Three more children have died from covid-19 in Fiji, taking the death toll since the pandemic hit the country in 2020 to 791.
The Fiji government also confirmed on Wednesday that a 10-day-old infant, 8-year-old girl and 13-year-old boy are among 12 covid-19 patients who have died.
There are 223 new cases in the community, with a total of 1980 patients in isolation.
Health Secretary Dr James Fong said all three children were from the Northern Division.
He said the baby had died at home before she could be taken to hospital.
He said the eight-year-old had a significant congenital medical condition that likely contributed to her death.
“The 13-year-old male was admitted for nine days at Nabouwalu Hospital in Bua before he passed away,” Dr Fong said.
“He had a significant congenital medical condition, and an assessment made by medical consultants confirmed that his pre-existing conditions contributed to his death. He was not vaccinated.”
Four-day intervals Dr Fong said that due to the time required by clinical teams to investigate, classify and report deaths, a four-day interval is given to calculate the seven days rolling average of deaths, “based on the date of death, to help ensure the data collected is complete before the average is reported”.
“Therefore, as of January 20 the national 7-day rolling average for covid-19 deaths per day is 4.1, with a case fatality rate of 1.32 percent.”
Dr Fong said there were 155 covid-19 patients in hospital.
The Health Ministry also recorded nine more covid-19 deaths between January 8-22.
Latest deaths
* A 70-year-old man from the Northern Division died at home on January 14. He was not vaccinated.
* A 98-year-old woman from the Western Division died on arrival at Lautoka Hospital on January 16. She was fully vaccinated.
* An 81-year-old woman, also from the west, died at home on January 16. She was fully vaccinated.
* A 74-year-old man from the west died on arrival at Tavua Hospital on January 18. He had pre-existing medical conditions and was not vaccinated.
* A 75-year-old woman from the west died at home on January 20. She was fully vaccinated.
* A 72-year-old woman from the Central Division had died at home on January 21. She had pre-existing medical conditions and was fully vaccinated.
* A 46-year-old woman from the Western Division died at home. She was not vaccinated.
* A 78-year-old man from the Eastern Division died at home on January 21. He was fully vaccinated.
* A 79-year-old man from the Central Division had died on arrival at the Colonial War Memorial Hospital in Suva on January 22. He was fully vaccinated.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
From the federal mask recommendations suspended in May to White House COVID coordinator Jeffrey Zients’s December pronouncement that the unvaccinated are to blame for “the hospitals you may soon overwhelm,” the Biden administration has organized its COVID response around an ethos of personal responsibility.
COVID is spun as a pandemic of the unvaccinated even as the vaccinated can also spread the virus. Vaccines and their boosters, importantly protecting the vaccinated from hospitalization and death, appear nothing of the public health silver bullet they’ve been positioned to be, presently offering only 10 weeks’ protection against symptomatic infection with the now circulating Omicron variant.
Such a campaign against the unvaccinated represents both bad politics and bad public health.
Many of the unvaccinated aren’t ideologically motivated. Skepticism and hesitancy mark as much a failure of vaccine access, including the absence of a national door-to-door campaign to convince the 84 million Americans walking around without a single COVID shot to get vaccinated or to physically transport them to an appointment. Winning their trust is critical in controlling the outbreak stateside.
Other patients may refrain from vaccination even when it puts them in great personal danger. Jesse Rouse, photographed here in November suffering his second bout of COVID in Minneapolis, was reported to be unvaccinated at the time after he previously underwent a double lung transplant. Researchers have proposed that lung transplantees are especially vulnerable to respiratory infection and should be vaccinated for COVID.
Some people may refrain from vaccination for medical reasons – including confusion or conflicting information about how vaccination might interact with their health conditions or treatments.
Regardless of why particular people remain unvaccinated, thrusting culpability fully onto individuals is a harmful move. Like Ronald Reagan’s campaign against “welfare queens,” presuming public health problems emerge primarily from bad actors and individual decision-making obfuscates the systemic and structural roots of the failure of the U.S.’s response to the pandemic.
Much like Trump, the Biden administration appears repeatedly intent on turning the COVID page, no matter the state of the pandemic itself. The May mask recommendations, which stated that vaccinated people could stop wearing masks in most indoor spaces, were textbook on that account. The administration later ignored an October report from public health experts recommending free testing at a pace of 732 million tests per month in preparation for a holiday COVID surge:
The plan, in effect, was a blueprint for how to avoid what is happening at this very moment — endless lines of desperate Americans clamoring for tests in order to safeguard holiday gatherings, just as COVID-19 is exploding again.
Yesterday, President Biden told David Muir of ABC News, “I wish I had thought about ordering” 500 million at-home tests “two months ago.” But the proposal shared at the meeting in October, disclosed here for the first time, included a “Bold Plan for Impact” and a provision for “Every American Household to Receive Free Rapid Tests for the Holidays/New Year.”
Early in December, Biden spokesperson Jen Psaki scoffed at reporter Mara Liasson’s query about why the U.S. doesn’t just pay for home COVID tests for every American household like other countries do instead of making Americans submit for reimbursement from insurance companies that have routinely failed to pick up the bill. “How much is that going to cost?” Psaki asked.
Should a government that had voted $768 billion for the Pentagon, $24 billion more than Biden requested, just pay for COVID tests? Yes, April Wallace replied in the Washington Post. Yes, it should:
I am a dual citizen of the United States and Britain, now living in Edinburgh, Scotland, and I am able get rapid antigen tests anytime I want to, at no cost and with no hoops to jump through. I know that Americans pay more than $20 for a package of two tests — if they’re in stock. Here you can walk into your local pharmacy, and they will just hand you packs of seven tests at no charge. In my neighborhood I can also go to the local recreational center and collect packs of tests free for my family, or swing by a coronavirus testing center.
It turns out the reimbursement for home tests wasn’t to start until mid-January anyway:
The administration has already said that the plan will not provide retroactive reimbursement for tests that have already been purchased, which means that any tests you buy for the holidays will not be covered.
The Biden no-plan, expanded to a whole four rapid tests per household and three masks for each American, appeared to be phase one of a campaign of further eroding American expectations. As self-described “shitposter” @fingerblaster tweeted about what’s missing:
Wild that the most unhinged republican president in history sent us $2000 checks back when we had like 12k cases a day and now we have 300k cases a day and a dem president who’s like “lol not my problem go to work jack”
The more august New York Times reported on the end of monthly child benefits millions of Americans were depending on:
The end of the extra assistance for parents is the latest in a long line of benefits “cliffs” that Americans have encountered as pandemic aid programs have expired. The Paycheck Protection Program, which supported hundreds of thousands of small businesses, ended in March. Expanded unemployment benefits ended in September, and earlier in some states. The federal eviction moratorium expired last summer. The last round of stimulus payments landed in Americans’ bank accounts last spring.
These benefit programs, as modest as they were, saved thousands of Americans from COVID deaths.
A March 2021 FamiliesUSA report summarized research showing a third of COVID deaths were tied to the lack of health insurance. The effect was multiplicative: “Each 10% increase in the proportion of a county’s residents who lacked health insurance was associated with a 70% increase in COVID-19 cases and a 48% increase in COVID-19 deaths.”
Controlling for stay-at-home orders, school closures and mask mandates, another study, first posted November 2020, estimated that lifting eviction moratoriums state-to-state resulted in between 365,200 and 502,200 excess coronavirus cases and between 8,900 and 12,500 excess deaths.
Omicron’s Delta Strain
So, public health clearly extends beyond necessary prophylaxes into necessary social interventions. But if there was any doubt about which constituency the political class serves instead, in December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cut down its recommendation for quarantine upon COVID exposure from 10 days to five. The act was decidedly in response to pressure from employers, notoriously Delta Air Lines’ CEO Ed Bastian in a letter that Delta proudly posted.
The Delta letter summarized the scientific literature in favor of its request in two sentences. The science is in reality more nuanced, marked by a variety of definitional complications.
Omicron, like new variants before it, is almost certain to evolve out from underneath the vaccine effectiveness that Delta Airlines cites as, full-stop, protection enough. Permitting COVID variants to circulate on Delta planes or elsewhere increases the chances they can evolve enough to circumvent medical and non-pharmaceutical controls.
Other drawbacks refute such summary boosterism. Omicron is already associated with increased reinfection. The variant’s other impacts on clinical courses and epidemiology are likely to be geographically specific, depending on a variety of local factors, including pre-existing immunity and the state of non-pharmaceutical interventions. What works as an intervention under one set of conditions does not necessarily hold under all.
More meta, the speed at which new variants are being allowed to evolve is outpacing even the frantic pace of the research conducted. “Flattening the curve” extends beyond our hospitals to research efforts aimed at discovering how to better control COVID.
In other words, under a more infectious Omicron, a variety of interventions, one layered atop another, is necessary, rather than stripping them back to serve criteria pretending to be scientific.
This isn’t the first time the airline industry tried to bend basic COVID science to its financial advantage. JetBlue CEO and reopen proponent David Neeleman funded and helped coordinate a Stanford University study that whistleblower complaints showed used a testing kit that erred on the side of false positives. By these tests, the study concluded the COVID virus was more widespread in the public and therefore, given the underlying number of deaths in the study population, was less dangerous of a pathogen.
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, proving Lysenko on the Potomac, ran interference for Delta and other employers in the face of the twists and turns obvious in the COVID literature. Fauci parroted Bastian’s arguments nearly to the letter:
There is the danger that there will be so many people who are being isolated who are asymptomatic for the full ten days, that you could have a major negative impact on our ability to keep society running. So the decision was made of saying let’s get that cut in half.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky once fought back tears over the likelihood of COVID mass deaths. Now, like a meat plant manager thinking only of the bottom line, she defends sending people back to work still infectious:
There are a lot of studies [from other variants] that show the maximum transmissibility is in those first five days. And [with Omicron] we are about to face hundreds of thousands more cases a day, and it was becoming very, very clear from the health care system that we would have people who were [positive but] asymptomatic and not able to work, and that was a harbinger of what was going to come in all other essential functions of society.
In short, the combination of economic compulsion and traumatic bonding that sent millions of workers into unprotected workplaces the pandemic’s first two years now represents state policy. The denialism for which liberals punch down on Trumpists is the labor law of the land. It is now a key part of the administration’s public health campaign.
“I’m not letting COVID-19 take my shifts,” one recent CDC ad declared. “My job puts me at high risk for COVID-19 exposure. I got vaccinated because it’s better to be protected than to be out sick.”
Another CDC post shamelessly used the U.S.’s privatized health care system as a cudgel of class discipline: “Hospital stays can be expensive, but COVID-19 vaccines are free. Help protect yourself from being hospitalized with #COVID19 by getting vaccinated.”
In that spirit, Biden economic advisor Jared Bernstein waxed optimistic on the economy. The depletion of personal savings would drive low-paid workers back into the labor market during a pandemic, Bernstein cheered.
“We are intent,” Jeff Zients declared mid-December, “on not letting Omicron disrupt work and school for the vaccinated. You’ve done the right thing, and we will get through this.” The vaccinated are presented as pure enough of soul to get back to working the gears of the economic machine. The unvaccinated are cast, to appropriate Hillary Clinton’s characterization, as a basket of eschatological deplorables.
Zients, a Biden campaign donor, was the CEO of investment firm Cranemere and director of Obama’s National Economic Council before becoming COVID czar with no public health experience. His primary portfolio of priorities was always apparent.
The quarantine switcheroo follows CDC’s changing recommendations for school distancing from six feet to three, which it now pretends is the virus’s limit. In reality, even six feet isn’t enough for the airborne virus. But in changing it to three, CDC could legally accommodate efforts to stuff students back in brick-and-mortar schools without changing day-to-day public health precautions.
Keeping kids out of school can have terrible impacts on learning outcomes and emotional well-being. Keeping kids in school, potentially leading to the deaths of other students or teachers in school, and older adults back home, can incur a different kind of emotional damage. Both risks serve as more the reason for bringing the outbreak under control with a full-spectrum intervention.
The CDC’s position, sending students back to school without controlling the outbreak, is geared toward other aims. It’s about putting the economic cart before the epidemiological horse. The kids need to go to school so that the parents can go to work.
Comedian Roy Wood Jr: CDC just said you only need to quarantine if you on a ventilator. But if ya ventilator got wheels and a battery pack you gotta take yo ass to work.
Author Alexander Chee: If you have to deploy the military to support hospitals you may have spent your budget on the wrong part of the system given the challenges we actually face.
Designer Char: CDC okays pull-out method as “eh, good enough.”
The administration is too full of itself to see it is losing the country. Its caustic claims about “the science” aren’t supported by the science, further undercutting research as a trusted source of both state strategy and public response.
The original 10-day quarantine that the CDC changed was grounded in the evidence-based realities of the virus itself, specifically its incubation time, generation time and serial interval. At the same time, the 10 days aren’t a matter of essentialist measures of central tendency.
Against CDC Director Walensky’s characterization, it’s about the variation in patients’ infectious periods. Some patients exit out of their infectiousness early, in the five days Walensky cited. Others can be infectious much longer. No one knows who’s a late bloomer in transmission. As a matter of practical public health intervention, it’s an unknown.
A public health campaign must therefore institute mask and quarantine policies that cover for the late transmissions, so that they don’t serve as the means by which the outbreak rolls on — particularly as Omicron’s infectiousness approaches that of measles and a 100% attack rate can still result from even a small group of infectious people walking around.
Instead, we have slashed public assistance, shortened quarantines, offered no-to-little remote schooling, hired few community health workers, conducted little genomic sequencing of the virus, and let hospitals get overrun. The CDC gave in upon the subsequent furor around the shortened quarantine by adding only a recommendation — not a requirement — of a negative rapid antigen test before workers returned to work.
Beyond trying to circumvent the rancor of partisan criticism, why did Trump and Biden alike aim at pretending the pandemic away? Biden’s trajectory is illustrative that capitalist realism has a way of eating away at even good faith efforts at addressing existential threats.
In October 2020, candidate Biden put the failings of his opposition in perspective: “We’re eight months into this pandemic, and Donald Trump still doesn’t have a plan to get this virus under control. I do.”
“This crisis,” President-elect Biden added, “demands a robust and immediate federal response.”
A year later, President Biden pivoted: “There is no federal solution. This gets solved at a state level,” months after many state governors had lost or abandoned their emergency powers to impose mask mandates and shelter-at-home orders.
Other countries see federal jurisdiction differently, as if the very health of their ostensible constituencies has something to do with governance.
While the U.S. daily breaks record COVID caseloads, some other countries appear to be of another world. COVID long-hauler Ravi Veriah Jacques reported these January 2 caseloads from abroad:
New Zealand – 51
China – 191
Taiwan – 20
Japan – 477
Hong Kong – 18
China’s reactions are both broader and triggered more quickly, with the public health results to show for it. Xi’an, a metropolis of 13 million people in Shaanxi Province, underwent an arguably arduous lockdown upon the emergence of 175 COVID cases. Western media has played on the difficulties in obtaining food in the city over the 12 days’ quarantine, but not the campaigns to alleviate those problems.
Some may argue the Biden administration’s reaction is better late than never, but that’s not how controlling COVID’s lightning strikes works.
As epidemiologist Rodrick Wallace models, whatever the intervention, there’s nothing worse than dithering. Given the insidious nature of the virus, we are routinely six weeks too late if spikes in cases, rather than anticipatory planning, are the trigger. Repeated delays mark U.S. COVID planning — among them, the spread of the original wave out of coastal cities to the rest of the country in spring 2020 and the arrivals since of Delta and Omicron stateside.
Rapid Confusion Test
It happens that the mass at-home testing the Biden administration passed over in October, setting up a program several months too late, is itself already a failure. Big picture, like vaccination, it represents yet another technicist intervention that, while necessary, is also insufficient. It’s more of a grand gesture that detracts from the administration’s refusal to pursue multilevel systemic public health programming.
The specifics of such a rollout and the tests themselves also get in the way. It’s much more than a matter of rapid tests permitting an exit out of the shots for the deplorable unvaccinated, as the Biden administration feared. It’s also not merely a matter of doctors defending their testing territory, as rapid test proponents argued.
Among several intrinsic errors that biotech consultant Dale Harrison explores around the rapid tests, there is the difficulty of self-administering them:
One important note is that at-home antigen tests will give VERY poor results (both high false-positives and high false-negatives) if you are sloppy or misuse them.
These are complex molecular assays and the EXACT usage is critical. You MUST read and follow every single detail in the instructions to get a reliable outcome….
The difficulties extend beyond administering the tests. Interpreting them is a difficult task; it is swayed by our hopes as well as by technical matter:
Now comes the tricky part… what happens if you get conflicting test results.
Let’s say you get a positive result on an at-home antigen test (like the BinaxNow) and decide to take it again “just to be sure”.
Then you get a negative result on the 2nd Binax test. Now you schedule an appointment to get a PCR test.
A couple of days later, it comes back negative.
ARE YOU INFECTED? Absolutely positively YES!
If you’re non-symptomatic and get a [Binax+ Binax- PCR-] set of results … a positive and two negatives in any order.
In that case, it is 56-times MORE likely that you’re infected than not infected … 5600% more likely!
And if you’re FULLY symptomatic and get a [Binax+ Binax- PCR-] set of results, it is 20-times MORE likely that you’re infected than not infected … 2000% more likely!
Even if you get ANOTHER PCR test and THAT test comes back negative as well [Binax+ Binax- PCR- PCR-] you are still 4-times more likely to be infected than not … 400% more likely!
And it does NOT matter the order of the test results … the math holds true regardless.
Even medical doctors conducting these tests in clinics stumble:
I know this seems VERY counter-intuitive and even most doctors who prescribe these tests (other than Infectious Disease specialists) tend to NOT understand this!
And when faced with multiple conflicting test results, most medical people will incorrectly select the LAST result as the “correct one”.
This is a DANGEROUS mistake! Again, outside of certain specialties, few medical staff are trained to think in terms of Bayesian statistics.
Vanity Fair’s palace intrigue set the COVID Collaborative of high-end epidemiologists recommending the holiday testing surge against the administration that ignored them. But that isn’t quite right. Both sides agree on turning public health into an individualistic (and commodifiable) option:
Once [ex-Harvard epidemiologist and now chief science officer at the eMed diagnostic company Michael] Mina began to advocate for rapid home tests, he encountered the same mindset: doctors “trying to guard their domain.” Some doctors had long opposed home testing, even for pregnancy and HIV, arguing that patients who learned on their own about a given condition would not be able to act on the information effectively. Testing, in this view, should be used only by doctors as a diagnostic instrument, not by individuals as a public-health tool for influencing decisions.
The U.S. approach sticks the American people with the job of administering and then interpreting the conflicting results of multiple tests. The false positives might be low in part because nearly 100 percent specificity aligns with peak viral load. But, as Harrison describes, even should the test be administered correctly, the false negatives are legion and the results of one test do not necessarily change the implications of previous ones.
Techno-utopianism offers another iteration of blaming the victim if the outcome goes south: “It’s your own fault you didn’t do the test right.” Don’t let the easy lines on the lateral flow ag card confuse matters. Against Mina’s insinuation, it’s decidedly unlike a pregnancy test.
There is also the matter of what happens when organizing society’s access to work and recreation around such tests collides with a run on the tests at local stores already suffering supply chain problems, making the tests both unavailable and priced beyond working people’s budgets.
If, on the other hand, the Biden administration hired and trained a million community health workers to go door-to-door across the country administering these tests for free — like really free — we wouldn’t be in such a free-for-all, if you’ll excuse the phrasing.
If such teams had been put in place from the beginning, they may have been able to build the trust necessary to successfully introduce a variety of time- and place-specific public health interventions that would likely have minimized the duration and impact of each wave of the pandemic.
Surprising the Supposedly Surprised
What’s interesting about Harrison’s direct and clearly written posts is that his recommendations are framed by the context of what the U.S. can, or is willing to, offer right now: not much.
Yes, everyone should be able to test themselves whenever they wish, all the time. But the U.S. chooses to position itself as unable to pursue such a public health program. Should the sensitivity and specificity reported on the test boxes match their actual outcomes? Yes, they should, however righteous the original testing went into bringing the products to market. Should the efficaciousness and effectiveness of vaccines match? Yes, that would be nice.
There are expectations that individual American consumers hold about solutions — cheap and immediately effective — that the market repeatedly promises but can’t deliver. In this case, the multifactorial virus doesn’t cater to such an ideal of a single packet solution. And the public health response we need, and the market treats as a rival, is starved to near-death.
The U.S. government, and governments around the world, treat the capitalism that helped spring the COVID virus out of commoditized forests as more real than the ecologies and epidemiologies upon which the global system depends. To protect that mirage of a difference, each new variant that has since emerged is strangely presented as the beginning of the pandemic’s end, resetting the next round of denialism, instead of alerting us that in reality, without a change in public health practice, we’re caught in a daisy chain of viral evolution.
Each “surprise” that the COVID virus refuses to cooperate with such an expectation, acting in its own interests instead of ours, also serves to protect the system from the implications of its refusal to act. Surprise — pretending we don’t know what we know — is itself an ideological project. The business of governing a system in decline, after all, is about managing expectations. All is well, get back to work, until, suddenly, it isn’t, as it always was.
From the virus’s vantage, the resulting public health dithering and half-measures serve the virus as both escape hatch out of our control efforts and selection pressure to evolve around those campaigns. A combo that leads to the worst of epidemiological outcomes.
If we wish to unplug out of this trap, we have to organize together against our rulers and their financers. We must deploy a full-spectrum intervention that drives the COVID virus under its rate of replacement.
That requires we reject not only Washington’s business bipartisanism, but also the core model of our economy around which our civilization is organized. That’s no small matter, of course, but with climate change and other pandemics also in the wings, likely our sole option out.
He said community transmission was now widespread in the capital Honiara and some provincial areas.
“For the Western Province, a surge in flu-like illness was noted in Rukutu village where we suspect a recent gathering involving those who travelled from Honiara and may have transmitted covid-19.
“Our team has reached the village, distributed face masks, advised on covid-19 safe measures and collected samples for testing in Gizo.”
He said health officials were still waiting on lab results from Australia to determine the variant they are dealing with in the current outbreak.
Loss of staff a challenge
Dr Togamana said loss of staff had added challenges to the already overwhelmed health system.
More than 100 frontline workers in Solomon Islands have been infected with covid-19 and are isolating.
“Our only national referral hospital [Honiara] is now compromised. Many staff from the Ministry of Health also tested positive and continue to work from isolation,” he said.
“Guadalcanal health teams have also reported six of its workers isolated at Good Samaritan — four have tested positive while the remaining two await the results.”
Dr Togamana said 24 Honiara City Council health workers had also tested positive with covid-19.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The Kiribati Health Ministry has confirmed that the atoll island nation has surpassed 100 covid-19 cases after it recorded 37 new positive infections yesterday.
There are 116 people infected on Tarawa – 36 imported and 80 local cases.
Nine new cases have been found in Butaritari Island, prompting the government to advise local authorities to enforce a lockdown.
Several other islands have been placed under strict restrictions — including South Tarawa, Betio, and Buota — to stop the virus from spiralling out of control.
Meanwhile, the government said that from today, fishermen in South Tarawa and Betio would only be allowed to go fishing between 6am and 2pm.
Only four people would be allowed to be on a boat or part of a group fishing near shore, it said.
The government has declared a state of disaster and the entire nation — of 120,000 — is on lockdown under a strict 24-hour curfew.
‘Real fear’ in community
Speaking to RNZ Pacific from Tarawa, freelance journalist Rimon Rimon said the increase in positive cases had caused “real fear in the community”.
“That’s the initial reaction that people have, when their life is in danger, they panic you know. That’s certainly the situation in Kiribati,” he said.
Kiribati Fisheries Minister Ribanataake Tiwau (left) and Health Minister Tinte Itinteang who are part of the country’s Covid-19 Response Taskforce. Image: Kiribati Govt/RNZ Pacific
Kiribati was among a handful of countries that were covid-19-free, mainly because it kept its borders shut to the outside world for almost two years.
More than 93 percent of its eligible population has been vaccinated, while just over 50 percent are fully vaccinated.
But the nation is well short of its target of inoculating 80 percent of its target population, even though the government announced in September 2021 that it had enough vaccines to immunise more than 70,000 people over 18 years old.
Rimon said while the vaccination programme was rolled out smoothly, it was not adequate for Kiribati to open its borders freely — as in the case of other countries.
“Once the government opened up its borders and brought in its flights that’s when things changed completely,” he said.
Change ‘pretty sudden’
“The change was pretty sudden on the people and also the government, and we can see on the ground the response is not as efficient as people would want it to be.”
It was still unclear how the virus spread into the community after a flight carrying 36 covid-19 positive people arrived from Fiji on January 14, he said.
“At the moment our Ministry of Health is on top of things but as I understand they are overwhelmed at the moment with resources and manpower.”
Meanwhile, the authorities are advising people to strictly follow the covid-19 protocols to minimise the risks and spreading the virus in the community.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
New Zealand could be facing 50,000 daily omicron infections by Waitangi weekend, according to modelling by US-based health research organisation, peaking at about 80,000 each day just a few weeks later.
There are also warnings this country’s ICU capacity will come under “extreme stress” through February and March.
These are of course predictions and should be viewed as such, however they have been given credence by New Zealand’s leading experts, including University of Otago professors Nick Wilson and Michael Baker: “Our impression is that this work is of high quality and should be considered by NZ policy-makers … [it’s] an organisation with a very strong track record for analysing health data (with some of the best epidemiologists, health data scientists and computer scientists in the world).”
The modelling by the IHME at the University of Washington shows the “most likely” scenarios are based on vaccinations carrying on at the expected pace, mask use staying about the same, and 80 percent of those already vaccinated getting a booster within six months — the numbers do drop if 100 percent get their booster and then again with 80 percent of people using masks whenever they’re out in public.
Under the ‘most likely’ scenario, daily infections start to rapidly take off almost immediately: by February 1 at just over 13,000, by the 9th hitting about 62,000, and peaking in mid-February at over 81,000.
Numbers drop slightly
The numbers drop slightly if everyone gets their booster shot, but there is a significant difference when 80 percent of people are wearing masks.
These are the two public health controls taken into account, so the modelling does not include other measures in place, for example, under New Zealand’s red setting; the different responses around the world vary considerably and compliance would be difficult to accurately gauge.
After peaking in mid-February, infections are projected to fall back to around 50,000 by the first week of March, then tailing off through the rest of that month and April.
The government has been preparing for up to 50,000 cases a day and this week unveiled the “three phase” response, under which testing, contact tracing and isolation requirements will change once cases start to rapidly increase.
Associate Health Minister Dr Ayesha Verrall gives details of the three-phase government response to the Omicron outbreak. Image: Angus Dreaver/RNZ
In the face of criticism the government had failed to increase the number of fully resourced ICU beds, Health Minister Andrew Little said there were 289 ICU or High Dependency Unit beds available, insisting that could be increased to up to 550 under surge capacity if needed.
Strongly challenged
That was strongly challenged by clinicians and ICU experts who said the extra capacity was more like 67 — totalling 356 — mainly due to an acute shortage of highly skilled ICU nurses
At the peak of the outbreak, in early March, the modelling estimates 458 ICU beds could be needed, and occupancy could come under “extreme stress” for a number of weeks.
Experts from the University of Otago summarised and analysed the findings, saying the government should take heed and consider police settings accordingly.
They noted socio-economic status and ethnicity were not taken into account, so the modelling would not highlight potentially disproportionate impacts on Māori, New Zealand specific data is incomplete, if delta cases start emerging again and we end up with a “dual variant” outbreak the numbers could be worse, and ICU capacity — outlined in classified Across Government Situation Report leaked to Māori Television — may be underestimated so the predicted pressure on the healthcare system may be even greater.
The authors also draw attention to the “high uncertainty” in the data, for example “the number of cases in hospital might peak at 2790 in early March 2022 … but the 95 percent confidence interval around this 2790 figure is large at: 120 to 9,070”.
“As well as considering the strengths and weaknesses of this IHME modelling, policy-makers will need to consider the potential social and economic disruption from an Omicron outbreak,” they conclude.
Stronger border approach
They also call for a stronger approach at the border, as a key area of vulnerability.
“The NZ government is obviously taking this threat seriously with a recent suspension of future places in MIQ. However, this change will not have an impact on arriving cases until March 2022.
“Therefore, substantially reducing the risk now will probably require a rapid and marked reduction of incoming international flights from some countries (ie, until their outbreaks subside in coming weeks).”
Professor Baker also says the phased opening of the border, due at the end of February, should be pushed out, and the time between the second vaccine dose and booster reduced from four to three months.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
A covid-19 Māori health analyst says more than 106,000 vaccinated Māori are not eligible for a booster shot until after March 1 — too late to protect against the expected omicron surge in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Dr Rāwiri Taonui is calling on the government to urgently pull back the waiting period for boosters from four months to three.
He said otherwise Māori will be dangerously exposed to the serious outbreak widely expected by the end of February.
Dr Taonui said the age banding for the original vaccination rollout favoured Pākehā (an overall older population) and pushed Māoridom’s more youthful population to the end of the queue.
“Many Māori didn’t become eligible for vaccination until September 1. Around that time, there was a 23 percent gap between Māori vaccination and the national average,” Dr Taonui said.
“Our health providers have done a really amazing job in terms of narrowing that gap back to 10 percent and that included vaccinating over 106,000 people since November 1.
“But the inequity rolls on because now those people wouldn’t be eligible for a booster until March 1 — and that’s going to be too late if omicron surges as we expect it will through February.”
International evidence
Ministry of Health data shows 571,052 Māori aged 12 years and over are eligible for vaccination.
Dr Taonui said international evidence showed a third booster Pfizer dose increased protection 55 to 65 percent against infection, 70 percent against symptomatic illness and 90 percent against hospitalisation, including in older populations over 65 years.
But on Sunday’s numbers, the Māori uptake of boosters was 18.9 percent of the eligible over-18 years population — well behind the national average of 27 percent.
“The government must shorten the qualifying period to three months to meet its obligation under Te Tiriti o Waitangi to actively protect the lives of Māori,” Dr Taonui said.
He said Britain, Australia and some other countries allowed a three-month booster waiting period.
“The international reporting is telling us that indigenous peoples, for example in Australia, Canada and the United States, are being disproportionately inundated with omicron infections.
“Māori are going to be particularly vulnerable because in terms of total vaccinations we’re 10 percent behind the national average. We’re about 12 percent behind in terms of being fully vaccinated and with the booster rollout we’re nearly 10 percent behind the national average there as well.
Māori children vulnerable
“This leaves 17.6 percent of Māori aged over 12 years unvaccinated and therefore particularly vulnerable to the hyper-infectious omicron variant.”
Dr Rawiri Taonui … Indigenous peoples in countries such as Australia, Canada and the US have been the worst affected by omicron. Image: LDR
The low rate of vaccination for Māori children aged 5-11 years was “very, very serious”, he said.
“The Ministry of Health hasn’t released national figures yet but there are progress figures available for different DHBs. In Auckland, the Māori rate of tamariki vaccination is running at about half that of the rest of the city. That is another area where Māori need more support from the government.”
Dr Taonui said during the holiday period, active Māori cases declined by 70 percent while active Pākehā cases increased. That reflected higher vaccination rates and was a credit to the vigilance and leadership among Māori communities.
Notwithstanding the lower numbers for Māori, the country’s relatively good vaccination rates, compared to other countries, could slow omicron down but the traffic light system would only go so far with that, he said.
“At the end of the holiday period there was quite a lot to celebrate, except now we’re facing omicron. We’ve also had cases become more widespread across 18 of 20 DHBs now.
“So the traffic light system actually facilitates the more widespread movement of the virus. omicron is going to accelerate and increase quite rapidly, certainly before the middle of February.”
Local Democracy Reporting is Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air.
Fiji has recorded 987 covid-19 cases, says Ministry of Health permanent secretary Dr James Fong who says the latest deaths are a “stark reminder” of the seriousness of the pandemic.
Dr Fong said 656 cases were recorded last Saturday while 81 new cases were recorded on Sunday and 250 new cases in the past 24 hours ending at 8am on Monday morning.
Dr Fong said it was known there remained a high risk of resurgence of endemic variants and the arrival of new variants.
“Our socioeconomic survival depends on our ability to build and sustain individual and community-wide resilience. We should expect that covid-19 will be endemic, however we need to appreciate that ‘endemic’ doesn’t mean harmless,” he said.
“Endemic means that we expect continued circulation of the disease in the community, the baseline levels of which are yet to be determined.
“Leptospirosis, typhoid and dengue are endemic in Fiji and they are associated with serious outcomes, especially when the number of cases increases to outbreak levels.
“Building resilience means that we must adopt healthier lifestyles, make covid-safe behaviour a habit that we adopt and support others to adopt. Our objective is to live with the virus and, at the same time, ensure a high level of transmission suppression and prevention of severe outcomes.”
Luke Rawalai isa Fiji Times journalist. Republished with permission.
Twenty five new cases of covid-19 have been reported in the New Zealand community today, including 10 confirmed omicron cases.
In a statement, the Ministry of Health said the new cases were located in Northland (1), Auckland (18), Bay of Plenty (2), Lakes (2), MidCentral (1) and Nelson Marlborough (1).
“Both cases are in the same household and are isolating at home. Case investigations are ongoing but, at this stage, there are a limited number of exposure events associated with these cases.”
The ministry said one omicron case was in Nelson Tasman and was a household contact of a previously reported case. They were already isolating when they tested positive.
And another case in Palmerston North that is a household contact of a previously reported case was also already isolating when they tested positive.
The last six omicron cases reported today are in Auckland — all have been linked to events on January 15 and 16.
Second private event
The ministry revealed that a case from the January omicron cluster also attended a second private event in Auckland during their infectious period.
“The exposure occurred on the evening of January 16 at the Pukekohe Indian Hall in Auckland.
“Auckland Regional Public Health Service believe a large number of people attended this event. Anyone at this location at the relevant times is asked to get tested immediately, and self-isolate until a negative result has been returned.”
Further locations of interest have also been identified across Auckland and the Nelson Tasman region and will be published on the ministry’s website as they are confirmed, the ministry said.
To date, there are 29 community cases of covid-19 associated with the January omicron cluster — all are in isolation.
“Public health officials are continuing to manage omicron cases in the community through rapidly isolating cases and contacts, contact tracing, and testing in order to slow the spread.”
At the border, there are 37 new cases today.
10 with virus in hospital
There are also 10 people with the virus in hospital today – five in North Shore, two in Auckland, one in Middlemore and two in Rotorua.
The average age of those currently hospitalised is 62.
On testing, 12,687 covid-19 tests have been taken in the past 24 hours.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is due to lay out a blueprint for how the country will handle the three planned stages of a widespread outbreak of the omicron variant tomorrow.
We go to Nuku’alofa, capital of Tonga, to speak with Tongan journalist Marian Kupu on the humanitarian relief efforts underway after an undersea volcano erupted on January 14, blanketing the South Pacific island nation with ash and triggering a tsunami. Kupu was able to flee the worst effects of the initial eruption by driving to higher ground but now reports lingering aftereffects such as water tanks polluted by ash. Although the islands have prepared for hurricanes, climate change has exacerbated a newly volatile environment. “We have never been prepared for volcanic eruptions,” says Kupu. “This is something really new for us.”
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN:Humanitarian aid flights are continuing to arrive in the Pacific island of Tonga after a massive undersea volcanic eruption blanketed the South Pacific island nation with ash, destroyed homes and triggered huge tsunami waves. At least three people died after the January 15 blast. Shock waves from the eruption were felt around the world. Scientists atNASAsay the blast was hundreds of times stronger than the U.S. atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
Tonga is made up of about 170 islands. It’s located about 2,000 miles east of Australia. Communication is still cut off for some of the 36 islands where people live. An undersea telecommunications cable connecting Tonga to the rest of the world was severed by the blast. The island nation is now in dire need of food and clean water. This is Drew Havea, vice president of the Tonga Red Cross.
DREWHAVEA:Dust in Nuku’alofa is a huge problem. People are still struggling to clean their homes, struggling to clean the roof of their houses. So, everybody is — even the unaffected areas by the tsunami are all affected by the ash.
AMYGOODMAN:We go now to the capital of Tonga, the city of Nuku’alofa, where we’re joined by Marian Kupu, a reporter for Broadcom Broadcasting.
Marian, we’re so relieved to be able to speak with you. Can you describe what took place? Describe the extent of the volcano.
MARIANKUPU:Thank you. I don’t know how I can describe or compare what we experienced, what we’ve seen, what we felt on the 15th of January, that was Saturday. It was a very — it was a very new experience, very scary experience, that I know we will never forget — the panicking, the queuing, the confusion that the people had because we do not know or have experience or know what to do after that, during the explosion, during the tsunami and after the tsunami, with the rocks, the ashes and the thunder, and also to learn that some of the islands have been fully destroyed.
AMYGOODMAN:Can you describe what happened to you and your family? Describe January 15th, what you were doing, what you heard and saw.
MARIANKUPU:We were at home as usual. Saturday is cleaning day for Tongan people, and it’s a day for the Tongan people to get ready for Sunday, because Sunday is taboo for shops to open. Sunday is just church service and staying home, having a feast. So, basically, we were just at home getting everything ready and just laying back.
And then, around after 5:00, that’s when we first heard the first bang. The first thing that I can really recall was my ears ringing. It was very new. Everything else just — it was just like — all I can remember was just trying — because we were very, very much aware that it is the volcano, because since last year we’ve been seeing lightning from there. We’ve been seeing clouds in the sky, just weird clouds, colors in the sky. It would be pinkish. It was just being very new for us here in the islands to witness this.
So, I think it is a good thing that we’ve had experience of witnessing that there is and know that there is a volcano that is very active down at the west side of Tonga, or the main island also, that as soon as the blast went on, the first blast went on, we knew exactly what to do, and we knew that there is a volcano. All we can think of is just running away from the sea, because where — my village is close to the main island and is also close, but not too close, to the shoreline of where the waves came. All we did was just to drive away from Nuku’alofa, drive away from the shore.
AMYGOODMAN:And then describe the impact, and on the islands, and what you even understand at this point, more than a week later, with the only internet line cut with the volcano going off.
MARIANKUPU:Thinking back, around I’m not too sure if it was Wednesday or Thursday, we experienced — we woke up in the morning and smelled this very distinctive smell. It was not a nice smell. This is — I’m not sure if it was Wednesday or Thursday morning. All of the country can smell that. And we — finally, throughout the day, we can make up and thought it came from the volcano. So, these are the things that we now have experienced and we can now know, if we treat the volcano now that it is active, right? So, if a smell comes today, definitely we will be ready for another volcanic eruption in two or three days to come. So these are the signs that we have looked back and thought of it, and just it makes sense to what we have experienced.
With the connection or the fiber-optic — fiber cable is down because it’s laid on the seashore under the seabed, which cater all the internet connection with us here in Tonga. However, here in Broadcom we were able to connect with the rest of the world. We were practically one of the public or private companies that ever started connecting firsthand to connect with the world, besides the embassies here, because we were using our satellite. And our satellite carriers is from the Kasafic satellite company. That’s how we were able. In the meantime, there is limited access to internet. We are working together with the Tonga Corporation Communication, which is calledTCC, and a local-owned phone company —
AMYGOODMAN:Can you talk about the —
MARIANKUPU:— which is —
AMYGOODMAN:Marian, can you talk about the effect of the ash on the water supply? And what kind of international aid are you getting? What do you need?
MARIANKUPU:The whole country, and I mean in the whole country or island, is covered with ash. From the highest building to the lowest, it’s covered with ash. So, all our water tanks — the majority of our water tanks in private homes, we gather our water from rainwater. That’s our everyday drinking water, which is safe water, nice, clear, clean water. However, when ashes came, and it just — it has polluted our tank, and is now advised not to take. However, we are very fortunate to have aid coming on our shore. They’re coming on our shore. They’re also coming in our ports — water supplies, clothing, food, and also tents for temporary shelter for those that have lost their homes.
AMYGOODMAN:According to theIMFjust two years ago, Tonga is one of the world’s most exposed countries to climate change and natural disasters, suffered the highest loss from natural disasters in 2018, is among the top five over the last decade. Can you talk about volcanoes and climate change?
MARIANKUPU:Every year in Tonga, we are expecting a natural disaster. Our most — our hurricane season is from January to March, or even can extend. So, every year we will be expecting a tropical cyclone. We have experienced tropical cyclones for years, and we have overcome them, and we are always prepared for hurricane seasons with tropical cyclones.
But we have never been prepared for a volcanic eruption. Here in the mainland, we will hear stories. Tonga is not even — Tonga, the mainland, is not even a volcanic island. The furthest island of Tonga from here is Niuas, Niuas. The Niuas are closer to Samoa than here to us here in the mainland. Those two islands are the volcanic islands. And we’ve been hearing stories coming from them from eruption, but never here in the mainland. And this is something really new for us.
AMYGOODMAN:And what about, finally, the issue of international aid andCOVID, in this era ofCOVID?
MARIANKUPU:We treat all cargos coming in, all the supplies or anything that lands on our country the way we treat when we have supplies forCOVID, which is we do not accept or offload passengers. Only cargos are allowed to come out from the planes, and they are taken to a quarantine place for three days before we are allowed to use them or distribute them. This is also — applies to our ships coming in. They’re offloaded and are kept in a secured designated place for quarantine for three days before we can actually use them. We do not accept, or we — we still follow theCOVID, because we still have to be cautious that there isCOVIDaround in the world. I can brag that we have only had one big positive case here so far. But since theCOVID-19, we have never had a seriousCOVIDproblem here in Tonga.
AMYGOODMAN:And in this last 30 seconds, Marian Kupu, as you speak to us from Tonga, I think it’s our first broadcast from Tonga, though we’ve interviewed people from Tonga when it comes to the climate crisis. What is your message to the world?
MARIANKUPU:We’ll be expecting — I don’t think this will be the last disaster or natural disaster that Tonga will be experiencing. Every year after year we will be having natural disasters. And year after year we’ll be expecting aid to come for us, because we cannot control nature. But this is what we have to live for and live with, and this is normal for us here in the island.
AMYGOODMAN:Marian Kupu, reporter for Broadcom Broadcasting in the capital of Tonga, Nuku’alofa.
Next up, Saturday marked the 49th anniversary ofRoe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. Many question if the Supreme Court will strike down the landmark ruling before it turns 50. We’ll look at a new documentary at the Sundance Film Festival calledThe Janesabout life beforeRoe, when a collective of women in Chicago built an underground service for women seeking an abortion. Could this be what post-Roelooks like, as well? Stay with us.
New Zealand does not have enough nurses or ICU beds, warn healthcare figures as their workforce braces for omicron.
The College of Critical Care Nurses told RNZ Morning Report that the country was currently short of at least 90 ICU beds if there was a major omicron outbreak.
Chair Tania Mitchell said intensive care capacity had been a sticking point for other countries during the outbreak, and New Zealand was under-prepared.
“We know compared to other areas in the OECD that, even for business as usual, we have a low number of intensive care beds per head compared to other countries, and that puts us on the back foot going into this.”
She said more beds were always welcome, and there was a $644 million increase in funding to hospitals and ICUs from the government to cope with covid-19 that was announced in December.
But there was real concern it would not be enough, and there were not enough intensive care nurses.
“In intensive care we’re actually struggling to cope with business as usual,” Mitchell said.
“That’s to do with bed numbers, but most importantly nursing numbers — you can build new building, and increase more beds much easier than you can create the nursing resources.”
It is likely more cardiac and cancer patients would have surgery delayed, to help free up ICU beds.
Urgent work on immigration could help, she said, and nurses wanting to come to or remain in New Zealand should be prioritised, and assistance with shifting here made available.
Quarter of nursing workforce could be out of action Nurses and other health workers becoming sick with omicron as an outbreak spreads was going to strain healthcare provisions, Nurses Organisation industrial officer Glenda Alexander said.
“If we lost a quarter of them even, at any one time … which is predicted, it is going to put immense strain on already tight staffing levels.
Nurses representative Glenda Alexander … “If we lost a quarter of [nurses] even, at any one time … which is predicted, it is going to put immense strain on already tight staffing levels.” Image: RNZ/NZNO
“But it’s not just hospital nurses, our workforce who work in aged care, primary health care, those people on the frontline doing vaccinations and taking tests — it’s right across.
“If you imagine a quarter — at least, of those people not being able to be a work, because it won’t just be their own health, it’s the health of their families as well, that they have to address.”
Alexander said nurses were already carrying the burden of long understaffing problems, and they would likely have to prioritise only urgent and necessary work — “just life preserving services only, so no elective surgery”.
“If we’d planned for a pandemic five years ago, as we were predicting nursing shortages, that would have helped immensely right now, but we can’t actually grow [nurses] as quickly as we need right now. It is a stressful situation.”
Māori vaccination rates still a concern to health sector Māori health providers are in a race to vaccinate children and boost adult immunisations before omicron spreads widely.
They expect the number of people getting booster shots and vaccinations for their children to increase now people are coming back from holiday.
Māngere health provider Turuki Health chief executive Te Puea Winiata told Morning Report many people were working on pulling the rate up.
Ministry of Health data shows 93 percent of the wider Counties Manukau DHB population is fully vaccinated, but Māori lag behind at 84 percent.
Manurewa, Papakura and parts of Māngere were particularly low, Winiata said, and mobile vaccination clinics were being used to help reach some of those areas.
“What we’ve done is to focus on particular suburbs or particular areas in those suburbs, to do a bit of a boost to those areas.
“On an ongoing basis [we’re using] communication, messaging to our communities, making sure that we understand the issues on whānau perhaps not coming forward.”
Vaccine rollout still ‘good numbers’
Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins earlier told Morning Report there were still good numbers of people coming forward for vaccinations, particularly for boosters, but the summer break had slowed that rate for all New Zealanders.
Winiata said staff have reported that vaccination slow-down is now recovering for Māori in her area.
“We had a big surge of people getting boosters before Christmas. And interestingly the surge in weekends before Christmas is now reversed — lots of people are coming in during the week and fewer at the weekend.
“But … in the week of the 17th when a number of people were coming back to work that was a bit of a leverage for people to think about being vaccinated, who weren’t.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
A Papua New Guinean doctor, who is alleged to be covid-19 positive, has been arrested and charged in Solomon Islands for illegally crossing the border.
The doctor, from Bougainville and employed at Nonga Provincial Hospital in East New Britain province, was arrested and charged in the Solomon Islands capital, Honiara, for illegally crossing, authorities from both countries have said.
Solomon Island Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare made reference to the case in a statement he had made, saying the doctor was now being quarantined.
Sogavare had, in his covid-19 update address to Solomon Islands on January 18, said: “…according to our contact tracing information, the index case that brought in the infection to Pelau is a medical doctor from Papua New Guinea who hails from Tasman Island and has traditional ties with the people of Pelau.
“This doctor with nine other people, including members of his family crossed the border illegally from Tasman to come to Paleu on 9th January 2022 and it is quite disturbing that such a highly qualified person a medical doctor, blatantly disregarded our laws, breached our covid-19 regulations, and crossed our border illegally.”
“He has now started a community transmission of covid-19 to his relatives and people in Pelau.
“It is extremely disappointing that the relatives of this doctor in Pelau completely disregarded the instructions from the government to not allow any person from the other side of the border to land at or stay in any of their villages and homes.
“By allowing the doctor to enter the village they have provided the platform to start the community transmission of covid-19 in Pelau.
In this regard the relatives of this doctor have also breached the covid-19 by allowing this doctor and his family to land and stay in Pelau and started the community transmission of covid-19.”
Confirmed by Bougainville
Autonomous Bougainville Government Health Secretary Dr Clement Totavun has confirmed that the doctor, from Tasman Island, works at Nonga Hospital, and travelled to Bougainville during Christmas, got on a ship to Tasman and then on to Pelau in Solomon Islands.
“I have been advised by my covid-19 team that this is true.
“The doctor from Tasman who works at Nonga General Hospital, Rabaul, came here during Christmas and got on the ship to Tasman and on to Pelau,” Dr Totavun said.
“He was arrested by Solomon Island police for crossing the border, which is currently closed, and is currently in Honiara. Doctors at Honiara Hospital have contacted our CEO Buka Hospital and confirmed.
“I have alerted our surveillance team to check out Tasman in the coming week as the virus might be spreading there,” Dr Totavun said.
Buka Hospital chief executive officer Dr Tommy Wotsia told the Post-Courier he was advised of the reports.
Traditional border crossing banned
Traditional border crossing between Bougainville and Solomon Islands has been banned since November last year following claims that Bougainvilleans had been smuggling arms into that country to arm and train Malaita islanders seeking to overthrow the Sogavare government.
Bougainville Police Commissioner Francis Tokura said he confirmed with Solomon Islands police about the incident but could not elaborate further.
Nonga Hospital chief executive officer Dr Ako Yap and his deputy Dr Patrick Kiromat also confirmed the doctor was working with them and had been on holiday since December.
They said they had not been officially notified of the incident involving the doctor in Honiara but said he was due to return to work soon.
Gorethy Kennethis a senior journalist on the PNG Post-Courier. Republished with permission.
People should do everything they can against omicron, but it is likely large numbers will be infected, New Zealand’s Covid-19 Response Minister says.
Speaking to RNZ Morning Report today, Chris Hipkins said masks, booster shots, isolating and good preparation for isolation were all vital steps people should take to slow the spread of the virus.
But “the cat is out of the bag to some extent, and we know that we’re likely to see more cases, and potentially significantly more cases associated with these ones.
“There are some unavoidable realities about this, and one of those unavoidable realities is that we will see omicron spreading much more quickly than previous variants of the virus,” Hipkins said.
Booster vaccinations were going strongly, he said, but there was still a chunk of those eligible who weren’t getting them as soon as they could.
“Our main message is once you’re eligible come forward and get your booster dose.”
Covid-19 vaccination providers have been warned to prepare for high demand today in response to the news of omicron spread in the community, and have been asked to consider staying open late to meet demand.
“We do know from our delta experience that when an outbreak is happening or is imminent, that drives a lot more [vaccinations].”
Queues for testing in Bell Block, Taranaki, in December. Image: RNZ/LDR
Making people eligible for the booster three months after their second Covid-19 shot, rather than the current four months would only shift about 100,000 people forward, Hipkins said, and while it had been considered, the benefit was not considered worthwhile at this stage.
Testing strategy shifts expected
Hipkins said it was expected that as the situation changed, the public will be asked to make changes in their response.
In this future this was likely to include whether those experiencing symptoms get tested.
Right now, Hipkins said, the government wanted everyone to continue to get tested if they had any cold or flu symptoms, or if they were a contact. But if daily case numbers rose considerably not everyone would be tested.
“A lot more people will get it, but many of those people — particularly those who’ve been boosted … are likely to be able to recover by staying at home,” he said.
“There will be some … further down the line … that we’ll be saying: ‘Don’t worry about getting tested … just stay home and get better’.”
National Party leader Christopher Luxon told Morning Report the 4.6 million rapid antigen test kits (RATs) currently in the country was an alarmingly low number and the government should have acted sooner to stockpile them and authorise private importing.
National Party leader Christopher Luxon… “We need [rapid antigen test kits] now, and we needed them months ago.” Image: Samantha Gee/RNZ
“We need them now, and we needed them months ago. Now we’re in a place where it’s quite an urgent situation,” Luxon said.
“Many countries … you actually upload the result of your rapid antigen test you do at home … and that’s how the government tracks what’s actually happening with cases.”
Hipkins said there were widespread international issues with RAT supplies; “Countries that are relying on them are now running out.”
But before Christmas the government had begun efforts to purchase as many as possible
“We know that as this situation unfolds we’re going to want to use rapid antigen testing a lot more.”
Luxon said the National party supported the government’s shift to the red framework setting “reluctantly”.
But he said the government must act more quickly at adopting international learning in how to respond to the virus: “We’ve got to keep going forward.”
He said once daily case numbers rose drastically, managed isolation and quarantine facilities (MIQ) at the border could become redundant. If that happens, National want the government to reconsider MIQ, and in particular to allow all New Zealanders overseas to return without having to go through it.
Mask use tutorials Hipkins said experts strongly advised surgical masks were still the best for the public to use, and: “We’ve got plenty of those available.”
He said while testing showed N95 masks were more effective against Covid-19, in real world application it was not that simple.
“An N95 mask needs to be the right fit, otherwise it can be potentially less effective. If you buy the wrong shape or the wrong size and it doesn’t sit properly, then actually the extra protection that you could be getting from that – you won’t necessarily get that.”
The country has plenty of N95 masks for health workers and frontline workers in stock, and they were given professional fitting tutorials and had their fit checked by others.
Hipkins said the government would enact any new advice around masks and omicron quickly as it came in, but research on masks was still evolving.
Hipkins did not have any new updates on the Nelson Tasman region cluster of cases at this stage.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
More than a month after the omicron variant was first discovered in Indonesia, the highly transmissible but less fatal variant has claimed its first fatality amid a surge in covid-19 cases, prompting calls for the government to speed up vaccination of the elderly.
Health Ministry spokesperson Siti Nadia Tarmizi told The Jakarta Post yesterday that the country’s first two omicron-related deaths were a 64-year-old man and a 54-year-old woman with “severe comorbidities”.
The man, Tarmizi said, was a local transmission case and died in Sari Asih Hospital in Ciputat, on the outskirts of Jakarta, while the woman was an imported case.
Tulagi in the Central Islands province of Solomon islands is the first provincial capital to ban the sale of betel nut — for an indefinite period — as a measure to help control any potential spread of covid-19.
Premier Stanley Manetiva told SBM Online that the measure became effective yesterday as news reports indicated fears of a community spread of the virus in parts of the capital Honiara.
A 60 hour lockdown was declared in the city and was due to be lifted today.
He said that this was to avoid people chewing and spitting which potentially would spread the virus and from sharing lime as well.
He said that this was to avoid people chewing betel nut and spitting which potentially would spread the virus — and from sharing lime as well.
Manetiva said the ban stopped people from bringing in their betel nut to the Tulagi market and from selling it in the town.
The ban is only for betel nut while other local produce is still sold at the market.
Tulagi starts curfew
Meanwhile, the premier also confirmed that Tulagi had started its own curfew — banning or limiting all movements by people in the town after 10pm.
He said it was an understanding among the residents in Tulagi that there should be no movement after that time.
The old capital has also monitored ships entering its shores and now has only two designated places for canoes to land on the island town at Taporo and the market.
Besides Guadalcanal, the Central Islands province, is the closest to Honiara, which is experiencing community transmission of covid-19.
RNZ Pacific reports Solomon Islands had reported 48 new cases of covid-19 on Thursday.
It took to 81 the number of cases in the country, which until this week had had just a handful of people with the virus.
Robert Iroga is editor of SBM Online. Republished with permission.
A New Zealand iwi development and social services leader in Taihape is urging rural people to prepare urgently for self-isolation or infection as the threat of omicron looms.
Mōkai Pātea Services general manager Tracey Hiroa, who is also a Rangitīkei District councillor, says country people think of themselves as self-sufficient but must make plans for extended periods of isolation or sickness.
She said people must connect now with family, friends and neighbours to put practical measures in place for a worst-case scenario.
“We’ve been very, very lucky in this region so far, but it’s just a matter of time,” Hiroa said.
“Probably one of the key things that people need is their own whānau plan. Be prepared as opposed to sitting back and thinking, ‘oh no, that’s not going to happen to me’.
“Preparation really is the biggest thing. If you’re self-isolating, if you are diagnosed with [covid-19], think about things that in theory are going to be able to keep you going.
“If you’ve got animals, have you sorted out anything to make sure that they’ve got food? Make sure you’ve got kai to last you over that two-week period. Make sure you’ve got a chilly bin or something like that — with a lid — that can be left out by the front gate that kai or anything else is able to be put in, so that you’re not in contact with people.”
Two weeks of supplies
Hiroa said people should get in two weeks of supplies and items such as torches and batteries or candles, as well as sanitiser, masks and medicines for fever, congestion, muscular pain and sore throats or coughs.
And she said it is vital for people to make sure they have support at hand if needed.
“Making sure that you’ve got those relationships already in place if something was to happen. Have you made the connections out with your whānau to say here’s some of the things outside of the home that I need you to be picking up on.
“It might mean you’ll need somebody to go and feed out your cattle. Go and meet your neighbours so that if something happens you’ve got somebody to call on.”
Local Democracy Reporting is a public interest news service supported by Asia Pacific Report, RNZ, the News Publishers’ Association and NZ On Air.
Eighty-four million Americans remain unvaccinated against COVID-19. Nearly no one has knocked on their doors to explain why a vaccine is a good idea. Even at this late date, now is a good time to start.
As with COVID testing, thousands of newly hired community health workers are needed to hit the streets and back roads to convince people that vaccines are safe and necessary. Daily conversations, some over the course of many weeks, are needed to turn millions of skeptics or the disconnected into participants. This would be the kind of program the Biden administration proposed, if still in an inadequate form, for contact tracing before the inauguration and never pursued after.
Certainly, the ongoing bloodbath — only inches deep but wide as a lake — isn’t just a matter of the present administration. Trump’s vindictive inaction helped kill half a million Americans the first year of the outbreak. Biden’s smug insufficiency, however, will likely add another half a million by spring. But more pointedly, it’s as much a matter of the U.S.’s structural decline that produced the holes in our public health coverage. Beginning nearly 50 years ago, public health was increasingly abandoned or monetized under the neoliberal program.
Public health spending clearly saves lives. Ten years ago, health policy analysts Glen Mays and Sharla Smith found that U.S. mortality rates from preventable deaths — including infant mortality and cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer — fell between 1.1 to 6.9 percent for every 10 percent increase in local public health spending.
Yet this crucial spending has dropped. In 2018, the Trust for America’s Health reported on the effective decline of public health funding.
The report described the Public Health Emergency Preparedness (PHEP) Cooperative Agreement Program as the only federal program that supports state and local health departments to prepare for and respond to emergencies. Except for one-time bumps for the Ebola and Zika outbreaks, core emergency preparedness funding had been cut by more than one-third (from $940 million in 2002 to $667 million in 2017).
The report went on to identify precipitous declines in public health funding at the state level. Thirty one states cut their public health budgets from FY 2015-2016 to FY 2016-2017, with spending lower that year than in 2008. The budget cuts during the Great Recession were never restored.
The impact was felt at the local level, too. Local health departments cut 55,000 staff in the decade following the Recession. By this system’s logic, an acute emergency is also grounds for such cuts. Thousands of health staff were furloughed during the COVID outbreak — cuts attributed in part to declines in more lucrative elective surgeries. One in five health workers have left their jobs during the pandemic.
The Trust for America report went on to describe the incoming disasters for which the U.S. appeared unprepared in 2018. They sound like headlines of the past year: weather disasters; flooding; wildfires; extreme drought; hurricanes; infectious disease outbreaks; and deaths of despair due to factors including racial disparities, opioids, and regional disparities that continue to drive distrust of government.
Trust for America placed particular focus on pandemics and the need to fully fund the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act, the Hospital Preparedness Program, the Project BioShield Act and PHEP.
The report recommended increasing funding for public health at all levels of jurisdiction — federal, state and local. It called for preserving the Prevention and Public Health Fund, increasing funding to prepare for public health emergencies and pandemics, establishing a standing public health emergency response fund, and surge funding during an emergency to avoid the delays that were apparent in the Ebola outbreak, the swine flu pandemic, Hurricane Sandy and the Zika virus outbreak.
Trust for America concluded with a recommendation for a national resilience strategy to combat diseases of despair, for preventing chronic disease, and for expanding high-impact interventions across communities.
While it is important to consider recommendations for increased funding and preparedness, it’s also crucial to take a step back and consider the system under which these suggestions are being made. Trust for America’s recommendations were wrapped in the worst of language and precepts. The report accepted the class character of the state. Public health is a means of cleaning up messes that capitalist production produces. Public health outcomes were pitched in terms of returns on investment.
All terrible. And yet, in the present context, such recommendations are radical, if only in pushing back against the damage of an empire at the end of its cycle of capital accumulation, organized around helping billionaires squeeze what’s left of the commons and turning decades of social infrastructure back into bunker money.
Anti-Public Health — at Home and Abroad
We find an analogous fallacy in U.S. COVID policy abroad. While the Biden administration has taken a stance in favor of waiving TRIPS rules against vaccine generics for COVID, tech billionaire and philanthrocapitalist Bill Gates, funding WHO efforts, effectively sets U.S. foreign policy on the matter.
there are only so many vaccine factories in the world and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines. And so moving something that had never been done, moving a vaccine from, say, a J&J factory into a factory in India, that, it’s novel, it’s only because of our grants and our expertise that can happen at all. The thing that’s holding things back in this case is not intellectual property, there’s not like some idle vaccine factory with regulatory approval that makes magically safe vaccines.
The reality is something different. Last month AccessIBSA and Médecins Sans Frontières identified 120 companies in Africa, Asia and Latin America with the likely capacity to produce mRNA vaccines. Human Rights Watch reported:
“Global vaccine production forecasts suggesting there will soon be enough Covid-19 vaccines for the world are misleading,” said Aruna Kashyap, associate business and human rights director at Human Rights Watch. “The US and German governments should press for wider technology transfers and not let companies dictate where and how lifesaving vaccines and treatments reach much of the world as the virus mutates.”
Two months earlier, The New York Times had investigated the possibility:
“You cannot go hire people who know how to make mRNA: Those people don’t exist,” the chief executive of Moderna, Stéphane Bancel, told analysts.
But public health experts in both rich and poor countries argue that expanding production to the regions most in need is not only possible, it is essential for safeguarding the world against dangerous variants of the virus and ending the pandemic.
Setting up mRNA manufacturing operations in other countries should start immediately, said Tom Frieden, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, adding: “They are our insurance policy against variants and production failure” and “absolutely can be produced in a variety of settings.”
Both at home and abroad, pharmaceutical industry apologists propose nothing can be conceived, much less pursued, unless the largest companies make billions in profit. Our men of the year are to be treated as no less than gods with rocket wings. Few of the respectable establishment have described, much less denounced, the fallacy.
Others have been much more truculent in their commentary, connecting increasing wealth concentration with COVID failures:
Economic historian Matthias Schmelzer started one Twitter thread early December: “The global concentration of capital is extreme: The richest 10% own around 60-80% of wealth, the poorest half less than 5%, according to just published World Inequality Report.”
Americans For Tax Fairness reported: “America’s billionaires got $1 TRILLION richer in 2021, a 25% gain in collective wealth that will go largely untaxed.”
Union organizer Jack Califano encapsulated the damage of such an arrangement: “COVID has been a perfect illustration of how our government now works. In a crisis, it will provide benefits, but only the absolute minimum it determines necessary to protect the system from political upheaval. And then, as soon as stability is restored, it will take them away.”
The Pandemic ThinkTank has taken up the core matter in similarly direct terms. In a report it released in November, the ad hoc group — comprised of a social psychiatrist, disease ecologist, medical anthropologist, epidemiologist, critical care physician and county official — unpacked the origins of the COVID trap that the U.S. placed itself in and offered a plan of escape other than “go to work.”
The team described how social systems set the ways epidemics spread, the damage that accrued in the American system of disease control long before SARS-2 showed up, the history of successful public health efforts before that destruction, and what a working public health system looks like:
Several lessons emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic and frame our approach to planning for the next pandemic.
First, there are three ‘partners’ in this enterprise: the government, the public health establishment, and the communities. Each partner has an important role to play in ensuring that we learn these lessons and can meet the next challenge with a better chance at survival. But there is an underlying issue of excess power held by the American oligopoly and the politicians allied with them. They profit in power and wealth from the array of policies David Harvey (2019) labeled ‘accumulation by dispossession’.
Any serious examination of pandemic threat must confront the danger contained in such one-sided power. Part of the way in which the oligopoly has gained and maintained power is by undermining communities and destroying their organizations. While this is good for short-term profit, it poses an enormous threat to long-term survival. Rebuilding community power is an essential part of epidemic control.
Rebellion as Intervention
So, there are minds stateside who understand both disease and the country in ways the establishment that rejects their counsel does not. In contrast to the president’s chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci and a CDC that repeatedly places commerce and empire before people, Pandemic ThinkTank explicitly counsels a rebel alliance:
Local health departments must, in many municipalities and counties, foment revolution.
This, like most revolutions, must occur in secret and with interactions with community groups in places like neighborhood bars, playgrounds, houses of worship, and barbershops/beauty salons.
In order to bring communities into condition for improved public health and for pandemic prevention and response, the health department must have the social and political muscle to pressure the elected executive into reforming the relevant agencies.
The health departments themselves must feel the pressure of empowered communities to establish egalitarian planning councils that will produce plans acceptable to and supportable by the various elements that form the local communities.
Unlike the COVID Collaborative of establishment epidemiologists who, like the CDC, push a more individualistic approach to public health, we can see why the Pandemic ThinkTank holds no direct line to the president. Indeed, ultimately, it’s going to take everyday people from beyond the Beltway to help bend epidemiology back into a science for the people.
Younger epidemiologists are taking on that spirit, turning on Biden and their better-connected colleagues in confrontational terms for which most journeymen are punished:
Perhaps with the COVID Collaborative and ex-Harvard epidemiologist and now chief science officer at the eMed diagnostic company Michael Mina in mind, Columbia University’s Seth Prins tweeted: “Turns out lots of blue check public health experts moonlight as pandemic profiteers.”
Ellie Murray, of Boston University’s School of Public Health, tweeted: “Honestly baffled by people who claim the COVID plan put in place by the president of the united states, ‘leader of the free world’, was so fragile that an assistant professor tweeting on her coffee breaks could undermine it, & that *isnt* somehow worse than the plan just failing?”
Justin Feldman, a social epidemiologist at the Harvard FXB Center for Health & Human Rights, who wrote his own critique of Biden’s COVID year, followed up: “There’s ‘a lot to unpack’ about how the only substantive criticism the media has been willing to pursue wrt Biden’s pandemic response is failing to make a consumer product (rapid tests) available to individuals.”
From abroad, Botswanan doctor Letlhogonolo Tlhabano weighed in: “I’m an intensivist and have been taking care of COVID patients since this pandemic begun, and the new AHA guidelines are idiotic. We’re not martyrs. The CDC guidelines are also motivated by the need to protect capital, and not necessarily by any science. We’re on our own.”
Science organizer and biochemist Lucky Tran commented: “We are not ‘learning to live with COVID’. When we give up on protecting our healthcare systems, workers, the immunocompromised, and the vulnerable, in reality we are ‘surrendering to COVID.’”
It really speaks to the tenor of our times when March for Science retweets Black radical Bree Newsome on the out-of-pocket costs of COVID testing.
I tried warning people about Biden’s pandemic-related policies before the inauguration, twice, and wrote a book titled Dead Epidemiologists,underscoring the mortally wounded thinking of even some of the field’s best and brightest practitioners.
The advocacy work of these younger scientists, however, may signal that our ugly future also offers hope. A more recent invitation to my millennial colleagues that we had a world to win reminded me of the generation-appropriate Marx t-shirt I’m getting my kid for his birthday: “You’re A Wizard, Harry.”
Of course, I don’t have all the answers on how we’ll get through this shit show — to use the technical term. I’m always learning alongside this new generation.
I experienced a bout of my own booster hesitancy, born out of the ethical quandary in which Gates trapped us all. Why a third inoculation for me when much of the world hasn’t gotten stuck a single shot? The utter shame of it, with the appropriate symptoms of a red face and shortness of breath. I finally concluded that being alive allowed me to use what little power and platform I had to argue for a different public health order the world over.
For ending a pharmaceutical industry focused on commoditizing health and reinvesting in a public health organized around our shared commons here and abroad is the only way out of this pandemic in any short order. Otherwise, we are left to letting the virus burn out on its own by something like 2025, as early models projected. The Black Plague in Europe eventually ended after eight years. Unless we act now to restore an active, on-the-ground public health mobilization helping people block-by-block and farm-by-farm, we will be forced to assimilate the possibility that we are to suffer a pandemic of a similar duration.
In October 2021 discrepancies in distribution and funding of the Philippines government’s Social Amelioration Program (SAP) were queried by Senator Panfilo (Ping) Lacson during a Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) budget hearing. The DSWD claimed to have disbursed 94% of SAP aid when its financial records indicated the disbursement of only 80% of funds. In response the DSWD cited delays in updating the lists due to altered quarantine status and out-dated beneficiary data. Clearly something is wrong with the SAP.
These COVID-19 relief funds are legislated for under Republic Act (RA)11469, the “Bayanihan to Heal as One Act”. Eligible families on the SAP list have been able to claim funds during a number of disbursement rounds during the pandemic. However, getting on the list and receiving aid has been problematic. The problems with the SAP have not just been technical but also social.
RA 11469 was passed on 25 March 2020 and granted President Duterte emergency powers in response to the COVID-19 pandemic for an initial period of three months. RA 11469 legislated for a minimum of 5000 (98 USD) and a maximum of 8000 (156 USD) PHP to be distributed to around 18 million low-income families twice over a period of two months. A subsequent act, RA 11494 the “Bayanihan to Recover as One Act” or Bayanihan 2, was signed into law by the president on 11 September 2020. Bayanihan 2 extended the emergency powers granted under Bayanihan 1, which officially expired on 5 June 2020, and provided an additional 165.5 billion PHP (32.4 billion USD) for the pandemic response. Bayanihan 2 initially ran until 19 December 2020, was extended until 30 June 2021 and then extended again until the end of 2021. It was left to Local Government Units (LGUs) to identify SAP beneficiaries and submit budget proposals to the DSWD.
We conducted interviews with over 35 community leaders, aid workers and public servants working with the urban poor in Metro Manila between September and November 2021. The evidence from these interviews indicates that the SAP has suffered from palakasan. Palakasan is a Tagalog word that means “the assertion of personal interest via lakas while subtly bypassing prescribed rules and procedures in line with delicadeza”. Lakas means power or strength and delicadeza means a refusal to be vulgar or crass in the exercise of power. Palakasan is the subtle, and therefore deniable, disregard of regulations in the pursuit of self-interest. Palakasan underpins clientelism.
Political clientelism relies on its “lopsidedness” under which the patron offers protection and the client offers loyalty. Social protection initiatives can undermine clientelism if distribution is rule-based. This is because the client does not owe the benefactor any particular allegiance for the benefit, because they are entitled to it and disbursement is regulated. However, where the benefit is discretionary, i.e. a politician or barangay leader can control disbursement and claim credit for it, there is the potential for irregularities. In reality “virtually any programme can become a resource for clientelism if discretionary allocation is possible”. Clientelism can be dyadic but it can also characterise social networks.
On 29 May 2020 the (DSWD) reported that 17.57 million families had received a share of 99.32 PHP billion (1.94 billion USD) in disbursed funds. 1,510 out of 1,634 LGUs nationwide had completed the SAP distribution and 774 LGUs had completed the paperwork necessary for the release of the next tranche of funds. However, by September 2020 it became evident that the SAP had run into problems. Only 13.9 families had received a second payment and only 83.5 billion PHP (1.63 billion USD) of an available 16.86 billion PHP (3.3 billion USD) had been disbursed.
The DSWD claimed that the money had not been disbursed because the LGUs had submitted only 14 million names when 18 million were expected. It was also claimed that some families had received two payments under the first tranche of the SAP and that others had received emergency subsidies from elsewhere and were therefore ineligible for a second payment. There was also confusion over which areas were eligible for the second tranche of the SAP. The DSWD used Executive Order No. 122, dated 30 April 2020, to identify areas under emergency or general community quarantine lockdown regulations and declared only those areas eligible. By September 2020 the DSWD had received more than 400,000 complaints about the distribution of SAP funds and hotlines hotlines were set up to deal with complainants. In October 2020 the Presidential Anti-Corruption Commission (PACC) reported that it had investigated 7,601 complaints of corruption related to the distributed of SAP funds.
The allocation of SAP funds was distorted at the local level because LGUs devolved responsibility for the compilation of lists of SAP beneficiaries to barangay leaders. Where qualification for the SAP was clear or rule based—e.g. if beneficiaries were already in receipt of the 4Ps—an existing cash grant programme for poor families, then SAP disbursement was mostly regularised. But in cases where the status of the beneficiary was less clear problems arose. Our interviewees reported the following problems (all names are false to protect anonymity).
Ellen a community worker in Sampoloc, City of Manila told us that barangay officials were sometimes embroiled in personal or political vendettas with some constituents and “families did not receive food or cash aid because of this” She also stated that “officials find ingenious and cunning ways to justify why these households were not eligible to receive aid”.
Ernest stated that he observed “an unjust and unfair implementation of programs and aid. For example, families who are friends with local government officials or local community leaders can get two stubs (used to claim government food packs) while others only receive one stub”. Arthur, a child focussed human rights worker working in Malabon and Navotas, used the term Palakasan directly. He said that palakasan was a common complaint in the communities as “those who were connected or related to the one who distributes aid were able to receive assistance even if there are others more in need”. Victor, a human rights worker active across Metro Manila, also referenced palakasan directly. He told us that “we received reports that some families that were related to the LGU officials, received aid even if there were others who were more in need”. He also told us that “our partner families indicated that there were issues of corruption within LGUs. Some families had to sign a waiver saying that upon receiving the cash donation worth 1000 pesos (USD19.6), they lose their right to ask for more donations”. This effectively meant that they were signing away their right to the second tranche of the SAP. Delia, a community worker, reported that she was aware of needy families who received no government aid, because they were not close to the barangay captain their names were not listed. Her evidence for this came from regular monthly meetings with local families over the course of the pandemic. She stated that to get on the list you had to be close to the barangay captain or barangay councillor and clarified this by saying “of course you know that in the Philippines if you’re not in the same party or in the same group you don’t receive your allocation,” thus indicating that the misallocation of resources was not a localised or one off mistake but an embedded practice—the practice of palakasan.
Meanwhile Jacob, a field manager for the distribution of aid from the office of Vice President Leni Robredo, told us that local politicians in areas not politically aligned to the Vice President would not allow his team to distribute relief goods. That is because those politicians did not want their lakas challenged or their loyalty to their patron (Duterte) questioned.
Whilst some of those distributing aid had it refused others were wary of having it hi-jacked. Harry, who worked with a relief foundation associated with the Vincentian Missionaries, told us that his organisation preferred to work with priests and lay workers, not political actors. This was because they wanted their relief packs to be “distributed to those who are really in need and not on the basis of how they would vote in an election”. Audrey, a businesswoman who initiated her own relief agency and campaigned for donations from friends, family and private companies, also stated that she avoided working with politicians. She was advised by “various agencies” that she should put the name of her agency “on all food-packs or the government would try and put their name on the packs. Or repack the goods in packs with their political logos”. In Tagalog the word epal is used in relation to this practice, meaning “butting in where not needed”.
Palakasan is a “negative” social practice that distorted the allocation of the SAP and other aid which local politicians had control over. This is because members of bonded social networks in local communities trusted each other to sanction this practice for their own self-interest. The delicadeza that allowed rules to be bypassed by patrons (those in control of the lists) also applied to the subtle acceptance of what was happening by the clients (those who benefitted from the distortion of the lists). Those not bonded to the patron missed out. The SAP was in effect a resource for clientelism.
The COVID-19 pandemic is far from over and many poor families across the Philippines, especially un- or under-employed and informal workers continue to suffer hardship. Problems with the allocation of aid under the Bayanihan Acts need to be urgently addressed, especially as palakasan is likely to be heightened as we move into the 2022 election period.
“We know … that omicron is in every corner of the world at the moment. And we also know that there will be other variants. And we know that we will experience in New Zealand cases at a level that we haven’t experienced before.”
Ardern stressed the government had and was continuing to prepare for an omicron outbreak in the community.
“But it will not be without its challenges, though, we are facing a trickier enemy given it keeps evolving,” she said.
“But in my view, and I’m sure in the view of everyone in this room, we can move into 2022 feeling resolute about what is required, because we’ve seen what is required and confident because on reflection of what we’ve gone through, we know that when we build a plan, that it will end can make an absolute difference and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”
Progress needed in other areas
Despite the challenges thrown up by the pandemic, Ardern stressed the government must continue to make progress in other areas.
Its attention would be on keeping the economy “humming”, progressing health reforms, lifting children out of poverty, as well as having a sharp focus on climate change and mental health, Ardern said.
The government was also looking to expand its trade arrangements, with Ardern participating in EU trade talks over summer.
“Our eye is on the prize with EU this year. I was in talks even over summer, so that’s an agreement that I know will continue to make a difference for exporters and will be a big focus.”
Work on the EU trade deal will work alongside the government’s plan to re-open the borders, Ardern said.
There would be an increased amount of international travel for the government and exporters in 2022, she said.
“Labour has demonstrated our ability to manage challenges and change and will continue to demonstrate our ability to manage challenges and change when it comes to climate, housing, poverty, and everything that we continue to face as a nation.”
Northland to join orange setting Prime Minister Ardern later announced Northland would join the rest of the country in the orange traffic light setting from 11.59pm tonight, and signalled plans for omicron.
Ardern announced this afternoon the region would change settings tonight.
“Vaccination rates have continued to increase in Northland and are now at 89 percent first dose. The easing of the Auckland boundary over summer did not drive an increase in cases so we believe it is safe for Northland to join the rest of the country at orange,” she said.
By Moana Ellis, Local Democracy Reporter A covid-19 Māori health analyst is calling on the New Zealand government to prioritise Māori and Pasifika children in the 5-11 years vaccine rollout or risk the consequences of a “brown pandemic”.
Dr Rāwiri Taonui says tamariki Māori make up 53.3 percent of all cases of those aged under 12 and 63 percent of all hospitalisations of under 12s.
According to Dr Taonui’s analysis, when Pasifika children are included, 82 percent of cases and 78.3 percent of hospitalisations of those under 12 have been Māori or Pasifika.
Taonui has contributed to a Ministry of Health working group for vaccination of Māori aged 12 years and under.
He described the statistics as disturbing and said they reflect the higher disease burden on Māori in the current outbreak.
Omicron remained a serious risk for unvaccinated Māori and Pasifika, and the tamariki rollout should focus on equal outcomes with Pākehā, he said.
“Pacific and Māori peoples face similar prejudice. This is our brown pandemic.”
Dr Taonui said data emerging from overseas backed the need to prioritise Māori and Pasifika children in the vaccination rollout.
Rise in child infections
“Last week, the American Academy of Paediatrics reported a 50 percent rise to 199,000 child infections and a 66 percent rise to a record 400 child hospitalisations in one week at the end of December,” Dr Taonui said.
“The lesson [is that] a small percentage of severe young cases among an enormous number of mild omicron cases equals a serious number of cases among the young and vulnerable.
“Tamariki are the taonga in the future of our whakapapa. At 24.6 percent of our population, Māori communities will be concerned that our tamariki are 29.2 percent of all Māori cases,” Taonui said.
A new international study this month by the University of Auckland’s Professor Stuart Dalziel showed children are at risk of severe outcomes from covid-19.
Professor Dalziel said greater numbers of children were being infected and needing hospital treatment.
“There is a perception that covid-19 is only a very mild infection in children. Unfortunately, for some of these children, covid-19 results in severe disease,” Professor Dalziel said.
The study followed more than 10,300 children at 41 emergency departments in 10 countries, including New Zealand, Canada and the United States.
It found that more than 3200 children tested positive for covid-19. Of those, three percent experienced severe outcomes within two weeks, including cardiac or cardiovascular complications such as myocarditis (inflammation of the heart) and neurological, respiratory or infectious problems.
Twenty-three percent were hospitalised and four children died.
More than 30,000 children’s doses have been given across the first three days of the vaccination rollout for children aged 5-11 years.
Local Democracy Reporting is a public interest news service supported by Asia Pacific Report, RNZ the News Publishers’ Association and NZ On Air.
The Solomon islands government endorsed a 60 hour lockdown in the capital Honiara last night after an urgent special national address by Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare confirming covid-19 community transmission.
Honiara Emergency Zone will be in lockdown from 6pm last evening to 6am, Saturday, 22 January 2022.
The lockdown comes with restriction of movements of people as ordered by the Prime Minister under Emergency Powers (COVID-19) (Honiara Emergency Zone) (Restriction of Movement of Persons) Order 2022.
The order reads: “A person must not enter or leave the emergency zone on and from 6.00 pm on Wednesday 19 January 2022 until 6.00 am on Saturday 22 January 2022.”
The order also spelt out that a person must be at his or her residence during the lockdown period.
And it further stated that a person must not be away from his or her residence during the lockdown period.
Essential workers exempt
Those who are exempt to travel during the lockdown are essential services workers who are covered under the Essential Services Act (Cap. 12).
The lockdown in the Honiara Emergency Zone is important for the Ministry of Health and Medical Services to continue to carry out contact tracing of people who travelled on MV Awka from Ontong Java on January 10 after a passenger on that trip was tested positive for covid-19.
Prime Minister Sogavare said: “The full extent of the covid-19 infection in Honiara is yet to be established, since this diagnosis.
“Given that the positive case lives in a household with other people, and some other passengers that travelled on the vessel have been reported to be unwell, I am sad to inform you that we already have community transmission of covid-19 in Honiara.”
Members of the public are requested to practise basic health activities such as washing hands for 20 seconds or use hand sanitizers, keep social distancing of at least 2 meters apart from another person, always wear face masks and avoid congregating together.
Other measures that have been put in place include:
Temporary suspension of all domestic flights to provinces until further notice;
Suspension of all incoming passenger service from international flights — humanitarian cargo flights to continue; and
Suspension of all incoming passenger services from international flights until further notice.
Humanitarian cargo services will continue. Other cargo services will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Overseas cargo vessels, fuel and gas tankers will continue to operate as Solomon Islands depend on these vessels for its survival.
They do not pose high covid-19 risks so they will continue to operate during the lockdown period if necessary.
The Honiara Emergency Zone boundary is from Alligator Creek in the East to Poha in the west end of Honiara.
Earlier warning RNZ Pacific reports that Prime Minister Sogavare had earlier warned the country could expect a rapid spread of covid-19 and deaths.
This came after 10 people had illegally entered Solomon Islands at Pelau in Ontong Java – six of them were confirmed positive with covid-19.
One of those infected is a doctor and Sogavare said he was greatly saddened by this distressing news.
Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare … saddened by “distressing news”. Image: RNZ Pacific/SI govt
A foreign national on a flight from Brisbane has also tested positive.
It took the Solomons tally of positive cases to 32.
Sogavare spoke on Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation (SIBC), saying the number of positive cases was expected to grow rapidly in the coming weeks, and loss of life was expected.
The SIBC reports the prime minister saying the government had sent 31 personnel, including five additional police, to Pelau to bring the outbreak under control.
The new infection was reported after 75 isolating close contacts already tested negative — and it comes with people surging to vaccination sites to make the most of paediatric and booster doses.
The Ministry of Health is yet to complete genetic sequencing to determine if it is the ultra-contagious variant.
Microbiologist Associate Professor Siousxie Wiles said it proved the worker was infectious.
“There’s a large number of close contacts. Those people are obviously isolating and we may well see some of them now test positive,” Dr Wiles said.
However, health officials said they were still trying to track down 10 people who shared bus rides with the worker to ensure they isolated and got tested as well.
Dr Wiles said getting contacts into isolation bought time for more people who were eligible “to go and get boosted”.
More than half of the country’s eligible adults have got a third shot, with more than 789,000 booster doses administered.
Paediatric vaccines Today, thousands more children rolled up their sleeve — on top of more than 14,300 during the first day of the paediatric vaccines yesterday.
Microbiologist Associate Professor Siousxie Wiles … Image: Dan Cook/RNZ
The momentum was clear at Auckland’s vaccination centres, where Northern Regional Health Co-ordination Centre clinical director Dr Anthony Jordan said the majority of parents were keen to do walk-in vaccinations for their children, rather than making bookings.
“We haven’t had any queues today and the demand is pretty good. We’d done over 8000 vaccinations by midday — so that’s pretty good progress by midday — and we estimate about 2000 of those are 5 to 11 year olds,” Dr Jordan said.
However, it has not been all plain sailing for the paediatric vaccine rollout elsewhere in the country.
Charlotte te Riet Scholten-Phillips was one of several people who told RNZ they had visited sites listed as children’s vaccination centres online — only to find they were not, or they were not fully set-up.
Te Riet Scholten-Phillips and her and her five-year-old daughter spent hours driving around the Kāpiti Coast yesterday, and even decided they would have to cancel their holiday next week before finally securing a vaccination appointment today, she said.
“I turned up at booking appointments that didn’t go through … and [did] all this driving around the whole area trying to find somewhere that would do it.”
It was still possible to book online at places te Riet Scholten-Phillips knew did not actually have children’s vaccines, and that was a concern for parents taking time off work.
“I’ve been waiting for the children’s vaccine since there was one for adults … finally it was announced on the 17th of December and it would happen in a month and it’s frustrating that even having had a long lead-in time, the system still is not working properly.”
Working with health boards
The Ministry of Health said it was working with health boards and providers to ensure there was sufficient sites and vaccines available, and it asked people to be patient.
In a statement, National Immunisation Programme Manager Rachel Mackay explained the number of centres would increase over coming weeks as health providers who had been taking a summer break reopened.
“With reports of strong demand for child vaccinations, particularly in Auckland, we thank those who have been waiting at vaccination centres or holding for the 0800 number for their patience,” Mackay said.
“It’s great to see this uptake and extra resources are being deployed to the busiest sites to reduce queues as much as possible.”
Medical director of the Royal New Zealand College of GPs Dr Bryan Betty said just half the total number of vaccine sites were equipped for children’s vaccines.
“We’ve got about 500 clinics and pharmacies across the country that are up and running with the paediatric vaccine. Overall there’s about 1000 centres across the country that can provide vaccines,” Dr Betty said.
He also expected they would be more widely available soon, as more providers became accredited.
Meanwhile, there are 14 new cases of covid-19 in the New Zealand community today and 30 in MIQ, reports the ministry.
Thirty people are in hospital — including two people in ICU.
Of today’s community cases, seven are in Auckland, six in the Lakes District (all in the Rotorua District) and one in Wellington.
Solomon Islands covid cases rise to 32 RNZ Pacific reports that the Solomon Islands Prime Minister, Manasseh Sogavare, has warned the country could expect a rapid spread of covid-19 and deaths.
This comes after 10 people illegally entered Solomon Islands at Pelau in Ontong Java — six of them confirmed positive with covid-19.
One of those infected is a doctor and Sogavare said he was greatly saddened by this distressing news.
A foreign national on a flight from Brisbane has also tested positive.
It takes the Solomons tally of positive cases to 32.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Cuba puts people before profits — showing the world an alternative to the monopolistic practices of Big Pharma. It promotes a public health system, state-funded research and shows global solidarity through tech transfer and vaccine delivery to developing countries, writes Richa Chintan.
On January 13, 2017, a family including a husband, wife and three small children scurried from building to building in East Mosul, Iraq. They were seeking refuge as a battle between ISIS (also known as Daesh) and U.S.-backed forces swirled around them. The family was huddled in an abandoned school surrounded by other civilians when a U.S.-operated drone struck and destroyed the structure. The father and one of his sons narrowly escaped with their lives. The tragic fate of his wife and other children would not be confirmed until months later when he watched as their bodies were excavated from the rubble.
This account was just one of several described in a recent publication of Pentagon reports documenting the extensive civilian casualties resulting from U.S. drone and air strikes. As the reporting shows, the considerable toll armed drones reap on civilian populations has largely been obfuscated by the U.S. government. What reporting such as this makes clear, however, is that weaponized drones are becoming a serious threat to public health.
The use of weaponized drones for targeted killings is not new and neither is the government’s lack of transparency. The U.S. government has been steadily increasing lethal covert drone operations since 2008, and almost everything we know about the program comes from whistleblowers and leakers. Specifics around the number of civilians killed and the extensiveness of the program are difficult to ascertain, but stories like the one above demonstrate the disregard for human life that results from the use of weaponized drones.
Like all violations of human rights, the public health community, of which I am a part, has an obligation to condemn the use of weaponized drones and demand an end to these targeted killings. If the goal of the public health sector — which includes health care practitioners, researchers, academics and policy makers — is, as the American Public Health Association’s (APHA) website states, “to prevent people from getting sick or injured,” then surely lending an authoritative voice in opposition to weaponized drones is more than appropriate.
U.S. citizens bear special responsibility. Unlike other causes of death or disability, weaponized drones are built, maintained and funded by our tax dollars. It is our elected officials who put them in action. Our complicity is unacceptable.
The APHA has made impassioned arguments advocating for the prevention of armed conflict from a public health perspective. However, little has been written specifically with regard to drones. This omission is important when one considers how our political leaders — even those often seen as advocates for “peace” — view the use of weaponized drones. For example, the Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning former President Barak Obama saw drone strikes as an alternative to the more uncouth, “stupid wars” that he railed against during his campaign. This perspective resulted in a huge expansion of the program under his administration with well over 500 strikes, including one that explicitly targeted and executed a 16-year-old-boy. Political leaders like Obama see drones as an acceptable “middle ground” that allows for the implementation of U.S. force without, at least ostensibly, the traditional collateral of American casualties or civilian deaths.
Drone strike-related deaths are not the only consequence felt by civilians. One researcher explains how children living in a region such as northern Pakistan — with heavy U.S. drone activity — “become hysterical when they hear the characteristic buzz of a drone,” which often circle overhead 24/7. The psychiatric toll this constant threat of violence takes on children is hard to imagine.
Despite the common refrain from U.S. government officials that weaponized drones offer an extremely “precise” method of targeting, the truth is that civilian casualties of weaponized drone attacks are a common occurrence. The indiscriminate nature of weaponized drone attacks is reminiscent of a much older though equally brutal weapon — landmines. Over the past several decades, human rights organizations, academics and activists have worked tirelessly to show the world that landmines maim and kill civilian populations, and therefore, their use should be banned. The public health community has played a pivotal role in this movement by, for example, conducting research which adds evidentiary support for the movement’s claims. The same tact should be taken with weaponized drones. Public health researchers should work with activists and human rights scholars to form a coalition that demands an end to the use of weaponized drones.
Professional societies such as the APHA could provide guidance highlighting the role of public health in ending the use of weaponized drones. This could take the form of a bold policy statement similar to the one APHA released in 2009 regarding public health’s role in the prevention of armed conflict.
With political leaders from both major U.S. parties seeing drones as a convenient workaround to the traditional pitfalls of American use of force, it is imperative that the public health community remind the world that these weapons have tragic consequences. It is our responsibility to lend our voices, research skills and positions of prominence to stop the use of weaponized drones and end the pain and suffering they cause.
New Zealanders living overseas say covid-19 is now part of everyday life as cases of the highly-infectious omicron variant steadily grow around the globe.
More than 307 million covid-19 cases have been confirmed since the pandemic began, with countries now breaking records for daily case numbers as leaders struggle to keep the new variant at bay.
Cantabrian Savannah Winter has been working as an au pair in Paris for about six months.
France is currently reporting around 300,000 cases each day, and while she is double vaccinated and has had her booster shot, she still caught covid-19 three months ago.
“Everyone I know, knows someone that has it and the kids I look after are constantly not at school because people in their class are getting it, so I’m thinking, ‘Oh am I going to get it again?’, we are just waiting and seeing if our kids test positive,” Winter said.
As omicron spread, the situation became overwhelming and there was a shortage of rapid-antigen testing, she said.
“All of the pharmacies are just inundated with people needing to get tested. I went to the gym this morning and I walked past a few pharmacies and there is just a line at 8am in the morning going around the street of people just lining up to get a test.”
About 10 percent effective
A study from the UK Health Security Agency found the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were only about 10 percent effective at preventing symptomatic infection from omicron, 20 weeks after the second dose.
But two doses of those vaccines still provide good protection against severe illness, hospitalisation and death.
The study also found that boosters are up to 75 percent effective at preventing symptomatic infection.
In the US, the booster programme is well underway, but cases are still skyrocketing.
Ben Fitchett, 22, moved to Los Angeles in December.
“On my second night here, I caught it from a friend and over the period of that weekend until the week leading up to Christmas cases just exploded,” said Fitchett.
“Everyone seems to know someone that has it. Everyone is basically dropping like flies.”
WHO says not categorised as ‘mild’
Last week the World Health Organisation (WHO) said that while studies suggested omicron was less likely to make people seriously ill compared to previous variants, it should not be categorised as mild.
Fitchett said despite the high case numbers, people in Los Angeles were going about life as normal.
“It is a deadly virus. Some people will get it and it does react differently within people, but people don’t seem to be too worried about it here. Obviously, if you are immunocompromised, you are, but people are just living life as normal and then if you get it, you get it, and you just have to stay away from everyone else.”
In Australia, case numbers have also been rising exponentially, with the state of Victoria recording more than 40,000 cases yesterday.
Heather Jameson and her family are in a self-imposed lockdown in Melbourne to ensure they do not catch the virus before their family holiday.
“I personally hate the idea that I would be spreading something to immunocompromised people without my knowledge … so our own self imposed lockdown, while we are well, is purely to make sure that we don’t get it, and then risk passing it on should we have symptoms when we go away.”
Her children would almost certainly catch covid-19 once they returned to school next month, she said.
Case numbers blowing up
“Case numbers are just blowing up every day, to be honest it gives me a pretty high sense of anxiety when I’m looking at the actual numbers.
“We just have the sense that it is literally everywhere. A lot of work mates have had it, our direct neighbours have got it right now. It’s pretty panic inducing. We feel like we’re still in lockdown.”
New Zealanders should look after each other to ensure covid-19’s spread in Aotearoa remained contained, Jameson said.
To date, there have been 196 omicron cases detected at the border since December 1.
The Ministry of Health says there are also 217 border cases that have been caught still undergoing genome sequencing. Most are expected to be omicron.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare has appealed to his fellow Solomon Islanders at the western border not to allow Bougainvilleans into the country.
In his nation’s address last Friday, Sogavare recapped the country’s first covid-19 case recorded from a Shortland islander, dropped off by four Bougainvilleans in Shortland, who was automatically tested positive and is still in a 14-day quarantine with his seven family members who also tested positive.
The four Bougainvilleans returned home the same day and are back in their respective villages.
Sogavare singled out the New Year delta and omicron cases recorded in Solomon Islands which were brought in by citizens returning from outside Honiara.
“The western border continues to be an area of priority for health,” he said.
“For the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force and other border force agencies, it represents a potential source of covid-19 incursion into the country.
“For example, on New Year’s Day, a man from the Shortlands travelled with four Bougainville nationals from Bougainville to Shortland.
“The four Bougainvilleans returned straight after dropping off the man.
In quarantine facility at Nila
“The man is now held at the quarantine facility in Nila along with seven of his family members with whom he had made close contact.
“They will undergo 14 days of quarantine and only released if all tests results are returned negative.
“Five who had been held at the Nila isolation ward at Shortlands will be released after serving 14 days if their results return negative.
“These five individuals have made close contact with people from Bougainville.
“My good people, living along the western border, I ask you to refrain from going across the border to Bougainville.
“I also ask you to not allow any visitors from Bougainville to your villages during the period of the State of Emergency. Please continue to be vigilant to prevent the entry of covid-19 through our western border.”
ABG health chief ‘not aware’
Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG) Health Secretary Dr Clement Totavun told the Post-Courier they were not aware of the incident singled out by Sogavare but also said the border had been closed since 2020 when the covid initial measures were released and PNG Immigration and other border offices had ordered immediate closure.
“There is currently a ban on traditional border crossing,” he said.
“The border is closed.
“The Border Protection Authority is supposed to man the border but surveillance at the moment is not effective.”
He said he would communicate with National Pandemic Controller David Manning on this issue.
Gorethy Kennethis a senior PNG Post-Courier journalist. Republished with permission.
Governor Lou Leon Guerrero presents her covid update message … “Our focus remains on preventing severe illness, preventing increased hospitalisation and saving lives.” Video: Office of the Governor of Guam
By Mar-Vic Cagurangan in Tumon, Guam
Guam has reported its 273rd covid-19 death and 422 new positive cases on Tuesday, breaking its daily record for new infections and shooting up the island’s Covid Area Risk score to 189.3.
Despite the phenomenal increase in new infections, Governor Lou Leon Guerrero said she was not currently inclined to change the status quo.
“Our Public Health interventions and protective measures remain effective and as such, I am not announcing any new restrictions at this time,” the governor said.
“Our focus remains on preventing severe illness, preventing increased hospitalisation and saving lives,” she added.
A 90-year-old man died, who died at the US Naval Hospital on January 5, was Guam’s 273rd covid-related death. He was partially vaccinated and had underlying health conditions. He tested positive on December 27.
There are currently 14 covid-19 admissions within the island’s hospitals. One is receiving ICU level of care and “the remainder are not as severe,” the governor said.
The 422 coronavirus infections were detected in 2304 specimens analysed on January 10. This is the largest single-day result ever recorded on Guam. Of the total number of new positive cases, 126 were identified through contact tracing.
Speculated over omicron variant
Although data is not currently available, public health officials speculated that the omicron variant, described as highly transmissible, is already spreading on the island along with the delta variant.
To date, there have been a total of 21,540 officially reported cases, 273 deaths, 2062 cases in active isolation, and 19,205 not in active isolation.
The unprecedented surge of infections has prompted the Department of Public Health and Social Services to accelerate the testing in Tiyan, which has transitioned to an appointment-based system.
“Scheduling of appointments for Covid-19 testing will allow for more efficient processing and reduce long lines and wait times,” the department said.
Testing has been expanded to six days a week and six hours a day.
“We know that community testing helps us quickly identify new covid cases, so we can isolate the virus. Please get tested,” the governor said.
Although data is not currently available, Guam public health officials have speculated that the omicron variant, described as high transmissible, is already spreading on island along with the delta variant. Image: Pacific Island Times
Booster clinics at 6 schools
“To expand access and availability, we have added vaccination and booster clinics at six schools, in addition to clinics widely available at the University of Guam, Public Health community centers, and private providers.”
She reiterated her advice for residents to “wash your hands, wear your mask and watch your distance”.
Dr Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said last week that despite the astronomic rise in omicron-related covid cases nationwide, there was a possibility that the number would fall just as fast.
Mar-Vic Cagurangan is editor-in-chief of the Pacific Island Times. Republished with permission.
The Omicron variant’s transmission rate is exponentially higher than Delta, leaving healthcare workers across the U.S. in dire straits. Waves of doctors, nurses and other health professionals are unionizing, and some have quit the profession over exploitative conditions. The staffing shortage has added on to the strains of increasing hospitalizations due toCOVID-19, limited availability of necessary equipment and lack of federal support for preventative measures such as paid medical leave. “This is the cost of two years spent pushing prematurely for a return to normal,” says Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and science writer at The Atlantic. Yong also discusses the debate over keeping schools open during theCOVID-19 surge, and challenges to President Biden’s vaccine mandates affecting nearly 100 million workers.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN:This isDemocracy Now!, democracynow.org,The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
Here in the United States, nearly a quarter of hospitals are reporting critical staffing shortages as Omicron drives an unprecedented surge in infections. This comes as public schools in Chicago are closed for a fourth day as talks between the teachers’ union and Mayor Lori Lightfoot over in-person teaching remain at an impasse.
For more, we’re joined by Ed Yong, science writer atThe Atlantic. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for his coverage of the pandemic. His most recentpieces, “Hospitals Are in Serious Trouble” and “Omicron Is Our Past Pandemic Mistakes on Fast-Forward: We’ve been making the same errors for nearly two years now.”
Welcome back toDemocracy Now!It’s great to have you with us, Ed. Let’s start with the hospitals. Explain the serious trouble our hospitals are in.
EDYONG:Yeah, they are at breaking point. It’s really hard to overstate how badly hospitals are faring right now. Even before the Omicron wave, they were already in trouble, because so many healthcare workers had left because of the collective traumas of the last two years of the pandemic. And now we have, firstly, a Delta wave and now Omicron on top of that. Huge volumes of patients are flooding hospitals. And while Omicron is less severe than previous variants, it’s so contagious that the sheer number of those patients is so high that there are still a lot of very sick people, and there are a lot people, full stop. So they are inundating hospitals at a time when there are fewer healthcare workers than ever before. Those healthcare workers are demoralized. They’re exhausted. And a lot of them are out sick because they have breakthrough infections from Omicron.
And all of this means that hospitals are — like, I really struggle to use the words like “crumbling,” because I don’t want to, like, exaggerate the risk, but that is what I’m hearing from people all around the country. People are waiting for six to 12 hours to get seen for any kind of emergency procedure. People in the ER are on ventilators waiting to get into ICUs, which are full. The entire system is clogged up. And it’s not just aboutCOVIDanymore. This now means that medical care for basically anything is worse than it was two years ago, because the system is just so completely flooded and unable to cope with the volume of patients right now.
AMYGOODMAN:The National Nurses United said, “Going to work should not mean putting your life and the lives of your loved ones in danger.” A group of nurses’ unions and theAFL–CIOhave demanded the federal government enact permanent rules to ensure workplace safety, saying all frontline health workers should be guaranteed “personal protective equipment, exposure notification, ventilation systems, and other lifesaving measures.” Can you talk about this kind of organizing that’s going on?
EDYONG:Yeah. I think a lot of healthcare workers are fed up. Like, there’s sort of a culture, a social contract in medicine, that you sacrifice yourself for the sake of your patients. And while that contract means that the rest of us get decent medical care when we expect it, it also creates the conditions where healthcare workers are very easily exploited by society at large, as we’re seeing now, and by their own particular institutions.
So it’s no surprise, after two years of this, after feeling betrayed by the public, by a lot of places they work for, that a lot of them are starting to organize, and there’s more movement towards unions. There’s more of a sense of, like, “We just cannot take this anymore.” And I commend that. I do think, like, that’s necessary for creating a more stable medical system.
What I worry is that there are a lot of people who, rather than deciding to fight for this, have just decided, very reasonably, to stop, to leave their jobs or the profession. I’ve heard from so many healthcare workers who have already made that choice. And their decisions thin the ranks of those who are left behind to take care of the rest of us and whose jobs are now that much harder.
But, honestly, if so much of society has pretended that the pandemic is over, and has longed to get back to normal, can you really blame healthcare workers for wanting to do the same? This is the cost of two years spent prematurely pushing towards a return to normal, except, for the healthcare system, for our ability to get medical care, there might not be a normal to return to.
AMYGOODMAN:Last week, President Biden reiterated his support for keeping schools open during theCOVIDsurge. This is what he said.
PRESIDENTJOEBIDEN:We know that our kids can be safe when in school, by the way. That’s why I believe schools should remain open.
AMYGOODMAN:I want to get your response to this, Ed. We see the Chicago schools are closed because the Chicago Teachers Union says they’re not going to expose their teachers in this way. Other schools that are remaining open around the country, like in New York, are just vectors for infection.
EDYONG:So, I sympathize with everyone on this side of the debate, right? Like, on the one hand, you have parents who are really scared about putting their children in these conditions where this extremely transmissible virus is just going everywhere. I sympathize for parents who can’t handle remote schooling or just don’t have the option to do that. I sympathize with teachers who don’t feel that they can put themselves at risk anymore. I think, though, that we’re sort of — we’ve been put in a position where we’re having to choose, we’re having to, like, take sides between people who are all in the right. Like, this shouldn’t be a debate in the way it’s framed.
The jobs of the federal government should have been to control transmission of this virus and to control the pandemic to an extent where this shouldn’t even have been an issue. And so many of the measures that were necessary — you know, the rollout of rapid tests, mask mandates — all of these things have been, if anything, got pulled back at both the federal and the state level. There’s not been enough done to control the pandemic for two years now. And last year really wasn’t that much different. Like, because our policymakers have made bad decisions, it puts individual schools, teachers, parents in an impossible position and sets them against each other, when, in fact, I think the main problem is that the policies that should have protected all of us have not been put in place.
AMYGOODMAN:So, let’s talk about what those policies should be. I mean, you’ve pointed out in your writing, for example, that when — obviously, for politicians, they want to put this behind them, so then talking about unmasking — the fact that there aren’t tests available now, though President Biden said he’s going to get half a billion out to the country, and the fact that Abbott, which makes Binax, one of the tests, destroyed millions of those tests.
EDYONG:Right, because we keep on treating this like a short-term problem. We keep on assuming that we’re going to get back to normal at some point in the near future without actually doing the work to get to that point. Rapid tests are a clear example of this. Like, why do we not have them deployed on a mass scale? Biden talks about deploying that number of tests out to people. It’s roughly like one-and-a-half tests per person.
And I also want to talk about the social measures that should have been put in place right from the start. Like, we know that a pandemic is a social problem. It’s not just a biomedical one. Yes, vaccines and therapeutics and diagnostic tests are great, but we need things that actually allow people to protect their livelihoods and their lives at the same time. And paid sick leave is a great example of this. It seems like a really weird measure to be talking about in the context of a pandemic, but if you can’t actually take the time off to isolate or to take care of yourself if you’re exposed, if your workplace conditions don’t allow you to do that, then how are you going to stop yourself from spreading this disease?
Like, we know that these things actually matter and can have an immediate impact, but they don’t seem to be part of the package of measures that we’ve been talking about. People sort of gravitate between just going on completely as normal or going to a strict lockdown. There are so many things in the middle. Like, we’ve talked about masking, we’ve talked about rapid tests, we’ve talked about paid sick leave. Ventilation is important. Having places where people can isolate is important. These kind of measures are going on in parts of the country but not everywhere, and there doesn’t seem to be any sort of federal push to really make them everywhere or to pressure states into actually putting them into place. And that is part of the problem. That is why we’re in the state where we’re having these horrendous discussions about schools and where we’re looking at a healthcare system that is collapsing under the sheer weight of infections.
AMYGOODMAN:Do you think this could lead to Medicare for All? I mean, it has exposed the fracture of the entire system, a system that was broken already in terms of who gets healthcare and who doesn’t in this country. Now it’s who dies and who doesn’t.
EDYONG:Yeah. You know, people who are unvaccinated are actually, like, the uninsured, make a disproportionate — I’m saying this terribly. A lot of people who are unvaccinated are also uninsured, right? And that says something about the medical system in this country. Like, there’s this sort of tendency to paint unvaccinated people as all like antagonistic anti-vaxxers. And I think access is still actually a large problem that isn’t really grappled with.
I would hope that the lessons from these two years are that inequities harm us. You cannot fight a vaccine — you cannot fight a pandemic properly in a grossly unequal society such as what we currently live in. But that doesn’t seem to be the lesson that is being learned. Like, we’ve had lip service paid to the need to focus on inequities, but even from, like, leading public health voices, it seems to be a thing that is readily forgotten. And that is — you know, that is part of why we are where we are now. Unless we actually make efforts to protect the most vulnerable, to help people on low incomes, people from marginalized groups, disabled communities — unless we stop treating them like disposable commodities, we’re going to end up back in this situation that we currently find ourselves in.
AMYGOODMAN:The Supreme Court hearing oral arguments around Biden’s vaccine mandates, your thoughts?
EDYONG:I worry that we are — instead of learning the lessons that you’ve just talked about, that would make us better prepared for the next one, that we are setting legal precedent in place that would actually make us more vulnerable next time ’round. And, you know, there are many different examples of this. State legislatures around the country have put in orders that make it more difficult for people to put in, say, mask mandates or quarantine orders. That contributes to how hard it is to fight something like Omicron. It is going to make it more difficult to deal the next variants. It’s going to make it more difficult to deal with the next pandemics, which I guarantee you we will face.
AMYGOODMAN:Well —
EDYONG:I worry —
AMYGOODMAN:Well, Ed, we’re going to have to go, but I wanted to wish you a happy 40th birthday. I know it was very difficult. You wrote apiecetalking about canceling your 40th birthday because of Omicron.
EDYONG:Thank you.
AMYGOODMAN:Thank you so much for being with us. Ed Yong, science writer atThe Atlantic, won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the pandemic. We’ll link to hispieces.
That does it for our show. Remember, wearing a mask is an act of love. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.
With Capitol Hill — like much of the United States — experiencing a major spike in Covid-19 cases, members of Congress and their offices are reportedly set to receive KN95 masks to help stem the spread of the highly contagious Omicron variant.
The public, meanwhile, has largely been left to fend for itself as much of Congress and the Biden administration ignore calls for action to ensure widespread distributionof high-quality masks.
According toan email sent to House staffers last week and obtained by the Washington Post, “The Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) has updated its PPE monthly allotment program to include KN95 masks for all House offices” as expertswarnthat widely used cloth masks are less effective at preventing Omicron transmission.
“The Office of Attending Physician (OAP) supports CDC guidelines recommending the use of a face cover such as the KN95 mask when in public spaces, particularly when a six-foot separation cannot be maintained between two individuals,” reads the email, which was sent after the U.S. Capitol’s attending physicianraised alarmover an “unprecedented” surge in coronavirus infections.
Under the new allotment program, each House office in Washington, D.C. will get 40 KN95 masks per month.
“This is so grotesque,” said Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves. “Members of Congress (and White House staff) have full access to good masks (and I bet tests too!). The little people — meaning the rest of us — are on our own.”
Abraar Karan, a physician and infectious disease expert at Stanford University, noted in response to the new House safety protocol that “there are unprecedented infections around the entire country!”
“What about the general public?” he asked.
A bit of Friday night news: Congress will start providing KN95 masks to House staff and lawmakers, per email obtained by The Post.
Congress’ top doctor warned this week of “unprecedented” infections at Capitol.
The U.S. is currently averaging roughly 700,000 new coronavirus cases per day as the Omicron variant continues to rip through the population,pushing up hospitalizationsand straining overburdened healthcare systems.
Capitol physician Brian Monahan wrote in a letter to lawmakers that, in order to combat the latest coronavirus wave, high-quality face coverings are “a critical necessity unless the individual is alone in a closed office space or eating or drinking in a food service area.”
Monahan noted that based on a limited sample of positive tests on Capitol Hill, 61% of the cases were the Omicron variant.
Last month, as Omicron was detected in state after state across the U.S., Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)urgedCongress to guarantee the mass production and distribution of N95 masks to all households.
In July of 2020, Sanders introduced legislation that would have required the federal government to manufacture and deliver high-quality masks to every person in the country — but the bill has gone nowhere.
The Biden administration is in the process of enacting a plan todistributefree at-home coronavirus tests to U.S. households that request them, but it has yet to take similar action on masks. In the absence of federal leadership, some local governments have begun handing out free masks to residents.
“With this variant, it’s really good to have an upgraded mask,” Nick Tomaro of the Milwaukee Health Departmentsaidas the city launched its mask distribution effort. “This is the opportunity to get it.”
While N95 shortages arenot currentlyas acute as they were in the early stages of the pandemic,genuine maskscan often be difficult to find, particularly in an online marketplace still awash in counterfeits.
“Not all face masks are created equal,” Sanders, the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, tweetedSunday. “N95 face masks are far more effective than cloth masks in preventing the spread of Covid. We must utilize the Defense Production Act to mass produce these masks and distribute them to every household in the country.”
However, according to the public broadcaster, police used teargas after the end of the rally to disperse some demonstrators.
The march was called to oppose a health pass required to enter venues, such as restaurants and museums, and to protest against the law making vaccinations mandatory.
The law, which is yet to be applied, was adopted last September just days before the territory’s delta outbreak, which rapidly infected thousands and killed more than 280 people.
Last Thursday, the first cases of the omicron variant were detected, renewing calls by the authorities to be prudent as the virus is expected to raise infection rates.
From yesterday, vaccinations have opened for children aged five and older.
Children aged 11 and older must wear masks in indoor settings.
About 65 percent of New Caledonia’s population has had at least two jabs, making it the most vaccinated French Pacific territory.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
New Zealand covid-19 experts are nervously observing an ever-increasing number of cases at the border, as the threat of an omicron outbreak looms.
The highly transmissible variant has rapidly spread around the globe and New Zealand has dodged a community outbreak so far.
But with the escalating number of overseas returnees testing positive, there are fears a new wave of the virus could be out in the community within weeks.
Epidemiologist and University of Otago professor Michael Baker called the variant a “huge threat” and said it was not a matter of if there was an outbreak, but when.
Professor Baker was concerned there may have been undetected transmission of the virus — whether that was the delta or omicron variant — during the Christmas and New Year period.
“It will take a while for people to people to develop symptoms if they were exposed. Everyone should be aware of getting any cold or flu symptoms, which is unusual for this time of year.”
Daily NZ new covid-19 community cases since 18 August 2021. Graph: RNZ News
MIQ hotels well set up
A Managed Isolation and Quarantine (MIQ) spokesperson told RNZ the hotels were well set up to cater for omicron cases and a number of precautionary measures were in place to manage the risk.
This included travellers staying 10 days in MIQ and undergoing four tests during that time.
Anyone who tested positive was treated as an omicron case until proven otherwise by genome sequencing.
Despite these measures, Dr Baker was doubtful the country could make it through the month without the omicron variant escaping.
“We’re getting more than 20 cases a day in the last three days. That’s going to put huge strain on the MIQ system, as we know every infected that arrives increases the risk of border failure.”
Microbiologist Dr Siouxsie Wiles, who is an associate professor at the University of Auckland, told RNZ Morning Report that rather than embracing the arrival of the new variant as some have done, Aotearoa needed to be prepared for its arrival.
‘Back to where we started’
“We’re kind of back where we started again, and what we really need to be doing is trying to delay that coming into our community for as long as possible so we can get everybody with that third booster dose and so that we can also get the vaccine rollout started and hopefully finished with our children,” she said.
“There is no controlled spread with omicron, I think it’s an absolutely ridiculous idea.
“There’s being prepared for it to come and then there’s welcoming it with open arms and all we have to look at is everywhere around the world doing open arms and it’s just not working at all.”
University of Otago senior lecturer Dr Lesley Gray said this did not bode well.
“We know that for every approximately 100 that we have in MIQ there is a risk that there might be one that might end up in the community.”
From January 7, travellers to New Zealand must return a negative test within 48 hours of their departure, down from 72 hours.
Catching virus in short time-frame
Director of Public Health Dr Caroline McElnay had previously said that people may have been incubating covid-19 before their flight or been exposed during their travel.
Dr Gray was concerned people were catching the virus within that short-time frame.
“We do have to ask the questions of ‘how, what, when, and why’. As these people travel, they’re distanced for the most part on the planes, when they’re in airports they’re wearing masks and they have to take a reasonable number of precautions,” she said.
She urged New Zealanders to ask themselves if they were ready for an omicron outbreak.
This included having adequate supplies and a suitable place to quarantine if needed.
She said getting a booster shot, scanning in, mask-wearing, and testing were among the best tools to tackle omicron.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
