Daily Archives: February 7, 2022

Jerusalem, February 6, 2022- An additional grant of US$3.75 million was allocated to the ongoing West Bank and Gaza COVID-19 Emergency Response. The additional financing will continue to support the Palestinian Authority's response to the threat posed by the COVID-19 pandemic while ensuring continuity of essential health services and contributing to long-term resilience.

The grant will be contributed from the Health Emergency Preparedness and Response (HEPR) Multi-donor Trust Fund administered by the World Bank. It is a flexible mechanism for rapid financing to support countries and territories to improve their capacities to prepare for, prevent, respond to, and mitigate the impact of epidemics on populations.

"*COVID-19 continues to pose a high risk of morbidity and mortality, as well as a burden to healthcare systems. Due to low capacity of testing in the Palestinian territories, the number of COVID-19 cases are underestimated. Still, the numbers of new infections reported daily continue to reach new highs. The additional financing will support the original project by providing immediate response to COVID-19, but also contributing to long-term resilience,*" said Kanthan Shankar, World Bank Country Director for West Bank and Gaza.

Beyond strengthening the overall healthcare services and clinical capacity in immediate response to COVID-19 under the framework of the parent project, the new grant focuses on procuring supplies and equipment that could be utilized to promote resilience to future pandemics and health shocks. These include medicines for the treatment of health emergencies and chronic conditions as well as emergency medical devices and equipment including defibrillators, vital-signs monitors, emergency trolleys, patient beds, mobile blood banks, ultrasound machines, generators, and more.

The operation will also seek to reduce limitations to access to healthcare experienced by rural and marginalized communities. For instance, women in remote areas often find it difficult to access health services due to distance to health facilities and lack of transportation. Mobile clinics financed through the additional financing will ensure equitable access to quality care for populations that are often left behind. The World Bank will continue to strengthen resilience and pandemic preparedness in the health system through technical and operational engagement with the Ministry of Health and other partners in the sector.

Mary Koussa

+(972) 2-2366500

mkoussa@worldbank.org

Serene Jweied

+1 (202) 473-8764

sjweied@worldbankgroup.org

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New US$3.75 million Grant to Help Palestinians Fight the Coronavirus Outbreak and Future Health Shocks - occupied Palestinian territory - ReliefWeb

A statistician has said he was "overly-optimistic" at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, chairman of the Winton Centre for Risk of Evidence Communication at Cambridge University confessed he "didn't take it seriously enough".

He added that he had a naturally optimistic personality "and that's why I'm very glad I'm not a government adviser".

"The pandemic has been a net lifesaver for younger people, if you look at people between 15 and 30 in 2020, 300 fewer died than would normally have died and that includes the 100 that died from COVID sadly," Sir David said.

"So that's 300 fewer families mourning the death of a young person because of the pandemic.

"Now that's because young people were essentially locked up, they couldn't go out driving fast, they couldn't go out and get drunk, and they couldn't get into fights and whatever, and so all these lives were saved."

However, the professor said that this doesn't necessarily mean he advocates for lockdowns, because "on the flip side of that you have a big increase in mental health problems".

Sir David, who has been a regular commentator on the pandemic, admitted he had an "optimistic" disposition during the pandemic.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, he said: "I think it's very important that we have to acknowledge that we can never take an objective view about evidence, we always bring our, I think, personalities into it, and mine is unfortunately very optimistic and that's why I'm very glad I'm not a government adviser, I don't think I'd be very good at it because I do tend to hope for the best and sort of expecting the best as well.

"I was terribly over-optimistic at the start of the pandemic and didn't take it seriously enough."

'Could he have been caught earlier?'

Sir David was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, including leading the statistical team for the public inquiry into high rates of deaths among babies following heart surgery at Bristol Royal Infirmary.

He also discussed his work as an expert witness to the public inquiry into serial killer doctor Harold Shipman.

Shipman was jailed for life in January 2000 for murdering 15 patients while working in Manchester but official predictions are that he killed between 215-260 people during a 23-year-period in West Yorkshire.

He said: "I was part of the team that was asked to say 'well, could he have been caught earlier if people had been looking at the data?'.

"We looked at the statistical methods that were used in industrial quality control, where you monitor whether a process is going out of kilter by seeing whether you're getting more failures than you would expect and, in Harold Shipman's case, it was looking for when more people were dying in his practice than you would expect.

"And we adapted the methods used in industrial quality control and showed that, actually Shipman could have been caught much earlier and if someone had been looking at the data and had blown the whistle you might have been able to save 200 lives."

See more here:

COVID-19: Cambridge professor admits he was 'over-optimistic' at the start of the coronavirus pandemic - Sky News

The test kits alone, the city estimated, caught 25,000 cases. School attendance hovered around 70 percent in early January, as children were out sick or kept home by their parents to try to avoid infection.

While Omicron often causes milder illness in adults, it sometimes has a more severe impact on children, particularly those too young to be vaccinated, creating new challenges for health care workers. Hospitalization rates for children rose more quickly than in previous waves, mirroring trends elsewhere.

Still, of the 181 children that Cohen Childrens Medical Center in Queens admitted with Covid-19 in the recent wave, only one, an unvaccinated 17-year-old boy, died, a spokesman said. From Jan. 1 to Jan. 27, three children under 18 died of Covid-19 in the city, bringing the citys total death toll in that age group during the pandemic to 32, according to data from the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Although Omicron is receding quickly, the wave is not totally gone. There were 2,633 people with Covid-19 in city hospitals on Feb. 2, fewer than half than at the Omicron peak, but still more than four times as many as before the variant was first detected in December.

Even with the numbers declining, medical workers on the front lines say staffing shortages remain acute.

At SUNY Downstate, employees from across departments pitched in when the emergency room was taking in four times its regular number of patients in early January. Vaccines and new treatments helped limit severe cases. But there were too many patients flooding the entire health system at once to load balance, or transfer patients, between Downstate and other hospitals that were also being hit hard.

Still, strategies that had been developed after earlier waves helped, said Patricia A. Winston, the hospitals senior vice president for operations. Those included regular check-in calls with state and city officials and the Greater New York Hospital Association, a trade group that followed the situation across medical centers.

Before, it was like, you were in this by yourself, Ms. Winston said. Now you talk to each other and work together and figure out how to strategize. Even if you cant move somebody, you have someone to talk to.

Original post:

How New York Citys Hospitals Withstood the Omicron Surge - The New York Times

Australia will reopen its borders to fully vaccinated tourists from February 21, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has announced, ending some of the worlds strictest and longest-running pandemic travel restrictions.

Its almost two years since we took the decision to close the borders to Australia, Morrison said during a media briefing on Monday.

If youre double vaccinated, we look forward to welcoming you back to Australia.

Australia shut its borders in March 2020 to protect itself against a surging COVID-19 pandemic.

For most of the time since then, Australians have been barred from leaving and only a handful of visitors have been granted exemptions to enter.

The rules have split families, hammered the countrys large tourist industry and prompted sometimes acrimonious debates about Australias status as a modern, open and outward-looking nation.

With the rollout of its vaccination programme last year, Morrisons government has slowly relaxed the rules for Australians, long-term residents and students.

Mondays decision will see almost all remaining caps lifted.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) said it greatly welcomed the move.

The Asia Pacific region has been very cautious in its approach to border restrictions so far but in recent weeks, we have seen growing momentum towards relaxation of travel restrictions in the Philippines, Thailand, and to some extent New Zealand, Philip Goh, IATAs Regional Vice President for Asia Pacific said in a statement.

We urge other governments in the Asia Pacific to look at similarly further easing their border restrictions so as to enable aviation businesses to accelerate their much needed recovery and to bring maximum benefits to their economies.

Tim Soutphommasane, a professor of sociology at the University of Sydney, Australia, said the reopening of borders meant Australia can re-engage with the world. But challenges remain, he cautioned.

We may be seeing the beginning of the end for Fortress Australia, but psychologically the country still has some way to go, Soutphommasane told Al Jazeera.

The pandemic has seen Australia retreat into seeing itself as a sanctuary, sheltered from the rest of the world. With a highly vaccinated population, Australia should be confident about reopening. But there is still a lot of caution and anxiety, with the country still learning to live alongside the virus.

For most of the pandemic, Australia pursued what it called a COVID-zero policy that included strict snap lockdowns. But it abandoned the policy after rolling out vaccines.

Some 79 percent of Australias population has now received two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, and the country has pushed ahead with easing curbs even as the Omicron variant began to drive up infections.

The past week has seen a slowdown in daily infections and hospital admissions, with Australia reporting just over 23,000 new cases on Monday.

The figure marks the lowest daily case count this year and is well below the peak of 150,000 about a month ago.

Approximately 2.4 million cases have been recorded since the first Omicron case was detected in Australia in November. Until then, Australia had counted about 200,000 cases.

Some 4,248 people in Australia have died from the virus since the pandemic began.

Continued here:

Australia to open borders to vaccinated tourists on February 21 - Al Jazeera English