Hanoi said Saturday that, using genetic sequencing, it has found a highly infectious new variant that combines characteristics of variants previously detected in Britain and India. Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long told reporters that the new variant was particularly contagious via air, while viral cultures revealed it replicates extremely quickly.
Here are some significant developments:
China’s Bat Hunter and Bat Woman under scrutiny as coronavirus lab-leak theory gets another look
In the video, the researchers scale the cavern wall, their headlamps ghostly blue.
“If our skin is exposed, it can easily come in contact with bat excrement and contaminated matter, which means this is quite risky,” says Tian Junhua, one of the bat hunters.
The video was released by national science authorities and offers a rare glimpse of field conditions on the eve of the pandemic. The video is perhaps even more notable for what it doesn’t reveal. Nothing is known outside China about the science gleaned from that expedition by the Wuhan CDC.
Tian has not spoken publicly for more than a year.
The silencing of scientists, the blanket denials, the careful guarding of raw data and biological samples — these elements have been emblematic of the approach by Chinese authorities at every stage of the coronavirus outbreak. And they continue to obstruct the world’s ability to get answers.
U.S. Embassy in Kabul urges Americans to leave Afghanistan as soon as possible as covid-19 spreads
The U.S. Embassy in Kabul issued a warning Thursday urging American citizens to leave Afghanistan as soon as possible because of the worsening coronavirus situation there.
“New cases and deaths from COVID-19 haven risen sharply throughout Afghanistan. Hospitals are reporting shortages of supplies, oxygen, and beds,” the Embassy said in a statement. It added that U.S. citizens have reported being denied admittance to hospitals because of a lack of space.
“The U.S. Embassy strongly suggests that U.S. citizens make plans to leave Afghanistan as soon as possible,” the alert said.
Afghanistan appears to be in the grip of a third wave of infections, driven in part by the spread of the Alpha variant first discovered in Britain, according to the Ministry of Public Health.
The country has recorded about 75,000 cases and more than 3,000 deaths, but testing resources are scant. And just 1.3 percent of the population has received a single dose of coronavirus vaccine, according to Our World in Data, which tracks publicly available figures.
Afghanistan’s health-care infrastructure has been battered by years of war. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month issued a travel alert warning that “even fully vaccinated travelers may be at risk for getting and spreading COVID-19 variants and should avoid all travel to Afghanistan.”
The landlocked nation has kept its shared borders with Iran and Pakistan open throughout the pandemic and has maintained direct flights to India, which recently suffered one of the world’s worst outbreaks of the virus.
“Given the security conditions and reduced staffing, the Embassy’s ability to assist U.S. citizens in Afghanistan is extremely limited,” the U.S. Embassy said.
Syrian diplomat in Russia walks back statement that Assad was immunized with Sputnik V vaccine
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has not yet been immunized against covid-19, the country’s ambassador to Moscow said Thursday, just hours after declaring that the leader had received Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine.
“President Assad was sick with coronavirus. … He has high antibodies. In this regard, he does not need to be vaccinated,” Ambassador Riad Haddad said Thursday, Russia’s Interfax news agency reported.
The agency previously quoted Haddad as saying that Assad had been vaccinated, along with other senior government officials, with an initial batch of Sputnik V doses.
“Sputnik V is already in Syria. The first batch of Sputnik has been used to vaccinate doctors and the country’s top officials. It has already been done. The population is now being inoculated,” Haddad said, Interfax reported.
“Yes, he has been vaccinated,” the agency quoted Haddad as saying in response to a question about Assad’s immunization status.
Later, Interfax revised the story, saying, “Significant changes were made to the headline and text … at the request of the [Syrian] embassy.”
Assad and his wife, Asma, contracted the virus in March and were flown to Moscow for treatment. They have since recovered.
Speaking to reporters in Moscow on Thursday, Haddad did not say how many doses of Sputnik V vaccine have arrived in Syria. Damascus has also received vaccine doses through the United Nations-backed Covax initiative for equitable vaccination, as well as through donations from the United Arab Emirates.
Officially, Syria has reported more than 24,000 coronavirus cases and nearly 1,800 deaths since the pandemic began. But with few testing centers, doctors and aid workers in Syria say that those numbers are vast undercounts.
Indonesia cancels annual hajj pilgrimage for second year in a row
Religious Affairs Minister Yaqut Cholil Qoumas said at a news conference that Saudi Arabia, home to the Muslim holy city of Mecca, had not yet set a quota for travelers from Indonesia, which normally sends more than 220,000 pilgrims each year.
The journey, one of the five pillars of Islam, begins next month. But Qoumas said it was too late to prepare and implement the health protocols needed to ensure that a large group of pilgrims remains safe while traveling during the pandemic, local media reported.
Last year, Saudi Arabia severely curbed the number of pilgrims allowed to travel to Mecca and Medina, Islam’s second-holiest city, limiting visitors to those who were already inside the country. In 2019, before the covid-19 outbreak, nearly 2.5 million people traveled to Saudi Arabia for the hajj.
Bahrain recommending Pfizer-BioNTech booster for those already vaccinated with China’s Sinopharm
DUBAI — A top Bahraini health official says the country is now offering Pfizer-BioNTech doses to high-risk individuals who have already received two jabs of Sinopharm in the latest development to cast doubt on the Chinese-developed vaccine’s effectiveness.
Waleed Khalifa al-Manea, Bahrain’s undersecretary of health, told the Wall Street Journal that people fully vaccinated with Sinopharm who are over 50, with chronic illnesses or obese are being urged to get a booster of Pfizer-BioNTech six months after their last Sinopharm shot.
Bahrain and neighboring United Arab Emirates — both of which relied heavily on Sinopharm for their rapid vaccine rollouts — announced they were offering third-dose Sinopharm booster shots starting in mid-May after studies showed that some of those vaccinated hadn’t developed sufficient antibodies.
Both countries at the time said the Sinopharm third dose was for seniors, those with chronic illnesses and other high-risk individuals. The Bahraini announcement now suggests a belief that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is more effective.
Studies of Sinopharm have shown efficacy rates of around 70 percent, but other countries that have used it have reported issues, including the Seychelles, which had one of the world’s highest vaccination rates yet still reported a major coronavirus outbreak.
Bahrain, which saw infections go from the low hundreds in January to more than 3,000 a day in May, also has one of the world’s highest vaccination rates, with more than 47 percent of the population of 1.5 million fully vaccinated. The country has since gone into lockdown.
In the UAE, there are increasing reports of people getting infected after receiving two doses of Sinopharm. At a vaccination center recently, very few people were queuing up for the Chinese vaccine, preferring to wait for the nearby Pfizer-BioNTech option.
WHO says Vietnam coronavirus hybrid not considered a new variant ‘at this moment’
The World Health Organization’s top official in Vietnam said that the coronavirus mutation first detected in the Southeast Asian country does not meet the global health body’s definition of a new variant, though it is still very transmissible and dangerous.
Vietnam’s health minister said Saturday that through genetic sequencing, Hanoi had found a highly infectious new variant that combined characteristics of strains previously detected in Britain and India, now characterized by the WHO as the Alpha and Delta variants.
“The new variant is very dangerous,” Nguyen Thanh Long told reporters, adding that it was particularly contagious via air. Viral cultures revealed it replicates extremely quickly, as well.
But the WHO’s representative in Vietnam told Nikkei Asia in an interview published Thursday that “there is no new hybrid variant in Vietnam at this moment based on WHO definition.”
Instead, what Vietnamese officials found was a mutation of the Delta variant, Kidong Park told the magazine, referring to the B.1.617.2 strain.
“As for now, there is no alarming alert from WHO,” he said.
Vietnam, a rare developing economy to have successfully contained the coronavirus, is now battling clusters of infections that have popped up in Ho Chi Minh City, its economic hub in the south, and two industrialized provinces in the country’s north.
The communist regime has locked down much of Ho Chi Minh City and says it plans to test all 9 million people living in the metropolis. Hanoi is also struggling to accelerate a sluggish inoculation program and this week reiterated a call for international patents to be suspended to speed up vaccine production. Only about 1 percent of the country’s roughly 100 million residents has been administered at least one dose of a vaccine.
Vietnam reported 245 new infections on Wednesday, slightly below the seven-day average of 255. There have been at least 7,870 cases and 49 deaths since the start of the pandemic.
India’s Supreme Court orders government to fix sputtering vaccination policy amid crisis
NEW DELHI — Calling India’s decision to charge people ages 18 to 44 for vaccines when it is provided free to other groups, “arbitrary and irrational,” the Supreme Court on Wednesday sharply criticized the faltering government vaccination policy as a second wave slammed the country.
The court raised questions over the government spending from its $4.8 billion budget allocation for vaccine procurement and whether that money could be used to provide free vaccinations for younger age groups.
The Indian government has in recent months come under fire from experts and opposition-ruled states for its muddled vaccination policy at a time when speeding up the drive is key. In several states, vaccinations for younger groups have halted as supplies from the central government have run out.
State governments’ attempts to procure vaccines directly from the international market have not worked out, as American companies such as Pfizer and Moderna say they will only engage with the federal government. India’s domestic vaccine production has not been able to keep pace with the huge numbers required to inoculate the country of over 1.3 billion people.
In March, India paused coronavirus vaccine exports in an effort to shore up the domestic program, jeopardizing the vaccination plans of dozens of low-income countries. Given the pause on exports, India’s Serum Institute has been unable to supply the millions of doses it had pledged to Covax, a global initiative for equitable vaccination.
India’s Supreme Court directed the government to review its policy, seeking details about procurement and distribution of vaccines within two weeks. The central government told the court that it aimed to vaccinate everyone above the age of 18 — more than 940 million people, by the end of the year.
Apple’s Tim Cook says staff to return to ‘hybrid’ office from September
Apple chief executive Tim Cook has asked the tech company’s employees to return to physical offices starting from early September, citing accelerating coronavirus vaccinations and declining infection rates.
Cook said that Apple would use a “hybrid model” that allows most staff members to work remotely two days a week, while being in the office on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, according to a companywide email sent Wednesday that was seen by The Washington Post.
Apple employees in some Asia-Pacific countries, where the pandemic had largely been under control, have worked part-time in the office for months in what Cook called a “hopeful example.” And by the end of the month, all Apple-operated retail stores will be reopened worldwide, he said.
But Cook also acknowledged that covid-19 continues to persist globally and another company email sent Thursday to Apple staff in Asia, which is fighting a resurgence of covid-19, said that the maker of Mac computers and iPhones would continue to follow local regulations on working from home.
Cook has praised the creativity that can arise from impromptu face-to-face meetings but wrote in his email that Apple would allow staffers, with their managers’ permission, to work remotely for up to two weeks annually for reasons that could include “a change of scenery.”
He had said at the Atlantic Festival last year that the company would not “return to the way we were, because we’ve found that there are some things that actually work really well virtually.”
The Apple chief also encouraged employees to get vaccinated on Wednesday, as President Biden announced a “national month of action” to boost inoculation rates in the United States ahead of the July Fourth holiday.
“Let me simply say that I look forward to seeing your faces,” Cook wrote. “How we do [our work] may change, but why we do it never will.”
The video games that got us through the pandemic
It has been 469 days since covid-19 cut us off from our colleagues. We’ve now logged more than 11,256 hours at home, but we’ve been far from idle. The past year-plus bathed the nation in stress and suffering, a number of us enduring it alone. And as we’ve self-isolated in our homes, separated by walls and miles from colleagues, friends and family, the distance strained the bonds that unite us and the calm that keeps us sane.
For a number of us, video games provided a refuge, proxy worlds to inhabit while ours was unsuitable for life as we knew it. Instead of grabbing beers at a bar, friends paired up in multiplayer lobbies. They donned headsets and delivered life updates in disembodied voices. Vacations were scrapped and replaced with byte-sized getaways to war-torn battlefields and post-apocalyptic hellscapes that somehow instilled serenity.
Thousands of Olympic volunteers quit; top Japanese doctor warns of ‘not normal’ Games
The beleaguered Tokyo 2020 Games took another blow this week after it emerged that roughly 10,000 volunteers had quit and a top medical adviser to the government expressed worries about the event going ahead.
Tokyo’s failure to control an ongoing spike in coronavirus infections was a factor behind the mass resignations, said Toshiro Muto, the Japanese organizing committee’s chief. But he insisted that the loss of more than 10 percent of the 80,000 volunteers who had signed up was not “particularly problematic,” given the smaller nature of the event, which will not have foreign spectators, the Japan Times reported.
Tokyo last week extended a state of emergency that covers much of the country’s population until just a month before the opening ceremony on July 23. The capital’s local government recently canceled a plan to hold public viewings of the already delayed Games in a large park.
About 8 percent of the Japanese population had received at least one dose of a vaccine as of Tuesday.
Sexist comments made by a former organizing committee president, who complained that women allegedly talked too much, also played a role in volunteers leaving, the Kyodo News Agency said.
Both Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and the International Olympic Committee, which has sizable TV deals at stake, have insisted that a “safe and secure” Games can be held.
But Shigeru Omi, a top infectious-disease expert who advises the government, also told a parliamentary committee Wednesday that holding the Games during a pandemic was “not normal.”
“If they were to be held during a pandemic, it is the organizers’ responsibility to scale them down as much as possible and strengthen the management system,” he said.
Covax gets massive funding bump after pledges from Japan, Spain
The Covax program to ensure the equitable distribution of coronavirus vaccines globally raised nearly $2.4 billion in fresh funding after a virtual conference on Wednesday — a sum that will allow it to deliver 1.8 billion fully subsidized doses to developing economies by early 2022.
The donations, pledged by roughly 40 private donors and countries, filled what had been a $1.7 billion funding gap. The sums ranged from a $2,500 contribution from Mauritius to $50 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, $61 million from Spain and $800 million from Japan, Reuters reported.
Tokyo co-hosted the conference with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which helps lead Covax.
“We have taken a big step towards ‘one world protected,’ ” said José Manuel Barroso, chairman of Gavi.
Japan’s inoculation program is gradually ramping up and Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said that Tokyo was aiming to donate 30 million doses of Japanese-made vaccines “in the right time,” according to the Nikkei newspaper.
The United States, which has already committed $4 billion over two years for the program, did not make any new announcements at the conference, which was attended by Vice President Harris.
Covax, which has raised over $9.5 billion, has shipped more than 77 million doses thus far. The program has been delayed by the recent spike of c coronavirus infections in India, where its largest supplier is based.
The Serum Institute of India has not made deliveries in about three months as New Delhi froze large-scale exports of coronavirus vaccines to use them domestically. Gavi recently said it was in talks with Sinovac on acquiring the Chinese-developed vaccine, which was recently approved by the World Health Organization for emergency use, for Covax.
As of Wednesday, nearly 2 billion doses of coronavirus vaccines have been administered globally — the vast majority in wealthier nations.
Perspective: The pandemic laid bare the internalized fatphobia I’ve struggled with throughout my life
I shudder when I think about the Fuscos. Last year in March, seven members of the overweight New Jersey family contracted the coronavirus, and four of them died. Facebook commenters zeroed in on the photograph, cruelly pointing out their heft and blaming it for their demise.
In January 2020, two months before we all entered lockdown, I decided to lose weight. These appearance-based fears are a major part of my fatphobia. I never really considered it in terms of my health. My doctor visits made sure to point out that I may be okay now, but eventually, I wouldn’t be. It made me feel like a ticking time bomb.
Then the pandemic hit, and it ushered in a new type of anxiety. That ticking bomb got louder, and my sense of time felt both finite and endless.
Analysis: Actually, getting the vaccine *is* a partisan act, even if it shouldn’t be
President Biden on Wednesday renewed his calls for Americans to be vaccinated against the coronavirus. In doing so, he directly addressed a key divide on willingness to get vaccinated: partisanship. While 9 in 10 Democrats in polling conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation said they have gotten a shot or will as soon as possible, only half of Republicans said the same. Three percent of Democrats said they would definitely not get a vaccine; more than a quarter of Republicans said the same.
“We were elected to be president and vice president for all Americans, and I don’t want to see the country, that is already too divided, become divided in a new way: between places where people live free from fear of covid and places where, when the fall arrives, death and severe illnesses return,” Biden said during a speech in Washington.
“Getting the vaccine is not a partisan act,” he added.
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