Myths about COVID-19 continue to circulate around the Internet. Misinformation ranges from the laughable (the virus arrived from outer space!) to the dangerous (hydroxychloroquine or bleach cure the virus). Conspiracy theories suggest that Greta Thunberg caused COVID-19 to help with climate change or that hand sanitizer companies invented the virus as a marketing scheme.
The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic to Kisumu, Kenya, is placing a heavy burden on a population already suffering routinely from disease and lack of basic health care. If that weren’t enough, since early 2020, East Africa has experienced unprecedented waves of locust swarms — a crisis linked to climate change — which has destroyed livestock and crops and threatens to worsen food scarcity.
The New York Times reports that while the COVID-19 pandemic is lessening in many of the countries hit early in 2020, new hot spots in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East are causing a record rise in the number of first-time cases of the virus.
The World Health Organization (WHO) held the 73rd session of the World Health Assembly May 18–19 — its first-ever to be held virtually. Most low-resource countries and all developed countries attended the meeting. At the direction of the Trump administration, the United States did not participate.
The agenda focused on the COVID-19 pandemic and adopted a resolution by consensus to use the tool of global unity to fight the virus. More than 130 countries (excluding the United States, which has halted funding to the WHO) sponsored the resolution, which calls for the following actions:
* Intensification of efforts to control the pandemic
* Equitable access to and fair distribution of all essential health technologies and products to combat the virus
* An independent and comprehensive evaluation of the global response, including, but not limited to, WHO’s performance
Despite early action by the Peruvian government, COVID-19 continues to devastate the nation. Once in Lima, the virus rapidly spread to the city of Iquitos and from that gateway to remote villages along the Amazon, an area where WiRED’s partner, Project Amazonas (PA), provides medical services. Working with PA, WiRED provides health education and other IT resources, including an electronic patient record system that runs entirely off the grid; patient data collected in remote regions can be uploaded to country-level data programs for aggregation and analysis.
The COVID-19 pandemic has turned our lives upside down. People are isolated at home with time on their hands. Anxiety levels are high.
One way to cope is to adopt or to foster an animal. Shelters and rescue organizations report record numbers of applications, and some places are empty of animals for the first time ever.
When The World Health Organization declared 2020 “The Year of the Nurse and Midwife,” no one had any idea that nurses and other first responders would be front and center in the fight against COVID-19.
Healthcare workers expose themselves to the risk of the virus as they do what they are trained to do every time they begin a shift, which is care for those with disease, work in their communities on prevention through education, and care for those in community and home settings.
COVID-19, climate change, neglected tropical diseases, recently released health education modules and videos on our work, a new smartphone app — these are all topics of recent stories posted on WiRED International’s website.
GivingTuesday, a global generosity movement, is launching a special day of unity to take place on May 5, to address urgent needs caused by COVID-19. People are encouraged to donate to organizations dealing with the severe impact of the virus.
Due to dramatic advances in transportation, a viral outbreak that began halfway around the world now assaults our entire country. It is sickening and killing even people in small towns like Odon, Indiana. That’s where my 91-year-old brother is confined to a small room in an assisted living facility. He’s recuperating from hip surgery and isolated to hopefully avoid contracting the deadly virus.