India's Pandemic Death Toll Could Be In The Millions
Source: AP News
NEW DELHI (AP) — India’s excess deaths during the pandemic could be a staggering 10 times the official COVID-19 toll, likely making it modern India’s worst human tragedy, according to the most comprehensive research yet on the ravages of the virus in the South Asian country.
Most experts believe India’s official toll of more than 414,000 dead is a vast undercount, but the government has dismissed those concerns as exaggerated and misleading.
The report released Tuesday estimated excess deaths — the gap between those recorded and those that would have been expected — to be 3 million to 4.7 million between January 2020 and June 2021. It said an accurate figure may “prove elusive” but the true death toll “is likely to be an order of magnitude greater than the official count.”
The report was published by Arvind Subramanian, the Indian government’s former chief economic adviser, and two other researchers at the Center for Global Development, a nonprofit think tank based in Washington, and Harvard University...
Texas has seen nearly 9,000 COVID-19 deaths since February. All but 43 were unvaccinated people.
Source: The Texas Tribune
Of the 8,787 people who have died in Texas due to COVID-19 since early February, at least 43 were fully vaccinated, the Texas Department of State Health Services said.
That means 99.5% of people who died due to COVID-19 in Texas from Feb. 8 to July 14 were unvaccinated, while 0.5% were the result of “breakthrough infections,” which DSHS defines as people who contracted the virus two weeks after being fully vaccinated.
The agency did not release details about the 43 deaths and noted that these are preliminary numbers, which could change because each case must be confirmed through public health investigations. Statewide, more than 50,000 people have died of COVID-19 since March 2020, but the rate of deaths has slowed dramatically since vaccines became widely available in April.
Dr. David Lakey, the chief medical officer of the University of Texas System, said people succumbing to the coronavirus despite being vaccinated was “not unexpected.”
(Common Dreams) As athletes from around the world prepare to compete in the Olympics in Tokyo—without any in-person spectators due to the coronavirus pandemic, more than a year after the crisis began and despite the availability of effective vaccines—advocacy groups on Wednesday called on world leaders to "stop playing games" and end the apartheid that's keeping the Global South from accessing vaccine doses.
The People's Vaccine Alliance and Public Citizen launched their new Stop Playing Games campaign to demand that leaders of wealthy countries, 33 of which have vaccinated at least 50% of their populations, invest in a global vaccine manufacturing plan to produce and distribute doses at a faster rate in regional hubs around the world.
As part of the campaign, the groups will circulate a petition during the Olympic Games calling on U.S. President Joe Biden to invest $25 billion in the manufacturing plan, allowing the production of eight billion doses within a year—enough to vaccinate more than half of the world population and putting the global community much further on the path to ending the pandemic.
"Global leaders like President Biden cannot ignore the deadly pandemic and gross inequalities in vaccine distribution that are the backdrop of the Olympics this year," said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. "They must share vaccine technology and invest in scaled-up manufacturing to produce billions more doses in order to end vaccine apartheid."
As of now, only 1% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine. Last month, Oxfam reported that at the current rate, it would take 57 years for every person in the Global South to be fully vaccinated against the disease.
(Alternet) Lab accidents happen. Outbreaks linked to labs have been happening throughout the history of microbiological research, but they tend to be relatively small and limited to researchers, their close contacts and the odd health care provider. Which is not surprising considering that, for all their faults, labs are designed to keep people safe from infectious disease within a larger world that offers no such assurances. Lab-based infections account for a tiny percentage of all infectious disease.
(Sociologist Zeynep) Tufekci specifically framed this as a discussion of the origins of pandemics, rather than infections, or outbreaks. Lab-based infections would look even rarer if we compared them to all infections, or all outbreaks, or to all known outbreaks of new diseases.
Whatever the flaws of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, it was surely more secure than countless roosts where bats are swapping SARS-like coronaviruses in innumerable uncontrolled serial passage experiments, all day, every day, with no biosafety protocols. We can debate about whether Biosafety Level 2 lab is secure enough for altered bat coronavirus research, but the fact remains that the corresponding Bat Safety Level=0.
Zeynep Tufekci is right in that we can't rule out the possibility that covid came from a lab a priori, but she's attacking a straw man. Nobody thinks the possibility can be discounted out of hand. Everyone thinks there ought to be continued investigation. But we don't need to pretend all possibilities are equally likely to justify it.
It's comforting to think that the risk of emerging infectious disease can be pinned on a few arrogant scientists. It's far more terrifying to acknowledge that the bats—and all the factors that make spillovers more likely—are all still out there, waiting for us.
'We are in trouble': Kansas City hospital leaders to call for new mask mandates
Source: KC Star
While COVID-19 hospitalizations in the metro haven’t reached their winter peaks, the current spike is placing additional pressure on the health care system because more people are hospitalized for non-COVID reasons now than in the winter. On Wednesday, Stites said the University of Kansas Health System was turning down transfer patients because its beds are full.
“We have a severe shortage of in-patient beds and that shortage is throughout our community,” Stites said.
He also raised the possibility of asking state officials to provide additional resources. Local officials in Springfield asked Missouri Gov. Mike Parson to fund an alternative care site to help treat the inflow of virus patients.
“We saw in Springfield, they tried to put a field hospital up — and maybe we could be getting close to that,” Stites said.
Hospital leaders, who cannot themselves issue mandates, will have to build support for the idea with elected leaders and public health officials in order to obtain a second mandate. Officials would almost certainly face intense blowback from some portion of their constituents against any new order, especially after going months without one.
