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At India's Covid Mass Cremations - The New York Times
NEW DELHI — The first 36 corpses were placed in the designated concrete cremation pits and set ablaze by 10 in the morning. After that, all the extra bodies went to the muddy parking lot, for a mass ceremony later.
On Wednesday, ambulances doubling up as hearses lined up along the narrow street outside the Ghazipur crematory, on the city’s eastern border. There were no cremation pits in the parking lot, so hospital attendants in protective equipment carried out the dead and placed them near the scorch marks left behind by the previous day’s pyres.
Ram Karan Mishra, the presiding priest of the parking lot, walked among the corpses unmasked and unafraid.
“If I fall sick and die, I will go to heaven,” he said, before paraphrasing a popular reading of Hindu scripture: “Death is the only truth.”
It is an aphorism that India’s government would do well to remember.
Two months ago, India’s ruling party claimed that India had “defeated Covid under the able, sensible, committed and visionary leadership of Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi.” In January, Mr. Modi told the World Economic Forum in Davos that India “has saved humanity from a big disaster by containing corona effectively.”
Today, as a deadly second wave of the coronavirus ravages the country — with some 300,000 new infections daily and more than 21,400 dead over the past week — Mr. Modi and his party are downplaying the severity of the crisis, grossly underestimating the numbers of the sick and the dead.
Tushar Mehta, one of the government’s lead lawyers, recently claimed that “nobody in the country was left without oxygen.” Yet crippling shortages, of oxygen and hospital beds, have resulted in many deaths — including of a former ambassador who passed away in his car while waiting for care for hours outside a fancy private clinic.
The chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state and one of its poorest, has asked officials to seize the property of people he accuses of “spreading rumors” about shortages on social media. (The police in Amethi, a town in northern India, reportedly have brought criminal charges against one man for appealing on Twitter for an oxygen bottle for his sick grandfather.) The Indian government has ordered Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to take down dozens of posts criticizing its handling of the pandemic.
But the graphic images of mass cremations have cut through this wall of noise, misinformation and propaganda, capturing what epidemiologists call “excess mortality” in gruesome detail.
Everyone I know has lost someone to the virus. Many have lost several members of their family. But while you’re in lockdown, the dead don’t feel dead as much as disappeared.
So when my father called me on Tuesday to say that his uncle had died of Covid-19, that the uncle’s whole family was ill with the disease and that a cousin of my father’s was in an intensive care unit, I sensed the onset of a familiar numbness.
“I might go out for a drive,” I mumbled vaguely to my wife over dinner that night.
But as I got into my car the next morning and drove out to several crematories, I realized I just wanted to feel something.
*
The parking lot at Ghazipur is so small and the bodies are so closely packed that the pyres can be lit only all at once. So the corpses are placed on individual pyres through the day and then ignited in one big blaze in the evening. (Other crematories, especially those with pyres powered by electricity or gas, burn corpses from morning to sundown.)
Mr. Mishra, the priest, told me on Wednesday that for the past 10 days the crematory’s staff had been burning between 40 and 50 bodies every day in a space no larger than two tennis courts. The heat from the flames had scorched the leaves of the mango trees facing the pyres to a deep sooty black, while the tops of the canopies still shone a bright summer green.
A cremation site is a mostly male space. Many Hindus still believe that only a son has the right to light his parent’s funeral pyre. At Ghazipur, small groups of young men briefly put their grief on hold to divide themselves into teams and tend to various tasks.
One group runs off to stand in the queue to register the corpse of their loved one. Another dashes to the shed to get its allotted share of wood before all the good pieces run out. A third rushes with the body to reserve a spot on which to build a pyre. Everything in this pandemic — medicines, oxygen, ventilators, hospital beds — has been marked by scarcity born of the government’s total failure to plan for and procure essential supplies. The crematory is no different.
On Wednesday, Malvika Parakh, one of the few women at Ghazipur, stood alone amid this frenzy, the body of her father, Dr. Dattaraj Bhalchandra Parakh, at her feet. He was a plant pathologist at India’s National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources and was 65 years old when he died of Covid-19. He needed an I.C.U. bed with a ventilator, but Ms. Parakh could organize only a hospital bed with an oxygen cylinder.
“His oxygen stats didn’t come up,” she said. He had died at 7:30 that morning.
Mr. Parakh’s mother died a decade ago; most of her other relatives had Covid-19. A family member who had escorted her father’s body from the hospital morgue to the crematory had suddenly felt sick there. So here she was alone, a 32-year-old clinical psychologist standing by her father’s corpse in a parking lot-turned-crematory, trying to make sense of it all.
“It’s like one of those movies in which the world has been attacked, and there are bodies everywhere,” she said, as she looked at the rows and rows and rows and rows of pyres in various stages of completion. “You wait for the superhero to come and save everyone. Only in this case, there is no superhero.”
Instead of superheroes, there are people like Mr. Mehta, the government lawyer, who, in response to the Delhi authorities’ complaints that the Modi administration was not providing the city with enough oxygen, said in court, “Let’s try and not be a crybaby.”
*
Earlier on Wednesday, Bikki, a young mortuary assistant at a private hospital in the city, had told me about a new type of funeral: the “WhatsApp funeral.” (He wouldn’t give his full name because he isn’t supposed to talk to journalists.) When Covid-19 patients in the I.C.U. breathe their last breath, Bikki wheels the body down to the morgue.
There, he carefully wraps the corpse in a mortuary sheet, then in a plastic sheet, then in the distinctive white tarp that marks this death as a Covid-19 case. He secures everything with white micropore surgical tape.
“When a family member comes, we quickly unwrap the head so they can peek at the face and identify the body,” Bikki said. “Often, an immediate family member is either stranded abroad or isolated with Covid, so we put on a WhatsApp video call and show them the face.”
Then Bikki and his team place the body in an ambulance and accompany it to the crematory. I met Bikki and his colleagues at the crematory at Sarai Kale Khan, also in the city’s east, on Wednesday morning, before heading to Ghazipur. As we spoke, construction workers used cement and red brick to quickly build human-size platforms just outside the crematory’s walls.
“They can only do 10 bodies at a time inside the crematory,” Bikki said. “They are building space for another 50.” I counted 30 bodies in front of me. There were 20 more at the back, Bikki said.
One of Bikki’s attendants said that every night for the past week he had dreamed of the faces of the dead passing before his eyes in an endless parade.
“I’m pulling back the tarp, and I’m seeing their faces,” he said. “I’ve forgotten their names, but I’m seeing their faces.”
I know what he means.
Almost a month ago, I was called to the apartment on the floor just below mine. My neighbor, a retired Air Force officer in his 70s, had been in bed for a week with a high fever but had tested negative for the coronavirus. Now Uncle, as I called him, had lost consciousness.
We tried to revive him using a portable oxygen cylinder he had at his bedside. His elderly brother pointed his cellphone camera at the cylinder while someone on the other end of a WhatsApp call tried to tell us how to use it.
Auntie, Uncle’s wife, was in shock.
“Hello?” she said, taking Uncle’s hand in hers. “Hello! Say something.”
Slowly and inexorably, and then all at once, Uncle’s oxygen level fell to zero. The ambulance arrived soon after. He was declared dead at the hospital, and also Covid positive.
His children flew in from abroad, but they couldn’t meet their mother for two weeks: She, too, had tested positive and had to isolate herself. I attended a prayer meeting in his memory over Zoom.
After a week, I tried to get a Covid test but couldn’t because the labs were overwhelmed with samples. I isolated myself for one week, then another — no symptoms. My doctor suggested I continue my self-quarantine and watch out for symptoms rather than burden the city’s already stretched testing infrastructure.
Uncle’s face appears in front of me each time I pass his door. Sometimes I’m reminded of his wife holding his hand as he was dying.
“Hello,” Auntie says to him in my recollection. “Hello?”
*
It was now a little after 3 p.m. at Ghazipur, and most of the pyres had been built.
Wood is strictly rationed, so mourners began by fashioning what looked like a makeshift stretcher: First three short, heavy logs were laid on the ground parallel to one another; then longer, narrower planks were put on top, perpendicular to the logs.
Once the body was placed on the stretcher, mourners arranged sticks upright around it in a sort of wooden tent and stuffed that with bales of dry straw. The whole process took about 20 minutes.
From then until the evening, mourners would flit back and forth like birds building a nest: They would pick up stray bits of straw, a length of broken bamboo, a gnarled knot of wood that someone had discarded, and fit them into the gaps in the pyre.
A few pyres, including the one for Ms. Parakh’s father, were yet to be assembled. Ms. Parakh was on her phone with her relatives, trying to find someone who could help. A caretaker of the family’s was on his way, she said. “He’s been with us for over 20 years,” she said. “So the loss is as much his as ours.”
Things moved faster once Ms. Parakh’s family caretaker arrived; soon, the pyre was built.
It was almost 5 in the evening now, and the parking lot looked like a small, congested village of low, pointy-roofed homes. Mr. Mishra, the priest, made his way through the pyres chanting hymns for the dead.
A young woman sat weeping into the elbow of her protective suit. “My parents are waiting outside,” she told me, pointing to one wooden structure among the others. “It’s my husband. My husband. That’s my husband.”
The first pyre was lit, then another, and another. Slowly the sound of chants and prayers was silenced by the crackling of flames burning through dry wood. The heat rose in gusts, then in waves and then in a steady shimmering wall.
The fires blazing, I thought of everyone my family and friends had lost over the past year, all the funerals we could not attend, all the grief this city carries.
Ms. Parakh stood before her father’s pyre, talking into what looked like a WhatsApp group call on her phone.
Nearby, a middle-aged man in a striped T-shirt told me, pointing at a pyramid of flames, “That’s my mother.”
“Non-Covid case. It is a pity that she had to be cremated in the middle of all of this.”
He had another complaint: “Don’t mind, but the media is making it seem like bodies are being burned everywhere all the time to show the government in a bad light.”
Are we not in a parking lot among 50 burning pyres? I asked him.
“Yes,” he replied, “but the media should say, ‘These pyres are lit all at once, only once a day,’ so people get the correct impression.”
“Death is the only truth,” I said.
“Death is the only truth,” he said.
The blaze continued for several hours. Small groups of mourners began to leave, their eyes glistening with tears held back through the fear, the frustration, the heartbreak, the exhaustion, the heat, the horror and the sorrow. Ms. Parakh and her caretaker walked out, hailed down an auto-rickshaw and went home to the house she had once shared with her father.
“Remember to come by 8 tomorrow morning to collect the ashes,” Mr. Mishra told everyone. “We need to clear up in preparation for tomorrow’s cremations.”
Aman Sethi (@Amannama) is a journalist based in New Delhi and the author of “A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi.”
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April 30, 2021 at 09:14PM
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At India's Covid Mass Cremations - The New York Times
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Critics say India's leader could have prevented a devastating Covid crisis. He didn't - CNN
His country was on the brink of a humanitarian crisis. That day, India recorded more than 261,000 new coronavirus cases -- more than many countries have seen during the entire pandemic.
And it was only going to get worse. Each day since April 22, the country has reported more than 300,000 new cases -- at times, up to half of the daily cases reported globally. The capital New Delhi is now running out of wood for cremations. Hospitals are full and lacking oxygen. Only 2% of the population has been fully vaccinated. Foreign leaders are now rushing to India's aid.
While Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesman Narendra Taneja told CNN this week that responsibility for India's second wave belonged "first and foremost" to the government, he maintained the crisis could not have been foreseen -- despite countless countries being battered by second waves as new variants emerged globally.
Others in Modi's orbit have argued state governments are to blame for not imposing regional lockdowns and mismanaging their health care systems. Last weekend, Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said oxygen shortages at hospitals were a problem not of supply but distribution, which he claimed was the responsibility of state governments.
But many in India believe responsibility lies with Modi and his Hindu nationalist government, which not only didn't prepare for a second wave but also encouraged mass gatherings at Hindu festivals and political rallies, including in a closely contested battleground state.
"The government has failed us all," Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, the general secretary of opposition party Indian National Congress, said in a statement this week. "Even those of us who oppose and fight them could not have foreseen a complete abdication of leadership and governance at a time as devastating as this."
Modi's pandemic PR moves
Modi has been keen to tie himself to positive aspects of India's pandemic responses.
Vaccinated Indians receive a certificate with his face on it. The Covid relief fund, a charitable trust which gathers voluntary contributions to help support those affected, is named PM Cares -- an acronym for Prime Minister's Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations Fund. It also bears Modi's face on its official website.
With his name tied to these positive initiatives, a first wave that avoided the catastrophic caseload some experts feared, and a roaring pharmaceutical industry that had produced a homegrown vaccine, India's pandemic response was on track to be a PR win for Modi. The country was positioning itself to help other countries, having exported more than 66 million doses of vaccines, rather than be the one in need of aid.
"(India) has saved the world, entire humanity, from a major tragedy by effectively controlling coronavirus," Modi boasted at the World Economic Forum on January 28.
With many in India feeling the pandemic was over, there was a slower take-up of vaccines there than expected. About 300 million of India's 1.3 billion population are illiterate, meaning they may have had less ability to investigate what was going on for themselves.
"You can't blame people for thinking 'maybe the government knows best, maybe things are back to normal, maybe we should go out and live our normal lives,'" said Pradeep Taneja, an expert on Asian politics at the University of Melbourne and a fellow of the Australia India Institute.
But the pandemic was far from over. By February, cases were beginning to tick up. The BJP, however, still claimed India had "defeated Covid under the able, sensitive, committed and visionary leadership" of Modi.
On March 7, when the country reported about 18,000 new daily cases, the Health Minister Vardhan said India was in the "end game of the Covid-19 pandemic." And on March 30, a day before authorities reported more than 81,000 cases in a single day, Vardhan said: "The situation is under control."
Yet mutations had been circulating overseas for months, and epidemiologists in India believed another wave was coming. While the second wave was inevitable, its size took everyone by surprise, said Ramanan Laxminarayan, an economist and epidemiologist at Princeton University who is in New Delhi.
"I think there was a premature sense of optimism among many that was probably unwarranted and in hindsight has ended up being quite deadly," he said.
Asia politics expert Taneja said: "Modi was complacent, even arrogant in thinking that India had succeeded when more developed countries, countries with much stronger health systems ... were struggling."
Fury over the second wave
As it became clear India's cases were spiraling, Modi stayed largely silent -- and a second nationwide lockdown that some expected never came. In a national address last month, he actively advocated against a nationwide lockdown.
Modi's apparent inaction prompted a wave of anger, spurring hundreds to share hashtags on Twitter such as #ModiMustResign and #ModiMadeDisaster. This week, the national vice president of the Indian Medical Association, Navjot Dahiya, called Modi a "super spreader" for holding political rallies and allowing millions of pilgrims to descend on Haridwar in northern India, to celebrate the Hindu festival Kumbh Mela, local media reported.
"People expect their governments to assure them that they are in charge and taking care of things ... but the government is almost missing in action," Pradeep Taneja said. "Now that India is facing the worse crisis, in my lifetime, certainly, where is the Prime Minister?"
This sort of criticism of Modi is remarkable in a country where he is seen by many as a "saintly" figure who always acts in the national interest, according to Asim Ali, a researcher at the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research think tank. Modi's landslide 2019 re-election for a second five-year term gave him a sweeping mandate to push his Hindu nationalist agenda, in a country where 80% of the population is Hindu.
Despite this, experts believe Modi was too concerned about losing support to impose another nationwide lockdown.
When on March 24, 2020, Modi announced an unprecedented nationwide lockdown, India had only reported 519 cases. Buses and trains were brought to a halt, cross-state travel was banned, and most people weren't allowed out of their house unless they were buying groceries. Some called it the world's strictest lockdown.
That lockdown lasted months in some parts of the country. Although cases eventually fell after peaking in September, the elongated lockdown hurt India's millions of daily wage workers. The country's economy shrank by a record 24% in the second quarter, and GDP contracted by 6.9% overall last year.
This time, Modi has instead advocated for "micro containment zones," where restrictions are focused on areas of concern. It's been up to states to decide when and how to implement them. So far, at least eight of India's states and territories have some form of lockdown, ranging from a curfew in Karnataka and Gujurat states to a full lockdown in New Delhi.
Rajeev Sadanandan, a former bureaucrat in the health ministry of the state of Kerala and CEO of non-profit Health Systems Transformation Platform, said the reason for that was simple: "Last time, the lockdown was widely criticized as a failure" because it came at a huge economic cost and suffering to the poor.
The legislative elections held over the past month in Assam, West Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu states, and Puducherry union territory, may have also been a factor. Two of those are BJP-run, while one -- West Bengal -- was a closely contested state. When asked why BJP had continued to hold rallies, the party's spokesman Taneja said the "autonomous" Election Commission of India allowed election events to proceed.
Michael Head, a senior research fellow in global health at the University of Southampton's Clinical Informatics Research Unit, said aside from restricting gatherings and having clearer messaging, the government could have curtailed cross-country travel -- as it did during the first lockdown.
Lack of preparedness
As India enjoyed a relative period of calm at the beginning of this year, Modi could have been preparing his country for another battle with Covid-19, patching up health care gaps in preparation for a possible future outbreak.
Pradeep Taneja said there was "criminal negligence on the part of the government" to not prepare for another wave despite knowing other countries with better health care systems had experienced multiple waves.
Both the US and the UK were hit harder by their second waves than their first, despite warnings from experts. In the US, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said last June the US was preparing for a second wave by "filling the stockpile."
Despite local media in India reporting officials had warned of looming oxygen shortages in April last year, and then again in November, the government didn't appear to take action. Pradeep Taneja said it was "arrogant" for Modi to hold campaign rallies, rather than safeguarding the country's oxygen supplies.
The criticisms of the lack of preparedness in India's government, however, go beyond Modi.
In April, local media outlet The Caravan reported the country's national scientific taskforce -- a group intended to advise the central government on how to respond to the pandemic -- did not meet during February and March, as daily cases increased more than sixfold. CNN has contacted the chairman of the taskforce, V. K. Paul, for comment.
And India's health system has been underfunded for years. In 2018, India spent 3.5% of its GDP on health care, according to World Bank figures -- well below the world average of 10%, or the 17% spent in the US, which also battled to contain its Covid-19 outbreak. India has 0.9 physicians per 1,000 people, well under the world average of 1.6, or the US's 2.6, according to the World Bank.
As human rights activist Harsh Mander puts it, India had "starved" its public health systems for decades -- long before Modi's time in office.
Even before hospitals were overwhelmed, this impacted India's ability to monitor the virus. According to a paper published in February, India had only sequenced 0.06% of its reported cases. Its rate is lower than neighbors Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
Sadanandan, the former Kerela health official, said most parts of India did not have an adequate surveillance system to keep track of the outbreak. But to him, that was a state-level failing -- not a central government one -- as health is a state issue. "I'm not surprised by what has happened because we've seen this happen for many epidemics," he noted.
Was it all Modi's fault?
To critics, while state leaders have some blame to bear, ultimately if Modi is going to take credit for India's pandemic wins, he also needs to take responsibility for its pandemic failings.
His extraordinary popularity means his actions have power -- so underplaying the risk of the pandemic could have influenced how millions of his followers across the country acted. By the start of this year, many people in India stopped wearing masks and many social distancing measures had fallen by the wayside.
It's too early to know if the grim scenes India is witnessing will tarnish Modi's reputation. There are still three years before the next general election, and Modi has no clear challenger.
But Taneja expects to see a "significant reevaluation of the Modi government by the Indian public."
"No single person can be blamed for the catastrophe that India finds itself in. But if you are the Prime Minister, clearly the primary responsibility falls on you," he said.
Barkha Dutt, a Washington Post columnist whose father died from Covid a few days ago, said her father's last words were: "I'm choking. Please give me treatment." She felt angry and betrayed that as people across India battled the virus, politicians were still holding rallies. Dutt described Modi's government as "callousness," "tone deaf" and in "complete denial."
She said the health care system had clearly collapsed -- but that wasn't the fault of doctors, hospitals or frontline workers.
"We've been failed by the government that did not think to put in place a contingency plan for the second wave," she said. "Is anyone going to take accountability for the thousands that are dying?"
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May 01, 2021 at 09:22AM
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Critics say India's leader could have prevented a devastating Covid crisis. He didn't - CNN
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Why Fauci And Others Say Skipping 2nd Dose Of COVID Vaccine Is Unwise : Goats and Soda - NPR
Signs direct people arriving to get COVID-19 vaccines last week at the Mountain America Expo Center in Sandy, Utah. Spenser Heaps/Deseret News
Each week, we answer "frequently asked questions" about life during the coronavirus crisis. If you have a question you'd like us to consider for a future post, email us at goatsandsoda@npr.org with the subject line: "Weekly Coronavirus Questions."
I got my first dose, and now I feel invincible! Do I really need to get the second shot?
Dr. Anthony Fauci devoted his segment of Friday's White House press briefing to the topic of second doses and summed it up like this: "Get vaccinated, and if you're getting a two-dose regimen, make sure you get that second dose."
The good news is that the vast majority of Americans who got the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine are going back for their second dose. (Those who got Johnson & Johnson, of course, are home free after one shot.) New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that 92% are getting both jabs.
"As a society we want everyone to get two, but to have 92% is really good," says Dr. Jill Weatherhead, assistant professor of adult and pediatric infectious diseases at Baylor College of Medicine.
Compared with rates of some other two-dose vaccines, that 92% looks even better: Only 20% of those children who needed two doses of the influenza vaccine went back for the second jab, and just 75% of adults go back to get their second dose of the shingles vaccine.
More good news: Even if you miss your second appointment by more than the recommended 42-day window, you can still go back for it.
"If you were to miss the designated time interval, you should still get the second vaccine as soon as possible in order to build a stronger immune response," Weatherhead says. "The vaccine will still be available to you and still provide protection."
But the sooner you can get it after the initial waiting period, the better, she adds, because you're not fully protected in that interval period.
And here's where the more sobering news comes in: Fauci referred to a new report showing there's some confusion on the matter: Twenty percent believe that the vaccines provide strong protection before the second dose, and 36% were unsure.
"The people who are not yet fully immunized are now in the most dangerous phase of the pandemic," says Dr. Gregory Poland, head of the Vaccine Research Group at the Mayo Clinic and editor-in-chief of the journal Vaccine. "They are facing a much greater risk than at any other time. The reason for this is the variants that are circulating are far more transmissible, and the virus will look for those who are not protected."
In addition, he says, some of the treatments for COVID-19 don't work as well against the variants. A study published Friday, for example, shows that a single dose of Pfizer isn't protective against some of the key variants.
"The first dose is meant as a priming dose, and the second is a booster dose," Poland says. "When you get that second dose, you are keeping and improving the quality of your immunity. Until you get that second dose, you remain at risk."
Even though the overall efficacy rate after one dose was 80% in trials, "that will vary widely," Poland notes. "It won't be 80% in a frail 80-year-old. It might be in a healthy 25-year-old. It'll be nowhere near that in someone who is immunocompromised or on chemotherapy."
So why were some experts advocating for spreading out the first and second doses — didn't that work for the whole country of England?
When vaccines were in such high demand that the U.S. didn't have enough doses for everyone who wanted one, some experts — including Poland — championed the idea of getting as many first doses into arms as possible and then following up with second shots when they were available.
"Those conditions no longer hold," Poland says. "Our issue now is we have more vaccine than people who want it."
The only reason people may want to spread out doses is the belief that you could enhance your ultimate immune response, he says.
And while it's possible that could happen — research shows the immune response to the AstraZeneca vaccine was better after an interval of more than 12 weeks than it was at less than six weeks — it's completely theoretical for the approved U.S. vaccines, Poland says, and we don't have that luxury during a pandemic when the trade-off is not being protected between doses.
Ultimately, Weatherhead says, getting vaccinated — fully — is what will get us back to pre-COVID-19 normalcy.
And don't look for excuses to skip the second dose, the experts say. Fauci has noted that college students who get the first dose on campus can schedule their second one in their hometown if they've left school for the semester. And clinics and centers administering doses will do a mix-and-match, offering a second dose of Pfizer or Moderna to someone with proof of a first dose, even if it wasn't delivered on site.
Sheila Mulrooney Eldred is a freelance health journalist in Minneapolis. She's written about COVID-19 for many publications, including Medscape, Kaiser Health News, Science News for Students and The Washington Post. More at sheilaeldred.pressfolios.com. On Twitter: @milepostmedia
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May 01, 2021 at 02:23AM
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Why Fauci And Others Say Skipping 2nd Dose Of COVID Vaccine Is Unwise : Goats and Soda - NPR
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Indian teen reportedly gang-raped after being lured by promise of COVID vaccine - New York Post
A teenage girl in coronavirus-ravaged India was reportedly gang-raped for an hour after being lured into an abandoned house by being promised a vaccination.
Two suspects have been arrested and accused of luring the girl on the pretext of getting her inoculated in the northeast city of Patna earlier this week, The Sun reported.
“Accordingly, they took her to a deserted house in Jamunapur area and started misbehaving with her. When the victim showed resistance and attempted to flee, they … managed to tie her legs and hand,” an investigator told the India Times on condition of anonymity.
“They also stuffed a handkerchief in (her) mouth and raped her one by one,” he added. “The victim managed to free herself and reached home. She narrated her ordeal before her family members who approached local police.”
Recounting her ordeal, the victim said: “I begged before them to set me free, but they behaved like beasts and started touching my private parts before I could show some resistance,” The Sun reported.
“They slapped me repeatedly. They took me to a house and started grabbing me. Before I could try to run away from the spot, they tied my legs and hands to cover my mouth with a hanky,” she added.
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April 30, 2021 at 07:15PM
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Indian teen reportedly gang-raped after being lured by promise of COVID vaccine - New York Post
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The Latest: India sets record of 386,000 daily virus cases - Seymour Tribune
NEW DELHI — India has set another global record with 386,452 daily coronavirus cases.
The Health Ministry on Friday also reported 3,498 deaths in the last 24 hours, bringing the total to 208,330. Experts believe both figures are an undercount, but it’s unclear by how much.
India’s pandemic response has been marred by insufficient data. An online appeal — signed by over 350 scientists Friday afternoon — asks the government to release data about the sequencing of virus variants, testing, recovered patients and how people were responding to vaccines.
The appeal says the “granular” data on testing was inaccessible to non-government experts and some government experts too.
India has set a daily global record for more than a week with an average of nearly 350,000 infections. Daily deaths have nearly tripled in the past three weeks, reflecting the intensity of the latest surge.
India has reported more than 18.7 million cases since the start of the pandemic, second only to the United States. Globally, total deaths rank fourth.
THE VIRUS OUTBREAK:
— India sets another global record with more than 386,000 daily cases
— Pfizer-BioNTech seeks vaccine approval for children ages 12-15
— Brazil backs away from the virus brink, but remains at risk
— As virus engulfs India, diaspora watches with despair
Follow more of AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic and https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine
HERE’S WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING:
TOKYO — A Japanese cruise ship operator says a passenger on its “Asuka II” ship has tested positive for the coronavirus, causing it to return to its home port of Yokohama, near Tokyo.
The infected passenger is in stable condition and resting in a cabin that’s been isolated, the operator, Nippon Yusen, said in a statement. The infected passenger was traveling with just one companion and other passengers didn’t have close contact, according to Yokohama City officials.
All the passengers had tested negative before the trip. But results of tests conducted at Thursday’s boarding were available the next day, when the tour already has begun, Nippon Yusen said. The ship on a domestic tour departed Yokohama on Thursday and was headed to Aomori and Hokkaido in northern Japan.
All facilities on the ship have been closed and all passengers are asked to stay in their cabins, the operator said.
The case is a reminder of an outbreak on a luxury cruise ship Diamond Princess, where more than 700 of its 3,700 passengers got infected during a two-week quarantine on board at the Yokohama port. Thirteen people died.
Overall, Japan has totaled more than 580,000 confirmed cases and 10,200 confirmed deaths. Tokyo and three other metropolitan areas are currently under a state of emergency because of a surge of infections.
Pfizer and BioNTech have submitted a request for European Union drug regulators to extend the approval of the companies’ coronavirus vaccine to include children ages 12 to 15, a move that could offer younger and less at-risk populations in Europe access to the shots for the first time.
In a statement on Friday, the two companies said their submission to the European Medicines Agency was based on an advanced study in more than 2,000 adolescents that showed the vaccine to be safe and effective. The children will continue to be monitored for longer-term protection and safety for another two years.
BioNTech and Pfizer previously had requested their emergency use authorization with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration also be extended to children 12-15.
The COVID-19 vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech was the first one to be granted a greenlight by the EMA in December, when it was licensed for anyone age 16 and over across the 27-nation EU.
MADRID — Spanish health authorities say they have started giving Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine doses to participants in a government-led study involving young people who received a first dose of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.
Researchers from Spain’s Carlos III Institute want to study the effects of mixing vaccines from different manufacturers as they look for a second dose alternative following very rare brain blood clots linked to the vaccine produced by AstraZeneca.
Experts say the risks of the British=Swedish pharmaceutical company’s vaccine are less than the clot risk healthy women face while on birth control.
A total of 400 people were given the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for their second dose until Thursday, Spain’s Health Ministry said Friday, while 200 other people have been recruited as part of the study’s control group.
Five major hospitals across Spain are involved, and results are expected in mid-May.
There are about 2 million people under age 60 who received a first shot of the AstraZeneca vaccine before Spanish authorities halted its use in that age group.
Individuals who received their first dose on Feb. 8 should receive a second dose by May 8, according to the vaccine manufacturer’s recommendation. Authorities say that delaying the second shot is safe.
ISLAMABAD — Pakistan’s minister for planning and development warned his countrymen Friday that the number of critically ill COVID-19 patients is rapidly increasing and the next few weeks will be critical for the impoverished Islamic nation.
Asad Umar, who oversees Pakistan’s response to the coronavirus, said as many as 5,360 patients with COVID-19 were on oxygen support at hospitals. That is 57% more than the number of COVID-19 patients who were critically ill during Pakistan’s previous outbreak peak in June, he said.
Umar tweeted that Pakistan has managed the situation but “no system can cope if we allow the disease to spread rapidly”.
Pakistan on Friday reported more than 5,000 new confirmed cases and 131 virus-related deaths in 24 hours. Since last year, Pakistan has reported 17,680 deaths among 815,711 confirmed cases
The government earlier this week deployed troops in high-risk cities to stop people from violating social distancing rules.
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has said he will be forced to impose a lockdown if the positivity rate does not decrease.
LISBON, Portugal – Residents of Portugal will be able to go to cinemas, stores and restaurants on Saturday night as the country continues its gradual easing of a prolonged COVID-19 lockdown.
The land border with neighboring Spain will also reopen from Saturday after closing to non-essential travel in January, when Portugal was the country hit worst by the pandemic in the world by size of population.
Limits on indoor seating capacity at restaurants and cafes will remain from Saturday onward, however. The wearing of face masks is also mandatory, if social distancing is not possible, as is working from home.
Portugal’s virus incidence rate per 100,000 population over 14 days — a key pandemic measure — has fallen to 67 from 1,628 at the end of January.
Intensive care units in the country of 10.3 million people were treating more than 900 patients in early February, but now are looking after 88.
BUDAPEST— Hungary will loosen several COVID-19 pandemic restrictions for holders of a government-issued immunity card in the latest round of reopenings that the government has tied to the number of administered vaccines.
Beginning Saturday morning, card holders may access indoor dining rooms, hotels, theaters, cinemas, spas, gyms, libraries, museums and other recreational venues. Opening hours for businesses will also be extended to 11 p.m., and the start of an overnight curfew in place since November will be extended until midnight.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban says the reopening comes as Hungary reaches 4 million first-dose vaccinations, representing about 40% of the population.
“In the past, we defended ourselves by closing, thereby slowing the spread of the virus. But now we are on the attack,” he said. “The vaccine is like a bulletproof vest, the virus bounces off of it.”
Hungary is the only country in the European Union to use vaccines from China and Russia in addition to Western jabs. It has the second highest vaccination rate in the EU, but a devastating pandemic surge in the spring has given it the highest total death rate per 1 million inhabitants in the world, according to Johns Hopkins University.
ROME — Italy is nearing its goal of administering a half-million COVID-19 vaccines a day.
Premier Mario Draghi’s office said early Friday that provisional data indicates some 497,993 doses were administered on Thursday, a daily record.
Italy’s vaccine czar has aimed to have at least 500,000 shots administered per day by the end of April, to reach the goal of inoculating 80% of the population by September. Italy was the one-time epicenter of the outbreak in Europe and still has the world’s sixth highest confirmed death toll at 120,544, second only to Britain in Europe.
The vaccination campaign got off to a slow start because of delivery delays, logistical hiccups and organizational decisions that didn’t fully prioritize Italy’s oldest and most vulnerable residents. Some 300 people are still dying each day.
But the campaign has accelerated in recent weeks and to date some 19.4 million doses have been administered, with 5.75 million people receiving both jabs, according to Health Ministry data.
PARIS — France has announced its first confirmed cases of the virus variant that is sweeping over India, just as the French president outlined a national reopening plan after six months of virus restrictions.
The Health Ministry announced late Thursday night that three people tested positive for the new variant in the Bouches-du-Rhone and Lot et Garonne regions of southern France. All three had traveled to India, and are under medical observation.
Authorities are seeking to trace their contacts and investigating other suspected cases, the ministry said. It noted that the variant has been detected in at least six other European countries.
France last week stepped up virus controls for travelers arriving from India as well as some other countries where variants are spreading.
The announcement came as French President Emmanuel Macron laid out a four-stage reopening process aimed at boosting the economy, welcoming back tourists and lifting nearly all of France’s virus restrictions by June 30.
The vast majority of France’s virus cases now involve the more contagious, more dangerous variant first identified in Britain. France has reported one of the worlds highest virus death tolls, at more than 103,000 deaths.
SAN JOSE, Costa Rica — A record surge in COVID-19 infections in Costa Rica forced the government to announce new restrictions Thursday that will dial back the country’s economic reopening.
Health Minister Daniel Salas said that in the prior 24-hour period, Costa Rica had tallied 2,781 new infections, the highest daily total since the country’s first case was confirmed in March 2020. Fifteen people died of COVID-19 during the same period.
“Non-essential” businesses in central Costa Rica, including the capital, were told to close and stronger sanctions were announced for businesses violating reduced capacity rules for their venues.
The rapid increase in infections has stressed the country’s public health system. The intensive care units of public hospitals had reached 94% of their capacity.
Costa Rica will however continue in-person learning. Salas said that while infections had been identified at schools the vast majority were isolated and in total that represented only 6% of the country’s schools.
Costa Rica has confirmed more than 248,000 COVID-19 infections and more than 3,200 deaths.
SAO PAULO, Brazil — Brazil on Thursday became the second country to officially top 400,000 COVID-19 deaths, losing another 100,000 lives in just one month, as some health experts warn there may be gruesome days ahead when the Southern Hemisphere enters winter.
April was Brazil’s deadliest month of the pandemic, with thousands of people losing their lives daily at crowded hospitals.
The country’s Health Ministry registered more than 4,000 deaths on two days early in the month, and its seven-day average topped out at above 3,100. That figure has tilted downward in the last two weeks, to less than 2,400 deaths per day, though on Thursday the Health Ministry announced another 3,001 deaths, bring Brazil’s total to 401,186.
Local health experts have celebrated the recent decline of cases and deaths, plus the eased pressure on the Brazilian health care system — but only modestly. They are apprehensive of another wave of the disease, like those seen in some European nations, due to a premature resumption of activity in states and cities combined with slow vaccination rollout.
TRENTON, N.J. — Pfizer says it will soon start shipping its two-dose COVID-19 vaccine in smaller packages meant to better suit U.S. clinics, pharmacies and other medical providers in remote and rural areas.
The new package holds 25 vials with six doses each, for a total of 150 doses. Pfizer’s boxes now contain trays of 195 vials with nearly 1,200 doses.
“In the U.S., we’re progressing away from mass vaccination, so the smaller package size would be helpful,” Tanya Alcorn, Pfizer’s head of supply chain, told The Associated Press on Thursday.
The company will begin shipping vaccines in the smaller packages in the U.S. at the end of May. In other countries scaling up their vaccination campaigns, Pfizer will continue shipping the larger boxes, Alcorn said.
The drugmaker also is working on new vaccine formulations for easier distribution, including one designed to remain stable for months in powder form.
MEXICO CITY — A study suggests that as many as one-third of Mexicans may have been exposed to the coronavirus by the end of last year.
Coronavirus antibodies were found in 33.5% of samples from blood banks and medical laboratory tests in Mexico unrelated to COVID-19. The random samples were taken between February and December 2020.
The levels varied according to regions. The highest exposure rate was found in the northwest, from Baja California to Chihuahua, at 40.7%. The lowest came in western states, at 26.6%.
In general, areas along the U.S. border had higher rates.
Victor Borja of the Mexican Social Security Institute says the nationwide average may have risen as much as 10 percentage points following a steep rise in cases in January.
But even if the exposure rate is currently as much as 43.5%, Borja stresses that the country is still far from herd immunity.
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After a Year of Loss, South America Suffers Worst Covid-19 Death Tolls Yet - The New York Times
If the world doesn’t stop the region’s surging caseload, it could cost us all that we’ve done to fight the pandemic, one health official said.
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — In the capital of Colombia, Bogotá, the mayor is warning residents to brace for “the worst two weeks of our lives.”
Uruguay, once lauded as a model for keeping the coronavirus under control, now has one of the highest death rates in the world, while the grim daily tallies of the dead have hit records in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Peru in recent days.
Even Venezuela, where the authoritarian government is notorious for hiding health statistics and any suggestion of disarray, says that coronavirus deaths are up 86 percent since January.
As vaccinations mount in some of the world’s wealthiest countries and people cautiously envision life after the pandemic, the crisis in Latin America — and in South America in particular — is taking an alarming turn for the worse, potentially threatening the progress made well beyond its borders.
Last week, Latin America accounted for 35 percent of all coronavirus deaths in the world, despite having just 8 percent of the global population, according to data compiled by The New York Times.
Latin America was already one of the world’s hardest hit regions in 2020, with bodies sometimes abandoned on sidewalks and new burial grounds cut into thick forest. Yet even after a year of incalculable loss, it is still one of the most troubling global hot spots, with a recent surge in many countries that is even more deadly than before.
The crisis stems in part from predictable forces — limited vaccine supplies and slow rollouts, weak health systems and fragile economies that make stay-at-home orders difficult to impose or maintain.
But the region has another thorny challenge, health officials say: living side-by-side with Brazil, a country of more than 200 million whose president has consistently dismissed the threat of the virus and denounced measures to control it, helping fuel a dangerous variant that is now stalking the continent.
The length of Latin America’s epidemic makes it even harder to fight. The region has already endured some of the strictest lockdowns, longest schools closures and largest economic contractions in the world.
Inequality, a longstanding scourge that had been easing before the pandemic, is widening once again, and millions have been tossed back into the precarious positions they thought they had escaped during a relative boom. Many are venting their anger in the streets, defying official pleas to stay home.
“They’ve taken so much from us that we’ve even lost our fear,” read a sign held by Brissa Rodríguez, 14, at a protest with thousands of others in Bogotá on Wednesday.
Experts worry that Latin America is on a path to becoming one of the globe’s longest-haul Covid patients — leaving public health, economic, social and political scars that may run deeper than anywhere else in the world.
“This is a story that is just beginning to be told,” Alejandro Gaviria, an economist and former health minister of Colombia who leads the nation’s Universidad de los Andes, said in an interview.
“I have tried to be optimistic,” he also wrote in a recent essay. “I want to think that the worst is over. But that turns out, I believe, to be counter-evident.”
If Latin America fails to contain the virus — or if the world fails to step in to help it — new, more dangerous variants may emerge, said Dr. Jarbas Barbosa of the Pan-American Health Organization.
“This could cost us all that the world is doing” to fight the pandemic, he said.
He urged leaders to work as fast as possible to provide equal access to vaccines for all countries.
“The worst-case scenario is the development of a new variant that is not protected by current vaccines,” he said. “It’s not just an ethical and moral imperative, but a health imperative, to control this all over the world.”
The spread of the virus in the region can be attributed at least in part to a variant called P.1 first identified in the Brazilian city of Manaus late last year.
Manaus, the largest city in the Brazilian Amazon, was devastated by the virus in mid-2020. But the second wave there was worse than the first.
While the data is far from conclusive, initial studies indicate that P.1 is more transmissible than the initial virus, and is associated with a higher death rate among younger patients and patients without pre-existing conditions. It can also reinfect people who have already had Covid, though it’s unclear how often that occurs.
P.1 is now present in at least 37 countries, but appears to have spread most thoroughly through South America, said William Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard University.
Across the region, doctors say that the patients coming into hospitals are now far younger and far sicker than before. They’re also more likely to have had the virus already.
In Peru, the National Health Institute documented 782 cases of likely reinfection in the first three months of 2021 alone, a surge from last year. Dr. Lely Solari, an infectious disease doctor with the institute, called this “a very significant underestimate.”
Official daily death tolls have exceeded previous records in recent days in most of South America’s biggest countries. Yet scientists say that the worst is yet to come.
The director of epidemiology in Colombia’s health ministry, Julián Fernández, said it was likely that variants — including P.1 and another variant first found in Britain last year — would be the dominant strains of the virus within two or three months.
The region is not prepared. Colombia has been able to issue a first vaccine to just 6 percent of its population, according to Our World in Data, a project at the University of Oxford. Several of its neighbors have achieved half that, or less.
By contrast, the United States, which bought up vaccines ahead of other countries, is at 43 percent.
Peru, the fifth most populous country in Latin America, has emerged as a microcosm of the region’s mounting struggles.
Like many of its neighbors, Peru made significant economic progress in the last two decades, using raw material exports to lift income, shrink inequality and raise middle-class dreams. But the boom brought few stable jobs, led to little health care investment and failed to contain the region’s other scourge — corruption.
The virus arrived in Peru in March last year, like much of Latin America, and the government moved quickly to lock down the country. But with millions of people working in the informal sector, enforcing quarantines became unsustainable. Cases rose quickly and hospitals soon fell into crisis. By October, the country became the first in the world to record more than 100 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants.
The actual death toll is far higher, because many of the dead have not been included in the official count of coronavirus patients.
Then, mercifully, new cases began to subside. A government study in the capital, Lima, found that 40 percent of residents had coronavirus antibodies. Officials said the population had reached such a high level of immunity that a second wave might not be so bad. The government opted not to impose a lockdown during Christmas and New Year’s celebrations.
But in January, just as the United States and other nations began robust, if sometimes chaotic, vaccine rollouts, a second surge began in Peru — and this wave has been even more brutal than the first.
Last month was the deadliest of the pandemic by far, according to official data, with health experts blaming the increase on holiday gatherings, crippled health systems and the new variants.
Vaccines arrived in Peru in February, followed quickly by anger after some politically connected people jumped the line to get vaccinated first. More recently, multiple government agencies have begun investigating whether some health workers have asked for bribes in exchange for access to scarce hospital beds.
“It was that or let her die,” said Dessiré Nalvarte, 29, a lawyer who said she helped pay about $265 to a man who claimed to be the head of the intensive care unit at a hospital in order to get treatment for a family friend who had become sick.
The crisis has plunged nations like Peru into grief, ripping at the social fabric. This month, thousands of poor and newly poor Peruvians began to occupy empty swaths of land in southern Lima, with many saying that they were doing so because they had lost their livelihoods amid the pandemic.
Rafael Córdova, 50, a father of three, sat on a square drawn in the sand that marked his claim to land overlooking the Pan-American Highway and the Pacific Coast.
Before the pandemic, he explained, he was a supervisor in the human resources department of a local municipality, and had a grip — or so he thought — on stability.
Then, in May, he became sick with Covid and was fired. He believes his bosses let him go because they feared that he would sicken others, or that his family would blame them if he died.
He now struggles to pay for minutes on the one family phone so that his children can do class work. Meals are small. Debts are mounting. “Today I went to the market and bought a bag of fish bones and made soup,” he said.
He says he has lost an aunt, a sister-in-law and a cousin to Covid, as well as friends. In June, his wife, who had also had Covid, gave birth to twins prematurely. One daughter died days after birth, he said, and the second died about a month later. He had no money for a proper burial.
“I left the hospital with my daughter in a black plastic bag and got in a taxi and went to the cemetery,” he said. “There was no Mass, no wake. No flowers. Nothing.”
When he heard about the occupation, he said he was three months behind on rent and feared eviction. So he made a run for the hill, pitching a tent that became his new home.
“The only way they’ll get us out of here,” he said, “is if we’re dead.”
A week later, the police arrived, set off tear gas — and booted him and thousands of others from their camp.
Reporting was contributed by Isayen Herrera in Caracas, Venezuela; Sofía Villamil in Bogotá, Colombia; and Daniel Politi in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
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