Barack Obama 'Not Optimistic' On Syria As Aleppo Pummelled

November 21, 2016

Damascus/Syria, Nov 21: US President Barack Obama said he is "not optimistic" about Syria's future, as the UN warned time is running out to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe in Aleppo which has been pounded by air strikes for nearly a week.

obamaGovernment forces launched a ferocious assault last Tuesday to recapture eastern Aleppo, killing 115 civilians so far. In fresh fighting on Sunday at least eight children died when rebel rocket fire hit their school in the government-controlled west.

Obama warned that Syria's second city was likely to fall, and that Russian and Iranian backing for Syrian leader Bashar al Assad had made the situation untenable for the opposition.

"I am not optimistic about the short-term prospects in Syria," he said Sunday at a summit of Pacific leaders in Lima.

"Once Russia and Iran made a decision to back Assad in a brutal air campaign... it was very hard to see a way in which even a trained and committed moderate opposition could hold its ground for long periods of time."

Obama earlier Sunday urged greater efforts to end the violence when he met Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.

But in Damascus, UN envoy Staffan de Mistura was rebuffed on a truce proposal that would allow the opposition to administer the city's rebel-held east.

"We are running out of time, we are running against time," de Mistura said after meeting Foreign Minister Walid Muallem.

Muallem said he had rejected the proposal, under which jihadist forces would leave and the government would recognise the opposition administration in the east which has been bombarded by air strikes, barrel bombs and artillery.

"How is it possible that the UN wants to reward terrorists?" he asked.

Aid agencies fear that instead of a humanitarian or a political initiative there will be "an acceleration of military activities" in eastern Aleppo and elsewhere, de Mistura told journalists.

"By Christmas... due to military intensification, you will have the virtual collapse of what is left in eastern Aleppo; you may have 200,000 people moving towards Turkey -- that would be a humanitarian catastrophe."

'War crimes'

On Sunday, rebels retaliated with a barrage of rockets into government-held western Aleppo, state media said, hitting a primary school and killing at least eight children.

Syrian television showed bloodied and weeping children being treated in hospital, and an AFP journalist saw pupils being rushed from the school after the attack.

But regime forces broke through into the city's northeastern area of Massaken Hanano, sparking fierce clashes, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

It also reported heavy fighting as the army sought to gain ground in two eastern neighbourhoods.

The Britain-based monitoring group said at least 19 civilians including five children were killed in the east on Sunday. That brought to 115 the number of civilians killed since the bombardment resumed.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon condemned the indiscriminate shelling, saying it had killed and maimed civilians, destroyed schools and left the city's east without functioning hospitals.

"The Secretary-General reminds all parties to the conflict that targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure is a war crime," his office said in a statement.

"Those responsible for these and other atrocities in Syria, whoever and wherever they are, must one day be brought to account."

On Monday the UN Security Council is scheduled to meet in New York to discuss humanitarian efforts in Syria. Last week it decided to extend for another year a probe into chemical attacks in the country and who is responsible.

The regime offensive on eastern Aleppo has forced hospitals and schools to close and destroyed facilities for hard-pressed rescue workers.

Shelling on Friday destroyed one of the last hospitals there and staff were also forced to evacuate the area's only children's hospital because of repeated attacks.

Russia, which intervened militarily last year, says it is not involved in the current assault on Aleppo, and is instead concentrating its firepower on opposition and jihadist forces in neighbouring Idlib province.

But Damascus and its allies have made clear they want rebels expelled from eastern Aleppo, which fell from regime control in mid-2012.

More than 250,000 people remain in eastern Aleppo, which has been sealed off since government forces surrounded it in mid-July. No aid has entered the east since then and the siege has created food and fuel shortages.

More than 300,000 people have been killed in Syria since the conflict began with anti-government protests in March 2011.

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News Network
February 18,2020

Beijing, Feb 18: A hospital director at the epicentre of China's virus epidemic died on Tuesday, state media said, the latest medical worker to fall victim to the new coronavirus spreading across the country.

The COVID-19 virus, which is believed to have originated in Wuhan late last year, has infected more than 72,000 people and killed nearly 1,900.

Liu Zhiming, the director of Wuchang Hospital in Wuhan, died Tuesday morning after "all-out rescue efforts failed," state broadcaster CCTV reported.

China said last week that six medical workers had died from the virus, while 1,716 have been infected.

Liu's death was initially reported by Chinese media and bloggers shortly after midnight on Tuesday -- but the stories were later deleted and replaced with reports that doctors were still trying to save him.

After initial reports of his death were denied, the hospital told AFP on Tuesday morning that doctors were giving him life-saving treatment.

Liu's death has echoes of that of Wuhan ophthalmologist Li Wenliang, who had been punished by authorities for sounding the alarm about the virus in late December.

Li's death prompted a national outpouring of grief as well as anger against the authorities, who were accused of mishandling the crisis.

People took to social media to mourn Liu on Tuesday, with many users on the Twitter-like Weibo platform drawing critical comparisons between Liu's death and Li's.

In both cases their deaths were initially reported in state media posts -- later deleted -- and their deaths denied, before being finally confirmed again.

"Has everyone forgotten what happened to Li Wenliang? They forcefully attempted resuscitation after he died," one Weibo commenter wrote.

Another commenter said, Liu "already died last night, (but) some people are addicted to torturing corpses".

A hashtag about Liu's death had 29 million views by Tuesday afternoon.

Doctors in Wuhan face shortages of masks and protective bodysuits, with some even wearing makeshift hazmat suits and continuing to work despite showing respiratory symptoms, health workers have told AFP.

Hubei province and its capital Wuhan have been the hardest hit by the virus, accounting for nearly 1,800 of the deaths from the virus so far.

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Agencies
August 1,2020

Mexico City, Aug 1: The number of people, who have died of COVID-19 in Mexico, has risen by 688 to 46,688 within the past 24 hours, Deputy Health Minister Hugo Lopez-Gatell said.

The number of victims in Mexico is now higher than in the United Kingdom, where 46,119 people have died of the disease. The largest number of fatalities - 153,311 - has been recorded in the United States, while Brazil comes second with 92,475 deaths.

Lopez-Gatell also said on late Friday that the number of confirmed coronavirus cases had increased by 8,458 to 424,637 over the past day.

A day earlier, the Latin American nation recorded 7,730 new cases of the coronavirus, with 639 fatalities.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic on March 11. To date, over 17.5 million people have been infected with the coronavirus worldwide, with over 677,000 fatalities, according to Johns Hopkins University.

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Agencies
March 15,2020

Houston, Mar 15: Researchers, studying the novel coronavirus, have found that the time between cases in a chain of transmission is less than a week, and over 10 per cent of patients are infected by someone who has the virus, but does not show symptoms yet, a finding that may help public health officials contain the pandemic.

The study, published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, estimated what's called the serial interval of the coronavirus by measuring the time it takes for symptoms to appear in two people with the virus -- the person who infects another, and the infected second person.

According to the researchers, including those from the University of Texas at Austin, the average serial interval for the novel coronavirus in China was approximately four days.

They said the speed of an epidemic depends on two things -- how many people each case infects, and how long it takes cases to spread.

The first quantity, the scientists said, is called the reproduction number, and the second is the serial interval.

Due to the short serial interval of the disease caused by the coronavirus -- COVID-19 -- they said, emerging outbreaks will grow quickly, and could be difficult to stop.

“Ebola, with a serial interval of several weeks, is much easier to contain than influenza, with a serial interval of only a few days,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, study co-author from UT Austin.

Meyers explained that public health responders to Ebola outbreaks have much more time to identify and isolate cases before they infect others.

“The data suggest that this coronavirus may spread like the flu. That means we need to move quickly and aggressively to curb the emerging threat,” Meyers added.

In the study, the scientists examined more than 450 infection case reports from 93 cities in China, and found the strongest evidence yet that people without symptoms must be transmitting the virus -- known as pre-symptomatic transmission.

More than one in ten infections were from people who had the virus but did not yet feel sick, the scientists said.

While researchers across the globe had some uncertainty until now about asymptomatic transmission with the coronavirus, the new evidence could provide guidance to public health officials on how to contain the spread of the disease.

“This provides evidence that extensive control measures including isolation, quarantine, school closures, travel restrictions and cancellation of mass gatherings may be warranted,” Meyers said.

The researchers cautioned that asymptomatic transmission makes containment more difficult.

With hundreds of new cases emerging around the world every day, the scientists said, the data may offer a different picture over time.

They said infection case reports are based on people's memories of where they went and whom they had contact with, and if health officials move quickly to isolate patients, that may also skew the data.

“Our findings are corroborated by instances of silent transmission and rising case counts in hundreds of cities worldwide. This tells us that COVID-19 outbreaks can be elusive and require extreme measures,” Meyers said.

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