i_need_contribute
|
Country, |
Total |
New |
Total |
|
World |
184,552,362 |
+329,877 |
3,993,347 |
|
34,592,377 |
+4,169 |
621,293 |
|
|
30,584,872 |
+40,387 |
402,758 |
|
|
18,769,808 |
+27,783 |
524,475 |
|
|
5,786,203 |
+2,549 |
111,161 |
|
|
5,610,941 |
+25,142 |
137,925 |
|
|
5,444,786 |
+4,418 |
49,924 |
|
|
4,903,434 |
+24,248 |
128,222 |
|
|
4,535,473 |
+9,000 |
95,904 |
|
|
4,350,495 |
+26,265 |
108,896 |
|
|
4,263,317 |
+808 |
127,649 |
|
|
3,833,868 |
+12563 |
80,911 |
|
|
3,738,451 |
+411 |
91,584 |
|
|
3,254,818 |
+13,781 |
84,792 |
|
|
2,880,270 |
+54 |
75,084 |
|
|
2,537,457 |
+6,228 |
233,580 |
|
|
2,284,084 |
+27,233 |
60,582 |
|
|
2,237,553 |
+351 |
52,470 |
|
|
2,065,113 |
+2,001 |
193,230 |
|
|
2,062,896 |
+16,585 |
61,840 |
|
|
1,689,106 |
+1,215 |
17,756 |
|
|
1,667,935 |
+124 |
30,310 |
|
|
1,569,784 |
+3,323 |
33,103 |
|
|
1,436,369 |
+5,966 |
25,149 |
|
|
1,416,969 |
+308 |
26,360 |
|
|
1,371,475 |
+6,264 |
17,316 |
|
|
1,080,951 |
+33 |
33,928 |
|
|
962,313 |
+1,228 |
22,408 |
|
|
944,917 |
+8,661 |
15,065 |
|
|
889,088 |
+2,041 |
17,112 |
|
|
842,969 |
+321 |
6,428 |
|
|
805,376 |
+1,878 |
14,842 |
|
|
778,652 |
+6,045 |
5,497 |
|
|
753,192 |
+575 |
9,781 |
|
|
716,873 |
+77 |
7,058 |
|
|
650,737 |
+75 |
10,709 |
|
|
644,622 |
+1,042 |
9,225 |
|
|
639,476 |
+1,599 |
1,834 |
|
|
545,570 |
+207 |
7,861 |
|
|
534,550 |
+605 |
9,319 |
|
|
492,785 |
+1,173 |
7,876 |
|
|
444,090 |
+1,206 |
16,920 |
|
|
443,631 |
+4,686 |
15,377 |
|
|
433,931 |
+3,003 |
4,444 |
|
|
428,743 |
+1,201 |
13,346 |
|
|
425,964 |
+617 |
12,716 |
|
|
422,053 |
+19 |
18,084 |
|
|
421,350 |
+944 |
3,185 |
|
|
408,123 |
+793 |
6,574 |
|
|
391,717 |
+21 |
12,513 |
|
|
372,709 |
+531 |
5,689 |
|
|
363,672 |
+1,654 |
2,017 |
|
|
360,237 |
+56 |
8,218 |
|
|
336,417 |
+99 |
4,978 |
|
|
328,942 |
+566 |
3,857 |
|
|
314,569 |
+77 |
3,573 |
|
|
302,012 |
+823 |
9,461 |
|
|
295,317 |
+392 |
2,537 |
|
|
283,067 |
+5,916 |
2,226 |
|
|
282,082 |
+179 |
16,264 |
|
|
278,888 |
+20 |
4,390 |
|
|
277,635 |
+1,240 |
3,190 |
|
|
276,435 |
+67 |
4,331 |
|
|
275,166 |
+1,272 |
3,283 |
|
|
274,306 |
+562 |
5,000 |
|
|
266,918 |
+1,744 |
7,081 |
|
|
266,426 |
+140 |
1,360 |
|
|
265,630 |
+1,573 |
3,236 |
|
|
257,421 |
+9 |
4,419 |
|
|
256,970 |
+39 |
6,196 |
|
|
225,553 |
+89 |
4,526 |
|
|
222,574 |
+121 |
592 |
|
|
204,247 |
+3,519 |
1,351 |
|
|
195,042 |
+719 |
3,211 |
|
|
185,868 |
+277 |
3,675 |
|
|
167,859 |
+56 |
2,121 |
|
|
165,405 |
+2,318 |
3,419 |
|
|
164,282 |
+1,795 |
2,443 |
|
|
160,084 |
+742 |
2,026 |
|
|
141,471 |
+464 |
3,755 |
|
|
137,631 |
+31 |
2,528 |
|
|
132,535 |
+1 |
2,456 |
|
|
131,949 |
+88 |
794 |
|
|
131,188 |
+27 |
1,269 |
|
|
130,633 |
+1,401 |
2,037 |
|
|
125,260 |
+2,520 |
617 |
|
|
112,597 |
+467 |
747 |
|
|
100,327 |
+11 |
1,615 |
|
|
96,463 |
+91 |
973 |
|
|
96,317 |
+250 |
796 |
|
|
95,703 |
+1,656 |
1,649 |
|
|
91,847 |
+14 |
4,636 |
|
|
78,022 |
+577 |
379 |
|
|
22,380 |
+177 |
545 |
|
|
19,933 |
+890 |
86 |
Retrieved from: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Patients in the mucormycosis ward at Ahmedabad Civil Hospital in Ahmedabad, India, last month.Credit...Atul Loke for The New York Times
At least three cases of the deadly black fungus disease have been recorded in Afghanistan, including one leading to a death at a hospital in the capital, Kabul, public health officials said.
The disease, mucormycosis, is rare in the United States and Europe but has already infected tens of thousands in India, likely because of unsanitary hospital conditions. It is fatal in over 50 percent of cases. The fungus eats bone and tissue, often spreads to the eye socket and brain, and requires disfiguring surgery.
In addition to the death earlier this week of a 31-year-old man in Kabul, two cases are being treated in Afghanistan, a health ministry spokesman said on Saturday. Covid-19 infections have apparently played a role, as they did in India: All three were Covid sufferers.
In India, where oxygen is in short supply, doctors have liberally prescribed steroids to aid Covid sufferers’ breathing. Often these prescriptions exceed, by far, recommend doses, weakening patients’ immune systems and leaving them more vulnerable to the deadly fungus.
Diabetics are also vulnerable because steroids increase blood sugar levels. It is not known if the Afghan patients had diabetes. But it is likely that the official figures for the disease so far seriously underreport its incidence. This has been the case with Covid, in a country with little capacity for accurate health reporting.
Last month, black fungus cases in India shot up to more than 30,000 from low numbers, and over 2,000 deaths were recorded. Mucormycosis develops from spore buildups in homes and hospitals. India typically records some 50 of these infections a year, compared with a mere handful in the West.
Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/07/04/world/covid-vaccine-coronavirus-mask/afghanistan-reports-fungal-disease-that-infected-thousands-in-india
By Hari Kumar
Lining up at a vaccination center in Mumbai in April.Credit...Fariha Farooqui/Getty Images
As India intensifies its vaccination effort amid fears of another wave of the coronavirus, officials are investigating allegations that perhaps thousands of people were injected with fake vaccines in the financial capital, Mumbai.
The police have arrested 14 people on suspicion of involvement in a scheme that administered injections of salt water instead of vaccine doses at nearly a dozen private vaccination sites in Mumbai over the past two months. The organizers, including medical professionals, allegedly charged between $10 and $17 per dose, according to the authorities, who said they had confiscated more than $20,000 from the suspects.
“Those arrested are charged under criminal conspiracy, cheating and forgery,” said Vishal Thakur, a police officer in Mumbai.
More than 2,600 people came to the camps to receive shots of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, manufactured and marketed in India as Covishield. Some said that they became suspicious when their shots did not show up in the Indian government’s online portal tracking vaccinations, and when the hospitals that the organizers had claimed to be affiliated with did not match the names on the vaccination certificates they received.
“There are doubts about whether we were actually given Covishield or was it just glucose or expired/waste vaccines,” Neha Alshi, who said she was a victim of the scam, wrote on Twitter.
Siddharth Chandrashekhar, a lawyer who has filed a public interest lawsuit in Mumbai’s high court, described the scenario as “heartbreaking.” The court said it was “really shocking that incidents of fake vaccination are on the rise.”
Medical scams are nothing new in India, where, during the country’s mammoth outbreak this spring, profiteers targeted vulnerable Covid patients with fake drugs and oxygen. The police in West Bengal state are also investigating whether hundreds of people, including a local lawmaker, received fake vaccines there.
India has administered more than 340 million vaccine doses, but less than 5 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford. The country is reporting nearly 50,000 new cases daily and nearly 1,000 Covid deaths, numbers that are far lower than two months ago, although experts have always believed India’s official tallies to be vastly undercounted.
On Saturday, the pharmaceutical company Bharat Biotech reported that its Covaxin shot — the other vaccine in wide use in India — was 77.8 percent effective in preventing symptomatic illness, according to the results of a late-stage trial. Those results were published online but have not been peer-reviewed.
The report said that the vaccine prevented severe Covid in 93.4 percent of cases and was also effective against the Delta variant, preventing infection in 65.2 percent of cases.
There have been lingering doubts about the vaccine, which was approved by the Indian government in January and administered to millions before it had been publicly proved to be safe or effective.
Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/04/world/asia/india-covid-vaccine-scam.html
Since April, health care providers in France have routinely given a third dose of a two-dose vaccine to people with certain immune conditions. The number of organ transplant recipients who had antibodies increased to 68 percent four weeks after the third dose from 40 percent after the second dose, one team of French researchers recently reported.
But in the United States, there is no concerted effort by federal agencies or vaccine manufacturers to test this approach, leaving people with low immunity with more questions than answers.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health in fact recommend even against testing to find out who is protected. And academic scientists are stymied by the rules that limit access to the vaccines.
“There should be already a national study looking at post-transplant patients getting booster shots,” said Dr. Balazs Halmos, an oncologist at the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, who led a study showing that some cancer patients did not respond to the vaccines. “It shouldn’t be our little team here in the Bronx trying to figure this out.”
An estimated 5 percent of the population is considered to be immunocompromised. The list of causes is long: some cancers, organ transplants, chronic liver disease, kidney failure and dialysis, and drugs like Rituxan, steroids and methotrexate, which are taken by roughly five million people for disorders from rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis to some forms of cancer.
“These are the people being left behind,” said Dr. Jose U. Scher, a rheumatologist at NYU Langone Health who led a study of methotrexate’s effect on the vaccines.
The third-dose approach has widespread support among researchers because there is clear precedent. Immunocompromised people are given booster doses of vaccines for hepatitis B and influenza, for example.
Several studies have indicated that a third coronavirus vaccine dose might succeed in patients who did not have detectable antibodies after the first or second dose. But research has lagged.
Moderna is gearing up to test a third dose in 120 organ transplant recipients, and Pfizer — which produces some immunosuppressant medications — is planning a study of 180 adults and 180 children with an immune condition.
The N.I.H. is recruiting 400 immunocompromised people for a trial that would track their levels of antibodies and immune cells for up to 24 months, but has no trials looking at a third dose.
“It takes time, unfortunately, especially as a government agency,” said Emily Ricotta, an epidemiologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “We have to go through a lot of regulatory and approval processes to do these sorts of projects.”
By Sabrina Imbler
Road cones lining the nearly empty parking lot of a vaccination site in Forest, Miss., last month. Vaccination rates in the state are lagging the national average.Credit...Elijah Baylis for The New York Times
If Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, were right now in, say, Biloxi, Miss., he would consider wearing a mask.
Dr. Fauci is fully vaccinated. But on Sunday in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he told anchor Chuck Todd that in parts of the country with low levels of vaccination and rising coronavirus caseloads, he might “go the extra mile to be cautious enough to make sure that I get the extra added level of protection.”
“Even though the vaccines themselves are highly effective,” he added. Just 36 percent of Mississippi residents have had at least one shot of a coronavirus vaccine.
Whether and when vaccinated people should wear masks is a question that’s been on the minds of many Americans. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced in May that fully vaccinated people did not need to wear masks, even indoors, and has stuck with the guidance.
But worried about the spread of the contagious Delta variant, health officials in Los Angeles County have begun recommending that vaccinated residents wear masks in some settings. And the World Health Organization recently reiterated its advice that all people continue to wear masks and take precautions.
Though about 67 percent of Americans 18 and older have gotten at least one dose of a vaccine and almost 60 percent are fully vaccinated, vaccination rates vary sharply by region. “We’re going to see, and I’ve said, almost two types of Americas,” Dr. Fauci said on Sunday.
On July 1, The White House announced it would send out “surge response teams” with additional testing supplies and therapeutics to communities experiencing a rise in Covid-19 cases. Missouri, where the daily number of reported cases has recently doubled, requested a response team just hours after the announcement. Vaccinations in that state, too, have lagged the national average, at 45 percent.
Dr. Fauci said that 99.2 percent of Covid-related deaths in June occurred among unvaccinated people. “It’s really sad and tragic that most of all of these are avoidable and preventable,” he said.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, on Sunday predicted 85 percent of the population might end up with some level of immunity to the coronavirus, citing the high transmissibility of the Delta variant.
“We now have our choice in terms of how we acquire that immunity,” Dr. Gottlieb said in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “You can acquire it through vaccination or you’re going to end up acquiring it through natural infection.”
By Charly Wilder
Restaurants and bars lining the alleyways of the Psiri neighborhood of Athens.Credit...Maria Mavropoulou for The New York Times
On May 14, Greece officially opened its doors to vaccinated and coronavirus-negative visitors from much of the world, including the United States.
In doing so, the country jumped ahead of a broader European Union reopening at a time when cases remained high and more than three-quarters of the Greek populace was still unvaccinated. It was a gamble Greece couldn’t afford not to make, after seeing its economy shrink a staggering 8.2 percent in 2020. The country welcomed only 7.4 million visitors last year, compared with 34 million in 2019, when travel and tourism accounted for more than 20 percent of Greece’s economic output.
“It’s beyond wanting. We need the people to come back,” said Chara Lianou, an Athenian with dyed-lilac hair and matching acrylics who was serving coffee at Kafeneion 111 in the neighborhood of Monastiraki, part of Athens’s Old Town. “The economy needs it, and going back to work, you feel like you are doing something. The communication with the people, even the bad ones, they make my day,” she said.
Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/07/03/world/covid-19-vaccine-coronavirus-updates/to-one-travel-writer-greece-looks-almost-normal
Indonesia is requiring foreign visitors to be fully vaccinated as one of the entry requirements as the country tries to curb the spread of coronavirus, AP reports.
Ganip Warsito, National Task Force for Covid-19 Mitigation Chief, said Sunday that starting on July 6, both foreigners and Indonesian nationals entering the country have to show digital or physical proof that they have been fully vaccinated.
A school student receives a shot of Covid vaccine during a mass vaccination drive for teenagers in Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia, 5 July 2021. Photograph: Made Nagi/EPA
The obligation to show vaccination cards can be excluded in some cases, including diplomatic visas and service visas, and during official visits at ministerial level.
The government is also extending the quarantine time for foreign travelers from five days to eight days.
Indonesia recorded 27,233 new cases and 555 deaths from the virus in the last 24 hours. It brings the total to 2,284,084 cases and 60,582 death tolls as of Sunday.
Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/health/delta-variant-covid-england.html
Here are the other key developments from the last few hours:
· Coronavirus has killed at least 3,972,934 people around the world since it first emerged in China in December 2019, according to the Johns Hopkins tracker.
· Prime Minister Boris Johnson is on Monday set to confirm the fourth and last step to lifting lockdown will go ahead on July 19, despite warnings that doing so would be like building “variant factories”.
· The UK has recorded 24,248 new cases of Covid-19 in the past 24 hours, according to official figures.There were a further 15 deaths, bringing the overall death toll to 128,222. Meanwhile, 86 % of adults have had their first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, while 63.8% received both doses.
· The Oakland zoo in northern California has administered an experimental Covid-19 vaccine to animals deemed at highest risk. The two-dose jab has been approved by United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and distributed to nearly 70 zoos.
· Brazil has seen recorded 27,783 new Covid-19 cases and 830 new deaths in the past 24 hours, the health ministry said on Sunday.The news comes as8tens of thousands took to the streets of the South American country’s biggest cities on Saturday to demand the removal of President Jair Bolsonaro, who they deem responsible for the death of over half a million people.
· Iran announced today it was reimposing coronavirus restrictions on major cities, as the spread of the highly contagious delta variant spurs fears of another devastating surge in the nation, the Associated Press reports.
· Russia has recorded 25,142 new Covid-19 infections on Sunday - the highest number since January 2. The news comes after Covid deaths in the country hit at a record high for five days in a row this week. President Vladimir Putin has for now refrained from calling another lockdown.
· South Africa recorded more than 26,000 new Covid-19 cases on Saturday, its highest daily number since the pandemic broke out.
· Bangladesh recorded 153 deaths, its highest daily toll yet, in the 24 hours to this morning, the Dhaka Tribune reports.
· The Luxembourg prime minister, Xavier Bettel, was admitted to hospital on Sunday morning. Bettel tested positive for coronavirus last week.
· Schools in England are “bleeding out” with thousands of teachers having to isolate under a bubble system that is harming the most vulnerable children, ministers have been warned, The Guardian’s Josh Halliday reports.
Medicine
