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Fighting misinformation in the time of COVID-19, one click at a time

“Public trust in science and evidence is essential for overcoming COVID-19,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General.
“Therefore, finding solutions to the infodemic is as vital for saving lives from COVID-19 as public health measures, like mask-wearing and hand hygiene, to equitable access to vaccines, treatments and diagnostics.”

Low rates of vaccine acceptance are a concern across the globe. Data released in January 2021 by the Johns Hopkins Centre for Communication Programs** suggest that across 23 countries, only 63 percent of respondents will accept a vaccine.

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Tackling climate change through emerging hydrogen industry: Managing complex risks

Driven by climate change, the possibilities of energy storage, use as a fuel and the long-term intention to replace reliance on coal and oil, hydrogen has the potential to morph from a niche power source into big business.
New bulletin from Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty (AGCS) highlights operational risks that need to be addressed in hydrogen projects, including fire and explosion hazards, impact of embrittlement and business interruption exposures.
AGCS sees increasing demand for insurance coverage for hydrogen solutions in future.

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World’s fastest recovery outlook at risk as coronavirus sweeps India

That uncertainty doesn’t look to be going away in a hurry, with India adding more than 300,000 cases daily for at least three consecutive days last week, pushing the total infections to more than 16.5 million. While the outbreak has overwhelmed the nation’s hospitals and crematoriums, it’s also hit consumer confidence in an economy that was only beginning to recover from an unprecedented recession last year.

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Why India is shattering global infection records

Despite warnings and advice that precautions were needed, authorities were unprepared for the magnitude of the surge, said K Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India.

Critics have pointed to the government deciding to not pause Hindu religious festivals or elections, and experts say that these may have exacerbated the surge.

“Authorities across India, without exception, put public health priorities on the back burner,” Reddy said.

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Covid-19 pushes India’s middle class toward poverty

Now a second wave of Covid-19 has struck India, and the middle class dreams of tens of millions of people face even greater peril. Already, about 32 million people in India were driven into poverty by the pandemic last year, according to the Pew Research Center, accounting for a majority of the 54 million who slipped out of the middle class worldwide.

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With poor data on variants, India’s Covid surge remains a mystery

India has enough laboratory capacity for genome sequencing, but getting a wide spread of regular samples from across the country — including the rural hinterland and potential super-spreader events — has been a problem, said Rakesh Mishra, the director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, one of the labs working to sequence positive virus samples.

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