Category:

Disaster & Management

University of Washington forecasts 300,000 U.S. COVID-19 deaths

“We’re seeing a rollercoaster in the United States. It appears that people are wearing masks and socially distancing more frequently as infections increase, then after a while as infections drop, people let their guard down,” Dr Christopher Murray, director of the IHME, said in announcing the university’s revised forecast.

The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 stands at more than 159,000, the most of any country in the world, with nearly 4.9 million known cases

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Facebook’s dilemma: How to police claims about unproven COVID-19 vaccines

Determining what constitutes a false claim regarding the COVID-19 shot is much harder than fact-checking a claim about an established vaccine with a proven safety record, Facebook fact-checkers told Reuters.

“There is a lot of content that we see and we don’t even know what to do with it,” echoed Emmanuel Vincent, founder of Science Feedback, another Facebook fact-checking partner, who said the number of vaccines in development made it difficult to debunk claims about how a shot would work.

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Serum Institute to produce up to 100 mn COVID-19 vaccine doses for India, other countries

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, via its Strategic Investment Fund, will provide at-risk funding of USD 150 million to Gavi, which will be used to support the Serum Institute of India (SII) to manufacture the potential vaccine candidates and for future procurement of vaccines for low- and middle-income countries via Gavi’s COVAX Advance Market Commitment (AMC), the statement said

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Crowded villages show why coronavirus cases are surging in rural India

The disease is now widespread outside metropolitan areas, said Bhramar Mukherjee, professor at the School of Public Health, University of Michigan. “We need commitment and collective sacrifice from people of rural India to keep contact diaries, symptom diaries, and to not feel stigmatized if they test positive or have symptoms, so that the disease does not infest villages like an enemy in the dark.”

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Over 56,000 COVID-19 cases in country in single day

There are 5,95,501 active cases of coronavirus infection in the country presently which contribute to 30.31 per cent of the total cases.

The fatality rate has further dropped to 2.07 per cent, the data stated.

This is the eighth consecutive day that COVID-19 cases have increased by more than 50,000.
Of the 904 fresh deaths reported, 334 are from Maharashtra, 112 from Tamil Nadu, 100 from Karnataka, 77 from Andhra Pradesh, 61 from West Bengal, 40 from Uttar Pradesh, 29 from Punjab, 23 from Gujarat, 17 from Madhya Pradesh, 13 each from Rajasthan and Telangana, 11 from Delhi and Nine each from Jammu and Kashmir and Odisha.

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Centre releases Rs 890 cr as 2nd tranche of package for COVID-19 health system preparedness

The second instalment of the aid will be used to strengthen public health infrastructure for testing, including procurement and installation of RT-PCR machines, RNA extraction kits, TrueNat and CB-NAAT machines, bolster infrastructure for treatment and development of ICU beds, installation of oxygen generators and procurement of bedside oxygen concentrators among others.

It would also be used for engagement, training and capacity building of necessary human resources and incentives to healthcare workforce and volunteers, including ASHA workers on COVID-19 duties, the health ministry said

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Global recovery could be faster if COVID vaccine made available to all:WHO chief

“Sharing vaccines or sharing other tools actually helps the world to recover together. The economic recovery can be faster and the damage from COVID-19 could be less,” World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus .

“Vaccine nationalism is not good, it will not help us,” he said in an allusion to the competitive scramble of nations and pharmaceutical researchers to come up with an effective vaccine and order as many doses as possible in advance.

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