Day: July 24, 2021

Forty-five percent of the Americans who have not been inoculated with COVID-19 vaccines say they definitely do not have any plans to get the shots, according to a new poll.

Another 35% are a little less sure and say they will probably not get the vaccines, the survey, conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research said.

Meanwhile, 3% of those polled said they would definitely get the shots, while 16% say they would probably get the vaccines.

In addition, 64% of the unvaccinated Americans who participated in the survey told the pollsters that they had little to no confidence that the vaccines are effective against the COVID-19 variants, including the highly transmissible delta variant. Eighty-six percent of those vaccinated believe the vaccines work.

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky recently called the current U.S. surge in cases “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” because nearly all current patients and those who have recently died from the coronavirus are unvaccinated.

Kay Ivey, the governor of Alabama, says it is “time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks” for the current surge in cases. The Republican governor said the vaccines are “the greatest weapon we have to fight COVID.” She said the unvaccinated “are letting us down.”

The European Union’s main drug regulator has given its nod for the use of the Moderna vaccine for use in children 12-17 years old. The Moderna vaccine is already authorized for people 18 and older. The European Medicines Agency said in a statement that the protocol for the use of the vaccine with children would be the same as with adults — “two injections in the muscles of the upper arm, four weeks apart.” The European Commission must give the final approval.

Thousands of people have staged an anti-lockdown rally in Sydney, Australia, in defiance of the city’s stay-home order to curb a COVID-19 outbreak. The Associated Press reported that “mounted police and riot officers” were on the scene and several demonstrators were arrested. AP reported that New South Wales police said the demonstration was a breach of public health orders.

Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Saturday that there are more than 193 million confirmed global COVID cases with more than 4 million deaths.

Source: Voice of America

PARIS – French anti-riot police fired tear gas Saturday as clashes erupted during protests in central Paris against COVID-19 restrictions and a vaccination campaign, television reported.

Police sought to push back demonstrators near the capital’s Gare Saint-Lazare railway station after protesters had knocked over a police motorbike ridden by two officers, television pictures showed.

Images showed a heavy police presence on the capital’s streets. Scuffles between police and demonstrators also broke out on the Champs-Elysees thoroughfare, where tear gas was fired and traffic was halted, the pictures showed.

Opposition to ‘dictatorship’

At another protest called by far-right politicians in west Paris, demonstrators opposed to anti-coronavirus measures carried banners reading “Stop the dictatorship.”

Across France, protests were planned in cities including Marseille, Montpellier, Nantes and Toulouse.

An official with France’s interior ministry said 161,000 people had demonstrated across the country on Saturday, up from 114,000 a week earlier.

French lawmakers are due to vote this weekend on a bill drafted by the government aimed at setting up a health pass and mandatory vaccination for health workers.

Source: Voice of America

OMAHA, NEBRASKA – Several states scaled back their reporting of COVID-19 statistics this month just as cases across the country started to skyrocket, depriving the public of real-time information on outbreaks, cases, hospitalizations and deaths in their communities.

The shift to weekly instead of daily reporting in Florida, Nebraska, Iowa and South Dakota marked a notable shift during a pandemic in which coronavirus dashboards have become a staple for Americans closely tracking case counts and trends to navigate a crisis that has killed more than 600,000 people in the U.S.

In Nebraska, the state stopped reporting on the virus altogether for two weeks after Governor Pete Ricketts declared an end to the official virus emergency, forcing reporters to file public records requests or turn to national websites that track state data to learn about COVID statistics. The state backtracked two weeks later and came up with weekly reports of some basic numbers.

Other governments have gone the other direction and released more information, with Washington this week adding a dashboard on breakthrough cases to show the number of residents who contracted the virus after getting vaccines. Many states have recently gone to reporting virus numbers only on weekdays.

When Florida changed the frequency of its virus reporting earlier this month, officials said it made sense given the decreasing number of cases and the increasing number of people being vaccinated.

Cases started soaring soon afterward, and Florida cases earlier this week made up one-fifth of the country’s new coronavirus infections. As a result, Florida’s weekly releases — typically done on Friday afternoons — have consequences for the country’s understanding of the current summer surge, with no statewide COVID stats coming out of the virus hotspot for six days a week.

In Florida’s last two weekly reports, the number of new cases shot up from 23,000 to 45,000 and then 73,000 on Friday, an average of more than 10,000 day. Hospitals are starting to run out of space in parts of the state.

With cases rising, Democrats and other critics have urged state officials and Governor Ron DeSantis to resume daily outbreak updates.

“There was absolutely no reason to eliminate the daily updates beyond an effort to pretend like there are no updates,” said state Representative Anna Eskamani, a Democrat from the Orlando area.

Alarming trend

The trend of reducing data reporting has alarmed infectious-disease specialists who believe that more information is better during a pandemic. People have come to rely on state virus dashboards to help make decisions about whether to attend large gatherings or wear masks in public, and understanding the level of risk in the community affects how people respond to virus restrictions and calls to get vaccinated.

“We know that showing the data to others actually is important because the actions that businesses take, the actions that schools take, the actions that civic leaders take, the actions that community leaders take, the actions that each of us individually take are all influenced by our perception of what the risk is out there,” said Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, who leads the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California-San Francisco.

Reporting the numbers weekly still allows people to see the overall trends while smoothing out some of the day-to-day variations that come from the way cases are reported. And experts have long advised that it makes sense to pay more attention to the seven-day rolling average of new cases because the numbers can vary widely from one day to the next.

And Florida health officials say that they have not curtailed the sharing of data with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Overwhelmed staff

Maintaining daily updates on the virus does require significant resources for states. For instance, Kansas went to reporting virus numbers three times a week in May because the state health department said providing daily statistics consumed too much of its overwhelmed staff’s time.

In Nebraska, officials decided that continuing to update the virus dashboard daily wasn’t the best use of state resources now, partly because there had been a steady decline in the number of views of the website, indicating less interest in the numbers, spokeswoman Olga Dack said. The state could return to providing daily updates if the governor’s office decided that was needed, she said.

State health departments have a long history of providing the public regular updates on other diseases like flu and West Nile, but those viruses have none of the political baggage associated with COVID-19.

In Florida, a former health department employee was fired last year after publicly suggesting that managers wanted her to manipulate information on coronavirus statistics to paint a rosier picture. The employee, Rebekah Jones, did not allege any tampering with data, but her comments sowed doubts about the reliability of the metrics.

Weekly updates, no updates

Infectious-disease specialist Dr. David Brett-Major said that for many people, national websites such as the one run by the CDC can be a good source of data on the latest state trends, and that weekly updates could be OK. The World Health Organization often uses weekly updates, but he said they do that for practical data management reasons, not political ones.

He said the message Nebraska sent when it ended its dashboard — that the state emergency was over and conditions were returning to normal — was troubling.

“The main problem is that it reflects a disinterest in pandemic risk management,” said Brett-Major, with the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.

Janet Hamilton, executive director of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, said part of the problem is that public health officials generally don’t have sophisticated data systems, which makes it more labor intensive to produce the daily dashboards. Even though public health agencies have money for operations at a time when pandemic government spending is flush, they haven’t necessarily had the chance to upgrade.

“It would be great if daily reporting could be made widely available, but public health would have to be funded better to do that and right now that is just not the case,” Hamilton said.

And even in states where virus numbers aren’t being reported publicly every day, health officials are still looking at the latest data, Hamilton said.

But at a time when the delta variant is, in the words of the CDC director, “spreading with incredible efficiency,” Bibbins-Domingo said it is important that everyone can see the latest trends and understand the risks.

“Even if we know that they are available to decision-makers on a daily basis, there is considerable value to providing the data to the public,” she said.

Source: Voice of America

PARIS – Tens of thousands of people protested in Australia, France, Italy and Greece on Saturday, sparking clashes with police as they railed against COVID-19 measures and government sanctions against the unvaccinated aimed at prodding more people into getting their shots.

Dozens of protesters were arrested after an unauthorized march in Sydney, with the city’s police minister calling those who took part “morons.”

Organizers had dubbed the protest a freedom rally. Attendees carried signs and banners reading “Wake up Australia” and “Drain the Swamp.”

In France, where police deployed tear gas and a water cannon against some protesters, an estimated 160,000 took to the streets in nationwide protests against President Emmanuel Macron’s health pass that will drastically curtail access to restaurants and public spaces for unvaccinated people.

‘Don’t touch our children’

“Freedom, freedom,” chanted demonstrators in France, carrying placards denouncing “Macron, Tyrant,” “Big Pharma shackles freedom” or saying “No to the pass of shame.”

The demonstrations highlight the conflict globally between the advice of the World Health Organization and other public health agencies and people who for one reason or another refuse to be vaccinated.

In Indonesia and the United Kingdom, governments have eased pandemic restrictions even in the face of surging cases of coronavirus infection.

Meanwhile, around 5,000 people demonstrated in Athens, carrying placards touting slogans such as, “Don’t touch our children,” according to an AFP journalist at the scene.

Thousands of people protested in at least 80 cities across Italy as Rome tries to slow an upturn in COVID-19 infections. Most were not wearing masks.

The Green Pass, an extension of the EU’s digital COVID certificate, will be required starting Aug. 6 for anyone who wants to enter cinemas, museums, indoor swimming pools or sports stadiums, or eat indoors at restaurants.

It will serve as proof bearers have either been vaccinated, undergone a recent negative COVID-19 test, or recovered from a coronavirus infection.

The decision Thursday to make the pass mandatory for many activities saw a boom in vaccine bookings, up 200% in Italy’s smaller regions, according to COVID-19 emergency chief Francesco Figliuolo.

Half of Australia in lockdown

Earlier in Sydney, demonstrators pelted officers with potted plants and bottles of water as they defied a monthlong stay-at-home order, a day after authorities suggested the restrictions could remain in place until October.

New South Wales state Premier Gladys Berejiklian said she was “utterly disgusted” by the protesters whose “selfish actions have compromised the safety of all of us.”

Police said they issued nearly 100 fines and arrested 57 people.

In Melbourne, six people were arrested. police said.

New South Wales Police Minister David Elliott said a team of detectives would be scouring footage to identify and charge as many people as possible in the coming days.

“Sydney isn’t immune from morons,” he said.

Sydney, a city of more than 5 million people, is struggling to contain an outbreak of the delta variant, first identified in India and now spreading globally.

After escaping much of the early pandemic unscathed, about half of Australia’s 25 million people are now in lockdown across several cities.

There is growing anger at the restrictions and the conservative government’s failure to provide adequate vaccine supplies.

Just 11% of the population is fully vaccinated.

Harder to put off shots

In France, as elsewhere in Europe, the government is making it harder for reluctant citizens to put off getting their shots.

Legislation now being considered by lawmakers will make vaccinations compulsory for certain professions, while the controversial health pass will severely restrict social life for holdouts starting at the end of this month.

There were signs the tougher measures announced on July 13 were having the desired effect: 48% of the population were fully vaccinated as of Friday, up 8 percentage points from July 10.

While more than three-quarters of French people backed Macron’s measures, according to a July 13 Elabe poll for BFMTV, a sizeable and vocal minority do not.

Elodie, 34, a care assistant at a Strasbourg nursing home, denounced “the blackmail of caregivers who were at the front line” during the first wave and who are now threatened” with “no more pay” and even being fired.

“They’ve been lying to us since the beginning,” she said.

Source: Voice of America