US Vice President Mike Pence did not wear a face mask during a Tuesday visit to the Mayo Clinic, violating the prestigious medical center’s policy despite his team being warned in advance.

Video showed Pence visiting staff and a patient in a crowded hospital room without wearing a mask.

The Minnesota-based center’s policy states: “Part of our protocol for ensuring your safety is to require all patients, visitors and staff to wear a face covering or mask while at Mayo Clinic to guard against transmission of COVID-19.”

The clinic said in a statement that it had “shared the masking policy with the VP’s office.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently updated its advice to recommend that people wear cloth face coverings in public settings where it is difficult to maintain adequate physical distance at all times, such as in grocery stores and pharmacies.

This is because a very high proportion of people infected with the coronavirus are believed to be asymptomatic and because recent research has shown that it may in certain circumstances be possible to infect others through normal speaking and breathing.

Pence, President Donald Trump, and other senior White House officials have pointedly ignored the advice, leading to speculation it is a coordinated decision to downplay the severity of the crisis.

The vice president said he did not wear a mask because the CDC guidelines suggest that masks help prevent the spread of the virus by those who are infected — and he is not.

“Since I don’t have the coronavirus, I thought it’d be a good opportunity for me to be here, to be able to speak to these researchers, these incredible health care personnel, and look them in the eye and say thank you,” he said.

Source: AFP

First there was Corona Kumar, then Covid Marie: parents have taken to naming newborns after the coronavirus, apparently unperturbed by the prospect of their children being forever associated with a deadly pandemic.

When Colline Tabesa gave birth to a healthy baby girl in the central Philippine city of Bacolod on April 13, she and the father John Tupas decided to mark the occasion with a show of gratitude.

“This COVID-19 has caused great suffering around the world,” said 23-year-old Tupas, expressing relief after the uneventful delivery.

“I wanted her name to remind us that COVID did not only bring us suffering. Despite all of this, a blessing came to us,” he added.

And so, Covid Marie it was.

Weeks earlier, two mothers in southeastern India had had similar ideas, apparently encouraged by a doctor in the hospital where their babies were delivered.

One was called Corona Kumar and the other Corona Kumari.

“I told them this would help create awareness about the disease and remove the stigma around it,” said S.F. Basha, the doctor.

“To my surprise, they agreed.”

Not to be outdone, a migrant-worker couple in India’s northeast stranded thousands of kilometres from their home in the desert state of Rajasthan decided to name their child Lockdown.

“We named him Lockdown remembering all the problems we had to face during this tough time,” local media reports quoted the father Sanjay Bauri as saying.

“She might experience bullying, but I’ll just teach my daughter to be a good person,” he said.

“We didn’t have second thoughts.”

Source: AFP

A New York emergency doctor who treated coronavirus patients has killed herself, with family, police and physicians linking her death to trauma faced by health care workers battling the outbreak.

Lorna Breen, 49, died on Sunday from self-inflicted injuries in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she had been staying with her family, police said in a statement.

Breen ran the emergency department of New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital in Manhattan, a facility that has seen a huge influx of COVID-19 patients.

While it is not clear why she took her own life, her family, police and doctors suggested stress caused by the outbreak had contributed to her death.

“She tried to do her job and it killed her,” her father Philip Breen told The New York Times.

He said she had no history of mental illness and had contracted coronavirus herself before returning to work and then being sent home.

“Frontline healthcare professionals and first responders are not immune to the mental or physical effects of the current pandemic,” said Charlottesville police chief RaShall Brackney.

The president of the American College of Emergency Physicians, of which Breen was a member, said her death was a tragic reminder of the suffering that many health care workers are going through.

“The impossibility of the situation in many of our hospitals leaves us deeply wounded.

“I can only imagine for Dr. Breen it was more than she could bear — not out of weakness, but out of the strength of her compassion,” William Jaquis said in a statement on the group’s website.

The hospital where she worked described her as “a hero who brought the highest ideals of medicine to the challenging front lines of the emergency department.”

More than 17,300 people have died from COVID-19 across New York state, the epicenter of America’s outbreak.

Source: AFP

US President Donald Trump has hinted that “disinfectant” can be used to cure people infected with the coronavirus after previously suggesting chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as treatment, which the EU said could kill patients.

Speaking during his daily briefing on Thursday night, Trump suggested injecting disinfectant into the bodies of humans to cure covid-19 patients.

“I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning,” the president said.

However, a senior health official later told reporters that federal laboratories are neither considering nor trying to develop such a treatment option.

Yet Trump, appearing to refer to the disinfectant idea, continued to say, “You see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number [on the] lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”

“We’re going to have to use medical doctors, but it seems interesting to me.

This comes as his much touted drugs – chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine – are said to have fatal side effects.

The European Medicines Agency, the EU’s drug regulator, repeated concerns on Thursday that the two drugs being prescribed in the US and some other countries as treatments for the covid-19, have yet to demonstrate any medical benefits and, therefore, should not be used outside trials or national emergency use programs.

“Recent studies have reported serious, in some cases fatal, heart rhythm problems with chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine, particularly when taken at high doses or in combination with the antibiotic azithromycin,” read a statement by the Amsterdam-based EMA.

The drugs could also cause low blood sugar, liver and kidney problems as well as nerve cell damage that can lead to seizures.

The statement came days after the largest study on drugs, commissioned by the US government, found that the two drugs had no effects on the virus and instead, hydroxychloroquine was associated with more deaths among the patients.

Trump also doubled down on his claim that sunlight kills the coronavirus, with his vice president Mike Pence saying there was “encouraging” news about how “heat and sunlight” affect the virus. However, such a claim has been rejected by experts, including, Deborah Birx, one of Trump’s coronavirus task force members.

So far, the coronavirus has affected more than 878,000 people in the US and killed over 49,700 across the country.

Source: Presstv

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Thursday that the coronavirus pandemic is “a human crisis that is fast becoming a human rights crisis.”

The U.N. chief said in a video message that there is discrimination in the delivery of public services to tackle COVID-19 and there are “structural inequalities that impede access to them.”

Guterres said the pandemic has also seen “disproportionate effects on certain communities, the rise of hate speech, the targeting of vulnerable groups, and the risks of heavy-handed security responses undermining the health response.”

He warned that with “rising ethno-nationalism, populism, authoritarianism and a push back against human rights in some countries, the crisis can provide a pretext to adopt repressive measures for purposes unrelated to the pandemic.”

In February, Guterres issued a call to action to countries, businesses and people to help renew and revive human rights across the globe, laying out a seven-point plan amid concerns about climate change, conflict and repression.

“As I said then, human rights cannot be an afterthought in times of crisis — and we now face the biggest international crisis in generations,” he said.

The secretary-general said he was releasing a report Thursday on how human rights must guide the response to the virus and recovery from the pandemic. Neither he nor the report name any countries or parties responsible for human rights violations.

Guterres said governments must be “transparent, responsive and accountable,” and stressed that press freedom, civil society organizations, the private sector and “civic space” are essential.

The report said governments also need to take action to mitigate the worst impacts of COVID-19 on jobs, livelihoods, access to basic services and family life.

Guterres said any emergency measures — including states of emergency — must be “legal, proportionate, necessary and non-discriminatory, have a specific focus and duration, and take the least intrusive approach possible to protect public health.”

“Emergency powers may be needed but broad executive powers, swiftly granted with minimal oversight, carry risks,” the report warned. “Heavy-handed security responses undermine the health response and can exacerbate existing threats to peace and security or create new ones.”

The report said the best response is proportionate to the immediate threat and protects human rights.

“The message is clear: People — and their rights — must be front and center,” Guterres said.

Source: AP

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards chief on Thursday warned the US of a “decisive response” after President Donald Trump said he ordered the US Navy to destroy Iranian boats that harass American ships in the Gulf.

Iran and the United States have appeared to be on the brink of an all-out confrontation twice in the past year.

Decades-old acrimony between the two sides worsened in 2018 when Trump unilaterally withdrew from a deal that gave Iran relief from sanctions in return for curbs on its nuclear programme.

Tensions escalated further in January when a US air strike killed Qasem Soleimani, the top Iranian general who headed the Guards’ foreign arm, the Quds Force.

“We declare to the Americans that we are absolutely determined and serious… and that all action will be met with a decisive response that will be efficient and quick,” Major General Hossein Salami said.

“We have also ordered our naval units to target (US boats and forces) if they try to endanger the safety of our ships or boats of war.”

The latest confrontation between the arch-foes came after the United States accused Iran of harassing its ships in the Gulf last week.

Trump took to Twitter on Wednesday as the Guards said they had launched the Islamic republic’s first military satellite.

The US president said he had “instructed the United States Navy to shoot down and destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at sea”.

In response, Iran on Thursday summoned the Swiss ambassador to Tehran that represents US interests in the Islamic republic, state media said.

Salami said last week’s maritime incident was the result of “unprofessional and dangerous behaviour by the Americans in the Persian Gulf”.

The Guards commander also indicated that US actions in the sensitive waterway had been affected by an outbreak of the novel coronavirus.

“In last week’s incident, there was operational turmoil and disorder among US naval units at sea,” said Salami.

This, he added, was an indication that the “command and control of their military units may have been weakened by… the coronavirus disease”.

Iran and the United States are among the countries hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

– ‘Cruel’ US sanctions –

Tehran called Thursday for Washington to be held accountable for the sanctions that have hampered its efforts to fight the coronavirus outbreak.

The Iranian health ministry said 90 new deaths in the past 24 hours took the country’s overall coronavirus death toll to 5,481.

“Today, the coronavirus has spread not only in Iran but in almost all countries, and it requires serious effort and collective action to deal with it,” said Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi.

“In addition to fighting the virus, Iran faces illegal and inhuman American sanctions, doubling the pressure on the Iranian people,” he said, quoted by his ministry.

“It is the right of the Iranian people to have access to their financial resources to fight the disease and to counter its economic consequences,” said Araghchi.

“The United States’ cruel and unilateral sanctions against Iran constitute a clear violation of Security Council Resolution 2231, and the United States must therefore be held accountable by the international community.”

Medicines and medical equipment are technically exempt from the US sanctions but purchases are frequently blocked by the unwillingness of banks to process purchases for fear of incurring heavy US penalties.

Iran’s coronavirus outbreak first emerged in the Shiite holy city of Qom on February 19.

Health ministry spokesman Kianoush Jahanpour announced 1,030 new cases of coronavirus infection on Thursday, taking the country’s total to 87,026.

Source:  AFP

Arab countries in the Persian Gulf region have locked down over-crowded labor camps and areas with large populations of low-wage workers in an attempt to curb the spread of the new coronavirus, leaving migrant workers stranded and jobless.

The over-crowded labor camps in the region, often unsanitary and populated with mostly Asian workers, are believed to be hotspots of the new coronavirus.

In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), charity groups are looking for empty buildings to separate migrant workers, while Bahrain is repurposing closed schools to relocate low-income laborers from other overcrowded accommodation.

The deadly virus has also spread in densely-populated commercial districts where many expatriates share housing to save on rent.

“Many people are infected and are staying with other people,” Krishna Kumar, the president of the UAE-based Kerala Social Center, said on Wednesday. “We are trying to isolate them.”

Despite measures being taken to contain the spread of coronavirus, such as suspending passenger flights, closing most public venues, and imposing curfews, the number of coronavirus cases in the Arab states has been rising.

Doctors in the UAE, who spoke with Reuters on the condition of anonymity, said overcrowding is one of the biggest factors for the surge in cases.

Several Persian Gulf Arab states have allowed outbound flights for foreign workers who have lost jobs or been put on leave, but some of the home countries say they are not prepared to take them back.

On Sunday, the UAE threatened to review labor ties with countries that refuse to allow workers who have lost their jobs to be repatriated. The UAE said it would limit quotas for work visas issued to the citizens of those countries.

The new coronavirus, which causes a respiratory disease known as COVID-19, emerged in the city of Wuhan in December last year, incrementally affecting the rest of the world.

The virus has so far infected 2,000,065 people worldwide, and over 126,754 have died, according to a running count by worldometers.info.

The UAE, which has the second largest number of coronavirus cases after Saudi Arabia in the Persian Gulf, has so far recorded more than 4,933 confirmed cases and 28 deaths.

Source: Presstv

New York City, the hardest hit U.S. city in the coronavirus pandemic, revised its official COVID-19 death toll sharply higher to more than 10,000 on Tuesday to include victims presumed to have perished from the disease but never tested.

The new cumulative figure for “confirmed and probable COVID-19 deaths” released by the New York City Health Department marked a staggering increase of over 3,700 deaths formally attributed to the highly contagious illness since March 11.

The 60 percent spike in reported deaths underscored the enormous losses endured in the nation’s most populous city, where the sounds of wailing sirens have echoed almost non-stop through largely empty streets for weeks.

The city’s revised count, 10,367 in all, raised the number of coronavirus deaths nationwide to more than 28,300 – New York accounting for the biggest share of deaths.

With only a tiny fraction of the U.S. population tested for coronavirus, the number of known infections climbed to more than 600,000 as of Tuesday, according to a running Reuters tally.

U.S. public health authorities have generally only attributed deaths to COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus, when patients tested positive for the virus.

New York City’s Health Department said it will now also count any fatality deemed a “probable” coronavirus death, defined as a victim whose “death certificate lists as a cause of death ‘COVID-19’ or an equivalent.”

March 11 was used as the starting point because that was the date of the first confirmed coronavirus death, the city said.

“Behind every death is a friend, a family member, a loved one,” said Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot. “We are focused on ensuring that every New Yorker who died because of COVID-19 gets counted.”

The new approach in New York City could pave the way for similar policies across the country, possibly leading to a surge in the US number of reported coronavirus deaths.

Even before Tuesday’s revision in New York City, the number of new U.S. deaths on Tuesday had reached at least 2,228, the highest toll yet in a single 24-hour period.

‘Not a comfortable place’

Louisiana, another coronavirus hot spot, and California also reported record daily spikes in deaths on Tuesday, despite tentative signs across the country in recent days the outbreak was beginning to ebb.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose state’s healthcare network was strained to breaking point by a wave of COVID-19 hospitalisations, had said on Monday it appeared “the worst is over.”

Health officials have cautioned that death figures are a lagging indicator of the outbreak, coming after the most severely ill patients fall sick, and do not mean stay-at-home restrictions are failing to curb transmissions.

New York state and some other hard-hit areas continue to report sharp decreases in hospitalisations and numbers of patients on ventilators, although front-line healthcare workers and resources remained under extraordinary stress.

“The plateau is not a very comfortable place to live,” David Reich, president of New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, said in a telephone interview. “So I don’t think people should be celebrating prematurely.”

That cautious note was also sounded by President Donald Trump’s top infectious diseases adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who said Trump’s May 1 target for restarting the economy was “overly optimistic”.

Fauci, echoing many governors, said in an Associated Press interview that health officials must first be able to test for the virus quickly, isolate new cases and track down new infections.

At his daily White House briefing later in the day, Trump said he was close to completing a plan for ending America’s coronavirus shutdown, which has thrown millions out of work, and may forge ahead with restarting the battered U.S. economy in some parts of the country even before May 1.

The president took renewed aim at the World Health Organization at the briefing, saying he has instructed his administration to halt U.S. funding to the Geneva-based institution over its handling of the pandemic.

Mutiny on the bounty

Trump, a Republican who before the outbreak touted a vibrant economy as a pillar of his Nov. 3 re-election bid, earlier lashed out at Democratic state governors, after Cuomo said he would refuse any presidential order to reopen the economy too soon.

“Tell the Democrat Governors that ‘Mutiny On The Bounty’ was one of my all time favorite movies,” Trump wrote on Twitter on Tuesday, referring to a classic film about an 18th-century rebellion against the commanding officer of a British naval vessel.

But Trump toned down his remarks at the White House briefing saying he would “authorize” governors – despite doubts from some experts that the presidency has such powers – to implement plans in their states at the appropriate time.

Cuomo, a Democrat, and governors of six other northeastern states have announced they are coordinating on a regional plan to gradually lift restrictions. The governors of California, Oregon and Washington formed a similar West Coast regional pact.

California Governor Gavin Newsom and Oregon Governor Kate Brown, both Democrats, on Tuesday offered frameworks for eventually restarting public life and business in their states.

Some Republicans, including the governors of Ohio, Maryland and New Hampshire, also said states have the right to decide when and how to reopen.

(REUTERS)

A spike in racial discrimination in China prompted by fears over the Covid-19 pandemic has led some in the African diapora to reevaluate the relationship between the African continent and Beijing.

Over the past week, footage has been published on social media showing Africans in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou being evicted from their apartments, refused access to hotels or restaurants, and being forced to sleep on the streets. These incidents occurred ostensibly as part of efforts to halt the spread of Covid-19 in the country but have led to a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and African nations.

The images sparked outrage across Africa, with the hashtag #chinamustexplain trending on Twitter and Chinese ambassadors being summoned by irate officials in Nigeria and Ghana, to name but a few. African ambassadors in China wrote to the foreign minister this week over what they called the “stigmatisation and discrimination” being faced by their citizens.

Beijing initially chose to dismiss and deny the accounts of unfair treatment.

“We do not have discrimination in China against African brothers,” foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Monday. He then accused the United States of trying to exploit the issue to undermine China’s relations with Africa. The statement came after a group of African ambassadors in Beijing expressed concern over numerous reports of Africans being forced into quarantine or being singled out for scrutiny by health authorities.

The tone then appeared to soften, as China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi spoke on the phone with Moussa Faki Mahamat, the chairperson of the African Union Commission, with Wang assuring Mahamat that measures were being taken to improve the situation of Africans in Guanghzou. Mahamat later described the relationship between China and Africa in a tweet as being “strong and brotherly”. It now appears that most of the displaced Africans in Guangzhou have found places to stay and that city authorities are engaging in consultations with the African community as well as academics to repair the relationship.

On Monday, ambassadors and envoys from more than 20 African nations met with China’s assistant minister of foreign affairs, Chen Xiaodong. Chen vowed to lift the health measures aimed at African residents except for those with confirmed cases of Covid-19, AFP reported.  

Over the past 20 years, China has become an increasingly influential presence on the continent as Africa’s natural resources have helped fuel the country’s meteoric economic development. According to data from Johns Hopkins University, the Chinese government as well as its banks and companies have lent some $143 billion to Africa between 2000 and 2017, often to finance large infrastructure projects. Recent estimates put the number of Chinese citizens currently residing in Africa at one million while some 200,000 Africans live and work in China.

But for some within the African diaspora, the events of the past week have signaled a change in how they view the China-Africa relationship. Nillah Nyakoa, a Kenyan citizen who has been living in China since 2009 and who works for China Radio International, told FRANCE 24 that the events of the past few weeks might change her view on her host country as imbalances in the relationship come to the fore.

“I’ve called China home for so many years, my narrative has always been about pushing a positive image about China because of my experiences. But when I see my fellow African people being treated as second-class citizens, obviously it makes me want to change my mind.”

“We give good treatment to Chinese people in Africa and it’s not being reciprocated,” she added.

For Samantha Sibanda, the founder of the Appreciate Africa Network, this discrimination has always been present. Her organisation has been trying to counteract the negative perception of Africans in China since 2013 and organises an annual Pride of Africa Asia Award to promote the achievements of her fellow Africans in China.

“People are blowing things out of proportion; this is not new for me,” she said. “This is what we go through every other day.” She cites the difficulty Africans face in obtaining visas or securing equal pay, and said these difficulties will remain even once the pandemic is over.

As for the recent incidents, she said African governments – which have a responsibility to defend the interests of their citizens in China – and media coverage are both to blame.

“Chinese people are never shown Africans doing well in China,” Sibanda said.

Source: France 24

China has rejected accusations that it is discriminating against Africans amid the COVID-19 epidemic in the country.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian emphasized during a daily briefing on Monday that all individuals in the country, including “African brothers,” were being treated as equals.

The Chinese official rejected accusations by American and African officials about the alleged mistreatment of black people in in China in the middle of the coronavirus epidemic, particularly in the southern city of Guangzhou.

He said accusations that Beijing was racially discriminating in its measures to prevent the spread of the disease were an abortive attempt by the US to harm China’s growing relations with African countries.

China treats all foreigners equally, Zhao insisted.

A US Embassy security alert on Saturday claimed that Chinese “police ordered bars and restaurants not to serve clients who appear to be of African origin,” and local officials launched mandatory testing and self-quarantine for “anyone with African contacts.”

It had allegedly been rumored that some infected Africans had ignored quarantine measures and gone to a family restaurant, infecting both the owner and his eight-year-old son, who later died due to complications from the infection.

The police and public health bureau in Guangzhou told reporters that officials had responded to rumors that “300,000 black people in Guangzhou were setting off a second epidemic.”

In related news, the Chinese Embassy in Zimbabwe dismissed the accusation that Africans were being targeted and mistreated in the country.

While acknowledging that there had been some incidents, it pointed out that highlighting the events could be detrimental to bilateral relations.

“It is harmful to sensationalize isolated incidents,” it said in a Twitter statement. “China treats all individuals in the country, Chinese and foreign alike, as equals.”

Over 1.84 million people are diagnosed with COVID-19 across the globe, and 114,090 others have died according to the latest data collected by Johns Hopkins University.

China, where the virus first emerged, has brought its epidemic under control, while essentially the rest of the world continues to grapple with rising cases.

Source: Presstv