That figure accounts for almost a quarter of the country’s population, which was calculated at 44 million by the World Bank in 2020.
Of those who have left their homes, the majority — 6.48 million as of March 16, according to figures provided by the International Organization for Migration on Friday — have been internally displaced since the conflict began on February 24.
Others have sought refuge in neighboring countries, including Poland, Romania, Moldova, Hungary, Slovakia, Russia and Belarus.
“Among the responsibilities of those who wage war, everywhere in the world, is the suffering inflicted on civilians who are forced to flee their homes,” the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said in a tweet on Sunday.
“The war in Ukraine is so devastating that 10 million have fled — either displaced inside the country, or as refugees abroad,” he added.
UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, said on Thursday that more than 90% of the 3.1 million people who have left Ukraine are women and children.
Raouf Mazou, the UNHCR assistant commissioner, said this indicated a “heightened risk of gender-based violence and other forms of exploitation and abuse, including trafficking.”
UNICEF spokesman Joe English told CNN on Sunday that 1.5 million Ukrainian children have been made refugees by Russia’s invasion, and that a further 3.3 million children are currently displaced within the country.
“Each of these is an individual child whose life has been torn apart, whose world has been turned upside down,” English said.
Where have people fled to?
In the first three weeks of the conflict, two million people arrived in Poland from Ukraine, according to the UN, while more than a million went to other neighboring countries.
Mazou said last week that he estimated 490,000 Ukrainians had fled to Romania, 350,000 to Moldova, 280,000 to Hungary, and 228,000 to Slovakia.
Poland has become “one of the largest refugee hosting countries in the world” in the space of just a few weeks, Mazou added.
Grandi has previously called the sheer number of people fleeing their homes in Ukraine “terrifying,” and earlier this month described the situation as “the fastest growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.”
Countries across Europe have also welcomed refugees from Ukraine, including France, where more than 10,000 people have arrived since Russia’s invasion, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin told French broadcaster RTL on Monday.
Ukrainian nationals can enter France without a visa, he said, adding that many of those arriving were only passing through on their way towards the large Ukrainian community in Spain.
Meanwhile, more than 187,000 refugees have arrived in Germany from Ukraine, the German Interior Ministry said on Thursday.
However, a ministry spokesperson said the actual number could be significantly higher due to the absence of border checks between Poland and Germany.
CNN’s Benjamin Brown, Joseph Ataman, Camille Knight and Amy Cassidy contributed to this report.
Idaho resident Jimmy Hill spent the last few weeks of his life in Ukraine doing what his sister, Katya Hill, said he did best: being a peacemaker and working to bring people together. The 68-year-old was killed by a Russian bomb just days ago, and his sister shared his story with reporters on Saturday. (Hill family photo)
Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
SALT LAKE CITY — Idaho resident Jimmy Hill spent the last few weeks of his life in Ukraine doing what his sister says he did best: being a peacemaker and working to bring people together.
“He went out to stand in store and bread lines with Ukrainians. He brought back cookies and chocolate for the nurses. He found a woman with four young children living near the hospital to share food, use her internet when it was working, and (was) trying to find a way out of Chernihiv for her and others,” Katya Hill said of her 68-year-old brother.
She said he was out trying to find buses to help friends leave the country when a Russian bomb was dropped nearby, killing him.
“My brother Jimmy was a victim of the tragedy happening in Ukraine,” Katya Hill said in a Zoom call with reporters on Saturday morning.
Although her brother’s death has been confirmed by the United States Department of State, Katya Hill said her family is still waiting to hear more details from the government, including what happened to her brother’s body and where it is located.
Jimmy Hill was in Ukraine while his life partner, Irina Teslenko, who was receiving treatments for multiple sclerosis. Katya Hill said she talked to her brother about postponing the treatments for Teslenko and leaving the country before the war started but he didn’t believe war would actually come to Ukraine and choose to stay by his partner’s side while she received the treatments.
“He felt confident that the invasion would not happen, that the world wouldn’t let it, and he had fought so hard for this treatment. He didn’t want to delay,” Katya Hill said. “Then the bombing started.”
Jimmy Hill sits by partner Irina Teslenko’s beside in a hospital in Chernihiv, Ukraine, in March 2022. Jimmy Hill, of Idaho, spent the last few weeks of his life in Ukraine doing what his sister, Katya Hill, said he did best: being a peacemaker and working to bring people together. The 68-year-old was killed by a Russian bomb just days ago, and his sister shared his story with reporters on Saturday. (Photo: Family photo)
For the first few weeks of the war, Katya Hill said that her brother reported crimes against civilians to her. She said he was a forensic psychologist and teacher at multiple universities in Europe, including one in Kyiv, Ukraine, so he collected and shared evidence of these crimes.
He remained positive during more than 20 days of bombing, the loss of utilities and limits on food, Katya Hill said, and he was able to communicate frequently with his family in the U.S. because of his access to the hospital internet.
Katya Hill said she would hear bombs going off in the background while she spoke with her brother over the phone. Jimmy Hill told her that the bombs were being used specifically to kill civilians, she said, and that bombing would stop for a few hours, just long enough for people to go out to try and get supplies, and then bombs would be dropped on people waiting in lines.
I can’t explain what the connection is between two human beings that fall in love and have that strong bond for one another that they will go through everything. … It’s a beautiful love story but, unfortunately, it has a tragic end.
–Katya Hill, Jimmy Hill’s sister
After the war began, Katya Hill said her brother talked about housing Ukrainians in his Airbnb properties in Idaho and Montana and building a “little Ukraine” with his friends. He had gone with his friend Katrina to find information about buses that were taking people out of the country through a safe corridor on the day he died.
In a chat with Jimmy Hill’s family and others involved in Teslenko’s care, Katrina said Jimmy Hill saw over 1,000 people waiting for buses and had decided to go back to Teslenko at the hospital when the bomb hit. She also shared that she lost hearing in one of her ears in the blast that killed her friend.
Katya Hill said her brother met Teslenko while teaching forensic psychology at universities in Europe, and the two had a strong bond with each other. He wanted to do everything he could to stop the progression of Teslenko’s disease.
Teslenko is still in the hospital, and friends are trying to find a way to help her travel out of the area safely, Katya Hill said. Katrina told Teslenko’s mother that Jimmy Hill was killed but, at that point, they did not want to tell Teslenko. Katya Hill said that she assumes that, by this point, Teslenko has learned what happened.
“I can’t explain what the connection is between two human beings that fall in love and have that strong bond for one another that they will go through everything,” Katya Hill said, “and certainly, my brother sacrificed his life for her. … It’s a beautiful love story but, unfortunately, it has a tragic end.”
At least one person was killed, 50 homes were destroyed and nearly 500 others evacuated in central Texas after a wildfire burned more than 45,000 acres on Thursday and Friday, according to the authorities.
The wildfire, a set of several blazes collectively called the Eastland Complex fire, began on Thursday evening.
A deputy with the Eastland County Sheriff’s Office, Barbara Fenley, died in the blaze while helping others, the authorities said.
On Friday evening, Gov. Greg Abbott signed a disaster declaration that would allow the state to better help 11 counties affected by the fire. He said more counties could be added.
Mr. Abbott said the fire remains dangerous because of “ever-shifting winds” and dry ground.
“Part of what we’re fighting is the fire,” he said. “Part of what we’re fighting is the weather and the winds.”
On Friday afternoon, about 10 percent of the fire was contained, the Texas A&M Forest Service said on Twitter.
“This is definitely one to pay attention to,” Madison Gordon, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said, adding that this was the first wildfire of this magnitude to hit Texas this year.
Ms. Gordon said that forecasters had anticipated the blaze’s size and had sent several warnings. On Thursday, the National Weather Service issued wind advisories for central and northern regions of the state.
The Texas A&M Forest Service said it responded to 10 wildfires overall across the state. Those fires burned about 52,700 acres, the service said, adding that strong winds and dry grasses were contributing factors.
The Eastland Complex fire consists of four fires. The largest of them, the Kidd fire, was responsible for burning 30,000 acres alone.
The four fires scorched parts of Comanche and Eastland Counties, according to InciWeb, which tracks fires.
Communities affected included Gorman, where roughly 475 homes were evacuated; Carbon, where a highway was closed; and Lake Leon. Gorman is about 100 miles west of Fort Worth. Shelters for evacuees were opened at sites that included local churches and a school.
Residents were sharing footage of the fire across social media, including scenes of damaged homes. Smoke from the blaze was reaching other parts of the state, including Houston, some 300 miles away, the National Weather Service said.
The Houston Health Department told residents, especially those with respiratory issues, to stay indoors on Friday.
Smoke from the fire can lead to health problems, including burning eyes and chronic heart and lung disease, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Frequent napping or regularly napping for extended periods during the day may be a sign of early dementia in older adults, a new study revealed. (Lev Dolgachov/Syda Productions, Adobe)
Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
ATLANTA — Frequent napping or regularly napping for extended periods during the day may be a sign of early dementia in older adults, a new study revealed.
Elderly adults who napped at least once a day or more than an hour a day were 40% more likely to develop Alzheimer’s than those who did not nap daily or napped less than an hour a day, according to the study published Thursday in Alzheimer’s and Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association.
“We found the association between excessive daytime napping and dementia remained after adjusting for nighttime quantity and quality of sleep,” said co-senior author Dr. Yue Leng, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, in a statement.
The results echo the findings of a previous study by Leng that found napping two hours a day raised the risk of cognitive impairment compared with napping less than 30 minutes a day.
The new study used data gathered over 14 years by the Rush Memory and Aging Project, which followed over 1,400 people between the ages of 74 and 88, with an average age of 81.
“I think the public isn’t aware that Alzheimer’s is a brain disease that oftentimes causes changes in mood and sleep behavior,” said Dr. Richard Isaacson, director of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic in the Center for Brain Health at Florida Atlantic University’s Schmidt College of Medicine.
“Excessive napping may be one of the many clues that a person could be on the road to cognitive decline, and trigger an in-person evaluation with a treating physician,” said Isaacson, who was not involved in the study.
Increased need for naps
Sleep quality and quantity does decline with age, often due to pain or complications from chronic conditions such as more frequent bathroom breaks. Thus, elderly people do tend to take naps more often than they did when they were younger.
But daytime napping can also be a signal of brain changes that are “independent of nighttime sleep,” Leng said. She referenced prior research that suggests the development of tau tangles, a hallmark sign of Alzheimer’s, may be affecting wake-promoting neurons in key areas of the brain, thus disrupting sleep.
For 14 days each year, participants in the current study wore a tracker that captured data on their movements; No movement for an extended period between the hours of 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. was interpreted as a nap.
While it’s possible that people could have been reading or watching TV, “we have developed a unique algorithm to define naps and to differentiate naps from no activity. We didn’t define a specific length for ‘extended nap’ but we were more focused on the accumulated nap minutes per day and the change in the length of naps over the years,” Leng told CNN via email.
I don’t think we have enough evidence to draw conclusions about a causal relationship, that it’s the napping itself that caused cognitive aging. But excessive daytime napping might be a signal of accelerated aging or cognitive aging process
–Dr. Yue Leng, UCSF
“Further studies are warranted with devices that are validated to detect sleep versus sedentary behavior,” Isaacson said. “But at the same time, being sedentary and not moving for long periods of time Is a known risk factor for cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s.
“Regardless of the reason, falling asleep during the day or excessive napping raises my antenna to focus on whether the person may be at higher risk for Alzheimer’s disease or cognitive decline,” he said.
Over the 14 years, the study found daily daytime napping increased by an average 11 minutes per year for adults who did not develop cognitive impairment. However, a diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment doubled nap time to a total of 24 minutes a day. People who were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s nearly tripled their nap time, to an average of 68 minutes a day.
The “drastic increase” in napping length and frequency over the years seems to be a particularly important signal, Leng said.
“I don’t think we have enough evidence to draw conclusions about a causal relationship, that it’s the napping itself that caused cognitive aging, but excessive daytime napping might be a signal of accelerated aging or cognitive aging process,” she said.
What to do?
Preferably, adults should limit any daytime naps to 15 to 20 minutes before 3 p.m. to achieve the most restorative benefits from napping and keep from harming nighttime sleep, Leng said.
In addition, older adults and caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease should pay increased attention to daytime napping behaviors, and be alert to signs of excessive or increased numbers of naps, she said.
Any significant increase in napping behavior should be discussed with a doctor, Isaacson said.
“I think it’s never too late for someone to be able to make a brain-healthy lifestyle change or pay more attention to their brain health,” Isaacson said. “Making sleep a priority, paying attention to sleep quality and talking to your doctor about sleep: These are all critical things.”
While COVID-19 cases have dropped in Utah this month, other respiratory illnesses are now making people sick. (Subbotina Anna, Shutterstock)
Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
SALT LAKE CITY – While COVID-19 cases have dropped in Utah this month, other respiratory illnesses are now making people sick. That could cause confusion for some people because doctors with Intermountain Healthcare expected the sniffing and sneezing to continue for a few weeks.
A year ago, COVID-19 dominated respiratory illness in our communities, and the health precautions most people took helped them avoid other illnesses, but the flu and the head colds are back.
“A lot of people are talking about colds going around work, or things getting shared around families,” said Dr. Per Gesteland, a pediatric hospitalist at University of Utah Health and Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital.
That’s what they’re seeing at the hospital, too, he said. Plus, COVID-19 is not gone yet.
“We’re still seeing, obviously, a steady trickle of that because it’s still in our neighborhoods, and it’s still in our communities,” he said.
If you think you have COVID-19, Gesteland said get tested, especially if you are at high risk. Meantime, other respiratory viruses are moving in.
“Kind of a late respiratory season rally and starting to make people sick again,” he added.
Seasonal influenza is rising again after previously peaking around the new year. That information is easily found on GermWatch by Intermountain Healthcare which provides the latest surveillance of illnesses going around in Utah.
Gesteland helped create GermWatch 20 years ago.
“We’re watching that (influenza) pretty closely because it’s still marching up and doesn’t seem to have peaked just yet,” Gesteland said. “Influenza, as you know, can look a little bit, or a lot like COVID with a fairly rapid onset of congestion, fever, sore throat, cough, muscle aches, and can make you feel pretty miserable.”
The flu is not showing any signs of waning, yet.
“I don’t know how much higher it’s going to go. But, I know it’s going to last for several weeks because we’re not over the hump of that second peak.”
Metapneumovirus, which shows up with mild cold-like symptoms is also circulating on the Wasatch Front. That virus can cause cough, stuffy or runny nose, sore throat, and fever. Some infections cause vomiting, diarrhea, and breathing problems. Symptoms develop three to five days after exposure.
Respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, which can be especially dangerous for babies, surged around Thanksgiving.
“It looks like it’s peaked and may be coming down. But I think we’re expecting a steady drumbeat of various respiratory viruses for the next several weeks,” the doctor said.
He said it’s not too late to get a flu shot. With several viruses around, he said, it’s a good idea to wash our hands regularly and stay home when we’re sick.
Image captured of fireball that burst over Utah in 2009. On Friday March 11, a similar asteroid burst over the Arctic Ocean. Astronomers discovered and tracked this asteroid only hours before impact. (ksl.com)
Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
SALT LAKE CITY — An asteroid smaller than a GPS satellite but traveling at twice the speed impacted Earth’s atmosphere above the Arctic Ocean on Friday after being discovered only hours earlier.
The harmless collision marks only the fifth time in history astronomers have spotted an object before it collided with Earth.
The asteroid, which measured 10 to 13 feet in diameter (or as the Daily Mail called it, “half the size of a giraffe”), is now officially designated as minor planet 2022 EB5 and was first discovered by the Hungarian astronomer K. Sarneczky, who detected the small speck flitting through his telescope.
A couple of hours later — sometime in the afternoon according to Mountain Standard Time — the object exploded upon entry into the atmosphere north of Iceland in a 2-kiloton explosion. By then, other astronomers had spread the word, observing the rock and precisely tracking its final destination.
Impact! When 2022 EB5 struck the Earth north of Iceland this morning, it became the 5th asteroid to be discovered prior to impacting Earth. pic.twitter.com/kYsQ40uuFq
— Tony Dunn (@tony873004) March 12, 2022
While small asteroids hitting Earth are not uncommon, spotting and tracking an object before impact is uncommon.
“This happens all of the time.” Patrick Wiggins, NASA/JPL solar system ambassador to Utah, said of the asteroid’s impact. “The thing that makes this different is that we saw it coming.”
Wiggins said impacts of this magnitude happen at least several times a month, yet most occur unseen over the ocean.
Were it not for the vigilance of a handful of astronomers and scientists, Friday’s collision would have been missed. Italian astronomer Ernesto Guido laid out the timeline of the minor planet, from discovery to disintegration, in a blog post on Saturday.
Sarneczky, who according to Wikipedia has discovered dozens of similar objects, spotted the asteroid in a 0.6-meter telescope on a mountaintop in Hungary. He then placed the object on the Near Earth-Object Confirmation Page for other observers to confirm his sighting. Astronomer Bill Gray then calculated the object’s trajectory, predicting an impact somewhere southwest of the Norwegian island Jan Mayen.
But Gray also discovered there was no time to waste. He shot off a message to fellow minor-planet observers, alerting them of the imminent impact and imploring someone in Europe to get a sighting.
“I strongly urge European observers to take a look for this object,” he said. “(The impact is) about forty minutes from ‘right now.'”
Shortly after, Gray replied to his own message, with more observation data from Slovakia and an “obligatory disclaimer” belying any fears of a catastrophe.
“This thing is maybe a meter or two across … mostly harmless,” he said in the message thread entitled “Sar2953 = small impactor.”
After impact, reports came in on the message thread of reported observations in Iceland, as well as China. Participants in the thread started crunching the numbers, trying to discern the details of the collision. One participant pointed out tracking the object was similar to tracking GPS satellites, which move about half as fast.
I did not, but facebook friends north east of Husavik were asking about a blue-ish explotion/flash in the sky that lasted for about two seconds. The time of the questions fits. pic.twitter.com/6c2n7V4uaK
— Sindri Geir 🇺🇦🇵🇸 (@sindrigeir) March 12, 2022
A low-frequency observation taken in Greenland at impact time revealed not only the size of the explosion left by the object but also its size, Guido wrote in his post.
“From this data yield is approximately 2-3 kT TNT. At 15 km/s, this is roughly 3-4 m diameter,” came the report from Greenland.
Infrasound detection from 2022 EB5 impact off the coast of Iceland at I37NO between 2223-2227 UTC. Below is I18DK infrasound data in Greenland. Arrival near 2340 UTC. From this data yield is approximately 2-3 kT TNT. At 15 km/s, this is roughly 3-4 m diameter. @WesternU#2002EB5pic.twitter.com/FYI9jn7zCb
— Peter Brown (@pgbrown) March 12, 2022
Wiggins said this is surely not as large an impact as the Tunguska impact in Siberia, or even the more recent Chelyabinsk impact in 2013, also over Russian skies. Yet, the sighting still taught us lessons.
“It is a great example of why we need more than two hours notice, if we want to do anything about it,” said Wiggins.
Contrary to some social media posts, the ambassador said, we did not “dodge a bullet.” But in the event a larger object was on a collision course with our planet, he said we would want “months if not years” to prepare.
Still, Wiggins described Earth’s exposure to minor planets such as a “cosmic shooting gallery.” 2022 EB5 is considered an Apollo asteroid, which is a class of asteroids whose orbits cross Earth’s orbit.
No meteorite fragments have been reportedly discovered after 2022 EB5’s impact. It is rare for even predicted meteorites to be found, said Wiggins. The first recorded impact yielded small fragments of meteorite.
Utah has also been targeted by small asteroids. Some Utahns may remember the night sky lighting up in 2009 when a meteorite fell in the West Desert. Wiggins recalled sitting in his living room when the fireball burst in the sky. Though that event was unexpected, the sonic boom heard in Utah made it possible to track, Wiggins said. This meteorite was also the focus of an episode of the show “Meteorite Men” in 2010.
A new study shows sleeping with a dim light raised the blood sugar and heart rate of healthy young people. (l i g h t p o e t, Shutterstock)
Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
ATLANTA — Sleeping for only one night with a dim light, such as a TV set with the sound off, raised the blood sugar and heart rate of healthy young people participating in a sleep lab experiment, a new study found.
The dim light entered the eyelids and disrupted sleep despite the fact that participants slept with their eyes closed, said study author Dr. Phyllis Zee, director of the Center for Circadian and Sleep Medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
Heart rate typically drops at night, slowing down as the the brain is busy repairing and rejuvenating the body. An elevated heart rate at night has been shown in numerous studies to be a risk factor for future heart disease and early death.
High blood sugar levels are a sign of insulin resistance, where the body stops using glucose properly and the pancreas goes into overdrive, flooding the body with extra insulin to overcompensate until it eventually loses its ability to do so. Over time, insulin resistance can ultimately lead to Type 2 diabetes.
Sleeping with eyes closed
Prior research has shown an association between artificial light at night and weight gain and obesity, disruptions in metabolic function, insulin secretion and the development of diabetes, and cardiovascular risk factors.
“Why would sleeping with your lights on affect your metabolism? Could that explain why there is a higher prevalence of diabetes or obesity (in society)?” Zee asked.
Zee and her team took 20 healthy people in their 20s and had them spend two nights in a sleep lab. The first night was spent in a darkened room where “you wouldn’t be able to see much, if anything, when your eyes were open,” Zee said.
All of the study participants were connected to devices monitoring a number of objective measures of sleep quality. So data could be gathered with minimal interference, they slept with an IV with long tubes that snake across the room and through a hole to the researcher’s side of the lab. The blood was drawn without ever touching the slumbering participants.
“We recorded the brainwaves and could tell what sleep stage the person was in,” Zee said. “We recorded their breathing, their heart rate, their EKG, and we also drew blood from them to measure melatonin levels while they were sleeping.” Melatonin is a hormone that regulates the body’s circadian rhythm, or sleep and wake body clock.
A randomized portion of the group repeated that same light level for a second night in the lab, while another group slept with a dim overhead light with a glow roughly equivalent to “a very, very dark, cloudy day or street lights coming in through a window,” Zee said.
“Now these people were asleep with their eyelids closed,” she explained. “In the literature the estimation is that about 5% to 10% of the light in the environment would actually get through the closed lid to the eye, so this is really not a lot of light.”
Yet even that tiny amount of light created a deficit of slow wave and rapid eye movement sleep, the stages of slumber in which most cellular renewal occurs, Zee said.
In addition, heart rate was higher, insulin resistance rose, and the sympathetic (fight or flight) and parasympathetic (rest and relax) nervous systems were unbalanced, which has been linked to higher blood pressure in healthy people.
The light was not bright enough, however, to lower levels of melatonin in the body, Zee added. The study was published Monday in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
What to do?
What advice would Zee give people based on her study and existing research in the field? Close your blinds and curtains, turn off all the lights, and consider using a sleep mask.
“I think the strength of the evidence is that you should clearly pay attention to the light in your bedroom,” she said. “Make sure that you start dimming your lights at least an hour or two before you go to bed to prepare your environment for sleep.”
You should clearly pay attention to the light in your bedroom. Make sure that you start dimming your lights at least an hour or two before you go to bed to prepare your environment for sleep.
–Dr. Phyllis Zee, study author
Check your bedroom for sources of light that are not necessary, she added. If a night light is needed, keep it dim and at floor level, “so that it’s more reflected rather than right next to your eye or bed level,” she suggested.
Also be aware of the type of light you have in your bedroom, she added, and ban any lights in the blue spectrum, such as those emitted by electronic devices like televisions, smartphones, tablets and laptops.
“Blue light is the most stimulating type of light,” Zee said. “If you have to have a light on for safety reasons change the color. You want to choose lights that have more reddish or brownish tones.”
LED lights can be purchased in any color, including red and brownish tones.
She immediately told her employer, who urged her to get to a hospital. But once she was there, she said she was turned away, with staffers explaining there was no room. They advised her to go home and quarantine.
The problem? Her place of work was her home and “my employer didn’t want me to come back,” said Maria, noting that they had “kids in the house.”
“I said, ‘I don’t know where I can go. We don’t have a place,'” she told CNN Business, breaking into tears. She asked not to publish her real name, for fear of reprisals from current or future employers, and to notworry her family abroad. CNN Business agreed to call her “Maria.”
Maria, who is from the Philippines, returned to the hospital, where she spent the night sleeping on a chair in the emergency room, along with a friend in a similar situation. But the next day, they were told by a nurse more expressly to “go away,” she said.
Not knowing what else to do, they set up camp on the street.
“We cannot express what [we] feel [at] that time — just crying only,” said Maria.
Maria and her friend eventually found a shelter to stay in, run by the charity HELP for Domestic Workers.
Maria is one of dozens of migrant domestic workers who have been abandoned — and temporarily made homeless — in Hong Kong after testing positive for the coronavirus, according to the charity. Her story, and others like it, shine a light on deep-seated inequalities in the city that are worsening under a devastating fifth wave of Covid-19.
To be sure, workers across the spectrum are struggling in Hong Kong, given its rigid pandemic measures.
But as top companies give their employees more flexibility and even help pay for expensive hotel quarantines, local businesses are teetering on the brink of collapse. And while some expatriates can command higher salaries for simply agreeing to move to the city, the city’s poorestare struggling just to afford food or basic necessities.
Heading for the exits
Thewidening gap comes at a time when Hong Kong is facing an exodus of expats, despite the additional benefits on offer, which continues to raise questions about its future as a global business hub.
Many foreigners have had enough of the city’s unwavering commitment to its “zero Covid” policy, even as cases surge to record highs and cause more fatalities, overloading the health care system and delivering a huge punch to the economy.
Throughout 2020and 2021, more residents left Hong Kong than came in, according to official population statistics. That marked a reversal from early 2019, when the population was going up.
Last month alone, more than 94,000 people departed the city, while only about 23,000 came in, immigration data showed.
“The recent wave of emigration is leading to a shortage of skilled workers and impacting businesses of all sizes,” the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce said in a statement earlier this month.
The group’s chairman, Peter Wong, said the city was “facing an exodus of educated workers on a scale not seen since the early 1990s.”
“This will have a material knock-on impact on the economy,” he added. “There is real cause for concern if we cannot stem the current brain drain.”
The city has been largely sealed off from the rest of the world for the last two years, in part because most inbound travelers must quarantine in hotel rooms at their own expense for two weeks. Previously, the requirement was for three weeks.
The issue has increasingly forced companies to rethink where their employees should be based, if only for now.
Last month, Mandarin Oriental(MAORF) CEO James Riley told the Financial Times that the former British colony had become a “very, very poor” base due to the restrictions.
According to the newspaper, the hotel group recently advocated for senior executives to temporarily live abroad, away from its Hong Kong headquarters. Mandarin Oriental declined to comment to CNN Business.
Last year, Cathay Pacific(CPCAY) said that it would consider letting some of its pilots live abroad for a few months as aircrew continued to face arduous self-isolation measures. The carrier later said that its workers spent more than 73,000 nights in government-mandated quarantine in 2021.
French spirits maker Pernod Ricard(PDRDF) has alsoasked top executives from its Hong Kong office to work abroad for some time, according to unidentified sources who spoke with the FT. The company did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Meanwhile, other players have moved away entirely.
In November, FedEx(FDX) said it would shut down its crew base in Hong Kong and relocate pilots, citing the city’s “pandemic requirements.”
From the start of the pandemic through the end of last year, at least 84 companies have either closed or moved their regional headquarters out of Hong Kong, according to CNN Business calculations based on government data.
Asked about the figure, a government spokesperson responded that “Hong Kong remains a competitive city globally and a major regional base for international companies.”
The representative also pointed to emerging opportunities in the Greater Bay Area, a zone connecting Hong Kong, the southern Chinese province of Guangdong and the city of Macao as “a market of 86 million people.” Many banks have honed in on the area as a key priority in the coming years.
The government, which includes mainland Chinese companies in its annual tally of international businesses in Hong Kong, said that the number had recently “risen to a record high of 9,049.”
But the exodus amongst Western playersmay not slow down this year.
BASF(BASFY), a German chemicals giant, recently relocated its chief for Asia Pacific, excluding Greater China,to Singapore “after careful consideration of her office’s strategic location in the region,” according to the company.
The decision was based on “the requirement for proximity to relevant stakeholders and markets,” it told CNN Business in a statement.
Others may be biding their time. Hong Kong recently brought forward the end of the school year for some institutions to March or April, giving families more time to reevaluate their options before the new term begins in September.
In some sectors, bonus season typically takes place around this period, too.
“I suspect there’s a lot of international bankers who may be waiting till then before they decide whether they’ve had their fill of Hong Kong,” said a person working in the finance industry, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.
Free flights and country clubs
This exodus means that top companies in the city are working extra hard to attract — and retain —skilled workers.
Two senior headhunters in Hong Kong said that job candidates were increasingly pricing in the inconvenience of living in the city — if they were even persuaded to do so.
“Most of them are just kind of immediately saying no,” said John Mullally, regional director of Southern China and Hong Kong financial services at recruitment agency Robert Walters.
“You’ve got a smaller candidate pool, especially when it comes to those with overseas experience.”
Mark Tibbatts, managing director of Southern China and Taiwan for the agency Michael Page, described it as “an ongoing battle” that had made it “nigh on impossible” to lure international talent.
The circumstances have revived the so-called “expat package,” which had mostly been scrapped in recent years, according to both recruiters.
“Let’s go back a couple of decades. Most of the senior expats in Hong Kong were on a pretty juicy package that might have included flights home, and education, and club memberships and all these types of things,” said Tibbatts. “Over the last, let’s say, 10, 15 years, most of that’s been phased out.”
Now, some of those deals are “coming back,” he added.
Mullally also described a rising view that Hong Kong was becoming “a bit of a hardship posting” for expats, a term that typically refers to a place with hostile living conditions.
That perception was more common from the 1970s to early 1990s, and back then justified more perks for businesspeople, he said.
Now, companies are “going to have to try to bring that back because … realistically, if you want to attract people, that’s kind of the package you’ll have to put together.”
Nowhere to go
As international executives jump ship, blue-collar workers and the city’s poorest are being left behind to face thedarkening economic outlook.
It’s not just in Hong Kong: Inequality around the world has worsened throughout the pandemic, with billionaires making unprecedented gains in wealth as tens of millions of people fall into poverty.
Despite a growing shortage of domestic workers in Hong Kong, “it is not easy to say whether [the pandemic] has as a whole positively or negatively impacted them,” said Manisha Wijesinghe, executive director of HELP for Domestic Workers.
“We definitely have seen a number of domestic workers who are being offered higher than statutorily mandated wages due to the shortage of incoming domestic workers,” she said.
“But we have also seen domestic workers being forced to take on salaries lower than the minimum allowable wage … there is a power imbalance.”
From January 2020 to the end of 2021, the city’snumber of domestic workers dropped from more than 400,000 to roughly 340,000,according togovernment statistics.
In a recent blog post, Hong Kong Labor Secretary Law Chi-kwong pointed to flight bans from certain countries as a possible reason for the slump, saying that some workers had likely been stranded abroad.
When asked about the plight of domestic workers, authorities told CNN Business that foreign workers who test positive for Covid-19 “will receive support and medical treatment like local people in Hong Kong.” And, if unemployed, they will be admitted to community isolation facilities, they said.
A government spokespersonalso said that it“has continuously reminded employers of their statutory obligations and requirements” during the pandemic, and “any breach of such requirements will render them ineligible to employ [a domestic worker] for a period of time.”
‘Zero income’
While big international firms may have the privilege to up and move, most local businesses have no choice but to hunker down.
As many as 50,000 small businesses could shut down over the city’s fifth wave of Covid, estimates Danny Lau, chairman of the Hong Kong Small and Medium Enterprises Association.
That’s about one in seven such registered entities across the city — and there could be more, he said.
Despite soaring infections, Hong Kong officials have been holding onto the “zero Covid” strategy in recent weeks, introducing social distancing restrictions that have stifled local activity.
Many places, such as beauty parlors and fitness studios, have been forced to stop operating for months until the current measures end.
“They don’t have any income. Zero income,” Lau said of those business owners. He added that some had resorted to operating secretly just to keep making a living.
Like elsewhere, small businesses had already been hit hard earlier in the pandemic, especially by the lack of tourists.
These firms were “almost half dead,” said Lau, noting that some entrepreneurs had already taken out significant loans or dug into their reserves just to stay afloat.
“The worst thing is you cannot see the future,” he added. “We don’t know how long these restrictions will last for.”
Researchers at Intermountain Healthcare in Utah published a study on Wednesday showing an improved method for treating pneumonia in emergency rooms that the system says has reduced mortality by 38%. (Jeffrey D. Allred, Deseret News)
Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
SALT LAKE CITY — A new method for treating pneumonia in emergency rooms has reduced mortality rates by 38%, according to a study published Wednesday by researchers at Intermountain Healthcare.
In the study, clinicians treated patients using a real-time electronic decision support system called an ePNa. This system makes recommendations to bedside clinicians about how to treat patients.
The support system was used at 16 Intermountain hospitals from December 2017 to June 2019 to treat 67% of the almost 7,000 pneumonia cases hospitalized over time span.
The study found that after using the ePNa, there was a 38% relative reduction in mortality 30 days after a pneumonia diagnosis, including a large reduction in mortality for patients admitted to intensive care.
Researchers also found a 17% increase in “outpatient disposition,” a decrease in admissions to intensive care units and a decrease in the time between emergency department admission and when a patient is first given an antibiotic.
An Intermountain statement says these results are consistent with what health officials saw when they first used ePNa at the company’s larger hospitals.
“Treating pneumonia in emergency departments is challenging, especially in community hospitals that don’t see severe pneumonia as often as urban academic medical centers,” said Dr. Nathan Dean, chief of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Intermountain Medical Center and principal investigator for the study.
Dean explained that ePNa, in addition to making helpful recommendations, allows for treatment from clinicians to be more structured and could decrease unnecessary variations.
“Even if they don’t follow the recommendation, decision-making is more consistent with best practices,” Dean said.
Intermountain says pneumonia is the leading cause of death from infectious diseases in the United States, even before the pandemic.
U.S. News and World Report ranked Intermountain as “high performing in pneumonia care with excellent outcomes” while the study was underway, Intermountain officials said.
The study, “A Pragmatic Stepped-wedge, Cluster-controlled Trial of Real-time Pneumonia Clinical Decision Support,” was published Monday in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.
Eating disorder recovery advocate Christine Parks hikes Denali National Park. Since the pandemic began, there have been documented increases in eating disorders in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Europe and the Middle East. (Christine Parks)
Estimated read time: 11-12 minutes
SALT LAKE CITY — When employees at a local eating disorder clinic asked a teenage resident why she was refusing to eat, the teen lifted up her shirt and pointed at her stomach.
“I would rather die than have tummy rolls,” she said.
Christine Parks, a care technician who witnessed the interaction at Utah’s Center for Change, has gone through recovery for eating disorders and felt flooded with emotion — and protectiveness.
She knew that the girl’s statement was not an exaggeration. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness, and they are impacting teenage girls now more than ever.
Experts say that since the COVID-19 pandemic began, there have been documented increases in eating disorders in the United States, Canada, Australia, Europe and the Middle East.
According to a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released last week, emergency room visits for eating disorders doubled among 12- to 17-year-old girls nationwide since the pandemic began. And those are just the cases that are life-threatening enough to warrant emergency admission during a pandemic.
The National Eating Disorders Association has reported a 107% increase in calls to their help line since March 2020.
Researchers have found a number of potential reasons for the growing number of eating disorder cases, including having to eat meals in front of others, having less-structured meal times, exercising at home using videos on social media and apps, video conferencing and increases in stress levels.
Multiple studies have shown that the heightened attention to weight gain on social media during lockdown led people to increase their physical activity to an excessive level out of fear. One 2021 study from the University of Connecticut Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity found that over 50% of teenagers saw social media content that stigmatized weight gain during that time period.
Although no organizations are quantifying exactly how many eating disorder cases there are in Utah, the demand for treatment has skyrocketed since 2020.
“Every person I know is full or has a waitlist and has closed their waitlists, including dietitians and people working at hospitals. I have colleagues who prefer not to treat eating disorders, and it’s not an option anymore,” said Dr. Corinne Hannan, a psychologist specializing in eating disorders and assistant clinical professor at Brigham Young University.
“From my chair, it’s not showing any decline. Quite the opposite,” she added.
A culture of perfection
When a former college track athlete, who asked to remain anonymous for privacy reasons, arrived at the Utah university a couple of years ago, she noticed a pattern in the people around her that she said she didn’t see nearly as often in her home state.
She said it was completely normal for her friends and teammates to eat foods they deemed unhealthy or fattening and then compensate by “running it off” for miles and miles or exercising excessively. In fact, she said this behavior was rewarded and encouraged. She said her coach at the time even told her to lose 3 to 5 pounds, even though she was regularly exercising and lifting weights.
Excessive or compulsive exercise as a form of purging is also known as anorexia athletica or exercise bulimia, but it is not a recognized clinical eating disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. However, the National Eating Disorder Association website states that compulsive exercise can be a symptom of disordered eating or a recognized eating disorder, and the symptom itself can lead to bone density loss, loss of menstrual cycle in women, and other severe medical conditions, some of which can be life-threatening.
Hannan explained that it was impossible to find data on how many Utahns are dealing with eating disorders because the data does not exist. There’s not enough research being done and not enough funding for researchers to pursue it.
The former athlete’s mother, Michelle, who runs an international Facebook group for family members of people with eating disorders, expressed that another problem gathering this data is that everyone has different definitions of what recovery means. So local treatment centers, which go largely unregulated, might not report accurate recovery rates.
Every person interviewed for this story mentioned a culture of toxic perfectionism that applies to appearance.
Hannan speculated that the high rates of perfectionism she sees in clients and students in Utah occur because of an association with physical perfection and religious worthiness or an unconscious need to stand out as the most perfect in a homogenous crowd of other white, slim people who make up the majority demographic of the state.
No matter the reason, it is impossible to drive down a freeway without coming across billboards telling you to change your appearance through plastic surgery, cool sculpting or dieting, Park said.
“It’s definitely a beauty-saturated place,” she continued. “Hair extensions, fake eyelashes, spray tans: It’s almost like the expectation is that everyone should have that. … How did we get here? How did Utah’s beauty ideals become like this? It’s so preventable.”
No specific look or size
Although the reported number of hospitalizations is growing specifically among adolescent girls, eating disorders do not pertain only to people of a certain look or size.
Eating disorder recovery advocate Christine Parks eats a pumpkin cupcake in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Christine Parks)
During Parks’ work at Center for Change, she has come across grandmothers who have had an eating disorder for 40 years, military personnel, athletes, mothers, and people of all ages and backgrounds.
“You can never tell based off looking at someone,” she said. “It gives me so much more compassion for anyone who struggles with food and body issues because it’s truly an invisible disease. Everybody is worthy of getting help.”
Multiple studies show that marginalized populations like people of color and members of the LGBT community have higher rates of developing eating disorders. And children are far from immune, as some Americans are putting children on diets at younger and younger ages.
“I wish the average person understood that eating disorders are not something you can diagnose with your eyes. They are underdiagnosed and underrepresented due to misinformation and normalization and promotion of disordered eating of society,” Hannan said.
Anyone of any ethnicity, gender, size, age or ability could possibly have an eating disorder, she added, but the biggest predictor of youth developing an eating disorder is dieting.
Effects of social media
Parks was 15 years old when she first started developing orthorexia, an eating disorder characterized by an obsession with healthy eating. She didn’t see it as a problem. After all, she told herself, she was just trying to be healthy.
This was also when Instagram was fairly new, and it became the breeding ground for her issues with food.
“I 100% used it as a resource to figure out how to lose weight. I remember looking up strategies of what to do when I’m hungry instead of eating,” she said.
Now, after recovering from her years of being trapped in a cycle of heavily restrictive eating — becoming nutritionally and calorically deprived, binging secretly and resetting weight loss goals in shame — she runs an account specifically dedicated to eating disorder recovery on the same platform that encouraged her illness: Instagram.
When she was an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, all-consuming thoughts of food terrorized her during 90% of her waking hours. She began to isolate herself from everyone, even planning her walks across campus to avoid crowds so she wouldn’t be seen because she “didn’t feel worthy or valuable as a person until (she) was thin enough.”
Eating disorder recovery advocate Christine Parks hikes in Rock Canyon Park in Provo. (Photo: Christine Parks)
In 2019, she attended a meeting on campus that addressed disordered eating and eating disorders and promoted intuitive eating, or making peace with food and relying on your body’s cues to decide what and when to eat.
As Parks began to work with a dietitian and a therapist to get her life back, she came across a quote from Dr. Thema Bryant, a psychologist and minister, that inspired her to write about the eating disorder she had kept hidden for so many years.
“When you shatter the shame and begin sharing your story, a thousand chains will fall off people you never met,” Bryant wrote.
Parks wrote out her story in a blog post titled, “The eating disorder that no one talks about.” She took a deep breath and clicked “publish.” The response from her community was immediate.
“Messages upon messages came pouring in from people I know and people I didn’t know,” she said.
Later that year, she decided to start an Instagram account called @ed_stories. She shared 120 recovery stories within the first year from people across the country and abroad.
“Advocating lights my soul on fire,” Parks said, and her experience running the account has shown her social media’s “incredible capacity for good.”
“Now I follow a million therapists and dietitians in the eating disorder space. You can curate your feed for recovery,” she said. “But it does need to be heavily regulated and monitored.”
The National Eating Disorder Association website states that 7 out of 10 women and girls report a decline in body confidence attributed to pressure to attain society’s unrealistic beauty standards.
In October, Frances Haugen, a Facebook data scientist turned whistleblower, leaked internal Facebook studies that showed that Instagram harmed teenagers. One study, in particular, showed that 17% of teenage girls reported that the app made eating disorders worse. Haugen testified before Congress on Oct. 5, 2021, stating, “Facebook knows that they are leading young users to anorexia content.”
When Hannan heard this news, she was disappointed and angry but unsurprised.
“There is a substantial body of research showing how social media can contribute to disordered eating and body negativity. The issue with Facebook is a continuation and magnification of an already existing problem,” she said.
It is almost impossible to use social media without coming across millions of money-making accounts that invent a flaw, make you feel insecure, and then sell you a solution, Hannan explained. And youth are using social media for hours as a part of their daily routine.
“Companies with all this power and influence are preying on the most vulnerable of us: teens and children. There’s no accountability and no ethics. It continually breaks my heart,” she said.
However, she also believes social media can reach and connect people worldwide in an unprecedented way and share accurate information. But doing so in a way that competes with the multibillion-dollar diet industry takes a lot.
Although she hasn’t done publishable research on curating a social media feed, Hannan has found that if she only followed and interacted with very specific accounts, she could limit the amount of damaging material she was exposed to.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if curating a media feed that supports your recovery is as powerful as being exposed relentlessly to hours and hours of images,” Hannan said, and she’s optimistic that people with the time and team will create content to make a better world.
Parks also said she doesn’t recommend blocking teens from accessing social media. Instead, she suggests taking breaks, paying attention to the research being done on social media consumption, educating teenagers about the risks, unfollowing any accounts that promote unhealthy behaviors or comparison, and following specialists and doctors involved in eating disorder recovery and intuitive eating.
Recovery is possible
The biggest point every interviewee emphasized was that recovery from eating disorders is absolutely possible.
Hannan’s clients sometimes refer to the journey to recovery with pop culture references, like Frodo destroying the ring in “Lord of the Rings” or Ron Weasley having to face all his worst fears before destroying a horcrux in the Harry Potter movies.
Michelle recommends that parents and supporters help their loved ones with eating disorders find evidence-based treatment that will lead to long-term recovery.
Rewiring the brain doesn’t happen overnight, but for Parks, recovery looks like getting her life back: dating, creating and deepening relationships with friends, being present with family, pursuing a career, and living a fulfilling and happy life.
She still struggles occasionally, but she really does feel as though a thousand chains have fallen off her since she began recovery. She is miraculously, gloriously free.
Resources for people dealing with eating disorders
