‘Don Quixote-like quest’: Ukraine attack and easing Covid mandates leave US trucker protest on the fringe

Trucks and cars in support of the “people’s convoy” heading to south on Interstate 81. Photograph: Aimee Dilger/SOPA Images/REX/Shutterstock

The convoy, which set out to ‘clog the streets’ has had too few vehicles to make an impact on traffic

Sergio Olmos in Lupton, Arizona
Sun 27 Feb 2022 

Ryan Wright stood around a campfire in Lupton, Arizona, a town on the Navajo reservation where members of an American trucker convoy protest were resting for the night. As the fire flickered he discussed a conspiracy myth about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, he proffered, was a distraction. “I’m not the only one that feels this way,” Wright said. “But I feel like it’s a big fat smokescreen to keep everyone distracted on what is really going on in the world.”


National guard troops to be deployed in DC as trucker convoy protests loom

Certainly the break out of a new land war in Europe had dealt Wright and his fellow trucker protestors a serious blow. Their attempt to replicate the Canadian trucker protests – which had closed borders and brought chaos to Canada’s capital city – had won wide support from Republican politicians, Fox News and rightwing social media.

Surely, the same could happen in the US, whose political divides are so much starker than Canada’s.

But Putin’s invasion had wiped the convoy’s progress off the media map. Having left Barstow in California amid honking horns and cheering supporters, the line of truckers was crossing the entire breadth of the US in a convoy and headed to Washington DC to protest Covid-19 vaccine mandates and a roster of other mostly conservative causes.

But now – with Ukraine dominating airwaves across the globe – no one was paying much attention to the American truckers. Especially, perhaps, as the convoy was promoting “freedom” against restrictions in the US that have largely been lifted already as the pandemic has ebbed recently and weary politicians have focused on the economy.

Another trucker, wearing an American and Canadian flag as a cape, nodded in agreement with Wright that it was all a plot. Others around the campfire too agree with the conspiracy myth that the outbreak of war in Europe is an attempt to divert attention away from this trucker convoy, which is currently about a couple hundred people parked in the desert of the American southwest.
People gather to rally with truckers at the start of the ‘people’s convoy’ protest against Covid vaccine and mask mandates. Photograph: Patrick T Fallon/AFP/Getty Images

Around a hundred cars and several dozen semi-trucks that made up “the people’s convoy” had left California midweek with the aim of arriving in Washington just after Joe Biden’s delivery of the annual State of the Union speech on Tuesday night. Mindful of the possibility of a repeat of the chaos in Canada, the Pentagon had approved the deployment of 700 National Guard and 50 tactical vehicles to bolster Capitol police ahead of their expected arrival.

But in the long distances the convoy has so far driven across the vast expanses of the American West, the convoy has had too few vehicles to make an impact on traffic or “clog up cities”, as right-wing Senator Rand Paul had declared he hoped they would.

In the western United States, where most people drive cars rather than use public transportation, far larger queues of vehicles have been seen at the opening of an In-N-Out burger, for example.

Most US states have also already rescinded many pandemic restrictions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced last week they would lift their recommendation for many Americans when it came to wearing masks. Now most Americans live in places where healthy people, including school kids, can go mask-free.

Meanwhile, despite the truckers’ ire, America’s vaccine mandates, like the one Biden proposed, were never implemented after being struck down by the US courts. In the end, vaccine mandates were only put in place for certain healthcare workers participating in federal programs.

But around the blazing campfire in Lupton the nation-wide easing of restrictions had not deterred the demonstrators. Some kept their distorted views of mandates that did not exist or simply did not believe Covid-19 was killing as many people as reported.

The convoy is headed for Washington DC, and is expected to arrive on 5 March. Photograph: Patrick T Fallon/AFP/Getty Images

“I haven’t got my shot and I don’t want to, there’s nothing wrong with me,” said Harrison Yazzie a member of the Diné Nation, the traditional name for the Navajo, and a local resident that came to greet the convoy. “But every day they say ‘Oh this many people got Covid, that many got Covid.’ But where I live, among the native people I don’t see no sirens, you know, running back and forth picking up people dying of Covid.”

The facts say otherwise. Reporting by Native American news website IndianZ found that “in mid-2020, the Navajo Nation had the highest per-capita infection rate of Covid-19 in the US”. Though those rates have dropped as tribal leaders have promoted vaccines and encouraged masks.

But not everyone was despondent or seeing conspiracy. Some saw the chance for comradeship and a road trip.

After the 300 mile journey from the previous stop in Kingman, Arizona, some locals who came to greet the convoy prepared a dinner of shredded elk barbecue and fry bread. Melissa Applin said she had never been to anything like this before. “It’s beautiful, it’s freedom I love it. I’ve made new friends.” Applin drove two and a half hours from her home to meet the convoy. “I’ve been helping cooking and smoking meats,” she said.

Others were less bothered by the pandemic and more bothered by other American politics.

For some, this convoy was just the latest in a series of demonstrations springing from their support for Donald Trump. Eric, who declined to provide a last name, said he attended multiple rallies for Trump and “Stop the Steal” rallies in the aftermath of the 2020 election. He is convinced – wrongly – that the election was stolen and the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol was “staged”.

Security around the US Capitol has increased ahead of next week’s State of the Union speech. Photograph: Shawn Thew/EPA

But despite some of the far-right and conspiratorial views of convoy participants, the demonstration has been peaceful with no indication it will escalate toward violence. Organizers have made an effort to exclude the violent elements like the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers militia which have been promoting the convoy on some far-right tech platforms.

The harsh, sometimes hateful attitudes found in these online groups, were often softened around the campfire in the cold Arizona desert. In many ways the convoy seemed to mostly reflect a real thirst for community, as people with like-minded politics found themselves connecting on other things – like camping beneath the stars.

Eric brought his 14-year-old son Wyatt, who also declined to provide a last name, on the road for the convoy. The father and son duo have attended Trump rallies together and said they enjoy spending time together this way. Asked what it was like attending political protests with his dad, Wyatt responded: “Its fucking awesome.”

But there is no getting away from the fact that the journey of the truckers – far from being a threat to anyone – is more of a Don Quixote-like quest tilting at rightwing windmills in their own minds. After all, in the 550 miles they’ve traveled so far, none of the gas stations, restaurants or hotels along the route have asked for their vaccine status or required masks indoors.

Do three new studies add up to proof of COVID-19’s origin in a Wuhan animal market?

Preprints unlikely to end debate over how SARS-CoV-2 began the pandemic, but some scientists say lab-leak hypothesis has taken a “blow”

28 FEB 2022
BYJON COHEN

Three new studies build the case that COVID-19 originated at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China.

AP PHOTO/DAKE KANG

Three new studies offer one indisputable conclusion about the origin of SARS-CoV-2: Despite the passage of 2 years and the Chinese government’s lack of transparency, data that can shed light on the pandemic’s greatest mystery still exist. And although these new analyses don’t all reach the same conclusion for how COVID-19 was sparked, each undercuts the theory that the virus somehow escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, long a focus of suspicions.

The studies examine different aspects of the viral spread at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China, the city where the first cases were detected. Two international efforts build the case that SARS-CoV-2 jumped to people from infected animals—a zoonotic leap—at the market, likely twice, at the end of 2019. A third, largely Chinese effort details early signs of the coronavirus in environmental and animal samples from the market but suggests the virus was imported there, perhaps from outside the country—a conclusion the University of Arizona’s Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist who is a corresponding author of the two international studies, calls “a huge disconnect.”

The studies were posted as preprints and are not peer reviewed, but scientists, biosecurity experts, journalists, and others are already intensely examining their details. “I have been brought closer to the zoonosis side with these preprints,” says Flo Débarre, an evolutionary biologist at the French national research agency, CNRS, who has followed the origin debate closely and not thrown her lot with either the natural-origin or the lab-leak camp. Evolutionary biologist William Hanage of Harvard University agrees these studies “will be taken as a blow” to the lab-leak hypothesis. “They substantially move the needle on the origins in the direction of the market,” Hanage says.

Skeptics of the natural origin theory maintain the market cluster could merely be a superspreader event touched off when a person infected with a lab-escaped coronavirus visited it. But Worobey thinks further data could make that contention even less tenable. A more transparent analysis of the market’s genetic sampling data, in particular, might identify exactly which species of animals sold there carried the virus.

In one study, Worobey and colleagues describe two subtly different lineages of SARS-CoV-2 that were found in people at the Huanan Seafood Market in late 2019, which they take as a sign that the virus jumped twice from animals to humans there. Their other study offers a geospatial analysis of the earliest human cases that pinpoints the market as the “epicenter” of SARS-CoV-2’s emergence, showing both lineages infected people who had links to the market or lived near it. It also connects the specific stalls at the market where live animals were sold to environmental samples known to have tested positive for the virus. “Together, these analyses provide dispositive evidence for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 via the live wildlife trade and identify the Huanan market as the unambiguous epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic,” they conclude.

Worobey and colleagues had hoped to release their preprints in the next week but sped up their plans, choosing a preprint server that posts without any delays, when the Chinese study was posted on 25 February on the Research Square site. Led by George Gao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and co-authored by 37 other scientists (one is from Canada), that research—which builds on data earlier leaked to the media but never officially published—offers the most detailed description yet of the environmental samples the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention obtained at the Huanan Seafood Market between 1 January and 2 March 2020.

In the new preprint, Gao and colleagues analyzed 1380 samples from 188 animals in the market and the environment, including sewer wells, the ground, feather removing machines, and “containers.” They found SARS-CoV-2 in 73 samples. But because all were from the environment, not the animals themselves, they assert that humans introduced the virus to the market. The authors call the market an “amplifier,” not the source, of SARS-CoV-2.

Hewing closely to government assertions on COVID-19’s origin, the preprint by Gao and colleagues notes studies that have reported evidence of SARS-CoV-2 in other countries before it surfaced in Wuhan, making no mention of critiques that attribute that evidence to contamination. It also floats a widely disputed theory that frozen food imported to China might have been the original source. (Authors of the paper, including Gao, did not respond to requests to discuss the work.)

The coronavirus lineage analysis from Worobey and colleagues refines an argument posited by virologist Robert Garry last year. In data on the early human cases, Garry had identified two different forms of SARS-CoV-2, differing by just two mutations, which he argued surfaced at different Wuhan markets in December 2019. The new work, which includes Garry as a co-author and cites evidence from the Gao study, reshapes that scenario significantly. It concludes that both lineages, dubbed A and B, originated at the Huanan Seafood Market and soon spread in nearby neighborhoods. B likely jumped from animals to humans in late November 2019, leading to the first detected case on 10 December, and lineage A a few weeks later, the group concludes. Either way, the team argues the almost simultaneous emergence of two lineages challenges the lab-origin thesis, as it would require two different viruses leaking at roughly the same time. (Gao and colleagues also found both SARS-CoV-2 lineages in their environmental samples.)

The second preprint from the international team builds on a June 2021 Chinese-led study that spent 2 years documenting a tick fever disease in mammals for sale at a specific stall in the market. The new study pinpoints for the first time where species susceptible to SARS-CoV-2—including raccoon dogs, hedgehogs, badgers, red foxes, and bamboo rats—were sold and maps those sites to the positive environmental samples, including in one “container” the authors believe was a cage. “To anyone who really grasps what is in all of those three papers, I think it’s very hard to dismiss that this is a very, very, very strong case that this pandemic started at that market,” Worobey says.

Others say they are not definitive. “They are interesting studies, but I don’t think they close the case on what happened with the origins of the virus,” says Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center who has criticized colleagues for too blithely dismissing the lab-origin hypothesis. “I’m especially skeptical of the conclusion that there must have been two zoonotic jumps.”

He notes that in about 10% of human transmissions of SARS-CoV-2, the virus acquires two mutations, which means a second lineage could have emerged after the infection of the first human rather than two zoonotic jumps. Worobey, Garry, and colleagues did a computer simulation that challenges Bloom’s assertion. They modeled what would have happened if there was an introduction of a single lineage and compared that with the viruses sequenced from Wuhan cases through 23 January 2020. By matching the sequence data from the actual epidemic, they found there was only a 3.6% chance that a single lineage mutated into a second one.

The environmental samples from the Wuhan market that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 might resolve the stalemate over the virus’ origin if they can reveal a specific animal source of the virus. “If you find a positive sample with, say, lots of raccoon dog DNA, you’ve got a hit,” on the likely source of SARS-CoV-2, says evolutionary biologist David Robertson of the University of Glasgow, who co-authored the epicenter paper.

But the preprint by Gao and colleagues only notes that those samples contain DNA from many animals without specifying which one—other than humans. “The authors have already done the analysis, they have just not put all the results needed to interpret them in their paper,” says evolutionary biologist Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh, a co-author of both studies. “This will undoubtedly be fixed if the paper gets through peer review.”

Still, Worobey and his co-authors concede, even that evidence might not be enough to end this polarizing debate. “With the way that people have been able to just push aside any and all evidence that points away from a lab leak, I do fear that even if there were evidence from one of these samples that was full of red fox DNA and SARS-CoV-2 that people might say, ‘We still think it actually came from the handler of that red fox,’” Worobey says.

Nvidia hit by cyberattack so they hack the hackers as revenge

Michael Beckwith

METRO UK

Monday 28 Feb 2022 

It’s not often you hear about the hackers being hacked (pic: Nvidia)

After being hit by a ransomware attack, Nvidia has allegedly done the same against the hackers responsible.

It’s barely been six months since Nvidia’s GeForce Now database was datamined, revealing a giant list of supposed upcoming PC releases (a list which is proven more accurate with each passing month). Now, the company has suffered a far more severe data breach

The Telegraph originally reported that Nvidia had been the victim of a ransomware attack, with Nvidia only later confirming that it had actually happened.

While Bloomberg’s sources say the attack was minor in scope and unrelated to the Ukraine-Russia war, it’s believed that a ransomware gang known as Lapsus$ is responsible.

The group itself has claimed as much and, according to HotHardware, says it has stolen 1TB of Nvidia files, including employee passwords and source code. Lapsus$ is threatening to release the data if its demands, namely an unspecified sum of money, aren’t met.

In a surprising turn of events, Lapsus$ itself then suffered a ransomware attack of its own, one which tried to delete the stolen data. The attempt didn’t quite work as Lapsus$ says it has a back-up, but what’s shocking is that the group believes Nvidia was responsible and hacked them back in retaliation.

Lapsus$ is, hilariously, incensed by this and calls Nvidia ‘criminals’ and ‘scum,’ which isn’t so much throwing stones in glass houses but rolling an Indiana Jones style boulder through one.

Nvidia, obviously, hasn’t addressed the accusation or admitted to do anything. It actually hasn’t said much about the ransomware attack at all so far, besides a brief statement that really seems to downplay the incident.

‘We are investigating an incident. Our business and commercial activities continue uninterrupted. We are still working to evaluate the nature and scope of the event and don’t have any additional information to share at this time,’ says Nvidia spokesman Hector Marinez.

Cyberattack forces Toyota to suspend vehicle production in JapanOne of its major suppliers was reportedly hit.

S. Dent
@stevetdent
March 1st, 2022

Tomohiro Ohsumi via Getty Images

Toyota has reportedly halted vehicle production at all its plants in Japan following a cyberattack against a major supplier, Nikkei has reported. "Due to a system failure at a domestic supplier (Kojima Industries Corporation), we have decided to suspend the operation of 28 lines at 14 plants in Japan on Tuesday, March 1st," Toyota wrote on its global website.

Kojima supplies both exterior and interior parts, including components used in its air-conditioning system and steering wheel. The parts weren't affected but Kojima was reportedly unable to communicate with Toyota or monitor production. The issue affected Toyota's "just in time" manufacturing system that requires parts be delivered just before they're installed so they don't have to be stocked.

Toyota didn't mention a cyberattack on its website, but Kojima confirmed the issue. "It is true that we have been hit by some kind of cyberattack. We are still confirming the damage and we are hurrying to respond, with the top priority of resuming Toyota's production system as soon as possible," a Kojima official told Nikkei.

Two other Toyota partners were reportedly hit, including truck manufacturer Hino Motors and Daihatsu Motor. The origins of the cyberattack, type of malware and other details have not been revealed. Toyota didn't say when it expects to restart the manufacturing lines, but the Japanese government is reportedly involved in the investigation.

SOTU
Axios-Ipsos poll: Biden gets little credit for COVID recovery

Margaret Talev

Data: Axios/Ipsos poll; Chart: Will Chase/Axios


Americans are abandoning COVID-19 fears and precautions, a sea change in the past few weeks as severe illnesses fell, states dropped mandates and the CDC relaxed guidelines, according to the latest installment of the Axios/Ipsos Coronavirus Index.

Why it matters: As President Biden gives his State of the Union address tonight, more people feel the worst is behind them — but they aren't giving him credit. That's a devastating miss for a leader who won election on his promises to move the nation beyond the pandemic.

Just 35% of respondents said the Biden administration has done an excellent or good job jumpstarting the economy and supporting American small business.

It's also underwater on communicating clearly with Americans, protecting frontline health workers and supporting workers.

58% said the administration did an excellent or good job on supporting vaccine development and distribution — but that's the only measure where its approval ratings are above 50%.

Data: Axios/Ipsos poll; Chart: Will Chase/Axios

Between the lines: Just 43% of respondents now say they trust Biden to provide them with accurate information about the virus, down from 54% a year ago.

That's still nearly twice as high as the 24% who say they trust former President Trump.
But Biden isn't running against Trump anymore — he's running against his expectations, and, by extension, so are the Democrats on this year's ballot.

By the numbers: Two-thirds of Americans now say they believe the country is moving toward a time when the virus will no longer disrupt daily life.

Just 40% now say returning to their normal pre-coronavirus lives is risky, a 16-point drop from our last survey in early February and the lowest share since July.

Notably, only 55% of Democrats now see a return to normal as risky. That's high compared with 21% of Republicans and 38%, but it represents an important shift given that Democrats have been the most worried about COVID risk throughout our surveys.
64% of overall respondents said they're concerned about the virus or another outbreak, down from 73% and the lowest since June.

Only 32% say they're wearing a mask at all times outside the home; 41% said they're social distancing, down from 51%; 63% said they're visiting friends and family outside the home, up from 50%; and 61% have gone out to eat in the past week, up from 52%.

About one in five said that in the past few weeks, their employers have asked those working remotely to start coming back to the office.

52% said their employers are still requiring masks at work, down from 59% three weeks ago and the lowest share since last summer.

36% said their state or local governments were requiring masking in public places, down from 46% at the start of this month and the lowest since August.

What they're saying: "COVID has really been an incumbency buzzsaw," said Cliff Young, president of Ipsos U.S. Public Affairs. "That doesn't mean incumbents won't win. But they're getting inbound from their constituencies."

Biden won the 2020 election on the pandemic, Young said. "So in a relative sense, his central pillar is really fragile."

In Americans' minds, Biden "wasn’t able to resolve the most important thing to them, which was a return to normalcy," Young said. "It happened way after we thought it was going to happen."

The flip side, said Ipsos senior vice president Chris Jackson, is that "there is a lot of data suggesting the American public has very much moved past COVID" and "the worst of the pandemic is seen as being in the rear view mirror."

"The elimination of COVID from the agenda probably reduces some of the pressures Biden is dealing with," Jackson said. "It helps get his base back behind him."

Methodology: This Axios/Ipsos Poll was conducted Feb. 25-28 by Ipsos' KnowledgePanel®. This poll is based on a nationally representative probability sample of 1,030 general population adults age 18 or older.

The margin of sampling error is ±3.2 percentage points at the 95% confidence level, for results based on the entire sample of adults.

SOTU
Nearly half of 500m free Covid tests Biden made available still unclaimed


White House sees program as a more elastic testing infrastructure that will accommodate surges and remain on standby

Free Covid-19 at-home antigen rapid tests at a library in Silver Spring, Maryland. 

Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA

Associated Press in Washington
Sun 27 Feb 2022 

Nearly half of 500m free Covid-19 tests the Biden administration made available to the US public have not been claimed, as cases plummet.

Wild demand swings have been a subplot in the pandemic, from vaccines to hand sanitizer and tests. On the first day of the White House test giveaway in January, the covidtests.gov website received more than 45m orders. Now officials say fewer than 100,000 orders a day are coming in for packages of four free rapid tests per household, delivered by the US Postal Service.

Still, the White House sees the program as a step toward a more elastic testing infrastructure that will accommodate surges and remain on standby.

“We totally intend to sustain this market,” said Dr Tom Inglesby, testing adviser to the Covid-19 response team. “We know the market is volatile and will come up and down with surges in variants.”

The White House says Americans have placed 68m orders for tests, which leaves about 46% of stock still available. Testing will become more important with mask requirements easing, some experts say.

On Sunday, the governor of one of the most populous states, New York, announced an end to a school mask mandate next week. New rules effective from Wednesday will apply to children two years and older in childcare facilities. New York has 2.7 million schoolchildren, including about 1 million in New York City.

Dr Leana Wen, a former Baltimore health commissioner, said: “If infection control is still our priority, testing is central. Four tests per household for one family will only last you one time. There should be enough tests for families to test twice a week.”

Private insurers are required to cover eight free rapid tests per person, per month. Medicare coverage will start in the spring. The administration has also been making free at-home tests available through libraries, clinics and other community venues.

Capacity for more accurate PCR tests performed by labs has been built. The White House recently put out a request to industry for ideas on how to sustain and expand domestic testing this year.

Wen said people still need a guide for when to test and how often.

Joe Biden’s pivot to testing came under duress as the Omicron variant gained force before Christmas. Tests were hard to come by and expensive. The White House is sensitive to criticism that help may have come too late.

“There is no question some people found out they were positive from taking one of these tests and were able to keep other people from getting infected,” said Tim Manning, supply coordinator for the Covid-19 response team.

Around mid-December, White House officials began discussing how to make free tests available.

“A critical thing to us was that anything we did had to be done in a way did not create a shortage at retail to the general public,” Manning said.

The White House enlisted the Pentagon and parts of the health department that worked on the Trump administration effort to distribute vaccines. Logistics experts scoured the globe for tests. The postal service was designated to take and deliver orders.

That proved to be a good call, said Hana Schank, an expert on government technology projects with the New America thinktank. The postal service had a database of every address in the land and the means to deliver.

The project took less than a month to get ready, Manning said. “We said this is not online retail. This is emergency response, so we have go to as fast as possible.”

The administration targeted deliveries to low-income areas.

“We prioritized the processing of orders to the highest social vulnerability zip codes in the country,” Inglesby said.


CDC relaxing mask guidelines for more than 70% of US population

Denise Smith, executive director of the National Association of Community Health Workers, said the group was able to use its website to link more than 630,000 people to covidtests.gov.

Overall about 20% to 25% of the tests have gone to distressed areas, officials said. Now demand is way down, it is unclear what will happen to the White House giveaway. Allowing repeat orders is one possibility.

Smith says groups like hers should get any surplus.

“We know where the people are,” she said.

Lindsey Dawson of the Kaiser Family Foundation said the program’s legacy may lie in familiarizing people with testing.

“It may get someone comfortable with utilizing the tests, thinking about how they might use testing in their lives,” she said.

Covid’s first wave was deadliest of the three in UK care homes, figures show

The virus was involved in the deaths of 19,783 residents between March and September 2020, accounting for 23.2% of fatalities across the period, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Hospitals were condemned for discharging so many untested elderly patients back into care homes at the start of the pandemic in a bid to free up beds (Photo: Getty/Hugh Hastings)

By Paul Gallagher
Health Correspondent
February 28, 2022 8:02 pm

The first wave of the pandemic was the most fatal of the three in care homes in England, figures suggest, with Covid-19 involved in the deaths of almost 20,000 residents between March and September 2020.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, there have been 274,063 deaths of care home residents registered in England and Wales, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Of these, 45,632 involved Covid accounting for 16.7 per cent of all deaths of care home residents.

Total deaths of care home residents in England increased by 16.5 per cent between the first and second waves of the pandemic and decreased by 23.9 per cent between the second and third waves.

The proportion of deaths involving Covid was highest in the first wave when 19,783 residents died (23.2 per cent) and lowest in the third wave (2,707 – 3.6 per cent).

In July 2020, a group of MPs said the decision to allow hospital patients in England to be discharged to care homes without Covid-19 tests at the start of the pandemic was “reckless”.

The Public Accounts Committee said there had clearly been an “emerging problem” with official advice before it was “belatedly” changed in April that year and accused ministers of being slow to support social care during the crisis Around 25,000 patients were discharged into care homes in England between mid-March and mid-April 2020 to free up hospital beds.

There have been 45,632 deaths involving Covid of people living in care since the pandemic began, according to the data. The ONS said the term “involving Covid” referred to deaths in which Covid was listed anywhere on the death certificate – not just deaths where the virus was found to be a cause.

The first wave was defined as deaths registered from 14 March 2020 to 11 September 2020, while the second ran from 12 September that year to 11 June 2021. The third wave was from 12 June 2021 to 21 January 2022.

In England, the number of deaths also shot up 43.9 per cent higher than the five-year average in the first wave, but was lower in the second and third waves.

In Wales, the sharpest rise in Covid deaths was registered in the first wave but overall a higher proportion of deaths involved Covid in the second wave.

In both England and Wales, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease was the leading cause of death across all waves, except for male care home residents in the first wave in England where Covid was the leading cause of death (24.8 per cent). Covid was not one of the top three leading causes of death for care home residents in the third wave.

Caroline Abrahams, Charity Director at Age UK, said: “These statistics bring back painful memories of just how appalling the toll of death and serious illness was in care homes during the first Covid wave. There’s no doubt that as a country we were unprepared to cope with that scale of Sars-like infection, and during the early months of the pandemic policymakers did not know enough about what care homes do and who they help.”

She added: “As time went on there was much greater appreciation by Government, the NHS and others of how to protect care homes from Covid, and more tools became available to deal with it too, including PPE, testing and vaccination. However, we must never forget the lives that were lost in care homes during that first, terrible wave, and when the inquiry into the pandemic gets underway a key question must be how we can avoid anything so terrible ever happening again.”

AUSTRALIA

Media cuts 'impacting flood coverage'


Alex Mitchell
National
MARCH 1 2022 

An inquiry has been told that regional media job cuts have impacted coverage of the floods crisis.

Media coverage of crisis events like Australia's floods has been badly impacted by regional newsroom cuts, an inquiry has been told.

A parliamentary inquiry is examining the news media bargaining code created so media companies are paid fairly for content on Google and Facebook, along with how regional newspapers can remain viable.

But Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia vice-president Peter English said many stories from the recent floods featured "little value added through on-the-ground reporting", with so few regional towns covered by journalists.

"People are relying on social media for images, both images that are real and things that might not be real," he said.

"That may have impacted on the (flood-related) decisions they've made in terms of leaving their house or staying."

Dr English said there was little incentive for journalists to go to or stay in regional areas.

He recommended governments subsidise wages for journalists employed by local outlets and benefits if they continue to stay, while he also suggested tax cuts for regional outlets that maintain a local office.

"The employment of journalists who are embedded in local communities is essential," Dr English said.

"Only local reporters can understand how local issues impact on their local areas, not someone trying to report remotely."

The inquiry was told extra money from Google and Facebook allowed the ABC to create 50 new positions, including many in new small regional bureaus, but JERAA president Alex Wake said that was "just not enough".

She pointed to "quite gripping" and "brilliant" coverage of Lismore's floods, but said nearby towns were not being provided similar information.

"Just further north where there aren't local journalists located, coverage is not occurring," she said.

"It's great what's happening, but we need more jobs and more newsrooms across the country ... we need to encourage young people to stay in the regions and to have families and be there and be part of the community."

Australian Associated Press

Worst Australian floods in decades: 40,000 ordered to evacuate

Rod McGuirk,

 Mar 01 202

Tens of thousands were ordered to evacuate as heavy rains smashed Australia's east coast on Monday, submerging towns and stranding residents on rooftops.

Tens of thousands of people had been ordered to evacuate their homes by Tuesday and many more had been told to prepare to flee as parts of Australia’s southeast coast are inundated by the worst flooding in decades.

Scores of residents, some with pets, spent hours trapped on their rooves in recent days by a fast-rising river in the town of Lismore in northern New South Wales, and dozens of cars were trapped on a bridge in the nearby town of Woodburn over Monday night with both the bridge's approaches submerged.

QUEENSLAND FIRE AND EMERGENCY SERVICES/AP
Heavy rain is bringing record flooding to some east coast areas while the flooding in Brisbane, a population of 2.6 million, and its surrounds is the worst since 2011 when the city was inundated by what was described as a once-in-a-century event.

Up to 50 people were rescued from the bridge early Tuesday, officials said.

“We had no capabilities to get them off in the dark so we just had to make sure that they bunkered down and we went in this morning and got them all out,” Woodburn State Emergency Services Commander Ashley Slapp told the ABC.

The flood waters are moving south into New South Wales from Queensland state in the worst disaster in the region since what was described as a once-in-a-century event in 2011.

New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet said there had been 1000 rescues in his state by Tuesday and more than 6,000 calls for authorities to help.

Perrottet said 40,000 people had been ordered to evacuate, while 300,000 others had been placed under evacuation warnings.

“We’ll be doing everything ... we can to get everybody to safety and get these communities right across our state back on their feet as quickly as possible,” Perrottet told reporters in Sydney.

QUEENSLAND FIRE AND EMERGENCY SERVICES/AP
In this photo provided by the Fraser Coast Regional Council, water floods streets and buildings in Maryborough, Australia on February 28.

Government meteorologist Jonathan Howe described the amount of recent rainfall in northern New South Wales and southern Queensland as “astronomical.”

The death toll from the latest disaster remained at eight with all the fatalities in Queensland. The latest fatality was a man who was trapped in a car in flood water on Monday at Gold Coast city.

Queensland Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll said emergency services held grave concerns for a man aged in his 70s who fell from his moored yacht in the state capital Brisbane into a swollen river on Saturday and for a 76-year-old man who disappeared with his vehicle in flood water northwest of Brisbane on Sunday.

QUEENSLAND FIRE AND EMERGENCY SERVICES/AP
A blue barrier helps hold back flood water in a section of Maryborough, Australia.

The extraordinary rainfall comes as the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported this week that vast swathes of Australia have already lost 20 per cent of its rainfall and the country’s fire risk has gone beyond worst-case scenarios developed just a few years ago.

Australia’s hottest and driest year on record was 2019 which ended with devastating wildfires across southeast Australia. The fires directly killed 33 people and another 400 people were killed by the smoke.

The fires also destroyed more than 3,000 homes and razed 19 million hecatres of farmland and forests.

But two La Nina weather patterns have since brought above average rainfall to the same regions.

Dramatic scenes from northern NSW floods captured from the sky

By A Current Affair Staff|3 hours ago


New South Wales is in the firing line with the Northern Rivers region and in particular Lismore experiencing some of the worst flooding it has ever seen.

There have been distressing calls for help and extraordinary rescue scenes out of Lismore, Bungawalbin, South Ballina, Woodburn and along the Princess Highway.

Dramatic rescues were captured by A Current Affair's cameras from a helicopter flying above flood affected areas.

New South Wales is in the firing line with the Northern Rivers region. (A Current Affair)

Lismore is experiencing some of the worst flooding it has ever seen. (A Current Affair)

‣6:50
Brisbane residents angered by lack of flood warnings.
‣3:37
Lismore hero says 'just about every house we went past had people on roofs'.
‣3:56
Lismore gym becomes flood evacuation centre.

READ MORE: Brisbane residents angered by lack of flood warnings

Pregnant women, children and whole families were among those who needed rescuing.

Lismore was the first place in the state to be flooded after a levy that was built to protect the town gave way.

While the river south of Lismore has always been an area that gets hit hard by floods, there wasn't a house nearby that hadn't been inundated with water this time round.

There wasn't a house in the area that hadn't been inundated with water. (A Current Affair)

READ MORE: Dozens left with no option but to head to their roofs and wait for help

While some of the water had dropped off slightly today, there were still people moving about – a lot of them in canoes.

Lismore airport was totally flooded, with some of the smaller aircraft appearing as if they'd been thrown around like toys.

In Woodburn people could be seen trapped on a bridge after they parked their cars there in the hope they would be safe

.

There have been distressing calls for help and extraordinary rescue scenes out of Lismore, Bungawalbin, South Ballina, Woodburn and along the Princess Highway. (A Current Affair)

In Woodburn people could be seen trapped on a bridge after they parked their cars there in the hope they would be safe. (A Current Affair)

READ MORE: Lismore hero says 'just about every house we went past had people on roofs'

Most of the roads around the town of Woodburn were blocked, which left some people isolated.

Debris could be seen everywhere today, showing the destruction caused to local businesses and as authorities were overwhelmed, locals went out themselves in boats and tinnies to help with the rescue mission.

For people impacted by flooding, there is help available.

In an emergency, phone your local SES unit on 132 500.

In life threatening situations call triple zero immediately.

Flooded and freezing in Gaza

Sarah Algherbawi The Electronic Intifada 1 March 2022
Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza has been badly flooded over the past few months. 

 Ashraf AmraAPA images

The day I was born was probably the hottest day of 1991 – at least that is what my mother tells me.

Yet despite being a summer baby, I am happiest when it is cold and wet.

When I was a child, I gave myself a few nicknames. One of them was Winter Butterfly.

I often drew butterflies and wrote that nickname inside them on my textbooks and notebooks at school.

When I went to college, I deliberately waited until it started raining before walking home on many days.

The distance between college and home was approximately 3 kilometers. As I undertook that walk, I would feel energized by the rain.

It seemed to relieve whatever stress I was going through.

The love of rain has stayed with me. I especially enjoy visiting my in-laws at wintertime.

My in-laws belong to a family forced out of al-Majdal just north of Gaza during the Nakba – the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine. They now live in the middle of Jabaliya refugee camp.

It is hugely satisfying to drink a hot cup of tea and listen to raindrops falling on a tin roof in Jabaliya camp. I would go so far as to say it is good for the soul.

This winter has been different. We – my husband, children and I – did not visit Jabaliya camp even once.

My in-laws’ home was damaged during Israel’s May 2021 attack on Gaza.

An explosion nearby left cracks in its roof and walls. A lot of rainwater has leaked through the roof since then.

My in-laws are fortunate compared to others in the camp. They live on higher ground than many of their neighbors.

That seems to have protected my in-laws’ home from being flooded.
Emergency

The Salem family, who live on the southern edge of Jabaliya camp, have not had any such escape.

At one stage during the winter, they were awakened at 3 am. They quickly realized that their home had been flooded with a mixture of rainwater and sewage.

The water – more than a meter deep – caused immense destruction in their home, where a total of 12 people live.

Waseem, the youngest member of the family, is only a few months old. He became ill as the home got colder.

“I couldn’t find anything to keep the baby warm,” said Atef Salem, Waseem’s father. “All of our clothes were underwater. The only thing I could do was to wrap him with heavy bags that had been filled with sugar. We were rescued by civil defense people in a small fishing boat. They took baby Waseem and fortunately an ambulance was waiting nearby.”

Waseem was rushed to Gaza’s Indonesian hospital. There, his condition improved.

Israel destroyed more than 1,300 residential units throughout Gaza during the May attack. Almost 6,400 were damaged to a significant extent.

The human rights lawyer Salah Abdel Ati is among those whose property was bombed.

He had devoted a great deal of time and money towards building a three-story house in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza. Completed in 2019, the building included an apartment for each of his adult sons.

Both of his sons – Muhammad and Waseem – got married the following year and moved into the apartments above their parents on the ground floor.

Muhammad and his wife Hadeel took the first floor apartment. Waseem and his wife Marah went into the second floor.

The newly married couples both became parents to baby girls soon afterwards. By Gaza standards, the family were reasonably comfortable, though both Muhammad and Waseem were unemployed despite having university degrees.

Then came Israel’s attack in May 2021.

The family’s home is close to the Hala al-Shawa clinic, which caters to mothers and children. It was one of many healthcare facilities bombed during Israel’s offensive.

Israel’s bombardment of the clinic occurred on 11 May.

The bombardment was so powerful that it also caused damage to windows, doors and walls in Salah Abdel Ati’s home.

Later that same day, the home was damaged yet again when another explosion occurred nearby. The family were at home at the time but were not injured.

Because of that damage, the house started to tilt. And when the rains came in winter, the problems worsened.

Gaza’s works ministry requested in February that the family evacuate their home and recommended its demolition. Assessments carried out by the ministry indicate that the building is at imminent risk of collapse.

Waseem and Muhammad, along with their parents, have been forced to find accommodation away from the shared building since the evacuation. Muna, their mother, is hoping that the extended family will be back living together before long.

She is thinking about renting a house for the extended family until such time as they can build a new home. Yet with the shock of losing her home still raw, she has not yet drawn up clear plans.

“We used to be a stable family,” she said. “Now we are torn apart. I don’t know what we should do.”

Her husband Salah is similarly distraught.

“I did not expect this to happen,” he said. “I put all my money into building this house. Now we have nothing left.”

Sarah Algherbawi is a freelance writer and translator from Gaza.