Some experts believe that most countries are underreporting covid-19 fatalities, in part due to insufficient testing or to conceal the true extent of domestic outbreaks. Scientists at the University of Washington estimated last month that the actual global death toll from the pandemic was more than twice as high as officially reported.
Here are some significant developments:
U.K. reports no new covid-19 deaths for first time since March 2020
Britain on Tuesday announced no new deaths from covid-19 within 28 days of a positive test for the first time since March 2020 amid an aggressive national vaccination campaign.
The news comes with the caveat that Monday was a British bank holiday, which may have delayed reporting new fatalities. The country’s number of reported infections also has risen in the past few weeks, and health officials urged continued caution.
“The vaccines are clearly working — protecting you, those around you and your loved ones,” U.K. Health Secretary Matt Hancock told reporters. “But despite this undoubtedly good news, we know we haven’t beaten this virus yet, and with cases continuing to rise please remember hands, face, space and let in fresh air when indoors, and of course make sure when you can you get both jabs.”
Britain has one of the world’s highest coronavirus vaccination rates, with about 59 percent of its population at least partially vaccinated. By comparison, roughly 51 percent of the U.S. population has gotten at least one dose of a vaccine.
WHO renames coronavirus variants with ‘non-stigmatizing’ Greek letters
Say goodbye to the “Indian,” “South African” and “British” coronavirus variants.
According to the World Health Organization, they’re the Delta, Beta and Alpha variants now.
The global health body unveiled its new naming system Monday, saying that it would use letters from the Greek alphabet as “non-stigmatizing labels” for new variants.
The WHO’s guidance is intended for the general public: Scientists will continue using traditional (and highly technical) naming conventions. Those names haven’t fully caught on in the wider discourse because nonscientists can easily get tripped up when trying to remember the difference between the B.1.1.7 strand, which was first detected in Britain, or the B.1.617.2 variant initially documented in India.
Greek letters are easier to pronounce and “more practical to be discussed by non-scientific audiences,” the WHO said in its announcement.
All White House staff to return to work on campus in July
All White House staff will return to work on campus in July as the Biden administration continues to phase out remote working prompted by the coronavirus pandemic.
The timeline was outlined in an email sent to White House personnel Tuesday morning from the White House Office of Management and Administration. According to the email, obtained by The Washington Post, all aides at the White House and in the Office of the Vice President currently working remotely will return to the White House campus between July 6 and July 23.
The directive does not apply to employees who work elsewhere in the Executive Office of the President, who will return at an undetermined later time, according to the email, which was first reported by Axios.
The White House is making exceptions for personnel with “an extenuating circumstance that makes working in person not possible” and allowing them to work remotely “until those circumstances change,” according to the email. The transition for staff also require some shuffling for White House aides who have already been reporting to work in-person. The email notes that personnel working out of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building may be asked to move to a new permanent seat.
“In order to welcome all staff back to campus, we must maximize our EEOB office space, and this requires rearranging some offices and desk assignments,” the email read.
Sinovac earns WHO approval as vaccine gets boost from Brazilian study
The WHO announced Tuesday that it had authorized the China-developed Sinovac vaccine for emergency use as a new study suggests that the vaccine may be more effective at preventing symptomatic infection and death from covid-19 than expected.
Deaths fell by 95 percent in Serrana, a town in the covid-ravaged São Paulo state, in the five weeks after most of its adult residents were given Sinovac shots, according to a study by Brazil’s Butantan Institute. Meanwhile, symptomatic infections in the town, which has a population of about 45,000, dropped by 80 percent and hospitalizations decreased by 86 percent.
The pandemic was not successfully managed in Serrana until the Sinovac doses were widely administered.
The death and case figures in neighboring localities were significantly higher, said Butantan Institute Director Dimas Covas, according to Bloomberg News. São Paulo has been badly affected by the coronavirus variant that emerged in Brazil, which the World Health Organization has since named “Gamma.”
Previous trials had given the vaccine an efficacy rate ranging from 50.4 percent in Brazil — barely above the 50 percent threshold that governments find usable — to more than 80 percent in Turkey. Singapore has received doses of the vaccine but not approved it for use, citing limited data.
The vaccine is largely used by developing economies and the study will be a big boost to vaccination efforts in Brazil, which has the third-highest case rate in the world. On Sunday, it reported more than 43,000 new infections, taking its case total to about 16.5 million.
Amid coronavirus crisis, China finds possible first human case of H10N3 bird flu strain
A man in China’s Jiangsu province, northwest of Shanghai, has become the first person known to have been infected with the H10N3 strain of bird flu, the Chinese government announced Tuesday.
China’s National Health Commission emphasized in a statement that there was no evidence that the strain can spread from human to human, adding that the risk of a significant outbreak was “very low.”
The patient, a 41-year-old man who lives in the city of Zhenjiang, was hospitalized April 28 after having a fever, the National Health Commission said. He was diagnosed with H10N3 a month later. Though the man remains under medical supervision, his condition was described as stable and meeting the standards for discharge. It was not clear from the statement how he caught the virus.
Sixty percent of D.C.-area students haven’t learned in a school building since March 2020
In the diverse and expansive Washington region, around 40 percent of its roughly 700,000 public school students are learning at least once a week in a school building. The other 420,000 students have been entirely remote since the coronavirus pandemic closed schools in March 2020, according to data from the region’s school systems.
The percentage of students reporting to a classroom in the two school districts that are majority Black and low-income — D.C. public schools and Prince George’s County public schools — is even lower, with just 28 percent of students learning in person part of the week.
Across the Potomac River, Arlington has the highest population of students learning in person — nearly 60 percent at the end of May. Sixty-nine percent of White students are learning in-person, but just 41 percent of Black students have returned.
Anthony Fauci’s emails offer a peek into his world in the early days of the coronavirus crisis
As the coronavirus pandemic engulfed the world last spring, Science magazine quoted a top Chinese health official saying that the United States and other Western nations were making a “big mistake” by not telling people to mask up. The official, George Gao, worried that the comment might upset his longtime friend Anthony S. Fauci, Washington’s leading expert on infectious diseases. So amid the deepening crisis, Gao reached out to clear the air.
“I saw the Science interview, how could I say such a word ‘big mistake’ about others? That was journalist’s wording. Hope you understand,” Gao, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote to Fauci in a March 28 email. "Lets work together to get the virus out of the earth.”
“I understand completely. No problem,” Fauci wrote back. “We will get through this together.”
Fauci’s actions during that period and beyond remain an intense focus for many Americans and political leaders. Now serving his seventh president, Fauci, 80, is helping to craft Biden’s pandemic strategy, and many Republicans accuse him of playing a key role in Trump’s loss in the November election.
During daily televised briefings at the White House, Fauci emerged as an at times reluctant — and polarizing — media star: To Trump supporters, he was a contrarian who seemed to undermine the president at every turn, while others viewed him as a reassuring voice of reason. The emails show that he was inundated with correspondence from colleagues, hospital administrators, foreign governments and random strangers — about 1,000 messages a day, he says at one point — writing to seek his advice, solicit his help or simply offer encouragement.
Two men are charged with stealing 192 donated ventilators bound for El Salvador
It was the dead of night when a white tractor truck pulled off a palm-lined road into the quiet parking lot of a South Florida warehouse. It rolled in with nothing in tow, but about one hour later, the truck drove off hauling a 53-foot trailer, an eagle emblazoned on the cab’s side clearly visible on a security camera.
It was a seemingly innocuous scene. But that trailer — which was longer than a school bus — was loaded with $3 million worth of government-owned ventilators bound for El Salvador, a donation from the U.S. Agency for International Development to aid the Central American country’s pandemic response. And it had just been stolen.
The August heist set off a sprawling, multiagency investigation of one of the most unusual and audacious crimes of the coronavirus crisis, culminating late last week in the arrest of the second of two suspects.
A new national model? Barbershops offer coronavirus shots in addition to cuts and shaves.
Reginald Alston never expected to get a coronavirus vaccine and never expected anyone would change his mind about it.
But his best friend, a hair salon owner, kept telling him he was being shortsighted and maybe even a little bit selfish. What about his niece and her newborn who live with him? How would he feel if they became sick? Also, his job as a contractor and painter meant he was often going into other people’s homes. Didn’t he want to be protected?
By the time that friend, Katrina Randolph, told him about the nearby barbershop hosting a vaccination clinic, and offered to drive him there, Alston, 57, was far along on the journey to changing his mind.
“She really influenced me to get it,” he acknowledged, standing on the sidewalk outside the Hyattsville, Md., barbershop earlier this month after getting immunized. “I listen to Katrina. I know she wants me to be around.”
Turkey relaxes some coronavirus restrictions as infections decline
The government will relax nighttime and weekend curfews and allow gyms, cafes, restaurants and other businesses to open until 9 p.m., President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a televised address Monday.
A shorter nighttime curfew would remain in place, he said, as well as full lockdowns on Sunday to keep case numbers down. Most bars, clubs and concert venues will also stay closed and residents will be required to continue wearing masks.
Infections here surged in March and April as a more contagious variant first discovered in Britain — and renamed Alpha by the World Health Organization this week — tore through the population of about 82 million. The wave of new cases in spring marked the worst outbreak in Turkey since the pandemic began, reaching a record of more than 63,000 daily cases in April.
Authorities have reported more than 5.2 million infections and at least 47,000 deaths since March 2020. Some independent doctors, however, have accused the government of lying about the extent of the pandemic and say that both figures are massive undercounts.
Turkey’s vaccination rate also remains stubbornly low with just 15 percent of the population fully vaccinated despite a campaign that began in January.
The government bet big on the coronavirus vaccine developed by Sinovac — but not all of the promised doses have arrived. Turkey also signed a deal with Pfizer-BioNTech for 60 million vaccine doses, the health minister said, but it remained unclear when those shipments would land in the country.
Big U.S. travel surge during Memorial Day as millions take to the skies in first maskless holiday of pandemic
With half of American adults fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, millions are celebrating Memorial Day by taking to the skies, with authorities reporting a surge in air travel as many embark on their first maskless holiday since the pandemic began.
Nearly 2 million people passed through airport security checkpoints Friday, a new daily pandemic record, according to the Transportation Security Administration. About 6 million people were expected to go through airports this weekend, CBS News reported. Airports, including Los Angeles International, are breaking their 2021 records for daily passenger travel.
More than 37 million Americans are projected to travel 50 miles or more this holiday weekend, an increase of 60 percent compared with this time last year, which registered the lowest number of Memorial Day travelers on record, according to AAA. Just 23 million people traveled last year for the holiday, the company said.
Faced with a new variant and mounting cases, Vietnam scrambles for vaccines
Vietnam said Tuesday that it wanted to built a factory to supply vaccines to the Covax initiative that seeks to distribute doses equitably around the world, as its Health Ministry repeated a call for patents on coronavirus vaccines to be waived.
The Southeast Asian country has been a model of coronavirus containment since the start of the pandemic, but it is now struggling to control a small but fast-growing virus outbreak. Global concern grew Saturday, after Hanoi said it had detected a highly infectious new strand of the coronavirus that appeared to combine characteristics of two variants initially documented in Britain and India respectively.
“Vietnam would build the plant and would like to receive the patent so it could supply vaccines to Covax, to other countries as well as to Vietnam,” the ministry said in a statement, according to Reuters, after World Trade Organization talks on a possible waiver restarted Monday.
Many of the recent infections were located in two industrialized provinces in northern Vietnam, where brands such as Apple and Samsung have suppliers. Hanoi has sent around 400,000 doses to inoculate workers there, and it has asked international companies that manufacture in the Bac Ninh and Bac Giang provinces for help procuring vaccines, reported Bloomberg News.
Vietnam reported 161 new infections at noon on Tuesday. Roughly half of the nation’s 7,500 recorded cases were detected in the past month, and the number of infections remains relatively low by global standards. It has also registered just 47 covid-19 deaths. But only about 1 percent of the country, which has a population of around 100 million, has received at least one dose of a vaccine.
Vietnam’s health minister has also asked Covax to speed up deliveries. It is relying mainly on Oxford-AstraZeneca doses and has also approved the Russian-developed Sputnik V shot.
Number of ICE detainees testing positive for the coronavirus rises; advocates say agency needs robust vaccination program
Hundreds of immigrants in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers tested positive for the coronavirus in the past week, compared with just 60 inside the much-larger Bureau of Prisons, a stark discrepancy that comes as lawyers and lawmakers urge the Biden administration to swiftly vaccinate all detainees.
Infections in ICE detention rose from 370 in mid-March to nearly 1,500 in the past week because more migrants are crossing the U.S.-Mexico border and many are arriving infected, federal officials said. But the American Civil Liberties Union says ICE has not created the type of robust vaccination program that helped the Bureau of Prisons drive down infections, and it told the Department of Homeland Security in a letter Thursday that detention centers have been “among the most dangerous” places during the pandemic.
Peru now has world’s worst covid mortality per capita after adjusting toll
Peru on Monday announced that it was revising its official pandemic death toll to include more than 111,000 additional fatalities, an adjustment that would position the South American nation as having the worst covid-19 mortality rate per capita in the world.
Peruvian authorities had previously recorded 69,342 deaths attributed to covid-19, based solely on whether a patient tested positive for the coronavirus. But after convening an expert panel in April, which found that the death toll probably was a vast undercount, the government broadened the criteria for virus-related deaths.
Now, Peru is including “probable cases” with an “epidemiological link to a confirmed case,” as well as those people who were believed to be infected and also presented “a clinical picture compatible with the disease.”
The additions bring Peru’s total death toll between March 2020 and May 22 to 180,764. Peru’s population is roughly 33 million, meaning that it has suffered about 500 deaths per 100,000 people. Hungary previously had the world’s highest covid-19 mortality rate per capita at 300 deaths per 100,000 people.
Peru has reported approximately 1.9 million coronavirus cases since the pandemic began.
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Covid-19 live updates: Peru now has the world’s worst coronavirus mortality per capita after revising toll - The Washington Post
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