Tag Archives: COVID-19

India sends army to help hospitals hit by COVID-19 as countries promise aid

By Shilpa Jamkhandikar and Neha Arora

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India ordered its armed forces on Monday to help tackle surging new coronavirus infections that are overwhelming hospitals, as countries including Britain, Germany and the United States pledged to send urgent medical aid. In a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Chief of Defense Staff General Bipin Rawat said oxygen would be released to hospitals from armed forces reserves and retired medical military personnel would join COVID-19 health facilities.

And where possible, military medical infrastructure will be made available to civilians, a government statement said, as new coronavirus infections hit a record peak for a fifth day.

“Air, Rail, Road & Sea; Heaven & earth are being moved to overcome challenges thrown up by this wave of COVID19,” Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said on Twitter.

Modi on Sunday urged all citizens to get vaccinated and to exercise caution amid what he called a “storm” of infections, while hospitals and doctors in some northern states posted urgent notices saying they were unable to cope with the influx.

In some of the worst-hit cities, bodies were being burnt in makeshift facilities offering mass cremations.

The southern state of Karnataka, home to the tech city of Bengaluru, ordered a 14-day lockdown from Tuesday, joining the western industrial state of Maharashtra, where lockdowns run until May 1, although some states were also set to lift lockdown measures this week.

The patchy curbs, complicated by local elections and mass festival gatherings, could prompt breakouts elsewhere, as infections rose by 352,991 in the last 24 hours, with crowded hospitals running out of oxygen supplies and beds.

“Currently the hospital is in beg-and-borrow mode and it is an extreme crisis situation,” said a spokesman for the Sir Ganga Ram Hospital in the capital, New Delhi.

FIRE

Following a fire at a hospital in the western diamond industry hub of Surat, five COVID-19 patients died after being moved to other hospitals that lacked space in their intensive care units, a municipal official told Reuters.

Television channel NDTV broadcast images of three health workers in the eastern state of Bihar pulling a body along the ground on its way to cremation, as stretchers ran short.

“If you’ve never been to a cremation, the smell of death never leaves you,” Vipin Narang, a political science professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, said on Twitter.

“My heart breaks for all my friends and family in Delhi and India going through this hell.”

On Sunday, President Joe Biden said the United States would send raw materials for vaccines, medical equipment and protective gear. Germany joined a growing list of countries pledging supplies.

In Moscow, which expects 50 million doses of its Sputnik V vaccine to be made each month in India this summer, a Kremlin spokesman expressed concern over the situation.

India, with a population of 1.3 billion, has an official tally of 17.31 million infections and 195,123 deaths, after 2,812 deaths overnight, health ministry data showed, although health experts say the figures probably run higher.

The surge in infections hit oil prices amid worries about a fall in fuel demand in the world’s third-biggest oil importer.

RALLY BACKLASH

Several cities have ordered curfews, while police enforce social distancing and mask-wearing. Politicians, especially Modi, have faced criticism for holding rallies during state election campaigns that draw thousands into packed stadiums.

About 8.6 million voters were expected to cast ballots on Monday in the eastern state of West Bengal, in the final phases of a contest set to wrap up this week. Also voting in local elections was the most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, which has been reporting an average of 30,000 infections a day.

Modi’s plea on vaccinations came after inoculations peaked at 4.5 million doses on April 5, but have since averaged about 2.7 million a day, government figures show.

Virologists said more infectious variants of the virus, including an Indian one, have fueled the resurgence.

The government told people to stay indoors and follow hygiene protocols. “Please don’t invite people into your home… It has become clearer that the transmissibility of this virus is faster,” said senior health official Vinod Kumar Paul.

Vaccine demand has outpaced supply as the inoculation campaign widened this month, while companies struggle to boost output, partly because of a shortage of raw material and a fire at a facility making the AstraZeneca dose.

However, the federal government will not import vaccines itself but expects states and companies to do so instead, in a step aimed at backing domestic manufacturers, two government officials told Reuters. [L4N2MF3ZM]

Neighboring Bangladesh sealed its border with India for 14 days, its foreign ministry said, though trade will continue. Air travel has been suspended since Bangladesh imposed a lockdown on April 14 to combat record infections and deaths.

(Reporting by Shilpa Jamkhandikar and Neha Arora; Additional reporting by Sumit Khanna, Krishna Das, Anuron Kumar Mitra, Chandini Monnappa in Bengaluru, Rajendra Jadhav in Satara, Ruma Paul in Dhaka and Dmitry Antonov in Moscow; Writing by Clarence Fernandez and William Maclean; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore and Gareth Jones)

Third-trimester vaccination appears safe; Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine effective in those with chronic illnesses

By Nancy Lapid

(Reuters) -The following is a roundup of some of the latest scientific studies on the novel coronavirus and efforts to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus.

Third-trimester vaccination appears safe in early data

Among pregnant women who received COVID-19 vaccines manufactured by Pfizer Inc and BioNTech SE or Moderna Inc and who signed up for an online survey, side effects were no different than what has been seen in the general population, researchers reported Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. But they noted that data of this nature is still sparse. They looked at responses from smartphone users who participated in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “v-safe” program, which collects information on COVID-19 vaccination experiences. Compared to non-pregnant women, the 35,691 pregnant responders reported more injection site pain but fewer headaches, muscle aches, chills, and fevers. Among 3,958 women who signed up for a CDC pregnancy registry, no one vaccinated in the first trimester has given birth yet. The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), run jointly by the CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, has recorded 46 miscarriages potentially related to COVID-19 vaccination, including 37 in the first trimester, the researchers said. “Early data from the v-safe surveillance system, the v-safe pregnancy registry, and the VAERS do not indicate any obvious safety signals with respect to pregnancy or neonatal outcomes associated with Covid-19 vaccination in the third trimester of pregnancy,” researchers concluded.

Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine effective in people with chronic illnesses

The Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine is effective at preventing symptomatic and severe disease in people with some chronic illnesses, like diabetes and heart disease, according to a large real-world study published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. The analysis of almost 1.4 million people, conducted by Clalit, Israel’s largest healthcare provider, showed the vaccine was 80% effective against symptomatic infection for people with heart or chronic kidney diseases, 86% for people with type 2 diabetes, 75% for cerebrovascular disease, and 84% for people suffering from immunodeficiency. For vaccinated people with at least three chronic conditions or risk factors, the vaccine was 88% effective in preventing symptomatic infection. It was more than 90% effective against severe disease for people with type 2 diabetes, heart or cerebrovascular disease. The results were lower than the 95% overall vaccine effectiveness observed after the second dose in clinical trials last year. “These results are very encouraging, as they suggest that most COVID-19 cases will be prevented by vaccination even in the elderly and chronically ill,” said Ran Balicer, Clalit’s chief innovation officer.

Fever, shortness of breath are COVID-19 red flags in pregnancy

Pregnant women with COVID-19 and their newborns face “consistent and substantial increases” in risks of complications, an international study has found. COVID-19 in newborns is associated with a three-fold risk of severe medical complications, according to the study by scientists at the University of Oxford. And pregnant women with symptomatic COVID-19 face higher risks of preterm delivery, preeclampsia (high blood pressure with organ failure risk), need for intensive care and death. That was particularly true for women with fever and shortness of breath, according to a report published on Friday in JAMA Pediatrics. “Women with COVID-19 during pregnancy were over 50% more likely to experience pregnancy complications compared to pregnant women unaffected by COVID-19,” said co-author Aris Papageorghiou. The study, conducted in 18 countries, included 706 pregnant women with COVID-19 and 1,424 similarly pregnant women without COVID-19 who were giving birth at the same hospital. Findings also showed a delivery by Caesarean section may be associated with an increased risk of virus infection in newborns. Breastfeeding, however, does not seem to heighten risks of transmission from mothers to babies, they found.

(Reporting by Nancy Lapid and Maayan Lubell; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Hospitals overrun as India’s COVID-19 infections top global record for second day

By Alasdair Pal and Neha Arora

NEW DELHI, (Reuters) -People scrambled for life-saving oxygen supplies across India on Friday and patients lay dying outside hospitals as the capital recorded the equivalent of one death from COVID-19 every five minutes.

For the second day running, the country’s overnight infection total was higher than ever recorded anywhere in the world since the pandemic began last year, at 332,730.

India’s second wave has hit with such ferocity that hospitals are running out of oxygen, beds and anti-viral drugs. Many patients have been turned away because there was no space for them, doctors in Delhi said.

Ambulance sirens sounded throughout the day in the deserted streets of the capital, one of India’s worst hit cities, where a lockdown is in place to try and stem the transmission of the virus.

Mass cremations have been taking place as the crematoriums have run out of space and families have had to wait for two days to cremate the dead.

At Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital in the north east of the city, critical patients gasping for air arrived in ambulances and autorickshaws. One man among half a dozen people waiting for hours on trolleys outside on Friday died before being admitted.

“The staff are doing their best but there is not enough oxygen,” Tushar Maurya, whose mother is being treated at the hospital, told Reuters. “If you are not in a serious condition please don’t come. It isn’t safe.”

ALL ALONE

The India Today television channel showed angry relatives outside a hospital in Ahmedabad, the largest city in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat.

“People are dying in front of hospitals while they wait for a bed to become available,” one man said.

Another young man, who was not identified, said “Is this why we voted for this government? When we need it the most, we find ourselves all alone. Where will the poor go?”

Health experts say India became complacent in the winter, when new cases were running at about 10,000 a day and seemed to be under control, and lifted restrictions to allow big gatherings.

Modi himself has faced rare criticism for allowing political rallies and a Hindu religious festival, in which millions take a ritual bath in the Ganges river, to go ahead. He addressed many of the rallies with packed crowds and few people wearing masks.

“Indians let down their collective guard,” Zarir Udwadia, a pulmonologist on Maharashtra’s task force, wrote in the Times of India newspaper.

“We heard self-congratulatory declarations of victory from our leaders, now cruelly exposed as mere self-assured hubris.”

Delhi’s government declared in February it had beaten back the coronavirus. On Friday, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal went on live television to plead for medical oxygen supplies in a virtual meeting with Modi, warning that many people would die.

“All of the country’s oxygen plants should immediately be taken over by the government through the army,” he said.

Police in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, some wielding assault rifles, escorted trucks to waiting hospitals in Delhi, while city governments traded accusations over hoarding.

Modi said government was making a “continuous effort” to increase oxygen supplies, including steps to divert industrial oxygen.

A fire broke out in a hospital treating COVID-19 patients in a Mumbai suburb early on Friday, killing 13 people, underlining the stress the hospitals were under. On Wednesday, 22 patients died at a public hospital in Maharashtra where Mumbai is located when oxygen supply ran out due to a leaking tank.

World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was concerned about the growing case load in India, which on Thursday passed the previous global high of 297,430 recorded in January in the United States, where case numbers have fallen.

“The situation in India is a devastating reminder of what the virus can do,” he told a virtual briefing in Geneva.

WHO emergencies director Mike Ryan said reducing transmission would be a “very difficult task” but the government was working on limiting mixing between people, which he said was essential.

Bhramar Mukherjee, a professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the University of Michigan in the United States, said it seemed as if there was no social safety net for Indians.

“Everyone is fighting for their own survival and trying to protect their loved ones,” he said. “This is hard to watch.”

(Additional reporting by Shilpa Jamkhandikar, Sachin Ravikumar, Devjyot Ghoshal, Aditya Kalra, Anuron Kumar Mitra, Nivedita Bhattacharjee, Stephanie Nebehay, Writing by Sanjeev Miglani and Richard Pullin; Editing by Robert Birsel, Clarence Fernandez and Philippa Fletcher)

More risks to pregnant women, their newborns from COVID-19 than known before – study

(Reuters) – Pregnant women infected with COVID-19 and their newborn children face higher risks of complications than was previously known, a study by British scientists showed on Friday.

An infection of the new coronavirus in such newborns is associated with a three-fold risk of severe medical complications, according to a study conducted by scientists at the University of Oxford.

While pregnant women are at higher risk of complications such as premature birth, high blood pressure with organ failure risk, need for intensive care and possible death.

“Women with COVID-19 during pregnancy were over 50% more likely to experience pregnancy complications compared to pregnant women unaffected by COVID-19,” said Aris Papageorghiou, co-lead of the trial and a professor of fetal medicine at Oxford University.

The study was conducted in more than 2,100 pregnant women across 18 countries, where each woman affected by COVID-19 was compared to two non-infected women giving birth at the same time in the same hospital.

Findings from the study, published in the medical journal JAMA Pediatrics, also showed a delivery by caesarean section may be associated with an increased risk of virus infection in newborns.

However, breastfeeding does not seem to heighten risks of babies contracting COVID-19 from their mothers, scientists said.

(Reporting by Pushkala Aripaka in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)

‘Unnecessary sadness’: Inside Ontario’s strained intensive care units

By Anna Mehler Paperny

TORONTO (Reuters) – Over the course of a single shift last week, critical care physician Laveena Munshi saw her intensive care unit (ICU) at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital fill with pregnant and post-partum COVID-19 patients.

During that week, the ICU doubled the total number of pregnant COVID-19 patients it had previously seen throughout the entire pandemic. Swamped with patients with complex medical needs, one day Munshi ended up pulling a 36-hour shift.

“You do what you have to do,” she said.

Ontario’s hospitals and ICUs have been crushed by a punishing third coronavirus wave, as depleted resources and overworked staff push Canada’s healthcare system – often held up as a model for the rest of the world – to the brink.

Last week, Munshi and her colleagues spent agonizing hours discussing what to do if a pregnant woman needed an artificial lung to help her get enough oxygen.

“Having delivery equipment outside an ICU room is never a thing you want to be walking into at the beginning of your shift,” she said. “It just adds an added layer of unnecessary sadness to this whole pandemic.”

By Thursday, ICUs in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, had 800 COVID-19 patients, with such admissions at the highest point since the pandemic began.

Patients are coming in younger and sicker, driven by more highly transmissible virus variants. Hospital staff say they are seeing whole families infected due to transmission at front-line workplaces that have remained open through lockdowns and stay-at-home orders.

Mount Sinai Hospital just added a third ICU. It has seconded non-ICU nurses to help deliver critical care to the most seriously ill patients as it braces for the worst.

“The next couple of weeks are going to be extremely busy, there’s no question,” Munshi said, adding that people most affected by the current wave do not come from privileged backgrounds that would allow them to protect themselves, for example by working from home.

The provincial government has promised more ICU beds and requested medical staff from other provinces.

‘HOW MUCH MORE CAN WE STRETCH?’

Ramping up vaccinations targeting high-risk communities will help bring the third wave under control, experts said. But that will not relieve the immediate pressure on hospitals.

Exhausted staff are pulling overtime shifts and doctors are bracing for the tipping point no one wants to talk about: The activation of a “triage protocol” that will dictate who gets critical care when there isn’t enough for everyone who needs it.

Ontario’s Ministry of Health did not respond when Reuters asked what criteria would activate that protocol.

The protocol provides a standardized way to predict who is more likely to survive the subsequent 12 months, “trying to prioritize so that the most lives could be saved,” explained Dr. James Downar, one of its authors.

It does not include a provision for withdrawing life-sustaining measures, he said.

Raman Rai, manager of the ICU at Toronto’s Humber River Hospital, said she has never seen such a volume of critical care patients.

The hospital has redeployed staff, is treating people in “unconventional spaces,” and is stretching resources so a nurse who might have been responsible for one or two patients now has three, Rai said.

“We have already gone over capacity,” she said. “How much more can we stretch?”

Hospitals have been conducting drills and exercises in preparation for the triage scenario, said Ontario Hospital Association Chief Executive Anthony Dale.

“If it is used, it means we’ve failed as a province,” he said. “This did not have to happen. But are we preparing with everything we’ve got? Yes.”

In Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital on Wednesday morning, the ICU was buzzing with health workers having bedside discussions, punctuated by alarms from pumps and various equipment monitoring patients’ vital signs.

“It’s particularly distressing when we see someone who is 30 years old and healthy who comes in unable to breathe,” said intensivist doctor Hannah Wunsch. She is also seeing younger patients, pregnant patients and whole families with COVID-19.

From a medical perspective much of the work is the same, Wunsch said – save for ubiquitous masks.

“I haven’t seen anyone smile in a long time.”

(Reporting by Anna Mehler Paperny; Editing by Denny Thomas and Bill Berkrot)

‘Beg, borrow, steal’: the fight for oxygen among New Delhi’s hospitals

By Devjyot Ghoshal and Aditya Kalra

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Pankaj Solanki, a doctor and the director of a small hospital in New Delhi, rushed to an oxygen vendor earlier this week to secure enough cylinders to keep 10 COVID-19 patients on the ICU ward breathing.

His supplies would only last until Thursday night, and so he has sent a driver out to try to find more.

“It is mental agony. I can’t bear it any more. What if something happens to the patients?” he told Reuters.

The last-minute scramble for oxygen at Dharamveer Solanki Hospital is playing out across the city and the country, which is facing the world’s largest surge in COVID-19 cases.

Hospitals in India’s capital, renowned for some of the best medical care in the country, are unable to guarantee basic services and thousands of lives hang in the balance – a stark warning of how India’s healthcare system is buckling amid the pandemic.

Big private hospital chains have not been spared.

This week in New Delhi, which has been hit particularly hard by the coronavirus, seven Max Healthcare hospitals treating more than 1,400 COVID-19 patients were down to between 2 and 18 hours of oxygen left.

Staff at a major facility of the Apollo group had a harrowing night wondering if oxygen to 200 patients would run out. A tanker arrived at around 3 a.m., just in time, a source at the hospital said.

As panic breaks out at hospitals unable to admit some people with severe COVID-19 symptoms, police are being deployed to secure oxygen. In court, judges are challenging the central government to do more to address shortages.

In a late-night court hearing on Wednesday, Delhi justices called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government to “beg, borrow, steal or import” to meet the city’s needs. Officials said they were arranging supplies, but the judges weren’t convinced.

The state “cannot say ‘we can provide only this much and no more’, so if people die, let them die; that cannot be an answer by a responsible sovereign state,” said Justice Vipin Sanghi.

OXYGEN EMERGENCY

Demand for medical oxygen has soared. India recorded 314,835 new COVID-19 infections on Thursday, the highest tally anywhere during the pandemic. In Delhi alone, the daily rise is around 25,000.

Modi and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal have been criticized for failing to plan for the upsurge in cases.

On April 13, when Delhi recorded 13,000 new cases, Kejriwal told a news channel there was “no shortage of oxygen”. Five days later, he tweeted, “OXYGEN HAS BECOME AN EMERGENCY”.

“It is poor forecasting. Maybe they are not able to understand the gravity of the situation,” said Anant Bhan, an independent researcher of global health and bioethics.

“This is a reminder again – we should have extra reserves of oxygen. It shows poor planning.”

A senior gas industry source directly involved in supplying oxygen to Delhi hospitals said the city had moved too slowly in recent days in liaising with authorities and suppliers.

The city has few production units nearby and transportation is a challenge.

The Delhi government and federal health ministry did not respond to Reuters questions for this story.

At an INOX gas plant in the state of Uttar Pradesh, around an hour’s drive from Delhi, 12 trucks from cities across northern India were waiting to load oxygen on Thursday.

Six drivers told Reuters they had faced long delays, as surging demand from hospitals in the capital and elsewhere outstripped supply.

“We have been waiting for three days,” said Bhure Singh, one of the drivers. “Demand has increased and there is no gas.”

The plant has been visited by government officials and police, some carrying assault rifles. An Uttar Pradesh police officer said they had been given orders to escort trucks in some instances to make sure they reached their destination.

LAWYERS’ BARBS

At one Max facility in west Delhi treating 285 COVID-19 patients, oxygen supplies this week ran dry as authorities diverted their tanker to another hospital, the healthcare group wrote in a letter to Delhi’s health minister.

Staff had to borrow cylinders from another facility.

The medical superintendent at the Shanti Mukund Hospital, Kulwinder Singh, told Reuters on Thursday they were asking families of 85 patients who needed high-flow oxygen to make other arrangements because they had only two hours’ worth of supply.

Some hospitals in Delhi have run out of oxygen altogether, putting lives at risk, the city’s deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia said in a televised address. “After some time, saving lives would be difficult,” he warned.

In the capital, the fight for oxygen has reached the High Court, where judges convened late on Wednesday night to hear a plea from Max hospitals.

For around two hours, lawyers for Delhi and the federal government traded barbs over transportation challenges and supplies. Other lawyers shared real-time updates on oxygen tanks reaching hospitals in the city, and a judge took notes on demand and supply statistics for the capital.

The Supreme Court also intervened, saying Modi’s administration should draw up a plan to address shortages of oxygen and critical supplies.

“The situation is alarming,” the court said.

(Additional reporting by Alasdair Pal in Yusufpur and Danish Siddiqui in New Delhi; Editing by Mike Collett-White)

India posts world record COVID cases with oxygen running out

By Neha Arora and Sachin Ravikumar

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India recorded the world’s highest daily tally of 314,835 COVID-19 infections on Thursday as a second wave of the pandemic raised new fears about the ability of crumbling health services to cope.

Health officials across northern and western India, including the capital, New Delhi, said they were in crisis, with most hospitals full and running out of oxygen.

Some doctors advised patients to stay at home, while a crematorium in the eastern city of Muzaffarpur said it was being overwhelmed with bodies, and grieving families had to wait their turn. A crematorium east of Delhi built funeral pyres in its parking lot.

“Right now there are no beds, no oxygen. Everything else is secondary,” said Shahid Jameel, a virologist and director of the Trivedi School of Biosciences at Ashoka University.

“The infrastructure is crumbling.”

Six hospitals in New Delhi had run out of oxygen, according to a tally shared by the city government, and the city’s deputy chief minister said neighboring states were holding back supplies for their own needs.

“It might become difficult for hospitals here to save lives,” Manish Sisodia said in a televised address.

Another 2,104 people died in the space of a day, taking India’s cumulative toll to 184,657, according to the health ministry data. The previous record rise in cases was in the United States, which had 297,430 new cases on one day in January, though its infection rate has since fallen sharply.

“INDIA WEEPS”

Television showed images of people with empty oxygen cylinders crowding refilling facilities, hoping to save relatives in hospital.

In the western city of Ahmedabad, a man strapped to an oxygen cylinder lay in the back of a car outside a hospital as he waited for a bed.

“Helplessness,” tweeted former foreign secretary Nirupama Menon Rao. “India weeps.”

“We never thought a second wave would hit us so hard,” Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, executive chairman of the healthcare firm Biocon, wrote in the Economic Times.

“Complacency led to unanticipated shortages of medicines, medical supplies and hospital beds.”

Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain said the city needed about 5,000 more intensive care beds.

Similar surges of infections, notably in South America, are threatening to overwhelm other health services.

China said it was willing to help India, although it was not immediately clear what this might consist of.

Only a tiny fraction of the Indian population has received a vaccination.

Authorities have announced vaccines will be available to anyone over 18 from May 1, but experts say there will not be enough for the 600 million people who will become eligible.

Health experts say India let its guard down during the winter, when daily cases were about 10,000 and seemed to be under control, and lifted restrictions to allow big gatherings.

MORE INFECTIOUS VARIANTS

New, more infectious variants of the virus, in particular a “double mutant” variant that originated in India, have helped accelerate the surge, but many also blame the politicians.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government ordered an extensive lockdown in the early stages of the pandemic but has been wary of the economic costs of more tough restrictions.

In recent weeks, the government has been criticized for holding packed political rallies for local elections and allowing a Hindu festival at which millions gathered.

“The second wave is a consequence of complacency and mixing and mass gatherings. You don’t need a variant to explain the second wave,” said Ramanan Laxminarayan of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy in New Delhi.

This week, Modi urged state governments to use lockdowns as a last resort. He asked people to stay indoors and said the government was working to expand oxygen and vaccine supplies.

He cancelled a visit to West Bengal scheduled for Friday.

A YouTube stream showed a hundred or more supporters attended Interior Minister Amit Shah’s election rally in Harirampur on Thursday.

Most donned saffron-colored face-masks — in sharp contrast to the thousands seen at similar gatherings this month — but were still seated close together.

“We are dying here, and they are holding rallies there,” one woman in the northern city of Lucknow said on television.

Madhukar Pai, professor of epidemiology at McGill University in Canada, said India was a cautionary tale for the world.

“If we declare success too soon, open up everything, give up on public health, and not vaccinate rapidly, the new variants can be devastating,” he tweeted.

(Additional reporting by Sanjeev Miglani, Krishna N. Das, Rupam Jain, Anuron Kumar Mitra, Alasdair Pal, Sumit Khanna, Shilpa Jamkhandikar; Writing by Robert Birsel, William Maclean; Editing by Kim Coghill and Kevin Liffey)

Remdesivir appears safe for seriously ill children; patients may not pose highest risk to hospital staff

By Nancy Lapid

(Reuters) – The following is a roundup of some of the latest scientific studies on the novel coronavirus and efforts to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus.

Antiviral remdesivir appears safe for children

The antiviral drug remdesivir appears to be as safe and effective for use in children with COVID-19 as in adults, according to the largest study to date of children with severe COVID-19 who received the drug. Remdesivir, sold by Gilead Sciences Inc under the brand name Veklury, shortens time to recovery in adults with COVID-19. It is not yet approved for children under age 12. In March 2020, Gilead began accepting doctors’ requests for compassionate use of remdesivir in critically ill children with COVID-19. In the new study of 77 children in the United States, UK, Italy and Spain, “remdesivir was well tolerated, with a low incidence of serious adverse events,” related to the drug, researchers reported on Wednesday in Pediatrics. Within four weeks of starting treatment, 88% of the children had decreased need for oxygen support, 83% had recovered and 73% were discharged. Among those requiring mechanical ventilation, 90% were able to be taken off the ventilators. A randomized controlled trial is underway to confirm that the high level of recovery was due to the effects of remdesivir, the researchers said. An editorial published with the study said: “Although morbidity and mortality rates differ, children hospitalized with acute COVID-19 often have a similar disease course as adults. Children are also likely to have a similar response to remdesivir as adults.”

Patients may not pose highest COVID-19 risk for hospital staff

U.S. healthcare workers on the frontlines of the pandemic who become sick with COVID-19 are more likely to have acquired the infection in the community than through patient care, new research suggests. At a major Wisconsin medical center, researchers investigated likely sources of infections by analyzing the gene sequences of the virus obtained on swab samples from 95 healthcare workers and their patients. Only 11% of participants’ infections could be traced to a coworker and only 4% to a patient, the researchers reported in Clinical Infectious Diseases. They said their observations align with recent studies evaluating healthcare-associated infections in the Netherlands and in the UK, and with another recent study that found the most important risk factor for COVID-19 was the rate of the disease in surrounding communities, not workplace factors. “It appears that healthcare personnel most commonly become infected with SARS-CoV-2 via community exposure,” the researchers conclude. “This emphasizes the ongoing importance of mask-wearing, physical distancing, robust testing programs, and rapid distribution of vaccines.”

(Reporting by Nancy Lapid; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Nowhere as worrisome for COVID-19 as South America, Brazil especially concerning – Pan American Health official

By Julia Symmes Cobb

BOGOTA (Reuters) – South America is now the most worrying region for COVID-19 infections, as cases mount in nearly every country, the director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) said on Wednesday.

“Nowhere are infections as worrisome as in South America,” Director Carissa Etienne said during a weekly news conference.

Brazil has seen the most merciless surge. Scientists forecast it will soon surpass the worst of a record January wave in the United States, with daily fatalities climbing above 4,000 on Tuesday.

“The situation in Brazil is concerning countrywide,” said COVID-19 incident director Sylvain Aldighieri. “Our concern at the moment is also for the Brazilian citizens themselves in this context of health services that are overwhelmed.”

Brazil needs access to more COVID-19 vaccines now and should be able to receive them through global partnerships, Aldighieri said.

PAHO can expand its help to Brazilian states if requested, he said, adding it is already aiding with virus genetic sequencing, procuring oxygen and coronavirus testing.

Intensive care units are nearing capacity in Peru and Ecuador, and in parts of Bolivia and Colombia cases have doubled in the last week, Etienne said, adding that the southern cone is also experiencing an acceleration in cases.

The United States, Brazil and Argentina are among the 10 countries seeing the highest number of new infections globally, she added.

The Americas recorded more than 1.3 million new coronavirus cases and over 37,000 deaths last week, Etienne said, more than half of all deaths reported globally.

“We cannot ease public health and social interventions without good data and justification,” Etienne said, adding slowing and stopping transmission “requires decisive action by local and national governments.”

More than 210 million vaccine doses have been administered across the Americas, Etienne said.

Bolivia, Nicaragua and Haiti may be affected by Serum Institute of India vaccine shipment delays, said sub-director Jarbas Barbosa, but the World Health Organization is appealing to the Indian government to ensure shipment agreements.

(Reporting by Julia Symmes Cobb; Editing by Bill Berkro)

Analysis: The housing boom, central banks and the inflation conundrum

By Sujata Rao

LONDON (Reuters) – A multi-year boom in global house prices which even a pandemic has failed to halt is forcing central banks around the world to confront a knotty question – what, if anything, should they be doing about it?

The surge in property values from Australia to Sweden is often viewed benignly by governments as creating wealth. But history also shows the risk of de-stabilizing bubbles and the high social cost as millions find home ownership unaffordable.

The irony is that while the cheap money created by low or negative interest rates has driven the price rises, they barely figure in central banks’ calculations of inflation, one of the key drivers of their monetary policy.

While housing costs, whether rent or home repairs, are assigned varying weights in inflation indices ranging from 40%-plus in the United States to 6.5% in the euro zone, house prices themselves are left out. As they spiral higher and higher, many argue this is no longer tenable.

“The debate of whether we actually are reflecting inflation properly will come up more and more. House prices will start getting a lot of attention,” said Manoj Pradhan, co-author of a book called The Great Demographic Reversal, which predicts a global inflation resurgence in coming years.

Global residential property prices have risen 60% in the past 10 years, according to a Knight Frank index. In 2020, even as COVID-19 choked the world economy, they climbed an average 5.6%, with 20%-30% jumps in some markets.

While low interest rates have long been the main driver of the rally, existing government subsidies for home ownership and more recently pandemic-era support such as suspending property taxes have been factors too.

Many of these one-off support measures will start to be wound down, but governments often fight shy of politically tricky measures to keep a lid more firmly on prices, such as banning multiple property ownership or easing building regulations.

That raises the question of what central banks can do.

FIRST SALVO

New Zealand’s government fired the first salvo in February when it told its central bank to consider the impact of interest rates on house prices, which soared 23% last year.

Others are considering the question too. European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said last week that measuring housing’s role in the rising cost of living had emerged as a key point in a strategic policy review due to be unveiled this year.

If real inflation is higher than the official consumer price index is measuring, it could imply that central bank or government policies are more expansionary than they should be.

“If housing does not signal inflation via the CPI, then the economy is more likely to run hot, and what you get over time is generalized inflation pressures,” Pradhan said.

At present rental inflation is subdued due to pandemic hardship, or because low interest rates and remote working are encouraging home-buying.

Morgan Stanley’s chief cross-asset strategist Andrew Sheets said this may be giving a misleading signal. “The rental market will be weak and the housing market will be strong and that (rental weakness) could show up as a disinflationary force.”

There are strong arguments for excluding headline shifts in house prices from inflation indexes. Housing is, for most people a lifetime purchase rather than an ongoing expense, which they are designed to gauge.

Including house prices in the inflation measures central banks use to guide policy is also widely seen as impractical, given their extreme volatility.

More central banks may however consider adapting inflation indices to include a measure of the costs associated with living in one’s own home, such as maintenance and home improvements.

At present, inflation measures used by the Fed, the Bank of Japan, New Zealand and Australia include so-called owner-occupier costs. But the gauge employed by the Bank of England does not, and they are also not factored into the main inflation measure used by the ECB.

The ECB has argued for their inclusion, but collecting timely data from 19 countries and differing home ownership levels across the bloc would complicate the task.

Crucially, economists believe including these costs might have lifted euro zone inflation by 0.2 to 0.3 percentage points, taking the ECB nearer its elusive inflation target of close to 2%.

LONG-DORMANT INFLATION

Ultimately, such policymaking shifts may be risky amid uncertainty created by the pandemic.

Adding property prices to CPI indexes just as long-dormant inflation finally awakes could send readings soaring, heaping pressure on central banks to tighten policy even as economies nurse pandemic-time wounds.

Some analysts, such as at ING Bank, predict that with some exceptions housing rallies may anyway start to cool as support measures introduced during the pandemic are unwound.

Voters’ anger may even goad governments into slugging property investors with higher taxes – as New Zealand did at the end of March.

Those who argue against extending central bank remits further into housing say tighter policy could even exacerbate the problem by crimping property supply.

George Washington University professor Danny Leipziger argues housing markets are more effectively cooled by regulation and measures outside central banks’ scope, such as raising capital gains taxes and increasing the supply of housing.

“I have no problem with the ECB adding rental or home-owners’ costs to its basket,” Leipziger said. “But if I am concerned about house prices in Berlin or Madrid, asking the ECB to deal with it is not the right way.”

(Additional reporting by Dhara Ranasinghe and David Milliken; Editing by Mark John and Jan Harvey)