Israel on Thursday began administering doses of coronavirus vaccines tailored to fight the highly infectious omicron variant as its health authorities urged at-risk groups and those over 65 to get the shot.
The rollout of the new vaccine follows Israel’s world-leading drive to vaccinate its population early in 2021 and marks it out as one of the first countries to start distributing omicron-specific vaccines. Health officials are now voicing growing concerns about increased COVID-19 infections in the upcoming winter.
Arsen Arutiunian, an official with the Israeli healthcare provider Clalit, said that there had been “big demand” for the booster since the new campaign began. He said the clinic has been flooded with phone calls from people of all ages looking to schedule an appointment.
“I received all of the previous vaccinations. So far, touch wood, I haven’t been infected even though my entire family has I’ve somehow become Teflon. And as they say, keeping healthy,” said Eytan Gurfinkel, a Tel Aviv resident.
As of Thursday, 95 people were hospitalized with serious cases of coronavirus — the lowest point since May. Over 11,600 Israelis have died of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic in early 2020, according to Health Ministry statistics.
Israel was a world leader last year in vaccinating its population of 9.5 million against the coronavirus, after it struck a deal with Pfizer to trade vaccines for medical data. It quickly vaccinated over 60% of its population with at least two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine by last fall.
Over 4.5 million Israelis have received a third dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, but just over 800,000 have taken a fourth shot.
In August, the FDA approved updated COVID boosters that target the omicron strain and U.S. health officials are beginning the rollout this fall.
Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II has tested positive for the coronavirus after attending the funeral of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, the royal palace said Wednesday.
In a statement, the royal household said that Margrethe, 82, who has been on the throne for 50 years, canceled her official duties after the Tuesday night test.
The palace said her oldest son, heir to the throne Crown Prince Frederik, and his wife, Crown Princess Mary, would would take the queen’s place hosting a dinner with Danish government officials and members of parliament.
Margrethe previously tested positive for the virus in February. At the time, the palace said she had received three doses of a COVID-19 vaccine. The queen was among the dignitaries who attended Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral Monday at Westminster Abbey in London.
Margrethe’s half-century reign makes her Europe’s longest-serving monarch following the Sept. 8 death of Elizabeth, 96, who ruled for 70 years.
Out of respect for the late British monarch, Margrethe had asked her court to adjust the Sept. 10-11 program for her own 50-year anniversary commemorations. Among the events she canceled at short notice was appearing on the Amalienborg Palace balcony to greet well-wishers and a ride in a horse-drawn carriage through Copenhagen.
Margrethe was proclaimed queen on Jan. 15, 1972, a day after her father, King Frederik IX, died following a short illness.
A nighttime bus crash that killed 27 people in southwest China this week has set off a storm of anger online over the harshness of the country’s strict COVID-19 policies.
The initial police report did not say who the passengers were and where they were going, but it later emerged they were headed to a quarantine location outside their city of Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou province.
The bus with 47 people on board crashed about 2:40 a.m. Sunday. City officials announced many hours later that the passengers were under “medical observation,” confirming reports they were being taken to quarantine.
Following public anger, Guiyang fired three officials in charge of Yunyan district, where the residents had been picked up, the provincial government said Monday. Guiyang’s deputy mayor apologized at a news conference, bowing and observing a moment of silence.
Online, many wondered at the logic behind transporting people outside of Guiyang, accusing the government of moving them so that the city would no longer report any new cases.
“Will this ever end? On the top searches (on social media), there’s all sorts of pandemic prevention situations every day, creating unnecessary panic and making people jittery,” one person wrote. “Is there scientific validity to hauling people to quarantine, one car after another?”
Guiyang officials had announced the city would achieve “societal zero-COVID” by Monday, one day after the crash.
The phrase means new infections are found only among people already under surveillance — such as those in a centralized quarantine facility or who are close contacts of existing patients — so the virus is no longer spreading in the community.
China has managed the pandemic through a series of measures known as “clearing to zero,” or “zero COVID,” maintained through strict lockdowns and mass testing.
The approach saved lives before vaccines were widely available, as people refrained from public gatherings and wore masks regularly. However, as other countries have opened up and loosened some of the most onerous restrictions, China has held steadfast to its zero-COVID strategy.
While China has cut down its quarantine time for overseas arrivals and said it would start issuing student visas, the policy remains strict at home. Officials are concerned about the potential death toll and the impact any loosening would have on the country’s stretched medical system.
Zero COVID also has become a political issue, and at one point was celebrated by many Chinese as signifying the superiority of their country over the U.S., which has had more than a million COVID deaths.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has cited China’s approach as a “major strategic success” and evidence of the “significant advantages” of its political system over Western liberal democracies.
Yet, even as other countries open up, the humanitarian costs to China’s pandemic approach has grown.
Earlier this year in Shanghai, desperate residents complained of being unable to get medicines or even groceries during the city’s two-month lockdown, while some died in hospitals from lack of medical care as the city restricted movement. Last week, residents in the western region of Xinjiang said they went hungry under a more than 40-day lockdown.
According to FreeWeibo, a website that tracks censored posts on the popular social media platform, three of top 10 searches on Weibo related to the bus accident.
Many fixated on images of the bus shared by social media users. One photo showed the bus after it had been retrieved from the accident site. Its roof was crushed and portions missing. Another photo allegedly showed the driver decked out in a full white protective suit.
Users online questioned how a driver could see properly when his face was covered up, and why he was driving so late at night. Many comments were censored but some that expressed discontent with the current approach to the pandemic did remain up.
“I hope that the price of this pain can push for change faster, but if it’s possible, I don’t want to pay such a high price for such a change,” said the comment with the most likes on an online report about the accident by state broadcaster CCTV. “Condolences.”
One of the passengers on the bus said her whole building had been taken for central quarantine, according to a report by Caixin, a business news outlet. Yet her apartment building had not reported a single case, according to a friend who shared their text conversation with Caixin.
Another popular comment quoted a proverb, “These human lives are like straw.”
On Tuesday, Guizhou reported 41 new COVID-19 cases in the entire province. The province has been on high alert in the past few weeks after discovering one case at the end of August. It has locked down its capital city, using the euphemistic “quiet period” to describe the move, which means people are not allowed to leave their homes.
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Associated Press news assistant Caroline Chen in Beijing contributed to this report.
With COVID-related school disruptions setting back children around the world, activists implored world leaders Monday to prioritize school systems and restore educational budgets slashed when the pandemic hit.
The summit on transforming education, held at the U.N. General Assembly ahead of the annual leaders’ meeting, was expected to produce commitments from the world’s nations to ensure that children everywhere from sub-Saharan Africa to the United States don’t fall too far behind.
“Seven years ago, I stood on this platform hoping that the voice of a teenage girl who took a bullet in standing up for her education would be heard,” said Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Malala Yousafzai, a U.N. messenger of peace. ”On that day, countries, corporates, civil society, all of us committed to work together to see every child in schools by 2030. It is heartbreaking that halfway through that target date, we are facing an education emergency.”
Nigerian youth activist Karimot Odebode was more pointed. “We demand you take responsibility,” Odebode told the General Assembly. “We will not stop until every person in every village and every highland has access to an education.”
The percentage of 10-year-old children in poor and middle-income countries who cannot read a simple story increased to an estimated 70% — up 13 percentage points since before the pandemic shuttered classrooms, according to a report from the World Bank, UNESCO and UNICEF.
Will the world’s leaders do enough to help their youngest citizens learn to read and gain the other skills they need to thrive? It will require addressing systemic problems that existed before the pandemic, dignitaries and students say. Countries will need to increase spending, change policies to increase access for girls and disabled students, and modernize instruction to stress critical thinking rather than rote memorization.
“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us to radically transform education,” U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed told reporters ahead of the education summit at U.N. headquarters in New York. “We owe it to the coming generation if we don’t want to witness the emergence of a generation of misfits.”
When COVID-19 closed schools around the world in spring 2020, many children simply stopped learning — some for months, others for longer. For many, there was no such thing as remote learning. More than 800 million young people around the world lacked internet access at home, according to a study by UNICEF and the International Telecommunication Union in December 2020.
More recent studies underscore the pandemic’s lasting effects. “The learning losses from COVID were enormous,” Mohammed said.
There also were huge variations in the availability and quality of remote learning. In some countries, students stuck at home had access to paper packets, or radio and television programs, or almost nothing at all. Others had access to the internet and video conferences with teachers.
The estimated learning delays on average ranged from over 12 months of school for students in South Asia to less than four for students in Europe and Central Asia, according to an analysis by consulting firm McKinsey & Company.
Most of the world’s classrooms are now back open, but 244 million school-age children are still out of school, UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay said during the summit, citing data from the U.N. education agency. Most of those children — 98 million — live in sub-Saharan Africa, followed by Central and Southern Asia, in a reminder of the deep inequalities that persist in access to education, she said.
In many places, money is the key ingredient for stemming the crisis, if not fully reaching the leaders’ lofty goal of “transforming education.” “Education financing must be a priority for governments,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the General Assembly on Monday. “It is the single most important investment any country can make in its people and its future.”
On average wealthy countries invest $8,000 a year per school-aged child, compared to upper middle income countries, like some in Latin America, that invest $1,000 per year, according to a report from UNESCO and Global Education Monitoring. Lower income countries allot roughly $300 a year and some poor countries, just $50 a year per student.
Rich countries should also step up spending, said Guterres. In recent years, Germany, France and the United States have given the most international aid towards education in low-income countries, according to a 2021 Center for Global Development report. The United States invested more than $1.5 billion annually from 2017-2019, according to the report based on the most recent available data.
As top dignitaries urged individual countries to prioritize their youngest citizens, it was some of the youngest attendees at the summit who aired the most skepticism towards any prospect of change. After all, the U.N. lacks any authority to force countries to spend more on schooling.
Yousafzai urged countries to devote 20% of their budgets toward education. “Most of you know what exactly needs to be done,” she said. “You must not make small, stingy and short-term pledges.”
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The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Follow Bianca Vázquez Toness on Twitter at http://twitter.com/biancavtoness and Jocelyn Gecker at http://twitter.com/jgecker
Total Doses Distributed = 834,376,095. Total Doses Administered = 612,781,120. Number of People Receiving 1 or More Doses = 263,415,633. Number of People Fully Vaccinated = 224,636,858.
The head of the World Health Organization said Wednesday that the number of coronavirus deaths worldwide last week was the lowest reported in the pandemic since March 2020, marking what could be a turning point in the years-long global outbreak.
At a press briefing in Geneva, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the world has never been in a better position to stop COVID-19.
“We are not there yet, but the end is in sight,” he said, comparing the effort to that made by a marathon runner nearing the finish line. “Now is the worst time to stop running,” he said. “Now is the time to run harder and make sure we cross the line and reap all the rewards of our hard work.”
In its weekly report on the pandemic, the U.N. health agency said deaths fell by 22% in the past week, at just over 11,000 reported worldwide. There were 3.1 million new cases, a drop of 28%, continuing a weeks-long decline in the disease in every part of the world.
Still, the WHO warned that relaxed COVID testing and surveillance in many countries means that many cases are going unnoticed. The agency issued a set of policy briefs for governments to strengthen their efforts against the coronavirus ahead of the expected winter surge of COVID-19, warning that new variants could yet undo the progress made to date.
“If we don’t take this opportunity now, we run the risk of more variants, more deaths, more disruption, and more uncertainty,” Tedros said.
The WHO reported that the omicron subvariant BA.5 continues to dominate globally and comprised nearly 90% of virus samples shared with the world’s biggest public database. In recent weeks, regulatory authorities in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere have cleared tweaked vaccines that target both the original coronavirus and later variants including BA.5.
Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on COVID-19, said the organization expected future waves of the disease, but was hopeful those would not cause many deaths.
Meanwhile in China, residents of a city in the country’s far western Xinjiang region have said they are experiencing hunger, forced quarantines and dwindling supplies of medicine and daily necessities after more than 40 days in a lockdown prompted by COVID-19.
Hundreds of posts from Ghulja riveted users of Chinese social media last week, with residents sharing videos of empty refrigerators, feverish children and people shouting from their windows.
On Monday, local police announced the arrests of six people for “spreading rumors” about the lockdown, including posts about a dead child and an alleged suicide, which they said “incited opposition” and “disrupted social order.”
Leaked directives from government offices show that workers are being ordered to avoid negative information and spread “positive energy” instead. One directed state media to film “smiling seniors” and “children having fun” in neighborhoods emerging from the lockdown.
The government has ordered mass testing and district lockdowns in cities across China in recent weeks, from Sanya on tropical Hainan island to southwest Chengdu, to the northern port city of Dalian.
