Gadhafi-era oil chief found dead

Beijing, Feb 9: After making sure everyone's face mask is on and sanitizer is to hand, the Qiao family heads out to Jingshan Park, a former royal sanctuary beside the Forbidden City in China's capital Beijing.

Snow has fallen for a second day, a rare event in the city of 21.5 million that would normally bring hundreds of thousands of people out to take photos and play. But the streets are empty and the parks are so quiet the only sound is of birds chirping.

It's not just Beijing. Shanghai, China's financial hub, and other cities in the world's most populous nation have turned into ghost towns after the government extended a holiday and asked residents not to go out because of the coronavirus.

"We know the situation of the coronavirus is severe. But the epicentre is far away, so we think it should be fine here ... It's a God-given chance to enjoy this family moment with snow and without work," said Mr Qiao, who has an 11-year-old daughter.

The epidemic has killed 722 people and infected nearly 32,000 in China as of February 8. More than three-quarters of the cases are in the central Hubei province where the virus originated - more than 1,000 km (620 miles) from Beijing.

Only a few people are brave enough to come out. A security guard at Jingshan Park said there were less than a third of the number of tourists than usual, even with the rare snowfall.

Even at one of the best spots for snapping photos of snowy Beijing just outside the Forbidden City, there's barely a crowd, while the usual tour buses and groups of people speaking different dialects are nowhere to be seen.

"Last year when it snowed, I took a few hours off work to come down here to take a picture and the crowd was several layers deep," said a man in his 30s who gave his surname as Yang. "But this year, I am not at all worried about finding a space to take a photo. The virus is keeping people indoors."

Security guards along Wangfujing street, a popular pedestrianised shopping area in downtown Beijing, said it was normally so crowded during the holiday period that it was hard to move around.

"Look at it now, there are more security guards and street cleaners than tourists!" said one of the guards.

Businesses, including shops, bars and restaurants, have been severely hit by the epidemic as the government has banned mass gatherings and even group meals in an effort to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

"You would have to wait outside for a table on a normal day," said a waitress at a restaurant with more than 50 tables. Just five were taken at the peak lunch hour.

Only a handful of the more than 100 restaurants along Beijing's famous food street, Guijie, were open, and the remaining outlets were wondering how long they can hold out.

New York, May 8: An Indian-American father and daughter, both doctors in New Jersey, have died due to the COVID-19, with Governor Phil Murphy describing their demise as “particularly tough" and hailed them for dedicating their lives for others.

Satyender Dev Khanna, 78, was a surgeon who served both on staff and as the head of the surgical departments for multiple hospitals across New Jersey for decades.

Priya Khanna, 43, was a double board-certified in both internal medicine and nephrology. She was Chief of Residents at Union Hospital, now part of RWJ Barnabas Health.

"Dr Satyender Dev Khanna and Dr Priya Khanna were father and daughter. They both dedicated their lives to helping others. This is a family dedicated to health and medicine. Our words cannot amply express our condolences," New Jersey Governor Murphy tweeted on Thursday.

“Both dedicated their lives to helping others and we lost both of them to COVID-19,” Murphy said during a press conference on Thursday, saying their demise is a "particularly tough one.”

Satyender passed away at the Clara Maass Medical Center where he had worked for more than 35 years.

Murphy described him as a "pioneering doctor” who was one of the first surgeons to perform laparoscopic surgery in the state. He is being remembered by colleagues as a “gentle and caring physician."

“And for a doctor, I'm not one, but I would bet, I don't think there could be a more fitting way to be remembered, or a nurse or a healthcare worker of any kind,” Murphy said, adding that the doctor had a passion for bicycling, and he often found peace from the hustle of the hospital in biking along the Jersey Shore.

Priya did all of her medical training in New Jersey and then did her fellowship in nephrology in South Jersey with the Cooper Health System. Like her father, she too worked at Clara Maass, where she died.

She was also Medical Director at two dialysis centres in Essex County and “took pride” in teaching the next generation of doctors, Murphy said, adding that the ICU physician who cared for Priya Khanna was trained and taught by her as well.

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“Priya will be remembered as a caring and selfless person who put others first. And even while in the hospital, fighting her own battle, she continued to check up on her mom and dad and her family,” Murphy said.

“This is a family, by the way, dedicated to health and medicine,” he said.

The governor spoke with Satyender's wife Komlish Khanna, who is a paediatrician. The couple has two more daughters - Sugandha Khanna, an emergency medicine physician and Anisha Khanna, a paediatrician.

“Unbelievable. Our words cannot amply express our condolences nor, I am sure, can they express the pain that the Khanna family is feeling. But I hope that the fact that our entire state mourns with them is some small comfort. And we mourn everyone we have lost. We commit in their memory to saving as many lives as we can,” Murphy said.

Washington, Jun 9: When epidemiologists talked about "flattening the curve," they probably didn't mean it this way: the US hit its peak coronavirus caseload in April, but since that time the graph has been on a seemingly unending plateau.

That's unlike several other hard-hit countries which have successfully pushed down their numbers of new cases, including Spain and Italy, which now have bell-shaped curves.

Experts say the prolonged nature of the US epidemic is the result of the cumulative impact of regional outbreaks, as the virus that started out primarily on the coasts and in major cities moves inward.

Layered on top of that are the effects of lifting lockdowns in parts of the country that are experiencing rising cases, as well as a lapse in compliance with social distancing guidelines because of economic hardship, and in some cases a belief that the threat is overstated.

"The US is a large country both in geography and population, and the virus is at very different stages in different parts of the country," Tom Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told AFP.

The US saw more than 35,000 new cases for several days in April. While that figure has declined, it has still been exceeding 20,000 regularly in recent days.

By contrast, Italy was regularly hitting more than 5,000 cases per day in March but is currently experiencing figures in the low hundreds.

"We did not act quickly and robustly enough to stop the virus spreading initially, and data indicate that it travelled from initial hotspots along major transport routes into other urban and rural areas," added Frieden, now CEO of the non-profit Resolve to Save Lives.

To wit: the East Coast states of New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts accounted for about 50 percent of all cases until about a month or so ago -- but now the geographic footprint of the US epidemic has shifted to the Midwest and southeast, including Florida.

Another key problem, said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, is that the United States is still not doing enough testing, contact tracing and isolation.

After coming late to the testing party -- for reasons ranging from technical issues to regulatory hurdles -- the US has now conducted more COVID-19 tests than any other country.

It even has one of the highest per capita rates per country of 62 per 1,000 people, according to the website ourworldindata.org -- better than Germany (52 per 1,000) and South Korea (20 per 1,000).

But according to Nuzzo, these numbers are misleading, because "the amount of testing that a country should do should be scaled to the size of its epidemic.

"The United States has the largest epidemic in the world so obviously we need to do a lot more testing than any other country."

For Johns Hopkins, the more important metric is the positivity rate -- that is, out of all tests conducted, how many came back positive for COVID-19.

As of June 7, the United States had an average daily positivity rate of 14 percent, well above the World Health Organization guideline of 5 percent over two weeks before social distancing guidelines should be relaxed.

By contrast, Germany, which has tested far fewer people in relation to its population, has a positivity rate of 5 percent.

Even if testing were scaled up, carrying out tests in of itself does very little good without the next steps -- finding out who was exposed and then asking them to isolate.

Here also, too many US states are lagging woefully behind.

Texas, which is experiencing a surge in cases after relaxing its lockdown, is a case in point. The state targeted hiring a modest 4,000 tracers by June, but according to local reports is still more than a thousand shy of even that goal.

Opt-in app based efforts have also been slow to get off the ground.

Then there is the fact that some people are growing tired of lockdowns, while others don't have the economic luxury of being able to stay home for prolonged periods.

The government sent some 160 million Americans a single stimulus check of up to $1,200 back in April but it's not clear whether more will be forthcoming.

Still others, particularly in so-called red states under Republican leadership, have chafed under restrictions and mask-wearing guidelines that they see as an affront to their personal freedom.

"The US is kind of on the extreme of the individual liberty side," Sten Vermund, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, told AFP.

Part of this has to do with mixed messaging from Republican leaders, including President Donald Trump, said Nuzzo.

"We have had at the highest political level an assertion that this is a situation that's been overblown, and that maybe certain protective behaviors are not necessary," she said.

More recently, tens of thousands of people across the country have taken to the streets to protest the killing on an unarmed black man by police, risking coronavirus infection to demonstrate against the public health threat of racialized state violence.