Stopping the spread of Covid-19 through public health measures remains vital to curbing the pandemic, one of Britains most senior scientific figures has warned.
On the eve of the second anniversary of the lockdown that began the UKs Covid response, Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, called for investment in next-generation vaccines and better access to vaccinations for poorer countries.
Farrar joined several of the UKs most eminent scientists in praising the extraordinary response to the pandemic by the clinicians, researchers and business leaders. But with Covid infections and hospital admissions rising across the UK, measures such as masks, social distancing and ventilation are key.
Progress made by researchers over the last two years has been remarkable, from delivering vaccines and treatments in record time, to the hard work of genomic sequencers tracking the spread of the virus and identifying new variants, said Farrar. We must ensure more vaccines reach low and middle-income countries while also investing in research into second and third-generation vaccines that give broader protection and block transmission.
Focus now needs to be on maintaining key public health interventions alongside vaccines, and developing and ensuring equitable access to new treatments and strengthening the supply chains for PPE and oxygen. Stopping the spread will help to break the constant and unsustainable cycle of reacting to new variants.
Another of the countrys most eminent scientists said Britains universities and private laboratories should be handed a permanent role in testing hospital and care home staff in the event of a pandemic, to avoid one of the main mistakes of the early response to Covid.
Paul Nurse, the Nobel prize winner and director of the Francis Crick Institute, said that the failure to harness the equipment and lab expertise of workers willing to offer public service meant that testing capacity took far longer than necessary to set up, leaving health and care settings fatally exposed.
There was no imaginative thinking about how to get testing rapidly in place, he said. They simply farmed it all out to commercial operations, working from big Lighthouse labs, which didnt have a chance of getting working in time to be of any use in the first round of the epidemic.
We cannot keep big commercial labs running like this for the next 10 years, 15 years, waiting for the next virulent virus outbreak. We do not have a sustainable system in place. Why not actually make use of exactly what we did, which is to identify a range of institutions around the country universities and publicly funded research places like the Crick so in an emergency you could activate a network very rapidly, relying on public service and not simply a commercial programme?
John Edmunds, a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), also said that work should begin now on vaccines for the most likely candidates to provoke the next pandemic. I sincerely hope that we will not need to take such extreme measures as lockdown again, he said.
He added: One way to help reduce the chances of having to impose very harsh measures on everyone is to improve our surveillance both nationally and internationally. We must also invest in vaccine platforms and develop vaccines against a range of currently rare diseases that have epidemic potential, so that we can adapt them rapidly should we need to.
Last week the seven-day average for UK hospital admissions related to Covid rose above 1,700, with more than half being admitted directly because of Covid, the NHS Confederation said. Nearly 5% of people in England had Covid in the week ending 12 March, according to the Office for National Statisticss weekly Covid infection survey. NHS staff absences have begun to rise again too, while emergency departments are also under pressure: in a seven-day period earlier this month nearly a quarter of ambulances in England faced a delay of more than 30 minutes before being able to hand over patients.
The single biggest lesson from this pandemic is to act early, decisively and globally to prevent problems becoming much bigger, Farrar said. At the heart of this is the need for solid, trustworthy, international cooperation, with focus on long-term solutions that will help us to achieve a meaningful and long-lasting recovery.
This means preparing for all possible scenarios when dealing with an unpredictable virus, not only for the easy outcome where we hope this crisis blows over. The global response can and must be better than what we have experienced. Nearly two years after the first lockdown began on 23 March 2020, at least 185,000 people have died with Covid on their death certificate. More than 38.5 million people or almost 58% of the UK population have received at least three doses of the vaccines that were created, tested and delivered by scientists and pharmaceutical companies around the world.
About 487m virus tests have been conducted in the UK, most of them at the network of Lighthouse labs that was built after successive governments had allowed the public health laboratory system to run down. Now many of the Lighthouse labs are also being shut down, as part of the governments living with Covid plan.
Some of the institutions that played a crucial role in advising the government how to cope with the virus are also gone.
Sage, which was made up of some of the most eminent academics in the UK, has been mothballed, while funding has ended for many of the research projects that it relied on such as Imperial College Londons React-1 survey of infection prevalence, the CoMix social contacts survey and the Isaric-4C (Coronavirus Clinical Characterisation Consortium) information network that used healthcare records to discover Covids clinical features.
Three months after it was established on 23 March 2020, the Recovery trial, based at Oxford University, had discovered that dexamethasone reduced the chances of death for the sickest patients, and has since established the effectiveness of three other treatments.
Sir Martin Landray, Recoverys joint chief investigator and professor of medicine and epidemiology at Oxford Population Health, said he would not have thought it possible to go from a blank piece of paper to enrolling the first patient in nine days, to finding the first life-saving treatment within 10 weeks and for it to be made standard NHS policy within three hours.
Landray said he hoped the progress in how research is conducted would continue. We cannot afford to go backwards. Recovery was integrated into the routine care being delivered in our hospitals, and there was a commitment to act quickly and minimise bureaucracy.
With NHS staff keen to continue, he added, it could herald a new age for research, not just for this pandemic and the next but for other common infections such as influenza and chronic diseases if policy-makers invest and maintain existing staff and structures.
Two years on from the start of the coronavirus pandemic, let me tell you what life is like in my Hong Kong neighborhood. Playgrounds are wrapped in red-and-white caution tape and barricaded with plastic fencing to keep children out, and the swings have been tossed over the crossbar to ensure that no illicit amusement takes place. The governments disastrous public messaging about a possible citywide lockdown has led to widespread panic-buying, so gossip swapped while Im out walking my dog focuses on which shops have restocked.
All restaurants have to close at 6 p.m., and bars arent open at all. A restaurant down the street from my apartment now offers happy-hour deals starting at 10 a.m. Gyms, movie theaters, campsites, and beaches have been shut down entirely. If I want to take a walk on my own in a remote country park, I am legally required to wear a mask.
This situation feels all the more shocking because in early 2020, Hong Kong was ahead of the COVID curve, not lagging behind it. As soon as news emerged of a still-mysterious virus, everyone here began wearing masks and adapted to social distancing almost immediately; I wrote article after article about what life would look like in the weeks to come in America, having seen the future myself. While the West was caught off guard, Hong Kong felt prepared.
Now medical facilities are overwhelmed with sick patients, and because morgues have struggled to keep pace, body bags are piled up in hospitals alongside patients still receiving treatment. Coffins are being shipped in to meet the demand. Construction workers are racing to build isolation facilities, including one that looks like a wartime field hospital on the border with the mainland. Some 300,000 people are in isolation or under home quarantine. After recording only 213 deaths and about 13,000 cases of COVID-19 from January 2020 to early 2022, the city is swamped by the current Omicron wave, which began at the start of the year and has led to more than 960,000 cases and more than 4,600 deaths.
Hong Kong was lauded for controlling the coronaviruss spread with its zero-COVID strategy. It has ample vaccine doses. It is wealthy enough to support its poorest people if it chooses to. It has effectively shut down swaths of its economy, including its lucrative tourism sector, to battle the virus.
And yet this month, it recorded one of the highest COVID death rates in the world. What just happened?
Hong Kong has employed its zero-COVID strategy since the onset of the pandemic. The approach has not been as restrictive as the one used in mainland China, which calls for shutting down whole metropolises and testing their population over a handful of COVID cases. The city has an aggressive test-and-trace program, as well as toughened border controls, to catch infections and break transmission lines, and enacts social-distancing measures when cases spike. All of this helped Hong Kong buy itself time in the early stages of the pandemic, when vaccines were not available, keeping deaths to a minimum.
But now it clings to measures not based on sound science, and which experts have dismissed as largely performative (while also being heavily damaging to its travel- and service-based economy). It has neither pivoted to a more flexible approach nor prepared for an outbreak that analysts repeatedly warned was inevitable.
The missteps are almost too numerous to recount, but the worst ones have to do with Hong Kongs singular inability to vaccinate its population. The governments efforts were from the start imbued with politics and marred by poor messaging. It initially rushed through approval of the China-made Sinovac vaccine, and city leaders made a show of being inoculated with it, despite a better optionBioNTechs mRNA jabbeing available. (The large majority of deaths have been among the unvaccinated, but officials refuse to disclose data on which vaccine was administered to those who died after being vaccinated.) Press releases highlighting, with little context, the vaccines adverse effects were amplified by the media, leading to intense skepticism. Distrust in the government, still lingering from its handling of prodemocracy protests in 2019, did not help the cause. And most troubling has been the poor vaccination rate among the citys elderly population, a persistent problem. Today, just 55 percent of people older than 80 have received one vaccine shot, and 36 percent have received two.
Lam Ching-choi, a physician and a member of Chief Executive Carrie Lams cabinet, told me that the governments early reliance on family doctors to advise patients on vaccination was a mistake: Many warned the elderly to be cautious about receiving the vaccine. Predictably, COVID has swept through residential care homesmore than 29,000 elderly care-home residents have been infected during the current wave. Lam also told me that the government should have offered at-home vaccination for residents with mobility issues, and said the authorities would soon begin implementing that program. Yet it will start only next week, more than two months into the surge and more than a year after the vaccine rollout initially began.
The 21-day hotel quarantine required for all arrivals into Hong Kong, even for those without COVID, is dangerous and unscientific, experts told me, but the government has continued the practice anyway, leading to cross infections and a spike in cases. A government-funded study published last year warned about vaccine hesitancy, but officials did little beyond sloganeering and a perfunctory poster drive. The government also insisted on issuing compulsory testing notices to residents even when testing and quarantine facilities were already overloaded, leading to more stress on a teetering health system. Flight bans from countries including the United States and Britain are scheduled to be in place until next month, though the governments own advisers say there is no reason for this to continue.
In sum, decision makers ignored public-health expertise, driven instead by politics and overly enthusiastic efforts to show fealty to Beijing. The result has been an embarrassingly shambolic effort that has created a preventable public-health disaster, yet another glaring failure of governance from an administration whose defining characteristic is catastrophic ineptitude.
The question to ask, not unreasonably, would be: How come we either didnt have a good plan or didnt execute a good plan? Gabriel Leung, the dean of medicine at the University of Hong Kong and a pandemic-response adviser to the government, told me. When I asked whether he had any thoughts on the answer to that question, Leung responded, Suffice to say that we have done our very best to generate the best science to inform policy decisions. And, as Margaret Thatcher once said, Advisers advise; ministers decide. Lets put it at that.
Much of the world has struggled with various phases of the pandemic, but Hong Kongs difficulties are in no small part due to the fact that the city no longer has even its previous limited democratic accountability to push the government to review public-health decisions, thanks to a crackdown by Beijing and the imposition of a draconian national-security law. For varying reasons, many residents believed the governments fiction that only a small minority of people would be affected by these changes, but the mishandling of COVID has highlighted how the reengineering of Hong Kong will touch all aspects of life.
With opposition voices silenced, Hong Kongs rulers claimed they could more efficiently govern. But in the city legislature, overhauled last year to ensure that nationalism and obedience are valued over competence and political know-how, suggestions on how to tame the outbreak have included the wildly impractical (using cruise ships as temporary isolation facilities) and the patently absurd (dropping fresh food into Hong Kong by drone). Even this newfound sense of urgency on the part of lawmakers and the government has emerged only after Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke last month of the overriding mission to bring the current outbreak under control.
At the same time, pro-Beijing pundits and mainland officials have cast pandemic response, and adherence to dynamic zero COVID, as a loyalty test. (Determining what exactly dynamic zero COVID means is futile; the description shifts from official to official and day to day. Nevertheless, authorities insist that it shouldnt be questioned.) The director of Chinas Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office said this month that patriotic forces must forcefully expose, criticize, and sanction with laws the anti-China destabilizing forces who launched smearing attacks, spread rumors, and created panic to disrupt the anti-pandemic efforts. Addressing the United Nations, a Hong Kong doctor said that the idea of living with the virus was tantamount to the U.S. creating biological terrorists, in a melodramatic screed that seemed scripted for a comic-book villain. Hong Kongs civil service has become a targeted group, fingered as being polluted by Western ideas for questioning the COVID strategy.
Hong Kongs pandemic response definitely shows the NSL [national-security law] new order is not only about election and activists, but extends to all realms of life, Ho-Fung Hung, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author of the forthcoming book City on the Edge: Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule, told me by email.
As they did with the imposition of the national-security law, mainland officials felt the need to step in to address COVID-related problems that the Hong Kong government had created for itself, a move that has been met with slavish praise. Newspapers controlled by the Chinese government here have splashed their pages with adoration for workers arriving from over the border. Pro-Beijing lawmakers have rushed to social media to post their gratitude to the motherland for its support. My inbox fills up daily with statements thanking Beijing for taking control. The citys secretary of health applauded the mainlands donation of traditional Chinese medicine. (Authorities in Singapore, by contrast, have warned that there is no scientific evidence that one such remedy, called lianhua qingwen, can be used to prevent or treat COVID-19, while Australia has banned the sale of the treatment entirely.) The endless, unrestrained flattery seems akin to the celebration of an arsonist who lights his house on fire, cuts the water hose, and then cheers as the fire brigade arrives to extinguish the flames.
All the while, the broader political purge and repression of rights that was already under way in Hong Kong has carried on undisrupted. Half a dozen people were arrested and charged with sedition last month. In early March, the former head of the bar association, a British lawyer, was questioned by national-security police before he left the city, followed through the airport by reporters from Chinese state media. Authorities accused a U.K.-based rights group of endangering national security and demanded that it take down its website. Carrie Lam, the citys chief executive, employs wartime rhetoric as an excuse to exercise emergency powers. The longer the coronavirus outbreak persists, the more policies to combat it become intertwined with the ever-expanding security apparatus.
Listing Hong Kongs mistakes triggers a sense of dj vu: a politicized and inept response, an unwillingness to adapt existing strategies to the viruss mutations, an inability to overcome vaccine skepticism, long-running fissures in society torn open by COVID. For years, we were told by pro-Beijingers that these were the Wests problems, not ours.
Two years ago, we looked at the U.S. and Europe, dumbstruck at how badly they were managing the pandemic. Two years on, we are experiencing what Siddharth Sridhar, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong, describes as a plane crash in slow motion, having apparently learned little from the Westsor our ownexperience.
The country's daily case rate -- about 55,000 a day -- is still less than a third of what it was during the Omicron peak, but cases are rising as fast as they were falling just two weeks earlier, when self-isolation rules for infected people ended in the UK.
The situation has caught the eye of American public health experts, who worry that Europe's rise in infections may be a preview of what's to come in the US. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN that his British counterparts have pegged the rise in cases to a combination of three factors: The more transmissible BA.2 variant; the opening of society and people mingling more indoors without masks; and waning immunity from vaccination or prior infection.
"Without a doubt, opening up society and having people mingle indoors is clearly something that is a contributor, as well as overall waning immunity, which means we've really got to stay heads-up and keep our eye on the pattern here," Fauci said. "So that's the reason why we're watching this very carefully."
In the UK, 86% of eligible people are fully vaccinated, and 67% are boosted, compared with 69% of those eligible vaccinated and 50% boosted in the US. "What we see happening in the UK is going to be perhaps a better story than what we should be expecting here," Althoff said.
Even though the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) did away with masking recommendations for most parts of the country two weeks ago, it is vital to stay vigilant. "We have to stay diligent in terms of monitoring of it and testing and be prepared to possibly reverse a lot of the relaxing of these restrictions," said Deborah Fuller, a microbiologist at the University of Washington.
"We can't let our guard down, because the message that people get when they say 'we're lifting restrictions' is the pandemic is over. And it's not."
YOU ASKED. WE ANSWERED.
Q: What factors should people consider if they need to return to work in person?
"People should consider three factors. What are your medical circumstances and that of others in your household? What's the level of Covid-19 in your community? And finally what safety precautions are already being taken in your place of work?" Wen added. "Some offices require proof of vaccination, require regular testing, distancing, and ventilation. And remember that masks are always available, even if they are not required," she said.
READS OF THE WEEK
White House warns Congress about potential disruptions to Covid response
The latest warnings mark an escalation in pressure from the Biden administration ahead of key funding deadlines. Additional funding for federal Covid-19 efforts was initially included in a recent massive omnibus spending package, but was stripped out following a spat over how the spending would be offset.
As daily cases rise in Europe, a senior Biden administration official warned that Congress' failure to pass a supplemental Covid-19 funding bill could leave the US unprepared for another potential surge. "Our scientific and medical experts have been clear that in the next couple of months, we could see Covid cases increase here in the US just as we're seeing cases rising abroad right now," the senior official said, adding, "We are less well prepared without additional funding than we would be otherwise."
In China, 37 million people are in lockdown as the country suffers its worst outbreak since Wuhan
China is battling its worst Covid-19 outbreak since the early days of the pandemic. This outbreak has spread far faster than previous waves of less infectious variants, with daily cases skyrocketing from a few dozen in February to more than 5,100 on Tuesday -- the highest figure since the early 2020 outbreak in Wuhan.
Authorities and state media say it is still unclear how the first few outbreaks began. But several factors -- including cases imported from overseas and the prevalence of the Omicron variant -- exacerbated the severity of the outbreak nationwide.
She had a near-death experience because of Covid. But it wasn't a glimpse of an afterlife that changed her
They were spiritually transformed not by a glimpse of the afterlife but by what they saw in this life, when they were struggling to stay alive after being stricken by Covid.
Those type of stories don't tend to get book or movie deals. Yet people like Paige Deiner, 41, have these incredible stories of survival that can help us all.
Start with the power of gratitude. It's a clich for some, but not for many Covid survivors. "I think often of how much we take for granted," Deiner wrote in a Facebook post not long after she was released from the hospital in December, "from the ability to walk or swallow to breathe."
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President Biden participating in a virtual meeting with Prime Minister Micheal Martin of Ireland in the Oval Office on Thursday.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
President Biden canceled his face-to-face meetings with Prime Minister Micheal Martin of Ireland on Thursday after the prime minister received a positive result on a coronavirus test during a gala event in Washington on Wednesday night that both men attended.
Daniel Mulhall, Irelands ambassador to the United States, confirmed the positive test early Thursday, complicating the prime ministers plans to spend the day with Mr. Biden for traditional St. Patricks Day celebrations.
Mr. Biden and Mr. Martin instead met virtually on Thursday morning, with Mr. Biden seated near a television monitor showing Mr. Martin, with a bowl of shamrock on a coffee table. The president said he was deeply sorry for the inconvenience for the virtual format.
White House officials said that Mr. Biden, who is 79 and has been vaccinated and boosted, was not in close contact with Mr. Martin during Wednesdays gala, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines as being within six feet of someone for at least 15 minutes. Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said that Mr. Biden is tested weekly for the coronavirus, and that his last test was on Sunday.
We, of course, abide by what the recommendations and advice are of his medical doctor, she said at a press briefing on Thursday. And if that would be to do increased testing, we would certainly do that. But he does not feel that is necessary at this point in time based on these recent contacts.
The prime ministers test result came amid a burst of infections among public officials in Washington in recent days. At least nine Democratic members of Congress tested positive this week after a party retreat and late night voting last week. Douglas Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, also tested positive this week, as did former President Barack Obama.
White House officials have downplayed the recent spate of cases, noting that the overall rate in Washington is still extremely low. Ms. Psaki said on Thursday that that the new Omicron subvariant, known as BA.2, has been circulating around the country for some time, and the administration was monitoring cases in Europe and in China. New U.S. cases have plummeted from the height of the Omicron surge.
We expect some fluctuation, especially at this relatively low level, Ms. Psaki said, adding that the country is in a better position to manage the pandemic.
It is not gone, and it means we still need to continue to take steps we can to fight the virus, she said.
400% of last winters peak
Mr. Mulhall said on Twitter that he had accepted a leadership award for Mr. Martin on Wednesday at the gala for the Ireland Funds in Washington, an event that Mr. Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi also attended.
I filled in for the Taoiseach after he tested positive for #Covid19, he wrote, using the Irish word for the countrys leader. I wish the Taoiseach well for his recovery.
The speakers office confirmed that Ms. Pelosi, who is vaccinated and boosted, had tested negative on a P.C.R. test on Thursday morning, and would continue regular testing and to follow C.D.C. guidelines, though it was not clear which ones. It was unclear whether the Attending Physicians Office considered Ms. Pelosi, 81, to be a close contact.
Ms. Pelosi, who was photographed sitting next to Mr. Martin during the gala, appeared at her weekly news conference on Thursday, adding that she was tested nearly every day. Mr. Martin remained masked until food was served, she said, and was pulled aside during the appetizer course about his positive test.
Were very, very sad that on St. Patricks Day, the Taoiseach has this diagnosis, she said at her indoor news conference, where she removed her mask to speak and take questions. We wont be able to have the benefit of the honor of his presence.
A scheduled lunch The Friends of Ireland Luncheon on Capitol Hill proceeded on Thursday, without Mr. Martin present. Ms. Pelosi addressed the room, where lawmakers sat at round tables, while introducing Mr. Biden, who sat on a stool a few feet away. Neither wore a mask, and there were few face coverings in the room.
America has been blessed by Irish children, and one of those Irish children is now the president of the United States, Ms. Pelosi said, just before the shook hands and he took the lectern. Mr. Biden spoke, but did not stay for lunch.
Irish journalists traveling with Mr. Martins delegation reported that he had attended the early part of the gala, and photos from the event appeared to show him seated next to Ms. Pelosi.
A spokesperson for the Irish government said in a statement on Thursday that the prime minister had tested negative for the virus earlier on Wednesday and also on Sunday, before traveling to the United States.
His second test on Wednesday was administered after a member of the prime ministers delegation received a positive result on a test, the statement said.
Mr. Mulhall did not elaborate on whether Mr. Martin had symptoms.
A person walks past a closed coronavirus disease (COVID-19) testing station, in Berlin, Germany, March 18, 2022. REUTERS/Lisi Niesner
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March 18 (Reuters) - Here's what you need to know about the coronavirus right now:
COVID pandemic is 'far from over' - WHO official
A World Health Organization spokesperson said on Friday that the end of the COVID-19 pandemic was a long way off, citing a rise in cases in its latest weekly data.
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The U.N. health agency has previously said that the acute phase of the pandemic could end this year but it would depend on how quickly targets to vaccinate 70% of the population in each country are met, among other factors. read more
Moderna seeks FDA authorization for second COVID booster for all adults
Moderna on Thursday sought emergency use authorization from U.S. health regulators for a second COVID-19 booster shot, as a surge in cases in some parts of the world fuels fears of another wave of the pandemic.
The U.S. biotechnology company said its request covered all adults over the age of 18 so that the appropriate use of an additional booster dose of its vaccine, including for those at higher risk of COVID-19 due to age or co-morbidities, could be determined by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and health care providers. read more
Shanghai pushes ahead with mass COVID tests
The Chinese commercial hub of Shanghai is pushing ahead with a mass testing initiative as it tries to curb a new spike in COVID-19 infections, but some districts were easing lockdown rules in an effort to minimise disruptions.
The city, home to about 25 million people, saw symptomatic local community infections hit 57 on March 17, with another 203 domestically transmitted asymptomatic cases, up from eight and 150 respectively a day earlier. read more
Older people in China should get vaccinated against COVID-19, senior Chinese health officials said on Friday, adding that deaths among the elderly in the latest wave to hit Hong Kong serve as a lesson for the mainland. read more
Hong Kong reported about 20,000 new coronavirus cases on Friday as health experts called for a clear way out of a "zero COVID" policy that has left the city isolated. read more
Thailand drops pre-departure test requirement for visitors
Thailand said on Friday it will scrap a mandatory pre-departure coronavirus test for visitors starting next month but will still require entry registrations in advance and an on-arrival test.
Known for its nightlife and beach destinations, Thailand has sought to revive its pandemic-battered tourism sector by being among the first in the region to ease travel restrictions. read more
Germany to lift most COVID restrictions
Germany will lift most restrictions to contain the coronavirus despite infections hitting a record in the country on Thursday.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz said after talks with leaders of Germany's 16 states that a record of almost 300,000 infections in one day was not good news, but the easing of restrictions was justified given intensive care units were not overwhelmed. read more
Italy to roll back COVID curbs in the coming weeks
The Italian government announced plans on Thursday to phase out its coronavirus restrictions more than two years after the disease first swept the country, even though cases are once again on the rise.
The cabinet said COVID-19 health certificates, proving vaccination or recent recovery from coronavirus, would no longer be needed to gain access to a vast array of services, including restaurants, gyms and public transport, from May 1. read more
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Compiled by Linda Noakes; Editing by Kirsten Donovan
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Italy is marking the second anniversary of a tragic milestone of the coronavirus pandemic
By NICOLE WINFIELD Associated Press
March 18, 2022, 2:18 PM
3 min read
ROME -- Italy on Friday marked the second anniversary of a tragic milestone of the coronavirus pandemic: the day when a convoy of army trucks had to transport the dead out of hard-hit Bergamo because the citys cemeteries and crematoria were full.
Premier Mario Draghi opened a press conference Friday with the leaders of Spain, Portugal and Greece by recalling that it was Italy's official Day of Remembrance for COVID-19 victims. The Health Ministry called for Italians to observe a minute of silence, President Sergio Mattarella paid tribute to the dead and the city of Bergamo held a commemoration at its living memorial: a park of newly planted trees.
We bow down in memory of the victims, Mattarella said in his tribute. The entire international community shares in the pain of the families.
Italy became the epicenter of the outbreak in Europe after the first locally-transmitted case was confirmed in late February 2020 in the Lombard city of Codogno. But nearby Bergamo soon became the hardest-hit province in the hardest-hit region. By the end of March 2020, Bergamo had registered a 571% increase in deaths compared with the five-year monthly average, the biggest increase in Italy and one of the biggest localized increases in mortality rates in Europe.
Footage of the army convoy snaking its way through Bergamos roads on March 18, 2020 carrying caskets of the dead remains one of the most haunting and iconic images of the pandemic, early evidence of the outsized toll the first weeks of the outbreak had on the city northeast of Milan.
The anniversary of the convoy comes as Italy begins winding down its anti-virus restrictions. Draghi and Health Minister Roberto Speranza announced Thursday that many workplace vaccination requirements, quarantine rules and mask mandates would be eased in the coming weeks.
Italy, which has recorded more than 157,000 official COVID deaths, has fully vaccinated 89.7% of its over-12 population.
At the Bergamo memorial Friday, the president of the lower chamber of parliament, Roberto Fico, said the aim of the anniversary commemorations was to honor the dead but also to ensure that Italy is better prepared for the next pandemic.
What is important today is not just remember the victims and be close to their relatives but to learn from what happened, Fico told reporters. He called for greater investment in funding Italys network of general practitioners and local health care providers, improving telemedicine and rebuilding the public health system as a pillar of Italys social services.
We have to do this to remember those who died in an active way, he said.
Follow all AP stories on the pandemic at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic.
WELLINGTON, New Zealand
Samoa will go into lockdown starting Saturday as it faces its first coronavirus outbreak, two years into the pandemic.
The move comes after a woman who was about to leave the Pacific island nation tested positive for the coronavirus. It is the first time Samoa has found any unexplained cases in the community and likely points to an undetected outbreak that has been going on for days or even weeks.
A government report leaked online indicates that the woman had visited church services, a hospital, stores, a library and a travel agency since first feeling ill Saturday.
Samoa and several neighboring island nations were among the last places on Earth to avoid virus outbreaks. But the more transmissible Omicron variant has changed the equation, and one by one the island nations have witnessed infections.
Since the start of the year, Kiribati, Tonga, the Solomon Islands, the Cook Islands and American Samoa have all experienced their first big outbreaks.
John Fala, who runs a logistics company in Samoa, said it was inevitable that the coronavirus would eventually come to Samoa, a reality brought home for many when it began spreading in nearby American Samoa.
Weve had two years to prepare, Fala said. Now its finally here. Of course, there is going to be a bit of scrambling.
Starting Saturday, all schools will be closed, public gatherings will be banned, and all stores and other services will be shut down, except those considered essential. People are also required to wear masks.
There were reports Friday of panic-buying ahead of the lockdown.
Fala, who is vaccinated, said that his company is considered an essential service and that hes frantically trying to navigate the new rules to keep it operating.
The lockdown is initially scheduled to last through midnight Tuesday, but Fala expects it will be extended.
The father of three young children, Fala said his biggest concern is that unvaccinated children will catch the coronavirus. He said the nation of 200,000 had good rates of inoculation among adults but had only just begun vaccinating children ages 5 to 11 in the past week or so.
About 65% of all Samoans have had at least two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, according to Our World in Data.
Samoan Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mataafa told people about the positive case in a special announcement to the nation late Thursday. She said the infected woman was in isolation and that her movements and contacts with people were being traced.
Mataafa said officials wanted to do all they could to contain it from spreading rapidly.
Although our country continues to traverse through these difficult times, let us continue to trust in the Lord, Mataafa said in her announcement.
Samoa has had previous coronavirus scares and lockdowns after returning plane passengers tested positive while isolating, but had managed to avoid any community outbreaks until now.
Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Nauru are among the few remaining Pacific island nations to have avoided Omicron outbreaks.
All epidemics trigger the same dispiriting cycle. First, panic: As new pathogens emerge, governments throw money, resources, and attention at the threat. Then, neglect: Once the danger dwindles, budgets shrink and memories fade. The world ends up where it started, forced to confront each new disease unprepared and therefore primed for panic. This Sisphyean sequence occurred in the United States after HIV, anthrax, SARS, Ebola, and Zika. It occurred in Republican administrations and Democratic ones. It occurs despite decades of warnings from public-health experts. It has been as inevitable as the passing of day into night.
Even so, its not meant to happen this quickly. When I first wrote about the panic-neglect cycle five years ago, I assumed that it would operate on a timescale of years, and that neglect would set in only after the crisis was over. The coronavirus pandemic has destroyed both assumptions. Before every surge has ended, pundits have incorrectly predicted that the current wave would be the last, or claimed that lifesaving measures were never actually necessary. Time and again, neglect has set in within mere months, often before the panic part has been over. The U.S. funds pandemic preparedness like Minnesota snow, Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told me in 2018. Theres a lot in January, but in July its all melted.
Or, as it happens, in March.
This week, Congress nixed $15 billion in coronavirus funding from a $1.5 trillion spending bill, which President Joe Biden then signed on Tuesday. The decision is catastrophic, and as the White House has noted, its consequences will unfurl quickly. Next week, the government will have to cut shipments of monoclonal-antibody treatments by a third. In April, it will no longer be able to reimburse health-care providers for testing, vaccinating, or treating millions of uninsured Americans, who are disproportionately likely to be unvaccinated and infected. Come June, it wont be able to support domestic testing manufacturers. It cant buy extra doses of antiviral pills or infection-preventing treatments that immunocompromised people are banking on but were already struggling to get. It will need to scale back its efforts to improve vaccination rates in poor countries, which increases the odds that dangerous new variants will arise. If such variants arise, theyll likely catch the U.S. off guard, because surveillance networks will have to be scaled back too. Should people need further booster shots, the government wont have enough for everyone.
To be clear, these facets of the pandemic response were already insufficient. The U.S. has never tested sufficiently, never vaccinated enough people, never made enough treatments accessible to its most vulnerable, and never adequately worked to flatten global vaccine inequities. These measures needed to be strengthened, not weakened even further. Abandoning them assumes that the U.S. will not need to respond to another large COVID surge, when such events are likely, in no small part because of the countrys earlier failures. And even if no such surge materializes, another infectious threat inevitably will. As I wrote last September, the U.S. was already barreling toward the next pandemic. Now it is sprinting there.
The virus is moving too. Cases are shooting up across Western Europe, auguring a similar rise in the U.S., as has happened in every past surge. (A third of the CDCs wastewater sites have detected upticks in coronavirus samples this month, although such data are noisy and hard to interpret when levels of virus are low.) Meanwhile, mask and vaccine mandates are being lifted. Contact tracing and quarantine policies are being discontinued. The CDCs new guidelines recast most of the country as low risk and left the most vulnerable individuals with the burden of protecting themselves. Some experts supported the guidelines on the grounds that testing, treatments, and other defensive tools were availableand, as promised in Bidens recently unveiled national plan, would be strengthened even further. But those promises were always contingent on congressional funding; without it, those residual layers of protection evaporate too. For half a year, Biden, administration officials, and several prominent public-health voices have encouraged optimism because we have the tools to fight the virus. The first half of that catchphrase now seems doubtful.
As The Washington Post and others have reported, the funding meltdown occurred because Republicans were skeptical about the need for further COVID funding. Their counteroffer was to repurpose unspent pots of money that had already been set aside for state-level pandemic responses; Democrats refused, and coronavirus aid was omitted from the bill entirely. It is reasonable to ask for accountability in spending, but this particular line of reasoning is familiar. In 2016, Barack Obama asked Congress for $1.9 billion to fight Zika, but Republicans refused, arguing that such funds should be cannibalized from a pot that was set aside for the 2015 Ebola outbreak. In 2018, Donald Trump asked Congress to rescind $252 million that was leftover in that pot, which he billed as an example of irresponsible federal spending. In fact, those funds were an investment, left deliberately untouched so that the U.S. could more quickly respond to future outbreaks (such as the one that began in the Democratic Republic of the Congo exactly as Trump issued his call). The U.S. clearly grasps the concept of preparedness during peacetime: It spends at least $700 billion a year on its military, more than any other country. But when thinking about infectious diseases, vital preparations for the future are routinely seen as unnecessary excesses of the presenteven in the middle of a pandemic.
One could argue that such thinking reflects pragmatism rather than complacency. Budgets arent infinite, and countries face a multitude of pressing problems. If one threat goes away, doesnt it make sense to divert resources to others? This argument fails for three major reasons. First, and most obvious, the threat didnt go away! Even when the coronavirus reaches endemicity (which it very much hasnt yet), an endemic threat isnt one that can be ignored but one that must be managedwhich requires regular investment of the kind that Congress saw fit to deny. Second, preventing epidemics is far more cost-effective than dealing with their consequences, and allocating funds only when a threat is knocking on our door is economic folly.
Third, many of the measures that would make a difference against COVIDbetter ventilation, paid sick leave, equitable health care, a stronger public-health infrastructurewould also protect people from other diseases and health problems. In this respect, even the $15 billion that the White House asked for (and now wont get) is insufficient. And to consider such money as COVID funding is part of the problema misguided approach of tackling health problems one by one, instead of fixing the inequities that underlie them all.
These dynamics might occur for many of the same reasons that I identified in a recent article about why much of the U.S. has normalized so many COVID deaths. The virus is invisible. The ruin it inflicts is hidden from public view. The pandemic has gone on for two long years, turning tragedy into routine and breeding fatalism from failure. Older, disabled, poor, Black, or brown Americans, whose excess deaths were tolerated long before COVID, have borne the brunt of the pandemic, while privileged people have had the swiftest access to medical interventionsand have been quickest to declare the crisis over. A country that so readily forgets its dead is surely prone to also forgetting the lessons of the all-too-recent past, setting itself up for further failure in an all-too-imminent future.
