Hong Kong will lift its mask mandate Wednesday, ending the city’s last major restriction imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The city’s Chief Executive John Lee said the requirement will end outdoors and indoors, including public transit, but some high-risk premises can still require people to wear masks.
Lee’s announcement at a news briefing Tuesday came a day after the neighboring city Macao eased its mask rule and will bring the financial hub closer to the life in pre-pandemic days.
He said the return to normalcy would be beneficial to Hong Kong’s economic development and international competitiveness.
For most of the pandemic, people in Hong Kong have been required to wear a mask in indoor and outdoor public areas. Violators could be fined 5,000 Hong Kong dollars ($637).
Hong Kong had largely followed China’s “zero-COVID” strategy over the last three years and used to have some of the world’s strictest anti-virus rules. In the last six months, the government has taken bigger steps to open up in an attempt to revive its economy and catch up with its rivals such as Singapore.
A crucial question has eluded governments and health agencies around the world since the COVID-19 pandemic began: Did the virus originate in animals or leak from a Chinese lab?
Now, the U.S. Department of Energy has assessed with “low confidence” in that it began with a lab leak, according to a person familiar with the report who wasn’t authorized to discuss it. The report has not been made public.
But others in the U.S. intelligence community disagree.
“There is not a consensus right now in the U.S. government about exactly how COVID started,” John Kirby, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said Monday. “There is just not an intelligence community consensus.”
The DOE’s conclusion was first reported over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal, which said the classified report was based on new intelligence and noted in an update to a 2021 document. The DOE oversees a national network of labs.
White House officials on Monday declined to confirm press reports about the assessment.
In 2021, officials released an intelligence report summary that said four members of the U.S. intelligence community believed with low confidence that the virus was first transmitted from an animal to a human, and a fifth believed with moderate confidence that the first human infection was linked to a lab.
While some scientists are open to the lab-leak theory, others continue to believe the virus came from animals, mutated, and jumped into people — as has happened in the past with viruses. Experts say the true origin of the pandemic may not be known for many years — if ever.
CALLS FOR MORE INVESTIGATION
The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment on the report. All 18 offices of the U.S. intelligence community had access to the information the DOE used in reaching its assessment.
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, said she isn’t sure what new intelligence the agencies had, but “it’s reasonable to infer” it relates to activities at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. She said a 2018 research proposal co-authored by scientists there and their U.S. collaborators “essentially described a blueprint for COVID-like viruses.”
“Less than two years later, such a virus was causing an outbreak in the city,” she said.
The Wuhan institute had been studying coronaviruses for years, in part because of widespread concerns — tracing back to SARS — that coronaviruses could be the source of the next pandemic.
No intelligence agency has said they believe the coronavirus that caused COVID-19 was released intentionally. The unclassified 2021 summary was clear on this point, saying: “We judge the virus was not developed as a biological weapon.”
“Lab accidents happen at a surprising frequency. A lot of people don’t really hear about lab accidents because they’re not talked about publicly,” said Chan, who co-authored a book about the search for COVID-19 origins. Such accidents “underscore a need to make work with highly dangerous pathogens more transparent and more accountable.”
Last year, the World Health Organization recommended a deeper probe into a possible lab accident. Chan said she hopes the latest report sparks more investigation in the United States.
China has called the suggestion that COVID-19 came from a Chinese laboratory “ baseless.”
SUPPORT FOR ANIMAL THEORY
Many scientists believe the animal-to-human theory of the coronavirus remains much more plausible. They theorize it emerged in the wild and jumped from bats to humans, either directly or through another animal.
In a 2021 research paper in the journal Cell, scientists said the COVID-19 virus, is the ninth documented coronavirus to infect humans — and all the previous ones originated in animals.
Two studies, published last year by the journal Science, bolstered the animal origin theory. That research found that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was likely the early epicenter. Scientists concluded that the virus likely spilled from animals into people two separate times.
“The scientific literature contains essentially nothing but original research articles that support a natural origin of this virus pandemic,” said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who has extensively studied COVID-19’s origins.
He said the fact that others in the intelligence community looked at the same information as the DOE and “it apparently didn’t move the needle speaks volumes.” He said he takes such intelligence assessments with a grain of salt because he doesn’t think the people making them “have the scientific expertise … to really understand the most important evidence that they need to understand.”
The U.S. should be more transparent and release the new intelligence that apparently swayed the DOE, Worobey said.
REACTION TO THE REPORT
The DOE conclusion comes to light as House Republicans have been using their new majority power to investigate all aspects of the pandemic, including the origin, as well as what they contend were officials’ efforts to conceal the fact that it leaked from a lab in Wuhan. Earlier this month, Republicans sent letters to Dr. Anthony Fauci, National Intelligence Director Avril Haines, Health Secretary Xavier Beccera and others as part of their investigative efforts.
The now retired Fauci, who served as the country’s top infectious disease expert under both Republican and Democratic presidents, has called the GOP criticism nonsense.
Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Texas, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has asked the Biden administration to provide Congress with “a full and thorough” briefing on the report and the evidence behind it.
Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman, emphasized that President Joe Biden believes it’s important to know what happened “so we can better prevent future pandemics” but that such research “must be done in a safe and secure manner and as transparent as possible to the rest of the world.”
___
AP reporters Farnoush Amiri, Nomaan Merchant and Seung Min Kim contributed. Ungar reported from Louisville, Kentucky
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Macao, the world’s biggest gambling hub, has eased its requirements for people to wear masks after mandating them for most of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Starting Monday, people no longer have to wear masks when outdoors, the statement by authorities in the Chinese territory said. They’ll still be required in places like elderly care homes and hospitals and on public transit, but indoor venues such as casinos have the discretion to decide themselves whether to require masks.
The statement said the policy was eased because the virus situation in Macao “has continuously remained stable for the past two months.”
In neighboring Hong Kong, authorities last week extended its mandate until March 8 to reduce the spread of respiratory viruses in cold weather, although they have signaled they may ease the requirements soon. Violators of the mandate requiring masks be worn in indoor and outdoor public areas can be fined 5,000 Hong Kong dollars ($637) on the spot.
Both territories had followed China’s “zero-COVID” strategy using travel restrictions and quarantines to try to stamp out the virus for much of the pandemic. The strategy was abandoned late last year as more virulent viral strains spread.
Both cities later reopened to tourists, and China on Jan. 8 dropped mandatory quarantine for inbound travelers.
There’s little doubt that North Korea’s chronic food shortages worsened due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and speculation about the country’s chronic food insecurity has flared as its top leaders prepare to discuss the “very important and urgent task” of formulating a correct agricultural policy.
Unconfirmed reports say an unspecified number of North Koreans have been dying of hunger. But experts say there is no sign of mass deaths or famine. They say the upcoming ruling Workers’ Party meeting is likely intended to shore up support for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as he pushes ahead with his nuclear weapons program in defiance of intense U.S.-led pressure and sanctions.
“Kim Jong Un can’t advance his nuclear program stably if he fails to resolve the food problem fundamentally because public support would be shaken,” said Lim Eul-chul, a professor at Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies in Seoul. “The meeting is being convened to solidify internal unity while pulling together ideas to address the food shortage.”
An enlarged plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party is slated for late February. Its specific agenda is unknown, but the party’s powerful Politburo earlier said that a “a turning point is needed to dynamically promote radical change in agricultural development.”
The meeting will be the party’s first plenary session convened just to discuss agricultural issues, though they often are a key topic at broader conferences in North Korea. Raising grain output was one of 12 economic priorities the party adopted during a plenary meeting in December.
It is difficult to know the exact situation in the North, which kept its borders virtually closed during the pandemic. Food shortages and economic hardships have persisted since a famine killed an estimated hundreds of thousands of people in the mid-1990s.
In his first public speech after taking over from his father as leader in late 2011, Kim vowed that North Koreans would “never have to tighten their belts again.”
During the first several years of his rule, the economy achieved modest growth as Kim tolerated some market-oriented activities and increased exports of coal and other minerals to China, the North’s main ally and biggest trading partner. More recently, however, tougher international sanctions over Kim’s nuclear program, draconian pandemic-related restrictions and outright mismanagement have taken a severe economic toll.
South Korean estimates put North Korea’s grain production last year at about 4.5 million tons, a 3.8% decrease from a year earlier. Annual grain output has plateaued at about 4.4 million tons to 4.8 million tons in the past decade.
North Korea needs about 5.5 million tons of grain to feed its 25 million people, so it’s usually short about 1 million tons each year. About half of the gap is typically offset by unofficial grain purchases from China. The rest is an unresolved shortfall, said Kwon Tae-jin, a senior economist at the private GS&J; Institute in South Korea.
Kwon says curbs on cross-border trade due to the pandemic have likely hindered unofficial rice purchases from China. Efforts by North Korean authorities to tighten controls and restrict market activities have also worsened the situation, he said.
“I believe this year North Korea is facing its worst food situation since Kim Jong Un took power,” Kwon said.
Koo Byoungsam, a spokesperson at the South Korean Unification Ministry, said that an unknown number of North Koreans have died of hunger, but said the problem is not as serious as the mid-1990s famine, which stemmed from natural disasters, the loss of Soviet assistance and mismanagement.
The current food problem is more an issue of distribution than of an absolute shortage of grain since much of the grain harvested last year has not yet been eaten, ministry officials said. Food insecurity has worsened as authorities tightened controls over private grain sales in markets, instead trying to confine the grain trade to state-run facilities.
Severe steps taken by the Kim government to contain the pandemic provided effective tools for imposing a tighter grip on the kinds of market activity that earlier helped foster stronger economic growth but might eventually erode the government’s authoritarian rule, analysts say.
Kwon said current food shortages are unlikely to cause mass deaths because food is still available in markets, though at high prices. During the famine in the mid-1990s, grain was hard to come by, he said.
North Korea monitoring groups have reported increases in the prices of rice and corn — the two most important staples — though the price of corn has stabilized recently in some regions.
“If North Korea indeed sees people dying of hunger and faces a chaos, it won’t publicly say things like ‘a very important and urgent task’ for an agricultural policy,” said Ahn Kyung-su, head of DPRKHEALTH.ORG, a website focusing on health issues in North Korea.
The North’s plenary meeting is “typical propaganda” meant to show Kim is working to improve living conditions and comes at a time when the leadership needs new fodder to burnish his image, on top of the nuclear program and assertions of a victory over the pandemic, Ahn said.
During the plenary meeting, Kwon said that leaders will likely pressure local farm officials to raise grain output without presenting any effective solutions for the food crisis. Targets will be set and officials may be punished for failing to meet them if food shortages worsen, Ahn said.
Yi Jisun, an analyst at the state-run Institute for National Security Strategy in Seoul, said in a report in January that North Korea recently imported large amounts of rice and flour from China, though it is unlikely to accept food assistance from the United States, South Korea and Japan.
While declaring that food problems must be improved at any cost, the state-run media in the North have continued to tout its longstanding policy of “self-reliance,” a strategy that shuns Western help.
“The assistance by imperialists is a trap for plundering and subjugation meant to wrest 100 things after giving one,” the North’s main Rodong Sinmun newspaper said in a commentary Wednesday. “Building up the economy by receiving this ‘poisoned candy’ would be a mistake.”
The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved the first combination test for flu and C OVID-19 that can be used at home, giving consumers an easy way to determine if a runny nose is caused by either disease.
The Lucira COVID-19 & Flu Home test, which can be purchased without a prescription, uses self-collected nasal swab samples and delivers results in about 30 minutes, the agency said.
While at-home COVID tests are readily available, this is the first home test for influenza A and B, commonly known as the flu. The test was granted an emergency use authorization, which facilitates the availability of “medical countermeasures” during public health emergencies.
Jeff Shuren, director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, called the authorization “a major milestone in bringing greater consumer access to diagnostic tests that can be performed entirely at home.”
The agency said the test is for individuals “with signs and symptoms consistent with a respiratory tract infection” and said it can be used on children as young as 2, with adults collecting the samples.
It recommends that tests be reported to healthcare providers and cautions that there is a risk of false positive and negative results. “Individuals who test negative and continue to experience symptoms of fever, cough and-or shortness of breath may still have a respiratory infection and should seek follow-up care with their healthcare provider,” the agency said.
Citing the impact of COVID and RSV, another respiratory infection, the FDA said it “recognizes the benefits that home testing can provide” and would work to increase the number of tests available.
Fink takes his time examining every photo, reading signs, weaving his way through the memories that have been plastered there to remember those lives lost. He pauses at some as they hit a nerve, wiping away tears, crouching to get a better look.
“She was the security guard I worked with,” said Fink, pointing to a smiling photo of a young woman. “I went back inside, that girl who was leaning against the VIP wall, I went back inside to get her. I had no idea she was dead until I pulled her up and I saw her face.”
But she isn’t the only one who haunts his memories.
“I had a guy die in my arms. I brought him out, then the tactical truck came out and I brought him right over here. I picked him up and a deputy picked his legs up. We were putting him on the bed and he was gone,” Fink said. “I can still see him. He had said, ‘Please, don’t leave me in here’ when we were in the lobby. My therapist makes the point, ‘You did what he said.’ I remember, like, losing him, how evil this world is.”
It’s a difficult trip back to the Orlando nightclub, but it’s one that’s necessary for Fink’s healing.
“For me, for so long, it was the feeling of guilt, the feeling of being responsible. All those things just kept replaying in my mind, in my mind, in my mind. And after a while you start believing, you start thinking, ‘I wasn’t good enough’ or ‘I’m responsible for him dying,’ ‘I should have saved them,’” Fink said. “But you have no idea that’s not the case. And it’s the devil, it’s the demons, it’s the darkness, that is slowly taking over you.”
But the darkness Fink is experiencing isn’t just because of Pulse.
“It started with Christina Grimmie. When she was killed at the Plaza Live, I was in patrols at that time, so I had to go sit with her. And I don’t know why she made such a big impact on me. The next night was Pulse,” Fink said. “Matthew Baxter, the Kissimmee police officer, he was one of my best friends. So then he got shot and killed. And then in 2018, my dad died of an opiate overdose. And then in 2019, I was hurt on the job. And in 2020, my wife and I, we lost our baby. And then 2021, my best friend from the army committed suicide.”
That’s when Fink said it all came to a head.
“Two and a half weeks later, my daughter was born and I didn’t feel anything for her. That was my aha moment because like, this beautiful baby, like, beautiful little princess, that he feels nothing for. It’s not fair to her. It’s not fair to my wife, not fair to my son. Daddy wasn’t OK,” he said.
Fink realized he needed to find help, but soon found the options available to officers weren’t really cutting it.
“It’s just a generalized program,” he said. “You have one mental health member in a classroom with 20 to 25 people. I remember thinking in that moment, ‘There’s no way I’m going to tell you my story because you’re not going to remember mine plus the other 24.’”
When he tried to meet with a therapist initially, he was canceled on multiple times.
“I finally told the therapy program and they said I was too damaged,” Fink said. “Other than that, we have nothing as law enforcement.”
So Fink decided to take matters into his own hands, creating the Officer Support Initiative.
“OSI is a peer-to-peer support program that allows officers to come forward and have full trust in us that we won’t, obviously, betray it. Because if you betray one officer’s trust, you’re done,” Fink said. “And so if they need to, you know, they just want to vent, they can vent if they want to, you know, talk to a therapist, we have therapists that are working with us.”
The program builds camaraderie between officers because they understand what one another is going through as far as the demands and the experiences of the job. There are different OSI liaisons in the program that are part of different groups in the agency—dispatchers, crime scene techs and others.
That way, they’re able to do what they call a buddy check. If they know a particularly difficult call has gone out, they’re able to reach out to those people who worked it to make sure everyone is doing OK.
“It shows officers that one: People are paying attention. And then two: If we’re reaching out, it’s okay to say something,” Fink said.
That’s key because one of OSI’s primary goals is breaking the stigma.
“It’s that stigma of, especially as a man, looking weak, looking insecure, looking, you know, not good enough,” Fink said. “One out of every 4 officers will or are going to have suicidal ideations. But if you have a sergeant or a supervisor, and no fault of their own, because that’s a stigma, but you say, ‘Hey, I was having a suicidal ideation,’ you’re done. You know, you automatically get relieved of duty.”
But Fink argued getting help is what makes a good leader and that’s why he’s made it his mission to get officers the help they need.
“I want to be able to help these officers. I don’t want them to come to me, and I don’t live up to their expectations,” Fink said. “But in terms of what they’re reaching out to me for, yes, I mean, substance abuse, relationships, struggle with the purposes, the guilt that they feel for, you know, whatever has haunted them. So an officer is talking to me. And you know, I say, ‘Say something good about yourself.’ And they’ll say, ‘I have nothing good to say.’ But I recognize that because that was me. Right? I think that’s what’s so important is because I lived it. I still live with every day.”
The program is still in the early stages but so far, it has helped dozens of officers across Central Florida.
“All these people started coming to you, because they know what you’ve been through and because you talk about it,” News 6 reporter Erik von Ancken said.
“Very openly, yes,” Fink said. “Now I go around, and I speak to the local all the local agencies, CIT classes, as well as the police academy.”
He said when officers can’t reach out “it will cost us a lot more in the end than if we do this now.”
“Ultimately, suicide?” von Ancken said.
“Yes,” Fink said.
Newly-appointed Orlando Police Chief Eric Smith said support like this is important for officers.
“Anything that makes our officers better I support 100%,” Smith said.
He added that the city is looking to adopt the program, but is also looking into other programs that might help officers.
It’s Fink’s hope that peer-to-peer support programs like OSI will become the norm across agencies. If he’s able to secure enough funding, he’s considering adding an app, training courses and even retreats.
“I think one officer is one too many. And I can’t, I can’t stomach that,” Fink said.
And in the meantime, he’ll keep up his own healing.
“Oftentimes, you know, people tell you drive on, don’t look back. But I think it’s important to take a second stop and look at where you are. Look back and see how far you’ve come. And then drive on. Because you don’t forget who you are. Don’t forget that,” Fink said.
The Officer Support Initiative recommended these resources for any law enforcement officer in need of assistance:
