different, believed to form because of a rogue immune reaction to the J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines because of how they’re made. Clots form in unusual places, such as veins that drain blood from the brain, and in patients who also develop abnormally low levels of the platelets that form clots. Symptoms of the unusual clots include severe headaches a week or two after the J&J vaccination — not right away — as well as abdominal pain and nausea.

Additionally, regulators added warnings about the blood clots and a rare neurological reaction called Guillain-Barré syndrome.

Source: Voice of America

The World Health Organization said Wednesday that the number of newly reported coronavirus cases and deaths globally continued to fall in the last week, continuing a decline that began in March.

In its weekly report on the pandemic, the U.N. health agency said there were about 3.8 million new infections and more than 15,000 deaths last week, a 17% and 3% drop on the week respectively. But those figures are believed to be a significant underestimate of COVID-19’s true toll as increasing numbers of countries abandon widespread testing and surveillance.

Still, WHO noted that cases rose by about a third in Africa and 13% in the Americas. There was also a nearly 70% jump in deaths reported in India, although that was attributed to delayed reporting rather than a recent surge of disease.

Last week, authorities in South Africa said they had noted an uptick in COVID-19 cases attributable to the BA.4 mutant of omicron, although they said it was too early to tell if that would result in a significant new wave of disease. Although the BA.4 version of COVID-19’s omicron variant appears more infectious than omicron, WHO said there was no evidence yet that it was leading to substantially higher rates of hospitalization or death.

Salim Abdool Karim, a public health expert at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, said that while only a “modest” rise in cases had been noted, South Africa was also in the middle of a holiday period and testing had dropped significantly. He said the cases were slowing and were “not following a rocket-like upward trajectory we would expect” in another spike of disease.

At a press briefing on Wednesday, WHO emergencies chief Dr. Michael Ryan said it was too soon to tell if COVID-19 was entering a seasonal pattern and warned against countries dropping all of their restrictions too quickly — as many in the West have done.

“The jury is still out as to how seasonal this virus will become,” he said, explaining that it wasn’t proven yet that COVID-19 would naturally drop off in the summer and that the world could yet face more unsettling variants. “If people are crowded together in conditions where a new variant is spreading, you will see high levels of transmission,” he said.

Meanwhile in China, authorities continued to crack down on cities, including Beijing, where more than 10% of the subway system was shut down in an effort to curb the virus’ spread, after authorities in the capital already closed down indoor dining, gyms and school classes.

In Shanghai, rigid and widely derided restrictions have led to shortages of food and medical aid along with a wider — though likely temporary — impact on the national economy. Desperate, outraged citizens have confronted authorities at barricades and online, screamed out of their windows and banged pots and pans in a sign of frustration and anger.

Source: Voice of America