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Cricket will be played just a  bit Louder this year with some spectators allowed in the stands for the hosting of the Hero Caribbean Premier League T20 cricket tournament in ST. Kitts and Nevis later this summer.

The 2021 Hero Caribbean Premier League (CPL) will get underway on August 28 and will run until 19 September. All 33 matches will be played at the Warner Park Cricket Stadium.

The other teams competing for the coveted title are the Barbados Tridents, Trinbago Knight Riders, Guyana Amazon Warriors, Jamaica Tallawahs and St. Lucia Zouks.

Initially, when negotiations got underway for the hosting of CPL 2021, it was done on the basis that there would be no spectators as had been done for CPL 2020 in Trinidad.

Since then, decisions have been made to allow 50% capacity for spectators. These spectators will of course have to be vaccinated.

The St. Kitts Marriot Resort has been named as the official hotel for CPL and members of the CPL cohort will arrive in St. Kitts by mid-August to facilitate quarantining ahead of the start of the tournament.

Minister of Sport in St. Kitts and Nevis, Jonel Powell told Loop Caribbean that preparation for the 2021 hosting of CPL is well underway.

“We are very much in an advanced stage in terms of preparation of the two venues; Warner Park is the match venue and Conaree Cricket Field is the practice venue.

A local organizing committee is in place and is in the process of setting up a local team that will deal with the day to day administration on the ground.”

As it stands, everything that was in place in the previous years in terms of media attendance and streaming remains.

“We are very excited!”

A CPL Bubble?

Essentially, everyone associated with the CPL will have to be vaccinated. The success of the tournament depends on it. In a covid19 age, vaccination is promoted as the best and safest way to resume daily activities.

Minister Powell said: “Approximately 90% of the cohort are already fully vaccinated; spectators will have to be vaccinated and there are vaccination requirements for all staff which includes ground staff, caterers, drivers, bar and concession stand operators among others.”

He said most of the players are on board in terms of the vaccination programme and have been vaccinated. There are only a few players who have not been vaccinated and this is either due to access to vaccines where they are or because of religious purposes.

“You would have seen recent ads through Cricket West Indies (CWI), with some of their players encouraging persons to get vaccinated and showing that there are vaccinated and so we are very happy with that compliance.”

St. Kitts Nevis Patriots Squad

St. Kitts and Nevis is home of the Patriots team which will be under some pressure as expectations will be high in terms of their performance on the home pitch. The question is, will they be able to win their first CPL title at home?

Here are the players who make up the squad:

• Dwayne Bravo (Captain)
• Evin Lewis
• Fabian Allen
• Chris Gayle
• Rassie Van Der Dussen
• Anrich Nortje
• Sherfane Rutherford
• Sheldon Cottrel
• Wanindu Hasaranga
• Devon Thomas
• Rayad Emrit
• Rahmanullah Gurbaz
• Collin Archibald
• Jon-Russ Jaggesar
• Dominic Drakes
• Joshua Da Silva
• Mikyle Loius.

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A new look for the Patriots

It’s a new captain, some new players and a new look for the patriots this August as the team gears up to show off its new jersey ahead of the tournament.

“I would have been briefed in terms of the new jersey that the team will be utilizing this year. I’ve seen it, I think it’s looking very good, we have a very good team. We are looking at a new team captain in Dwayne Bravo from Trinidad and Tobago, and we see the return to the Patriots of Chris Gayle from Jamaica. We also have coming back to the fray, who have always been with us, players like Evin Lewis who is our opening batsman, Fabian Allen,  Sheldon Cotrell and a number of others including at least one local player, Colin Archibald.”

As the date draws closer, it is expected that the owners of the Patriots will reveal the new jersey very soon.

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São Paulo, Brazil (CNN) “Who’s mommy’s little girl?” 22-year-old Brazilian Sameque Gois asks as she plays with her baby’s tiny hand, in one of the several videos she showed CNN. In the footage, little Sarah responds to her mother with an ear-to-ear smile.

Sarah was born in January this year. Despite having a few issues during pregnancy that caused her baby to be born prematurely, Gois says her daughter was generally healthy. But after she took her baby girl to the Casa de Saúde Hospital in São Paulo’s coastal city of Santos to treat a urinary tract infection, Sarah started to present persistent fever and flu-like symptoms.

“When her symptoms started, the doctors said it was bronchiolitis, that it wasn’t anything serious,” Gois explains. But her daughter would not recover.

Despite her pleas, her daughter died from Covid-19 on May 27. She was just five months old.

Sarah’s case is one of many in Brazil. The Brazilian Health Ministry says 1,122 children under the age of 10 have died from Covid-19 since the pandemic started. The Brazilian government records the number people who died from severe acute respiratory diseases — such as severe cases of the flu, and others.

However, researchers from global health organization Vital Strategies, which works in more than 70 countries around the world, say its studies suggest such case numbers have been severely underreported.

When comparing the number of Brazilian child deaths from such illnesses in 2018 and 2019 with the number of deaths since the beginning of the pandemic, Vital Strategies found an excess 2,975 deaths. The organization says it’s likely that the vast majority of these excess deaths — not just the official number of 1,122 — were because of Covid-19.

“What we see in Brazil is that the number of kids dying with Covid specified as the cause of death is higher than what we are seeing in other countries of the world — it’s 10 times higher,” Dr. Ana Luiza Bierrenbach, an epidemiologist at Vital Strategies, told CNN.

In the United States, the only country in the world with a higher overall official death toll than Brazil’s, far fewer children have died from Covid-19 — 382 Americans under the age of 18, according to CDC data.

Bierrenbach adds that the coronavirus variant known as Gamma or P.1, which was first identified in Brazil, may not be entirely to blame.

“Kids have been dying more in Brazil since the original variant was here, so it was not the addition of the P.1 variant that made kids die more here than in other countries,” she said.

Recognizing Covid-19 in children

Covid-19 is widely shown to have a more severe impact on the elderly than the very young. Even if all 2,975 excess child deaths were caused by Covid-19, children are still dying in much lower numbers than adults — the overall death toll in Brazil is now more than 514,000. Researchers fear that this small representation of children in Covid fatalities is causing some doctors to miss diagnoses in their youngest patients.

“Truthfully, Covid-19 in children was neglected at the beginning of the pandemic,” says Brazilian pediatrician Dr. Andre Laranjeira.

“A lot of pediatricians had a certain resistance when it came to requesting Covid-19 tests for children, when they were exhibiting those typical respiratory tract symptom — runny nose, cough, fever — practically all children have those symptoms this time of the year, in the autumn, and some doctors were not testing them,” he says.

According to Gois, it took 12 days after baby Sarah developed the first symptoms before doctors tested her for Covid-19. It was only when Gois herself was diagnosed with Covid-19 that doctors tested her daughter.

Dr. Marisa Dolhnikoff, a lung specialist and researcher at the São Paulo University Medical School has been studying the impact of the novel coronavirus on children and adolescents, and says children with Covid-19 could present symptoms different from the ones exhibited by adults with the disease.

“If a child presents high fever, (skin) rash, abdominal pain, doctors could potentially think of other diagnosis and not relate it to Covid-19,” Dolhnikoff says.

“We need to be aware that these different kinds of symptoms can be related to Covid-19 and these children can present a very severe disease.”

Disparity in treatment

And while different symptoms might throw off some doctors, most physicians and researchers also agree the main culprit for Brazil’s higher Covid-19 death rate in children is likely disparities in the country’s health care system — although Brazilians benefit from universal health care, there are vast differences in quality of treatment between private elite hospitals and small or rural public health care providers.

“In large centers we are prepared to deal with these children and we have very, very good ICUs but it doesn’t apply for the whole country,” Dolhnikoff explains. “We have a lot of poor regions in the country that struggle to deal with this situation.”

Bierrenbach at Vital Strategies agrees that inequality could be at play.

“Why is this happening? Probably due to higher vulnerability, lack of access to good quality health care,” Bierrenbach says. “Maybe they are undernourished, and they perish more from Covid.”

More than half of Brazilians — 116 million people — faced food insecurity in 2020. Of those, 19 million people, or 9% of the population, are starving, according to the Brazilian Network for Research in Sovereignty and Food and Nutrition Security.

Laranjeira says the disparity shows up not just in the quality of accessible health care, but also in how they are affected by the disease.

“When you take the fatalities within the pediatric age group, more than 60% are from vulnerable socio-economic groups,” he concludes. “It’s impossible to turn a blind eye to that.”

Journalists Rodrigo Pedroso and Marcia Reverdosa reported from São Paulo. CNN’s Vasco Cotovio and Isa Soares reported from London. Reporting also contributed by Juliana Koch in São Paulo.

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WORLD STATS

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CARACAS, June 29 (Reuters) – Venezuela will allow a coalition of major opposition political parties to field candidates in upcoming elections, the head of the electoral council said on Tuesday, as the opposition and government prepare to enter into a negotiation process.

The South American country’s supreme court in 2018 ruled that the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), which groups large opposition parties, could not participate in elections, arguing candidates could not be members of both the MUD and the individual political parties that form it.

The lifting of that ban by National Electoral Council (CNE) President Pedro Calzadilla comes after several actions by President Nicolas Maduro seen by some diplomats and analysts as olive branches to the opposition of state and local elections in November in the midst of a years-long political crisis.

Opposition leader Juan Guaido has not said whether or not he believes opposition candidates should take part in the upcoming vote, after the mainstream opposition boycotted presidential and parliamentary elections in 2018 and 2020, respectively, arguing they were rigged in favor of Maduro’s ruling socialist party.

The opposition, backed by the United States and most Western democracies, labels Maduro a dictator who has clung to power through rigged elections and persecution of opponents. Maduro, supported by Russia and China, labels Guaido a puppet of Washington seeking to oust him in a coup.

Tuesday’s move comes after the socialist-held National Assembly in May named opposition-linked figures to a new elections council for the first time in years, and after Maduro said he would be willing to negotiate with Guaido in an effort to ease tensions and convince Washington to lift sanctions. read more

“This step is an opportunity to regroup and rebuild the alternative for political change,” opposition politician Stalin Gonzalez, who participated in a prior round of negotiations in 2019, wrote on Twitter.

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BRASILIA, June 29 (Reuters) – A bill allowing commercial agriculture and mining on protected tribal reservations in Brazil advanced in Congress on Tuesday in what indigenous leaders said could be the biggest setback since their land rights were guaranteed in the 1988 Constitution.

The proposal, known as PL 490, cleared the constitutional affairs committee and headed for the lower house plenary.

Brazil’s powerful farm lobby and far-right President Jair Bolsonaro have pushed for the bill, arguing that indigenous communities are blocking development of the Amazon while sitting on reservations with mineral resources and agricultural promise.

PL 490 bars recognition of indigenous lands not occupied by October 1988, favoring farmers in several ongoing land disputes. The bill would also end a ban on the use of GMO crops on reservations.

It would also allow the government to build roads and dams, tap strategic resources on reservations and allow access to the police and military without consulting indigenous communities.

“This is the worst moment since 1988 for the rights that indigenous people gained,” Almir Surui, chieftain of the Paiter Surui, said by telephone from the state of Rondonia.

Surui, who made his name campaigning against hydroelectric dams that left-wing governments worked to build in the Amazon a decade ago, hopes that the Supreme Court will rule that the measure in unconstitutional and block its enactment into law.

If not, he warned of potential conflicts to come.

“There will be war because indigenous people will not allow their territories to be taken at any cost,” said Surui, who heads a forum of traditional tribal chiefs called Parlaindio.

Last week, riot police used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse indigenous people protesting against the bill outside Congress. read more

Protesters, including children and elders, ran for cover, many coughing their way through clouds of gas. Some shot arrows at the windows of the government’s indigenous affairs agency Funai, now seen as an ally of farming interests.

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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AFP) — Doctors without Borders (MSF) said Monday it had closed a hospital in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince after it was hit by gunfire at the weekend — a gloomy sign of an escalation of violence in the city.

Luckily, no one was wounded in the attack on the clinic in Port-au-Prince’s Martissant neighbourhood, which has been run by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning charity since 2006 and provides critical care to the poor.

The area is now effectively under siege by armed gangs, and Doctors Without Borders (or Medecins sans Frontieres or MSF) said it could no longer “keep caring for the population without putting its staff in danger”.

The facility has been evacuated and patients transported to other clinics, the group said in a statement.

“The safety of our personnel is a priority because we cannot care for others if our own staff is at risk,” said Alessandra Giudiceandrea, the head of MSF’s mission in Haiti.

She added she did not believe the group was directly targeted in the attack.

The impoverished Caribbean nation, which is deep in political and security chaos, has seen a marked uptick in the number of kidnappings for ransom by armed gangs, and is also facing an increase in the number of COVID-19 cases.

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A worker tends to a fibre-optic line in Lake Forest Park, Washington, amid the scorching heat

People sleep at a cooling centre set up in Portland in the US state of Oregon

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