Category: Covid-19

Princeton University will require that all faculty, staff, researchers, appointed visiting faculty and researchers, temporary employees, and independent contractors (i.e., individuals working alongside with or providing services to students and employees) receive and provide proof of having received a COVID-19 vaccine authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and/or World Health Organization. The requirement applies to employees and others routinely working on campus or in property occupied by the University. All employees (defined as the groups listed above) who will be on campus this fall must receive the final dose of their chosen vaccine no later than August 1, 2021.

Employees must receive a COVID-19 vaccine and provide proof of having received their final dose of the vaccine (second dose for two-dose vaccine or one dose for single dose vaccine). Employees should submit their vaccine information via the Universitys VacStatus tool.

Employees who cannot receive the vaccine because of a disability/medical contraindication or sincerely-held religious belief may request an accommodation (i.e., an exemption) to this requirement by completing and submitting the COVID-19 Vaccine Accommodation Request form found at the VacStatus link. Individuals who are granted accommodations will be required to comply with applicable workplace restrictions, including the wearingofface coveringsand social distancingindoors and participating in more frequent asymptomatic COVID-19 testing.

By July 1, 2021, all faculty, staff, researchers, appointed visiting faculty and researchers, temporary employees, and independent contractors routinely working on the Princeton campus or in property occupied by the University are required to do one of the following in VacStatus:

Employees that have not received an accommodation must provide proof of having received their final dose of the vaccine (second dose for two-dose vaccine or one dose for single dose vaccine) by August 1.

Employees who are not vaccinated and do not qualify for an accommodation must consult with their manager and Human Resources or the Office of the Dean of the Faculty to determine if a period of leave or use of accrued paid time off may be applied. Working remotely is not an approved option under this policy.

More information and answers to frequently asked questions about vaccine requirements are available on the COVID Resources website.

As previously announced, all undergraduate and graduate students are required to receive a COVID-19 vaccine for the 2021-22 academic year.

Updated guidelines for summer

The University also has amended its policies regarding social distancing, face coverings and campus gatherings to reflect updated federal and state health guidance. For the summer, all undergraduates approved to remain on campus must continue to follow the Social Contract.

Social distancing

Based on updated guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)and New Jersey executive orders, employees who are fully vaccinated, and whose status has been verified in VacStatus, no longer need to maintain six feet of social distance on University property, indoors or outdoors. Those who are not fully vaccinated or do not have vaccination records verified in VacStatus must continue to maintain social distancing indoors.

Employees who are vaccinated no longer need to comply with the occupancy limits posted for COVID-19 mitigation. Furniture may be replaced in common spaces and, if desired, Plexiglas and other barriers may be removed.

Employees are expected to act honestly and ethically. The University will not routinely check whether individuals who are not practicing social distancing indoors are vaccinated except in response to credible complaints. However, the University retains the right to undertake periodic compliance reviews to protect the community, and any employee found to be falsely claiming to be vaccinated will be subject to discipline up to and including termination.

Face coverings

As of June 3, 2021, the University updated its face coverings policy for all students, staff, faculty and visitors. Face coverings are no longer required outdoors. However, face coverings continue to be required indoors, regardless of vaccination status. This policy will be revisited after July 1, 2021, when the University can determine the vaccination rate across campus.

Exceptions to the indoor face covering policy, such as when an employee is alone in a reserved room or a student is alone in their living space on campus, are outlined on the COVID Resources website.

Gatherings, events, and meetings

As of June 3, 2021, in-person gatherings on campus for staff, faculty and students may be approved within certain limits. Gatherings of more than 25 people indoors and 100 people outdoors may be held in-person if approved by the Gatherings Review Team. Gatherings of 25 or fewer people indoors and 100 or fewer outdoors do not need approval from the Gatherings Review Team. All University public health measures must be followed and the event should be scheduled through the EMS web appfor reservable spaces.

For information about visitors attending gatherings on campus, consult the Visitor Policy.

Testing

Beginning July 1, 2021, employees who are routinely on campus and have not been verified as fully vaccinated in VacStatus will be required to be tested two times per week during the weeks they work on campus. Those whose VacStatus records indicate that they are fully vaccinated will continue to be tested once per week. The University will continue to require weekly testing for vaccinated individuals until the data indicate that testing vaccinated individuals is no longer needed. Individuals who are not fully vaccinated (i.e., those granted an accommodation) will be tested through the Fall semester. Testing frequency for all may change if increasing risk of virus spread is identified on campus or in our community.

Daily Symptom Check

Per current New Jersey executive orders, employees must continue to use the Daily Symptom Check before coming to campus, regardless of vaccination status.

Returning to campus prior to fall semester

Individuals who have been working remotely and are fully vaccinated, as verified in VacStatus, may wish to return to their campus workplace and should work with their manager to determine if that is allowed or encouraged. As noted in the recent letter from Lianne Sullivan-Crowley and Sanjeev Kulkarni, employees are still expected to return to work on campus by August 29, 2021.

Employees who are not currently in the asymptomatic testing program will need to be enrolled and will need to be tested once per week if they are fully vaccinated and twice per week if they are not vaccinated or do not have verified vaccination records in VacStatus. Managers will need to update the employee list in their Resumption plan to enroll their employees in the asymptomatic testing program.

Outlook for the fall

Looking toward the fall, the University continues to plan for the resumption of in-person instruction and operations. Classes are expected to be taught in person and the University anticipates concluding all remote work by Sunday, August 29. All activities will continue to follow then-prevailing public health protocols, but the expectation is that all University facilities, including administrative and research spaces, will operate at full capacity.

The University also expects the following will be permitted by August 29:

A phased move-in will be held for undergraduate and graduate students arriving on campus for the fall semester, and some students may be required to quarantine or isolate upon their arrival. Quarantine and isolation procedures and accommodations also will be in place throughout the academic year.The University also will continue its asymptomatic testing program, with regular asymptomatic testing for employees who are not vaccinated and periodic asymptomatic testing for fully vaccinated faculty, staff and students for surveillance purposes.

All of the policies and guidelines above are subject to change based on public health measures and guidelines from the state of New Jersey.

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Princeton will require employees to receive COVID-19 vaccine; updates public health policies for summer and fall - Princeton University

Many more men in India have received COVID-19 vaccines than women, government data showed on Tuesday, highlighting gender disparity in the countrys immunisation drive that has also disadvantaged the rural population.

India has partly or fully vaccinated about 101 million men, nearly 17% more than women. Men account for 54% of the total number of people inoculated, according to the data.

Many federally administered regions, the capital Delhi, and big states such as Uttar Pradesh have seen some of the worst inequities. Only Kerala in the south and Chhattisgarh in central India have vaccinated more women than men.

"We are noticing that men, especially in towns and villages, prefer to take the vaccine before women as they have to travel for work, while women are relegated to domestic chores," said Prashant Pandya, medical superintendent at a big government hospital in the western state of Gujarat.

Health officials say rumours about vaccines disrupting women's menstruation cycle and reducing fertility have also contributed to the skewed data. The government has rejected the concerns.

"The government will have to ramp up awareness programmes in rural India to ensure women understand the importance of vaccines and prioritise themselves in this race to secure the two shots," said Sudha Narayanan, a former bureaucrat who worked in the health ministry in New Delhi.

Women will have to step forward to get vaccinated or the divide will rapidly widen, Narayanan added.

India, with a population of 1.3 billion, has about 6% more men than women.

A spokesperson for the federal Ministry of Health and Family Welfare did not respond to Reuters' questions about the gender disparity.

Some women in the rural parts of Gujarat and neighbouring Rajasthan state have urged the authorities to deliver vaccines at their doorstep, saying they are unable to travel to hospitals leaving their children behind.

"I don't know how to read and write...how will I register for the vaccine," said Laxmiben Suthar, a mother of four in the town of Vadnagar in Gujarat. "The government must send the medicine to us."

India's vaccination policy has evolved fast but the federal government has so far resisted calls for door-to-door immunisations given that the vaccines have only been authorised for emergency use and recipients need to be monitored for a short period for any adverse reactions.

Urban Indians are also getting COVID-19 shots much faster than the hundreds of millions of people living in the countryside, government data has shown. That is partly due to a policy that helped richer cities buy more vaccine doses than rural districts. read more

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday reversed the policy and said vaccines will be offered at no charge to all adults starting June 21. The government will also facilitate more walk-in inoculations after complaints about the online registration process. read more

India has so far administered 233.7 million doses, the most in the world after China and the United States, but given the necessary two doses to only about 5% of its estimated 950 million adults.

India has the worlds second-largest number of coronavirus infections after the United States, with total cases at nearly 29 million, according to health ministry data. The country has suffered 351,309 deaths.

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Women falling behind in India's COVID-19 vaccination drive - Reuters India

A person receives a dose of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine at a vaccination centre for those aged over 18 years old at the Belmont Health Centre in Harrow, amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in London, Britain, June 6, 2021. REUTERS/Henry Nicholls

Britain on Monday reported 5,683 more cases of COVID-19 and one further death within 28 days of a positive test, according to official data.

The total number of people to have received a first vaccine dose reached 40,460,576, the figures showed.

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UK reports 5683 more COVID-19 cases, one further death - Reuters UK

In the yellow tier, gyms can be at 50% capacity indoor and outdoor. Photo via Pexels.com

San Diego County will move into Californias least restrictive yellow tier Wednesday morning, following two consecutive weeks of an adjusted new daily COVID-19 case rate of fewer than two cases per 100,000 residents, county officials announced Tuesday.

The county will move into the yellow tier just six days before the state scraps the tiered reopening blueprint on June 15, joining other urban counties such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and Orange.

In the yellow tier, outdoor music venues can increase to 67% capacity, restaurants and gyms can be at 50% capacity indoor and outdoor indoor bars can be at 25% or 100 people, whichever is fewer, and outdoor gatherings can expand to 200 people.

A full list of what limits will be lifted after the descent into the yellow tier for that one week can be found at https://covid19.ca.gov/safer- economy/.

When California fully reopens the economy on June 15, the state will move beyond the Blueprint for a Safer Economy the system of tiers the state has employed since last year. There will be no capacity restrictions or social distancing enforced, and only mega events events with crowds larger than 5,000 people indoors or 10,000 outdoors will require or recommend vaccine verification.

On Monday, the county reported 65 new COVID-19 infections, bringing the cumulative case total to 280,807, while the death toll remained unchanged at 3,764.

A total of 5,898 tests were reported to the county on Monday, with 1.1% returning positive. The 14-day rolling average percentage of positive cases is 0.8%.

As of Monday, nearly 1.68 million San Diego County residents almost 60% of residents 12 and older are fully vaccinated and more than 2.07 million residents have received one of two doses.

More than 4.21 million doses have been received by the county, with more than 3.78 million administered.

A full list of available vaccination sites can be found online.

City News Service

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San Diego County Moving into Least-Restrictive COVID-19 Yellow Tier - Times of San Diego

The vaccines are working better than expected, and the hospital system is averaging just one new COVID patient every other day.

CLEVELAND Coronavirus cases in the United States have fallen to levels not seen since March 2020, and it's the same story in Ohio.

The state has reported an average of just 604 cases per day over the past three weeks, and testing positivity rates are down to their lowest levels of the pandemic. Here in the Cleveland area, Playhouse Square is gearing up for live theatre on Friday, and Indians game are back to 100% capacity.

"I do think it's time," University Hospitals Dr. Keith Armitage said of restrictions finally being lifted.

Armitage says the vaccines are working better than expected, and the hospital system is averaging just one new COVID patient every other day. For perspective, during the peak of the pandemic, it was up to 10 new patients every single day.

"The admissions in the last few weeks tend to be younger because people over 65 are getting the vaccine, and we aren't seeing nearly as many critical patients," Armitage explained.

The same thing is happening at the Cleveland Clinic, with fewer than 20 COVID patients in ICUs across the system.

"[It's a] Huge deal," Dr. Rahed Dweik said. "In December, the hospital numbers approached 1,000, and [in the] ICU we approached almost 200, so that's definitely a huge change in a good direction."

Monday marked the end of a 12-week-long vaccination clinic at Cleveland State University's Wolstein Center. Experts say they expect case counts to stay low through the summer and potentially rise again in the fall when the weather cools and more people start to gather indoors.

"It's clear that transmission is much more likely indoors than outdoors, and we may see more cases," Armitage said. "But I think if we get to 70% of the population vaccinated and of the unvaccinated population, maybe ... one-third or a half will have had COVID, so I think we get to this mythical herd immunity by this summer."

Health officials, including Armitage, say increased vaccinations will prevent a widespread surge and increased hospitalizations like we saw this past winter.

"It's highly unlikely we will have a surge that will challenge the health care system," Armitage declared.

However, Armitage and others warn that could change if variants get out of hand. Currently, the vaccines have been shown to work well against a majority of the variants circulating in the U.S.

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University Hospitals doctor says another COVID-19 surge is 'highly unlikely' - WKYC.com

The state Department of Health (DOH) reported 402 new COVID-19 infections on Sunday, the second consecutive day with fewer than 500 new cases.

Of that total, there were only five new cases in the Valley, all in Northumberland County.

There were five new COVID-19-related deaths statewide and no new deaths in the Valley as the state continued its vaccination effort.

DOH officials did not update vaccination data on Saturday, but did update its dashboard on Sunday. The state said late last week that it would begin providing a weekend update at midday on Mondays beginning this week. The Sunday vaccine updated included 1,609 new vaccinations in Valley counties -- 1,126 of which were second doses providing full inoculation against the novel coronavirus.

Statewide, 60,933 second doses and 37,368 first doses were administered between Friday and Saturday, according to the Sunday data report.

To date, more than 10.8 million vaccines have been administered in the state and 154,220 shots have been given in the four Valley counties.

Hospitalizations

Pennsylvania reported a sharp decrease in hospitalizations on Sunday after a slight uptick on Saturday.

According to state officials, 767 patients were hospitalized on Sunday, 88 patients fewer than Saturday, a decrease of more than 20 percent. Of those patients, 180 were in intensive care units (ICUs) -- a decrease of 63 patients or more than 25 percent -- and 101 were on ventilators, a decrease of 14.

In Valley health care facilities, 34 patients were being treated in hospitals, 12 in ICUs and three on ventilators.

Geisinger in Danville had 27 patients, eight in ICUs and all of the Valleys ventilator cases. Four patients were admitted at Shamokin, one in the ICU. At Evangelical Community Hospital, all three patients being treated were in the ICU.

All of those figures were identical to Fridays and Saturdays midday reports from the state.

Prisons and state centers

At four federal prisons in Union County -- sites of several outbreaks throughout the pandemic -- there was one total active cases of COVID-19 on Sunday, the same number as reported on Saturday.

One staff member at the United States Penitentiary (USP) in Lewisburg is infected with the virus, according to the federal Bureau of Prisons. Since the pandemic started in March 2020, there has been one death at the prisons, a USP-Allenwood inmate.

There are no active cases at the State Correctional Institution in Coal Township, mimicking Saturdays report. Three inmates have died of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic.

There are no active cases at the Selinsgrove State Center. There have been fewer than five deaths since the pandemic started. The state Department of Human Services (DHS) does not report specific numbers if they are fewer than five.

There are fewer than five active cases among workers at Danville State Hospital and no active cases among clients. There have been fewer than five client deaths at the facility.

DHS figures from both the Selinsgrove Center and Danville State were the same as reported Saturday.

We are making critical coverage of the coronavirus available for free. Please consider subscribing so we can continue to bring you the latest news and information on this developing story.

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State reports only five new COVID-19 cases in the Valley; 98,301 vaccines administered statewide in 2 days - Sunbury Daily Item

A year of hybrid learning, bedroom Zoom meetings and quarantines has upended the education landscape, but its setting some students back more than others, according to studies.

While we have all been impacted by the pandemic, it has hit some homes and students harder than others, said Katie Joseph, assistant superintendent at Regional School Unit 1. The students who did not have consistent family support and nutrition, a quiet space to work, and a reliable internet to connect to their teachers likely struggled the most during the last one year.

The pandemic hit some demographics harder than others when it came to education. While the white students entered this school year with one to three months of learning loss in math, students of color lost three to five months, according to a report published in December by education consultant McKinsey & Company. The report predicted that if this trend continued through the end of the school year students on average could be five to nine months behind in math.

Ingrid A. Nelson, Associate Professor and Chair of Department of Sociology at Bowdoin College, argued that it is too early to gauge precise effects of the pandemic on learning.

We cant really knowthe full impact yet of pandemic-related school closures for student learning, but we do know that students from families with more resources are less likely to experience the same kinds of hardships that students from families with fewer resources are experiencing, said Nelson.

While high-quality summer learning programs have been shown to guard against the summer learning loss in pre-pandemic times, it is important to engage students in activities that attend to social and emotional competencies as well, added Nelson.

She also emphasized on the fact that it is important to honor and reinvigorate the teaching force to enable meaningful student-teacher connections that bring learning to life.

With weeks left before the summer break begins, local school district officials are beefing up their summer programs to provide more learning opportunities to the students.

In Brunswick, officials are in the initial stages of planning the summer program, which will be offered both in-person and online starting July 13.

Our goal is to help close the learning gaps that students have experienced in these two years. Hopefully, the students will be allowed to attend school five days a week when classrooms reopen, said Shawn Lambert, assistant superintendent of the Brunswick School Department.

With the main focus on social-emotional learning, the school department is offering various skill development programs to elementary and junior high school students, while credit recovery program is being offered to high school students.

Meanwhile, the Regional School Unit 1 which includes eight schools serving Arrowsic, Bath, Phippsburg, West Bath and Woolwich is planning an extended school year program to continue the learning for K-12 students. The program will run from June 21 to July 30.

The program will provide an opportunity to students to be with friends, stay engaged, while also ensuring that their learning and food needs are met, said Joseph.

Moreover, about 56 students from grades 6 to 8 will be attending the summer program at Midcoast Youth Center.

Our goal for the summer program is to get kids together for a lot of fun, outdoor games and physical, team building activities, said Jamie Dorr, executive director of center.

The program will help students explore hands-on STEM activities through orienteering/hiking, bike repair and bike riding, digital music production, film editing and math minutes. The six-week program, will also concentrate on culinary skills, cooking, art and literacy activities, Dorr added.

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COVID-19 leaves big gaps in learning - Portland Press Herald - pressherald.com

With slow vaccination rates threatening the likelihood of herd immunity, companies and federal and state governments are pouring billions of dollars into a future in which Covid-19 testing remains a key component for resuming normal life in the U.S.

Public-health officials increasingly expect pockets of America will remain largely unvaccinated. That has businesses and health officials counting on testing as a means for controlling the virus.

Test developers including Abbott Laboratories , the University of Illinois and Mount Sinai Hospital in New York have been testing their own employees and students to prove thatshort of herd immunityfrequent testing can allow for the safe return to work and school. So far, they have sold tests to companies and organizations like Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. , Toyota Motor Corp.s manufacturing plant in Lexington, Ky., Amys Kitchen Inc., Bloom Energy Corp. and Argonne National Laboratory, as well as universities and public schools.

Testing nationwide has declined as the U.S. vaccination campaign has picked up speed, and the pace of testing isnt expected to return to pandemic peaks. But many predict Covid-19 tests will continue to be a sustainable business, because they remain critical for people who have symptoms, who are unvaccinated or who are in outbreak situations, public-health experts say.

Developers are competing to bring test costs down and to convince businesses that testing can keep children in school and employees in offices. Abbott Chief Executive Officer Robert Ford said the company is making a bet that testing will be crucial even beyond the phase of widespread vaccination.

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Covid-19 Testing Could Be a Viable Long-Term Business Bet - The Wall Street Journal

Introduction

What touched off the COVID-19 pandemic remains a mystery. Several dominant hypotheses exist, but each lacks sufficient evidence to explain the cause of the crisis. A growing number of experts are calling for further investigation in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the outbreak is widely believed to have started. However, the scientific inquiry is being marred by political tensions between Washington and Beijing.

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Many scientists believe that SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, spread from animals to humansknown as zoonotic transmissionin late 2019. Some researchers have said the virus originated in bats, like other similar coronaviruses. But there are several possibilities: a naturally emerging virus that infected people outside of a laboratory; a naturally emerging virus that was studied inside a lab and leaked; or a virus that was produced as a result of experimentation in a lab.

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There is no definitive evidence yet for any one of these hypotheses. If there is any consensus, its that this is a very complicated issue, says CFRs Yanzhong Huang. There needs to be further work done to find a conclusive answer.

Until recently, the idea that COVID-19 was transmitted to humans in a lab was largely viewed as implausible. In the first weeks of the pandemic, much focus was placed on a so-called wet market in Wuhan as a possible place of origin, but researchers in China soon quashed the idea after discovering earlier cases of the virus with no connection to the market. Several widely shared letters by small groups of scientists from different countriespushed strongly in the direction of a natural origin, calling suggestions that COVID-19 emerged in a lab a conspiracy theory. Following an early 2021 mission to China, a World Health Organization (WHO) delegation called a lab leak extremely unlikely.

But a U.S. intelligence report that several researchers at a prominent Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses became ill in November 2019 has made accidental lab transmission a more credible hypothesis for some. The lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), was the first in China to achieve the highest level of biocontainment, known as Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4). (There are several dozen facilities around the world that have reached this level.) However, U.S. diplomats who visited the lab in 2018 raised deep concerns about vulnerabilities, including shortages of sufficiently trained technicians and investigators. The Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention has likewise been cast into the spotlight over its work on bat coronaviruses. There have been a few documented cases of pathogens leaking from laboratories in the past. For example, a leak from a Beijing lab is thought to be the cause of a small outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2004.

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A delegation of WHO scientists traveled to Wuhan in January 2021 for a four-week joint study with Chinese counterparts. The team followed many lines of investigation, including evidence that COVID-19 was circulating in China in the fall of 2019, and published their findings in a several-hundred-page report. In the report, the group stated that natural zoonotic transmission was the most likely among several possibilities, though scientists have yet to find samples of SARS-CoV-2 in any animals thought to be a possible host.

The WHO study also looked at the possibility that the virus was transmitted to humans through frozen food imported to China in the cold chain, a theory put forth by Chinese state media. But the team determined that there was no conclusive evidence for foodborne transmission.

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Similarly, it deemed the possibility that the virus escaped from a laboratory highly unlikely: the researchers dismissed the hypothesis that the virus was purposely engineered, and they separately noted that the risk that the virus was accidentally cultured in a lab was extremely low.

However, critics have said the inquiry lacked transparency and independence. The WHO scientists were reportedly severely constrained in their mission: Chinese officials secured veto rights over who was involved; refused to share raw data on early COVID-19 cases; and restricted the teams access to investigate different hypotheses, though the group did visit WIV for several hours. This is part of the problem for the WHO, a member-state organization, that you certainly dont have unfettered access, says CFRs Huang. Thats the reality.

Upon the reports release, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that further investigation was needed to reach a firm conclusion about the viruss emergence, and more than a dozen countries expressed concerns over the study in a joint statement. Scientists from around the globe called for a new and unrestricted investigation. Some experts organized their own collective to investigate the viruss origin, Vanity Fair reported.

Chinese officials have consistently rejected not only the hypothesis that the virus originated at the Wuhan laboratory, but that it originated in China at all. Additionally, Shi Zhengli, the top bat coronavirus expert at WIV, has said the virus didnt leak from her laboratory. (In April 2020, the U.S. National Institutes of Health pulled funding for a research project on coronaviruses in which the Wuhan institute was a chief partner.) Meanwhile, Beijing has called on the WHO to investigate the possibility that the pandemic started in other countries, including at a U.S. military lab in Maryland.

The accusations come amid heightened tensions between Washington and Beijing. Throughout 2020, the Donald Trump administration repeatedly blamed China for the pandemic, adding further friction to a relationship already strained by a trade war and U.S. responses to Chinas rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, among other issues. Many critics say Trumps use of inflammatory rhetoric such as China virus and kung flu contributed to a rise in anti-Asian bias in the United States amid the pandemic. President Joe Biden has tread more carefully, choosing not to support any one theory about the viruss origin; but he and top officials in his administration have persistently called for further investigation in China, which has angered Beijing.

Public health experts say uncovering how this pandemic started can help prevent the next one. A clear understanding of how a virus makes its way to humans sheds light on the risks associated with different behaviors: this includes various forms of human-animal interaction, such as farming, herding, and selling animals, as well as scientific research in the field or in laboratories.

Moreover, pinpointing the viruss origin in humans improves the scientific understanding of how such viruses work, particularly how they move and change across species. Experts are already urging governments to make major investments to detect future epidemic threats: a CFR Independent Task Force recommends an integrated network of national epidemic surveillance systems.

This pandemic has demonstrated the heavy economic toll that comes with major health crises. In late 2020, Harvard University economists estimated that the cost of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States alone would amount to at least $16 trillion. This includes lost economic output; premature deaths from COVID-19 and other illnesses; and long-term health-care costs, including for mental health. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank estimated that the pandemic pushed upward of 119 million people into extreme poverty in 2020.

Scientists warn that the more time that passes, the more challenging it will be to track down the origin of COVID-19. For instance, antibodies for the virus eventually disappearexperts are still working to understand how long COVID-19 antibodies lastso researchers hoping to trace clusters of infections around the start of the pandemicare working within a limited timeframe.

At the WHOs annual meeting in May 2021, countries including the United States, Australia, Japan, and Portugal called for a new probe into the viruss origin. At the same time, Biden asked U.S. intelligence agencies to up their investigative efforts on the issue and report their findings to the White House within ninety days.

However, Chinas foreign ministry denounced the continued U.S.-led push, claiming that Washington does not care about facts or truth, nor is it interested in serious scientific origin tracing. Experts say that given Chinas rebuffs, theres little chance it will allow the kind of access foreign investigators are asking for, and the WHO does not have authority to require China to comply with orders for an investigation. Some health experts caution that the discord could undermine global efforts to end the pandemic. If theres some turning down of the geopolitical heat between these two great powers, we could create some space to perhaps do some of the things that we need to do, CFRs David P. Fidler told Nature.

The controversy has additionally renewed calls to bolster biosafety measures. It is now becoming important for us to develop certain protocols for scientists to follow while conducting biological research on the one hand, says CFRs Huang. And on the other hand, we need to review existing international laws and norms, like the Biological Weapons Convention and the International Health Regulations, to strengthen their regulatory teeth to enforce those norms.

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Will the World Ever Solve the Mystery of COVID-19's Origin? - Council on Foreign Relations

KANSAS CITY, Mo. An officer from the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department died on Sunday after a battle with COVID-19.

According to a KCPD public information officer Donna Drake, the officer served with the department for 22 years.

"It is with a heavy heart we report the tragic loss of one of our own today," Drake said in an email. "This afternoon one of our officers passed away at the hospital after his battle with COVID-19. The officer was a dedicated officer who served our department for approximately 22 years and was assigned to the Patrol Bureau."

The identity of the officer was not released.

KCMO Mayor Quinton Lucas paid tribute to the officer after the announcement.

"I am heartbroken to hear of the death of a longtime Kansas City police officer who passed away today from COVID-19," Lucas said. "Our officers are on the front lines each day and in the past year, we have seen a new threat from COVID-19."

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Kansas City police officer dies after battle with COVID-19 - KSHB