Uganda Ebola outbreak in 5 points - 23 deaths linked so far: 'No cure but...'

Manjiri Chitre | Edited by Swati Bhasin - Monday


Uganda has reported 18 confirmed cases and 18 probable cases of Ebola so far, reported the country's ministry of health - fuelling fears of a spreading outbreak for which a vaccine has not yet been found. It also reported that a total of 23 people have died due to the disease - five confirmed and 18 probable deaths. The World Health Organization (WHO) has also dispatched a team to the East African country to help respond to the outbreak.


Uganda Ebola outbreak (AFP)© Provided by Hindustan Times

Here are the top five updates on the Ebola outbreak:

1. The Uganda health ministry has confirmed 18 cases of the Ebola disease from the Mubende, Kyegegwa, and Kassanda districts. Along with this, another 18 probable Ebola cases are also recorded. A total of 23 people have died due to the virus, the ministry said - out of which five are confirmed Ebola deaths and 18 are probable deaths.

Also read: Ghana reports highly infectious Ebola-like Marburg virus: Symptoms, treatment

2. The World Health Organization (WHO) has dispatched a team to the East African country to help respond to the health crisis. According to the WHO, while there is no cure for the disease, early detection of cases and treatment of symptoms greatly increases the chances of survival.

3. The WHO also said that a vaccine that is highly effective against the Ebola-Zaire strain does not provide cross-protection against the Ebola-Sudan strain.

4. The current outbreak first began in a small village in Mubende district around the beginning of September. On September 20, Uganda's health ministry announced the country's first fatality from the highly contagious Ebola virus since 2019.

5. The Ebola disease includes a haemorrhagic fever whose symptoms include intense body weakness, muscle pain, headache, sore throat, vomiting, diarrhea, and rashes among others.

(With inputs from agencies)

Ugandan president rules out Ebola containment, says ‘very easy to stop’ virus

NOT JUST MISINFORMATION, BUT DISINFORMATION
Daniel Stewart - Yesterday 

The President of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, has ruled out the application of a confinement because of the Ebola outbreak detected in the district of Mubende and has downplayed the epidemiological situation in the African country by stating that "it is very easy" to stop its spread.


Archive - Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni - XINHUA / ZUMA PRESS / CONTACTOPHOTO© Provided by News 360

"There is no need for confinement. We simply have to be careful with a few things. This time we are fighting (the disease) in a different way," said the president, who refused to "close schools, prevent people from going to churches or markets or from moving".

"We, who are used to fighting in war, when we heard about the characteristics of Ebola we decided to fight in a different way," he explained, before assuring that the authorities "have the capacity" to deal with the outbreak.

Thus, he stated that "this disease does not need great measures". "It is not spread through the air. It is an enemy that we can easily fight. The big battle is to wash our hands. Let there be no panic, because it is very easy to stop it," he argued.

Museveni has also confirmed that among the confirmed cases of Ebola there are five health workers who were exposed to the first patient identified as infected, who has already died, as reported by the Ugandan newspaper 'The Nile Post'.

The Ugandan Ministry of Health indicated on Monday in its latest report that 36 cases have been confirmed to date - 18 confirmed and 18 probable - including 23 deaths - five confirmed and 18 probable. Thirty-five people are also in hospital.

Uganda declared the Ebola outbreak on September 20 after confirming the death of a patient who tested positive, after which the World Health Organization (WHO) said the confirmation followed an investigation by the national rapid response team after six "suspicious deaths" in the district over the past month.

The agency noted that the outbreak is of the Zaire strain. To date, seven outbreaks of this strain -- four in Uganda and three in Sudan -- have been detected. Uganda reported its last case of this strain in 2012, while in 2019 it declared an outbreak for the Zaire strain, imported from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Uganda's Ebola outbreak: Why is it so serious?

By Anne Soy
Senior Africa correspondent

PublishedShar

IMAGE SOURCE,AFP

Image caption,

Health workers are at risk from treating Ebola patients

An outbreak of Ebola in Uganda is proving more difficult to deal with than more recent epidemics, but the president has rejected calls for a lockdown.

So far 31 cases have been confirmed, though it is feared that there could be many more.

What is Ebola?

It is a deadly virus with initial symptoms which can include a sudden fever, intense weakness, muscle pain and a sore throat.

Subsequent stages can include vomiting, diarrhoea and - in some cases - both internal and external bleeding, known as haemorrhaging.

The incubation period can last from two days to three weeks. Ebola can be associated with other illnesses such as malaria and typhoid.

Why is this outbreak so serious?

The fact that it was three weeks before the first case was detected on 20 September has caused concern.

Ebola spreads between humans by direct contact with bodily fluids and contaminated environments. Funerals can be a particular risk if mourners have direct contact with the body.

Most of the 31 cases identified are in Uganda's central district of Mubende, of whom six people have died.

However, the death toll may be higher as the health ministry says there were 18 deaths, linked to confirmed cases, where samples were not taken as they were buried before being tested.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates the case fatality rate is between 41% and 100%.

Is there a vaccine?

Another concern is that this is the Sudan strain of Ebola, for which there is no approved vaccine, unlike the more common Zaire strain.

This means there has been no vaccination of health workers, who account for six of the confirmed cases.

IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES

Image caption,

Ebola vaccines developed in the last few years have not been tested on the Sudan strain

The Zaire strain was responsible for the largest ever outbreak of Ebola, in West Africa from December 2013 to 2016. More than 11,000 people died.

With more than 28,000 cases in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, scientists carried out intensive research into Ebola vaccines.

Two years after that epidemic ended, the then unlicensed Ervebo vaccine, developed by Merck, was used during an outbreak of the Zaire strain in the west of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

It was granted clearance by the WHO, which said it had limited infections and saved lives.

A second vaccine by Johnson & Johnson has since been approved for use by the European Medicines Agency.

But neither of these vaccines has been tested against the Sudan strain.

Nonetheless Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni said his government was exploring whether it was worth trying them.

How is Uganda dealing with the outbreak?

The focus is on contact tracing - finding those who have been in close proximity with patients, especially those who attended the community funerals.

A 51-bed treatment facility is operational in Mubende district, the epicentre of the outbreak, and a second facility is due to be set up soon.

President Museveni said two mobile laboratories would be sent to Mubende by Friday, so that people would not have to travel for tests and so risk spreading the virus.

Medics have expressed concern about the lack of adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) such as gloves and masks. They have also called for the affected region to be put under quarantine.

However, President Museveni ruled out restrictions, saying: "Ebola is not spread like corona[virus]" as it is not an airborne disease.

He said markets, schools and places of worship would remain open, but urged people to observe personal hygiene and avoid close contact.

How does Ebola spread?

Ebola jumps to humans from infected animals, such as chimpanzees, fruit bats and forest antelope.

Bushmeat - wild forest animals hunted for human consumption - is thought to be the natural reservoir of the virus.

It then spreads between humans by direct contact with contaminated bodily fluids - blood, saliva, vomit, semen, vaginal discharge, urine, faeces and sweat.

Men who have recovered from Ebola have also been found to harbour the virus in their semen for a period after recovery.

What precautions can be taken?

To prevent infection, health professionals advise avoiding contact with cases, including stopping shaking hands, washing hands with soap and water and cleaning surfaces with chlorinated water.

It is also important to isolate cases and their contacts. Countries usually set up holding centres for suspected cases and treatment centres for laboratory-confirmed cases.

IMAGE SOURCE,EPA

Image caption,

Quarantines have been ruled out

In eastern DR Congo, which borders Uganda, survivors of Ebola played a key role in providing care for infected patients as it has been established that they cannot be re-infected.

However, medical teams must wear full PPE when attending to cases to prevent infection.

Bodies, in a body bag, must be buried by those wearing proper PPE. More recent innovations have included having body bags with clear covers around the face to enable families to view the body safely before burial.

New Infectious Threats Are Coming. The U.S. Probably Won't Contain Them.


Apoorva Mandavilli
Thu, September 29, 2022 

From left: Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Biden administration's top medical adviser, and Dr. Robert Califf, the FDA commissioner, during a Senate hearing on monkeypox, on Capitol Hill in Washington on Sept. 14, 2022. (Anna Rose Layden/The New York Times)

If it wasn’t clear enough during the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become obvious during the monkeypox outbreak: The United States, among the richest, most advanced nations in the world, remains wholly unprepared to combat new pathogens.

The coronavirus was a sly, unexpected adversary. Monkeypox was a familiar foe, and tests, vaccines and treatments were already at hand. But the response to both threats sputtered and stumbled at every step.

“It’s kind of like we’re seeing the tape replayed, except some of the excuses that we were relying on to rationalize what happened back in 2020 don’t apply here,” said Sam Scarpino, who leads pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute.

No single agency or administration is to blame, more than a dozen experts said in interviews, although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has acknowledged that it bungled the response to the coronavirus.

The price of failure is high. COVID has killed more than 1 million Americans so far, yielding untold misery. Cases, hospitalizations and deaths are all falling, but COVID was the third leading cause of death in the United States in 2021 and seems likely to keep killing Americans for years.

Monkeypox is spreading more slowly now, and has never posed a challenge of COVID’s magnitude. But the United States has reported more monkeypox cases than any other country — 25,000, about 40% of the global total — and the virus is likely to persist as a constant, low-grade threat.

Both outbreaks have revealed deep fissures in the nation’s framework for containing epidemics. Add to that plummeting public trust, rampant misinformation and deep schisms — between health officials and those treating patients, and between the federal government and states. A muddled response to future outbreaks seems almost inevitable.

“We really are poorly, poorly prepared,” said Larry O. Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University.

New infectious threats are certainly on the way, mostly because of the twin rises in global travel and vaccine hesitancy, and the growing proximity of people and animals. From 2012 to 2022, for example, Africa saw a 63% increase in outbreaks of pathogens that jump to people from animals, compared with the period from 2001 to 2011.

“In people’s minds, perhaps, is the idea that this COVID thing was such a freak of nature, was a once-in-a-century crisis, and we’re good for the next 99 years,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health.

“This is the new normal,” she added. “It’s like the levees are built for the one-in-a-100-years crisis, but then the floods keep happening every three years.”

Chronic Underfunding

Ideally, here’s how the national response to an outbreak might unspool: Reports from a clinic anywhere in the country would signal a new pathogen’s arrival. Alternatively, ongoing wastewater surveillance might sound the alarm for known threats, as it has recently for polio in New York state.

The information would flow from local health departments to state and federal authorities. Federal officials would rapidly permit and offer guidance for the development of tests, vaccines and treatments, rolling them out equitably to all residents.

Not one of these steps worked smoothly in the two recent outbreaks.

“I’m very familiar with outbreak response and pandemic preparedness, and none of it looks like this,” said Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego who has spent years studying epidemics.

Andersen said he had assumed that the flaws exposed by the coronavirus would be repaired as they became apparent. Instead, “we’re worse prepared now than we were early in the pandemic,” he said.

Public health in the United States has always operated on a shoestring. The data systems used by the CDC and other federal agencies are laughably out of date. Many public health workers were abused and attacked during the pandemic and have fled their jobs, or are planning to.

More money won’t solve all the problems, several experts said. But additional funding could help public health departments hire and train staff, update their aging data systems and invest in robust surveillance networks.

But in Congress, pandemic preparedness remains a tough sell.

President Joe Biden’s budget request for fiscal year 2023 includes $88 billion over five years, but Congress has not shown any inclination to approve it.

The United States spends between 300 to 500 times more on its military defense than on its health systems, and yet “no war has killed a million Americans,” noted Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who led the CDC under former President Barack Obama.

Renewed Urgency

The United States was supposed to be the very best at managing outbreaks. An assessment of global health security in 2019, a year before the arrival of the coronavirus, ranked the nation first among all others — best at preventing and detecting outbreaks, most adept at communicating risk and second only to the United Kingdom in the rapidity of its response.

But all of that assumed that leaders would move quickly and decisively when faced with a new pathogen, and that the public would follow instructions. The analyses did not account for an administration that underplayed and politicized every aspect of the COVID response, from testing and masks to the use of vaccines.

Too often in a crisis, government officials look for easy solutions, with dramatic and immediate impact. But there are none for managing pandemics.

“A pandemic is by definition a problem from hell. You’re vanishingly unlikely to be able to remove all of its negative consequences,” said Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Instead, he added, officials should bet on combinations of imperfect strategies, with an emphasis on speed over accuracy.

In both the coronavirus pandemic and the monkeypox outbreak, for example, the CDC at first tried to maintain control over testing, instead of disseminating the responsibility as widely as possible. The move led to limited testing, and left health officials blind to the spread of the viruses.

The Food and Drug Administration was slow to help academic labs develop alternatives for testing, and encouraged the highest quality of diagnosis. It may be reasonable for officials to ask which test is faster or which one produces the least errors, Hanage said, but “all of them are better than not doing anything.”

Gostin, of Georgetown University, has worked with the CDC for most of his career, and was among its staunchest defenders early in the pandemic.

But he became increasingly disenchanted as the United States was forced to rely on other countries for vital information: How effective are boosters? Is the virus airborne? Do masks work?

“Virtually in every case, we got our information and acted on it from foreign health agencies, from the U.K., from Israel, from South Africa,” Gostin said. The CDC “always seemed to be last and weakest,” he said.

Many at the CDC and other health agencies seemed to be paralyzed, fearful of being held accountable if things go wrong, he added: “They’re covering their rear ends trying to follow the procedure. It all boils down to a lack of fire in their bellies.”

Divided Responsibilities

The most intractable hurdle to a coordinated national response arises from the division of responsibility and resources between federal, state and local governments, along with gaps in communications between the public health officials coordinating the response and the doctors and nurses actually treating the patients.

The complex laws that govern health care in the United States are designed to protect confidentiality and patient rights. “But they are not optimized for working with the public health system and getting the public health system the data that it needs,” said Dr. Jay Varma, director of the Cornell Center for Pandemic Prevention and Response.

Generally, states are not obligated to share health data, such as the number of cases of infection or demographic details of vaccinated people, with federal authorities.

Some state laws actually forbid officials from sharing the information. Smaller states like Alaska may not want to hand over details that leave patients identifiable. Hospitals in small jurisdictions are often reluctant to surrender patient data for similar reasons.

Health care systems in countries like Britain and Israel rely on nationalized systems that make it much easier to collect and analyze information on cases, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Biden administration’s top medical adviser.

“Our system isn’t interconnected like that,” Fauci said. “It isn’t uniform — it’s a patchwork.”

A CDC official said the agency understood the perspective of the states, but the current rules on data sharing created “constraints and hurdles.”

“I don’t think it’s a matter of scapegoating states,” Kevin Griffis, a spokesman for the agency, said. “It’s simply a statement of the fact that we don’t have access to the information that we need to optimize a response.”

Legislation introduced in Congress might help remove those barriers, he added. The measure would require health care providers, pharmacies, and state and local health departments to report health data to the CDC.

Epidemics are managed by public health agencies, but it is clinicians — doctors, nurses and others — who diagnose and care for patients. An efficient outbreak response relies on mutual understanding and exchange of information between the two groups.

The sides did not communicate effectively in either the COVID pandemic or the monkeypox outbreak. The disconnect has led to absurdly convoluted procedures.

The CDC has not yet included monkeypox in its disease reporting computer system, for example. That means state officials must manually type in data from case reports, instead of simply uploading the files. A request for testing must often be faxed to the state laboratory; the results are often routed through a state epidemiologist, then to the provider, then to the patient.

Few public health officials understand how health care is delivered on the ground, some experts said. “Most people in the CDC don’t know what the inside of a hospital looks like,” said Dr. James Lawler, co-director of the University of Nebraska’s Global Center for Health Security.

Frieden, who once led New York City’s health department, suggested that embedding CDC staff into local health departments might help officials understand the obstacles involved in responding to an outbreak.

Frieden has also proposed what he calls a “7-1-7” accountability metric, loosely modeled on a strategy employed to address the HIV epidemic. Every new disease should be identified within seven days of emergence, reported to public health authorities within one day and responded to within seven days.

The strategy may give the government a clearer sense of the problems impeding the response, he said.

In the United States, “what we have is repeated cycles of panic and neglect,” Frieden said. “The single most important thing we have to do is break that cycle.”

© 2022 The New York Times Company

Discovery of ‘fingerprint’ confirms alarming predictions of Greenland ice sheet melt

Sarah Sloat
Thu, September 29, 2022 

Scientists now have unambiguous proof that a phenomenon critical to predicting the impact of climate change exists.

Researchers announced Thursday that they had detected the sea level “fingerprint” of the Greenland ice sheet melt, pinpointing the unique pattern of sea level change linked to the melting ice.

It’s the first time such a fingerprint has been definitively measured. While scientists agreed such fingerprints theoretically exist, the dynamic nature of the ocean had made it difficult to identify them confidently — until now.

The findings, which were possible with the help of high-resolution satellite observations, detail the unique pattern of sea level change linked to the Greenland ice sheet. The fingerprints are factored into models to predict overall sea level rise.


The discovery confirms and adds confidence to the sea level changes forecast by computational models. They are critical for understanding the consequences of climate change and preparing for future hazards. It is now more than clear that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet is accelerating, said Sophie Coulson a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Coulson is the lead author of the study that led to the findings, which were published in the journal Science.

Greenland Ice Sheet (Kerem Yucel / AFP via Getty Images file)

Until recently, fingerprint science was restrained by a lack of satellite observations — records documented only the southern tip of Greenland, making it difficult to examine the oceans around it.

The Greenland ice sheet, which covers almost 80% of the island country, contains enormous quantities of frozen water. The rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet is responsible for 20% of the current sea level rise globally, and a recent study predicted its disintegration would raise global sea levels by at least 10 inches, even if people stop burning fossil fuels.

The study was possible thanks to new satellite data shared by the Copernicus Marine Service, data that spanned over 30 years and extended to higher latitudes. Coulson plugged observations of ice-thickness change into a computational model and created a prediction of sea level from 1993 to 2019. She then compared the forecast against the new satellite data — and found a perfect match.

“It was really an exciting moment for us when we first looked at that side-by-side comparison of those observations to the model predictions,” Coulson said. “The images were staggeringly similar.”

It was especially surprising because it’s unusual in geophysics to prove something is happening with a certainty of more than 99.9%, Coulson said. But it was clear that the pattern of sea level change revealed by the satellites was the fingerprint of the melting ice sheet — and that the estimation of sea level change predicted by both earlier models and Coulson’s new one was accurate.

“We can really say with great certainty that sea level fingerprints exist,” Coulson said. “The theory was correct.”

Knowing fingerprints can be a tool to accurately predict sea level change is critical because the future of Earth’s oceans is so uncertain.

 Greenland Ice Sheet (Sean Gallup / Getty Images file)

“We know global sea levels will rise and that the amount and pace of sea level rise will depend on our greenhouse gas emissions,” Yarrow Axford, an associate professor at Northwestern University who studies the impact of climate change on Greenland’s glaciers and ice sheet, said by email. She was not a part of Coulson’s study.

“But how fast the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica will respond to warming is a really big unknown, and frankly a very scary unknown,” Axford said.

Fingerprints are already used to inform ocean level projections and coastal planning. In the U.S., an estimated 30% of the population lives in coastline communities. Every inch of sea level rise is expected to make coastal storms more catastrophic for those populations.

That is partly because sea level changes can lead to more destructive storm surges, one of the deadliest aspects of hurricanes. Hurricane Ian’s storm surge, along with its winds and flooding rain, has caused devastation across Cuba and Florida. Sea level rise, along with other aspects of climate change, is expected to increase the intensity and frequency of hurricanes.

“We’re already being forced to adapt to sea level rise around the world, and we need to do a lot more still to prepare,” Axford said. “Having decent projections of how fast our coastlines will retreat is essential for making tough decisions and the right big investments now in preparation for future sea level rise.”

NOT JUST RUSSIANS

Even More Young Americans Are Unfit to Serve, a New Study Finds. Here's Why.



Thomas Novelly
Wed, September 28, 2022 

A new study from the Pentagon shows that 77% of young Americans would not qualify for military service without a waiver due to being overweight, using drugs or having mental and physical health problems.

A slide detailing the findings from the Pentagon's 2020 Qualified Military Available Study shared with Military.com shows a 6% increase from the latest 2017 Department of Defense research that showed 71% of Americans would be ineligible for service.

"When considering youth disqualified for one reason alone, the most prevalent disqualification rates are overweight (11%), drug and alcohol abuse (8%), and medical/physical health (7%)," the study, which examined Americans between the ages of 17 and 24, read. The study was conducted by the Pentagon's office of personnel and readiness.

Read Next: The Army is Having No Issue Retaining Soldiers, Amid a Crisis Recruiting New Ones

Mental health accounted for 4% of disqualifications, while aptitude, conduct or being a dependent accounted for 1% each. Most youth, 44%, were disqualified for multiple reasons.

The updated figures paint a picture of what is currently plaguing military recruiters in many of the service branches, with a shrinking pool of potential service members available to them.

Maj. Charlie Dietz, a Department of Defense spokesman, confirmed that the study shared with Military.com was accurate and said all the services are being challenged by the current recruiting environment.

"There are many factors that we are navigating through, such as the fact that youth are more disconnected and disinterested compared to previous generations," Dietz said. "The declining veteran population and shrinking military footprint has contributed to a market that is unfamiliar with military service resulting in an overreliance of military stereotypes."

Lawmakers have been raising the alarm over the recruiting environment throughout the year. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee personnel panel, said during an April 27 hearing that he was worried the widespread ineligibility of many Americans will contribute to readiness problems.

"To put it bluntly, I am worried we are now in the early days of a long-term threat to the all-volunteer force. [There is] a small and declining number of Americans who are eligible and interested in military service," Tillis said. He added that "every single metric tracking the military recruiting environment is going in the wrong direction."

The Council for a Strong America, a nonprofit organization made up of retired military officers, law enforcement and business leaders that advocates for better nutrition and healthy lifestyles among kids, issued a press release expressing alarm at the findings.

The group called on lawmakers in Washington to take action so that younger generations would qualify for military service.

"The retired admirals and generals of Mission: Readiness recognize that the underlying causes of obesity cannot be solved by the efforts of the military alone," the Council for a Strong America said in a statement. "With an increase in youth being ineligible for military service, it is more important than ever for policymakers, including state and local school boards, to promote healthy eating, increased access to fresh and nutritious foods, and physical activity for children from an early age."

Dietz told Military.com that the Army and most of the service's reserve components are in jeopardy of missing their FY2022 recruiting goals.

UNION BUSTING

Amazon is reportedly encouraging their US call center employees to work from home indefinitely — so they can eventually close their offices


Lakshmi Varanasi
Wed, September 28, 2022 

An Amazon logo is displayed on a fulfillment center. Being the world's largest online retail company, Amazon operates more than 175 fulfillment centers worldwide, totaling in over 166 million square feet.

Gabe Ginsberg/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Amazon is asking some of its US-based call center employees to work from home indefinitely, according to Bloomberg.

The request is part of a broader push by Amazon to shut down several call centers across the country.

The move might also help Amazon recruit more call center workers across the country.

Amazon is weighing in again on the return-to-office debate.

The tech giant is reportedly telling many of its US-based call center employees to work from home, according to a report Wednesday by Bloomberg News.

Earlier this month, Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy said at the Code Conference in Los Angeles that the company would embrace a flexible model that allowed for remote and hybrid work. Jassy said many of Amazon's tech workers have returned to the office.

Call center workers though, comprise a small percentage of Amazon's 1.5 million-employee workforce, Bloomberg reports. The decision to keep them at home comes as part of a larger push to close several call centers across the country.

Aside from saving money on real estate, Amazon might be going remote to widen its call center talent pool. By requesting those workers to stay at home, the company can hire people from more remote parts of the country. That might also help Amazon retain more workers in a sector with high turnover rates, Bloomberg notes.

Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser told Insider via email that, "We're offering additional members of our Customer Service team the increased flexibility that comes with working virtually. We're working with employees to make sure their transition is seamless while continuing to prioritize best-in-class support for customers."

Amazon plans to close several U.S. call centers - Bloomberg News


A logo of Amazon is seen on a company's logistics centre

Wed, September 28, 2022 

(Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc is planning to close several call centers in the United States in a move toward remote working, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday citing people familiar with the matter.

The shift to remote working across most industries was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic with cloud call center companies such as Five9 Inc seeing a boom in business.

Amazon, the world's largest online retailer, is also encouraging its customer service employees at some call centers in the country to work from home in a move that would save money on real estate, the report added.

The company's cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, also sells Amazon Connect software that enables companies serve their customers using remote networks.

Amazon is working with employees to make sure their transition to remote working is seamless, a spokesman for the company told Reuters, but did not comment on the planned closure of call centers.

(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Shailesh Kuber)

Amazon wants more WFH and less offices


Erik McGregor—LightRocket/Getty Images

Sophie Mellor
Thu, September 29, 2022 at 6:02 AM·3 min read

Amazon is trying to slim down the number of people coming into its offices by encouraging its call center employees to work from home. `

The e-commerce giant is offering full remote work to its customer service workers and is planning to shut down multiple call centers around the country to save money on real estate, Bloomberg reported.

After the pandemic proved that many office jobs can be done remotely, companies like Amazon have concluded that most customer service roles—which fill up precious office space—do not need to happen in person. Customer service positions also experience quick turnover, and Amazon's remote working scheme could help it recruit more employees across different cities in the U.S.

“We’re offering additional members of our Customer Service team the increased flexibility that comes with working virtually," said Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser. "We’re working with employees to make sure their transition is seamless while continuing to prioritize best-in-class support for customers.”

The move to cut in-person call center offices coincides with other plans within Amazon to trim real estate holdings it bought up during the pandemic-era surge in online shopping. Amazon is looking to lease 10 million square feet of space and vacate even more by ending leases with landlords, according to Bloomberg, in warehouses in New York, New Jersey, Southern California, and Atlanta.
A staffing problem

There is a greater shift happening within Amazon away from the no-frills, low-wage, high-turnover labor model it has operated under for years.

In June, a leaked Amazon internal research memo published by Recode found that the tech giant could run out of workers to hire for its warehouses by 2024. The company also announced today that it would be increasing its hourly pay in the U.S. for most frontline employees in warehousing and transportation to more than $19 an hour.

Amazon has also already allowed remote work for its corporate employees. “We don’t have a plan to require people to come back,” CEO Andy Jassy told tech journalist Kara Swisher at Vox Media’s 2022 Code Conference, adding, “We don’t right now. But we’re going to proceed adaptively as we learn.”

One reason that Amazon may be more inclined to give concessions to its employees is that it is facing increasing employee activism and union drives across its warehouses in the U.S.

Amazon recently lost its attempt to overturn a historic union election held last April, where workers at a Staten Island, N.Y., warehouse voted to unionize—making the 8,000-employee Amazon facility the first to do so. Another union vote is scheduled at a facility in Albany, N.Y., next month.

Amazon is the second-largest private employer in the U.S., behind Walmart, and the company employed more than 1.1 million people in the U.S. at the end of 2021. While call center employees make up a small fraction of its workforce, it is another indication of a power shift toward the worker.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

SO MUCH FOR LACK OF SUN OR WIND
In one tiny German town, nobody worries about energy bills
 

Germany Energy Self Sufficient Village

Wind turbines turn near the village of Feldheim near Treuenbrietzen, Germany, Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2022. Located about an hour and a half south of Berlin, the village of Feldheim has been energy self-sufficient for more than a decade. 

AP Photo/Michael Sohn

FRANK JORDANS
Thu, September 29, 2022 a

FELDHEIM, Germany (AP) — Europeans are opening their energy bills with trepidation these days, bracing for hefty price hikes as utility companies pass on the surging cost of natural gas, oil and electricity tied to Russia's war in Ukraine. Many are trying to conserve by turning down the heat and shutting off lights this winter.

Not so the people of Feldheim, population 130.

Located about an hour and a half south of Berlin, this modest but well-kept village has been energy self-sufficient for more than a decade.

A bold experiment launched in the mid-1990s saw Feldheim erect a handful of wind turbines to provide electricity to the village. Then it built a local grid, solar panels, battery storage and more turbines. A biogas plant put up to keep piglets warm was expanded, providing extra income to the farmers' cooperative, which pumps hot water through a village-wide central heating system. A hydrogen production facility is also under construction.

Now, 55 wind turbines can be seen but not heard on the sloping farmlands around Feldheim and residents enjoy some of the cheapest electricity and natural gas rates in Germany.

“They can all sleep well at night," says Kathleen Thompson, who works for a local educational organization, the New Energies Forum. "They’ve got no concerns because the prices are not going to change, not in the immediate future anyway.”

Feldheim's hands-on approach to producing its own eco-friendly energy draws thousands of visitors from around the world each year and contrasts with the way Germany as a whole still relies on fossil fuel imports for much of its needs.

That became painfully apparent when Russia invaded Ukraine, upending the reliance Germany and other European countries had on Moscow's coal, oil and natural gas.

Despite Germany pumping billions into the growth of renewable energy to reduce climate-changing emissions, fossil fuels and nuclear were responsible for more than half of the country's gross power production in the first six months of the year.

A lack of sufficient transmission capacity means wind parks in the north regularly have to be shut down while fossil fuel plants are fired up to provide electricity to factories in the south.

Letting locals participate in — and benefit from — the project was key to Feldheim's success, said Michael Knape, mayor of Treuenbrietzen, a municipality to which Feldheim belongs.

While wind parks elsewhere in Germany often face opposition, including some economically depressed neighboring villages, Feldheim's close-knit community approved so many turbines that it actually exports about 250 times as much electricity as it consumes.

“Citizens need to feel that it’s their transition and not one imposed from above,” Knape said.

But he also credits authorities at the time with not interfering in what he describes as an “experiment” that could have failed. It fell into a legal gray area that officials elsewhere might have clamped down on.

“In Germany, you sometimes get the impression that if someone makes a mistake then it’s a huge problem," Knape said. "But it’s only in that way that we make progress.”

Feldheim's grassroots approach to generating clean energy contrasts starkly with the prevailing practice in Germany, where large energy companies tend to build and control vast power projects. Small-scale efforts, meanwhile, often face high regulatory hurdles.

Still, Knape is hopeful that Germany’s energy transition can catch up with Feldheim.

“I’m firmly convinced that given the current pressure in Europe ... it’s become clear to everyone that we need to approach this differently than before,” he said.

While Feldheim's approach can't be copied everywhere, such projects can be a big part of the solution, Knape said. “Many little Feldheims could supply at least parts of Berlin."

Siegfried Kappert, 83, is similarly optimistic. Born and bred in Feldheim, he enthusiastically paid the 3,000-euro (dollar) fee to connect his home to the electricity and heating grids when they were built.

That investment has paid off manifold since, with lower energy prices for him and the village, which has no unemployment and was recently able to afford new pavements, streetlights and a cultural venue in a converted barn topped with solar panels.

Kappert laments that longtime Chancellor Angela Merkel allowed Germany to become dependent on Russian energy and feels her Union bloc, now in opposition, should stop sniping at the new government.

“They should work together, that would be the right way,” he said.

Kappert, who as a child saw the Red Army roll in at the end of World War II, then grew up under communism in East Germany and saw his world turned upside down again with reunification, said Feldheim’s success is a source of satisfaction.

“We looked for a path and found one," he said. "I can say, quite honestly, that we’re proud of this.”

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