Archives: Situation Reports

THE OVERSEAS REPORT 26 NOVEMBER 2021 by Mike Evans

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/22/photos-of-anti-covid-protests-in-europe.html?recirc=taboolainternal

In this report we look at the latest issues surrounding the pandemic across the world. In a week where the number of new cases of infection rose across the world by 11% and only Asia showing a drop of 2% compared to the previous week, the main talking point has come from the WHO, Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. In a speech to journalists on Wednesday he made a point of reiterating the facts regarding the virus and what the vaccine is capable of doing for people.
His remarks included, “Even if you’re vaccinated, continue to take precautions to prevent becoming infected yourself, and to infecting someone else who could die,” He went on to say, “That means wearing a mask, maintaining distance, avoiding crowds and meeting others outside if you can, or in a well-ventilated space inside,” he said. Though the majority of reported Covid cases worldwide are in Europe, Tedros added that “no country or region is out of the woods” just yet.

The World Health Organization is urging the public to practice Covid mitigation tactics – including masking and distancing – regardless of vaccination status as cases surge across Europe heading into the holiday season. Some countries and communities have been lured into a “false sense of security” that the pandemic’s over and the vaccinations are fully protected against Covid, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters during an update Wednesday in Geneva.
He noted that Covid vaccines “save lives” and lower the risk of severe disease and death, but the vaccinated can still contract and spread the virus as social mixing returns to pre-pandemic levels.

“Even if you’re vaccinated, continue to take precautions to prevent becoming infected yourself, and to infecting someone else who could die,” Tedros said. “That means wearing a mask, maintaining distance, avoiding crowds and meeting others outside if you can, or in a well-ventilated space inside.”
Tedros called Europe “the epicenter of the pandemic,” with “unsustainable pressure” facing both health-care systems and personnel. Europe represented 67% of the world’s total new Covid cases during the week ended Nov. 21 with more than 2.4 million infections, an 11% increase from the previous seven days, according to the WHO’s most recent weekly epidemiological update.

The WHO’s office covering Europe and Central Asia said on Tuesday that those regions have surpassed a combined 1.5 million Covid deaths and could suffer 700,000 more fatalities by March 2022. The organization expects that intensive care units in 49 of the region’s 53 countries could experience high or extreme stress over the next four months.
Governments rolling back public health measures are fueling Europe’s current outbreak, said Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Program.
“In Europe, even in the midst of a very, very strong resurgence in cases, and even in the midst of some of those countries under huge pressure in their health systems, we’re seeing pre-pandemic levels of social mixing, gathering and many other things,” Ryan said. “And the reality is the virus will continue to transmit intensely in that environment.”

Though the majority of reported Covid cases worldwide are in Europe, Tedros added that “no country or region is out of the woods” just yet. But expanding vaccination coverage, wearing masks, using distancing, and improving ventilation indoors can help drive down Covid transmission without resorting to lockdowns heading into the holiday season, said Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on Covid.

The rise in new cases in Europe has been led this week by Germany where they had over 377,000 new cases in the week, up from 270,000 the previous week. The UK was next with over 300,000 new cases, a rise of 11% on the previous week.
The Netherlands, a country with a population of just 17 million, entered a partial lockdown on Saturday, and saw an increase of 32% with over 150,000 new cases and France, where for the past few weeks the numbers had been decreasing saw a massive jump of 75% to 152,325 while Austria’s fourth full Covid lockdown began on Monday, with a nationwide vaccine mandate taking effect Feb. 1. Germany is also weighing whether to introduce a lockdown as the country’s seven-day new case average reached a record-high of more than 53,100 per day on Tuesday, up 29% from the week before, according to a CNBC analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University.

Deaths are also on the rise in Europe with the leader being Russia where over 8,600 people lost their lives in the past week. Just under half of the countries in Europe have recorded an increase in deaths from Covid over the past two weeks. demonstrated high efficacy in preventing hospitalizations during a clinical trial.“We can curb the spread of infections that are also rising in the U.S., with more than 95,000 new cases reported daily on average, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. More than 1,100 people are dying a day in the U.S. from the virus on average, according to Hopkins.

More than 51,000 Americans are currently hospitalized with Covid-19, according to a seven-day average of Health and Human Services data as of Wednesday, up 7% over the past week. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says unvaccinated individuals ages 2 and older should wear a mask in indoor public settings. The fully vaccinated should wear facial coverings indoors or in crowded outdoor areas in places with elevated Covid transmission, according to the agency. The CDC also requires masks onboard planes, trains and buses, as well as within all transportation centers. CDC guidance also advises six feet of distance between people who don’t live in the same household, particularly for those at high risk for severe Covid symptoms.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and a Pfizer board member, told CNBC that more vaccinated people are contracting the virus than people realize due to weak monitoring of breakthrough infections in the U.S. “At this point I think we need to accept that there’s a lot of breakthrough infections happening, particularly people who are out a significant portion of time from their original vaccination,” Gottlieb said. “There’s going to be retrospective studies that identify this, but we’re not doing a good job of tracking this in real time. And this is the argument for people to go out and get boosters,” he said.

The U.S. cleared Pfizer and Moderna boosters for all adults on Friday. Johnson & Johnson boosters were cleared by the CDC in October. The WHO has criticized the broad distribution of boosters in wealthy nations because people in poorer countries have very limited access to vaccines.
The White House on Monday said the Biden administration has no plans for a lockdown, pointing to rising vaccination rates and new therapeutic treatments that are coming online. The U.S. government has purchased 10 million courses of Pfizer’s Covid treatment pill, Paxlovid, which d of the virus without having to in any way shut down our economy,” White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients told reporters during a briefing. “We have 82% of people now with one shot and more and more people getting vaccinated each week.”

In both Europe and the USA there is no sign that the virus is going away so we must all head the advice of the WHO and Stay Safe. Until the next time….

The Overseas Report 24 November 2021 by Mike Evans

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#main_table
https://www.who.int/

With the WHO signalling their concern at the increase in Covid 19 cases throughout Europe there is one place where the pandemic seems to be under control after what everyone assumed would be an area which was to be most hit by the sheer number of cases.

In this report we are looking at Africa, a continent where only around 5% of the people are vaccinated and a large number of people are living on the “breadline” with very poor health facilities. However, there does seem to be a slow down of the virus which is not happening in other parts of the world.

At a busy market in a poor township outside Harare this week, Nyasha Ndou kept his mask in his pocket, as hundreds of other people, mostly unmasked, jostled to buy and sell fruit and vegetables displayed on wooden tables and plastic sheets. As in much of Zimbabwe, here the coronavirus is quickly being relegated to the past, as political rallies, concerts and home gatherings have returned.
“COVID-19 is gone, when did you last hear of anyone who has died of COVID-19?” Ndou said. “The mask is to protect my pocket. The police demand bribes so I lose money if I don’t move around with a mask.”

Early last week, Zimbabwe recorded just 33 new COVID-19 cases and zero deaths, in line with a recent fall in the disease across the continent, where World Health Organization data show that infections have been dropping since July.

When the coronavirus first emerged last year, health officials feared the pandemic would sweep across Africa, killing millions. Although it’s still unclear what COVID-19’s ultimate toll will be, that catastrophic scenario has yet to materialise in Zimbabwe or much of the continent.

Scientists emphasise that obtaining accurate COVID-19 data, particularly in African countries with patchy surveillance, is extremely difficult, and warn that declining coronavirus trends could easily be reversed.But there is something “mysterious” going  on in Africa that is puzzling scientists, said Wafaa El-Sadr, chair of global health at Columbia University. “Africa doesn’t have the vaccines and the resources to fight COVID-19 that they have in Europe and the US, but somehow they seem to be doing better,” she said.

Fewer than six per cent of people in Africa are vaccinated. For months, the WHO has described Africa as “one of the least affected regions in the world” in its weekly pandemic reports.
Some researchers say the continent’s younger population – the average age is 20 verses about 43 in Western Europe – in addition to their lower rates of urbanisation and tendency to spend time outdoors, may have spared it the more lethal effects of the virus so far. Several studies are probing whether there might be other explanations, including genetic reasons or exposure to other diseases.

Christian Happi, director of the African Center of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases at Redeemer’s University in Nigeria, said authorities are used to curbing outbreaks even without vaccines and credited the extensive networks of community health workers.
“It’s not always about how much money you have or how sophisticated your hospitals are,” he said.

Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, said African leaders haven’t got the credit they deserve for acting quickly, citing Mali’s decision to close its borders before COVID-19 even arrived.
“I think there’s a different cultural approach in Africa, where these countries have approached COVID with a sense of humility because they’ve experienced things like Ebola, polio and malaria,” Sridhar said.

In recent months, the coronavirus has pummelled South Africa and is estimated to have killed more than 89,000 people there, by far the most deaths on the continent. But for now, African authorities, while acknowledging that there could be gaps, are not reporting huge numbers of unexpected fatalities that might be COVID-related. WHO data show that deaths in Africa make up just three per cent of the global total. In comparison, deaths in the Americas and Europe account for 46 per cent and 29 per cent.

In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, the government has recorded nearly 3,000 deaths so far among its 200 million population. The US records that many deaths every two or three days. The low numbers have Nigerians like Opemipo Are, a 23-year-old in Abuja, feeling relieved. “They said there will be dead bodies on the streets and all that, but nothing like that happened,” she said.

On Friday, Nigerian authorities began a campaign to significantly expand the West African nation’s coronavirus immunisation. Officials are aiming to inoculate half the population before February, a target they think will help them achieve herd immunity.
Oyewale Tomori, a Nigerian virologist who sits on several WHO advisory groups, suggested Africa might not even need as many vaccines as the West. It’s an idea that, while controversial, he says is being seriously discussed among African scientists – and is reminiscent of the proposal British officials made last March to let COVID-19 freely infect the population to build up immunity.

That doesn’t mean, however, that vaccines aren’t needed in Africa.

“We need to be vaccinating all out to prepare for the next wave,” said Salim Abdool Karim, an epidemiologist at South Africa’s University of KwaZulu-Natal, who previously advised the South African government on COVID-19. “Looking at what’s happening in Europe, the likelihood of more cases spilling over here is very high.”

The impact of the coronavirus has also been relatively muted in poor countries like Afghanistan, where experts predicted outbreaks amid ongoing conflict would prove disastrous.
Hashmat Arifi, a 23-year-old student in Kabul, said he hadn’t seen anyone wearing a mask in months, including at a recent wedding he attended alongside hundreds of guests. In his university classes, more than 20 students routinely sit unmasked in close quarters.

“I haven’t seen any cases of corona lately,” Arifi said. So far, Afghanistan has recorded about 7,200 deaths among its 39 million people, although little testing was done amid the conflict and the actual numbers of cases and deaths are unknown.

Back in Zimbabwe, doctors were grateful for the respite from COVID-19 – but feared it was only temporary.
“People should remain very vigilant,” warned Dr Johannes Marisa, president of the Medical and Dental Private Practitioners of Zimbabwe Association. He fears that another coronavirus wave would hit Zimbabwe next month. “Complacency is what is going to destroy us because we may be caught unaware.”

According to Worldometer.info in the past 7 days there has been a 7% increase in infections across the world but in Africa they have seen a 7% decrease. In terms of deaths the world has seen a 2% decrease while Africa has seen a 19% decrease in the past week.

Obviously the number of people being tested for Covid 19 is vastly different in Africa from say Europe, As an example, In South Africa with a population of just over 60 million, they have tested 316,728 people per million of population, so approximately 1 in 3 people. In France with a population of 65 million, they have tested 2,309,338 per 1 million of people, so in France they have tested 7 times more than South Africa which means many cases and deaths in Africa may not have been recorded.

Even so, there is still plenty of room for optimism across the world as many countries start to live with the disease and whilst being mindful of it not letting it affect their lives to the extent that things will never get back to what they were before the pandemic arrived.

Until the next time Stay Safe.

The Overseas Report 19 November 2021 by Mike Evans

As the COP26 conference finished in Scotland last week amid calls for countries to do more to combat climate change the pandemic has thrown up another issue which is having an effect on almost everyone’s daily lives. The Subject is Rubbish, Garbage or Trash depending where you come from. In this report we are looking at some of the issues that have come about due to the Covid 19 pandemic and what many countries are doing about it.The River Thames, the tidal artery that squiggles through central London, holds up a mirror to life on dry land: scraggly remains of fir trees float by after Christmas; in the first days of a fresh year, bobbing Champagne bottles hint at recent revelry.

Lara Maiklem, author of “Mudlark: In Search of London’s Past Along the River Thames,” scours the shoreline for artifacts such as coins, tokens, buckles and potsherds, some dating to the period of Roman rule. Loosed from pockets or heaped as infill, these are the flotsam of centuries lived on London’s streets. “I find stuff because humans are litterbugs,” Maiklem said. “We’ve always been chucking things into the river.”

But lately Maiklem is encountering a type of garbage she hadn’t seen there before: the remnants of COVID 19-era personal protective equipment (or PPE), particularly masks and plastic gloves bloated with sand and resting in the rubbly silt. Maiklem once counted around 20 gloves while canvassing 100 yards of shoreline. She wasn’t surprised; if anything, she had feared the shore would be even more inundated with pieces that had flown from pockets or trash cans or swirled into the Victorian sewers. Happily, Maiklem said, the carpet of COVID-inspired trash at the edge of the Thames wasn’t nearly as plush as it is elsewhere.
PPE litter is fouling landscapes across the globe. Dirtied masks and gloves tumbleweed across city parks, streets and shores in Lima, Peru; Toronto; Hong Kong and beyond. Researchers in Nanjing, China, and La Jolla, California, recently calculated that 193 countries have generated more than 8 million tons of pandemic-related plastic waste, and the advocacy group OceansAsia estimated that as many as 1.5 billion face masks could wind up in the marine environment in a single year.
Since January, volunteers with the Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup have plucked 109,507 pieces of PPE from the world’s watery margins. Now, across the litter-strewn planet, scientists, officials, companies and environmentalists are attempting to tally and repurpose PPE — and limit the trash in the first place.

Todd Clardy, a marine scientist in Los Angeles, sometimes counts the PPE he sees on the 10-minute walk from his apartment in Koreatown to the Metro station. One day this month, he said, he spotted “24 discarded masks, two rubber gloves and loads of hand sanitation towels.” Sometimes he sees them atop grates that read, “No Dumping, Drains to Ocean.” Clardy suspects some masks simply slip from wrists. “Once it falls on the ground, people probably look at it like, ‘Huh, I’m not wearing that again.’ ” Breezes likely free some from trash cans, too. “The bins are always full,” Clardy added. “So even if you wanted to put it on top, it would fly away.”

Clardy’s accounting isn’t part of a formal project, but there are several such undertakings underway. In the Netherlands, Liselotte Rambonnet, a biologist at Leiden University, and Auke-Florian Hiemstra, a biologist at Naturalis Biodiversity Center, keep a running count of masks and gloves littering streets and canals. They track animals’ interactions with the castoff gear. Among their documented examples are an unfortunate perch trapped in the thumb of a phlegmy-looking latex glove, and birds weaving PPE into nesting materials, risking entanglement. “Nowadays it would be difficult to find a coot nest in the canals of Amsterdam without a face mask,” Rambonnet and Hiemstra wrote in an email.

The researchers maintain a global website, Covidlitter.com, where anyone can report animal and PPE incidents. Dispatches include sightings of a brown fur seal tangled in a face mask in Namibia; a mask-snarled puffin found dead on an Irish beach; and a sea turtle in Australia with a mask in its stomach. Back home, the researchers, who also lead canal cleanups in Leiden, worry PPE trash will increase now that the Dutch government has reinstated mask requirements. Every weekend we encounter face masks — new ones and old, discolored ones,” Rambonnet and Hiemstra wrote. “Some are barely recognizable, and blend in with autumn leaves.”

Cleanup efforts are also underway in London, where staff members and volunteers with the environmental group Thames21 count and collect trash from the river’s banks. In September, the group closely surveyed more than 1 kilometer of shore and found PPE at 70% of their study sites — and notably clustered along a portion of the Isle of Dogs, where 30 pieces picked a 100-meter stretch. “I don’t remember seeing any face masks until the pandemic; they weren’t on our radar,” said Debbie Leach, the group’s CEO, who has been involved since 2005. Leach’s team sends the PPE to incinerators or landfills, but small bits are surely left behind because the trash “releases plastics into the water that can’t be retrieved,” she said.

Researchers in Canada recently estimated that a single surgical-style mask on a sandy shoreline could unleash more than 16 million microplastics, far too small to collect and haul away. Roaming sandy swaths along Chile’s coast, Martin Thiel, a marine biologist at the Universidad Católica del Norte in Coquimbo, saw plenty of signs asking visitors to mask up — but few instructions about ditching used coverings. To his frustration, masks were scattered, swollen with sand and water and tangled in algae. “They act a little like Velcro,” he said. “They very quickly accumulate stuff.”
But a few beaches, including one in Coquimbo, had trash cans designated specifically for PPE. Unlike oil-drum-style alternatives nearby, some had triangular tops with tiny, circular openings that would deter rummaging and prevent wind from tousling the garbage.

In a paper published in Science of the Total Environment this year, Thiel and 11 collaborators recommended that communities install more purpose-built receptacles like these, as well as signs reminding people to consider the landscape and their neighbors, human and otherwise. “We think there is more to the story than, ‘just protect yourself,’ ” said Thiel, the paper’s lead author. Houston has already started. In September 2020, the city launched an anti-litter campaign partly aimed at PPE. Featuring images such as a filthy mask on grass, the posters read “Don’t Let Houston Go to Waste” and encouraged residents to “Do the PPE123,” choreography that entailed social distancing, wearing masks and throwing them away.

Early in the pandemic, “we weren’t sure if (PPE) was a safety concern and would spread COVID around the city,” said Martha Castex-Tatum, the city’s vice mayor pro tem, who spearheaded the initiative. As a clearer picture of transmission emerged, the effort “became a beautification project,” she said. The images were plastered on billboards, sports stadium jumbotrons and trash-collection trucks. Council members handed out 3,200 trash grabber tools and urged residents to use them.

As the pandemic bloomed across South Africa, shoppers grabbed fistfuls of wet wipes as they entered stores, draping the cloths over shopping cart handles while roaming aisles, said Annette Devenish, marketing manager at Sani-touch, a brand that supplies many national Shoprite Group supermarkets with wipes for customer use. Sani-touch found that usage soared 500% early on and has fallen, but still hovers above pre-pandemic figures.
Environmentalists often rail on wet wipes, many of which snarl sewer systems when they are flushed down drains and degrade into microplastics that drift through food webs. (Thames21, for instance, is backing newly proposed legislation that would ban all wipes containing plastic.)

Devenish said that manufacturers ought to focus on making them recyclable or compostable, and this fall Sani-touch launched a project to give used wipes a second life. Customers can drop off cloths before leaving the store; recycling companies will turn the polypropylene cloths into plastic pallets for use in Sani-touch’s manufacturing facilities. Fashioned from many materials, including metal and elastic, single-use masks can be harder to recycle, Devenish said, but she hopes they can be stuffed into plastic bottles to become “ecobricks,” low-cost building blocks of benches, tables, trash bins and more.

PPE recycling schemes are also advancing elsewhere. In the Indian city of Pune, the CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory is teaming up with a biomedical waste facility and private companies to pilot ways to transform head-to-toe protective wear into plastic pellets used to manufacture other goods. (None are yet being made and sold, “but hopefully soon,” wrote Harshawardhan V. Pol, a principal scientist, in an email.)

In fall 2020, the Canadian government asked companies to pitch ideas for recycling PPE or making it compostable. The government may funnel up to $1 million each toward a few prototypes. Preventing PPE from polluting urban environments will be a boon to the spaces where residents have sought solace. “In stressful times, people seek out these places, but they’ve been pretty bad about taking rubbish and trash away with them,” said Leach of Thames21. “Masks blow hither and thither,” she added, “and finally come to rest when they hit a patch of water,” grass or sidewalk, where they too often remain.
It’s obvious that a lot is being done but as the covid 19 pandemic continues the world will need new ideas to combat the sheer amount of PPE which we all are using to stay as safe as possible.

Until the next time, Stay Safe but remember to pick up your trash!