epidemic – Page 20 – Desdemona Despair

Global monthly mean atmospheric CO2, 1980-2020. These graphs shows the mean global atmospheric burden of carbon dioxide as analyzed from measurements collected by the NOAA Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network. Graphic: NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory

April 11, 2021

Despite pandemic shutdowns, carbon dioxide and methane surged in 2020 – Carbon dioxide levels now higher than any time in past 3.6 million years – Largest annual methane increase ever recorded

7 April 2021 (NOAA) – Levels of the two most important anthropogenic greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane, continued their unrelenting rise in 2020 despite the economic slowdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic response, NOAA announced today. The global surface average for carbon dioxide (CO2), calculated from measurements collected at NOAA’s remote sampling locations, was […]

Dozens of vehicles are parked with their lights on at an illegal party at Tonto National Park on the night of 3 April 2021. The U.S. Forest Service estimated that more than 5,000 people gathered illegally. Photo: U.S. Forest Service

April 8, 2021

More than 5,000 people attended an illegal party at the Tonto National Forest in Arizona – “It’s going to be super destructive”

By Kelsie Smith 7 April 2021 (CNN) – More than 5,000 people attended an unauthorized and illegal event at Tonto National Forest near Phoenix on Saturday, leading to multiple violations and one person being emergency evacuated, officials said. Forest protection officers were patrolling near the Lower Sycamore Creek Recreation Area when they discovered thousands of […]

COVID-19 daily cases per 100,000 population in India, 4 April 2021. On 3 April 2021, the Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare confirmed 93,249 new cases, the highest single-day tally since mid-September 2020. The country’s daily case counts have been rising exponentially since early March 2021. Graphic: 91-DIVOC

April 5, 2021

India sees “alarming rate of growth of COVID-19 cases and deaths” – 47,913 new cases reported in a single day in Maharashtra, “which is more than double its earlier peak”

By Morgan Winsor 5 April 2021 LONDON (ABC News) – India has seen “an alarming rate of growth of COVID-19 cases and deaths” in recent weeks, the prime minister’s office said Sunday. More than 12.3 million people in India have been diagnosed with COVID-19 so far and at least 165,101 of them have died, making India one […]

Top 10 accounts by tweets, likes, and retweets in tweets mentioning “vaccines” or “vaccinations” between 9 November 2020 and 9 February 2021. The fact that the Russian Embassy in Mexico received the fifth most likes and retweets is remarkable given that the embassy only posted 46 tweets mentioning vaccines during the studied period. On a per-tweet basis, the embassy’s vaccine-related tweets received the most engagement of any monitored account—roughly 795 likes and 374 retweets per post—far more than state media accounts with 100 times more followers. Likely buoyed by its vaccine messaging, the @embrusiamexico account saw the third largest percent gain in followers (70 percent) among monitored Russian accounts during the studied period. Data: Hamilton 2.0. Graphic: ASD

March 31, 2021

How Russia, China, and Iran shaped and manipulated coronavirus vaccine narratives

By Bret Schafer, Amber Frankland, Nathan Kohlenberg, and Etienne Soula 6 March 2021 (ASD) – When Vladimir Putin announced last August that Russia had granted regulatory approval for Sputnik V, the world’s first coronavirus vaccine, it signaled—albeit perhaps prematurely—not only a potential turning point in the fight to end the coronavirus pandemic but also a new phase in […]

Covid-19 daily cases per 100,000 population in Brazil, 27 March 2021. On 24 March 2021, Brazil recorded 300,000 Covid-19 deaths, with roughly 125 Brazilians succumbing to the disease every hour. More than a year into the pandemic, deaths in Brazil are at their peak, and highly contagious variants of the coronavirus are sweeping the nation, enabled by political dysfunction, widespread complacency and conspiracy theories. The country, whose leader, President Jair Bolsonaro, has played down the threat of the virus, is now reporting more new cases and deaths per day than any other country in the world. Graphic: 91-DIVOC

March 27, 2021

A collapse foretold: How Brazil’s Covid-19 outbreak overwhelmed hospitals – “We have never seen a failure of the health system of this magnitude”

By Ernesto Londoño and Letícia Casado 27 March 2021 PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil (The New York Times) – The patients began arriving at hospitals in Porto Alegre far sicker and younger than before. Funeral homes were experiencing a steady uptick in business, while exhausted doctors and nurses pleaded in February for a lockdown to save lives. But Sebastião Melo, Porto Alegre’s […]

Aerial view of illegal gold mining camp on the Uraricoera river, Waikás region, TI Yanomami, in the far north of Brazil, between the states of Amazonas and Roraima, December 2020. Photo: Instituto Socioambiental

March 27, 2021

Illegal gold rush in the Amazon raises risk to indigenous people – “They are coming in like starved beasts, looking for the wealth of our land”

By Luana Souza 24 March 2021 (Bloomberg News) – Illegal gold and diamond mining is proliferating in Brazil’s Amazon rain forest and threatening South America’s largest group of native people who still live in relative isolation, the Yanomami. Criminal mining groups are encroaching on the indigenous territory that straddles Brazil and Venezuela, polluting rivers, bringing diseases […]

Monthly evolution of global CO2 emissions in 2020, relative to 2019. After hitting a low in April 2020, global emissions rebounded strongly and rose above 2019 levels in December. Global CO2 emissions were 2 percent, or 60 million tonnes, higher in December 2020 than they were in the same month a year earlier. Major economies led the resurgence as a pick-up in economic activity pushed energy demand higher and significant policies measures to boost clean energy were lacking. Many economies are now seeing emissions climbing above pre-crisis levels. Graphic: IEA

March 27, 2021

After steep drop in early 2020, global carbon dioxide emissions have rebounded strongly – “The rebound in global carbon emissions is a stark warning that not enough is being done to accelerate clean energy transitions worldwide”

2 March 2021 (IEA) – The Covid-19 crisis in 2020 triggered the largest annual drop in global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions since the Second World War, according to IEA data released today, but the overall decline of about 6% masks wide variations depending on the region and the time of year. After hitting a low in […]

Global map showing large-scale protests against COVID-19 control measures, defined as those that lead to arrests, in January 2021. Nations in green imposed large-scale lockdowns in 2021. Graphic: Al Jazeera / World Happiness Report

March 21, 2021

World Happiness Report 2021: Reasons for Asia-Pacific success in suppressing COVID-19 – Death rate in Asia-Pacific nations 42 times lower than North Atlantic nations

By Jeffrey D. Sachs 20 March 2021 (Sustainable Development Solutions Network) – […] Perhaps the most notable variation across world regions of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the far lower mortality rate (deaths per million) in the Asia-Pacific region (northeast Asia, southeast Asia, and Oceania) compared with the North Atlantic region (the US, Canada, the […]

An Asian-American man who did not want to be identified pauses at a makeshift memorial on 17 March 2021 in front of Gold Spa, one of three spas in Georgia where Robert Aaron Long is accused of opened fire, killing eight people. Six of the victims were Asian-American women. Photo: Chris Aluka Berry / The Washington Post

March 18, 2021

Asian Americans see shooting as a culmination of a year of racism – Anti-Asian attacks rise along with online vitriol – “I’ve never been this afraid to be Asian in America”

By Silvia Foster-Frau, Marian Liu, Hannah Knowles, and Meryl Kornfield 17 March 2021 (The Washington Post) – As Helen Kim Ho learned that a White man with a self-described sex addiction was charged with killing eight people — including six Asian women — at spas in the Atlanta area on Tuesday, she imagined the stereotypes of Asian […]

Anti‐Asian hate crime incidents reported to police in select U.S. cities, 2019‐2020. Graphic: CSUSB Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism

March 13, 2021

Anti-Asian hate crimes increased by nearly 150 percent in 2020, mostly in N.Y. and L.A. – “What Trump did is that he weaponized it”

By Kimmy Yam 9 March 2021 (NBC News) – An analysis of police department statistics has revealed that the United States experienced a significant hike in anti-Asian hate crimes last year across major cities. The analysis released by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, this month examined hate […]