The Democratic Republic of Congo reported Sunday that a woman has died of Ebola, three months after the country declared the end of the previous outbreak.
 
The woman’s husband had contracted the disease and survived in the previous outbreak in 2020. Samples from the hospital in Butembo, in the northeastern part of the country, were being sent to the capital, Kinshasa, to determine whether her illness is linked to the previous outbreak or constitutes a new one.
 
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the previous outbreak in the northwestern state of Equateur over in November of last year, after 55 people in the state died of the disease.
 
More than 2,200 people died of Ebola in the region between 2018 and 2020.
 
“It is not unusual for sporadic cases to occur following a major outbreak,” the WHO said Sunday.The patient was the wife of an #Ebola survivor. Samples have been sent to the National Institute of Biomedical Research in Kinshasa, #DRC for genome sequencing to determine link to the previous outbreak. It is not unusual for sporadic cases to occur following a major outbreak. pic.twitter.com/YVAMuOmvFn— WHO African Region (@WHOAFRO) February 7, 2021Still, extensive contact tracing in connection with the victim is already under way, according to the WHO.
 
The news comes as the country, like much of the world, battles the coronavirus pandemic.
 
The Ebola virus, formerly known as Ebola hemorrhagic fever, is a rare but severe and often fatal illness that spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids, triggering severe vomiting and diarrhea. 
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After hurtling hundreds of millions of kilometers through space since last summer, three robotic explorers are ready to hit the brakes at Mars.  The stakes — and anxiety — are sky high.  The United Arab Emirates’ orbiter reaches Mars on Tuesday, followed less than 24 hours later by China’s orbiter-rover combo. NASA’s rover, the cosmic caboose, will arrive on the scene a week later, on February 18, to collect rocks for return to Earth — a key step in determining whether life ever existed at Mars.Both the UAE and China are newcomers at Mars, where more than half of Earth’s emissaries have failed. China’s first Mars mission, a joint effort with Russia in 2011, never made it past Earth’s orbit.”We are quite excited as engineers and scientists, at the same time quite stressed and happy, worried, scared,” said Omran Sharaf, project manager for the UAE.All three spacecraft rocketed away within days of one another last July, during an Earth-to-Mars launch window that occurs only every two years. That’s why their arrivals are also close together.Called Amal, or Hope in Arabic, the Gulf nation’s spacecraft is seeking an especially high orbit — 22,000 kilometers by 44,000 kilometers (13,500 by 27,000 miles) high — all the better to monitor the Martian weather.  China’s duo — called Tianwen-1, or “Quest for Heavenly Truth” — will remain paired in orbit until May, when the rover separates to descend to the dusty, ruddy surface. If all goes well, it will be only the second country to land successfully on the Red Planet.The U.S. rover Perseverance, by contrast, will dive in straight away for a harrowing sky-crane touchdown similar to the Curiosity rover’s grand Martian entrance in 2012. The odds are in NASA’s favor: It’s nailed eight of its nine attempted Mars landings.Despite their differences — the 1-ton Perseverance is larger and more elaborate than the Tianwen-1 rover — both will prowl for signs of ancient microscopic life.Perseverance’s $3 billion mission is the first leg in a U.S.-European effort to bring Mars samples to Earth in the next decade.”To say we’re pumped about it, well that would be a huge understatement,” said Lori Glaze, NASA’s planetary science director.Perseverance is aiming for an ancient river delta that seems a logical spot for once harboring life. This landing zone in Jezero Crater is so treacherous that NASA nixed it for Curiosity, but so tantalizing that scientists are keen to get hold of its rocks.”When the scientists take a look at a site like Jezero Crater, they see the promise, right?” said Al Chen, who’s in charge of the entry, descent and landing team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “When I look at Jezero, I see danger. There’s danger everywhere.”Steep cliffs, deep pits and fields of rocks could cripple or doom Perseverance, following its seven-minute atmospheric plunge. With an 11½-minute communication lag each way, the rover will be on its own, unable to rely on flight controllers. Amal and Tianwen-1 will also need to operate autonomously while maneuvering into orbit.Until Perseverance, NASA sought out flat, boring terrain on which to land — “one giant parking lot,” Chen said. That’s what China’s Tianwen-1 rover will be shooting for in Mars’ Utopia Planitia.NASA is upping its game thanks to new navigation technology designed to guide the rover to a safe spot. The spacecraft also has a slew of cameras and microphones to capture the sights and sounds of descent and landing, a Martian first.Faster than previous Mars vehicles but still moving at a glacial pace, the six-wheeled Perseverance will drive across Jezero, collecting core samples of the most enticing rocks and gravel. The rover will set the samples aside for retrieval by a fetch rover launching in 2026.  Under an elaborate plan still being worked out by NASA and the European Space Agency, the geologic treasure would arrive on Earth in the early 2030s. Scientists contend it’s the only way to ascertain whether life flourished on a wet, watery Mars 3 billion to 4 billion years ago.NASA’s science mission chief, Thomas Zurbuchen, considers it “one of the hardest things ever done by humanity and certainly in space science.”The United States is still the only country to successfully land on Mars, beginning with the 1976 Vikings. Two spacecraft are still active on the surface: Curiosity and InSight.  Smashed Russian and European spacecraft litter the Martian landscape, meanwhile, along with NASA’s failed Mars Polar Lander from 1999.  Getting into orbit around Mars is less complicated, but still no easy matter, with about a dozen spacecraft falling short. Mars fly-bys were the rage in the 1960s and most failed; NASA’s Mariner 4 was the first to succeed in 1965.Six spacecraft currently are operating around Mars: three from the U.S., two from Europe and one from India. The UAE hopes to make it seven with its $200-plus million mission.The UAE is especially proud that Amal was designed and built by its own citizens, who partnered with the University of Colorado at Boulder and other U.S. institutions, not simply purchased from abroad. Its arrival at Mars coincides with this year’s 50th anniversary of the country’s founding.  China hasn’t divulged much in advance. Even the spacecraft’s exact arrival time on Wednesday has yet to be announced.The China Academy of Space Technology’s Ye Peijian noted that Tianwen-1 has three objectives: orbiting the planet, landing and releasing the rover. If successful, he said in a statement, “It will become the world’s first Mars expedition accomplishing all three goals with one probe.”The coronavirus pandemic has complicated each step of each spacecraft’s 480 million-kilometer (300-million-mile) journey to Mars. It even kept the European and Russian space agencies’ joint Mars mission grounded until the next launch window in 2022. 
 
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Rights groups in Cameroon marked the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation Saturday by protesting the resurgence of the practice, also known as FGM. The government says COVID-19, the country’s separatist crisis and Boko Haram terrorism have stopped campaigns on the dangers of the practice and made providers return to FGM, which was being abandoned.  Rights groups and FGM victims are pushing for an end to the practice. At least 100 women Saturday visited the Briqueterie and Tsinga neighborhoods in Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé, where they say female genital mutilation, or FGM, is resurging. The visit was part of activities marking the 14th International Day of Zero Tolerance to Female Genital Mutilation. The government said there is a resurgence of FGM in the neighborhood because some practitioners have relocated from Cameroon’s northern border with Nigeria to Yaoundé. This year’s theme for the day in Cameroon was “No excuse for inaction even in a COVID-19 context, unite, fund and act to end FGM.” Among the women was Comfort Mvoto of the NGO Action Against FGM. Mvoto says people her association had convinced three years ago to stop FGM are again circumcising girls. She says her association is again telling women who stopped female circumcision and are now resuming the practice that it is illegal and unhealthy to cut a girl’s clitoris. She says her association wants all men and women who circumcise girls to know that the practice is dangerous. She says FGM promoters should be aware that many uncircumcised girls grow up, get married and live happily with their husbands. 
 
Mvoto said the practice was increasing in the Far North region on Cameroon’s border with Nigeria and the English-speaking Southwest region because campaigns to stop FGM have stalled due Boko Haram terrorism and separatist crisis. The Briqueterie and Tsinga neighborhoods have a high concentration of people from Kousseri on Cameroon’s northern border with Chad and Nigeria. They are some of Cameroon’s ethnic groups that believe in FGM as a way to keep women faithful to their husbands. Cameroon says about 20% of girls in some communities around Kousseri were circumcised in 2010. By 2015, the number of girls circumcised in Kousseri dropped to 2% but rebounded to 10% last year. Lumli Amdangtii, a 42-year-old woman says she stopped circumcising girls says in 2017 when the government and NGOs gave her $200 to start a business. She says the business has crumbled and she has gone back to FGM to earn a living from it.  She says in December she began circumcision as a sign of respect to her tradition that encourages FGM and to earn a living from the practice.  
 
She says a girl who is circumcised does not have sexual desires and remains faithful when she gets married. She says women who are circumcised are hardworking, since they are not tempted into prostitution.  She says she decided to restart FGM to improve her living conditions with the money she makes and because there are many parents who want their daughters circumcised. Cameroon says the separatist crisis that has killed at least 3,000 people in its English-speaking western regions within the past four years makes it difficult to gather statistics. The government, however, says hundreds of girls and women seeking refuge in French-speaking towns within the past four years are circumcised. 
 
The Yaoundé protest was organized by rights groups, humanitarian NGOs and Cameroon’s government.FILE – Marie-Thérèse Abena Ondoa, Cameroon’s minister of women’s empowerment and the family, in Yaounde, Feb. 2019. (Moki Edwin Kindzeka/VOA)Marie-Thérèse Abena Ondoa, Cameroon’s minister of women’s empowerment and the family, says weekly education campaigns against FGM along Cameroon’s northern border with Nigeria have been stopped because of Boko Haram terrorism. She says FGM providers who were given funds to start other businesses are becoming poorer because Boko Haram terrorism and crisis in the English-speaking western regions have destroyed their trade. 
 
Ondoa says COVID-19 that was first reported in Cameroon in March reduced government financial assistance to FGM providers, and they are returning to the practice. 
 
“It is an income-generating activity, that is what they tell us, and particularly at this moment, coronavirus has brought reduction of income for most people and some find it a way to get a bit of money. So, the practice is real, and we should all join our forces to see the elimination of that practice that is detrimental to the health of women,” she said.Ondoa promised what she said will be a renewed government-led campaign to stop FGM. 
 
  
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Deep in the deciduous tropical forests on the Srepok River banks, Bun Tropin has a routine as he stations himself at the Mereuch Base for the armed forest rangers of Cambodia’s Ministry of the Environment.The base has a long history of combat dating to the pivotal A red muntjac. (World Wildlife Fund)But Bun Tropin, 27, a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) biodiversity research assistant, knows his way around the restricted sanctuaries in Mondulkiri province because he manages more than 200 camera traps as part of the conservation group’s effort to capture evidence of the presence of wildlife. Bun Tropin asked that his real name not be used to protect his family from threats by poachers.Bun Tropin and his team guided the journalists through chest-high grasses to check the cameras installed through the areas.“When you trek like this, you hardly see any of those bantengs, elephants, tigers and others,” the soft-spoken Bun Tropin told VOA Khmer. “But each time I spot them on camera, I am always wowed. Each time, I just could not take my eyes off them.”Drastic declinesWWF Cambodia released a report on Jan. 15 saying the ungulate populations in two sanctuaries –- Srepok and the neighboring Phnom Prich –- had An Eld’s deer. (World Wildlife Fund)Between the late 1960s and the early 1990s, Cambodia’s total banteng population fell by 95%, according to the WWF.In the neighboring Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), another conservation group, also documented a dramatic drop in ungulate population over the past 10 years.”Five out of six monitored ungulate species either show significant population declines or have been assessed by experts as being in decline within [Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary],” the WCS said in the report released in September 2020.Seng Teak, director of WWF Cambodia, said the findings were “concerning,” citing the ongoing hazards of habitat losses, poaching and snares.“If the snares remain throughout in the forest, there’s a chance forests of the future won’t have any wildlife,” he told VOA Khmer.A regulatory overhaul introduced in 2016 was designed to distinguish between the overlapping authority of Cambodia’s Ministry of Agriculture’s Forestry Administration and the Ministry of Environment has been implemented.Sorry, but your browser cannot support embedded video of this type, you can
download this video to view it offline.Download File360p | 3 MB480p | 4 MB540p | 6 MB720p | 15 MB1080p | 25 MBOriginal | 65 MB Embed” />Copy Download AudioThe Forestry Administration oversees economic land concession planning. The Ministry of Environment protects vast biodiverse areas and wildlife sanctuaries with an embattled crew of armed and uniformed rangers; there are only 51 Environment Ministry rangers in the two preserves, and 1,200 rangers throughout Cambodia. Their numbers are unlikely to increase soon due to austerity measures imposed as combatting the coronavirus pandemic consumes the national budget.Yet the mountainous province is preparing to welcome a new airport, more tourists and more new residents to areas that need protection.Powerful business interestsThe London-based Environment Investigation Agency found rampant deforestation was masked by powerful business interests, according to a 2018 case study. It found timber logged in Cambodia’s northeast, the Phnom Prich Wildlife Sanctuary, was illegally exported to Vietnam.“EIA investigations between September 2017 and March 2018 uncovered illegal logging operations on an unprecedented scale within the wildlife sanctuary, along with large-scale corruption implicating various elements of the Cambodian Government,” the report found.A wild pig. (World Wildlife Fund)Disgraced logging tycoon Soeng Sam Ol was arrested in 2019 with five senior environment, and forestry officials in the province were summoned for questioning by a national-level ad hoc investigatory team. Among them were Keo Sopheak, head of the provincial Department of Environment, and Paet Pheaktra, director of the Srepok Wildlife Sanctuary.The five were later cleared of any wrongdoing.’Strict legal enforcement’Paet Pheaktra told VOA Khmer during the press tour that “strict legal enforcement” is the best way to protect endangered wildlife.“Implementing the law will be an effective method,” Paet Pheaktra said as he showed VOA reporters the snares used by the poachers. “People will respect if we use the laws accordingly.”He said “considerable” number of snares remain in the forests. He blamed both Vietnamese from the east of the sanctuaries and the local people who lived on the edge of the protected areas as key actors in harvesting the wildlife in the areas.“High-tech snares are mostly imported from the neighboring country [Vietnam],” said Paet Pheaktra, reflecting the traditional animosity between Vietnam and Cambodia.“If everyone is committed, I think it’s not too late to save the wildlife,” he said, adding that to save the forests, “it will be too late if you wait until the next 10 or 15 years.”WWF Cambodia is introducing a number of programs to assist the rangers and the nearby communities to find alternatives to logging and poaching as a bid to save the ungulates and other endangered species living in the two sanctuaries.That includes convincing the locals to stop poaching, a tall order given they consume most of the animals.Phan Phonna, 49, a mother of seven moved to the area in 1994 from her home province of Tboung Khmun. At the time, forests and wildlife were abundant, but that is no longer true.“We choose to raise pigs and poultry to make a living instead of consuming wild meats in fears of health dangers,” she said.“You cannot just go there as they monitor your activities all over the jungles,” Phonna added.‘Endless job’Seng Teak, who heads WWF Cambodia, remains hopeful, said the pace of loss among ungulates has slowed over the past three years. He credits conservation efforts, saying those coupled with combating of forestry and wildlife crimes will lead to revivals of currently endangered species.“Wildlife need a quiet habitat free of snares, guns, chainsaws and other types of intrusion,” he said. “They need a safe haven so that they can reproduce fast.”Back in Mereuch, Bun Tropin sees no end to his mission – documenting and preserving the ungulates in both north-eastern sanctuaries.“It is just an endless job,” Bun Tropin said. “It will keep going and new things will keep coming up – new species, new evolvement — and that requires more follow-up.”
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With the world in a race between the spread of coronavirus variants and vaccinating millions, AstraZeneca announced Saturday that early data shows its vaccine provides limited protection against mild disease caused by the South African variant of the virus.The test group was small, about 2,000 people, and young, with a median age of 31. But none of the study’s participants were hospitalized or died, according to The Financial Times of London, the first to report the results.“We do believe our vaccine could protect against severe disease,” an AstraZeneca spokesperson said. He added that the company has not been able “to properly ascertain its effect against severe disease and hospitalization given that subjects were predominantly young healthy adults.”The pharmaceutical company will publish its study results Monday.AstraZeneca has begun adapting its vaccine against the South African variant, the spokesperson said.China approves second vaccineChina has conditionally approved the use by the general public of a second COVID-19 vaccine.The National Medical Products Administration said in a statement Saturday that regulators approved the use Friday of CoronaVac, developed by Sinovac Biotech Ltd.It’s the second vaccine approved for public use in the southeast Asian country. The first, a vaccine developed by a Chinese institute affiliated with the state-owned China National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm), was approved two months ago.The Sinovac vaccine, which is being administered in at least five other countries, was given emergency approval last July for high-risk people, such as health care workers and employees of state-owned companies.Conditional approval of the vaccine allows its use for the general public, while research continues. The company must submit current data and reports of any adverse effects after the vaccine is sold on the market.A third candidate vaccine from Sinopharm has been administered to high-risk groups in China, while a fourth candidate from CanSino Biologics is being administered to military personnel.Developing countries buy vaccineSome poorer countries, alarmed at watching rich countries receiving millions of COVID-19 vaccines, are deciding not to wait for vaccines from the World Health Organization and other groups, and have, instead, started striking their own vaccine deals.Juan Carlos Sikaffy, president of the Honduran Private Business Council, told the Associated Press that Honduras “cannot wait on bureaucratic processes or misguided decisions” to give citizens “the peace of mind” offered by the COVID-19 vaccine.The Honduran Private Business Council participated in a vaccine-buying deal for the Central American country by providing a bank guarantee.Serbia has also gone to the vaccine market even though it has paid 4 million euros to WHO’s COVAX program, created to distribute the COVID-19 vaccines fairly.Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said he could not wait for COVAX after watching rich countries buy up so many of the precious shots.“It’s as if they intend to vaccinate all their cats and dogs,” he said.The head of the World Health Organization called Friday for pharmaceutical companies to share manufacturing facilities to increase the production of COVID-19 vaccines.Speaking at an online news briefing from Geneva, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said what is needed is “a massive scale-up in production.”He noted that France’s pharmaceutical company Sanofi announced it would make its manufacturing infrastructure available to support production of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and called on other companies to do the same.He also repeated his call for rich nations to share doses with poorer countries once they have vaccinated health workers and older people.Curfews and lockdownsGreece has announced stricter lockdown restrictions in the capital, Athens, as well as other parts of the country to stop the spread of the pandemic. The restrictions include a curfew that will start at 6 p.m. Saturday.Also Saturday, South Korea begins easing its restrictions on businesses outside of the capital, allowing them to stay open an additional hour to 10 p.m. Small-business owners and self-employed people have been calling for an easing of restrictions imposed as the country seeks to control the coronavirus outbreak. However, businesses in Seoul, the capital, will still close at 9 p.m.Cuba imposed a strict nightly curfew Friday in the capital of Havana, as the country struggles to contain a resurgence of the spread of the coronavirus. The Havana Province Defense Council said people and vehicles would be restricted from moving about between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. Cuba reopened its airports three months ago and eased lockdown measures after apparently bringing the outbreak under control. But the relaxed measures triggered a dramatic surge in COVID-19 cases last month.There are more than 105 million global COVID-19 cases and 2.3 million deaths from the coronavirus, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.The United States remains at the top of the list as the location with the most infections, with nearly 27 million cases, followed by India with 10.8 million and Brazil with 9.4 million.
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China has conditionally approved a second COVID-19 vaccine for public use.The National Medical Products Administration said in a statement Saturday that regulators approved the use of Sinovac Biotech Ltd.’s CoronaVac the day before.A vaccine developed by a Chinese institute affiliated with the state-owned China National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm) was approved for public use two months ago.The Sinovac vaccine, which is being administered in at least five other countries, was given emergency approval last July for people at high risk for infection, such as health care workers and employees of state-owned companies.Conditional approval of the vaccine allows its use for the general public while research continues. The company must submit current data and reports of any adverse effects after the vaccine is sold on the market.A third candidate vaccine from Sinopharm has already been administered to high-risk groups in China, while a fourth candidate from CanSino Biologics is being administered to military personnel.FILE – A security guard takes a woman’s temperature as a precaution against the new coronavirus, as she lines up to enter a bank in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, June 18, 2020.Developing countries buy vaccineSome poorer countries, alarmed at watching rich countries receive millions of COVID-19 vaccine doses, are deciding not to wait for vaccines from the World Health Organization and other groups, and have instead started striking their own vaccine deals.Juan Carlos Sikaffy, president of the Honduran Private Business Council, told The Associated Press that Honduras “cannot wait on bureaucratic processes or misguided decisions” to give citizens “the peace of mind” offered by COVID-19 vaccines.The Honduran Private Business Council participated in a vaccine-buying deal for the Central American country by providing a bank guarantee.Serbia has also gone to the vaccine market, even though it has already paid 4 million euros to WHO’s COVAX program, created to distribute the COVID vaccines fairly.FILE – Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic talks to reporters in Belgrade, June 21, 2020.Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said he could not wait for COVAX after watching rich countries buy up so many of the precious shots.“It’s as if they intend to vaccinate all their cats and dogs,” he said.The head of the World Health Organization called Friday for pharmaceutical companies to share manufacturing facilities to increase the production of COVID-19 vaccines.Speaking at an online news briefing from Geneva, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said “a massive scale-up in production” was needed.He noted that France’s pharmaceutical company Sanofi announced it would make its manufacturing infrastructure available to support production of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and called on other companies to do the same.“We encourage all manufacturers to share their data and technology to ensure global, equitable access to vaccines,” Tedros said.He also repeated his call for rich nations to share doses with poorer countries once they have vaccinated health workers and older people.Tedros said 75% of all COVID-19 vaccinations worldwide have been given in just 10 countries, while nearly 130 nations have not given a single vaccination.“The longer it takes to vaccinate those most at risk everywhere, the more opportunity we give the virus to mutate and evade vaccines,” Tedros said, adding that unless the virus is suppressed everywhere, it could resurge globally.A health care worker prepares a dose of China’s Sinovac Biotech COVID-19 vaccine at a vaccination site in the Sambadrome, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Feb. 6, 2021.China’s Sinovac said Friday that late-stage trial data of its COVID-19 vaccine from Brazil and Turkey showed the vaccine prevented hospitalization and death in COVID-19 patients in 100% of participants. But the company said the vaccine was only 50.65% effective at keeping people from getting infected.The trial of Sinovac’s CoronaVac vaccine involved nearly 12,400 people and also found the vaccine was 83.7% effective in preventing COVID-19 cases that required any medical treatment.Biden sends in troopsIn the United States, President Joe Biden’s administration announced Friday that the Pentagon had approved the deployment of 1,100 active-duty troops to assist with COVID-19 vaccination efforts. It said that number would likely rise soon.The U.S. Supreme Court told the western state of California on Friday that it could not prohibit indoor worship services because of the pandemic, but that it could temporarily maintain a ban on singing and chanting indoors. The court’s orders came after two churches sued over the state’s lockdown measures. The court ruled that California could limit indoor services to 25% of a building’s capacity.FILE – People line up at a COVID-19 vaccination site at Yankee Stadium, Feb. 5, 2021, in the Bronx borough of New York.New York’s Yankee Stadium was transformed Friday into a COVID-19 vaccination hub.  The iconic stadium is located in the Bronx, a mostly Black and Hispanic borough that has experienced high infection and death rates from the coronavirus.Currently, only Bronx residents are eligible to receive the COVID shots at the stadium, where members of the National Guard have been deployed to assist in the vaccine campaign.Jacqueline Soto, 55, a school secretary from the Bronx, told Reuters on Friday “I was on a wait list for three weeks, desperate to get a vaccine. … I was unsuccessful. But today I’m here. I just went on the link yesterday and already I got the appointment today, and I’m happy to be here.”The U.S. supermarket chain Kroger said Friday that it would give $100 to workers who get a COVID-19 vaccination, joining a growing number of companies who are incentivizing employees to get vaccinated.Coronavirus cases in the United States have been decreasing in recent weeks. However, medical officials are urging U.S. residents to not turn Sunday’s Super Bowl, a yearly football game, into a superspreader event.  Fans usually gather at large home parties or in bars and restaurants to watch the game on television.  Medical authorities this year, however, are urging football fans to watch the game “with the people you live with.”Hundreds of people protested Saturday in the streets of Tunisia, which has yet to receive any vaccines. Frustrated Tunisians decried the lack of jobs, poor living conditions and the economic crisis worsened by the pandemic. They also demanded the release of those arrested during protests earlier this year. Demonstrators attend a protest to mark the anniversary of a prominent activist’s death and against allegations of police abuse, in Tunis, Tunisia, Feb. 6, 2021.Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi announced a government reorganization and promised that the new team would focus on deep reforms to improve conditions in the North African country.Greece announced stricter lockdown restrictions in the capital, Athens, as well as in other parts of the country to stop the spread of the pandemic. The restrictions included a curfew that began at 6 p.m. Saturday.FILE – A medical worker in a booth sprays disinfectant as she waits for people to come for tests at a coronavirus testing site in Seoul, South Korea, Feb. 5, 2021.Also Saturday, South Korea began easing its restrictions on businesses outside the capital, allowing them to stay open an additional hour, to 10 p.m.  Small-business owners and self-employed people have been calling for an easing of restrictions imposed as the country seeks to control the coronavirus outbreak. However, businesses in Seoul, the capital, will still close at 9 p.m.Cuba imposed a strict nightly curfew Friday in the capital, Havana, as the country struggles to contain a resurgence of the spread of the coronavirus. The Havana Province Defense Council said people and vehicles would be restricted from moving about between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. Cuba reopened its airports three months ago and eased lockdown measures after apparently bringing the outbreak under control. But the relaxed measures triggered a dramatic surge in COVID-19 cases last month.As of Saturday afternoon EST, there were more than 105.6 million global GOVID-19 cases and 2.3 million deaths from the coronavirus, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center.The United States remained at the top of the list as the location with the most infections, with more than 26.8 million cases, followed by India with 10.8 million and Brazil with 9.4 million.   
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Technology that can predict bushfires is being developed in Australia, one of the world’s most fire-prone countries. It will offer real-time visual displays of how fires are likely to spread. It comes as dozens of homes already have been destroyed this year by fires on the outskirts of the Western Australian state capital, Perth.Bushfires are a perennial menace in Australia. This week, Perth has confronted twin emergencies: raging flames and a coronavirus lockdown.“When I had to evacuate, I didn’t want to come to the evacuation center because I, obviously with the lockdown, I was so concerned that this was going to be like a COVID hot spot,” one resident said. “Yeah, grabbed my animals and just headed straight for the beach, actually. I ended up trying to sleep in my car,” she said.Firefighting in Australia is becoming increasingly sophisticated. A new simulator is being developed to predict well in advance how bushfires will move across the landscape.Currently, there are varying systems of modeling bushfires across Australian states and territories. The new technology could give emergency crews a critical advantage.Mahesh Prakash, a senior principal research scientist at Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, is working in collaboration with other organizations.“We take real-time weather as well as satellite data feeds for being able to predict the bushfires,” the scientist said. “We also take fuel and vegetation inputs. We are also working with state-based emergency management agencies who are trialing it out as we speak on a monthly basis while we are developing new features in the system as well as making it more robust. In the Australian context, we are intending it to be a nationally operational system over the next two to three years. We are also engaging with agencies in the U.S. such as CAL FIRE as well as with a few organizations in Europe, especially ones based in Spain, Portugal and Italy.”During Australia’s unforgettable Black Summer disaster of 2019 and ’20, 24 million hectares of land were burned, 33 people died and more than 3,000 homes were destroyed. An official report into the tragedy warned that bushfires would become “more complex, more unpredictable, and more difficult to manage.”Authorities said Saturday that most of the huge fire that has been threatening parts of Perth had now been contained.
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As the Trump administration was nearing the end of an unprecedented string of executions, 70% of death row inmates were sick with COVID-19. Guards were ill. Traveling prisons staff on the execution team had the virus. So did media witnesses, who may have unknowingly infected others when they returned home because they were never told about the spreading cases.Records obtained by The Associated Press show employees at the Indiana prison complex where the 13 executions were carried out over six months had contact with inmates and other people infected with the coronavirus but were able to refuse testing and declined to participate in contact tracing efforts and were still permitted to return to their work assignments.Other staff members, including those brought in to help with executions, also spread tips to their colleagues about how they could avoid quarantines and skirt public health guidance from the federal government and Indiana health officials.The executions at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, completed in a short window over a few weeks, likely acted as a superspreader event, according to the records reviewed by AP. It was something health experts warned could happen when the Justice Department insisted on resuming executions during a pandemic.Active inmate cases spikeIt’s impossible to know precisely who introduced the infections and how they started to spread, in part because prisons officials didn’t consistently do contact tracing and haven’t been fully transparent about the number of cases. But medical experts say it’s likely the executioners and support staff, many of whom traveled from prisons in other states with their own virus outbreaks, triggered or contributed both in the Terre Haute penitentiary and beyond the prison walls.Of the 47 people on death row, 33 tested positive between Dec. 16 and Dec. 20, becoming infected soon after the executions of Alfred Bourgeois on Dec. 11 and Brandon Bernard on Dec. 10, according to Colorado-based attorney Madeline Cohen, who compiled the names of those who tested positive by reaching out to other federal death row lawyers. Other lawyers, as well as activists in contact with death row inmates, also told AP they were told a large numbers of death row inmates tested positive in mid-December.In addition, at least a dozen other people, including execution team members, media witnesses and a spiritual adviser, tested positive within the incubation period of the virus, meeting the criteria of a superspreader event, in which one or more individuals trigger an outbreak that spreads to many others outside their circle of acquaintances. The tally could be far higher, but without contact tracing it’s impossible to be sure.Active inmate cases at the Indiana penitentiary also spiked from just three on Nov. 19 — the day Orlando Cordia Hall was put to death — to 406 on Dec. 29, which was 18 days after Bourgeois’ execution, according to Bureau of Prisons data. The data includes the inmates at the high-security penitentiary, though the Bureau of Prisons has never said whether it included death row inmates in that count.In all, 726 of the approximately 1,200 inmates at the United States Penitentiary at Terre Haute have tested positive for COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, according to Bureau of Prisons data. Of them, 692 have recovered.Social distancing difficultiesAdvocates and lawyers for the inmates, a Zen Buddhist priest who was a spiritual adviser for one prisoner, and even the families of some of the victims fought to delay the executions until after the pandemic. Their requests were rebuffed repeatedly, and their litigation failed. And some got sick.Witnesses, who were required to wear masks, watched from behind glass in small rooms where it often wasn’t possible to stand 2 meters apart. They were taken to and from the death-chamber building in vans, where proper social distancing often wasn’t possible. Passengers frequently had to wait in the vans for an hour or more, with windows rolled up and little ventilation, before being permitted to enter the execution-chamber building. And in at least one case, the witnesses were locked inside the execution chamber for more than four hours with little ventilation and no social distancing.Prison staff told their colleagues they should first get on planes, go back to their homes and then they could take a test, according to two people familiar with the matter. If they were positive, they said, they could just quarantine and wouldn’t be stuck in Terre Haute for two weeks, said the people, who could not publicly discuss the private conversations and spoke to AP on condition of anonymity.Following Hall’s execution in November, only six members of the execution team opted to get coronavirus tests before they left Terre Haute, the Justice Department said in a court filing. The agency said they all tested negative. But days later, eight members of the team tested positive for the virus. Five of the staff members who had tested positive were brought back to Terre Haute for more executions a few weeks later.Yusuf Ahmed Nur, the spiritual adviser for Hall, stood just feet away inside the execution chamber when Hall was executed on Nov. 19. He tested positive for the virus days later.Writing about the experience, Nur said he knew he would be putting himself at risk, but that Hall had asked him to be at his side when he was put to death. He, and Hall’s family, felt obliged to be there.“I could not say no to a man who would soon be killed,” Nur wrote. “That I contracted COVID-19 in the process was collateral damage” of executions during a pandemic.Later, two journalists tested positive for the virus after witnessing other executions in January, then had contact with activists and their own loved ones, who later tested positive as well. Despite being informed of the diagnoses, the Bureau of Prisons knowingly withheld the information from other media witnesses and decided not to initiate any contact tracing efforts.‘Clear to work’By mid-December, prison officials said that both Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs were sick. They were the last two prisoners to be executed, just days before President Joe Biden took office.Death row was put on lockdown after their results, inmates told Ashley Kincaid Eve, a lawyer and anti-death penalty activist. But even though they had also tested positive, she said Higgs and Johnson were still moved around the prison — potentially infecting guards accompanying them — so they could use phones and email to speak with their lawyers and families as their execution dates approached. Eve said prisons officials may have worried a court would delay the executions on constitutional ground if that access was denied.In response to questions from the AP, the Bureau of Prisons said staff members who don’t experience symptoms “are clear to work” and that they have their temperatures taken and are asked about symptoms before reporting for duty. (The AP has previously reported that staff members at other prisons were cleared with normal temperatures even when thermometers showed hypothermic readings.)The agency said it also conducts contact training in accordance with federal guidance and that “if staff are circumventing this guidance, we are not aware.”Officials said staff members were required to participate in contact tracing “if they met the criteria for it” and agency officials couldn’t compel employees to be tested.“We cannot force staff members to take tests, nor does the CDC recommend testing of asymptomatic individuals,” an agency spokesperson said, referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The union for Terre Haute employees declined to comment, saying it did not want to “get into the public fray of this whole issue.”Elsewhere, union officials have long complained about the spread of the coronavirus through the federal prison system, as well as a lack of personal protective equipment and room to isolate infected inmates. Some of those issues have been alleviated, but containing the virus continues to be a concern at many facilities.‘Extensive efforts’No more executions have yet been scheduled under Biden. The Bureau of Prisons has repeatedly refused to say how many other people have tested positive for the coronavirus after the last several executions. And the agency would not answer questions about the specific reasoning for withholding the information from the public, instead directing the AP to file a public records request.The Bureau of Prisons said it also “took extensive efforts to mitigate the transmission” of the virus, including limiting the number of media witnesses and adding an extra van for the witnesses to space them out.It has argued witnesses were informed social distancing may not be possible in the execution chamber and that witnesses and others were required to wear masks and were offered additional protective equipment, like gowns and face shields. The agency also refused to answer questions about whether Director Michael Carvajal or any other senior leaders raised concerns about executing 13 people during a worldwide pandemic that has killed more than 450,000 in the U.S.Still, it appears their own protocols weren’t followed. After a federal judge ordered the Bureau of Prisons to ensure masks were worn during executions in January, the executioner and U.S. marshal in the death chamber removed their masks during one of the executions, appearing to violate the judge’s order. The agency argued they needed to do so to communicate clearly and that they only removed their masks for a short time and disputes that it violated the order.Hundreds of staffers participatedIn a Nov. 24 court filing on the spread of COVID at Terre Haute, Joe Goldenson, a public health expert on the spread of disease behind bars, said hundreds of staff participated in one way or another at each execution, including around 40 people on execution teams and those on 50-person specialized security teams who traveled from other prisons nationwide. He said he had warned earlier that executions were likely to become a superspreader.Medical and public health experts repeatedly called on the Justice Department to delay executions, arguing the setup at prisons made them especially vulnerable to outbreaks, including because social distancing was impossible and health care substandard.“These are the type of high-risk superspreader events that the (American Medical Association) and (the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) have been warning against throughout the pandemic,” James L. Madara, the executive vice president of the AMA, wrote to the Department of Justice on Jan. 11, just before the last three federal executions were carried out.
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The head of the World Health Organization called Friday for pharmaceutical companies to share manufacturing facilities to increase the production of COVID-19 vaccines.Speaking at an online news briefing from Geneva, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said what is needed is “a massive scale-up in production.”He noted that France’s pharmaceutical company Sanofi announced it would make its manufacturing infrastructure available to support production of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and called on other companies to do the same.“We encourage all manufacturers to share their data and technology to ensure global, equitable access to vaccines.”He also repeated his call for rich nations to share doses with poorer countries once they have vaccinated health workers and older people.Tedros said 75% of all COVID-19 vaccinations worldwide have been given in just 10 countries, while nearly 130 nations have not given a single vaccination.“The longer it takes to vaccinate those most at risk everywhere, the more opportunity we give the virus to mutate and evade vaccines,” Tedros said, adding that unless the virus is suppressed everywhere, it could resurge globally.China’s Sinovac Biotech said Friday that late-stage trial data of its COVID-19 vaccine from Brazil and Turkey showed the vaccine prevented hospitalization and death in COVID-19 patients in 100% of participants but said it was only 50.65% effective at keeping people from getting infected.The trial of Sinovac’s CoronaVac vaccine involved nearly 12,400 people and also found the vaccine was 83.7% effective in preventing COVID-19 cases that required any medical treatment.A dog sits next to numbered crosses at the Iraja cemetery, where many COVID-19 victims are buried in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Feb. 5, 2021.In the United States, President Joe Biden’s administration announced Friday that the Pentagon had approved the deployment of 1,100 active-duty troops to assist with COVID-19 vaccination efforts. It said that number will likely rise soon.The U.S. supermarket chain Kroger said Friday it would give $100 to workers who get a COVID-19 vaccination, joining a growing number of companies incentivizing employees to get vaccinated.Coronavirus cases in the United States have been decreasing in recent weeks. However, medical officials are urging U.S. residents to not turn Sunday’s Super Bowl, a yearly football game, into a superspreader event. Fans usually gather at large home parties or in bars and restaurants to watch the game on television. Medical authorities this year, however, are urging football fans to watch the game “with the people you live with.”In France, coronavirus hospitalizations fell for a third day in a row. Officials said the number of people in the hospital with the virus fell by 194 to 27,614 and the number of people in intensive care fell by five to 3,245.Greece announced stricter lockdown restrictions in the capital, Athens, as well as other parts of the country to stop the spread of the pandemic. The restrictions include a curfew that will start at 6 p.m. Saturday.New Zealand said it is open to receiving refugees once again. The new measure comes almost a year after New Zealand closed its doors to foreigners in March because of the COVID-19 pandemic.Fiona Whiteridge, the general manager of New Zealand’s refugee and migrant service, said in a statement, “With health protocols in place and safe travel routes, we are ready to welcome small groups of refugee families as New Zealand residents to this country, to begin their new lives.”Students wearing COVID-19 protective gear social distance during snack time on their first day back to in-person class since March 2020 at Liceo Lunita, a private school in Chia on the outskirts of Bogota, Colombia, Feb. 5, 2021.In another development Friday, Pfizer told Reuters in a statement that it has withdrawn its application in India for emergency-use authorization of its COVID-19 vaccine developed with Germany’s BioNTech.Pfizer did not conduct a trial with its vaccine in India, a measure India usually requires.Pfizer’s decision to withdraw came after its meeting earlier this week with India’s drug regulator, the Central Drugs Standard Control Organization.The drug regulator said Pfizer’s vaccine was not recommended because there were no data from an Indian trial and because of reported side effects from the vaccine in its use abroad.Pfizer said it will “re-submit its approval request with additional information as it becomes available in the near future.”India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare reported 12,408 new coronavirus cases Friday.There are more than 105 million global GOVID-19 cases and nearly 2.3 million deaths from the coronavirus, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.The United States remains at the top of the list as the location with the most infections, with more than 26.8 million cases, followed by India with 10.8 million and Brazil with 9.4 million.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) said Friday that 75% of all COVID-19 vaccinations worldwide have been given in just 10 countries, while nearly 130 nations have not given a single vaccination.At the agency’s regular briefing in Geneva, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters that, globally, the number of vaccinations has now overtaken the number of reported COVID-19 infections.He said that is basically good news and a remarkable achievement in such a short timeframe. But there are almost 130 countries with 2.5 billion people, that have not delivered a single dose of vaccine.Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organization speaks during a session of the Executive Board on the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Geneva, Jan. 21, 2021.Tedros said there are some wealthier nations that have already vaccinated large proportions of their population at lower risk of severe disease or death.The WHO chief said he recognizes that all governments have an obligation to protect their own people. But he said once wealthier nations have vaccinated their priority populations — frontline health workers and the elderly — the best way those nations can protect the rest of their population is to share surplus vaccines so other countries can do the same.“The longer it takes to vaccinate those most at risk everywhere, the more opportunity we give the virus to mutate and evade vaccines,” said Tedros said, adding that unless the virus is suppressed everywhere, it could resurge globally.One way to make poorer nations less dependent on the richer ones is to ramp up production of vaccines worldwide, he added, noting how the multi-national pharmaceutical company Sanofi announced it would make its manufacturing infrastructure available to support production of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.Tedros called on other companies to do the same.“We encourage all manufacturers to share their data and technology to ensure global, equitable access to vaccines.”
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As more people get the COVID-19 vaccine, health care experts are tackling the issue of how someone can prove they’ve been vaccinated. Lesia Bakalets has more in this story narrated by Anna Rice. 
Camera: Sergii Dogotar     
 
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The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Friday that there are more than 104 million global GOVID-19 cases and 2.2 million deaths from the virus. The United States remains at the top of the list as the location with the most infections, with more than 26 million cases, followed by India with 10.8 million and Brazil with 9.3 million. Medical officials are urging U.S. residents to not turn Sunday’s Super Bowl, a yearly football game, into a superspreader event.  Fans usually gather at large home parties or in bars and restaurants to watch the game on television.  Medical authorities this year, however, are urging football fans to watch the game “with the people you live with.” Some areas in the United States are running into difficulty ensuring that their residents are being inoculated equitably. The nation’s capital is no exception.  Residents in some of the Washington’s poorest neighborhoods have been underrepresented in the city’s vaccination drive.  Now, however, representatives from the mayor’s office have begun knocking on the front doors of senior citizens’ homes in Washington’s poorest neighborhoods in an effort to get them to sign up for the vaccines. Johnson & Johnson Seeks US Vaccine Approval for Emergency UseDrugmaker’s application for its single-dose vaccine to US Food and Drug Administration follows January report that found the vaccine had a 66% rate of efficacy in preventing infections Washington residents aged 65 and older are eligible for the free vaccinations.  In other areas around the country, local governments have begun their vaccine programs with senior citizens 75 and up.City Health Director LaQuandra Nesbitt told The Washington Post  the life expectancy for some of Washington’s poorest neighborhoods is as low as 68 while it is as high as 89 for richer neighborhoods. “If we would have begun vaccinating individuals at 75 years of age or older, we would have missed the opportunity to have an impact in the neighborhoods with the highest burdens of disease,” Nesbitt told the Post.New Zealand reopens borders
New Zealand says it is open to receiving refugees once again, The new measure comes almost a year after New Zealand closed its doors to foreigners in March because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Fiona Whiteridge, the general manager of New Zealand’s refugee and migrant service, said in a statement, “With health protocols in place and safe travel routes, we are ready to welcome small groups of refugee families as New Zealand residents to this country, to begin their new lives.”According to Hopkins, New Zealand has 2,315 COVID cases, while it has suffered only 25 deaths.Sorry, but your browser cannot support embedded video of this type, you can
download this video to view it offline.Download File360p | 9 MB480p | 13 MB540p | 16 MB720p | 32 MB1080p | 65 MBOriginal | 197 MB Embed” />Copy Download AudioThumbnailThu, 02/04/2021 – 22:17Rick ShacklettMedia Duration00:02:43Rights RestrictedOffUS Will Support Program to Share COVID Vaccine with Poor Countries, But Offers Few DetailsBiden administration reiterates support for global initiative to ensure lower-income countries have access to the coronavirus vaccine but has not provided further detailsUS Will Support Program to Share COVID Vaccine with Poor Countries, But Offers Few DetailsIndia vaccinations
Pfizer told Reuters in a statement  Friday that it has withdrawn its application in India for emergency-use authorization of its COVID-19 vaccine developed with Germany’s BioNTech. Pfizer did not conduct a trial with its vaccine in India, a measure India usually requires.  Pfizer’s decision to withdraw came after its meeting earlier this week with India’s drug regulator, the Central Drugs Standard Control Organization.The drug regulator said Pfizer’s vaccine was not recommended because there were no data from an Indian trial and because of reported side effects from the vaccine in its use abroad.  Pfizer said it will “re-submit its approval request with additional information as it becomes available in the near future.” India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare reported 12,408 new coronavirus cases Friday. The British vaccines minister recently told lawmakers there are about 4,000 variants of the coronavirus worldwide.  Nadhim Zahawi said, however, that a vaccine to combat a “a variant that we are really concerned about” could be developed  in 30 to 40 days, that would then be mass produced,  according to a report in The Guardian. 
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Despite its world-class medical system and its vaunted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. fell behind in the race to detect dangerous coronavirus mutations. And it’s only now beginning to catch up.The problem has not been a shortage of technology or expertise. Rather, scientists say, it’s an absence of national leadership and coordination, plus a lack of funding and supplies for overburdened laboratories trying to juggle diagnostic testing with the hunt for genetic changes.“We have the brains. We have the tools. We have the instruments,” said Ilhem Messaoudi, director of a virus research center at University of California, Irvine. “It’s just a matter of supporting that effort.”Viruses mutate constantly. To stay ahead of the threat, scientists analyze samples, watching closely for mutations that might make the coronavirus more infectious or more deadly.But such testing has been scattershot.Less than 1% of positive specimens in the U.S. are being sequenced to determine whether they have worrisome mutations. Other countries do better — Britain sequences about 10% — meaning they can more quickly see threats coming at them. That gives them greater opportunity to slow or stop the problem, whether through more targeted contact tracing, possible adjustments to the vaccine, or public warnings.CDC officials say variants have not driven recent surges in overall U.S. cases. But experts worry that what’s happening with variants is not clear and say the nation should have been more aggressive about sequencing earlier in the epidemic that has now killed over 450,000 Americans.“If we had evidence it was changing,” said Ohio State molecular biologist Dan Jones, “maybe people would’ve acted differently.”U.S. scientists have detected more than 500 cases of a variant first identified in Britain and expect it to become the cause of most of this country’s new infections in a matter of weeks. Another troubling variant tied to Brazil and a third discovered in South Africa were detected last week in the U.S. and also are expected to spread.The British variant is more contagious and is believed to be more deadly than the original, while the South Africa one may render the vaccines somewhat less effective. The ultimate fear is that a variant resistant to existing vaccines and treatments could eventually emerge.Potentially worrisome versions may form inside the U.S., too. “This virus is mutating, and it doesn’t care of it’s in Idaho or South Africa,” Messaoudi said.But the true dimensions of the problem in the U.S. are not clear because of the relatively low level of sequencing.“You only see what’s under the lamppost,” said Kenny Beckman, director of the University of Minnesota Genomics Center, which started analyzing the virus’s genetics last spring.Medics take a patient out of an ambulance outside the Royal London Hospital in east London, Feb. 4, 2021.After the slow start, public health labs in at least 33 states are now doing genetic analysis to identify emerging coronavirus variants. Other states have formed partnerships with university or private labs to do the work. North Dakota, which began sequencing last week, was the most recent to start that work, according to the Association of Public Health Laboratories.The CDC believes a minimum of 5,000 to 10,000 samples should be analyzed weekly in the U.S. to adequately monitor variants, said Gregory Armstrong, who oversees the agency’s advanced molecular detection work. And it’s only now that the nation is hitting that level, he acknowledged.Still, it is a jumble of approaches: Some public health labs sequence every positive virus specimen. Some focus on samples from certain outbreaks or certain patients. Others randomly select samples to analyze.On top of that, labs continue to have trouble getting needed supplies — like pipette tips and chemicals — used in both gene sequencing and diagnostic testing.President Joe Biden, who inherited the setup from the Trump administration, is proposing a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package that calls for boosting federal spending on sequencing of the virus, though the amount has not been detailed and other specifics have yet to be worked out.“We’re 43rd in the world in genomic sequencing. Totally unacceptable,” White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients said.For more than five years, U.S. public health labs have been building up their ability to do genomic sequencing, thanks largely to a federal push to zero in on the sources of food poisoning outbreaks.At the pandemic’s outset, some labs began sequencing the coronavirus right away. The Minnesota Department of Health, for example, started doing so within weeks of its first COVID-19 cases in March, said Sara Vetter, an assistant lab director. “That put us a step ahead,” she said.The CDC likewise worked with certain states to sequence close to 500 samples in April, and over a thousand samples in May and June.But many labs didn’t do the same — especially those overburdened with ramping up coronavirus diagnostic testing. The CDC’s Armstrong said that at the time, he couldn’t justify telling labs to do more sequencing when they already had their hands full and there wasn’t any evidence such analysis was needed.“Up until a month ago, it wasn’t on the list of things that are urgently necessary. It was nice to have,” said Trevor Bedford, a scientist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. “There was definitely lack of federal resources assigned to doing exactly this.”At the same time, because of stay-at-home orders imposed during the outbreak, researchers at some labs were told not to go in to work, Messaoudi said.“Instead of having a call to arms,” she said, “they sent everyone home.”Over the summer, though, a group of scientists sounded the alarm about the state of genomic surveillance in the U.S. and began pushing for something more systematic.In November, the CDC began to roll out a national program to more methodically pull and check specimens to better determine what strains are circulating. Then in December, the U.S. got a wake-up call when British researchers announced they had identified a variant that seems to spread more easily.The CDC reacted by announcing its surveillance program would scale up to process 750 samples nationally per week. The agency also contracted with three companies — LabCorp, Quest Diagnostics and Illumina — to sequence thousands more each week. State labs are doing thousands of their own.Meanwhile, the outbreak is almost certainly seeding more COVID-19 mutations.“Where it has free rein of the place, there’s going to be significant variants that evolve,” Scripps Research Institute scientist Dr. Eric Topol said. “The more genomic sequencing, the more we can stay ahead of the virus.”
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Despite its world-class medical system and its vaunted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. fell behind in the race to detect dangerous coronavirus mutations. And it’s only now beginning to catch up.The problem has not been a shortage of technology or expertise. Rather, scientists say, it’s an absence of national leadership and coordination, plus a lack of funding and supplies for overburdened laboratories trying to juggle diagnostic testing with the hunt for genetic changes.“We have the brains. We have the tools. We have the instruments,” said Ilhem Messaoudi, director of a virus research center at University of California, Irvine. “It’s just a matter of supporting that effort.”Viruses mutate constantly. To stay ahead of the threat, scientists analyze samples, watching closely for mutations that might make the coronavirus more infectious or more deadly.But such testing has been scattershot.Less than 1% of positive specimens in the U.S. are being sequenced to determine whether they have worrisome mutations. Other countries do better — Britain sequences about 10% — meaning they can more quickly see threats coming at them. That gives them greater opportunity to slow or stop the problem, whether through more targeted contact tracing, possible adjustments to the vaccine, or public warnings.CDC officials say variants have not driven recent surges in overall U.S. cases. But experts worry that what’s happening with variants is not clear and say the nation should have been more aggressive about sequencing earlier in the epidemic that has now killed over 450,000 Americans.“If we had evidence it was changing,” said Ohio State molecular biologist Dan Jones, “maybe people would’ve acted differently.”U.S. scientists have detected more than 500 cases of a variant first identified in Britain and expect it to become the cause of most of this country’s new infections in a matter of weeks. Another troubling variant tied to Brazil and a third discovered in South Africa were detected last week in the U.S. and also are expected to spread.The British variant is more contagious and is believed to be more deadly than the original, while the South Africa one may render the vaccines somewhat less effective. The ultimate fear is that a variant resistant to existing vaccines and treatments could eventually emerge.Potentially worrisome versions may form inside the U.S., too. “This virus is mutating, and it doesn’t care of it’s in Idaho or South Africa,” Messaoudi said.But the true dimensions of the problem in the U.S. are not clear because of the relatively low level of sequencing.“You only see what’s under the lamppost,” said Kenny Beckman, director of the University of Minnesota Genomics Center, which started analyzing the virus’s genetics last spring.Medics take a patient out of an ambulance outside the Royal London Hospital in east London, Feb. 4, 2021.After the slow start, public health labs in at least 33 states are now doing genetic analysis to identify emerging coronavirus variants. Other states have formed partnerships with university or private labs to do the work. North Dakota, which began sequencing last week, was the most recent to start that work, according to the Association of Public Health Laboratories.The CDC believes a minimum of 5,000 to 10,000 samples should be analyzed weekly in the U.S. to adequately monitor variants, said Gregory Armstrong, who oversees the agency’s advanced molecular detection work. And it’s only now that the nation is hitting that level, he acknowledged.Still, it is a jumble of approaches: Some public health labs sequence every positive virus specimen. Some focus on samples from certain outbreaks or certain patients. Others randomly select samples to analyze.On top of that, labs continue to have trouble getting needed supplies — like pipette tips and chemicals — used in both gene sequencing and diagnostic testing.President Joe Biden, who inherited the setup from the Trump administration, is proposing a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package that calls for boosting federal spending on sequencing of the virus, though the amount has not been detailed and other specifics have yet to be worked out.“We’re 43rd in the world in genomic sequencing. Totally unacceptable,” White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients said.For more than five years, U.S. public health labs have been building up their ability to do genomic sequencing, thanks largely to a federal push to zero in on the sources of food poisoning outbreaks.At the pandemic’s outset, some labs began sequencing the coronavirus right away. The Minnesota Department of Health, for example, started doing so within weeks of its first COVID-19 cases in March, said Sara Vetter, an assistant lab director. “That put us a step ahead,” she said.The CDC likewise worked with certain states to sequence close to 500 samples in April, and over a thousand samples in May and June.But many labs didn’t do the same — especially those overburdened with ramping up coronavirus diagnostic testing. The CDC’s Armstrong said that at the time, he couldn’t justify telling labs to do more sequencing when they already had their hands full and there wasn’t any evidence such analysis was needed.“Up until a month ago, it wasn’t on the list of things that are urgently necessary. It was nice to have,” said Trevor Bedford, a scientist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. “There was definitely lack of federal resources assigned to doing exactly this.”At the same time, because of stay-at-home orders imposed during the outbreak, researchers at some labs were told not to go in to work, Messaoudi said.“Instead of having a call to arms,” she said, “they sent everyone home.”Over the summer, though, a group of scientists sounded the alarm about the state of genomic surveillance in the U.S. and began pushing for something more systematic.In November, the CDC began to roll out a national program to more methodically pull and check specimens to better determine what strains are circulating. Then in December, the U.S. got a wake-up call when British researchers announced they had identified a variant that seems to spread more easily.The CDC reacted by announcing its surveillance program would scale up to process 750 samples nationally per week. The agency also contracted with three companies — LabCorp, Quest Diagnostics and Illumina — to sequence thousands more each week. State labs are doing thousands of their own.Meanwhile, the outbreak is almost certainly seeding more COVID-19 mutations.“Where it has free rein of the place, there’s going to be significant variants that evolve,” Scripps Research Institute scientist Dr. Eric Topol said. “The more genomic sequencing, the more we can stay ahead of the virus.”
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Drugmaker Johnson & Johnson said Thursday it is seeking approval for its single-dose COVID-19 vaccine from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.The FDA said it has scheduled a Feb. 26 meeting of its Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee to discuss an emergency use authorization for the company.In January, Johnson & Johnson released a report that said its vaccine had a 66% rate of preventing the coronavirus infection in a large global trial. However, the vaccine was found in trials not to protect as well against the South Africa virus variant, which is highly transmissible and spreading around the globe, officials said.After previous such meetings of the FDA committee, vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna received authorization within a day.The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, which each require two doses to be fully inoculated, are 95% effective, studies show.Johnson & Johnson, which said it will also apply for European authorization within weeks, has a single-dose vaccine that does not need to be frozen during shipping, which the two other approved vaccines do.In January, Paul Stoffels, the company’s chief scientific officer, said the drugmaker would have vaccine ready to ship by March.”Upon authorization of our investigational COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, we are ready to begin shipping,” Stoffels said in a statement.The news of a possible new vaccine to fight the coronavirus pandemic comes as global confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, neared 105 million and deaths totaled nearly 2.3 million.The United States leads the world with more than 26.6 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and by late Thursday had recorded 455,657 deaths.However, the number of daily deaths is falling, from a record high of 4,466 on Jan. 12, to 3,912 Wednesday, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the new head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said COVID-19 deaths could fall even further by next week. But she also worried that the upcoming Super Bowl game on Sunday could lead to people relaxing coronavirus protocols to gather and watch the major football event.
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Far beneath the ocean surface, a cacophony of industrial noise is disrupting marine animals’ ability to mate, feed and even evade predators, scientists warn. With rumbling ships, hammering oil drills and booming seismic survey blasts, humans have drastically altered the underwater soundscape – in some cases deafening or disorienting whales, dolphins and other marine mammals that rely on sound to navigate, researchers report in a metastudy published online Thursday and in the Friday edition of the journal FILE – A large crevasse forms near the calving front of the Helheim glacier near Tasiilaq, Greenland, June 22, 2018.”It’s a chronic problem that certainly weakens the animals all the way from individuals to populations,” Duarte said in an interview. “This is a growing problem, one that is global in scope.” These noises and their impacts need more attention from scientists and policymakers, particularly the effects on sea turtles and other reptiles, seabirds, seals, walruses and plant-eating mammals such as manatees, the study says. The international team of researchers called for a global regulatory framework for measuring and managing ocean noise. Much of the human-caused noise should be easy to reduce, Duarte said. For example, measures such as building quieter ship propellers and hulls and using drilling techniques that do not cause bubbles and water vibrations could cut noise pollution in half, he said. Having the world use more renewable energy would lessen the need to drill for oil and gas. The benefits to marine life could be dramatic, he said, noting a resurgence in marine activity during April 2020 when shipping noise, typically loudest near coastlines, died down as countries went into lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. But humans have not only added noise to the ocean, they have also eliminated natural sounds, the study found. Whaling in the 1900s, for example, removed millions of whales from the world’s oceans – along with much of their whale song. And the chirp and chatter around coral reefs is growing quieter as more corals die from ocean warming, acidification and pollution. Climate change has also changed the soundscape in parts of the ocean that are warming by altering the mix of animals living there, along with the noises they make. Oceanographer Kate Stafford at the University of Washington Applied Physics Laboratory praised the timing of the metastudy, as the United Nations calls on governments to set aside 30% of the world’s land and sea areas for conservation. “The review makes it clear that, to actually reduce anthrophony [human noise] and aim for a well-managed future … we will need global cooperation among governments,” Stafford said. 
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As African nations wait for hundreds of millions of COVID-19 vaccine doses to arrive, health officials are concerned about a general rise in coronavirus cases and deaths, especially in Southern Africa.
 
The stories, reported in local media and highlighted by aid groups, are chilling. In the tiny kingdom of eSwatini, medical aid group Doctors Without Borders says health facilities are seeing 200 new cases per day and a death rate four times higher than they saw in the first wave.  
 
In the coastal nation of Mozambique, case numbers are nearly seven times higher than they were at the peak of the first wave in 2020.  
 
And in the landlocked nation of Malawi, the poorest country in Southern Africa, new cases are doubling every four to five days, and the nation’s main COVID-19 facility is nearly full.
 
Dr. John Nkengasong, head of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tried to break down the continent’s trajectory as many nations enter a second wave without enough vaccine supplies.  
 
He said one indicator worth noting is that for about a third of the continent’s countries, the death rate has risen above the global average.  
 
“It used to be the reverse,” he told reporters via teleconference on Thursday. “During the first wave, the case fatality rate was about 2.2%, and now we are seeing 2.6%. In terms of the number of countries experiencing the second wave, 41 of them are currently experiencing the second wave on the continent. That is 41 of the 55 member states. Five countries accounted for about 70%.”
 
Those countries are South Africa, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and Ethiopia.Workers load South Africa’s first COVID-19 vaccine shipments as they arrive at OR Tambo airport in Johannesburg, Feb. 1, 2021. (Credit: Elmond Jiyane for GCIS/Handout)Africa escaped the worst of the pandemic last year. But health experts point out the continent now has many factors complicating the situation. Testing has lagged behind the rest of the world. Vaccine rollout has been slower, with just a handful of countries only recently launching vaccination campaigns.  
 
And the continent’s chronic problems with infrastructure and capacity mean that health systems, social safety nets, transportation networks and economies are struggling to meet the challenge posed by this pandemic.   
 
This, said Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) regional director for Africa, is exactly what African health officials have been talking about when they warned against letting vaccine acquisition play out in the open market, a situation that gives wealthier nations advantages like having more power to negotiate for cheaper vaccines in larger quantities.  
 
Moeti told journalists Thursday she was still optimistic.
 
“Clearly, global solidarity is still a work in progress,” she said. “It was our ambition. It was our hope. It has not delivered to the extent that we had hoped, but it is still a work in progress. We are still doing our advocacy for donations from countries that have secured more vaccine to cover the entire population.”
 
Moeti said once African nations secure vaccine doses, they face another challenge: convincing people to take them. She emphasized that the vaccines approved by WHO are safe and effective, and said the organization is being proactive about dispelling the growing tide of false information about vaccines.   
 
“What encourages me is that we know in the African region that in general, people have been positive about having their children vaccinated,” she said. “It is only lately that some of the anti-vaccine sentiments, messaging, initiatives and campaigns have started to land here. We need to build on African people’s belief in vaccines for their children to help them to understand that something extraordinary was done to develop these vaccines. And of course, to be very factual about the fact that we are learning about the vaccines as we go along, but we know enough about their efficaciousness.”
 
Moeti advised people who can take a WHO-approved vaccine to do it. She and other experts reiterated their best advice on containing the coronavirus — stay at home, if possible, wear a mask, wash hands and keep a safe distance.
 
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