The authorities in Malaysia have barred people from venturing more than about six miles from home. Covid-19 patients are spilling into the hallways of overcrowded hospitals in Argentina. In Nepal, 40 percent of coronavirus tests are positive, suggesting that the virus is racing through the population.
All three nations are experiencing their worst coronavirus outbreaks since the start of the pandemic, joining countries across Asia and South America where infections have surged to record levels — a stark counterpoint to the optimism felt in the United States as summer dawns.
Deep into the second year of the pandemic, the emergence of coronavirus variants and the global gaps in access to vaccines have plunged parts of the world back into the anxious stages of Covid-19. Argentina, Malaysia South Africa and others have reimposed lockdowns. Thailand and Taiwan, which kept the virus in check for much of 2020, have closed schools and nightspots in the face of new waves.
Scores are dying daily in Paraguay and Uruguay, which now have the highest reported fatality rates per person in the world, according to a New York Times database. India’s catastrophic second wave has killed more than 3,000 people every day for the past month, according to official statistics, and experts believe the true toll is far greater.
The reasons for the surges vary across countries, but together they reflect “the challenge of maintaining vigilance against a highly transmissible, airborne virus for long periods of time, balanced against economic and social considerations,” said Claire Standley, an assistant research professor at the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University.
Globally, new infections have declined from their peak of more than 800,000 recorded cases a day in late April. Still, half a million people are reported infected with the virus daily. And countries that have kept cases low for more than a year, such as Australia and Singapore, are seeing small pockets of infections that have prompted partial lockdowns and delayed plans to reopen borders.
The only way to stamp out such surges, experts say, is to rapidly increase vaccinations, which have raced ahead in the United States and Europe while the rest of the world falls behind. In North America, 60 vaccine doses have been administered for every 100 people, compared with 27 in South America and 21 in Asia, according to New York Times data. In Africa, the rate is two doses per 100 people.
“Global vaccine access has been woefully inequitable, with a handful of high-income countries dominating procurement agreements and receipt of initial batches,” Dr. Standley said.
The gap leaves many countries vulnerable.
In South America, countries that imposed lockdown measures found that they did not work as well as in the United States and Europe at stopping the spread of the virus because many low-income laborers needed to continue to work, said Matthew Richmond, a sociologist at the London School of Economics. As new outbreaks emerge, the region’s lack of investment in medical care has put health systems at risk of collapse and delayed the rollout of vaccines, he said.
“The combined effect of social inequality and weak state capacity have meant these countries have not been able to reduce transmission, treat those with severe symptoms or vaccinate populations at the same scale or speed” as in the United States and Europe, Dr. Richmond said.
Even if rich countries shut off travel with countries where the virus remains endemic, border closings could mean little as long as the virus circulates widely. And new variants could emerge that are more resistant to vaccines.
“The ongoing devastation being wreaked by Covid-19 in the Global South should be reason enough for the rich countries to want to enable a quick and cheap global vaccine rollout,” Dr. Richmond said. “If it’s not, enlightened self-interest should lead them to the same conclusion.”
A 41-year-old man in China’s eastern Jiangsu Province is the first known human to be infected with a strain of bird flu known as H10N3, China’s National Health Commission said on Tuesday — a development that experts said merited close monitoring because of an underlying continued risk of pandemic flus.
Avian viruses do not typically spread among humans, but they can pose a danger to humans if they mix with a human virus, said Raina MacIntyre, the head of the biosecurity program at the Kirby Institute at the University of New South Wales in Australia.
“If someone has human flu and is infected with bird flu, the two viruses can swap genetic material,” she said. “That’s why you see the concern for pandemic flu arising in countries where humans and livestock have very close contact.”
The Health Commission’s announcement said that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission in the Jiangsu case. Contact tracing and surveillance have not uncovered any other infections, officials said.
Influenza viruses differ from coronaviruses, and the World Health Organization is working with the Chinese government to monitor the case, according to a statement from the W.H.O. division in Beijing.
The man began feeling feverish at the end of April and was hospitalized on April 28, the Chinese government statement said. On May 28, genome sequencing by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention determined that he had been infected with H10N3.
The government announcement did not say how the man had been infected, and the W.H.O. said the source of infection was still unknown. The man’s condition has stabilized, and he is ready to be discharged, the government said.
Professor MacIntyre said that people who are usually infected by avian viruses are those who are in prolonged close contact with the birds, such as poultry handlers.
The W.H.O. said that H10N3 had “been detected periodically in birds in live bird markets as early as 2002,” but the virus is unlikely to kill birds or lead to many signs of illness.
“As long as avian influenza viruses circulate in poultry,” the organization said, “sporadic infection of avian influenza in humans is not surprising, which is a vivid reminder that the threat of an influenza pandemic is persistent.”
NEW DELHI — The Indian government, still trying to control a devastating second wave of the coronavirus, has canceled national exams for 12th graders, affecting the fates of more than a million students.
The decision to call off the exams, which had been postponed from the spring, came late on Tuesday at a meeting of senior officials chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It showed that concerns around the spread of infections remain serious even as India’s official case count has dropped significantly from its peak a month ago.
“Students, parents and teachers are naturally worried about the health of the students in such a situation,” Mr. Modi said in a statement. “Students should not be forced to appear for exams in such a stressful situation.”
After India recorded more than 400,000 cases a day a month ago, the most in any country since the pandemic began, new infections there have dropped by more than half. Yet India is still averaging more than 3,000 deaths per day, a number that experts believe is a significant undercount. On Wednesday, the government reported 132,788 new cases and 3,207 deaths from the virus.
Most states remain under some form of lockdown, and hardly any of India’s young people have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19. The Indian government only last month opened vaccinations to people under 45, and a shortage of doses has meant that most states have made little progress in inoculating the young. About 12 percent of people in the country have received at least one dose of a vaccine, according to a New York Times database.
“This is the right step,” said Renu Singh, the principal of Amity International School in Noida, a suburb of New Delhi. “Most important is the safety, security and health of the child. Children are not vaccinated. If they come to school, they will be exposed.”
Antra Rajpoot, a 12th grader at the school, said that the idea of sitting for an exam with large numbers of students felt “really unsafe.” The government’s decision “definitely brought about a sense of certainty, safety, and it’s a very happy decision.”
India’s outbreak has taken a huge toll on teachers. In the state of Uttar Pradesh, teachers were assigned to serve as poll workers for a local election held as cases were surging. A teacher’s union says that 1,600 educators on poll duty died of the virus, although local officials dismissed those reports, saying that only three had died.
Without the exams, which help determine placement in colleges and professional schools, Mr. Modi’s office said that the Central Board of Secondary Education, which administers the tests, would come up with an alternate method of assessing student performance.
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — To prevent the worst of Covid devastation, Sri Lanka imposed lockdowns and stopped flights from abroad for nearly a year, battering the economy and drying up a vital tourism industry.
For animals in the island nation’s zoos, however, it’s been a jolly time.
Amid the absence of visitors, animal births in the zoos rose 25 percent over the past year, according to Ishini Wickremesinghe, the director general of Sri Lanka’s Department of National Zoological Gardens. Particularly striking, she said, is that several animals that do not have a history of breeding in local zoos have given birth.
“Animals are actually having a less-stress and relaxed time with no people around,” she said.
Sri Lanka closed its zoos in March 2020, briefly reopening to visitors earlier this year before closing again as coronavirus infections rose. Among the animals that have bred for the first time are a black swan, a white peacock and a nilgai, the largest antelope in Asia. Others that have produced offspring include an Arabian oryx, a black duck, a scimitar-horned oryx and a zebra.
“We also have three new lion cubs,” Ms. Wickremesinghe said. “After years, the animals really got a good break.”
The cubs are about six months old now. With no visitors around, adult lions are free to roam around their enclosures and consort with potential mates.
At Sri Lanka’s wildlife parks, officials could not confirm whether breeding was on the rise, but animals are “definitely stress-free,” said Manoj Vidyaratne, the warden of Yala National Park on the island’s southeastern coast. “Usually, we see about 400 vehicles in the park daily,” he said, “but this time there is no one.”
Creatures in captivity elsewhere, too, have taken advantage of the pandemic to procreate. Last April, two giant pandas successfully mated at the Hong Kong zoo, which was closed to visitors due to the coronavirus.
Sri Lanka, an early success story in containing the spread of the virus, has experienced a recent surge and is recording nearly 3,000 new daily infections, according to a New York Times database. The pandemic has worsened the economic woes of a country that was already struggling to recover from terrorist attacks in 2019.
Sri Lanka’s zoos, which house about 4,000 species, are among the tourism-dependent country’s major attractions, drawing more than three million visitors a year before the pandemic.
Despite the impact on revenue, Ms. Wickremesinghe said she hoped to keep the zoos closed until cases drop, fearing that primates could catch Covid-19 from an infected visitor. “We don’t know what to do if that happens,” she said.
The Kroger supermarket in Yorktown, Va., is in a county where mask wearing can be casual at best. Yet for months the store urged patrons to cover their noses and mouths, and almost everyone complied.
That changed in mid-May after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised vaccinated people in the United States that they could go maskless in most indoor settings. The next week, the store told employees that they could no longer ask customers to cover their faces. So mask use plummeted, and the workers’ anxiety shot up.
“We just feel like we’re sitting ducks,” said Janet Wainwright, a meat cutter at the store.
More than a dozen retail, hospitality and fast-food workers across the country interviewed by The New York Times expressed alarm that their employers had used the C.D.C. guidance to make masks optional for vaccinated customers.
The effect of the change appears to be most acute in politically mixed or conservative areas, where,
workers said, employer policies were often the only thing standing between them and customers who were neither masked nor vaccinated. As a result, they feel far more exposed now.
When New York City’s school system shuttered last spring, the one million students who had flooded its classrooms were sent home. Tens of thousands of teachers had just a few days to prepare for online classes. But there was a vast force of essential workers who never left the city’s 1,800 school buildings.
“This is my job — we had to be here,” said Theresa DiCristi, a custodial engineer in downtown Manhattan. She and her team cleaned the school’s hallways and cafeteria until they were sparkling, and distributed masks and hand sanitizer to families who came to pick up hot lunches.
In the Bronx, Robert Williams oversaw a team of carpenters who spent weeks in vacant school gymnasiums, building coffins for the hundreds of New Yorkers dying of the virus. By the summer, Mr. Williams, who manages maintenance work for all Bronx schools, was working every night and through the weekends to make sure school buildings were safe to welcome children back in the fall.
At the Star Academy in Brooklyn, even when some students spiked fevers over 100 degrees in his office or when weekly testing in schools revealed the occasional positive case, Cam Hawkins, a school nurse, knew he had to project calm. “First of all, your child is fine,” he’d say when he called parents.
Stephen Ali, a school lunch helper in the Bronx, knows how hard it is to teach a student who hasn’t had enough to eat, so he would give them more. During the pandemic, he and the school’s cook prepared meals for anyone in the community who needed them.
Demand for bikes has soared during the pandemic. More people are pedaling to stay fit after long lockdowns or to avoid crowded trains and buses. More bike lanes have been added to cities like Barcelona, Berlin, Lisbon and Paris.
And it has been a boon to northern Portugal, home to a heavy concentration of manufacturers with ties to bicycles. About 60 companies in the region assemble bikes or make their parts and accessories.
The country of 10 million people — a little more than 2 percent of the European Union’s population — produces nearly a quarter of the bloc’s bicycles. (The United States is a secondary market for Portuguese bikes and components, accounting for about $1.2 million in exports in 2019.)
The industry has turned into one of the nation’s fastest-growing employers.
As demand has escalated, the bicycle makers have run into the same supply-chain issues that have hurt other industries, holding up production because parts from Asia are missing. That has spurred additional investment in the region, including what is believed to be Europe’s first factory to make carbon-fiber bike frames.
“One lesson from the pandemic is that you need to be nearer to your production,” said Emre Ozgunes, the general manager of Carbon Team, the factory’s owner. “Because if everything shuts down, you can probably still drive to Portugal to pick up frames, but not to China.”
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