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New Zealand could see a devastating community outbreak if it moves to allow repatriation flights for New Zealand citizens out of India, according to an epidemiologist.
Your playlist will load after this ad University of Melbourne professor Tony Blakely told Q+A the rates of infection in the South Asian country were phenomenal . Source: Q+A
University of Melbourne professor Tony Blakely, who has been monitoring the outbreak, told Q+A with Jack Tame there was a vast underreporting of cases and deaths due to Covid-19 in the country, which could be as high as 0.5 to 1 per cent of the Indian population being infected per day .
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The actual mortality rate from the coronavirus (COVID-19) disease in Ukraine in 2020 is 138,507 deaths, while official statistics shows 46,737, according to the independent global health research center Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington on May 7.
According to IHME, COVID-19 has caused 6.9 million deaths globally, more than double what official reports show.
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As the second year of the Covid-19 pandemic unfolds, the United States has entered a new phase of heightened hope in the race to control the outbreak and get ahead of evolving variants. The U.S. government and health sector share an imperative to move quickly to immunize at scale and to address disparities in vaccine access at home and abroad.
Doctor John Rajiv writes a note before receiving his first dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine in December 2020. | JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images
But public trust and confidence in vaccines, science, and public health authorities are both fragile and absolutely pivotal. What is at stake is fundamentally a matter of national security: achieving herd immunity that truly and rapidly restabilizes public health, economic vitality, and society at large.
Now, with Covid ravaging the country, desperate Indians have taken to Twitter to ask for oxygen cylinders or beg hospitals for an open bed. The crisis has been exacerbated by the governmentâs concealment of critical information. Between Indiaâs long history of hiding and undercounting illness deaths and its much more recent history of restraining and suppressing the press, Modiâs administration has made it impossible to find accurate information about the virusâs hold in the country. Blocking that information will only hurt millions within the country. It will also stymie global efforts to stop the Covid-19 pandemic, and new variants of the virus, at Indiaâs border.