Category: General

Despite a second year of travel restrictions because of COVID-19, the town of Bethlehem, the site of Jesus’ birth, is reviving its annual Christmas Eve celebration.

“Last year, our festival was virtual, but this year it will be face to face with popular participation,” Bethlehem Mayor Anton Salman told the Associated Press.

On a typical Christmas, the biblical town is a popular destination for tourists from around the globe. An average of 3 million tourists come each year. Much smaller crowds attended the holiday celebrations in Bethlehem on Friday, accompanied by gloomy weather.

“It’s very strange,” said Kristel Elayyan, a Dutch woman married to a Palestinian, who came to Bethlehem from Jerusalem. “If it’s one year, it’s an interesting experience,” she told Agence France-Presse. “But because this is the second year and we don’t know what is going to come in the future, it’s a huge loss for the people here.”

Events included traditional marching band parades and street celebrations. Scout bands with drums and flags gathered in Manger Square to celebrate the holiday.

While celebrations are scaled down this year, Salman is hopeful that 2021’s festivities will exceed last year’s, when residents were forced to celebrate inside their homes because of lockdown restrictions, the AP reported.

Israel’s ban on nearly all incoming air traffic, which has lasted two years, continues to prevent tourists from entering the occupied West Bank, and subsequently, the historic town.

The travel ban to curb the spread of COVID-19 was lifted in November to allow foreign tourists in but was soon reimposed with the emergence of the highly contagious omicron variant. Coinciding with the holiday season, the disease’s newest strain has hampered Christmas celebrations.

Without the flood of tourists, local authorities hoped that the Holy Land’s small Christian community would keep the holiday spirit alive.

Latin Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the top Roman Catholic clergyman in the Holy Land, celebrated a midnight Mass at the Church of the Nativity, the grotto where Jesus is said to have been born.

“Compared to last year’s Christmas, the participation is much greater, and this is an encouraging sign,” he told the masked congregation, but regretted the absence of foreign worshippers because of the pandemic.

“We pray for them and at the same time ask for their prayers, so that all this may end soon and that the city of Bethlehem may once again be full of pilgrims,” he said, according to AFP.

Source: Voice of America

Worried that a new COVID-19 wave could overwhelm understaffed U.S. hospitals, federal officials on Thursday loosened rules that call on health care workers to stay out of work for 10 days if they test positive.

Those workers will now be allowed to come back to work after seven days if they test negative and don’t have symptoms. Isolation time can be cut to five days or even fewer if there are severe staffing shortages, according to new guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“As the health care community prepares for an anticipated surge in patients due to omicron, CDC is updating our recommendations to reflect what we know about infection and exposure in the context of vaccination and booster doses,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said in a statement.

“Our goal is to keep health care personnel and patients safe, and to address and prevent undue burden on our health care facilities,” she added.

Isolation is designed to keep infected people away from uninfected people and prevent further spread of the virus.

CDC officials have advised that in calculating the 10-day isolation period, the first day should be the first full day after symptoms first developed or after a positive test. If a person develops symptoms sometime after a positive COVID-19 test, the quarantine period must restart, beginning one day after the symptoms develop.

Source: Voice of America

New research from Britain and South Africa suggests the fast-spreading omicron variant of the coronavirus is milder and results in fewer hospitalizations than other versions.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland unveiled a study Wednesday showing that people who had contracted omicron were at least 60% less likely to be admitted, compared to those who had been infected with the delta variant, which had been dominating the world in recent months.

A separate study conducted at Imperial College London revealed that people diagnosed with omicron were 15%-20% less likely to seek emergency care at a hospital, while also showing a 40%-45% decline in the number of omicron patients who needed to be admitted for severe symptoms.

And scientists at South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases Wednesday released a study that discovered the risk of hospitalization was 70%-80% lower among patients who tested positive for omicron, compared with those who tested positive for delta or other strains. The NICD researchers also said Wednesday the omicron outbreak in that country appears to have peaked, with a 20% decline in new infections in the last week.

But John Nkengasong, the head of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned Thursday during a virtual press briefing that South Africa should not be used as an example for what may happen in other nations with omicron.

More encouraging news came Wednesday in the U.S.-based military publication Defense One, which said the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, the largest of its kind in the U.S. military, will soon announce the development of an experimental vaccine that can offer protection against all coronaviruses, including the one that causes COVID-19, as well as its variants, including omicron and delta.

Researchers at Walter Reed have begun the first phase of human clinical trials of its new vaccine after gaining positive results from animal trials completed earlier this year. Dr. Kayvon Modjarrad, the director of Walter Reed’s infectious diseases branch, told Defense One that it has been working to develop the “pan-coronavirus” vaccine for two years. He said the human trials took longer than expected to begin because researchers needed to find subjects who had neither been vaccinated nor previously infected with COVID-19.

Meanwhile, authorities around the world continue to impose more coronavirus restrictions in response to the wildfire-like spread of omicron. In Australia, Premier Dominic Perrottet of New South Wales state reintroduced an indoor mask-wearing mandate Thursday after it recorded 5,715 new cases, nearly double the 3,763 new cases posted on Wednesday – the bulk of Australia’s record one-day total 8,357 confirmed cases.

In China, authorities in the northern city of Xi’an have imposed a strict lockdown of the entire area of 13 million residents in an effort to curb a spike in new cases. The order bans people from leaving their homes unless they have essential jobs, and mandates that only one person per household may shop for supplies every two days.

Xi’an, the capital city of Shaanxi province, has confirmed more than 200 new locally transmitted cases in recent weeks, although it is not known if the surge is being driven by omicron or delta.

Source: Voice of America

U.S. health officials say 2021 is shaping up to be even deadlier than last year.

It’s too early to say for sure, since all the death reports for November and December won’t be in for many weeks. But based on available information, it seems likely 2021 will surpass last year’s record number of deaths by at least 15,000, said Robert Anderson, who oversees the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s death statistics.

Last year was the most lethal in U.S. history, largely because of the COVID-19 pandemic. A CDC report released Wednesday shows 2020 was actually worse than the agency previously reported.

The report presents a final tally for last year of about 3.384 million U.S. deaths, about 25,000 more than a provisional count released earlier this year. Such jumps between provisional and final numbers are common, but 2020’s difference was higher than usual because of a lag in death records from some states that switched to new electronic reporting systems, Anderson said.

The CDC this week also revised its estimate of life expectancy for 2020. Life expectancy at birth that year was 77 years, a decrease of 1.8 years from 2019. The agency previously estimated the decline at 1.5 years.

Anderson said it’s likely that the nation will see more than 3.4 million deaths in 2021. Other experts said they think deaths for the year will end up either about the same as in 2020, or higher.

“It’s really sad,” said Ali Mokdad, a mortality statistics expert at the University of Washington.

A large reason is COVID-19, which hit the U.S. hard around March 2020 and became the nation’s No. 3 cause of death, behind heart disease and cancer.

Last year, COVID-19 was the underlying cause in about 351,000 deaths. This year, the number is already 356,000, and the final tally could hit 370,000, Anderson said.

Experts also think the 2021 numbers will be affected by a drug overdose epidemic that is expected to — for the first time — surpass 100,000 deaths in a calendar year.

An increase in annual deaths is not unusual. The annual count rose by nearly 16,000 from 2018 to 2019 — before COVID-19 appeared.

But the coronavirus clearly had an impact. The nation had the smallest rate of population gain in history between July 2020 and July 2021, primarily because of the COVID-19 deaths, said Kenneth Johnson, a University of New Hampshire researcher.

Officials had hoped COVID-19 vaccines would slash the death count. But vaccinations became available gradually this year, with only 7 million fully vaccinated at the end of January and 63 million at the end of March.

Since then, many Americans have chosen not to get vaccinated. The CDC says 204 million Americans are fully vaccinated — or about 65% of the U.S. population that are age 5 and older and eligible for shots.

Indeed, that’s a big part of why COVID-19 deaths could climb despite the availability of effective vaccines, Mokdad said. The appearance of new, more transmissible variants of the coronavirus only made the problem worse, he added.

Source: Voice of America

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized the emergency use of an antiviral COVID-19 pill, the pill’s maker Pfizer Inc. said Wednesday.

The company says the pill, which is to be taken with another antiviral drug, ritonavir, is 90% effective in preventing hospitalization and death in high-risk people.

“The efficacy is high, the side effects are low and it’s oral. It checks all the boxes,” Dr. Gregory Poland of the Mayo Clinic told The Associated Press. “You’re looking at a 90% decreased risk of hospitalization and death in a high-risk group—that’s stunning.”

The pill is the first at-home treatment for the virus and is approved for use in those 12 and older who are at high risk.

Pfizer says it’s ready to start delivery of the drug immediately in the U.S. and will produce 120 million courses in 2022.

The U.S. government has a contract with the company for 10 million courses priced at $530 per course.

The drug will be sold under the name Paxlovid and will have to be taken every 12 hours for five days once COVID-19 symptoms appear. Potential users of the new drug will have to show a positive virus test.

Drug giant Merck is also working on a similar drug.

Despite the promise, health officials say getting a vaccine is still the best way to stave off the worst effects of the virus.

Source: Voice of America

The Malaysian military used boats Tuesday to distribute food to desperate people trapped in their homes after massive floods, as the death toll rose to 14 with over 70,000 displaced.

Days of torrential rain triggered some of the worst flooding in years across the country at the weekend, swamping cities and villages and cutting off major roads.

Selangor — the country’s wealthiest and most densely populated state, encircling the capital Kuala Lumpur — is one of the worst-hit areas.

Some parts of state capital Shah Alam were still under water Tuesday, and military personnel in boats distributed food to people stuck in their homes and government shelters.

Kartik Subramany fled his house as floodwaters rose, and took refuge in a school for 48 hours before being evacuated with his family to a shelter.

“My house is totally damaged, my two cars are wrecked,” the 29-year-old told AFP.

“These are the worst floods of my entire life. The federal government has failed the people miserably — it has failed in its primary function to protect and safeguard lives.”

He is among a growing number attacking what they say is a slow and inadequate official response.

Thousands of emergency service and military personnel have been mobilised, but critics say it is not enough and volunteers have stepped in to provide food and boats for the rescue effort.

An AFP journalist in one hard-hit Shah Alam neighbourhood saw people desperate for food snatching items from a devastated supermarket.

‘Hopeless’ official response

Opposition MP Fuziah Salleh described the official response as “hopeless” and “incompetent”.

“No early warning of the torrential rain was given,” she told AFP. “It is so sad lives have been lost.”

Opposition politicians have accused the government of ignoring their calls to better prepare for the monsoon season, from November to February, particularly by improving drainage in densely populated urban areas.

On Tuesday, the death toll from the floods rose to 14, including eight in Selangor and six in the eastern state of Pahang, official news agency Bernama reported.

But with reports of people still missing, it is expected to increase.

More than 71,000 people have been forced from their homes due to the floods, including 41,000 in Pahang and 27,000 in Selangor, according to official data.

Evacuees are being housed in government relief centres but officials have warned to expect a rise in coronavirus cases linked to the crowded shelters.

The rain has stopped and in many areas floodwaters have receded, leaving residents to count the cost.

“I’ve been doing business for more than 24 years… this has never happened before,” said Mohammad Awal, whose cosmetic shop outside Kuala Lumpur was flooded.

The Southeast Asian nation is hit by floods annually during the monsoon season, but those at the weekend were the worst since 2014 when over 100,000 people were forced from their homes.

Global warming has been linked to worsening floods. Because a warmer atmosphere holds more water, climate change increases the risk and intensity of flooding from extreme rainfall.

Source: Voice of America