Tag: overwhelmed

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World News

Manitoba is now the worst sizzling spot in North America, with its hospitals overwhelmed.

Manitoba is now the worst hot spot in North America, with its hospitals overwhelmed.

The coronavirus is now spreading faster in Manitoba than any other province or state in Canada, the United States, or Mexico. Indigenous and colored people are disproportionately affected.

Figures released on Wednesday show that the Prairie Province of central Canada has reported an average of 35 new cases per 100,000 per day over the past two weeks. Canada as a whole averages 10 per 100,000 per day; the United States 7 per 100,000; and Mexico 2 per 100,000. The next higher states or provinces are Alberta with 16 and Colorado with 15.

Dr. Marcia Anderson, the leader of the Manitoba First Nation Pandemic Response Coordination Team for public health, told reporters Wednesday that from the beginning of the month through May 19, 61 percent of the cases in Manitoba were indigenous and other non-white people, despite being 37 Make up percent of the province’s population.

People of Southeast Asian descent are most disproportionately affected at 146 per 1,000 people, 13 times the rate among whites.

The surge in Covid-19 cases has overwhelmed intensive care units at Manitoba hospitals, forcing some patients to be evacuated by air to other provinces. Eighteen patients were flown to neighboring Ontario, including some to Ottawa, about 1,000 miles away. Saskatchewan, the province to the west, was due to receive an evacuated patient from Manitoba on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, a group of doctors urged the province to follow the example of Ontario and others by introducing a stay-at-home order and closing non-essential businesses. These steps have allowed other provinces to contain their recent waves of infections.

Shops in Manitoba were limited to 10 percent of capacity, and gyms and hair salons have been closed for several weeks. On Tuesday, Provincial Prime Minister Brian Pallister extended the restrictions on outdoor gatherings held last weekend. They now last until the end of this week.

Mr Pallister suggested Tuesday that the worsening situation in the province was not caused by too few restrictions, but rather by people not complying with the restrictions already in place.

“I no longer have much sympathy for people who knowingly and willingly violate public health rules,” he said.

Categories
World News

A third Nationwide Lockdown Appears Seemingly in France as Hospitals Are Overwhelmed

A 3rd National Lockdown Seems Likely in France as Hospitals Are Overwhelmed

PARIS – After more than a year of lockdown and months of sputtering vaccination campaigns, Europe’s efforts to contain the coronavirus pandemic suffered another setback on Wednesday when French President Emmanuel Macron announced new restrictive measures to stop a new wave of death. The move resulted in a third national lockdown for a month that he had long tried to avoid.

With infections rising, hospitals crowded with patients, and the virus now entering classrooms, Mr Macron gave up a three month gamble keeping France open in hopes that a steady pace of vaccinations will make a lockout unnecessary would.

As the coronavirus death toll steadily neared the 100,000 mark, Mr. Macron effectively gave in to scientists and opposition politicians who had been pushing for a new lockdown in recent weeks, adding France to the list of European nations huddled together again. Many of them put in new bans to respond to a wave of new cases where a slow vaccine rollout couldn’t be stopped.

France on Tuesday reported more than 5,000 people in intensive care units for the first time since last April, with bed shortages in hospitals becoming acute in the hardest hit areas. And the slow adoption of the vaccine hasn’t prevented an outbreak of infection, with an average of 37,000 new cases reported per day over the past week.

“The outlook is worse than scary,” Jean-Michel Constantin, director of the intensive care unit at the Pitié Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, told RMC Radio on Monday.

“We are already at the level of the second wave and are quickly approaching the threshold of the first wave,” he said. “April will be terrible.”

In mid-March, new restrictions were put in place at the regional level to stave off a third wave of infections that affects around a third of the population, including the Paris region. The rules forced businesses that are deemed unnecessary to close, ordered residents to limit their outdoor activities to locations within six miles of their homes, and prohibited travel to or from areas where infections were increasing.

But when the infections stubbornly increased, pressure had built up on Mr. Macron to take stricter measures.

In Le Journal du Dimanche, 41 doctors from the Paris region warned that hospitals could soon be so congested that they will have to decide which patients to save.

“All the indicators show that current measures are insufficient to quickly reverse the alarming contamination curve,” they write.

In late January, Mr Macron took a calculated risk of opposing a new national lockdown in hopes his government could tighten restrictions just enough to combat a surge in infections while people were being vaccinated.

That strategy seemed to work until mid-March, when infections spiked and the vaccination campaign didn’t pick up pace given the mess around the launch of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Political opponents as well as some scholars said Mr Macron had “lost his gambling”.

For Mr Macron, the timing of the announcement on Wednesday was particularly important: the introduction of further restrictions a year after France’s first lockdown and a year before the presidential election, which is expected to leave voters with his presidency after his handling of the epidemic and vaccination campaign judge .

Health officials announced Tuesday that about 8.3 million people had received at least one first shot of the coronavirus vaccine, representing about 12 percent of the total population. The government plans to vaccinate 10 million people by mid-April and 30 million by summer.

But France is still lagging behind some other Western countries in introducing vaccines. According to the New York Times, the UK has vaccinated 46 percent of its population and the US 29 percent.

Categories
World News

This Island Nation Had Zero Covid Circumstances for Months. Now It’s Overwhelmed.

This Island Nation Had Zero Covid Cases for Months. Now It’s Overwhelmed.

“You are our family. You are our friends. You are our neighbors. They are our partners, ”said Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison last week. “This is in the interests of Australia and in the interests of our region.”

Covax, a global health initiative aimed at making vaccination access more equitable, began rolling out vaccine doses for developing countries last month and is expected to deliver 588,000 to Papua New Guinea by June.

However, in some cases, wealthier nations have failed to honor contracts and have reduced the number of cans the initiative can buy, said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director of the World Health Organization, in a statement last month. He warned the pandemic would not end until everyone was vaccinated.

“This is not a question of charity,” he said. “It’s a question of epidemiology.”

Until then, officials in Papua New Guinea will not only have to fight the virus itself, but also a deluge of misinformation about the pathogen and vaccines, most of which is broadcast via social media channels.

“Even for trained health workers, there are many doubts,” said Dr. Nou, the Port Moresby-based doctor who conducted a survey of health workers’ views on the pandemic. He said that some in the country believed the virus was a joke, or that people on the island were immune, or that it was safer to contract the virus than to be vaccinated.

With the country now waging a full battle against the coronavirus, some public health experts fear that the diversion of resources could cause deadly costs for people with other serious health problems such as malaria or tuberculosis. Papua New Guinea has some of the highest rates of tuberculosis in the world.

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Health

Well being care unions amplify the voices of frontline staff overwhelmed by pandemic circumstances.

Health care unions amplify the voices of frontline workers overwhelmed by pandemic conditions.

The unions that represent health workers in the country have emerged as increasingly powerful voices during the still raging pandemic.

With more than 100,000 Americans in hospital and many infected in their ranks, nurses and other health workers remain on a precarious front against the coronavirus and have reached out to unions for help.

Nurses from various unions across the country take part in dozens of strikes and protests. National Nurses United, the largest registered nurses union in the country, held a “day of action” on Wednesday with demonstrations in more than a dozen states and in Washington, DC as negotiations began in hospitals, major systems like HCA, Sutter Health and belong to CommonSpirit Health.

“It’s so overwhelming. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, ”said Erin McIntosh, a nurse at Riverside Community Hospital in Southern California, a part of the country that in some cases has been hit hardest by the surge. “Every day I’m waist-deep in death and dying.”

Hospitals said the unions were playing public health policy during a public health emergency, saying they had no choice but to ask more of their workers.

However, healthcare workers are bitterly disappointed with the response of their employers and government agencies to the pandemic. Lack of staff, inadequate and persistent supplies of protective equipment, limited virus testing and work pressure even when they might be sick have led many workers to turn to the unions as their only ally. The virus has killed more than 3,300 healthcare workers across the country, according to a census.

“We wouldn’t be alive today if we didn’t have a union,” said Elizabeth Lalasz, a nurse and steward at National Nurses United in Chicago.

Despite the decade-long decline of the labor movement and the low number of unionized nurses, labor officials have used the effects of the pandemic to organize new chapters and contract negotiations for better terms and benefits. National Nurses organized seven new negotiating units last year, compared to four in 2019. The Service Employees International Union, which Ms. McIntosh represents, also said interest has increased.