Tag Archives: catastrophic

World

Delta variant surges in Middle East and North Africa as region braces for ‘catastrophic consequences’

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Abu Dhabi
CNN
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The Middle East and North Africa is witnessing a surge in Covid-19 cases aggravated by the Delta variant of the virus – and it may get worse over coming weeks – according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

An increase in coronavirus cases has been reported in Libya, Iran, Iraq and Tunisia as the region edges toward a “critical point,” WHO’s Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office said Wednesday. Across the region, more than 11 million cases have been recorded in total since the start of the pandemic.

WHO also warned of possible “catastrophic consequences” of the Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday, which begins in the week of July 20 and is traditionally celebrated with large or medium-sized social gatherings.

Tunisia, one of the Arab world’s worst-hit countries by the Delta variant, has reimposed lockdowns. It has also appealed to Arab Gulf countries for critical aid, as its health care sector faces “catastrophe,” according to the Tunisian government.

Saudi Arabia has announced that it will send Tunisia 1 million vaccine doses, and the UAE has also donated half a million vaccines.

The North African country now has the highest Covid-19 mortality rate in the Eastern Mediterranean region as well as on the African continent after the Delta variant circulated widely in the country, according to WHO. Oxygen beds and intensive care unit beds in Tunisia are at 90% and 95% occupancy levels respectively.

“Between 8,000 and 9,500 cases are currently being reported every day, with wide circulation of the Delta variant. In less than one week, the number of deaths almost doubled, from 119 deaths on 5 July to 189 deaths on 8 July,” WHO said, referring to Tunisia.

Fethi Belaid/AFP/Getty Images

The body of a Covid-19 victim is placed into a casket at the Ibn al-Jazzar hospital in the Tunisian city of Kairouan on July 4, 2021.

Iran, which has been one of the worst-hit countries in the region since the start of the pandemic, nearly broke its daily record of cases after reporting more than 23,000 new infections on Thursday. The country’s daily average tally almost doubled over the last four weeks, and the number of daily deaths has increased over the past two weeks, WHO said.

Last week, Iraq, where less than 1% of the population has received a vaccine dose, reported its highest daily tally since the start of the pandemic, according to the country’s health ministry. This week, a fire wreaked havoc on a hospital treating coronavirus patients, killing more than 92 people and further underscoring the poor state of the country’s health sector.

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World

US official warns China against ‘catastrophic’ move on Taiwan | Taiwan

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A senior US official has warned China not to seek emboldenment from its Hong Kong crackdown to move against Taiwan, as Japan’s deputy leader said it would defend Taiwan against an attack.

Kurt Campbell, coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs on the US national security council, told a forum on Tuesday the US had tried to send a “clear message of deterrence across the Taiwan Strait” and any attempt by China to move on Taiwan would be “catastrophic”.

The ruling Chinese Communist party considers Taiwan to be a province of China despite the party never having ruled the island, and has vowed to take it by force if necessary. The government in Taipei maintains it is an independent nation and rejects China’s claim. China had promised Taiwan peaceful unification under the “one country, two systems” principle that governs Hong Kong.

But the recent crushing of dissent and opposition in Hong Kong, in what critics say defies the promises of “one country, two systems”, has further discouraged Taiwan from accepting.

Campbell told the forum the international community had been clear in expressing “dissatisfaction” over the Hong Kong crackdown in part because there was “a clear sense” that Chinese officials were quietly assessing the global response to see what it told them about how the world might react over Taiwan.

“I just want to underscore that such an effort would be catastrophic,” Campbell said.

The US does not have formal ties with Taiwan’s government but is treaty-bound to provide it with the means of self-defence, which has resulted in billions of dollars in arms sales. For decades the US has also maintained a deterrence policy of “strategic ambiguity”, refusing to confirm if it would come to Taiwan’s aid militarily in an attack.

Campbell’s comments came a day after Japan’s deputy prime minister offered his country’s strongest statement of support for Taiwan in some time, declaring it would defend the island alongside the US if China attacked.

Taro Aso told a fundraising event on Monday the fate of Taiwan was of great importance to Japan, whose southern islands neighbour Taiwan.

“If a major problem occurred in Taiwan, it would not be going too far to say that it could be an existential threat [for Japan],” Aso said. Under a 2015 reinterpretation of its pacifist, post-second world war constitution, Japan now says it can use force to come to the aid of an ally, with the justification that failing to do so could endanger Japan.

“In such a case, Japan and the United States will have to work together to defend Taiwan … We need to consider seriously that Okinawa could be next.”

Japan also claims some disputed territories in the East China Sea, and has needed passage through the Taiwan Strait.

Aso’s comments are a significant shift in Japan’s foreign policy, which has been growing bolder against China’s aggression and drawing closer to Taiwan.

Aso later told reporters that tensions should be resolved through dialogue. The Japanese government said Aso’s comments were a personal view. Local media reported the defence minister as saying there was no change to Japan’s policy on China.

The prospect of a Chinese attempt to take Taiwan, including when and what form it would take, is vociferously debated, but there is general consensus that the risk is higher now than it has been for decades.

In a speech marking 100 years of the Chinese Communist party last week, the president, Xi Jinping, reaffirmed an “unshakeable commitment” to “restore” Taiwan, and warned of a “bloody” collision for any country that sought to bully or subjugate China.

On Tuesday China’s foreign ministry said Aso’s comments were “extremely wrong and dangerous” and reiterated Beijing’s position that Taiwan was an internal matter and it would allow no foreign interference.

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US

Florida Gov. DeSantis says he is trying to prevent ‘real catastrophic flood situation’ at Tampa-area reservoir

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The governor assured the public that the water being discharged to nearby Port Manatee, on the Gulf Coast, is not radioactive.

The Manatee County Public Safety Department declared a state of emergency Saturday and ordered a complete evacuation of the Piney Point reservoir site, about 20 miles south of Tampa, and surrounding areas because of a leak that could cause a collapse of phosphogypsum stacks, radioactive waste that is created during fertilizer production and phosphate rock mining.

“What we’re looking at now is trying to prevent and respond to, if need be, a real catastrophic flood situation,” DeSantis said. “The goal is to ensure the integrity of the stack system as quickly as possible in order to minimize impacts to local residents and to prevent an uncontrolled discharge.”

Manatee County Commission Chair Vanessa Baugh assured Manatee County utility customers “their drinking water is completely safe to drink.”

“The water distribution system is a closed system without any way for floodwater to enter,” Baugh said. “There is also no threat to our primary source of drinking water, Lake Manatee.”

The leak in the containment wall was discovered about a week ago, and residents in the area were evacuated Thursday as officials warned the reservoir could cause structural collapse at any time.

DeSantis said Manatee County public safety officials sent out evacuation notices to residents and businesses in the surrounding area and assisted with the evacuation of 316 homes that were in the evacuation zone near Piney Point.

Onsite engineers said a controlled release was necessary to prevent a “catastrophic failure,” according to the governor. Controlled discharges that began March 30 and continued Sunday are averaging about 35 million gallons per day, he added.

The Florida National Guard is dropping off additional pumps, which “will be fed into surrounding waterways” to help quickly decrease the water levels in the reservoir, DeSantis said.

Acting county administrator Scott Hopes cautioned residents, asking them to “listen” to emergency management.

“If we should have a full breach, within minutes, we’re down to about 340 million gallons that could reach in totality, in a period of minutes, and the models for less than an hour, are as high of a 20 foot wall of water,” Hope said. “So if you are in an evacuation area, and you have not heeded that, you need to think twice and follow the orders.”

Hopes also said while they are not out of the critical area yet, they believe they will be in “a much better position, and the risk level will have decreased significantly,” by Tuesday.

CNN’s Chris Boyette and Melissa Alonso contributed to this report.

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World

Paris doctors warn of catastrophic overload of virus cases

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PARIS (AP) — Critical care doctors in Paris say surging coronavirus infections could soon overwhelm their ability to care for the sick in the French capital’s hospitals, possibly forcing them to choose which patients they have the resources to treat.

The sobering warning was delivered Sunday in a newspaper opinion signed by 41 Paris-region doctors. Published by Le Journal du Dimanche newspaper, it comes as French President Emmanuel Macron has been vigorously defending his decision not to completely lockdown France again as he did last year. Since January, Macron’s government has instead imposed a nationwide overnight curfew and followed that with a grab-bag of other restrictions.

But with infections soaring and hospitals increasingly running short of intensive care beds, doctors have been stepping up the pressure for a full French lockdown.

The Paris-region doctors who wrote in Le Journal du Dimanche said: “We have never known such a situation, even during the worst (terror) attacks” that targeted the French capital, notably assaults by Islamic State extremists in 2015 that killed 130 people and filled Paris emergency wards with the wounded.

The doctors predicted that softer new restrictions imposed this month on Paris and some other regions won’t quickly bring the resurgent epidemic under control. They warned that hospital resources won’t be able to keep pace with needs, forcing them to practice “catastrophe medicine” in the coming weeks as cases peak.

“We already know that our capacity to offer care will be overwhelmed,” they wrote. “We will be obliged to triage patients in order to save as many lives as possible. This triage will concern all patients, with and without COVID, in particular for adult patients’ access to critical care.”

Macron remains adamant that not locking France down again this year, like some other European countries, was sound, even as more than 2,000 deaths per week push the country ever closer to the milestone of 100,000 people lost to the pandemic. The country now counts more than 94,400 dead.

“We were right not to implement a lockdown in France at the end of January because we didn’t have the explosion of cases that every model predicted,” Macron said last week. “There won’t be a mea culpa from me. I don’t have remorse and won’t acknowledge failure.”

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Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak

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Business

Why some Texans are facing catastrophic electric bills after a winter storm

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In Texas this week, freezing temperatures overwhelmed the state’s power grid, triggering rolling blackouts, multi-day power outages — and, catastrophic electric bills.

According to the Dallas Morning News, some Texans have been hit with power bills totaling as much as $17,000 for only a few days of electricity, many times more than the usual cost of power in Texas.

Specifically, it’s Texas residents who rely on a wholesale power plan, rather than a fixed-rate plan, who have seen their bills climb after the demand for power jumped dramatically across the state this week as Winter Storm Uri struck and temperatures plunged. Texas, which has a deregulated electricity market, has a number of providers, both wholesale and fixed rate.

Fixed-rate customers pay an agreed-upon rate for their power, but wholesale buyers pay a variable rate; whatever the current price per kilowatt-hour of electricity is. Wholesale power plans, such as those offered by Texas energy company Griddy, can be attractive because during good weather, a customer on a variable plan will pay less than one on a fixed-rate plan, according to Public Utility Commission of Texas spokesperson Andrew Barlow.

The problem is, weather isn’t always good — in Dallas on Tuesday, the low temperature was 4 degrees Fahrenheit, colder than in Anchorage, Alaska.

That freezing weather led to rolling blackouts throughout the state amid an increased demand for power; in turn, that demand caused prices to spike, with wholesale rates soaring to about $8,800 per megawatt-hour in the Dallas area on Wednesday.

According to Reuters, the wholesale rate before this week’s storm was only about $50 per megawatt-hour. On Wednesday, Texas’s Public Utility Commission moved to cap wholesale prices at $9,000 per megawatt-hour, or $9 per kilowatt-hour.

Griddy, the wholesale power company that has faced the most rancor from customers online, warned customers on Monday that their rates could climb precipitously with the onset of cold weather — but those warnings didn’t come in time for many Texans to change to a new service provider, the Dallas Morning News reported Friday, and people were still caught off guard by their power bills.

“$5,000 for five days is outrageous,” Dallas resident DeAndré Upshaw told Morning News reporter Maria Halkias Friday. “No one could have anticipated this except the people who manage the service and the power grid.”

The winter storm was not the first time wholesale customers in Texas have been stuck with large bills due to unexpected weather; in 2019, a heat wave caused a spike in power usage — and a sudden increase in wholesale prices — that left many Texans paying hundreds of dollars more than they expected for power. But for some Texans, the current situation is worse by several orders of magnitude, and comes at a difficult time economically, with the US in the midst of a pandemic-related recession.

According to The Verge, “4.8 million Americans were unable to pay at least one energy bill last year and received a disconnection notice from their utility company.” Texas’s supersized wholesale power bills are sure to make that problem more acute in the aftermath of the storm.

As Texas struggles to recover from the winter storm — President Joe Biden approved a major disaster declaration for the state on Saturday — it’s unclear what comes next for Texans who got stuck with astronomic energy bills.

In a Friday statement, however, Griddy said that it was “seeking customer relief” from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages most of the state’s power grid, and from the state’s Public Utility Commission.

“Griddy is continuing these efforts and is committed to crediting customers for any relief received, dollar-for-dollar,” the company said. Failing that relief, customers could be on the hook for thousands of dollars worth of bills.

Gigantic electric bills are just part of Texas’s power problem this week

Texas has been in unique difficulty this week in part because of the state’s unique power system: Unlike the rest of the lower 48, most of the Lone Star State relies on ERCOT’s independent, internal power grid, which provides about 90 percent of the state’s electricity.

As Vox’s Umair Irfan explained earlier this week, it’s been a hard week for that grid, even though Texas is “the largest oil, natural gas, and wind energy producer” in the country. Demand has far exceeded supply, which is what led to rolling blackouts and dramatically higher prices.

According to Irfan:

The sudden cold snap this weekend put the state’s ample resources to the test, with demand reaching a record high peak for the winter, more than 69,000 megawatts. That’s 3,200 MW higher than the previous record set in 2018.

As demand reached new heights, the supply of electricity fell drastically in the past few days, far below what operators expected. Ordinarily, ERCOT plans for winter to be much warmer and anticipates a lower energy demand. Power providers often schedule downtime and maintenance during the winter months to prepare for the massive annual surge in electricity demand in the hot Texas summer. The state’s ample wind and solar energy resources are also diminished in the winter, so ERCOT doesn’t depend on them to meet much of the demand they anticipate.

Texas’s power grid was also hobbled by lower-than-usual electricity supply after natural gas pipelines froze in the winter weather, and as energy production dropped off across the board. This put the state in an even worse jam, and also contributed to high power prices.

Texas’s decision to remain on an independent grid dates back more than 80 years, according to NBC, and was intended to keep Texas utilities free of federal regulation. It’s succeeded on that count — but at the cost of not being able to borrow power from other states in a crisis.

“The Texas power grid is really an island,” Rice University professor Daniel Cohan told Vox earlier this week. “Whatever happens in Texas stays in Texas.”

As of Friday, things were getting back to normal with the Texas grid, though the state is still facing water and food shortages. ERCOT ended emergency conditions and returned to normal operation; the number of people without power fell to just about 58,000, as of late Saturday afternoon, rather than millions.

For Griddy customers and other Texans on a wholesale plan, however, the effects of the storm will linger in the form of gigantic power bills.

“I don’t have that type of money,” one Texas resident, Akilah Scott-Amos, told the Daily Beast this week. “I now owe Griddy $2,869.11. This is going to put me in debt, this is going to mess up my credit. Are they going to cut me off? In the middle of this ongoing crisis?”



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Entertainment

Ashley Judd hospitalised following “catastrophic” accident in the Congo

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Ashley Judd has been hospitalised following a “catastrophic” accident in the Congo.

The actor recounted her recent fall during an Instagram Live interview with The New York Times‘ Nicholas Kristof in which she spoke from a South African hospital’s trauma unit.

Judd, who was in the Congo to track the endangered Bonobos, explained that she sustained “massive catastrophic injuries” after tripping over a fallen tree. “What was next was an incredibly harrowing 55 hours,” she said.

Recalling her evacuation from the rainforest, Judd said she spent five hours lying on the ground with her “badly misshapen leg”. “[I was] biting my stick, howling like a wild animal,” she remembered.

The actor was then carried back to her camp by her “Congolese brothers” before eventually making it out of the remote location by motorbike: “I had to physically hold the top part of my shattered tibia together, and we did that for six hours.”

Judd went on to say that she was on the “edge of my very edge” throughout the ordeal, but admitted her “privilege” in being able to make it to a fully equipped hospital for treatment.

“The difference between a Congolese person and me is disaster insurance that allowed me 55 hours after my accident to get to an operating table in South Africa,” she said, addressing the Conga villages’ lack of resources and “a simple pill to kill the pain”.

Back in 2018, Ashley Judd sued Harvey Weinstein for “damaging her career” due to her rejecting his sexual advances. The disgraced film mogul was convicted of first-degree and third-degree rape last March, and is currently serving a 23-year prison sentence.



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