Earlier this month, the New York-based photographer Hee Jin Kang woke up at 3am and went online to register her elderly parents for the coronavirus vaccine.

She created accounts on five different websites, including portals for state-run vaccination programs as well as hospitals, pharmacies and primary care locations. After hours of clicking through and refreshing various landing pages, she secured time slots for both parents.

“It’s just crazy,” she said. “There is no centralized system. I just couldn’t stop thinking, if you are not tech literate this would just be impossible – they make you jump through so many hoops.”

Biden team plan shake-up to get coronavirus shots into US arms

People across the United States have likened signing up for a vaccine shot in recent weeks to refreshing a page for highly coveted concert tickets. In Michigan, a website for vaccine sign-ups crashed almost immediately after the state expanded vaccine access to people 65 and older. The site, which processes 900 appointments on a typical day, saw more than 25,000 people trying to register. In Texas one website saw 9,000 appointments fill in less than six minutes. Users in Minnesota reported similar issues. Some health departments in Florida are using the ticketing site Eventbrite, leading to concerns about ticket scalpers buying up slots and reselling them.

The Trump administration promised in November that 20m Covid-19 vaccines could be distributed by 2021. As of this week just 18.5 million people have received at least one dose of the vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and about 3.2 million people have been fully vaccinated.

New vaccine doses can only be produced so quickly, but supply is just part of the problem. For Americans whose vaccines are not being arranged through their workplace, scheduling can be a major setback.

Most states have no centralized system to register for appointments and those that do exist are rife with glitches. Both these hurdles have made it difficult for those who aren’t tech savvy and people who don’t have time to refresh an online sign-up all day to get a potentially life-saving vaccine slot.

In fact, online sign-ups raise a number of ethics concerns, public health experts say. Most states in the US are in the second stage of vaccines, meaning people aged 65 and older are allowed to be vaccinated. That poses issues for elderly patients and others with little tech literacy, said Susan Lee, a primary care internist in New York. “The only elderly patients who have been able to get appointments – my parents included – are those who have someone able to advocate for them,” Lee said. “It is heartbreaking.”

In addition, millions of Americans lack access to broadband internet, and just 51% of seniors say they have high-speed internet at home. These statistics are further affected by race: only 58% of Black Americans and 57% of Hispanics own a computer at home, compared with 82% of whites.

Biden has pledged to increase the accine distribution to 1.5m doses a day within the next three weeks and said that anyone who wants a vaccine will be able to access it by spring, but America’s disjointed healthcare system presents unique struggles. One of the only high-income countries in the world without universal healthcare, the US relies on a mix of private and public health resources. The logistical challenges are compounded by the fact that states under the Trump administration were left to roll out their own plan for vaccine distribution with little national direction. On a federal level, a hesitancy from the Trump administration to share data has slowed vaccine roll out, the Biden administration has said.

In a new 200-page report outlining a vaccine rollout, Biden said his administration will facilitate “new technology solutions” to Covid vaccine scheduling. “The federal government will provide technical support to ensure that these systems meet mission critical requirements to support a robust response,” the report said.

Streamlining vaccination distribution and scheduling process as soon as possible will be integral to controlling and eventually ending the coronavirus pandemic, said Seju Mathew, a primary care physician and public health expert based in Atlanta, Georgia.

“We need 85% of the US vaccinated in order to get to herd immunity, so the next few weeks will be huge,” he said. “The only way to take care of this deadly pandemic is to vaccinate people very quickly.”

In the meantime, some states are taking action, private companies are stepping up, and community efforts are emerging. California, where the state government has been fiercely criticized for slow vaccination rates, just launched a state-wide portal called My Turn, which will alert residents of vaccine eligibility. This comes after a crowd-sourced site in California called VaccinateCA organized volunteers to call pharmacies across the state to determine which are providing vaccines to whom and publish what they learn.

Google announced on Monday it would put vaccination locations on its Maps feature. Private companies like ZocDoc, a platform used to register traditional doctor appointments, are offering their infrastructure to schedule vaccines. ZocDoc is partnering with large hospital systems and local governments to better facilitate scheduling. Amazon has also offered to assist with vaccine logistics and is drafting an official proposal to the Biden administration, a spokesman said on Saturday.

It’s crucial the government enable better scheduling logistics because both vaccines approved in the United States – from Moderna and Pfizer – require two doses to be effective. Mathew, the primary care physician, said based on what he has heard from news reports and directly from his patients, he worries people who have struggled to get an appointment for one shot will be more hesitant to schedule a follow-up appointment.

“Scheduling a vaccine should be as easy as booking a ride on Uber or a dinner reservation on OpenTable,” he said. “Otherwise, we are losing patients.”

This won’t be possible without a more streamlined technological approach, said Seema Yasmin, a doctor and director at the Stanford Health Communication Initiative. The system must also keep in mind the inequities that exist in the US healthcare system and in the spread of Covid-19 in the US.

“The same communities disproportionately dying from Covid-19 are being vaccinated at slower rates than white and wealthy citizens,” Yasmin said. “When something as basic as the ability to book a vaccination appointment or even to find out when you might be eligible for a vaccine pose such huge challenges, it can foster mistrust in the vaccination system and the vaccines themselves.”

The post America’s Disjointed Vaccine Rollout Can Be a Nightmare for Many appeared first on The St Kitts Nevis Observer.

1370 JANUARY 22 (wecompress.com)

The post Read the January 22, 2021 Issue appeared first on The St Kitts Nevis Observer.

The post Corona Effect: US Economy Shrank 3.5% in 2020 appeared first on The St Kitts Nevis Observer.

Bloomberg) — Everyone agrees that the Haitian president’s term ends Feb. 7, but there’s disagreement over which year.

As far as the opposition is concerned, President Jovenel Moise’s time is up next month, and they’ve protested and clashed with security forces as that day draws near. He says his term runs through 2022, and has no plans to quit before then.

The struggle over term limits comes as the poorest nation in the Americas grapples with 20% inflation, its sharpest economic contraction in a decade and surging gang-violence. In addition, Haiti is still recovering from the deadly 2010 earthquake and Hurricane Matthew in 2016, while chronic political instability has seen it churn through four presidents in a decade.

Moise, 52, maintains that his five-year term began when he was sworn in on Feb. 7, 2017, a position supported by the Organization of American States. But the opposition — and some legal scholars — says the clock started ticking in 2016, in the wake of chaotic and disputed elections that led to an interim presidency and a new vote.

Read More: Bandits Take Over Valley That Was Long Haiti’s Breadbasket

To complicate matters, Moise began ruling by decree last year after legislative elections were shelved and parliamentary terms expired amid a dispute over his hand-picked electoral authority. He’s used that sweeping power to create a new national intelligence service and broadened the definition of “terrorism” to include the blocking of roads — one of the main forms of protest.

U.S. Reaction

For months, the U.S., the European Union and the Organization of American States, among others, have urged new legislative elections to restore the balance of power. Instead, Moise is proposing a referendum in April to modify the constitution, followed by legislative and presidential elections in September and a run-off in November. That would essentially leave him governing by decree into 2022.

Haiti’s opposition fears the constitutional referendum is another power grab — an attempt by Moise to cling to his office, as the current constitution bars consecutive presidential terms.

The government has provided few details about the new constitution, but Moise has repeatedly said he wants to make the country more governable. At a Jan. 1 event marking Haiti’s independence, he said the nation’s institutions had been hijacked by “corrupt oligarchs” who have created “a predatory state that works only for their own petty interests.”

The presidency didn’t reply to an email seeking additional comment.

While the Donald Trump administration pushed for new elections it also maintained cordial relations with Moise, one of the Caribbean’s most vocal backers of the U.S. campaign against the Venezuelan government.

That dynamic may be changing.

Last month, a group of Democrat lawmakers including Gregory Meeks, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, accused Moise of “pursuing an increasingly authoritarian course of action” and said it would work with the Joe Biden administration to support “a credible, Haitian-led transition back to democratic order.”

Chaotic Country

Haiti’s constitution is ambiguous when it comes to the exact start-date of Moise’s five-year term, said Nicole Phillips, the legal director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, a coalition of non-profit organizations. That means the political struggle is playing out on the streets.

Moise’s “failure to hold any kind of election, his consolidation of power in the executive branch and his acting as a quasi-dictator, those are facts that are propelling legitimate opposition arguments that he needs to step down,” she said in a telephone interview from Port-au-Prince.

The post Haiti: If He Stays or If He Goes, in the End, Only Moise Knows appeared first on The St Kitts Nevis Observer.

The Cuban government hopes that the new US president, Joe Biden, will “quickly” reverse the hard line towards the island of his predecessor, Donald Trump, and resume the thaw initiated by Barack Obama in 2014.

This was stated to Reuters by Carlos Fernández de Cossío, the top Cuban Foreign Ministry official in charge of relations with the the US..

“Everything could be reversed in the short term if that is the will of the government,” he says in an interview with the British agency. Havana is open to dialogue, he says, but acknowledges that it will not make “political concessions” in exchange for a relaxation of sanctions.

Fernández de Cossío points out that Biden’s promises suggest he will restart the process where he left off when he was Obama’s vice-president.

Fernández de Cossío is also optimistic that Biden’s team will include officials with experience in relations with Cuba, “who would not be swayed by simplified narratives…This team has more experience than any other in the last 60 years,” he said.

The last measure against the Island’s regime by the Trump administration came just five days before leaving office, with the sanctions imposed on the Cuban Ministry of the Interior and its head, General Lazaro Alberto Alvarez Casas, for “serious human rights abuses.”

Earlier that same week, the US included Cuba in the list of countries sponsoring terrorism; it had been removed from the list in 2015 during the Obama Administration.

Last May, Washington included the island in the list of countries that “do not fully cooperate” with US anti-terrorism efforts, and, among other sanctions, banned the sending of remittances to Cuba through companies controlled by the Cuban Armed Forces, and included in its black list companies “controlled” by the military, such as Gaesa, Fincimex and Kave Coffee.

The post Cuba Hopes Biden Will Quickly Reverse Trump’s Hard-line on the Island appeared first on The St Kitts Nevis Observer.

More than four tonnes of the high-purity cocaine were discovered on a fishing vessel that was intercepted off the coast of Barbados.

Deputy Director Tom Dowdall, head of NCA International, said: “A seizure of this size will have a dramatic impact on the organised crime groups involved, and deprive them of huge profits.”

Working with European partners as part of an investigation started last year, the NCA developed intelligence leading to the identification of the fishing vessel that was carrying the drugs.

On January 17, a French naval vessel operating out of Martinique intercepted and boarded the boat in international waters east of Barbados.

The NCA said the 4.2 tonnes of cocaine found on board would likely have had “a street value of several hundred million pounds to criminal networks in Europe”.

The boat and her eight crew were apprehended and handed over to administrative and judicial authorities.

Throughout the operation, officers from the NCA’s international network shared intelligence and coordinated the deployment of law enforcement and military assets, working closely with international partners through the Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre (MAOC-N) in Lisbon.

Mr Dowdall said: “The role played by the NCA in identifying and locating the vessel was critical to the success of the operation.

“Through MAOC-N we were then able to ensure that the boat was intercepted by our partners, in this case the French Navy.

“Working with our European partners we have stopped a huge haul of drugs from making it onto the European market, and I’ve no doubt some of that would have ended up in the UK in the hands of criminal gangs also engaged in violence and exploitation.”

 

The post 4 Tons of Cocaine Seized from Fishing Boat off Barbados appeared first on The St Kitts Nevis Observer.

Larry Connor, Michael Lopez-Alegria (former NASA astronaut), Mark Pathy and Eytan Stibbe

These are the private astronauts who are paying $55 million to ride a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station next year, in what will be the first privately crewed mission.

Paying crew members Larry Conor, Mark Pathy and Eytan Stibbe, will be led on the mission by retired NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegría, who has traveled to space four times and is now the vice president of Aximo Space.

Connor is the managing partner of a real estate investment firm based in Ohio, Pathy is the chief executive of Canadian investment firm Mavrik Corp, and Stibbe is a businessman and former Israeli Air Force fighter pilot.

The trip will be conducted in collaboration between Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Aximo Space, which is coordinating the mission. The two announced their partnership in March 2020.

Scroll down for video 

Larry Connor, Michael Lopez-Alegria (former NASA astronaut), Mark Pathy and Eytan Stibbe are to be the first space crew of Axoim Space that will soar the the International Space Station for an eight day mission next years.  Lopez-Alegria is the vice president of Axoim

The first private crew will spend eight days at the space station, and will take one or two days to get there aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule following liftoff from Cape Canaveral.

SpaceX and Axoim had initially set this January for the first crew flight, but is now shooting for January 2022.

At the time of the partnership announcement, the firm said it had secured one seat on the craft, but today the ship has two more passengers.

Real estate mogul Larry Connor to be the first private mission pilot in space history

The 70-year-old Connor will become the second-oldest person to fly in space, after John Glenn’s shuttle flight in 1998 at age 77.

He will also serve under Lopez-Alegria as the capsule pilot, making him the first private astronaut mission pilot in the history of space travel.

‘I believe space is the last great frontier,’ Connor said.

‘I’m thrilled and honored to be a part of this historic mission.’

‘That’s what I’m excited about.’

‘It’s not about being the first pilot. It’s about doing things that can only be done in space – experiments in microgravity. It’s a unique way to help humankind.’

Connor made his first fortune in computer equipment in the 1980s and 90s, before founding the Connor Group real estate investment firm in 2003.

From left, crew members Eytan Stibbe, Michael Lopez-Alegria, Mark Pathy, and Larry Connor

Montreal businessman Mark Pathy initially feared the private spaceflight offer was a scam

Pathy, 51, is the father of three young children. He has dreamed of traveling in space all his life, but was skeptical when he first heard about the opportunity.

‘I wasn’t sure it was completely real, and I’d never heard of this company, Axiom,’ he told the Washington Post.

‘I obviously was not going to blast off in a rocket if this was some sort of Mickey Mouse travel outfit. But the more I inquired and the more I spoke with them directly, the more I realized they were the real deal. It was really possible.

‘And that moment where you think, ‘Holy cow, this is something I could actually do,’ it’s a bit of a surreal moment.’

Pathy plans to with the Canadian Space Agency and the Montreal Children’s Hospital on health-related research projects during the mission.

Retired Israeli fighter pilot Eytan Stibbe was friends with astronaut who died on Columbia shuttle disaster

Stibbe, 63, flew combat missions for the Israeli Air Force and later went on to found investment firm Vital Capital.

He is aware of the risks of spaceflight, not least because he was a close friend of Israel’s first astronaut, Ilan Ramon.

Ramon died when the space shuttle Columbia came apart on reentry in 2003.

‘Obviously there’s some fear, and this is definitely extreme. And then there are risks, and I’m aware of the risks,’ Stibbe told the Post.

Stibbe plans to conduct scientific research coordinated by the Ramon Foundation and the Israeli Space Agency.

Axiom CEO Michael Suffredini says the flight is a ‘watershed moment in the march toward universal and routine access to space.’

‘These guys are all very involved and doing it for kind of for the betterment of their communities and countries, and so we couldn’t be happier with this makeup of the first crew because of their drive and their interest,’ Suffredini said.

Each of these first paying customers intends to perform science research in orbit, he said, along with educational outreach.

Lopez-Alegria, a former space station resident and spacewalking leader, called the group a ‘collection of pioneers.’

Each of the private astronauts had to pass medical tests and will get 15 weeks of training, according to Suffredini.

Axiom plans about two private missions a year to the space station. It also is working to launch its own live-in compartments to the station beginning in 2024.

This section would be detached from the station once it’s retired by NASA and the international partners, and become its own private outpost.

Russia has been in the off-the-planet tourism business for years, selling rides to the International Space Station since 2001.

Eight space tourists have so far gone to the ISS on Russian Soyuz rockets with the company Space Adventures.

The first was Dennis Tito, who paid $20 million for an eight-hour stay on the ISS back in 2001. The last to go was Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte, in 2009.

Other space companies like Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin plan to take paying customers on up-and-down flights lasting just minutes. These trips – much more affordable with seats going for hundreds of thousands versus millions – could kick off this year.

The post Space X Tourists Pay $55m Each to Blast Off appeared first on The St Kitts Nevis Observer.

The Biden administration launched its new level-with-America health briefings with a projection that as many as 90,000 more in the U.S. will die from the coronavirus in the next month — a somber warning as the government strains to improve delivery and injection of vaccines.

The tone of the hourlong briefing was in line with President  Biden’s promise to be straight with the nation about the outbreak that has already claimed more than 425,000 U.S. lives, but was still a jarring reminder of the harsh road ahead. Zeke Miller and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar report.

It marked a sharp contrast to what had become the Trump show, when public health officials were repeatedly undermined by a president who shared his unproven ideas without hesitation.

Dr. Anthony Fauci says there’s reason to be concerned about the impact of some coronavirus mutations on vaccines but scientists have plenty of options for adjustments to maintain the effectiveness of vaccines and treatments.

States Easing Restrictions: Several states are loosening their coronavirus restrictions on restaurants and other businesses because of improved infection and hospitalization numbers but are moving cautiously, in part because of the more contagious variant taking hold in the U.S.

While the easing could cause new infections to rise, health experts say it can work if done in a measured way and if the public remains vigilant about masks and social distancing, David Eggert and Don Babwin report.

Vaccine Minorities: The role that race should play in deciding who gets priority for the COVID-19 vaccine in the next phase of the rollout is being put to the test in Oregon. An advisory committee will vote today on whether to prioritize people of color, target those with chronic medical conditions or some combination.

The debate shows the growing commitment to put racial equity at the heart of the nation’s mass vaccination campaign as the virus disproportionally affects people of color. Experts say 18 states included ways to measure equity in their original vaccine distribution plans and more have likely done so since the shots started arriving, Gillian Flaccus reports from Portland.

The post Biden’s 1st ‘Level with America’ Health Briefing Predicts 90,000 Feb. Deaths appeared first on The St Kitts Nevis Observer.

The post New Wonder Drug Successful in Treating COVID-19 appeared first on The St Kitts Nevis Observer.

LONDON, Jan. 27, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — The Federation of St Kitts and Nevis has largely tamed the spread of COVID-19, notes a data-tracking site assembled of over 4,000 scientists.

The report provides guidelines and recommendations for policymakers, businesses and individuals and has been in operation since February 29, 2020. The team includes New England Complex Systems Institute, Harvard, UCLA and MIT epidemiologists, clinicians, technology creators and data analysts. To date, the Federation has recorded only 35 cases and zero deaths.

The site rates countries as either ‘winning’, ‘nearly there’ or ‘needs action’, depending on the seven-day rolling average of their new confirmed cases. St Kitts and Nevis ranks under the ‘winning’ list and is classified in the ‘green zone’. This means the country has had no new local transmission for 14 consecutive days, any new cases are imported and isolated upon entering the zone, and the region does not share a land border with a red zone.

The site states: “Green countries are either at that point [zero new cases] or very close to it. Yellow countries are those which could reach that point within a reasonable time frame. They still have to get lower to be green. Red countries are either going the wrong way, staying constant, or going down very slowly.”

Also making the list of ‘winners’ were countries like Australia, Iceland, Vietnam and New Zealand. From the Caribbean, Dominica and the Bahamas are mentioned to be doing well in controlling new cases of the virus.

Aside from St Kitts and Nevis’ immediate action to close borders, limit gatherings and equip hospitals with state-of-the-art amenities to deal with COVID-19 patients, Prime Minister Timothy Harris’ government also allocated Citizenship by Investment (CBI) Programme funds to help the economy during the lockdown. CBI funded the Poverty Alleviation Programme, which provided low-income households with a monthly stipend.

During a webinar, the Prime Minister said, “it is the resources […] from the CBI Programme that allowed us to respond so early and properly.”

“St Kitts and Nevis is one of the safest places to be. [It] has the least number of confirmed COVID-19 cases of all sovereign states in the [Caribbean]. That is a remarkable record as we speak. We have not one death associated,” said Les Khan, the head of the nation’s CBI Unit in another webinar. “We acted quickly and decisively with regard to the science and the experiences of other countries to put St Kitts and Nevis in a strong place,” he added.

The post Scientific Report: SKN Has Beaten Coronavirus appeared first on The St Kitts Nevis Observer.