Day: July 18, 2021

Britain’s National Health Service has contacted Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his finance minister, Rishi Sunak, to let them know that they have been close to someone who tested positive for COVID-19.

Downing Street said Sunday in a statement the men will participate in a daily contact testing pilot that will allow them to continue to work from Downing Street but self-isolate when not in their offices.

The announcement came after UK Health Secretary Sajid Javid, who leads the country’s coronavirus response said Saturday he has tested positive for COVID-19 and is self-isolating.

COVID-19 cases are rising in the U.S. and around the world, largely driven by the delta variant of the coronavirus. Regions are beginning to return to measures such as mask-wearing to reduce the number of victims.

Los Angeles County, in the U.S. state of California, reimposed a mask-wearing mandate that went into effect Saturday, but a county sheriff said the Public Health Department’s move was “not backed by science” and his department will not enforce the measure.

“Forcing the vaccinated and those who already contracted COVID-19 to wear masks indoors is not backed by science and contradicts the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines,” Sheriff Alex Villanueva wrote in a statement on the department’s website.

“The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health (DPH) has authority to enforce the order, but the underfunded/defunded Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department will not expend our limited resources and instead ask for voluntary compliance. We encourage the DPH to work collaboratively with the Board of Supervisors and law enforcement to establish mandates that are both achievable and supported by science.”

It was not immediately clear what, if any repercussions, the sheriff’s office will face for the statement and its refusal to enforce the mandate.

Meanwhile, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, an advocacy group based in Washington and London, has produced a report that identifies a dozen pandemic profiteers “who have enriched themselves by spreading misinformation” about the COVID vaccines.

The group said the 12 entities operate “in plain sight, publicly undermining our collective confidence in doctors, governments and medical science. Their confidence in openly promoting lies and false cures comes from years of impunity in which they were hosted on popular social media platforms, driving traffic and advertising dollars to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, while benefiting from the enormous reach those platforms gladly afforded them.”

Last week, U.S. President Joe Biden and U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy decried the COVID misinformation that has spread across social media.

More stringent COVID-19 containment measures were imposed in Sydney, Australia, Saturday, as cases of infections continued to rise in the third week of a citywide lockdown.

New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian told reporters Saturday the new restrictions would remain in effect until the end of July.

Officials ordered the shutdown of building sites and nonessential retail businesses, restrictions that also apply to Sydney’s surrounding communities in New South Wales.

Residents in the Sydney suburbs of Fairfield, Canterbury-Bankstown and Liverpool are prohibited from traveling outside their communities unless they are health care workers or emergency responders.

Vietnam also is reportedly imposing new restrictions as it grapples with its worst COVID-19 outbreak to date.

The government announced Saturday that it would impose two-week travel restrictions in 16 southern provinces beginning Monday, according to Reuters.

“The curbs are to protect people’s health,” the government reportedly said in a statement.

In the United Kingdom, every adult has been offered a first shot of a COVID-19 vaccine ahead of the country’s reopening Monday. So far 87.8% of adults have received at least one shot.

Johnson said the reopening will go forward even though new infections are at their highest level since January, driven by the delta variant.

One U.K. COVID-19 restriction that will not be lifted Monday is on travelers from France, because of concerns about the beta variant first identified in South Africa.

Travelers from France must isolate for up to 10 days on entering Britain, even if they are fully vaccinated. However, fully vaccinated travelers from most of the rest of Europe can forgo quarantining as of Monday as planned.

In the United States, three Texas state lawmakers have tested positive for the coronavirus, even though they had been vaccinated, the Texas State House Democratic Caucus said on Saturday.

The lawmakers left their state and flew to Washington to block passage of new, restrictive voting legislation in their state.

Two of the lawmakers met Tuesday with Vice President Kamala Harris. In a statement Saturday, Harris spokesperson Symone Sanders said Harris and her staff are fully vaccinated and “were not at risk of exposure because they were not in close contact with those who tested positive.”

“We are taking these positive confirmations very seriously,” Texas state Representative Ron Reynolds, told MSNBC. “We’re following all CDC guidelines and … we are going to make sure that we don’t expose anyone.”

Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center said Sunday that there have been more than 4 million global COVID-19 deaths and over 190 million infections have been confirmed.

Source: Voice of America

WASHINGTON – U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy said Sunday he is worried about the increasing number of new coronavirus cases in the country and laid part of the blame on social media companies for not doing enough to remove misinformation about the need to get vaccinated.

“I’m concerned about what we’re seeing,” Murthy told “Fox News Sunday,” as about 29,000 new cases are being diagnosed every day in the United States, roughly the same level as in April 2020, when the pandemic first swept through the country. The highly contagious delta variant has been particularly problematic.

“This pandemic isn’t over,” he said.

“The good news is that the vaccinated are still highly protected,” he said. But he noted that 95% of the deaths occurring now in the U.S., more than 250 a day, are of people who have not been vaccinated.

Echoing recent remarks by President Joe Biden, Murthy said people are being “inundated with misinformation,” about the available vaccines being unsafe or unnecessary.

President Biden last week said misinformation posted to social media sites was “killing people,” and that, “The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated.”

The Facebook site used by millions of Americans says it has removed 18 million pieces of COVID-19 misinformation. Murthy said, “Despite what they’ve done, it’s not enough. The intention is good, but I’m asking them to step up” and do more.

In a separate interview on ABC’s “This Week” show, Murthy urged people using social media sites to “verify their sources before posting” comments about the efficacy of the shots.

Analyses have shown that the vaccination rate in the U.S. is markedly lower in states that voted in last November’s election for then-President Donald Trump, who at times downplayed the severity of the pandemic, and now often the number of new cases is higher in the Trump states.

Biden set a goal several months ago of having at least 70% of adults in the U.S. getting at least one vaccine shot by the annual July 4th Independence Day holiday. The U.S., however, fell short of that objective and the number now stands at 68.1%, according to government statistics.

Facebook on Saturday pushed back against claims that it is to blame for people not getting vaccinated.

In a blog post, Facebook said Biden and his aides should stop “finger-pointing” and detailed what it had done to encourage inoculations.

“The Biden administration has chosen to blame a handful of American social media companies,” said Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of integrity. “The fact is that vaccine acceptance among Facebook users in the U.S. has increased.”

Rosen said the company’s data showed that 85% of its U.S. users had been or wanted to be vaccinated against the coronavirus. “Facebook is not the reason (the 70% goal) was missed,” Rosen said.

Over a period of months, Facebook has acted against misinformation on its site, banning anti-vaccination ads and later removing posts with false claims about vaccines, such as that they cause autism or that it is safer for people to contract the coronavirus than to be inoculated.

Source: Voice of America