YCLOAK

U.S. President Joe Biden said Tuesday he is encouraged by data released by Pfizer Inc on its COVID-19 anti-viral medicine and his administration has ordered enough of the pills to treat 10 million Americans.

“Getting vaccinated and getting your booster shot remain the most important tools we have to save lives. But if this treatment is indeed authorized “and once the pills are widely available” it will mark a significant step forward in our path out of the pandemic,” Biden said in a statement.
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A new study out of South Africa shows that Pfizer’s two-dose COVID-19 vaccine provides a high degree of protection against hospitalization from the fast-spreading omicron variant.

The real-world study, conducted by the South African Medical Research Council and Discovery Health, the country’s largest private health insurance administrator, was based on more than 211,000 positive COVID-19 test results between November 15 to December 7, with about 78,000 believed to be caused by omicron.

The study concluded that while the vaccine offered only a 33% rate of protection against an overall infection, it provided 70% protection against hospitalization. It also concludes that while there was a higher risk of reinfection during this current surge, the risk of hospitalization among adults was 29% lower than during the initial wave. Pfizer developed the vaccine in collaboration with German-based BioNTech.

South Africa is experiencing a dramatic surge in new daily COVID-19 cases driven by omicron, which was first announced by the country in November.

In a related development, Pfizer announced Tuesday that a new study of its experimental COVID-19 antiviral pill confirms it is highly effective in preventing severe disease among high-risk adults that could lead to hospitalizations and deaths, even against the omicron variant.

The company says it found that the drug, dubbed Paxlovid, reduced the risk of hospitalization and death by 89% if given within three days of the onset of COVID-19 symptoms, and as much 88% if administered within five days.

Pfizer has asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to authorize use of Paxlovid based on results from a preliminary study.

The FDA is expected to announce soon whether to grant permission for doctors to use Paxlovid and a competing drug, molnupiravir, developed by Merck. Merck said last month a clinical trial revealed molnupiravir reduced hospitalizations and deaths by only 30% among high-risk adults.

The new developments come as health authorities around the world are warning that omicron could soon surpass delta as the most dominant variant of the coronavirus.

Denmark says omicron will trigger 10,000 new infections by the end of the week, compared to the current rate of 6,000 cases driven entirely by delta. The Norwegian Institute of Public Health also warned Monday that omicron “will soon dominate,” with new infections rising from 4,700 daily cases to a record 90,000 to 300,000 daily cases.

The new warnings come just days after the World Health Organization warned that omicron poses a “very high” global risk because its mutations may lead to higher transmission. The U.N. health agency said while the current vaccines are less effective against omicron, early data shows it causes less severe symptoms than other variants.

Meanwhile, China is reporting its second case of omicron infection on its mainland. A 67-year-old man tested positive Monday, two weeks after arriving in Shanghai from overseas. Authorities say the man repeatedly tested negative during his mandatory two-week hotel quarantine before flying to the southern city of Guangzhou, where he was spending another week in self-isolation at his residence. He tested positive for the new variant after researchers conducted genome sequencing.

The first case of omicron on mainland China was a person in the northern port city of Tianjin who tested positive for the new variant after arriving from overseas on December 9. The individual, who was shown to be asymptomatic, is now quarantined and undergoing treatment in a hospital.

The first cases of omicron on mainland China come two years after COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, was first detected in the central city of Wuhan. China has since imposed a “zero-tolerance” strategy, including mass testing, snap lockdowns and extensive quarantines, as a means to prevent any further outbreaks.

Some information for this report came from the Associated Press and Reuters.
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Benin has adopted a new law legalizing abortion in most cases, one of the few African countries to do so. A conservative country, the law was passed by parliament to prevent a wave of clandestine abortions that have resulted in deaths. Kouam Joel Honoré has this report from Cotonou.
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In a major victory for sexual minority advocates, Canada last week banned conversion therapy, a widely discredited practice that aims to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

The law makes it a crime to subject anyone in Canada to conversion therapy, profit from the practice or take a Canadian outside the country to undergo conversion therapy elsewhere.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took to Twitter to hail the ban of what he called “a despicable and degrading practice.”

University of Ottawa student Jonathan Di Carlo calls himself a conversion therapy survivor, having undergone sessions “primarily in religious settings” for more than a decade starting at age 13.

“They included attempted demon exorcisms in front of people, forced one-on-one counseling where a pastor with no formal psychotherapy training convinced me that homosexuality was caused by an absentee father or that it was caused by being raped at a young age by someone of the same sex such as a father or uncle,” Di Carlo told VOA. “Then I was told to ‘fast,’ a biblical practice where a person doesn’t eat or drink except for water. … I did 40 days [of consuming] only water, twice.”

Conversion therapy has been rejected by an array of Western medical groups, including the American Medical Association, which linked the practice to “significant long-term harm” including depression, anxiety and possibly suicidal behaviors.

 

Last year, a report submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council found that conversion therapy is practiced in 68 countries and that victims may be subjected to “heinous physical and psychological violence.” The report added, “Attempts to pathologize and erase the identity of individuals, negate their existence as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans or gender diverse and provoke self-loathing have profound consequences on their physical and psychological integrity and well-being.”

Di Carlo says he knows the consequences firsthand.

“The torture of conversion therapy only made me more depressed with a lot of thoughts of suicide,” Di Carlo told VOA. “I self-medicated with alcohol for several years under the pressure of wanting to be straight but God not making me straight.”

Today, the student wells with a different emotion: pride.

“I think the fact that Canada made this move makes the nation stand out,” Di Carlo said. “It says that we have an approach to human rights that few other longstanding democracies have. It says that Canada acknowledges that this practice has no basis in science. It is criminal and it is torture.”

Canada is already seen as a popular destination for LGTBQ individuals persecuted around the world, hosting a charity aimed at encouraging this migration named the Rainbow Railroad.

LGBTQ stands for lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual, questioning. In Canada, “2” is often added to the end of the initials, recognizing some Indigenous people who identify as having both a masculine and feminine spirit.

Some Canadian faith-based groups argued against the ban on the basis of religious freedom. Additionally, an opinion piece appearing in The Globe and Mail newspaper framed the issue as a matter of personal liberty, asking, “should consenting adults be allowed to access services that are harmful to them?”

Canada joins four countries that have legally banned conversion therapy on a national level: Brazil, Ecuador, Germany and Malta. Germany bans the practice for minors or the coerced. It is banned in some U.S. states but not others.

Some worry that, even where it is banned, conversion therapy will continue.

Sexual minority rights advocate Fae Johnstone of Halifax-based Wisdom2Action worries that Canada’s ban won’t “fully eradicate the practice.”

Johnstone noted, “A lot of practitioners don’t describe themselves as conversion therapists.” She added that conversion therapy likely will continue as an underground practice.

For now, however, ban supporters are taking a victory lap.

“Survivors have been fighting for this day for decades, so seeing that advocacy, that struggle and that resilience finally payoff is overwhelming in the best way,” Nicholas Schiavo, founder of No Conversion Canada, told VOA. “This legislation sends a clear message to LGBTQ2 people both here in Canada and around the world that Canada remains a human rights leader and will step up to protect the most vulnerable in our communities.” 

 
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The World Health Organization and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, a leading cancer center in the United States, are planning to provide cancer medication free-of-charge to children in developing countries.

Cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide, killing about 10 million people a year.  The World Health Organization estimates 400,000 children globally develop cancer every year, with nearly 100,000 dying.

The most common types of childhood cancers include leukemias, brain cancers, lymphomas, and solid tumors.  WHO reports nearly nine in 10 children with cancer live in low-and-middle income countries.

Andre Ilbawi, who heads WHO’s cancer division in the department of noncommunicable diseases,  said about 80 percent of children who have cancer in high-income countries survive  — a major achievement and improvement over the past decades.

“But that progress has not been achieved for children who are living in low-and middle-income countries, where 30 percent or less will survive a cancer diagnosis,” he said.  “One of the primary reasons is because of care that is simply not available or accessible, and medicines are a core part of the treatment of childhood cancer.”

WHO and St. Jude’s hospital have formed a partnership to change this situation, establishing a platform that will dramatically increase access to childhood cancer medicines around the world.

To kickstart this program, St. Jude is making a six-year investment by contributing $200 million.  Ilbawi said the money initially will provide medicines at no cost to 12 countries that will take part in a two-year pilot program, with governments involved in the care of the children and in selecting the medicines that are needed.

“From there we will work with country partners to make sure those medicines are delivered safely and effectively to the children in need,” Ilbawi said.  Over time, this will increase to 50 countries or more within six years.  This means that almost every child around the world, particularly those in low-and middle-income countries, will benefit from this platform.”

The new platform aims to provide safe and effective cancer medicines to approximately 120,000 children between 2022 and 2027.  The health partners say the program will be scaled up to include many more beneficiaries in future years.
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The Western U.S. is bracing for the brunt of a major winter storm expected to hit Monday, bringing travel headaches, the threat of localized flooding and some relief in an abnormally warm fall. 

Light rain and snow fell in Northern California on Sunday, giving residents a taste of what’s to come. The multi-day storm could drop more than 8 feet (2.4 meters) of snow on the highest peaks and drench other parts of California as it pushes south and east before moving out midweek. 

“This is a pretty widespread event,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Anna Wanless in Sacramento. “Most of California, if not all, will see some sort of rain and snow.” 

The precipitation will bring at least temporary relief to the broader region that’s been gripped by drought caused by climate change. The latest U.S. drought monitor shows parts of Montana, Oregon, California, Nevada and Utah in exceptional drought, which is the worst category. 

Most reservoirs that deliver water to states, cities, tribes, farmers and utilities rely on melted snow in the springtime. 

The storm this week is typical for this time of the year but notable because it’s the first big snow that is expected to significantly affect travel with ice and snow on the roads, strong wind and limited visibility, Wanless said. Drivers on some mountainous passes on Sunday had to wrap their tires in chains. 

Officials urged people to delay travel and stay indoors. Rain could cause minor flooding and rockslides, especially in areas that have been scarred by wildfires, according to the forecast. The San Bernardino County sheriff’s department issued evacuation warnings for several areas, citing the potential for flooding. Los Angeles County fire officials urged residents to be aware of the potential for mud flows. 

Forecasters also said strong winds accompanying the storm could lead to power outages. Karly Hernandez, a spokesperson for Pacific Gas & Electric, said the utility that covers much of California didn’t have any major outages on Sunday. Crews and equipment are staged across the state to respond quickly if the power goes out, Hernandez said. 

Rain fell intermittently across California on Sunday. Andy Naja-Riese, chief executive of the Agricultural Institute of Marin, said farmers markets carried on as usual in San Rafael and San Francisco amid light wind. 

The markets are especially busy this time of year with farmers making jellies, jams and sauces for the holidays, he said. And, he said, rain always is needed in a parched state. 

“In many ways, it really is a blessing,” Naja-Riese said. 

Lichen Crommett, manager of the San Lorenzo Garden Center in Santa Cruz, California, said customers weren’t deterred by a light sprinkling of rain Sunday morning. 

“It’s not like raincoat worthy just yet, but any second it could change,” she said. 

A second storm predicted to hit California midweek could deliver almost continuous snow, said Edan Weishahn of the weather service in Reno, which monitors an area straddling the Nevada state line. Donner Summit, one of the highest points on Interstate 80 and a major commerce commuter route, could have major travel disruptions or road closures, Weishahn said. 

The weather follows a calm November that was unseasonably warm. 

“With this storm coming in, it’s going to be a wakeup call to a lot of folks,” Weishahn said. 

Vail Resorts’ three Tahoe-area ski resorts opened with limited offerings over the weekend after crews worked to produce artificial snow. Spokeswoman Sara Roston said the resorts are looking forward to more of the real thing. 

“We will assess once the storm comes in, but we do expect to open additional terrain following,” she wrote in an email. 

Meanwhile, the Sierra Avalanche Center warned heavy snow and strong winds on top of a weak snowpack could cause large and destructive avalanches. One man died Saturday at a ski resort in the Pacific Northwest when he was caught in an avalanche that temporarily buried five others. 
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The top U.S. infectious disease expert on Sunday urged eligible Americans to get booster coronavirus vaccinations to give them the best protection against the new omicron variant.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, told ABC’s “This Week” show that omicron can evade the protection provided by the three vaccines available in the United States. Nearly 202 million Americans are considered fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, but only 53.8 million of them have received booster shots.

“If you want to be optimally protected, absolutely get a booster,” he said.

“The somewhat encouraging news is that preliminary data show that when you get a booster… it raises the level of protection high enough that it then does do well against the omicron,” Fauci said.

Health experts say that early anecdotal evidence shows that those who contract the omicron variant experience a mild illness, but its long-term effects are unknown. 

Omicron is highly transmissible, but the delta variant is still driving a sharp increase in the number of new cases in the U.S. The U.S. is now adding another 118,000 cases a day, a 42% increase in the last two weeks, but so far there are only 140 reported omicron cases. 

The U.S. death toll from the coronavirus now stands at nearly 794,000, more than in any other country, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC.

Fauci said 60 million eligible Americans have not been vaccinated and that about 100 million are eligible for boosters.
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More than 400 million South Asian children have been affected by school closures extending into a second year in some countries during the COVID-19 pandemic according to a new UNICEF report.

The United Nations agency has urged the region’s countries to fully reopen schools, warning that the consequences of lost learning are huge and will be long-lasting in a region where access to remote learning is limited.

“The remarkable achievements our region has made in advancing child rights over recent decades are now at risk,” said George Laryea-Adjei, UNICEF regional director for South Asia.

“If we fail to act, the worst impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic will be felt for decades to come,” he said.

School closures in South Asia have lasted longer than in many other parts of the world with schools remaining fully closed on an average for nearly 32 weeks between March 2020 and August this year, according to the report.

In Bangladesh, schools were shut for 18 months, until September, one of the longest closures in the world. In countries such as India and Nepal they have only partially reopened.

The transition to remote learning has been difficult in a region where many houses do not have internet connectivity and where access to smartphones is limited – an earlier study showed that in India for example nearly half of the students between ages 6 and 13 reported not using any type of remote learning during school closures.

Many teachers also found they lacked the training to make remote learning work effectively, according to UNICEF.

 

The loss of learning happened in a region where many children were already lagging.

Citing examples, the report said that one study in India showed that the proportion of third grade children who could read a first grade level text fell from around 42% in 2018 to 24% in 2020.

It said girls were at a particular disadvantage because they had more limited access to mobile devices and were under increased pressure to perform domestic work.

There have been some successes – in Sri Lanka and Bhutan the distribution of published material to continue out-of-school learning helped children keep up with their studies.

UNICEF has called on countries to prioritize helping students catch up on the learning they have missed, pointing out that South Asia is home to more adolescents than any other part of the world and will need 21st century skills to gain a foothold in a region where jobs remain scarce.

The report also flagged concerns about the disruption of health services such as regular immunization drives due to the pandemic. It said that key actions are needed to “reverse the alarming rollback in child health and nutrition.”

The report said that the picture in South Asia remains bleak compared to developed countries, where more people are immunized, and economies are recovering.

Only 30% of South Asians are fully vaccinated, the report said, “and as the region braces itself for future waves of the virus, more children and families are slipping into poverty.” 
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Six years ago today, nearly 200 nations signed the Paris Climate Accord, where they agreed to keep the rise in global temperatures at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. Scientists say that threshold is an absolute minimum to avoid catastrophic climate change.

“Our fragile planet is hanging by a thread,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said. “We are still knocking on the door of climate catastrophe.”

As he wound up the recent COP26 in Glasgow, Guterres had that harsh warning for the 200 countries who had gathered to talk climate change — and how to slow it down.

Hanging over the summit was the deadline of 2030 for a drastic reduction of greenhouse emissions that was set six years ago at COP21 in Paris.

Former executive secretary of the U.N. Climate Convention, Christiana Figueres, remembers it as a historic event.

“It was a real breakthrough for the United Nations to have a completely unanimous, legally binding pathway for decarbonizing the global economy,” Figueres said.

Secretary of state at the time, John Kerry signed that agreement for the U.S.

“It really was an exciting moment when 195,196 countries come together simultaneously, all wanting to move in the same direction, understanding the stakes,” Kerry said. 

2015 was the hottest year on record. Scientists pointed to that as sure proof that global warming was real and serious.

But that record keeps on getting broken as the planet gets hotter year by year.

The World Meteorological Organization says the planet has been propelled into uncharted territory, with rising sea levels, melting glaciers, and “relentless” extreme weather events.

The WMO warns that “extreme” weather is the new normal.

Nonetheless, both Figueres and Kerry remain optimistic.

“We are moving in the right direction,” Figueres said. “The question is the timing, and I do feel that everyone came out of Glasgow with a renewed sense of timing.”

Kerry is now President Biden’s special envoy for climate.

He was back in Paris this week as part of a whistle stop tour of Europe to reassure leaders the U.S. is back in the game, after former President Donald Trump shut the door on climate issues.

“No one country can save this. Everybody has to act,” said Kerry.

That was also perhaps the main takeaway from the Glasgow summit — as developing nations pleaded with their richer neighbors not to be complacent with what has been achieved, but to keep pushing hard to meet that 2030 deadline, to save the planet.
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On a moonless summer night in Hawaii, krill, fish and crabs swirl through a beam of light as two researchers peer into the water above a vibrant reef.

Minutes later, like clockwork, they see eggs and sperm from spawning coral drifting past their boat. They scoop up the fishy-smelling blobs and put them into test tubes.

In this Darwinian experiment, the scientists are trying to speed up coral’s evolutionary clock to breed “super corals” that can better withstand the impacts of global warming.

For the past five years, the researchers have been conducting experiments to prove their theories would work. Now, they’re getting ready to plant laboratory-raised corals in the ocean to see how they survive in nature.

“Assisted evolution started out as this kind of crazy idea that you could actually help something change and allow that to survive better because it is changing,” said Kira Hughes, a University of Hawaii researcher and the project’s manager.

Speeding up nature

Researchers tested three methods of making corals more resilient:

Selective breeding that carries on desirable traits from parents.

Acclimation that conditions corals to tolerate heat by exposing them to increasing temperatures.

And modifying the algae that give corals essential nutrients.Hughes said the methods all have proved successful in the lab.

 

And while some other scientists worried this is meddling with nature, Hughes said the rapidly warming planet leaves no other options.

“We have to intervene in order to make a change for coral reefs to survive into the future,” she said.

When ocean temperatures rise, coral releases its symbiotic algae that supply nutrients and impart its vibrant colors. The coral turns white — a process called bleaching — and can quickly become sick and die.

For more than a decade, scientists have been observing corals that have survived bleaching, even when others have died on the same reef.

So, researchers are focusing on those hardy survivors, hoping to enhance their heat tolerance. And they found selective breeding held the most promise for Hawaii’s reefs.

“Corals are threatened worldwide by a lot of stressors, but increasing temperatures are probably the most severe,” said Crawford Drury, chief scientist at Hawaii’s Coral Resilience Lab. “And so that’s what our focus is on, working with parents that are really thermally tolerant.”

A novel idea

In 2015, Ruth Gates, who launched the resilience lab, and Madeleine van Oppen of the Australian Institute of Marine Science published a paper on assisted evolution during one of the world’s worst bleaching events.

The scientists proposed bringing corals into a lab to help them evolve into more heat-tolerant animals. And the idea attracted Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who funded the first phase of research and whose foundation still supports the program.

“We’ve given (coral) experiences that we think are going to raise their ability to survive,” Gates told The Associated Press in a 2015 interview.

 

Gates, who died of brain cancer in 2018, also said she wanted people to know how “intimately reef health is intertwined with human health.”

Coral reefs, often called the rainforests of the sea, provide food for humans and marine animals, shoreline protection for coastal communities, jobs for tourist economies and even medicine to treat illnesses such as cancer, arthritis and Alzheimer’s disease.

A recent report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other research organizations concluded bleaching events are the biggest threat to the world’s coral reefs. Scientists found that between 2009 and 2018, the world lost about 14% of its coral.

Assisted evolution was not widely accepted when first proposed.

Van Oppen said there were concerns about losing genetic diversity and critics who said the scientists were “playing gods” by tampering with the reef.

“Well, you know, (humans) have already intervened with the reef for very long periods of time,” van Oppen said. “All we’re trying to do is to repair the damage.”

Rather than editing genes or creating anything unnatural, researchers are just nudging what could already happen in the ocean, she said. “We are really focusing first on as local a scale as possible to try and maintain and enhance what is already there.”

Millions of years in the making

Still, there are lingering questions.

“We have discovered lots of reasons why corals don’t bleach,” said Steve Palumbi, a marine biologist and professor at Stanford University. “Just because you find a coral that isn’t bleaching in the field or in the lab doesn’t mean it’s permanently heat tolerant.”

Corals have been on Earth for about 250 million years and their genetic code is not fully understood.

 

“This is not the first time any coral on the entire planet has ever been exposed to heat,” Palumbi said. “So the fact that all corals are not heat resistant tells you … that there’s some disadvantage to it. And if there weren’t a disadvantage, they’d all be heat resistant.”

But Palumbi thinks the assisted evolution work has a valuable place in coral management plans because “reefs all over the world are in desperate, desperate, desperate trouble.”

The project has gained broad support and spurred research around the world. Scientists in the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Germany and elsewhere are doing their own coral resilience work. The U.S. government also backs the effort.

Assisted evolution “is really impressive and very consistent with a study that we conducted with the National Academies of Sciences,” said Jennifer Koss, the director of NOAA’s Coral Reef Conservation Program.

Major hurdles

There are still serious challenges.

Scalability is one. Getting lab-bred corals out into the ocean and having them survive will be hard, especially since reintroduction has to happen on a local level to avoid bringing detrimental biological material from one region to another.

James Guest, a coral ecologist in the United Kingdom, leads a project to show selectively bred corals not only survive longer in warmer water, but can also be successfully reintroduced on a large scale.

“It’s great if we can do all this stuff in the lab, but we have to show that we can get very large numbers of them out onto the reef in a cost-effective way,” Guest said.

Scientists are testing delivery methods, such as using ships to pump young corals into the ocean and deploying small underwater robots to plant coral.

No one is proposing assisted evolution alone will save the world’s reefs. The idea is part of a suite of measures – with proposals ranging from creating shades for coral to pumping cooler deep-ocean water onto reefs that get too warm.

The advantage of planting stronger corals is that after a generation or two, they should spread their traits naturally, without much human intervention.
…

 Six years ago today, nearly 200 nations signed the Paris Climate Accord, where they agreed to keep the rise in global temperatures at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. Scientists say that threshold is an absolute minimum to avoid catastrophic climate change.

“Our fragile planet is hanging by a thread,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said. “We are still knocking on the door of climate catastrophe.”

As he wound up the recent COP26 in Glasgow, Guterres had that harsh warning for the 200 countries who had gathered to talk climate change — and how to slow it down.

Hanging over the summit was the deadline of 2030 for a drastic reduction of greenhouse emissions that was set six years ago at COP21 in Paris.

Former executive secretary of the U.N. Climate Convention, Christiana Figueres, remembers it as a historic event.

“It was a real breakthrough for the United Nations to have a completely unanimous, legally binding pathway for decarbonizing the global economy,” Figueres said.

Secretary of State at the time, John Kerry signed that agreement for the U.S.

“It really was an exciting moment when 195,196 countries come together simultaneously, all wanting to move in the same direction, understanding the stakes,” Kerry said. 

2015 was the hottest year on record. Scientists pointed to that as sure proof that global warming was real and serious.

But that record keeps on getting broken as the planet gets hotter year by year.

The World Meteorological Organization says the planet has been propelled into uncharted territory, with rising sea levels, melting glaciers, and “relentless” extreme weather events.

The WMO warns that “extreme” weather is the new normal.

Nonetheless, both Figueres and Kerry remain optimistic.

“We are moving in the right direction,” Figueres said. “The question is the timing, and I do feel that everyone came out of Glasgow with a renewed sense of timing.”

Kerry is now President Biden’s special envoy for climate.

He was back in Paris this week as part of a whistle stop tour of Europe to reassure leaders the U.S. is back in the game, after former President Donald Trump shut the door on climate issues.

“No one country can save this. Everybody has to act,” said Kerry.

That was also perhaps the main takeaway from the Glasgow summit — as developing nations pleaded with their richer neighbors not to be complacent with what has been achieved, but to keep pushing hard to meet that 2030 deadline, to save the planet.
…

The eldest daughter of pioneering U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard blasted off aboard Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin commercial space tourism rocket on Saturday, 60 years after her late father’s famed suborbital NASA flight at the dawn of the Space Age.

 

Laura Shepard Churchley, 74, who was a schoolgirl when her father first streaked into space, was one of six passengers buckled into the cabin of Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft as it lifted off from a launch site outside the west Texas town of Van Horn.

 

The crew capsule at the top of the fully autonomous, six-story-tall spaceship is designed to soar to an altitude of about 350,000 feet (106 km) before falling back to Earth, descending under a canopy of parachutes to the desert floor for a gentle landing.

 

The entire flight, from liftoff to touchdown, was expected to last a little more than 10 minutes, with the crew experiencing a few minutes of weightlessness at the very apex of the suborbital flight.

 

The spacecraft itself is named for Alan Shepard, who in 1961 made history as the second person, and the first American, to travel into space—a 15-minute suborbital flight as one of NASA’s original “Mercury Seven” astronauts. A decade later, Shepard walked on the moon as commander of the Apollo 14 mission, famously hitting two golf galls on the lunar surface.

 

Churchley was one of two honorary, non-paying guest passengers chosen by Blue Origin for Saturday’s flight. The other is Michael Strahan, 50, a retired National Football League star and co-anchor of ABC television’s “Good Morning America” show.

 

They were joined by four lesser-known, wealthy customers who paid undisclosed but presumably hefty sums for their New Shepard seats—space industry executive Dylan Taylor, engineer-investor Evan Dick, venture capitalist Lane Bess and his 23-year-old son, Cameron Bess. The Besses made history as the first parent-child pair to fly in space together, according to Blue Origin.

 
…

There’s no clear-cut definition for when a pandemic starts and ends, and how much of a threat a global outbreak is posing can vary by country.

“It’s somewhat a subjective judgment because it’s not just about the number of cases. It’s about severity and it’s about impact,” says Dr. Michael Ryan, the World Health Organization’s emergencies chief.

In January 2020, WHO designated the virus a global health crisis “of international concern.” A couple months later in March, the United Nations health agency described the outbreak as a “pandemic,” reflecting the fact that the virus had spread to nearly every continent and numerous other health officials were saying it could be described as such.

The pandemic may be widely considered over when WHO decides the virus is no longer an emergency of international concern, a designation its expert committee has been reassessing every three months. But when the most acute phases of the crisis ease within countries could vary.

“There is not going to be one day when someone says, ‘OK, the pandemic is over,'” says Dr. Chris Woods, an infectious disease expert at Duke University. Although there’s no universally agreed-upon criteria, he said countries will likely look for sustained reduction in cases over time.

Scientists expect COVID-19 will eventually settle into becoming a more predictable virus like the flu, meaning it will cause seasonal outbreaks but not the huge surges we’re seeing right now. But even then, Woods says some habits, such as wearing masks in public places, might continue.

“Even after the pandemic ends, COVID will still be with us,” he says.
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As the omicron variant sweeps through South Africa, Dr. Unben Pillay is seeing dozens of sick patients a day. Yet he hasn’t had to send anyone to the hospital.

That’s one of the reasons why he, along with other doctors and medical experts, suspect that the omicron version really is causing milder COVID-19 than delta, even if it seems to be spreading faster.

“They are able to manage the disease at home,” Pillay said of his patients. “Most have recovered within the 10- to 14-day isolation period.” said Pillay.

And that includes older patients and those with health problems that can make them more vulnerable to becoming severely ill from a coronavirus infection, he said.

In the two weeks since omicron first was reported in Southern Africa, other doctors have shared similar stories. All caution that it will take many more weeks to collect enough data to be sure, their observations and the early evidence offer some clues.

According to South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases:

Only about 30% of those hospitalized with COVID-19 in recent weeks have been seriously ill, less than half the rate as during the first weeks of previous pandemic waves.
Average hospital stays for COVID-19 have been shorter this time -- about 2.8 days compared to eight days.
Just 3% of patients hospitalized recently with COVID-19 have died, versus about 20% in the country’s earlier outbreaks.

“At the moment, virtually everything points toward it being milder disease,” Willem Hanekom, director of the Africa Health Research Institute, said, citing the national institute’s figures and other reports. “It’s early days, and we need to get the final data.

Often hospitalizations and deaths happen later, and we are only two weeks into this wave.”

In the meantime, scientists around the world are watching case counts and hospitalization rates, while testing to see how well current vaccines and treatments hold up. While delta is still the dominant coronavirus strain worldwide, omicron cases are popping up in dozens of countries, with South Africa the epicenter.

 

Pillay practices in the country’s Gauteng province, where the omicron version has taken hold. With 16 million residents, It’s South Africa’s most populous province and includes the largest city, Johannesburg, and the capital, Pretoria. Gauteng saw a 400% rise in new cases in the first week of December, and testing shows omicron is responsible for more than 90% of them, according to health officials.

Pillay says his COVID-19 patients during the last delta wave “had trouble breathing and lower oxygen levels. Many needed hospitalization within days,” he said. The patients he’s treating now have milder, flu-like symptoms, such as body aches and a cough, he said.

Pillay is a director of an association representing some 5,000 general practitioners across South Africa, and his colleagues have documented similar observations about omicron. Netcare, the largest private health care provider, is also reporting less severe cases of COVID-19.

But the number of cases is climbing. South Africa confirmed 22,400 new cases on Thursday and 19,000 on Friday, up from about 200 per day a few weeks ago. The new surge has infected 90,000 people in the past month, Minister of Health Joe Phaahla said Friday.

“Omicron has driven the resurgence,” Phaahla said, citing studies that say 70% of the new cases nationwide are from omicron.

The coronavirus reproduction rate in the current wave – indicating the number of people likely to be infected by one person — is 2.5, the highest that South Africa has recorded during the pandemic, he said.

“Because this is such a transmissible variant, we’re seeing increases like we never saw before,” said Waasila Jassat, who tracks hospital data for the National Institute for Communicable Diseases.

Of the patients hospitalized in the current wave, 86% weren’t vaccinated against the coronavirus, Jassat said. The COVID-patients in South Africa’s hospitals now also are younger than at other periods of the pandemic: about two-thirds are under 40.

Jassat said that even though the early signs are that omicron cases are less severe, the volume of new COVID-19 cases may still overwhelm South Africa’s hospitals and result in a higher number of severe symptoms and deaths.

“That is the danger always with the waves,” she said. 

 
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The eldest daughter of pioneering U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard is set for a ride to the edge of space aboard Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin commercial rocket ship on Saturday, 60 years after her late father’s famed suborbital NASA flight at the dawn of the Space Age.

Laura Shepard Churchley, 74, who was a schoolgirl when her father first streaked into space, is one of six individuals due for liftoff at 8:45 a.m. Central time (1445 GMT) from Blue Origin’s launch site outside the rural west Texas town of Van Horn.

They will be flying aboard the crew capsule of a fully autonomous, 6-story-tall spacecraft dubbed New Shepard, designed to soar to an altitude of about 106 kilometers before falling back to Earth for a parachute landing on the desert floor.

The entire flight, from liftoff to touchdown, is expected to last a little over 10 minutes, with the crew experiencing a few minutes of weightlessness at the very apex of the suborbital flight.

The spacecraft itself is named for Alan Shepard, who in 1961 made history as the second person, and the first American, to travel into space — a 15-minute suborbital flight as one of NASA’s original ‘Mercury Seven’ astronauts.

A decade later, Shepard walked on the moon as commander of the Apollo 14 mission, famously hitting two golf galls on the lunar surface.

Churchley is one of two honorary, non-paying guest passengers chosen by Blue Origin for Saturday’s flight. The other is Michael Strahan, 50, a retired National Football League star and co-anchor of ABC television’s Good Morning America show.

They are joined by four lesser-known, wealthy customers who paid undisclosed but presumably hefty sums for their New Shepard seats — space industry executive Dylan Taylor, engineer-investor Evan Dick, venture capitalist Lane Bess and his 23-year-old son, Cameron Bess. The Besses are set to make history as the first parent-child pair to fly in space together, according to Blue Origin.

Saturday’s flight is expected to reach a maximum height of about 106 kilometers – just above the internationally recognized boundary of space, the Karman Line, which is roughly 100 kilometers above Earth.

The launch marks the third space tourism flight for Blue Origin, the company Bezos – founder and executive chairman of retail giant Amazon — formed two decades ago, and the company’s first with a crew of six passengers.

Bezos himself tagged along on Blue Origin’s inaugural flight in July, joining his brother, Mark Bezos, trailblazing octogenarian female aviator Wally Funk, and 18-year-old Oliver Daeman, a Dutch high school graduate and beneficiary of a $28 million auction sweepstakes.

Actor William Shatner, who embodied the promise of space travel in his role as Captain James T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise on the 1960s TV series Star Trek, joined the second New Shepard crew in October to become the oldest person in space at age 90.

British billionaire Richard Branson beat Bezos to the punch by nine days when he rode along on the first fully crewed voyage of his own space tourism venture Virgin Galactic Holding Inc, soaring to the edge of space over New Mexico in a rocket plane released at high altitude from a carrier jet.

A third player in the burgeoning space tourism sector, fellow billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, inaugurated his SpaceX citizen-astronaut service in September with the launch of the first all-civilian crew ever to reach Earth orbit. 

 
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