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Thursday 24th of June 2021
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Coastal cities face their mortality on the climate 'frontline' @AFP Food, Climate & Agriculture |
For thousands of years, people have built their great metropolises right up against the contours of coasts, in estuaries and deltas, confident of the ebb and flow of the tides.
Domination of the seas allowed many coastal cities to become trading powerhouses and cultural melting pots.
But now that strength is becoming a liability as climate change swells the oceans, redrawing the map and putting hundreds of millions at risk.
That's the warning of an unpublished draft report by the UN's climate science advisory panel, seen exclusively by AFP, which outlines the vast and urgent climate threats facing the planet.
These cities are on the "frontline", the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report says.
Rising seas will likely spark mass migration and eventually force whole cities to be abandoned to the flood.
"I once was a bride of an affluent family," Yasmin Begum tells AFP in the bare corrugated metal hut she now shares with her relatives in the Bangladesh capital Dhaka.
"My in-laws and parents, they had everything -- cattle, nice house, farmland. But the river took it all away."
The family had lived a relatively prosperous life in the southern island district of Bhola, an exposed tendril of land at the outer limits of one of the world's most populated deltas.
Then one night 12 years ago, the raging Meghna river devoured everything they had.
Roughly a tenth of the world's population and assets are based less than 10 metres (33 feet) above sea level.
"Structurally, a lot of cities are set up in almost the exact wrong place for a world with rising seas," says Ben Strauss, CEO and chief scientist at Climate Central.
Cities like Venice and Jakarta are also sinking, while low-lying island nations, particularly in the Pacific, are at risk of disappearing under the waves.
The report says slashing emissions now can reduce the risks.
"But sea level rise is accelerating and will continue for millennia," it says.
The greenhouse gases already in the air have essentially baked-in the amount that waters will rise until around 2050.
By 2100, the IPCC has predicted water levels could be 60 centimetres (24 inches) higher, even if global warming is limited to well below two degrees Celsius -- the cornerstone target of the 2015 Paris Agreement.
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Octavio Paz Here Misc. |
My steps along this street
resound
in another street
in which
I hear my steps
passing along this street
in which
Only the mist is real
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Octavio Paz The Street Misc. |
A long and silent street.
I walk in blackness and I stumble and fall
and rise, and I walk blind,
my feet stepping on silent stones and dry leaves.
Someone behind me also stepping on stones, leaves:
If I slow down, he slows;
If I run, he runs.
I turn:
nobody.
Everything dark and doorless.
Turning and turning among these corners
which lead forever to the street
where nobody waits for, nobody follows me,
where I pursue a man who stumbles
and rises and says when he sees me:
nobody.
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Delta coronavirus variant: scientists brace for impact @Nature Misc. |
“In my mind, it will be really hard to keep out this variant,” says Tom Wenseleers, an evolutionary biologist and biostatistician at the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium.
“It’s very likely it will take over altogether on a worldwide basis.”
Delta, also known as B.1.617.2, belongs to a viral lineage first identified in India during a ferocious wave of infections there in April and May.
Delta seems to be around 60% more transmissible than the already highly infectious Alpha variant (also called B.1.1.7) identified in the United Kingdom in late 2020.
Delta is moderately resistant to vaccines, particularly in people who have received just a single dose.
A Public Health England study published on 22 May found that a single dose of either AstraZeneca's or Pfizer's vaccine reduced a person’s risk of developing COVID-19 symptoms caused by the Delta variant by 33%, compared to 50% for the Alpha variant.
A second dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine boosted protection against Delta to 60% (compared to 66% against Alpha), while two doses of Pfizer’s jab were 88% effective (compared to 93% against Alpha).
“The data coming out of the UK is so good, that we have a really good idea about how the Delta variant is behaving,” says Mads Albertsen, a bioinformatician at Aalborg University in Denmark. “That’s been an eye-opener.”
Cases of the Delta variant in the United Kingdom are doubling roughly every 11 days.
Delta poses the biggest risk, scientists say, to countries that have limited access to vaccines, particularly those in Africa, where most nations have vaccinated less than 5% of their populations.
“The vaccines will never come in time,” says Wenseleers. “If these kinds of new variant arrive, it can be very devastating.”
Surveillance in African countries is extremely limited, but there are hints that the variant is already causing cases there to surge.
Several sequences of the variant have been reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where an outbreak in the capital city of Kinshasa has filled hospitals. The variant has also been detected in Malawi, Uganda and South Africa.
Countries that have close economic links to India, such as those in East Africa, are probably at the greatest risk of seeing a surge in cases caused by Delta, says Tulio de Oliveira, a bioinformatician and director of the KwaZulu-Natal Research and Innovation Sequencing Platform in Durban, South Africa.
In his country, all of the Delta cases have been detected in shipping crews at commercial ports, with no signs yet of spread in the general community.
De Oliveira expects it to stay this way. South Africa is in the middle of a third wave of infections caused by the Beta variant (also known as B.1.351) identified there last year.
This, combined with a lack travel from countries affected by Delta, should make it harder for a new variant to take hold.
Conclusions
I disagree with the inestimable De Oliveira and would like to see high frequency South Africa sequencing data
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Forensic bioinformatics by @jbloom_lab @sergeilkp Recovery of deleted deep sequencing data sheds more light on the early Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 epidemic Misc. |
ABSTRACT The origin and early spread of SARS-CoV-2 remains shrouded in mystery.
Here I identify a data set containing SARS-CoV-2 sequences from early in the Wuhan epidemic that has been deleted from the NIH’s Sequence Read Archive.
I recover the deleted files from the Google Cloud, and reconstruct partial sequences of 13 early epidemic viruses.
Phylogenetic analysis of these sequences in the context of carefully annotated existing data suggests that the Huanan Seafood Market sequences that are the focus of the joint WHO-China report are not fully representative of the viruses in Wuhan early in the epidemic.
Instead, the progenitor of known SARS-CoV-2 sequences likely contained three mutations relative to the market viruses that made it more similar to SARS-CoV-2’s bat coronavirus relatives.
Chinese CDC Director Gao Fu dismissed the theory, stating “At first, we assumed the seafood market might have the virus, but now the market is more like a victim. The novel coronavirus had existed long before”
Indeed, there were reports of cases that far preceded the out- break at the Huanan Seafood Market.
The Lancet described a confirmed case having no association with the market whose symptoms began on December 1, 2019 (Huang et al. 2020).
The South China Morning Post described nine cases from November 2019 including details on patient age and sex, noting that none were confirmed to be “patient zero” (Ma 2020).
Professor Yu Chuanhua of Wuhan University told the Health Times that records he reviewed showed two cases in mid-November, and one suspected case on September 29 (Health Times 2020).
At about the same time as Professor Chuanhua’s interview, the Chinese CDC issued an order forbidding sharing of information about the COVID-19 epidemic without approval (China CDC 2020), and shortly thereafter Professor Chuanhua re-contacted the Health Times to say the November cases could not be confirmed (Health Times 2020).
In 2021, the joint WHO-China report dismissed all reported cases prior to December 8 as not COVID-19, and revived the theory that the virus might have originated at the Huanan Seafood Market (WHO 2021).
This paucity of sequences could be due in part to an order that unauthorized Chinese labs destroy all coronavirus samples from early in the outbreak, reportedly for “laboratory biological safety” reasons
The deleted data set contains sequencing of viral samples collected early in the Wuhan epidemic
The metadata in the first supplementary table of Farkas et al. (2020) indicates that the samples in deleted project PRNJA612766 were collected by Aisu Fu and Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University.
Known human SARS-CoV-2 sequences are consistent with expansion from a single progenitor sequence (Kumar et al. 2021; Pekar et al. 2021; Rambaut et al. 2020; Forster et al. 2020; Pipes et al. 2021). However, attempts to infer this progenitor have been confounded by a perplexing fact: the earliest reported sequences from Wuhan are not the sequences most similar to SARS-CoV-2’s bat coronavirus relatives (Pipes et al. 2021).
This fact is perplexing because although the proximal origin of SARS- CoV-2 remains unclear (i.e., zoonosis versus lab accident), all reasonable explanations agree that at a deeper level the SARS- CoV-2 genome is derived from bat coronaviruses (Lytras et al. 2021).
One would therefore expect the first reported SARS- CoV-2 sequences to be the most similar to these bat coronavirus relatives—but this is not the case.
The discrepancy is especially pronounced for sequences from patients who had visited the Huanan Seafood Market (WHO 2021).
All sequences associated with this market differ from RaTG13 by at least three more mutations than sequences subsequently collected at various other locations (Figure 3)—a fact that is difficult to reconcile with the idea that the market was the original location of spread of a bat coron- avirus into humans
However, neither the sophisticated algorithm of Kumar et al. (2021) nor my more simplistic approach explain why the progenitor should be so different from the earliest sequences reported from Wuhan.
Repeating the analysis of the previous section with these changes shows that several sequences from the deleted project and all sequences from patients infected in Wuhan but sequenced in Guangdong are more similar to the bat coronavirus outgroup than sequences from the Huanan Seafood Market (Fig- ure 5).
This fact suggests that the market sequences, which are the primary focus of the genomic epidemiology in the joint WHO-China report (WHO 2021), are not representative of the viruses that were circulating in Wuhan in late December of 2019 and early January of 2020.
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01-MAR-2020 :: The Origin of the #CoronaVirus #COVID19 Misc. |
What is clear is that the #COVID19 was bio-engineered The Science [and I am not a Scientist is irrefutable and in the public domain for those with a modicum of intellectual interest.
This information is being deliberately suppressed.
This took me to Thomas Pynchon
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”
“There's always more to it. This is what history consists of. It is the sum total of the things they aren't telling us.”
Now Why are we being led away from this irrefutable Truth
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21 OCT 19 :: The New Economy of Anger Emerging Markets |
nose-diving economic opportunity is creating tinder-dry conditions.
We have recently witnessed the ‘’WhatsApp’’ Revolution in Lebanon, where a proposed Tax on WhatsApp calls sent up to 17 per cent of the Lebanese Population into the street.
The Phenomenon is spreading like wildfire in large part because of the tinder dry conditions underfoot.
Prolonged stand-offs eviscerate economies, reducing opportunities and accelerate the negative feed- back loop.
Paul Virilio pronounced in his book Speed and Politics,
“The revolutionary contingent attains its ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street, where for a moment it stops being a cog in the technical machine and itself becomes a motor (machine of attack), in other words, a producer of speed.’’
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African Region WHO regional overviews - Epidemiological week 14-20 June 2021 @whoafro Africa |
The African Region reported over 132 000 new cases and over 1900 new deaths, a 39% and a 38% increase respectively compared to the previous week, the highest percentage increase reported globally.
The region reported a marked increase in weekly case incidence for the past month, with the largest increases in countries in the Southern and Eastern parts of Africa.
The highest numbers of new cases were reported from
South Africa (70 739 new cases; a 48% increase)
Zambia (16 641 new cases; a 54% increase)
Uganda (9926 new cases; a 16% increase).
The highest numbers of new deaths were reported from
South Africa (937 new deaths; 1.6 new deaths per 100 000 population; a 29% increase)
Zambia (230 new deaths; 1.3 new deaths per 100 000; a 271% increase)
Uganda (203 new deaths; 0.4 new deaths per 100 000; a 314% increase)
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