SharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingimage copyrightReutersAustralia has asked the European Commission to review Italy’s decision to block the export of 250,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to the country.It is the first time new rules have been used that allow a ban on EU exports if the drug provider fails to meet its obligations to the bloc.The move has heightened a tense dispute between AstraZeneca and EU countries over supply issues and delays.Australia said losing “one shipment” would not badly affect its rollout.Prime Minister Scott Morrison said while he had requested the review, he could also understand why Italy made the decision.”In Italy, people are dying at the rate of 300 a day. And so I can certainly understand the high level of anxiety that would exist in Italy and in many countries across Europe,” he said.Why is the EU having vaccine problems?Italian PM brands vaccine delay ‘unacceptable’ EU-AstraZeneca disputed jab contract made publicItaly has been hit badly by the pandemic, and its decision to block the exports has reportedly been backed by the European Commission. The country has registered more than 2.9m cases and nearly 99,000 deaths. Australia, on the other hand, has reported just over 29,000 cases and 900 deaths.Australia’s Finance Minister Simon Birmingham told Sky News: “The world is in unchartered territory at present – it’s unsurprising that some countries would tear up the rule book.”There has been no official comment on the Italian move by the EU or AstraZeneca.image copyrightEPAWhat does Italy say?Last week, the Italian government told the European Commission it intended to block the shipment from its plant in Anagni, near Rome.In a statement on Thursday, the foreign ministry explained the move, saying it had received the request for authorisation on 24 February.It said that previous requests had been given the green light as they included limited numbers of samples for scientific research, but the latest one – being much larger – was rejected.Italy said Australia was not on a list of “vulnerable” countries, that there was a permanent shortage of vaccines in the EU and Italy, and that the number of doses was high compared to the amount given to Italy and to the EU as a whole. What about the rest of the EU?France’s Health Minister, Olivier Véran, has told BFM TV France could potentially do the same thing with the vaccines being made there.Jens Spahn, Germany’s health minister, has said drug makers must honour their contracts to EU countries, but has not seen any reason to block shipments to other countries so far. AstraZeneca is not produced in Germany, but some of the final product is bottled there.EU media was fast to comment on the move.Italy’s Corriere della Sera said the move was decided together with Europe and motivated by the “plight of the desperate”.”Australia is angry with Italy’s vaccine blockade,” said Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.”The relations between the European Commission and the Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca could not be thornier,” Spain’s ABC daily said.In Poland, the Onet.pl news portal said the European Commission could have overruled Italy’s export ban, “but it did not dare do so”.Why is there a row with AstraZeneca?The EU signed a deal with AstraZeneca in August for 300 million doses, with an option for 100 million more, but earlier this year the UK-Swedish company reported production delays at plants in the Netherlands and Belgium.Instead of receiving 100 million doses by the end of March, the EU is now expected to get just 40 million.The EU accused the company of reneging on its deal, with EU Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides saying that UK factories making the vaccine should make up the shortfall.Ms Kyriakides also rejected AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot’s characterisation of the contract as one of “best effort” rather than an obligation to meet a deadline for delivery of vaccines.As a result of the row, the EU announced export controls which began on 30 January, known as the “transparency and authorisation mechanism”.Italy has become the first EU country to call on the guidelines and block the Australian shipment.What’s the latest with Australia’s vaccine rollout?People have started to be vaccinated, with the prime minister receiving his first jab – which was the Pfizer vaccine – in late February.Scott Morrison hopes four million Australians will have been vaccinated by the end of March.image copyrightEPAAustralia has a contract with AstraZeneca to receive 53.8m doses of the vaccine. About 3.8m of those will be imported from overseas.It has already been sent 300,000 doses, which the government says will last until late March, when it will begin making its own AstraZeneca vaccines domestically.

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesRisk Near YouVaccine RolloutNew Variants TrackerElderly citizens arrived for vaccinations last month at St. Anthony’s Parish Center in Pawtucket, R.I. The state was hit hard by the coronavirus. Credit…David Degner for The New York TimesHow Rhode Island Fell to the CoronavirusA dense population of vulnerable citizens set the stage for a frightening epidemic.Elderly citizens arrived for vaccinations last month at St. Anthony’s Parish Center in Pawtucket, R.I. The state was hit hard by the coronavirus. Credit…David Degner for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyMarch 5, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETPROVIDENCE, R.I. — The numbers began ticking up in September. After a quiet summer, doctors at Rhode Island Hospital began seeing one or two patients with Covid-19 on each shift — and soon three. Then four.Cases climbed steadily until early December, when Rhode Island earned the dubious distinction of having more cases and deaths per 100,000 people than any other state in the country. The case rate still puts it among the top five states.Where did this tightly knit state go wrong? Former Gov. Gina Raimondo’s “pauses” on economic activity were short-lived and partial, leaving open indoor dining, shopping malls and bowling alleys. But the shutdowns were no patchier than those in many other states.Until late summer, she was lauded for reining in the virus. Even now, few residents blame her for the bleak numbers. (Ms. Raimondo was sworn in as the secretary of commerce on Wednesday night.)Experts point instead to myriad other factors, all of which have played out elsewhere in the country but converged into a bigger crisis here.The fall chill sent people indoors, where risk from the virus is highest, and the holidays brought people together. Rhode Island is tiny — you can traverse it in 45 minutes. But crammed into that smallish area are a million people, for a population density second only to that of New Jersey. If everyone in the world is connected by six degrees of separation, Rhode Islanders seem to be connected by maybe two.Central Falls, the epicenter of Rhode Island’s epidemic, has a density of 16,000 people per square mile, almost twice that of Providence. “Just imagine, 16,000 people per square mile — I mean, that’s amazing,” said Dr. Pablo Rodriguez, a member of the government committee that guides Covid vaccine distribution in Rhode Island. “It doesn’t take much for the spark to create an outbreak.”Apart from its density, Rhode Island has a high percentage of elderly residents in nursing homes, accounting for the bulk of deaths. Packed into the state are multiple urban areas — Central Falls, Pawtucket, Providence — where language barriers, mistrust and jobs have left immigrant families in multigenerational homes particularly vulnerable. The state is also home to multiple colleges that set off chains of infection in the early fall.For months, the hospitals in Rhode Island were understaffed and overwhelmed. Doctors and nurses were trying to cope with rising caseloads, often without the protective equipment they needed, with constantly shifting guidelines and with their own resilience stretched to the limit.Dr. Megan Ranney, a researcher and public health advocate, is also an emergency room physician at Rhode Island Hospital who has witnessed the full scope of the state’s crisis firsthand. What she saw unfold over a single shift offers a window into what happened.Dr. Megan Ranney, an E.R. physician at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence. “I’ve just got to plow through it,” she said during a surge in December.Credit…David Degner for The New York TimesAn ambulance outside Rhode Island Hospital last month.Credit…David Degner for The New York TimesA map on the asphalt of a school parking lot in Pawtucket.Credit…David Degner for The New York TimesPlowing Through ItOne day in late December, as the crisis reached new heights, Dr. Ranney girded for a long eight-hour shift. The sores behind her ears, where her glasses and the straps of the N95 and surgical masks dug in, still had not healed. But how could she complain, Dr. Ranney said, when her medical residents “eat, sleep, breathe Covid” five days a week?The patients had it worse, she knew. Anxious and isolated, they became even more discomfited by the masked and unrecognizable doctors and nurses rushing around them. During Dr. Ranney’s shift the prior week, she had seen a broad spectrum: elderly people on a downward spiral, otherwise healthy young Latino men, Cape Verdean immigrants with limited English comprehension.These demographics are partly what made Rhode Island particularly susceptible, said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University in Providence: “Certainly in New England, it is the poorest state — so a lot of poverty, and a lot of multigenerational poverty.”As in most of the country, the Latino community has borne the brunt of the epidemic. In Rhode Island, Latinos have 6.7 times the risk for hospitalization and 2.5 times the risk of death, compared with white people. In the days before her shift, Dr. Ranney had been working in a part of the hospital intended to deal with non-Covid cases. But even people with other ailments, like ankle fractures, turned out to be positive for the virus, she found.“I never know from day to day how bad the surge will be,” she said. “I’ve just got to plow through it.”It turned out to be an extraordinarily busy day. “The E.R. is full, the hospital is full, the intensive care unit is full,” Dr. Ranney said. “All of our units are moving as quickly as they can, but the patients keep coming in.”Every time she took off masks during a shift, she ran the risk of contaminating herself. She had had four cups of coffee before this shift, and nothing since.The average age of the patients that night was about 70. One elderly woman who had trouble breathing could not isolate because she lived with her children and grandchildren. At any rate, she arrived at the hospital 10 days into her illness, too late for isolation to matter.The Coronavirus Outbreak

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesRisk Near YouVaccine RolloutNew Variants TrackerAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storythe new old ageCan Long-Term Care Employers Require Staff Members to Be Vaccinated?As legal experts and ethicists debate, some companies aren’t waiting.Joe Pendergast, a resident of Juniper Village, a nursing home in Bensalem, Pa., with Kevin Birtwell, a wellness nurse manager there. All staff members at Juniper are required to be vaccinated.Credit…Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesMarch 5, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETFor much of the winter, Meryl Gordon worried about the people caring for her 95-year-old mother, who was rehabbing in a Manhattan nursing home after surgery for a broken hip.“Every week they sent out a note to families about how many staff members had positive Covid tests,” said Ms. Gordon, a biographer and professor at New York University. “It was a source of tremendous anxiety.”Ms. Gordon feels reassured now that her mother is fully vaccinated and has returned to her assisted living facility. But what about the two home care aides who help her 98-year-old father, David, in his Upper West Side apartment?Neither has agreed to be vaccinated. David Gordon’s doctor has advised him to delay Covid vaccination himself because of his past allergic reactions.Ms. Gordon has not insisted that the caregivers receive vaccinations. “You’re reluctant to do something that could cause you to lose the people you rely on,” she said. But she remains uneasy.It’s a question that many long-term care employers, from individual families to big national companies, are confronting as vaccines become more available, although not available enough: In a pandemic, can they require vaccination for those who care for very vulnerable older adults? Should they?Some employers aren’t waiting. Atria Senior Living, one of the nation’s largest assisted living chains, has announced that by May 1 all staff members must be fully vaccinated.Silverado, a small chain of dementia care homes, most on the West Coast, mandated vaccination by March 1. Juniper Communities, which operates 22 facilities in four states, has also adopted a mandate.“We felt it was the best way to protect people, not just our residents but our team members and their families,” said Lynne Katzmann, Juniper’s chief executive. Of the company’s nearly 1,300 employees, “about 30 individuals have self-terminated” because of the vaccination requirement, she reported.Juniper’s experience supports what public health experts have said for years: Vaccine mandates, like those that many health care organizations have established for the flu vaccine, remain controversial — but they do increase vaccination rates. As of Feb. 25, 97.7 percent of Juniper residents had received two vaccine doses, and so had 96 percent of its staff members.Tamara Moreland, executive director at Juniper Village in Bensalem. The company operates 22 facilities in four states and reports about 30 “self-terminations” of its nearly 1,300 employees.Credit…Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesThat stands in stark contrast to staff vaccinations in many facilities. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported that during the first month of vaccine clinics in nursing homes, only 37.5 percent of staff members received the first shot, along with 77.8 percent of residents.The results of opinion surveys vary, depending on who is asked and when. In January, a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis found that 29 percent of health care workers expressed doubts about vaccination.A national recruiting platform for health care companies, myCNAjobs.com, last month polled 250 companions, aides and nursing assistants in facilities and in home care; it interviews thousands more daily. It estimates that 35 percent plan to be vaccinated, 20 percent do not and more than 40 percent remain unsure.The Coronavirus Outbreak

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#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesRisk Near YouVaccine RolloutNew Variants TrackerAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyCovid-19: U.S. Vaccination Pace Increases to 2 Million Doses a DayChina subjects some travelers to anal swabs, angering foreign governments.March 5, 2021, 2:39 a.m. ETMarch 5, 2021, 2:39 a.m. ETThe arrivals hall at Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport in January.Credit…Aly Song/ReutersChina is requiring some travelers arriving from overseas to receive an invasive anal swab test as part of its coronavirus containment measures, a move that has outraged and shocked several foreign governments.Japanese officials said on Monday that they had formally asked China to exempt Japanese citizens from the test, adding that some who had received it complained of “psychological distress.” And the United States State Department last moth said it had registered a protest with the Chinese government after some of its diplomats were forced to undergo anal swabs, though Chinese officials denied that.It is not clear how many such swabs have been administered or who is subject to them. Chinese state media has acknowledged that some arrivals to cities including Beijing and Shanghai are required to take the tests, though the reports said the requirements might vary depending on whether the travelers were deemed to be high-risk.Chinese experts have suggested that traces of the virus may survive longer in the anus than in the respiratory tract and that samples of the former may prevent false negatives. China has imposed some of the strictest containment measures in the world, including barring most foreign arrivals, and has largely suppressed the epidemic.Lu Hongzhou, an infectious disease specialist at Fudan University in Shanghai, told the state-controlled Global Times tabloid that nasal or throat swabs could cause “uncomfortable reactions,” leading to subpar samples. He acknowledged that fecal samples could replace anal swabs, to prevent similar discomfort.But other experts — including in China — have questioned the need for anal samples. The Global Times quoted another expert, Yang Zhanqiu, as saying that nasal and throat swabs are still the most effective because the virus is contracted through the respiratory tract.Benjamin Cowling, a public health professor at the University of Hong Kong, said in an interview that even if someone did test positive on an anal swab but not a respiratory one, he or she would likely not be very contagious.“The value of detecting people with the virus is to stop transmission,” Professor Cowling said. “If someone has got an infection but they’re not contagious to anyone else, we didn’t need to detect that person.”A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry said this week that the government would make “science-based adjustments” to its containment policies.Professor Cowling said he did not know what the scientific rationale was behind the existing policies. “I presume there’s some evidence leading to this decision, but I haven’t seen that evidence,” he said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story

SharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingimage copyrightDr Radhika Patnala/Sci Illustrate/BBCThere’s barely any country in the world that hasn’t been touched by the coronavirus pandemic and its aftershocks. But with so much information out there, it’s sometimes hard to digest all the details and fully take it in.Ahead of International Women’s Day on 8 March, we invite you to meet three women who are using their artistic talents, combined with their expertise in the fields of science, health and technology to help the fight against coronavirus.Avesta Rastan: ‘You help out in whatever way you can’image copyrightAvesta Rastan/ www.azuravesta.comAvesta Rastan, 25, is a visual science communicator currently living in California. At the start of the pandemic, she realised there weren’t many infographics revealing how Covid-19 directly affected the human body.So the artist, who is of Iranian and Canadian heritage, and is a member of the Association of Medical Illustrators, saw a unique opportunity to use her skills and her training in pathological illustration (the drawing of disease) to help the wider public.”I saw lots of illustrations and 3D models of the virus itself and its protein but I didn’t really see what it did to us,” she explained.She started investigating and soon created an infographic that unexpectedly went viral on social media. Even the World Economic Forum shared it.image copyrightAvesta Rastan/ www.azuravesta.comShe was approached by people all over the world wanting to see the poster in different languages and offering to translate her explanations. It’s now available to download in 18 languages on her website.Rastan says: “I’m not a frontline worker; I’m not in health care, but you help out in whatever way you can and for me that was using my art.She adds science can have a reputation for being difficult to learn and that does deter people but illustrations bridge that gap and could encourage more to enter her field.”Science itself isn’t hard – it’s a natural process for humans; we’re naturally curious and want to understand how things work”, she adds.image copyrightAvesta Rastan/Azuravesta Design/BBC In the future she wants to be involved in building educational platforms. But for now, she’s spreading the word about her unusual career. “I have definitely noticed in the past 10 to 20 years there are more women in this field than men. In the older generations it was definitely a male dominated field but now things are changing,” she says.And while the pandemic has been a terrible thing for the world to go through, Rastan admits that for her it did offer a silver lining. She embarked on a freelance career and worked with academic researchers, medical tech start-ups, doctors and surgeons. image copyrightAvesta Rastan/ www.azuravesta.comRastan, who finds a lot of her inspiration comes from nature, has a new job in the US now. But she continues to spend her spare time on a passion project on social media called Lumi Science where she’s still visualising the virus and its variants. “Science communication is so key to society. When you understand something, you’re empowered to try to change it or try to mitigate the risk”, she says.Dr Radhika Patnala: ‘The pandemic woke everyone up’image copyrightRadhika Patnala/ www.sci-illustrate.comDr Radhika Patnala is a neuroscientist and the founder and director of the start-up Sci-Illustrate. The Indian-born entrepreneur, who studied in Singapore and Australia before moving to Munich, Germany, says one of the beauties of working in science is that the field is incredibly collaborative and crosses geographical and institutional boundaries.Her company creates science illustrations for a whole range of clients but she also has several passion projects underway, with the most recent focused on her response to the pandemic. image copyrightRadhika Patnala/ www.sci-illustrate.comIt’s a 10-part series of illustrations called Covid Dreams. “I came across this very interesting piece of information, that people who got Covid-19 were having weird dreams. I thought that was an amazing idea to explore. I also wanted to challenge myself to try to depict something which is very serious and slightly depressing, in an unusual and visually different way,” she says.Her series encompasses different parts of the coronavirus experience, from detailing the nucleo-protein packages within the virus to imagining what someone’s mouth inside the mask looks like. image copyrightRadhika Patnala/ www.sci-illustrate.comIt was when she was doing her doctorate, with a focus on immunology and epigenetics, that Patnala, 32, reconnected with her artistic side. “I’d be in a neuroanatomy lab and we would look at slices of mice and rat brains and stain them, so we could look at individual cells and the tissue architecture of the brain in detail. “A lot of my PhD involved looking under a microscope at neural tissue, how the different cells talk to each other and how beautiful the tissue architecture of the organ itself was,” she says.image copyrightRadhika Patnala/ www.sci-illustrate.comFor Patnala, the pandemic has not led to a significant difference to her day job and, with so many in the industry now focusing on virus illustrations, she was continuing to work on visualising other diseases for clients in need.”There are important things happening all the time in our industry – there are companies looking at cancer therapeutics and trying to find drugs for niche cancer types; there are people working on cardiovascular diseases,” she explains.Stating the science field has always had trouble getting money from policy makers, she suggests perhaps a change is on the way, adding: “The pandemic woke everyone up to the amazing work that people are doing in laboratories all the time.”Nujuum Hashi: ‘If I can fight coronavirus others can try’ image copyrightNujuum HashiWhen Nujuum Hashi, 26, caught coronavirus early last year, she refused to let it destroy her creative ambitions and all the dreams she had steadily been working towards over the past few years.Hashi had given up her career as a nurse in Somaliland to pursue art, despite her family’s misgivings about her chosen path, and she resolved that while the pandemic had knocked her strength, it wasn’t going to kill her spirit.Hashi, who is now living in Mogadishu, Somalia, had just returned from a trip to Kenya in April 2020 when she realised that she was sick. “First I had a headache, then I had a rough throat. I lost my sense of smell and I was shivering and cold; I had dizziness and a migraine. I lost my appetite and even my eyes were very dry and sensitive to light. My brain couldn’t do any creative work – I just felt incredibly flat.”image copyrightNujuum HashiBut while she was self-isolating, she realised it was important for her to stay connected to the world.”I still tried to do live Instagram art classes – even while I was sick – to entertain others. I’d teach people how to draw faces and hands and other things. “I wanted to show the world I was fighting corona and that I was doing my best. When I felt my brain was returning to a better place, I did an illustration of me boxing the corona as I wanted to show I was fighting this evil virus. I was angry about the virus and this was a celebration picture. “If I can fight it; others can try to do so as well.”image copyrightNujuum Hashi As well as illustrations focusing on her experiences, Hashi has been drawing and painting scenes to encourage others to take care and be more aware of the community around them. Her illustrations include an image of the Covid-19 virus on a world tour and a drawing in tribute to the frontline doctors and nurses trying to save lives.Hashi grew up in a medical family – her mother is a midwife, while her late father was an anaesthetist. And it was back in Hargeisa, Somaliland that Hashi herself trained and worked as a nurse. She said it was a job she loved as it meant she could help the community but there came a point in her life when the desire to create art overwhelmed her.image copyrightNujuum HashiShe says it is not easy being a female artist in Somalia but as a creative person, she feels a personal responsibility to share her talents with the world.While 2020 was a difficult year, she is optimistic about the future. She plans to continue seeking out more business opportunities, and she wants to use her art to tackle misinformation about the pandemic.”There’s a lot of misunderstanding in our country. Sometimes I have to show people that the right information is here and tell others to stop spreading the wrong information,” she says.The virus has had global ramifications with many calculating women will bear the brunt with long-lasting social and economic effects. But could the virus be the catalyst for change in traditionally male dominated fields? Reports suggest the pandemic has led to more women considering a career in the sciences. After all, as these three women stress, education leads to empowerment. Related Internet LinksAzuravesta Design – Scientific Art & AnimationSci-IllustrateNujuum.A.Hashi (@nujuumarts)The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

Surge testing is being used in parts of the UK to help control the spread of new variants from Brazil and South Africa.The Kent variant is now the most commonly found strain of Covid-19 in the UK and it’s more easily spread than the first variant, which arrived in Spring 2020. Scientists are looking at tweaking the coronavirus vaccines to make sure they continue to be highly effective. But where are these variants coming from? And why do viruses mutate?Health correspondent Laura Foster explains.