The State Department on Monday urged Americans to reconsider any international travel they might plan and said it will issue specific warnings to avoid visiting about 80% of the world due to the risks of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pause on using the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine will probably be lifted by Friday, although some restrictions may be required, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday.
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, told CBS' "Face the Nation" that "you don’t want to jump ahead of yourself and decide you know the total spectrum of this, which is one of the reasons why they paused and why hopefully by Friday we’ll know."
Fauci, who also took his message to NBC's "Meet the Press," said he doubts the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will "just cancel" the J&J vaccine and continue allowing only the two-dose vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna.
"Everything is on the table," Fauci said. "My estimate is that we will continue to use it in some form. I doubt very seriously if they just cancel it. I don't think that's going to happen. I do think that there will likely be some sort of warning or restriction or risk assessment.”
States began halting use of Johnson & Johnson's vaccine last week after federal health officials recommended a pause "out of an abundance of caution" because of rare but dangerous blood clots.
Fauci's comments came one day before the deadline President Joe Biden set for states to make all American adults eligible for a vaccine. The April 19 deadline is two weeks earlier than the president's original goal of May 1.       
Any questionable vaccine should be called off, not just the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

Nigeria is motivated by the suspension of vaccine deliveries from India, which will prevent it from receiving millions of doses of anti-covid-19 vaccine. The African giant has announced that it is making progress in the development of its own vaccine. The country released $ 25 million earlier this year to develop a vaccine response. Two vaccine candidates are currently being developed according to the boss of the Task Force dedicated to the development of the vaccine, Boss Mustapha. "  Nigerian scientists have produced at least two local covid-19 vaccines which are awaiting clinical trials and certification ... This is a development that will open a new perspective in scientific breakthroughs, and strengthen the morale and image ", did he declare.
Nigeria has joined forces with the University of the Nile for national production, according to the Vanguard daily. Three federal agencies are said to be involved in research, with the aim of producing a vaccine against the coronavirus. This willingness of Nigeria to produce its own vaccine would limit some delays in the Covax Initiative, intended to provide vaccines to developing countries. To this must be added the stopping of India to export, favoring its population. Abuja has real industrial capacities to embark on large-scale production and supply the sub-region. While Nigeria aims to vaccinate 140 of its 200 million inhabitants, it has so far received only 4 of the 16 million doses required. " I ask all the agencies concerned to provide the necessary support and an environment conducive to the smooth running of the remaining protocols for the certification of these vaccines, in order to encourage and motivate other researchers,  ”said Boss Mustapha.
Nigeria is not the only country to embark on the development of anti-covid-19 vaccines on African soil. The current president of the African Union (AU) and head of state of DR Congo, Félix Tshisekedi, recently launched work on anti-covid-19 vaccination in Africa and the possibility of producing on the continent. Officials from the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization and NEPAD have supported the initiative. To date, Africa has an estimated 4.4 million cases and 115,000 deaths from the coronavirus. But she only received 2% of the vaccine doses allocated to her.

Nigerian merchant Feyintola Bolaji, struggling with stagnant earnings and dwindling sales, is now being squeezed by the ever increasing prices demanded by her food suppliers, leading her to cut down on the amount she can put on her own family’s table.
Bolaji’s belt tightening is being shared by millions across Africa’s most populous nation. Not long after Nigeria’s statistics agency revealed that one in three people in the continent’s largest economy were unemployed, on Thursday it announced that food inflation has accelerated at the highest pace in 15 years, compounding the misery of many households.
“It is really bad, I can’t simply afford to give my children what they really need in terms of food,” said Bolaji, a mother of three in her 50s based in the southwestern city of Ibadan. “I try to make them get the nutrients they need as growing children, but it is not enough,” she said, adding “I have had to cut down on meat and fish.”
Insurgency, unrest, and President Muhammadu Buhari’s government’s stand on food imports in a nation where more than half the population lives on less than $2 a day, are issues worsening food insecurity in the African country. Meanwhile, the coronavirus pandemic has robbed 70% of Nigerians of some form of income, according to a Covid-19 impact survey published by the statistics agency last month.

As U.S. Covid cases rise, the country is also administering vaccine shots at the swiftest pace ever. Cases are on the rise in 27 states, with Michigan continuing to lead the nation in daily new infections per capita.
Following more than 70,000 coronavirus cases reported on Monday, the seven-day average of daily new cases in the U.S. is 68,960, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. That figure is up 7% from one week ago.
Michigan again reported the highest level of daily new infections on a per capita basis, according to a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins data. On Monday, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said the state should “shut things down” as it deals with the surge and that a boost in Covid-19 vaccinations alone will not stop the spread of the virus.
Michigan is recording nearly 7,300 average daily new cases, close to the state’s pandemic high of more than 8,300 per day in December. Hospitalizations and deaths are also on the rise in the state.
The seven-day average of daily reported Covid deaths in the U.S. is 962, Johns Hopkins data show.
The latest trend in the death toll is being impacted by a bulk data release of about 1,800 deaths from Oklahoma, which occurred because the Oklahoma State Department of Health is transitioning to data reporting guidelines in line with CDC requirements. Those deaths are all currently being reported for April 7, even if they occurred previously.
Prior to this reporting anomaly, the daily Covid death toll in the U.S. had been trending downward from the record levels seen in January.

Nearly 40% of U.S. Marines who have been offered the COVID-19 vaccine have declined it, according to the Pentagon. 
Of the 123,500 Marines who have had access to the vaccine, 75,500 Marines are either fully vaccinated or have received one dose, and about 48,000 have declined it, Communication Strategy and Operations Officer Capt. Andrew Woods told USA TODAY.
"We fully understand that widespread acceptance of the COVID-19 vaccine provides us with the best means to defeat this pandemic. The key to addressing this pandemic is building vaccine confidence," he said, confirming a statistic first reported by CNN.
Woods said the Navy and Marines were working to ensure that soldiers have accurate information about the safety of the vaccine.
Woods said service members may have declined the offer for any one of a variety of reasons, including wanting to allow others to get the vaccine before them; having already received the vaccine through other channels; or waiting until the military makes receiving the vaccine mandatory, which it has yet to do. 
Because the Defense Department has only emergency-use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for the COVID-19 vaccine, the department can’t make receiving the vaccine mandatory for service members, but President Joe Biden could issue a waiver.
Seven Democratic members of Congress sent a letter to Biden asking him to issue a “waiver of informed consent” to require all U.S. military service members to get the vaccine. 
The letter, obtained by CNN, said that while the Pentagon has "made admirable efforts to educate service members on the safety and efficacy" of the vaccine, those efforts have been "outpaced by disinformation dominating social media."
Based on data shared with CNN by the Marine Corps, the refusal rate at one prominent Marine base, Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, was significantly higher: 57% of Marines there refused the vaccine. 
Of the 26,400 Marines at Camp Lejeune who have been offered the vaccine, 15,100 chose not to get it, including members from the II Marine Expeditionary Force and Marines Corps Installation East.
More than 100,000 Marines have yet to be offered the vaccine, Wood said.

US deliveries of the “one-shot” Johnson and Johnson vaccine are set to drop by 85% next week, in a setback to the government’s vaccination campaign.
The Biden administration has allocated just 700,000 J&J doses to states for the week beginning 12 April, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a huge drop from the nearly 5m shots allocated the week before.
The decline comes after J&J reported a batch of its Covid-19 vaccines developed in Baltimore had failed quality standards and cannot be used – as Anthony Fauci warned the US is at risk from a new coronavirus surge.
Distribution of the J&J vaccine – which requires just one dose, as opposed to the two-shot Moderna and Pfizer vaccines also authorized for use in the US – has been uneven since it was introduced.
The government allocated 2.8m doses to states at the beginning of March, only for that to drop to 493,000 the next week, but the drop to 12 April is the steepest yet.
The slowdown comes after workers at the plant manufacturing coronavirus shots for J&J and AstraZeneca accidentally conflated the vaccines’ ingredients several weeks ago, the New York Times reported.
It is unclear if the mix-up is the reason for the drop in J&J doses, and a J&J spokesman told the Wall Street Journal that the company still aimed to deliver 100m doses to the US by the middle of year, most of those by the end of May. The federal government has a deal with J&J for 200m doses.
On Thursday Fauci, the top infectious diseases expert in the US, told CNN coronavirus cases had plateaued at a “disturbingly high level”. More than 61,000 new cases were reported on Wednesday, according to Johns Hopkins University.
“It’s almost a race between getting people vaccinated and this surge that seems to want to increase,” Fauci said.
Health experts have warned the rising number of coronavirus cases in dozens of US states is probably attributable to the spread of virus variants. Michigan has recorded the worst increase in infections over the past two weeks, at a rate not seen since early December.
On Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that nearly half of new US virus infections are in just five states, with New York, Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania and New Jersey responsible for nearly 197,500 new cases in the latest available seven-day period.
Despite Michigan’s rate of new infections in the past two weeks, Gretchen Whitmer, the states Democratic governor, has stopped short of ordering restrictions, instead asking for voluntary compliance. She has blamed the virus surge on pandemic fatigue, which has people moving about more, as well as more contagious variants.
This week, Joe Biden said half of all American adults are on track to have received at least one Covid-19 vaccination by this weekend. The president has set a goal of delivering 200m vaccinations by 30 April – which marks his first 100 days in office.
One in four American adults have now been fully vaccinated against the virus, according to the CDC.

There have been increasing concerns about the future of the print media in Nigeria. The mounting worries also rubbish claims that business losses in the sector are largely due to the global pandemic. Victor Ifijeh, seasoned journalist, reportedly laments: "To say that the print is seriously challenged is an understatement. To say that it is in decline is putting it mildly. In the words of a commentator, the print media is dying slowly."
For Bayo Onanuga, another industry veteran, the emergence of digital media disrupted and drastically decreased the value of print editions. "Globally, newspapers in print are becoming anachronistic and with the way technology is driving the industry, many journalists will soon be jobless if they do not adapt quickly to the phenomenally-changing environment," Onanuga recently opines.

The University of Alabama lost one of their own due to the coronavirus.
Alabama student and Crimson Tide basketball fan Cameron Luke Ratliff died on Friday after he traveled to Indianapolis to watch the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.

COVID-19 was the third-most-common cause of death in the U.S. in 2020, contributing to more than 375,000 deaths, and a 16% increase in the national death rate, according to provisional data published today by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
All told, more than 3.3 million people in the U.S. died in 2020, for a rate of about 829 deaths per 100,000 people. That’s up from about 715 deaths per 100,000 people in 2019.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a clear culprit. The weeks ending April 11 and December 26 were the deadliest for the U.S. last year, coinciding with two major COVID-19 surges.
The virus was listed as an underlying or contributing cause of death for more than 377,000 people in the U.S. in 2020—which is likely an underestimate, if anything, since testing was hard to come by in the spring of 2020. Only heart disease and cancer killed more Americans in 2020. Meanwhile, suicide was pushed out of the top 10 causes of death; unintentional injury, stroke, lower respiratory disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, influenza/pneumonia and kidney disease rounded out the list.
Logically enough, death rates were highest among adults 85 or older and lowest among kids ages five to 14. While that was true across causes of death, COVID-19 certainly contributed to that gap. The CDC estimates that COVID-19 death rates are 7,900 times higher among adults older than 85 than they are among kids ages 5 to 17. Death rates were also higher among men than women, again consistent with COVID-19 trends.
Death rates varied widely across racial and ethnic groups, too. Overall death rates were highest among Black and American Indian/Alaska Native people, while COVID-19 death rates were highest among American Indian/Alaska Native and Hispanic people.
Though these figures are provisional and may change somewhat as the CDC’s data are finalized, they paint a stark picture. Last year marks the first since 2017 that the national death rate rose. It’s too soon to say whether the trend will continue in 2021, but COVID-19 remains a major cause of death both in the U.S. and globally. More than 550,000 coronavirus-related deaths have been reported in the U.S. since the pandemic began, and the virus continues to kill hundreds of people in the U.S. each day.

"Iwobi has left the camp," Eagles spokesman Babafemi Raji told AFP.
"Before he left, he did not show any symptoms, he was fine."
Iwobi, 24, has scored twice during the qualifying campaign for the delayed Cup of Nations, which will be hosted by Cameroon in January next year.
Nigeria's win over Benin guaranteed them top spot in Group L although they had already qualified before kick-off thanks to a goalless draw between Lesotho and Sierra Leone.
Gernot Rohr's side have 11 points from five matches and are seven points ahead of third-placed Sierra Leone, with the top two teams in the group qualifying for the tournament.
Nigeria host bottom side Lesotho in Lagos on Tuesday.

This is really a pity! I hope that Alex Iwobi can recover as soon as possible. At the same time, our country should also increase the injection of COVID-19, and pray that everyone can be vaccinated as soon as possible!

AstraZeneca said its COVID-19 vaccine was 76% effective at preventing symptomatic illness in a new analysis of its major U.S. trial - a tad lower than the level announced earlier this week in a report that was criticised for using outdated information.
U.S. health officials had publicly rebuked the drugmaker for not using the most up-to-date information when it published an interim analysis on Monday that said the vaccine was 79% effective.
The latest data was based on 190 infections among more than 32,400 participants in the United States, Chile and Peru. The earlier interim data was based on 141 infections through Feb. 17.
"The primary analysis is consistent with our previously released interim analysis, and confirms that our COVID-19 vaccine is highly effective in adults," Mene Pangalos, executive vice president of BioPharmaceuticals R&D at AstraZeneca said in a statement.
AstraZeneca said it plans to seek U.S. emergency use authorisation in the coming weeks and the latest data has been presented to the independent trial oversight committee, the Data Safety Monitoring Board.
AstraZeneca reiterated on Thursday that the shot, developed with Oxford University, was 100% effective against severe or critical forms of the disease. It also said the vaccine showed 85% efficacy in adults 65 years and older.
"A lot of us were waiting for this large, well-constructed and reported Phase III study," said Paul Griffin, a professor at the University of Queensland.
"This appears to be a very effective vaccine with no safety concerns. Hopefully, this should now give people the confidence that this vaccine is the right one to continue to use moving forward," he said, adding that he and his parents have taken the vaccine.
The updated 76% efficacy rate compares with rates of about 95% for vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna.
The AstraZeneca vaccine is, however, seen as crucial in tackling the spread of COVID-19 across the globe, not just due to limited vaccine supply but also because it is easier and cheaper to transport than rival shots. It has been granted conditional marketing or emergency use authorisation in more than 70 countries.
The highly unusual rebuke from U.S. health authorities had marked a fresh setback for the vaccine that was once hailed as a milestone in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, but has been dogged by questions over its effectiveness and possible side-effects.
The shot has faced questions since late last year when the drugmaker and Oxford University published data from an earlier trial with two different efficacy readings as a result of a dosing error.
Then this month, more than a dozen countries temporarily suspended giving out the vaccine after reports linked it to a rare blood clotting disorder in a very small number of people.
The European Union's drug regulator said last week the vaccine was clearly safe, but Europeans remain sceptical about its safety.

The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) announced 96 new cases of COVID-19 late on Wednesday, bringing the total number of infections in the country to 162,178.
The NCDC, which made the announcement on its official Twitter handle made no mention of any death from the disease within the past 24 hours.

Emirates has found itself banned from flying to and from flying to Nigeria because it was demanding passengers flying from Lagos and Abuja to Dubai take three separate COVID-19 tests. Nigeria had previously threatened to ban Emirates over the proposals and imposed a temporary ban on the airline last month.
The Dubai-based airline has required passengers to take a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test within 72-hours of departure since last July and passengers from certain high-risk countries are also required to take a second PCR test once they’ve landed in Dubai and before being allowed to leave the airport.
Health officials in Dubai have, however, proposed a third rapid antigen test taken at the departure airport in Nigeria just before passengers are allowed to board their flight to Dubai. It’s believed the idea was proposed because of the unusually high positivity rate of post-arrival tests in passengers from certain countries.
Nigerian officials objected to the plan and initially claimed it couldn’t go ahead because the test provider that Emirates wanted to use in Lagos and Abuja hadn’t been approved by the government. Nigeria dropped plans to ban the airline after Emirates agreed not to test passengers at the point of departure.
In response, the United Arab Emirates banned passenger flights from Nigeria but allowed Emirates to continue operating one-way passengers services to Nigeria. Anyone who has spent time in Nigeria has also been banned from trying to circumvent the rules by flying to Dubai via a third country.
Nigeria’s aviation minister Hadi Sirika, however, insists that the country will not accept its citizens taking three separate tests to get on a plane. “To make us go through three tests within 24 hours does not make sense. Since they insist, their operations remain suspended,” he told a news conference on Monday.
Emirates was forced to pull the plug late last week but the official reason only came to light yesterday.
Dutch airline KLM has recently restarted flights to and from Nigeria after it amended its pre-departure testing rules. Passengers can now choose to have a PCR test within 24-hours of departure or a PCR test within 72-hours of departure and a rapid antigen test within 24-hours.
Previously, the Dutch government wanted travellers to take a PCR test and then the rapid antigen test within four hours of departure. The requirement to take a third test after arrival has also been waived unless passengers want to skip home quarantine by taking a test on day five of isolation.

Minister of Health, Dr. Osagie Ehanire, has revealed that scientists in the country have produced at least two vaccines which are ready for clinical trials.
He said the government is presently looking for resources to enable it to take the vaccines to clinical trials, after which it will be ready for entrepreneurs who can reproduce them.
He added that the ministry is looking to place one primary health centre in every political ward in the country.
He said this at the closing ceremony of the Technology and Innovation Expo in Abuja.
His words, “The Ministry of Health is honored to be able to work with the Ministry of Science and Technology. We have been able to work on vaccines; we have at least two candidate vaccines which we are looking for resources to take them to the level of clinical trial and after the clinical trials to entrepreneurs who will now boost the production of the vaccines.
“At the Ministry of Health, we are looking to place one primary health centre in every political ward. I will like to say that we have over 4000 at the moment with about 6000 to go; many of them will be in the rural areas and we will have to work with the building research agency to find the lowest costing of building using domestic technology and resources to be able to construct a large number of primary health care centres at a cost that will be affordable to us. We want to achieve as many of them during the period of the administration of Mr. President.”
In his closing remarks, the Minister of Science and Technology, Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu, said the output of the past four editions of the expo have led to the creation of many micro and small scale businesses in the country.
He said, “I am happy to inform you that the output of our past four editions of the expo have led to the creation of many micro and small scale businesses in our dear country. I invite the Organised Private Sector (OPS), to take advantage of the research results and prototypes showcased at the expo to create jobs for the people, reduce poverty and crime in the country as well as create wealth for both themselves and the nation.”

KUCHING: The authorities will conduct a thorough investigation into the alleged failure of officials at the Semuja immigration detention centre in Serian to observe the standard operating procedures (SOPs).
They said that this could have been the reason for the centre to have recorded nearly two-thirds of the state’s positive Covid-19 cases over the last two days.
Sarawak Disaster Management Committee Chairman Douglas Uggah Embas said they have received the report claiming that the centre had failed to adhere to the SOPs when admitting new detainees, resulting in the spread of Covid-19 there.
“We will leave no stone unturned in our investigation as such an irresponsible action has jeopardised everyone’s health. The SOPs should have been strictly complied with,” he said.
The Semuja centre accounted for 138 of the 407 positive cases recorded in Sarawak today.
Uggah, also the deputy chief minister, urged commandants at all detention centres and prisons to ensure SOPs are followed strictly at all times.
“Do not take things for granted, take this responsibility seriously. Any negligence can result in devastating consequences.” he stressed.
The Semuja Immigration Depot Cluster declared yesterday now has a total of 245 cases while 137 tests were awaiting results.

Schools are key areas for epidemic prevention and control. Any country should place epidemic prevention and control in these key areas in a prominent position, take necessary measures to increase vaccine delivery, and promote school vaccination.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said Wednesday that making sure educators are vaccinated is the top priority to keep schools open for children and teens.
"We've seen examples where schools can open safely and be effective, but we know that prioritizing vaccinations will only assist with that," Cardona said in an interview with NBC Nightly News' Lester Holt.
"My experience was when schools had to close, it wasn't because Covid spread within the schools. It was because we had to quarantine educators. We had to quarantine teachers," he said. "Having the vaccination will help keep those doors open. Not only about opening schools, it's really about making sure they stay open."
The administration has spent the past week touting its $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which allocates $122 billion for the nation's public schools to reopen safely as testing capabilities and vaccine availability expands.
At Wednesday's White House press briefing, Cardona told reporters that expanding coronavirus testing for teachers, staff and students and organizing a virtual summit for educators to share “best practices” is part of the administration's push to keep schools open.
"Our students have shown a level of resilience that is impressive. It's inspiring. And we need to respond by reopening our schools safely," he said. "But when we do that, we need to make sure that through this American Rescue Plan, we utilize those resources to provide intervention and support, not only with the academic but almost more importantly the social and emotional needs that our students are going to come to school with."
"We've all experienced trauma together," Cardona said. "We're all getting through this pandemic and we need to make sure our schools are better prepared than ever before to meet their social and emotional needs."
Cardona said that his department will work closely with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to adapt coronavirus guidelines to best assist schools.
"If changes do come, we're going to be ready to adjust and make sure that we're doing as much as possible to safely reopen schools and get as many students as possible into the classroom this spring," he said.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (CBS12) — Tickets will go on sale later this month for the South Beach Wine and Food Festival. It’ll be the first known event like it here to require proof of a vaccine. You can also bring a negative COVID-19 test that’s less than 3 days old. Should the idea of proving you’ve been vaccinated come to the United States?
Israel has commercials promoting their 'green pass.' It's digital proof that you've been vaccinated, allowing the inoculated to do some activities like it's 2019.
Proving you’re immune is an old idea, infectious disease specialist Dr. Klepper de Almeida points out.
"A vaccine passport is not a new concept. It’s been used for other diseases. It’s been used for thousands of years in the times of the plague etc.," Dr. de Almeida says.
But should it be something required here in the United States?
"States that have rolled out the vaccine better, that have controlled the epidemic better, will be able to resume economic activity faster than states that are still dealing with the problem," Dr. de Almeida says.
Kenneth Goodman is a bioethicist from the University of Miami.
He says only when the vaccine distribution is equitable amongst race and wealth, can a vaccine credential type system be rolled out.
"The standard uncontroversial values that we try to teach our students about transparency and veracity and accountably seem not to (have) been appropriately appreciated by decision-makers in the State of Florida, which means if we move forward with credentials, without moving forward fairly with vaccines, we’re just going to make it worse," Goodman says.
Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg says being equitable is important. And like anything digitized, security needs to be tight.
"As long as there’s not a divide between the haves and have nots, as long as it’s no cost to obtain such a passport, as long as everyone has access to it and your information is protected. If you can satisfy those concerns, then I think we should do it," Aronberg says.
Aronberg also warned about people posting pictures online with their vaccine cards. The card has personal information on it, like your birthday.

Country Director, WaterAid Nigeria, Evelyn Mere has said Nigeria is off-track and not achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.0 on clean water and sanitation for all by 2030.
She said with the challenge posed by climate change, the task has become even more daunting, as the emphasis on water quality and the crucial role of regulation has become even more relevant and inevitable.
She disclosed this at the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between WaterAid Nigeria and the Lagos State Water Regulatory Commission (LSWRC) to improve its capacity to effectively regulate the water sector in the state.
The move, she said, would contribute to delivering the objectives of National Action Plan for the revitalisation of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector in the state.
She said the process would involve the conduct of several organisations and sectoral assessments and studies that would generate the data needed to inform interventions that would enhance LSWRC’s operations, management and effective functioning.
She maintained that such partnership was timely and necessary to generate needed momentum in fulfilling its mandate to the people.
Mere urged stakeholders in the water, sanitation and hygiene sector and government parastatals to continue to prioritise access to WASH and increase investment in the sector to cater to residents’ needs.
She urged that the allocated funds be used effectively to strengthen WASH access for better health, socio-economic, gender and education outcomes, thereby contributing to ending poverty, inequality and ensuring adequate pandemic preparedness.
“Together, we are set to make a big difference through our collective efforts in changing people’s lives for good, by providing access to sustained water supply to the good people of Lagos State,” she said.
WaterAid Global Director, Rob Fuller, said Lagos State and indeed Nigeria, needed safe water for all, with independent professionals as regulators.
He said this would call for transparency in decision-making processes.
Executive Secretary, LSWRC, Funke Adepoju, said for the collaboration to enhance ability to function as a regulatory body and improve performance, the need to strengthen institutional capacity and regulatory framework benchmarking against international best practices was critical.
In his address, Lagos State Commissioner for Environment and Water Resources, Tunji Bello, emphasised the need to strengthen regulatory commission, noting that water and waste were already mixing together, thereby discouraging investors.

The Chief Executive Officer of the International Hearing Centre Nigeria, IHC, Dr. Irene Okeke-Igbokwe has tasked Nigerians on the regular hearing checks to reduce the increasing number of hearing loss in the country.
To this end, the centre is providing a month-long free hearing screening for Nigerians in Lagos.
Okeke-Igbokwe who is a fellow of the American Academy of Audiology, FAAA, and presently the President of the Nigerian Audiology Association, NAA, made the last week during a free hearing screening organized by the centre to mark this year's World Hearing Day.
The IHC boss urged all Nigerians irrespective of their ages to pay special attention to their hearing status by undergoing hearing screening annually.
Okeke-Igbokwe who is also the former Director of, Nigerian Army Audiological Centre said the regular screening would reduce the increasing number of Nigerians suffering from all levels of hearing loss.
"Although there are no widely acceptable studies or data on the number of people with hearing loss in Nigeria, the World Health Organization, WHO, estimation is that 1.5 billion people in the world live with some degree of hearing loss, out of which around over 5 per cent of the world's population or 430 million people require rehabilitation to address their 'disabling' hearing loss (432 million adults and 34 million children). It also projected that by 2050 2.5 billion people worldwide or one in four people will be living with some degree of hearing loss.
"Nearly 80 per cent of people with disabling hearing loss live in low and middle-income countries. Nigeria with the largest population in Africa falls into the category of low and middle-income countries."
She explained that "IHC as a hearing health care provider for over 25 years in Nigeria is supporting the World Hearing Day 2021 by providing free hearing screening, free hearing aid checks all through the month of March 2021.
IHC is also providing counselling on hearing health care and advocacy through seminars in all of its centres in Abuja, Enugu, Ikoyi, Port Harcourt, and Yaba."
Lamenting the increasing wrong use of earpieces from cell phones, exposure to loud noise, and ototoxic medication, she warned that Nigeria may witness an unprecedented population of people with hearing loss in the next 10 years.
She emphasised that some of the most common causes of hearing loss such as exposure to loud noise, ear infections, and ototoxicity are preventable.
Okeke-Igbokwe enumerated some of the strategies for reducing hearing loss to include annual hearing screening, newborn hearing screening, good maternal and childcare practices, genetic counselling, identification and management of common ear conditions, and occupational hearing conservation programmes for noise and chemical exposure.
Other strategies include the reduction of exposure to loud sounds in recreational settings and the rational use of medicines to prevent ototoxicity.
Okeke-Igbokwe appealed to the federal and state government to assist in promoting awareness and creating programs to prevent hearing loss across Nigeria. She reiterates that embracing the theme of 2021 World Hearing Day, "Hearing Care For All-- Screen. Rehabilitate. Communicate" will ultimately improve the quality of life for all Nigerians.
World Hearing Day is held on March 3rd each year to raise awareness on how to prevent deafness and hearing loss and promote ear and hearing care across the world.rt."

The Federal Government has declared that the reports claiming it budgeted N10.6b to transport the COVID-19 vaccine to the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory is fake.
Executive Director of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA), Faisal Shuaib, dismissed the reports after a ceremony, where President Muhammadu Buhari, joined by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, yesterday, in Abuja, received the first doses of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.
Buhari and Osinbajo received the jab publicly, a day after the COVID-19 national vaccine programme commenced with the vaccination of healthcare and frontline workers at the National Hospital, Abuja.
Shuaib explained that the private sector-led Coalition Against COVID-19 (CACOVID) has already undertaken the distribution of the vaccines to states at no cost to the government.
He said: “I’m hearing this from you for the first time. It doesn’t make any sense that on the one hand, we’ve communicated very clearly to Nigerians that CACOVID, a private sector initiative, has provided a cargo plane that will help deliver the vaccines from Abuja to all states that have functional airports.
“For those that do not have functional airports, there is a delivery van that will convey the vaccines from those airports to the states without functionality. I do not see how that is going to cost N10b. So, there is no truth in that information...
“The only cost we’re going to incur is the cost of delivering the vaccines from any airport to nearby states that don’t have functional airports. Clearly, that cannot be N10.6b.”
Asked to reveal the actual cost, he said, “You can do the math on the back of an envelope and you know that it cannot be anything close to a billion naira.
“So, I believe that CACOVID has already identified that cost as something they are going to take off. I do not know how much it’s going to cost them, but that is something that they have already identified as a cost they will bear and we’re working together with them…”
Concerning the latest development on the 100,000 doses of Pfizer vaccines, the NPHCDA boss said: “What happened was that there was a committee that met at global level, and took the decision that it made more sense for Nigeria to get 16 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccines than 100,000 doses of Pfizer. 
“Hundred thousand doses of Pfizer is a drop in the ocean and given that the AstraZeneca vaccine is more suited to our cold chain environments, which is from +2 to +8 °C. Not only do we have the necessary cold-chain equipment, but our health workers also have the capacity to manage vaccines of that temperature. So, it just makes sense that we should get vaccines that are more suited to Nigeria.”

Govnor Yahaya Bello of Kogi State for north central Nigeria say 'I no need COVID-19 vaccine, nothing dey wrong wit me'.
Di Kogi State govnor statement wey e make for one live TV interview flood media across Nigeria on di same day President Muhammadu Buhari and im vice president, Yemi Osinbajo take di special prevention injection against coronavirus alias "Covid-19 vaccine".
However, Governor Yahaya Bello don respond to query about whether im go follow di example of di presidency and oda state govnors to take COVID-19 vaccine on live TV.
Wetin Governor Yahaya Bello tok about COVID-19 vaccine in Nigeria?
Oga Bello say im no need to take di vaccine, say "nothing dey wrong wit me, I dey hale and hearty 100 percent".
Di Kogi state govnor salute Nigeria President Muhammadu Buhari for taking COVID-19 jab on live TV, say na welcome development but for him, e no need take di vaccine.
"If I no dey ill, I no go take any vaccine". Oga Yahaya Bello tok.
He reveal dis information for interview wit tori pipo for Channels TV on Friday
Wen di interviewer bin also ask if Gov Yahaya Bello go encourage di pipo of Kogi state to take di COVID-19 vaccine.
He say: "COVID-19 no be our business for Kogi State, we get more prominent issues or more serious matters wey we dey attend to for di State.
Insecurity, we don meet wit star colleagues and plenti odas. We meet disunity for ground and we don unite Kogi state today, no be COVID-19.
"COVID-19 na just a small aspect of wetin we dey deal wit for di State.
We bin get outbreak of Lassa fever and Yellow fever and we handle am without making noise about am.
We vaccinate our pipo against yellow fever, we encourage dem, we educate dem and dem feel di impact, because e affect some communities for Kogi Sate."
"So If Federal goment dey gracious enough to give COVID-19 vaccine, we go collect am and sensitize our pipo ,
And anybody wey wan come out to take di vaccine fit come take am but I no go subject di pipo of Kogi State to vaccination and I no go make dem a guinea pig."
President Buhari bin "recommend coronavirus vaccination to all eligible Nigerians so dat we fit dey protected from di virus" as im and di Vice President of di kontri, Yemi Osibanjo follow take di AstraZeneca vaccine for live television on Saturday, 6 March.
Nigeria President ask state goments, traditional and religious leaders across di west African nation to lead di mobilization effort to receive coronavirus vaccine within dia area of influence.
Getting a vaccine can protect you from the virus, but many people still worry about the side effects of the vaccine.

The Covid-19 pandemic has occurred amid heightened focus on economic and racial inequality in the U.S. As the Biden administration seeks a large Covid stimulus relief package, the everyday financial needs and stresses are greatest based on race, ethnicity and gender.
Forty percent of Latinos and half of Blacks are counting on another round of government financial assistance just to “get by” versus only 22 percent of white respondents who feel that level of financial anxiety, according to a new CNBC + Acorns Invest in You survey conducted by SurveyMonkey. Thirty-one percent of Asian-Americans said they were counting on stimulus relief payment.
Twenty percent of white respondents taking the survey said they don’t need stimulus checks, and that the government should give the money to someone else who needs it. That’s roughly twice the percentage of Blacks and Latinos who answered similarly.
Meanwhile, those who need the Covid financial assistance the most are less likely to receive it promptly. Though more than three-quarters (76 percent) of whites say they’ve received at least one Covid-19 aid payment from the government, only 67 percent of Hispanics and 65 percent of Blacks say they received the funds, according to the survey, which was conducted between Feb. 1 and Feb. 8 among more than 6,100 Americans. Among Asian-Americans respondents, 61 percent said they received payments.
Louis Barajas, CFP, a member of the CNBC Financial Advisor Council says the data on payment receipt may be explained by lower reliance on direct deposit by Latinos.
“Checks are likelier to get lost in the mail, so if you don’t have a bank account for direct deposit, then it’s easier to miss your stimulus payment,” says Barajas.
Emergencies and everyday expenses
The survey underscores the disparate day-to-day impact of the coronavirus pandemic by race and gender.
A plurality of survey respondents spent the stimulus payment on everyday expenses (31 percent), but a higher proportion of Latinos and Blacks spent it on rent or mortgage payments compared to whites. Among Latinos, 27 percent spent it on housing payments, the highest proportion of any group in the survey. Twenty-six percent of Black respondents indicated spending a stimulus payment on housing, versus 12 percent of whites.
The differences in access to liquid savings are also apparent: While 58 percent of whites would access their savings account if they needed $2,000 in an emergency, only 38 percent of Hispanics surveyed would do the same. Meanwhile, 14 percent of Latinos — the highest proportion of any group — responded that they would borrow it from a friend or relative, highlighting, perhaps a savings or traditional banking gap between racial groups.

Trump Keeps Up Conspiracies, Blasts Biden And GOP Foes In 1st Post-Presidency Speech

Just a month after leaving office, Donald Trump on Sunday broke with the practices of past former presidents and took on the man who beat him in the 2020 election.
During a keynote address in Orlando, Fla., that lasted an hour and a half — and began more than an hour late — to the friendly Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, Trump blasted President Biden's tenure so far.
He called it "the most disastrous first month of any president in modern history" and hit Biden on many fronts — from immigration to national security to Biden's coronavirus pandemic response.
The main thrust of Trump's criticism, though, was on immigration policy. He claimed Biden was "eliminating our [southern] border," triggering "a massive flood of illegal immigration" that was letting criminals pour out onto U.S. streets.
It was similar to the dark and nativist anti-immigration vision that helped launch Trump to political prominence in the first place, from his 2015 presidential campaign announcement.
Trump called on Biden to reopen schools, which closed down during Trump's tenure due to the pandemic, saying that Biden "caved to the teachers unions."
"They're cheating the next generation of Americans out of the future that they deserve, and they do deserve this future," Trump said. "They're going to grow up and they're going to have a scar."
Biden has said his goal is to have the majority of schools open for in-person learning within the first 100 days of his administration.
The former president did not save his ire exclusively for his successor. He maintained the false conspiracy theory that he actually won the 2020 election, and despite picking three of the Supreme Court's current members, he blasted the court for not siding with him, saying the justices should be "ashamed."
Trump said he would not be starting a third party. He called for unity in the Republican Party and said he would work to elect Republicans — in his mold. But he called out Republicans by name who have opposed him.
He teased that he could run again in 2024. "Who knows?" he said, furthering his false claims of election victory: "I may even decide to beat them [Democrats] for the third time."
Trump lost the 2020 Electoral College vote and the popular vote by 7 million overall. Dozens of courts threw out his and his allies' frivolous claims of election fraud in multiple states, and his own administration called the 2020 election the "most secure" election in history.
The former president easily topped the conference's annual straw poll. Fifty-five percent of CPAC attendees said they would vote for Trump in a 2024 Republican presidential primary in their state if it took place today.
Notably, however, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis finished second with 21%. CPAC was held in DeSantis' home state, but he has gained more 2024 buzz recently, topping other figures in his home state, like Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott. This comes despite DeSantis struggling in his handling of the COVID-19 crisis.
With Trump not on the ballot, DeSantis was the top choice, followed by South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem. Both made speeches this weekend and were received warmly.
Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri did not fare as well, polling at 2% and 1%, respectively, with the crowd — despite the attention they have gotten for their objections to the 2020 election results.
But any movement in the GOP field is effectively frozen with Trump dangling that he may very well run again.

The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday that she is “really worried” about some states rolling back public health measures intended to contain the coronavirus pandemic as U.S. cases appear to be leveling off at a “very high number.”
The declines in Covid-19 cases seen since early January now appear to be stalling at around 70,000 new cases per day, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said during a White House news briefing. “With these statistics, I am really worried about more states rolling back the exact public health measures we have recommended to protect people from Covid-19.”
“Seventy thousand cases a day seems good compared to where we were just a few months ago,” she said. “Please hear me clearly: At this level of cases with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained.”
The U.S. is recording at least 67,300 new Covid-19 cases each day, based on a seven-day average calculated by CNBC using Johns Hopkins University data. The U.S. peaked at close to 250,000 cases per day in early January following the winter holidays.
Top U.S. health officials, including Walensky and White House Chief Medical Advisory Dr. Anthony Fauci, have warned in recent weeks that the rise of more contagious variants could reverse the current downward trajectory in infections in the U.S. and delay the nation’s recovery from the pandemic.
As of Sunday, the CDC has identified 2,400 cases of the B.1.1.7 variant, first identified in the U.K. The agency has identified 53 cases of the B.1.351 strain from South Africa as well as 10 cases of P.1, a variant first identified in Brazil.
Fauci said Monday that U.S. health officials are also closely monitoring another variant in New York that carries mutations that help it evade the body’s natural immune response.
Officials say viruses cannot mutate if they cannot infect hosts and replicate. They are also pushing Americans to get vaccinated as quickly as possible before potentially new and even more dangerous variants continue to take hold.
Walensky said Monday that vaccinations will help the U.S. get out of the pandemic, touting that the Food and Drug Administration authorized Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use, making it the third shot to be approved for distribution in the U.S. and the only vaccine that requires just one dose. Walensky signed off on the vaccine on Sunday.
The J&J vaccine is a “much needed addition to our toolbox,” she said, adding the authorization will make it possible for more people to get vaccinated.

ABUJA (Reuters) - Nigeria expects to take delivery of 3.92 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine on Tuesday, the third West African country to benefit from the COVAX facility after Ghana and Ivory Coast, the government’s coronavirus task force said on Sunday.
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country with some 200 million people, has reported fewer than 1,900 COVID-19 deaths so far, much better than had been widely predicted early in the pandemic.
Last week, Nigerian drug regulator approved the Astrazeneca/Oxford COVID-19 vaccine use in Nigeria.
The dispatch is part of an overall 16 million doses planned to be delivered to Nigeria in batches over the next months by the COVAX facility, the task force said in a tweet.
The COVAX facility for poor and middle-income countries is co-led by Gavi, the vaccine alliance, and the World Health Organization, with UNICEF as an implementing partner.
Nigeria plans to inoculate 40% of the population this year and 30% more in 2022. The country expects to receive vaccine donations that will cover one-fifth of its population and then procure an additional 50% of its requirement to achieve herd immunity, the budget head has said.
Finance Minister Zainab Ahmed said Nigeria will draw up a supplementary budget in March to cover the cost of COVID-19 vaccinations, for which no provision was made in the 2021 finance bill adopted in December.

Although Nigeria’s current situation is much better than the broad forecast at the beginning of the pandemic, we cannot relax our vigilance. Hope the situation will get better after the vaccination

THE University of Ibadan (UI) has inducted 44 new nurses into the Nigerian health workforce with a charge that they should be good ambassadors of the university and contribute to national health care development.
University of Ibadan’s acting vice-chancellor, Professor Adebola Ekanola, ?speaking at the induction ceremony for the university’s Bachelor of Nursing Science graduates said this new phase of life demands that they put into use their experience of the past, hard work, will and? determination to ensure they excel in the profession.
Professor Ekanola, speaking through the provost, College of Medicine, University of Ibadan, Professor Olayinka Omigbodun, said the department would transform into a faculty soon and urged the new nurses to work in synergy with other members of the health team in delivering care to Nigerians.
The Registrar, Nursing and Midwifery Council of Nigeria, Alhaji Faruk Abubakar, while formally receiving the inductees into the nursing profession, said they should keep to the ethics ?and etiquettes guiding this profession as well as the oath of providing care, regardless of race, religion and diversities of patients.
Alhaji Abubakar, represented by Dr Yahaya Sanni, urged them to promote health, prevent illness and refrain from actions that can endanger or is deleterious to life.
President, Ibadan College of Medicine Alumni Association (ICOMAA), Professor Dipo Otolorin, challenged them to emulate the likes of Florence Nightingale and exhibit clinical empathy as they work with other members of the health care team.
Professor Otolorin stated that empathy and compassion are associated with better adherence to medications, reduce malpractice, fewer mistakes and increased patient satisfaction and urged them to support improving patients’ experience during childbirth
At the induction ceremony that had four of the inductees graduating with first-class honours, Mr Isaac Olabanjo, the only male nurse in the group, recounting his training experience? as a nurse said “It was wield, lonely and tough.”



Thanks to the health department. Thanks to all medical staff.

More than 500,000 people have died from COVID-19 in the U.S.
This week President Biden is asking Americans to mark the 500,000 deaths with a moment of silence at sunset Monday. He's also ordered flags on all federal buildings lowered to half-staff for five days.
The disease has killed at least 100,000 people in the past five weeks and was the leading cause of death in the country in January, ahead of heart disease, cancer and other ailments, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Losing half a million lives to this disease was unimaginable when the first few people died of COVID-19 in the U.S last February. The disease soon began to ravage nursing homes and the five boroughs of New York City, frequently striking those left most vulnerable because of age, poor health, job requirements or crowded living conditions.
Now, around 2,000 people die from the disease every day on average, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, down from a high of over 3,000 a day on average in mid-January.
The pandemic's deadliest day in the U.S. so far has been Jan. 12, when 4,400 people died.
"The massive number and the loss of those people from our society has not been acknowledged," says Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones, an epidemiologist and past president of the American Public Health Association. "We cannot think these people are disposable and dispensable and that we can just get along very well without them. It's those kinds of blinders that sap the strength of the whole society."
"There's much that could be learned, much that would be added if we were to honor people's lives and to invest in people's lives," she adds.
How we got here
The death count in the U.S. far exceeds that of other countries — a fact that health experts attribute to the scattered, patchwork pandemic response from the Trump administration.
"From the very beginning, we had the luxury of time," says Dr. Richina Bicette, an emergency medical physician and associate medical director at the Baylor College of Medicine. "We saw what happened in China. We saw COVID ravaging through Europe. We could have prepared better. We could have hunkered down."
She and other experts cite the shortages of personal protective equipment, testing supplies and contact tracing capacity as some of the missing pieces that could have saved lives.
"If we had put the public health measures in place for the past year, we wouldn't be in this position," says Jones. "We have not paid people to make it feasible for most people to safely shelter in place. We have not ensured that workplaces for those who really have to go to work are safe. We have not equipped workers who must go to work with adequate personal protective equipment."
The politicization of public health messaging, on topics such as masking and the severity of the disease in comparison with flu, also confused and endangered the public, Bicette says.
What lies ahead
Perhaps the most heartbreaking fact about reaching half a million U.S. deaths, is that the toll is still rising. Though new infections and hospitalizations are slowing after a midwinter peak, the country has a long way to go to end the pandemic.
"That decline is really fragile and could change at any time," says Ali Mokdad, professor of health metrics sciences at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
He describes the present situation as a race between the vaccine and new, more transmissible variants, saying that even with the vaccine rollout, Americans will need to stick to safe behavior to keep the virus from surging badly again.
IHME is now forecasting the U.S. may surpass 600,000 deaths by June.
"We don't want people to drop their guard and think that now is the time to throw their masks away and to start gathering, because that's going to erase all the progress that we've recently made," Bicette says. "We do still have to continue to employ the mitigation strategies that we've been discussing since the beginning of the pandemic because people are still dying."
Still many experts speak with measured optimism about the future.
"I'm quite hopeful that we are starting our way down the path to normalcy," says Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
"[Daily deaths] are starting to tick down, and we're now several months into vaccinating," she says, adding that residents and staff at nursing homes, which had some of the highest death rates for COVID-19, were among the first to get vaccinated.
Saying goodbye
Signs of hope ahead do not soften the tragedy of each life lost to the illness.
Lives like that of Xavier Gaines, a 26-year-old security guard with underlying conditions and without health insurance, who died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital on Dec. 2.
And Claudette White, 49, a member of the Quechuan Tribal Council who performed a traditional song to kick off a Biden-Harris inauguration welcome event last month. She died on Feb. 6, shortly after getting COVID-19, which is killing Native American, Black and Latinx people at disproportionately high rates in the U.S.
The losses include children, like Braden Wilson, 15, from Simi Valley, Calif., who was so cautious about COVID-19 that he refused to get his school picture taken. He caught coronavirus at the emergency room when he went for an unrelated issue, says his mother Amanda Wilson.
On Jan. 5, less than a week after he tested positive, he succumbed to multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), a rare and dangerous complication from COVID-19 that has struck around 2,000 kids in America. "It was too fast, and too hard, and I was not ready for my boy to be gone," says Wilson, "He had too much life ahead."
And then there was Regina Angeles Yumang, a 62-year-old ICU nurse in New York and her husband, Dennis Yumang, who each died from the disease a month apart, leaving behind a college-age son. Regina is one of more than 3,400 health care workers in the U.S. who have died from COVID-19, according to numbers from The Guardian and KHN.
Lorraine Enger, 93, died on Jan. 6 at her assisted-living facility in Michigan, four days after testing positive for COVID-19 — and two days before vaccinations started there. "[The facility] had managed for 10 months to keep [the coronavirus] out," says her daughter Julie Enger. "The hard part that every family member goes through when they're faced with this is that their loved one was alone."
It's hard to fathom hundreds of thousands of lives in the U.S., and some 2 million more around the world, cut short by the pandemic.
"We as a nation have not coped with this. It's almost as if these are individual losses to individual families, but that they are not seen as a loss to the whole society," says Jones.
She notes that the COVID-19 memorial tribute last month, on the eve of President Biden's inauguration, in which lights were placed around the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, was the first formal acknowledgement of the pandemic's death toll in the U.S. by the executive branch of the federal government.
For most of the past year the burden of processing the grief has fallen on health care and funeral home workers.
Cheri Bentley, a hospice nurse with Bluegrass Care Navigators in Kentucky, has witnessed nine of the 500,000 deaths. "The hardest part is watching loved ones who want to be with a patient, and patients who want to be with their families — and cannot be [due to COVID-19 restrictions]," she says. Bentley says the nonverbal parts of saying end-of-life goodbyes — holding the hand of a loved one, stroking their face or sitting beside them for hours — are lost.
Her work helping families say goodbye remotely has raised her own risk of COVID-19 exposure. Yet, in these cases, "I do it anyway," she says, describing video calls between patients and their families: "I'm inches from their face, and they're coughing and they can't breathe and they're struggling. And I'm trying to convey what the patient is saying to the family."
The toll of witnessing these deaths has largely fallen on frontline health care workers.
"When you're the person that's putting your own health at risk and your own family's health at risk, and you're the person witnessing those very real and raw situations, this is a great burden that's felt," Bentley says. "And I think that's lost on a lot of our society right now."
It's really heartbreaking! This damn virus has brought too many bad effects to our lives, when will it end!

New York legislators move to strip Gov. Andrew Cuomo of pandemic powers. Cuba nears final testing for its first vaccine. Japan begins inoculations, with the Olympics on the horizon.
As lawmakers push for billions of dollars to fund the nation’s efforts to track coronavirus variants, the Biden administration announced on Wednesday a new effort to ramp up this work, pledging nearly $200 million to better identify the emerging threats.
Calling it a “down payment,” the White House said that the investment would result in a significant increase in the number of positive virus samples that labs could sequence. Public health laboratories, universities and programs run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sequenced more than 9,000 genomes last week, according to the database GISAID. The agency hopes to increase its own contribution to 25,000 genomes a week.
“When we will get to 25,000 depends on the resources that we have at our fingertips and how quickly we can mobilize our partners,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the C.D.C. director, said at a White House news conference on Wednesday. “I don’t think this is going to be a light switch. I think it’s going to be a dial.”
The program is the administration’s most significant effort to date to address the looming danger of more contagious variants of the virus. A concerning variant first identified in Britain has infected at least 1,277 people in 42 states, although scientists suspect the true number is vastly higher.
Doubling about every 10 days, the B.1.1.7 variant that emerged in Britain threatens to slow or reverse the rapid drop of new coronavirus cases. From a peak of almost 260,000 new cases a day, the seven-day average daily rate has fallen to below 82,000, still well above the high point of last summer’s surge, according to a New York Times database.
What’s more, Dr. Walensky said that the nation had seen its first case of B.1.1.7 that had gained a particularly worrying mutation that has been shown in South Africa to blunt the effectiveness of vaccines.
Other worrisome variants have also cropped up in the United States, including one that was first found in South Africa and weakens vaccines.
The F.D.A. is preparing for a potential redesign of vaccines to better protect against the new variants, but those efforts will take months. In the short term, experts say, it is critical to increase sequencing efforts, which are too small and uncoordinated to adequately track where variants are spreading, and how quickly.
Scientists welcomed the new plans from the Biden administration. “It’s a huge step in the right direction,” said Bronwyn MacInnis, a geneticist at the Broad Institute.
Dr. MacInnis said that the “minimal gold standard” would be sequencing 5 percent of virus samples. If cases continue to fall, then 25,000 genomes a week would put the country near that threshold, she said, which is “where we need to be to be detecting not only known threats, but emerging threats.”
Trevor Bedford, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, said there had been “substantial gains” in national sequencing efforts since December. Still, he said that the C.D.C. would also need to make improvements in gathering data about the genomes — such as tying it to information from contact tracing — and then supporting the large-scale analysis on computers required to quickly make sense of it all.
“There’s too much of a focus on the raw count that we’re sequencing, rather than turnaround time,” he said.
White House officials cast the sequencing ramp-up as part of a broader effort to test more Americans for the virus. The Department of Health and Human Services and the Defense Department on Wednesday announced substantial new investments in testing, including $650 million for elementary and middle schools and “underserved congregate settings,” like homeless shelters. The two departments are also investing $815 million to speed the manufacturing of testing supplies.
The C.D.C.’s $200 million sequencing investment is dwarfed by a program proposed by some lawmakers as part of an economic relief package that Democratic congressional leaders aim to pass before mid-March. Senator Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin, introduced legislation to enhance its sequencing efforts. House lawmakers have allocated $1.75 billion to the effort.