SEOUL — A South Korean fisheries official who went missing this week was questioned in North Korean (NK) waters before being shot dead by troops who then doused his body in oil and set it on fire, South Korea’s military said on Thursday.
South Korea’s military said evidence suggested the man was attempting to defect to the North when he was reported missing from a fisheries boat on Monday about 10 kms (6 miles) south of the Northern Limit Line (NLL), a disputed demarcation of military control that acts as the de facto maritime boundary between the two Koreas.
The exact reason the 47-year-old official was shot is not known but North Korean troops may have been acting under anti-coronavirus orders, South Korea’s military said.
Citing intelligence sources, the military said the unidentified man appeared to have been questioned at sea north of the NLL before he was executed on an “order from a superior authority.” Troops in gas masks then doused the body in oil and set it on fire.
The military said it sent a message on Wednesday to the North through the land border demanding explanations, but has not received any response yet.
“Our military strongly condemns such an atrocity, and strongly demands North Korea provide explanations and punish those who are responsible,” General Ahn Young-ho, who is in charge of operations at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a briefing.
The U.S. military commander in South Korea said this month that North Korean troops had been given “shoot-to-kill orders” to prevent the coronavirus entering the country.
In July, a man who had defected to South Korea three years ago triggered a coronavirus scare when he crossed back over the heavily monitored border into North Korea, which says it has had no cases of the disease.
His arrival prompted North Korean officials to lock down a border city and quarantine thousands of people over fears he may have had the coronavirus, though the World Health Organization (WHO) later said his test results were inconclusive.
Last week, South Korean police arrested a defector who they said had tried to return to North Korea by breaking into a military training site in South Korea’s border town of Cheorwon. — Reuters
SINGAPORE will allow more people to return to offices and trial a new business travel pass for senior executives as the city moves to re-open more of its economy amid ebbing virus cases.
Though working from home remains the default, the updated requirements allow office staff to return up to half their working time, with no more than half of such employees at the workplace at any point in time, the health ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.
Authorities said the updated measures were “carefully considered to balance the concerns of employers regarding the impact of extended periods of working-from-home on productivity and workplace relations, while creating safe workplaces for employees,” it said. The updated measures will take effect from Sept. 28.
With the business passes, which will be strictly limited at first, they will be for executives with regional or international responsibilities who need to travel regularly, the ministry said. Travelers on this pass will have the option of doing a virus test instead of stay-home notice upon return to Singapore, and self-isolate until the test results are out.
These announcements come as countries worldwide grapple with how to reopen their economies and borders safely amid the pandemic. In the U.K., banks from Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. to JPMorgan Chase & Co. this week halted plans to return workers in London after the government urged people to work from home to stem a surge in virus cases.
In Singapore, the number of daily cases has dropped significantly in recent months following partial lockdown measures imposed in April. Since then, cases have been kept at low levels through mandatory mask-wearing and other social distancing measures as the economy largely re-opened in June. The country has also ramped up containment strategies, including contact-tracing and targeted testing.
Here are more details of the updated measures as well as comments from the briefing:
• Work-related events within the workplace premises like conferences, seminars and corporate retreats will also be allowed to resume, for up to 50 people
• Authorities will consider allowing the resumption of work-related events at external venues at a later date
• Companies must not organize or encourage larger scale social gatherings within or outside the workplace such as parties, celebrations, team bonding activities, dinner-and-dance, and gala dinners
• Employers must continue to ensure clear physical spacing of at least one meter and demarcate safe physical distances
• Cinemas will be allowed to expand their capacities from Oct. 1
• All religious organizations will be allowed to conduct congregational and other worship services for up to 100 persons from Oct. 3. A pilot to increase worship limits up to 250 persons is also being considered, with more details to come
• Singapore will expand the current pilot for wedding receptions and marriage solemnizations to allow up to 100 attendees from Oct. 3
• Government is adjusting the legal cut-off age for children to wear masks to 6 years old and above, up from the current 2 years old and above.
• Results of the community testing operations indicate very low prevalence rates in the community: health ministry
• The end of the pandemic is still “some way” off: health minister Gan Kim Yong
“If all goes well, if we can continue to maintain this level of compliance and we can continue to control the infection well, then we will be able to continue with this path of resuming and opening up our economy and our society,” Lawrence Wong, the education minister who is the co-chairman of the virus task force, said during the briefing.
Mr. Wong said the government is working on the road map to phase three, the so-called stage where limited-sized social, cultural, religious and business gatherings or events would resume until a vaccine is developed. These plans could be shared in a few weeks, he said.
As of Wednesday, the city-state recorded 12 new infections, down from more than a thousand cases a day at the height of the outbreak.Of the more than 57,000 known cases of the virus in Singapore since the pandemic began, nearly 95% are among migrant workers living in dormitories.
In these dormitories, the government announced earlier on Wednesday it would pilot additional testing there, effectively increasing the frequency to a seven-day cycle from 14 days. This is “to understand how more frequent testing will enable earlier detection of asymptomatic cases among migrant workers,” according to a joint government press release.
Wong said at the briefing that authorities will need a few rounds of regular testing at the dormitories before the country can continue to see a decline in cases there. Even though those facilities were declared clear of the virus last month, clusters have persisted. — Bloomberg
CHICAGO — Johnson & Johnson (J&J) on Wednesday began a 60,000-person trial of an experimental single-shot COVID-19 vaccine that, if proven effective, could simplify distribution of millions of doses compared with leading rivals requiring two doses.
The company expects results of the Phase III trial by year end or early next year, Dr. Paul Stoffels, J&J’s chief scientific officer, said in a joint news conference with officials from the National Institutes of Health and the Trump administration.
J&J plans to manufacture as many as 1 billion doses in 2021, and more after that, Mr. Stoffels said.
Rival vaccines from Moderna Inc, Pfizer Inc and AstraZeneca all require two shots separated by several weeks, which make them more difficult to administer and means twice as much vaccine is needed to inoculate the same number of people.
“The benefits of a single-shot vaccine are potentially profound in terms of mass immunization campaigns and global pandemic control,” Dr. Dan Barouch, a Harvard vaccine researcher who helped design J&J’s COVID-19 vaccine, said in a telephone interview.
The J&J vaccine also does not need to be stored at extremely cold temperatures, Mr. Barouch noted, another advantage over some rival vaccine candidates.
J&J shares were up 1.2%.
“Big news. Numerous great companies are seeing fantastic results. FDA (Food and Drug Administration) must move quickly,” U.S. President Donald Trump said in a tweet.
J&J published a detailed study protocol for its Phase III trial on Wednesday on the company’s website, joining the three other vaccine makers that have made these details available in recent weeks after calls for increased transparency in the trials.
PROTECTION ‘FOR A LONG TIME’ Mr. Stoffels said J&J started the late-stage study after seeing positive results in its combined Phase I/II trial in the United States and Belgium. The company plans to release those results imminently.
Mr. Stoffels said the safety and level of protection demonstrated in the earlier trial were on par with what was seen in the company’s animal studies. The results showed a single dose could offer sufficient protection “for a long time,” he said.
J&J’s late-stage trial will be conducted at as many as 215 sites in the United States, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru.
The trial will assess whether the vaccine can prevent moderate to severe COVID-19 after a single dose. It will also seek to detect if the vaccine can prevent serious disease requiring medical intervention and whether it can prevent milder cases of the virus.
Mr. Stoffels said it likely will take six weeks to two months to fully enroll the trial.
J&J plans to manufacture doses before approval, so it will be ready to start distribution soon after an FDA green light.
The trial will be overseen by an independent Data and Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) that will review vaccine safety and effectiveness at pre-set intervals.
Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said all three vaccines being supported by the federal government’s Operation Warp Speed — J&J’s, Moderna’s and AstraZeneca’s — share a common DSMB. Pfizer is running its own trial and has a separate DSMB, Mr. Collins said.
J&J’s trial would be considered a success if it proves to be 60% effective, with a study protocol that could have an efficacy answer after 154 people became infected with the virus.
Stoffels said the company will start counting COVID-19 infections within the study population 15 days after individuals are vaccinated.
The DSMB will take its first look at the vaccine’s efficacy after 20 trial participants have become infected.
Mr. Collins said the DSMB does not include any government employees and is made up of “very highly experienced” scientists and statistical experts.
“Until they are convinced that there’s something there that looks promising, nothing is unblinded and sent to the FDA. So everybody should feel pretty reassured,” Mr. Collins said.
His comments follow concerns that government scientists may be pressured to rush the vaccine testing process to boost U.S. President Donald Trump’s re-election bid.
In August, J&J signed an agreement with the British government on a global Phase III clinical trial to study a two-dose version of its vaccine, which will run in parallel with the single-dose trial.
Mr. Stoffels, in the briefing, said the single-dose version would be “very important for emergency use.” The company will later test a booster dose that could produce even greater immunity to the virus, he added. — Reuters
LOUISVILLE, Kentucky — Two police officers were shot and wounded late on Wednesday in Louisville, Kentucky, during protests of a grand jury ruling decried by civil rights activists as a miscarriage of justice in the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor in March.
The grand jury decided that none of the three white officers involved in the deadly police raid on Taylor’s apartment would be charged for causing her death, though one officer was indicted on charges of endangering her neighbors.
The indictment came more than six months after Taylor, 26, a Black emergency medical technician and aspiring nurse, was killed in front of her armed boyfriend after the three officers forced their way into her home with a search warrant in a drug trafficking investigation.
Her death became a symbol, and her image a familiar sight, during months of daily protests against racial injustice and police brutality in cities across the United States. Last month media mogul Oprah Winfrey featured Taylor on the cover of her magazine calling for prosecution of the officers involved in her slaying.
Following the grand jury announcement, protesters immediately took to the streets of Kentucky’s largest city and marched for hours chanting, “No lives matter until Black lives matter,” amid sporadic clashes with police in riot gear.
The demonstrations remained mostly peaceful until several gunshots rang out as heavily armed police closed in on a throng of protesters at nightfall, ordering the crowd to disperse about a half hour before a 9 p.m. curfew was due to go into effect.
A Reuters journalist on the scene heard gunfire erupt from the crowd moments after police had fired chemical irritants and “flash-bang” rounds.
Two officers were shot and wounded, interim Louisville Metropolitan Police chief Robert Schroeder told reporters.
One suspect was arrested, and the two wounded officers were in stable condition — one undergoing surgery — with non-life-threatening injuries, Mr. Schroeder said. He gave no further details.
Earlier in the day about a dozen people were arrested in a skirmish between hundreds of demonstrators and a group of law enforcement officers in the Highlands neighborhood just outside downtown Louisville. Some windows of nearby businesses were also broken. The crowds largely dissipated after Wednesday night’s shooting. Police said at least 46 arrests were made in all.
Sympathy protests of varying sizes also were held in several other cities on Wednesday, including New York, Washington, Atlanta, and Chicago.
In announcing the grand jury’s conclusions, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron said the panel had declined to bring any charges whatsoever against two of the three white policemen who fired into Taylor’s apartment on March 13.
The two officers, Sergeant Jonathan Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove, were found to have been justified under Kentucky law in returning fire after Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, shot at them, wounding Mattingly in the thigh, Cameron said.
Walker has contended he believed intruders were breaking into Taylor’s home and that the couple did not hear police announce their arrival, contrary to the account of the officers and a neighbor.
The third officer, former Detective Brett Hankison, was indicted on three counts of wanton endangerment in the first degree, an offense that ranks at the lowest level of felony crimes in Kentucky and carries a prison sentence of up to five years. — Reuters
US Open champion Naomi Osaka, American soccer player Megan Rapinoe and Super Bowl MVP Patrick Mahomes were among the athletes named on the 2020 “Time 100” list of the most influential people in the world.
The annual list, which is not ranked, honors individuals who have had the most significant impact on the global landscape that year and includes heads of state, business leaders, activists and entertainers, among others. There is no winner named.
The athletes on the US magazine’s list have enjoyed sporting success as well as promoting other causes.
Rapinoe has fought for gender pay equity in soccer while Osaka has supported the Black Lives Matter movement.
Osaka wore a mask bearing the name of a different Black American before each match at the US Open, where she clinched the title, in support of the fight against racial injustice in the United States.
Four-times Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) champion and twice Olympic gold medalist Maya Moore, who skipped two seasons of her sport to fight for criminal justice reform in the United States, was also named on the list and penned Osaka’s tribute.
“Watching Naomi Osaka play the US Open, I was inspired by how beautifully she wove her dominant athletic performance into another narrative,” wrote Moore.
“It took humility and grace to point beyond what she was doing, winning on one of the biggest stages in her craft, at something more important.”
Other athletes named on the list included six-times Olympic gold medal-winning sprinter Allyson Felix, six-times world champion Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton, retired 13-times NBA All-Star Dwyane Wade, and back-to-back NBA MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo. — Reuters
For a while there, it looked as if the basketball gods were conspiring to alter the outcome of Game Four of the Eastern Conference Finals yesterday. The Heat were up nine with less than a minute to go in the match, seemingly poised to claim their third win in the series. As things turned out, they needed to go through the veritable wringer to secure the victory. And it wasn’t simply because the Celtics refused to give up. So-called breaks appeared to keep going against them en route, testing their limits and challenging their resolve to prevail.
Consider this: The Heat’s Jimmy Butler was whistled for a foul on a driving Jayson Tatum with 29.8 ticks left in the match. Following a successful coach’s challenge, the call was negated, prompting a jump ball on center court, which would have been all well and good (even if the Celtics subsequently controlled the tip), except that the same review enabling the referees to overturn the initial decision showed him: 1) being pushed away with a forearm (an offensive foul not called); and 2) taking a clean swipe at the ball (not at all the foul called) that bounced off Tatum’s leg before going out of bounds. In other words, the Heat wound up being penalized every which way.
Consider this as well: After the Celtics won the tip, Tatum was able to fire off a three-point attempt that missed. The ensuing scramble had the ball going out of bounds on the far end of the floor. After another lengthy review, the Celtics retained possession. Which, again, would have been all well and good, except that, for some reason, they were allowed to inbound much closer to the basket instead of the backcourt, where the ball went out. The result was a quick pass to a waiting Jaylen Brown for a baseline three, an option that would have otherwise been unavailable.
And consider this: With the Heat up two, Butler was fouled in order to stop the clock and send him to the line. After he received the ball and while he was prepping for his first charity try, the horn sounded to enable the Celtics to send in Daniel Theis for the fouled-out Marcus Smart. This shouldn’t have been allowed; he already had the ball. The ensuing reset was tantamount to icing him. Fortunately, he came through; his first attempt bounced around the ring a few times before hitting the net, and his second attempt was on the mark.
Considering that the Heat won in the end, anyway, their travails will, in retrospect, serve to underscore their sheer resiliency, and rightly so. They shot poorly throughout the set-to, and had to rely on grit and determination — not to mention an outstanding effort from 20-year-old rookie Tyler Herro — to come out on top. Now, they’re on the cusp of booking a seat in the National Basketball Association Finals. There’s a reason for their supreme confidence; it oozes from principal owner Micky Arison to head honcho Pat Riley to head coach Erik Spoelstra to All-Star Butler to neophyte Herro to veteran Udonis Haslem to benchwarmer Myers Leonard. It’s fueling their extraordinary 2020 postseason run, and proving the strength of their culture. The Celtics are a fabled franchise. Theirs isn’t bad at all.
Anthony L. Cuaycong has been writing Courtside since BusinessWorld introduced a Sports section in 1994. He is a consultant on strategic planning, operations and Human Resources management, corporate communications, and business development.
Mobile will dominate the future of gaming because of its high penetration rate and portability, according to experts in the field.
“All gamers will have mobile phones. Not everybody’s going to have PCs, not everybody is going to have consoles,” said DC Dominguez, head of games and esports for Globe Telecom, during a September 17 session in the online convention All That Matters.
According to Nielsen’s SuperData Research, mobile gamesgenerated $64.4 billion in 2019, close to 60% of the video game industry’s total revenue. This was attributed to the popularity of free-to-play games such as Fortnite and Dungeon Fighter Online, which made $1.8 billion and $1.6 billion respectively in the same year. Mobile versions of Triple-A titles such as Call of Duty and Mario Kart also proved attractive to gamers.
A separate report by Golden Casino News, a gambling and digital gaming publication,places Asia as the biggest part of this market, with China as the biggest revenue generator. Japan and South Korea also made it to the top five, along with the United States and the United Kingdom.
There is also a huge potential for growth in South and Southeast Asia because of increasing rates of smartphone adoption. Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA), an organization that represents the interests of mobile network operators worldwide,projects 89% smartphone adoption for Indonesia in 2025 and 78% for India in the same year.
Cloud gaming, also known as gaming-as-a-service, adds another dimension to the portability of gaming. Through this solution, games can be loaded from a remote server, eliminating the need for a download or to bring a specific console or personal computer. Since the games will be run from the Internet and not on the device’s central processing unit (CPU) or random access memory (RAM), it also makes cloud gaming a mobile-friendly alternative.
However, the service is heavily reliant on 5G, since high internet speeds and low latency are needed for the game to run smoothly. This is already possible for countries likeChina and South Korea but has yet to be seen in countries like the Philippines where 5G is not yet widely adopted.
While the mobile setup poses barriers to full game immersion, gaming phones, such as the recently launched Asus ROG Phone 3, have been improving graphics and processors for smooth and crisp gameplay. Mobile gaming controllers, such as Razer Kishi and SteelSeries Stratus Duo, allow users to play on their phones with a console feel.
“It’s just a matter of time before the experience on the phone, with additional goggles or devices, catches up, and [the device] doesn’t really matter,” said Quentin Staes-Polet, general manager for Southeast Asia and India at Epic Games, a video game software developer and publisher, in a separate All That Matters session held on September 16.
TORONTO — Canada’s recent spike in COVID-19 cases has created day-long lines at testing centers and prolonged waits for results, highlighting gaps in a system that leans heavily on traditional laboratory tests in a nation that has been slow to adopt newer, faster diagnostic technologies.
While other countries have approved new ways to test for COVID-19 in recent months, like rapid point-of-care tests, much of Canada stuck with the basics: deep nasal swabs collected by healthcare workers and sent off to labs.
New rapid point-of-care tests or home collection kits used in the United States could help clear the backlog, but are not yet available in Canada.
The US Food and Drug Administration authorized its first home collection kit on April 21. Health Canada discouraged applications for similar kits until late August, citing concerns about misuse, before changing course.
The long lines and waits for results could accelerate the spread of the virus by discouraging testing and making contact tracing more difficult.
“I’m really concerned that people who have to leave the house to perform essential services are in a bind,” said Jennifer Hulme, an emergency physician in Toronto.
Canada’s new cases have surged past 1,000 per day, after dropping below 300 in late June, numbers that still pale compared with surging outbreaks in the United States.
“There’s got to be more testing stations. There have to be more people employed, emergency measures taken. This is ridiculous,” said high school teacher Mary Capin, 47, outside Toronto’s Women’s College Hospital on Friday.
Health Canada in a statement said it is reviewing new kinds of tests “as quickly as possible without compromising patient safety” and working closely with manufacturers in Canada and abroad.
“We have also regularly contacted manufacturers who obtained an authorization from another jurisdiction to encourage them to file a submission with Health Canada,” the agency said.
Canadian labs tested about 47,000 people each day last week, and the country said last week it is aiming to get up to 200,000 tests a day.
The World Health Organization has urged countries to test until less than 10% of samples are positive. Only 1.4% of COVID-19 tests in Canada were positive last week, but public health experts argue that wider testing limits future virus spread.
FALSE POSITIVES COULD ADD TO TESTING BACKLOG Some doctors in Ontario have called for new testing guidelines that focus on those who have symptoms or had contact with an infected individual—an approach that could miss some contagious people. Right now, that group must rely on the same testing sites as those who need proof of a negative test to visit care homes, and anyone else who wants a test.
A potential solution would be to offer some people a different type of test—if only they were available in Canada.
Point-of-care tests from Quidel and Becton Dickinson that deliver results in a few minutes using small handheld machines would reduce the burden on labs.
Those tests are under review by Health Canada. Becton said it applied in Canada in July, after receiving emergency authorization in the United States. Quidel did not immediately comment.
At-home testing is another approach that could ease pressure on hospitals, where finding staff and space to test many people is a challenge.
In the United States, part of the next wave of testing expansion will come in the form of inexpensive disposable tests like Abbott’s BinaxNOW, a $5 credit card-sized device.
A similar Abbott test called the Panbio and one from Canada’s Sona Nanotech are also under review in Canada.
Other cheap, rapid tests may not be as accurate as lab tests, detecting the virus 80% to 90% of the time versus more than 95% for lab-based tests and the BinaxNOW—but could help ease the current backlog through speed and scale.
However, wide use of less accurate testing could lead to more false positives—healthy people testing positive—requiring confirmatory lab-based tests that could add to current backlogs, noted David Naylor, former dean of medicine and president of the University of Toronto, who has advocated for rapid testing in schools and workplaces.
Public health leaders, Mr. Naylor said, “may worry about a boatload of confirmatory test specimens turning up at public health labs.” — Allison Martell/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.
The spike protein on the novel coronavirus that helps it break into healthy cells has a tiny “pocket” that could make it vulnerable to antiviral drugs, researchers have discovered. Using a powerful imaging technique called electron cryo-microscopy, they studied the molecular structure of the virus and found the pocket, with a small molecule, linoleic acid (LA), buried inside. LA molecules are critical to the immune functions “that go haywire in COVID-19,” coauthor Imre Berger from the Max Planck-Bristol Centre for Minimal Biology in the UK said in a news release. “And the virus that is causing all this chaos, according to our data, grabs and holds on to exactly this molecule—basically disarming much of the body’s defenses.”
In a paper published on Monday in Science, researchers note that common-cold-causing rhinoviruses have a similar pocket, and drugs that fit into the pocket by mimicking fatty acids like LA have lessened symptoms in human clinical trials. This suggests, they say, that drugs developed to target the pocket on the coronavirus spike protein might help eliminate COVID-19.
Most people infected with the new coronavirus will have symptoms, according to researchers who reviewed data from nearly 80 studies of individuals with positive PCR tests for COVID-19. Overall, just 20% remained asymptomatic. Five of the studies provided enough data for the researchers to examine the spread of the disease.
Compared to COVID-19 patients with symptoms, patients who never developed symptoms were 65% less likely to transmit the virus to others, the researchers reported on Tuesday in the journal PloS Medicine. “A minority of people has truly asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection and, if they are less infectious than people with symptoms, they probably account for a relatively small proportion of all transmission,” coauthor Dr. Nicola Low of the University of Bern told Reuters.
“Most people will go on to develop symptoms and there is a substantial amount of transmission during the pre-symptomatic phase,” Ms. Low said. That means prevention measures to reduce transmission, including face covering, social distancing, physical barriers and widespread testing and contact tracing to find and isolate contagious people remains necessary.
The average time from when a heart attack starts to when treatment begins has gotten longer during the pandemic, and researchers attribute most of the delay to patients’ fears of contracting COVID-19 if they go to a hospital.
In a study published in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine, doctors in China found the average time from symptom onset to first contact with a healthcare provider was about an hour longer in January to April 2020 than during the same period in 2019. And this year, after arrival at the hospital, the time until a blocked artery was reopened was 22 minutes longer—and more heart attack patients died, the authors say.
Coauthor Dr. Ming-Wei Wang from Affiliated Hospital of Hangzhou Normal University told Reuters patients need to understand the importance of getting to a hospital quickly, and COVID-19 screening at hospitals should be hastened for patients with chest pain.
Dr. Aditya Kapoor from India’s Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences, who was not involved in the study, said other studies have found similar delays. “Resource and manpower allocation to COVID-19 treatment, lockdown restrictions, and patient apprehensions related to hospital visits all play an important role,” he said.
Living with a human who has COVID-19 raises the risk that dogs and cats will be infected with the new coronavirus, according to a French study. Blood tests performed on 34 cats and 13 dogs belonging to patients who had recovered from COVID-19 found antibodies to the virus, indicating likely past infection, in 21% of the pets—8 cats and 2 dogs.
By comparison, among 38 pets in households with no known COVID-19, only one cat tested positive, according to a report of the study posted on bioRxiv on Tuesday ahead of peer review. “We cannot definitively prove that all the 10 positive animals were infected with SARS-CoV-2,” the authors said, adding that it is not known whether infected pets can spread the virus back to humans. “While viral shedding from pets does not appear sufficient for transmission to humans or other animals encountered during walks, for people in closer contact, precautionary measures should be considered.” — Nancy Lapid/Reuters
Britain said it was working with partners on the potential for human challenge trials without commenting on a specific plan. Photo via HYTTALO SOUZA/UNSPLASH
Britain is planning to host clinical trials where volunteers are deliberately infected with the new coronavirus to test the effectiveness of vaccine candidates, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday, citing people involved in the project.
So-called “challenge trials” are expected to begin in January at a quarantine facility in London, the report said, adding that about 2,000 participants had signed up through a US-based advocacy group, 1Day Sooner.
Britain said it was working with partners on the potential for human challenge trials without commenting on a specific plan.
“We are working with partners to understand how we might collaborate on the potential development of a COVID-19 vaccine through human challenge studies,” a government spokeswoman said.
“These discussions are part of our work to research ways of treating, limiting and hopefully preventing the virus so we can end the pandemic sooner.”
The FT reported that the studies will be government funded, although 1Day Sooner said it would also launch a petition for public funding of a biocontainment facility big enough to quarantine 100 to 200 participants.
Imperial College London, reportedly the academic lead on the trials, did not confirm the studies.
“Imperial continues to engage in a wide range of exploratory discussions relating to COVID-19 research, with a variety of partners. We have nothing further to report at this stage,” a spokeswoman said, asked about the possibility of challenge trials.
Any trials conducted in the United Kingdom have to be approved by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the healthcare regulator which looks into safety and protocol.
The MHRA did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment, but 1Day Sooner, which lobbies for challenge trials to accelerate vaccine development, welcomed the report.
“1Day Sooner congratulates the British government on their plans to conduct challenge trials to test vaccines,” it said in a statement, confirming it would petition the government to house the trial participants.
The industry has seen discussions in recent months about potentially having to inject healthy volunteers with the novel coronavirus if drugmakers struggled to find enough patients for final trials.
The FT report said that volunteers would first be inoculated with a vaccine and later receive a challenge dose of the coronavirus. It did not name the vaccines that would be assessed in the project.
British drugmaker AstraZeneca, and French firm Sanofi both told Reuters that their vaccine candidates were not involved in the program. — Reuters
With COVID-19 curtailing visits in many prisons and jails, families rely on phone calls, video chats, and other forms of messaging, but advocates say the high costs of those services take a heavy financial toll on the people who can least afford them.
NEW YORK — Like many Americans with aging parents, Dominque Jones-Johnson started checking in more regularly with her father when the coronavirus pandemic broke out—but unlike most families, the cost of the calls strained her budget to the breaking point.
Her father, Charles Brown Jr., is incarcerated for aggravated rape, burglary, and “crimes against nature”—she said he was falsely accused of all charges—in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where a 15-minute phone call costs $3.15.
By May, these local calls—which would have been free for most people living in the state—had cost the family nearly $400.
“They’re making me pay to incarcerate myself,” Charles Brown Jr. told the Thomson Reuters Foundation earlier this month. A week later, he contracted COVID-19 and was put in isolation, no longer able to speak with his daughter.
Ms. Jones-Johnson, who founded the charity Daughters Beyond Incarceration, said in a phone interview that “the money stressed me out, but not talking to him stresses me out more”.
With COVID-19 curtailing visits in many prisons and jails, families rely on phone calls, video chats, and other forms of messaging, but advocates say the high costs of those services take a heavy financial toll on the people who can least afford them.
Even before the pandemic, a third of families went into debt to finance visits to incarcerated relatives and use telephone and messaging systems, said Bianca Tylek, executive director of advocacy group Worth Rises.
Now, those communications services are essential to the roughly 2.3 million people behind bars in the United States.
“People need to be in touch more than ever,” said Ms. Tylek. “And they have less money than ever to pay for it.”
A spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Corrections said it offers 30 minutes of free calls a week during the pandemic and that it “understands the importance of inmates maintaining contact with loved ones.”
INFRASTRUCTURE In US prisons and jails, private firms build out the communications infrastructure in exchange for the opportunity to charge for their services, often splitting revenue from the calls, video chats, and messaging services with the facility.
Critics of the practice refer to it as a form of kickback, paid by the industry to win access to captive customers.
A report published last year by the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) found that the average cost of a 15-minute call from local jails is $5.74.
Rates in state-run prisons are significantly lower, and calls across state lines from jails and prisons have been capped at 21 cents per minute by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which currently only regulates interstate calling.
While phone calls make up the bulk of communications between prisoners and their families, video calling and e-mail services, offered via kiosks and tablets, are often set up under similar agreements.
A 2017 case-study by the Vera Institute of Justice found the video calls in Washington State—which at the time cost $12.95—proved too expensive for many inmates and nearly 90% never even tried to use the service.
Ms. Jones-Johnson must pay $7.50 for a 30-minute video call with her father.
For local and state governments, those costs can be a significant source of revenue, explained Democratic Representative Josh Elliott, who is sponsoring legislation that would make phone calls from Connecticut’s state prisons free.
In 2019, Securus Technologies, a private firm that operates the phone network, spent $40,000 to hire lobbyists to oppose Mr. Elliott’s legislation, according to government documents.
After the lobbying became public Securus, which is owned by LA-based private equity firm Platinum Equity, promised it would no longer oppose the bill, Mr. Elliott said.
“This is the most straightforward thing,” he said in a phone interview. “Make calls free so people can be in touch with their families.”
HEAVY COSTS The pandemic has made a tough situation even tougher, said Mashonda Jones, whose son has been incarcerated for three years at the Virginia Beach Correctional Center following a conviction for breaking and entering, according to local media.
Ms. Jones runs a soul food restaurant that was forced to shut down in March because of coronavirus restrictions—her son’s facility is not allowing visitors.
With money tight, she now spends $100 a week on calls and video conferencing so that her grandchildren can stay connected with their father.
“Even though their dad is incarcerated I want them to know they still have a dad,” she said.
Global Tel Link (GTL), the company that operates the phones at the jail, offers two free five-minute calls a week, Ms. Jones said. Video conferencing at the facility costs $7.50 for 30 minutes.
“It wasn’t enough,” Ms. Jones said. “It’s just hello, how you doing, here are the kids and then he’s gone.”
A spokesman for GTL said it was “evaluating ways we may be able to improve our permanent free weekly communications program in the future.”
Kathy Hieatt, spokeswoman for the Virginia Beach Sheriff’s Office said in e-mailed comments that inmates pay 11 cents per minute for both local and long-distance calls, down from 15 cents per minute in 2018.
A spokeswoman for Securus said it had lowered the average cost of calls by more than 30% per minute over the last three years. The company said this month it had offered “191 million free minutes of phone connections” since the start of the pandemic.
Ms. Tylek, with Worth Rises, pointed out that adds up to less than 10 minutes of free calling a week for the more than 1.2 million in facilities with Securus phones.
EMERGING SOLUTIONS In recent years, lawmakers and regulators have taken steps to rein in the price of connection for incarcerated families.
The Democrat-controlled US Congress passed a law in May that would empower the FCC to limit the cost of calls within states as well as between states, and would bar local and state governments from taking a cut of the revenue.
The law has not yet passed the Republican-controlled Senate.
Brian Hill, the CEO of Edovo, a start-up that builds cheaper connectivity tools for incarcerated people—including tablets and free education software—said the root problem is the profit-sharing model.
“The system taxes the families of those who are incarcerated,” he said. “Ideally, you’d get rid of revenue sharing across the board.”
Ms. Tylek, who tries to convince investors to boycott companies that profit off incarceration, said the only solution is to put the firms out of business, and have the government pick up the bill for all essential services, like phone calls.
Meanwhile, Ms. Jones-Johnson is so worried that her father won’t receive adequate treatment for COVID-19 that she’s willing to pay what it takes to check in on him.
“It’s a constant struggle,” said Ms. Jones-Johnson. “But what else can I do?” — Avi Asher-Schapiro/Thomson Reuters Foundation
Fresh off a summer of relative freedom after harsh lockdowns at the beginning of the pandemic, Europe is trying a new strategy to halt the coronavirus’s next surge: Lockdown Lite.
Unlike the blanket stay-at-home orders that characterized responses to COVID-19’s first wave, a partial lockdown isn’t designed to stop transmission completely. Instead, the idea is to home in on hot spots—certain neighborhoods, nightclubs, or private parties, for example—while leaving large parts of the economy open for business.
With death rates running at only a small fraction of the levels last spring despite surging infections in France, Spain, the UK, and other countries, governments want to avoid draconian measures that caused their worst recessions in memory. Partial and shifting lockdowns are likely to become the norm into next year at least, as countries wait for an immunization that’s effective and broadly accessible.
“We have a lot left to go,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “I don’t think people really fully understand that. We’re still in the middle innings of a baseball game at the best.”
One lesson from the Asia-Pacific region, further along in the pandemic timeline, is that Lockdown Lite works only when paired with a broader strategy of testing and tracing. Europe’s inability to meet surging demand for testing and some countries’ lack of tracing capacity suggests the region could struggle with the new approach.
NEW MEASURES That hasn’t stopped governments from trying. Across western Europe this week, authorities have cracked down on nightlife, restricted gatherings, and tightened rules on mask-wearing in public spaces.
In the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson asked residents to work from home for six months if they can and ordered pubs and restaurants to close at 10 p.m.
In France, bars in the Paris region and other cities will be forced to close at 10 p.m. at the latest, starting Monday, while in the Marseille area, currently one of the most affected, all restaurants and bars will be shuttered, Health Minister Olivier Veran said Wednesday evening.
While the government isn’t currently considering lockdowns, even local ones, Mr. Veran said, it will reduce crowd-size limits for public events and has added new restrictions on private gatherings beginning Saturday.
In Spain, Health Minister Salvador Illa urged Madrid residents not to leave home unless they must, even as restaurants outside the worst-affected areas are allowed to stay open until 1:30 a.m.
The goal should be to create a sustainable situation where schools and economies aren’t hobbled by the virus, rather than simply hoping that a vaccine will soon solve the problem, said Robert Schooley, infectious disease specialist at the University of California San Diego.
“We really have to get on with it, about how to operate in the COVID era where the virus is kind of going to be looking over our shoulder for a while to come,” Mr. Schooley said.
TESTING, TRACING If the progression of the pandemic in the Asia-Pacific region is any precedent, targeted measures can work if they’re combined with rigorous testing and tracing, and if local populations follow them. Facing flare-ups from late June through August that were sometimes higher than the initial spread of contagion, countries initially refrained from blanket orders.
After an outbreak in Beijing in June, China abandoned its previous strategy of confining millions of people to their homes. Instead, the government shut schools, ordered more than 11 million tests, and told residents in high-risk housing compounds to stay home, while leaving a majority of the city’s more than 20 million people free to move around.
The targeted approach reaches its limits in places where infections of unknown origins grow to account for a high percentage of new cases. That’s when contact-tracing breaks down, leaving officials unsure where asymptomatic virus cases could be lurking. In Australia and Hong Kong, that led authorities to turn again to across-the-board lockdowns to slow the virus’s advance.
Australia’s second-largest city, Melbourne, first tried to lock down only the public housing blocks that were hot spots of infection. But as unlinked cases kept emerging, the government closed down the city of 5 million people from July until September.
Hong Kong, which saw its worst outbreak erupt in July, couldn’t fully lock down because tiny apartments leave some families without their own kitchens or bathrooms. Instead, the Asian financial hub limited restaurant dining hours, banned public gatherings of more than two people, and mandated masks even when exercising outdoors. It adapted measures every seven days to calibrate the blow to the wounded economy.
ALTERNATING WEEKS European authorities could try something similar, alternating two weeks of strict lockdown with four weeks of “less rigid” steps, according to David Salisbury, an associate fellow at the global health program at Chatham House, the London-based think tank.
“It’s a possible interim approach that never lets transmission really take off,” Mr. Salisbury said. “You don’t have to have a total shutdown.”
In its patchwork response to the new flare-up, Europe now looks more like the US, where targeted lockdowns have been imposed on college campuses and other infection clusters even as reopening proceeds elsewhere.
Lockdown Lite has shown some success in Europe. In Italy, authorities closed nightclubs at the first signs of another wave of infections in August—and have managed to avoid the same degree of resurgence as in France or Spain.
Yet the new measures have also created confusion over government flip-flops—such as the UK’s abandonment of a drive to get workers to return to offices—as well as some grumbling about mixed messages.
In Munich on Wednesday, with Oktoberfest canceled and a five-person limit on gatherings set to go into place the following day, a trio of tour guides in front of the neo-Gothic city hall wondered how long they’d be able to scrape together even a handful of sightseers. “The rules are really inconsistent,” said Brett Gooden, one of the guides. “It’s hard for the public to adjust.” — Bloomberg
