Hospitals in the Netherlands have begun delaying certain operations to free-up ICU beds during a record wave of Covid-19 infections, while an infectious diseases researcher has warned of an impending ‘Code Black’ in the sector.
The country set a daily national record for new Covid infections on Thursday, registering around 23,600 cases. It was the third day in a row of the figure topping 20,000.
To make more staff available for Covid wards, a number of operations, including those for cancer and heart patients, are being canceled from this week on, Dutch healthcare officials have said. Fewer than 200 beds remained available in Dutch ICUs as of Thursday, while Friday figures show almost half (47.8%) of occupied ICU beds were being used by Covid patients.
“These are cancer patients that should actually be operated-on within six weeks of diagnosis, and that won’t be met in all cases. It’s also heart patients,” said a spokesperson for the National Coordination Center for Patient Distribution (LCPS).
Meanwhile, new calculations by an infectious disease modeller at Wageningen University & Research suggest that a so-called ‘Code Black’ in hospitals is looming. The emergency designation means that patient safety is at risk and, if declared, would mean many people with life-threatening illnesses cannot go to the ICU, while doctors have to prioritize who to treat.
According to recent estimates from the Dutch Healthcare Authority (NZa), up to 200,000 operations were not performed as a result of urgently needed Covid care since the start of the pandemic. On Thursday, the NZa revealed that almost a quarter of operating rooms across the country are not currently in use due to a combination of Covid patient pressures and rising staff absences due to illness.
It is not yet clear what impact the delayed care will have on public health. In December 2020, the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) calculated that an estimated 34,000 to 50,000 ‘healthy life years’ had been lost due to the first Covid-19 wave alone.
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Australia’s Defense Minister derided a senior Chinese diplomat’s comments as “silly” and “comical,” after the latter dubbed Canberra’s trilateral nuclear-powered submarine pact with the US and UK a threat to peace.
During a television interview on Friday, Peter Dutton said acting Chinese Ambassador Wang Xining was “probably reading off a script from the Communist Party” when he warned that Australia would become the “naughty guy” if it procured the stealth-combat vessels through the AUKUS deal.
Wang, who is China’s most senior representative to the country after the previous ambassador’s term ended last month, told The Guardian on Thursday that Australia would be labeled a “sabre-wielder” rather than a “peace defender.” He said the Australian public “should be more worried” about the impact of the security pact their nation had made with the UK and the US.
There’s zero nuclear capacity, technologically, in Australia, that would guarantee you will be trouble free, that you will be incident free. And if anything happened, are the politicians ready to say sorry to people in Melbourne and in Adelaide?
However, Dutton “dismissed” the comments and countered that “most Australians [would] see through [their] non-productive nature.”
“We don’t see it from any other ambassador here in Australia. It’s quite remarkable,” the minister told the Nine Network, adding that “this type of diplomacy” was seen elsewhere in the world too.
“These provocative comical statements – it’s just so silly. It’s funny,” he added.
In September, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the deal to obtain at least eight nuclear-powered vessels as part of its new defense alliance. The pact angered not only China but also France, which claimed it had been “stabbed in the back” after Canberra unilaterally scrapped a multi-billion-dollar diesel-electric submarine contract with Paris.
Last weekend, Dutton had irked Beijing by stating that he could not conceive of a situation in which Australia would hesitate to support the US should armed conflict with China break out over Taiwan. Under its ‘One China’ policy, Beijing has pledged to reunify the island with the mainland.
Wang warned Australian politicians on Thursday not to do anything that would be “destructive to our relationship.”
Marx, Lenin, and Ho Chi Minh – the revolutionaries’ namesakes – have gathered for a wedding in India’s state of Kerala. Friedrich Engels was the one walking down the aisle.
And this has nothing to do with time travel. In India’s southwestern state of Kerala parents have often named their children after prominent figures in the hammer and sickle movement. The local communist party has been at the helm there for much of the past 60 years, and is still quite popular with voters.
In the town of Athirappilly on Sunday the groom, Friedrich Engels, a namesake of the 19th century German philosopher who helped conceive Marxism, tied the knot with the bride, Bismitha. In attendance were also Engels’s brother Lenin, named after the man behind the 1917 Russian Revolution, as well as the groom’s friends, Marx and Ho Chi Minh, who bear the names of Marxism’s founding father and the Vietnamese revolutionary leader respectively.
All four men are members of India’s Communist Party. Incidentally, Marx is currently working and residing in ultra-capitalist Dubai, but flew back to see his friend exchange wedding vows with his betrothed, as reported by local media.
Another wedding ceremony that took place in June in the state of Tamil Nadu, saw Socialism getting married in front of his brothers, Communism and Leninism, as well as nephew, Marxism.
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All cities and towns in China, as well as “most” villages, will be covered by 5G networks by 2025, the Ministry of Industry in Beijing has announced in a new infrastructure development plan.
Under the plan, the number of 5G base stations per 10,000 people will be increased to 26, and gigabit optical fiber networks will be extended to most urban and rural areas of China, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) announced on Tuesday.
Digital infrastructure has been defined as a “strategic, basic and pioneering industry to help build a new type of digital infrastructure and support economic and social development,” according to MIIT official Xie Cun.
Information technology will be “deeply integrated” with the economy and society, with the goal of spurring internet innovation and creating a business boom, the ministry added. Meanwhile, the authorities are working on “a new type of supervision system” as well as measures to protect users’ personal information and data.
The Islamic State terrorist group is tearing a path across Afghanistan, establishing itself in “nearly all” of its provinces while increasing attacks more than five-fold in the past year, the UN’s envoy to the country has warned.
Addressing the UN Security Council on Wednesday, the body’s special representative for Afghanistan Deborah Lyons spoke of a major Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) surge through the war-torn country, claiming the jihadist group has now expanded nationwide.
“Once limited to a few provinces and the capital, ISKP now seems to be present in nearly all provinces, and increasingly active,” Lyons said, referring to the group’s Afghanistan-based ‘Khorasan’ faction. She added that so far in 2021, IS has carried out 334 attacks, up from just 60 last year.
The envoy’s comments came just hours after an Islamic State bombing erupted in a Shiite Muslim neighborhood of the Afghan capital, killing one and wounding six others, according to Reuters.
Since taking over as the government following a chaotic US withdrawal and the outright collapse of the American-backed administration in Kabul last summer, the Taliban has struggled to keep the terrorist group at bay, Lyons said. Though she noted that the Taliban insists it is “waging a concerted campaign” against IS and is making “genuine efforts to present itself as a government,” she said its response “appears to rely heavily on extrajudicial detentions and killings.”
Despite the rise in IS attacks in recent months, however, Lyons said the overall security situation in Afghanistan has improved since the end of the US war, which stretched on for two decades.
In addition to the terrorism issue, the UN representative also cited broader concerns for the country in the coming months, warning of a looming “humanitarian catastrophe” driven by a litany of causes, including foreign sanctions – which she said have “paralyzed” the local banking system – as well as growing levels of food shortages due to famine and a failing economy, among other factors.
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As India is mulling new rules for digital money, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has called for regulations to ensure cryptocurrencies like bitcoin do not “end up in the wrong hands,” warning that this could “spoil” young people.
While he did not expand on those concerns, Modi spoke on Thursday about the need for “democratic nations” to band together and deal with challenges posed by emerging technologies. He was delivering a virtual address at the Sydney Dialogue, an annual cyber-tech summit.
Noting that technology and data could either become “new weapons” for conflict or “instruments of cooperation,” Modi brought up digital currencies as an example of how it was important that like-minded nations “work together on this” to “ensure it does not end up in the wrong hands, which can spoil our youth.”
We are at a historic moment of choice. Whether all the wonderful powers of technology of our age will be instruments of cooperation or conflict, coercion or choice, domination or development, oppression or opportunity.
He also urged the development of technical and governance standards and norms, singling out the use of data, and called for renewed efforts to prevent manipulation of public opinion. In recent weeks, Indian authorities have raised concerns over claims of huge returns from cryptocurrency investment as well as its potential connections to money laundering, organized crime and terror financing.
On Saturday, Modi chaired a meeting to formulate the country’s approach to digital currencies and examine their impact on the economy. According to The Economic Times, Indian officials are drafting regulations to propose a ban on all transactions and payments in cryptocurrencies, while allowing investors to hold them as assets, similar to gold, bonds and stock shares.
Citing unnamed sources familiar with the government’s discussions, the newspaper said there was a belief in policy circles that crypto markets needed to be regulated in order to tackle the problem of opaque advertising that exaggerates investment returns in order to attract young investors.
The sources informed the newspaper that draft legislation on the matter was expected to be forwarded to Modi’s cabinet for consideration in the next two to three weeks.
In September, China had banned all cryptocurrency transactions and crypto-mining.
A pack of wild boars were rounded up and euthanized after one of the animals attacked a police officer in the streets of Hong Kong – the opening shot in a pitched battle between the feral hogs and the city’s law enforcement.
A group of veterinarians took seven wild boars into custody, euthanizing the beasts after knocking them out with dart guns in an area near the financial center of the city, according to a statement from Hong Kong’s Agriculture, Fisheries, and Conservation Department on Thursday.
The pigs were captured after one attacked a police officer last week, an act which reflects the city’s new policy toward the animals: stop them before they attack again.
The aggressive boar knocked down a police officer by biting his leg last week as the two faced off in a residential car park, the pig only losing the battle after falling off the building to its death. The wild boars are apparently “accustomed” to wandering back and forth along the roadway, begging for food from pedestrians and vehicles alike. Previously, the city had handled the population by capturing and sedating the animals, then relocating them to “remote areas,” according to the the department.
Hong Kong CEO Carrie Lam vowed to increase penalties for those citizens found feeding the boars, which have reportedly been responsible for some 30 attacks in recent years. While residents are warned not to feed the boars so as not to encourage population growth or disease outbreaks, the animals are a favorite among some visitors. Still, Lam insisted “we can’t simply sit on our hands while things deteriorate.”
Animal rights groups have responded with a protest letter against a policy of euthanasia, pointing out that most visitors do not feed the boars and arguing resources should be directed toward stopping the human activity rather than blaming all the boars. Allowing the boars to be captured and killed “ignores their right to live and considers their existence in urban areas as a capital offense,” the letter read.
Australia’s government could be forced to spend tens of millions in payouts after receiving more than 10,000 compensation claims from people who suffered side effects and loss of income due to Covid-19 vaccines.
Under its no-fault indemnity scheme, eligible claimants can apply for compensation amounts between AU$5,000 (US$3,646) to AU$20,000 (US$14,585) to cover medical costs and lost wages as a result of being hospitalized after getting the shot. The scheme’s online portal is scheduled to be launched next month.
Official figures suggest, however, that over 10,000 people have already indicated their intention to make a claim since registration opened on the health department’s website in September. If each claim was approved, the government could face a bill of at least AU$50 million (US$36.46 million).
There were around 78,880 adverse events to Covid-related vaccination in Australia as of November 7, according to the Therapeutic Goods Administration, which regulates national health products. The majority of side effects were minor, including headaches, nausea, and arm soreness.
Only people who experienced a moderate to significant adverse reaction that resulted in a hospital stay of at least one night are eligible for coverage under the government’s scheme. Those seeking $20,000 or less have to provide proof their claims are vaccine-related – although there has been no information as yet on exactly what evidence would be acceptable.
“Adverse events, even though they happen to a tiny proportion of people, for the people it does impact it’s really quite devastating,” Clare Eves, the head of medical negligence at injury compensation firm Shine Lawyers, told the Sydney Morning Herald.
Among the adverse reactions covered are the blood clotting disorder “thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS)” linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine and the “myocarditis and pericarditis” heart conditions associated with the Pfizer vaccine. Other reportedly accepted side effects are Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare neurological condition, and immune thrombocytopenia (excessive bleeding due to low platelet levels).
Claims for over $20,000, including those for vaccine-related deaths, will be assessed by an independent legal panel of legal experts and compensation paid on its recommendations. Nine people have reportedly died after an adverse reaction to one of the three vaccines in the country.
Eves told the Morning Herald that her firm was representing a number of litigants over the vaccine side effects, including several who are not eligible for the scheme.
Australia’s Jewish community has condemned the repeated displays of Nazi references at anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown rallies in Victoria, some of which saw the state premier depicted as Adolf Hitler.
Daniel Aghion, the president of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, claims that references to the genocidal regime of the Nazis amid the current unrest over pandemic rules is a false equivalence.
“The Nazis had the intention of wiping from the face of the Earth a race or religion simply because of what they were,” Aghion told Guardian Australia. “Nothing in the current proposals is remotely like that, and the comparison to Nazi Germany is therefore shocking, inappropriate and wrong,” he added.
Aghion’s comments come after demonstrators, protesting against pandemic laws, referenced Nazi Germany in an effort to make their point. Some carried placards depicting state premier, Daniel Andrews, as Hitler.
I don’t agree with Daniel Andrews Pandemic Bill. It’s overreach & has rightly been condemned. But placards depicting the Premier in Nazi uniform is offensive & wrong.
It shows a lack of understanding of history. It fuels hatred. It’s dangerous & has no place in public debate. pic.twitter.com/9QN5rj5hym
Wendy Lovell, a Liberal MP, had also claimed laws proposed to govern future pandemics were similar to Germany’s 1933 Enabling Act – which allowed the Reich government to issue laws without the consent of parliament and preceded atrocities, most notably the Holocaust.
MP Bernie Finn had gone as far as to share a social media post depicting the state premier as Hitler. It was later deleted.Laws proposed by Andrews seek to grant powers to the state leaders in the event of another pandemic. Under the move, the minister “may make any order… that the minister believes is reasonably necessary to protect public health.”
Opponents claim the legislation, which would see power concentrated with the head of state and health minister, is too broad and far reaching.
China has accused the Philippines of breaching its territory, saying two supply ships were blocked by Beijing’s coast guard as they approached a disputed shoal. Manila protested over the run-in, citing its own claim to the area.
The two Philippines vessels “trespassed” into waters near the Nansha island chain – also known as the Spratly Islands – on November 16, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijan told reporters on Friday, noting that they entered the area “without China’s consent.”
“Chinese coast guard vessels performed official duties in accordance with law and upheld China’s territorial sovereignty and maritime order,” Zhao said, adding that the area is now “generally tranquil” and that the two countries are in communication about the encounter.
The comments from Beijing come just one day after Manila first publicized the incident, with the Philippines Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin claiming Chinese vessels fired water cannon on the two supply boats and forced them to abandon their mission near a disputed shoal in the Spratlys. He called on China to “back off” and “take heed” of Philippines claims to the region.
While both countries regard the Ayungin shoal – alternatively referred to as the Second Thomas or Renai Jiao shoal – as their own territory, The Hague’s Permanent Court of Arbitration settled the dispute in the Philippines’ favor in 2016. However, despite that ruling, as well as the fact that Manila has maintained a presence on the shoal since 1999, Beijing has not abandoned its claims to the area.
