Month: January 2021

The jails and prisons that stay open will probably become even more crowded, unsanitary and disease-ridden, and the transfers are likely to help the virus proliferate both inside and outside the walls…reports Asian Lite News

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__9sRgM8Wd4

Battered by an unabated spike in Covid-19 cases and deaths, local jails and state prison systems across the US have resorted to a drastic strategy to keep the virus at bay: shutting down completely and transferring their inmates elsewhere, a media report said.

“From California to Missouri to Pennsylvania, state and local officials say that so many guards have fallen ill with the virus and are unable to work that abruptly closing some correctional facilities is the only way to maintain community security and prisoner safety,” Xinhua news agency quoted The New York Times (NYT) report as saying on Saturday.

The newspaper quoted experts as saying that the fallout is easy to predict.

The jails and prisons that stay open will probably become even more crowded, unsanitary and disease-ridden, and the transfers are likely to help the virus proliferate both inside and outside the walls.

There have been more than 480,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and at least 2,100 deaths among inmates and guards in prisons and detention centres across the nation, according to a NYT database, among those statistics are the nearly 100,000 correctional officers who have tested positive and 170 who have died.

“Early in the pandemic, some states tried to ward off virus outbreaks by releasing some offenders early and detaining fewer people awaiting trial in order to reduce their populations, but those efforts often met with resistance from politicians and the public,” said the report.

More recently, as arrests in many areas have increased, jail populations have returned to pre-pandemic levels, according to data collected by the Vera Institute of Justice, a non-profit research and policy group based in New York.

“That fact, combined with widespread infections among correctional officers, staffing shortages stretching back many years and strains on prison medical facilities, have pushed states as the pandemic progresses toward more concentration and crowding, rather than less, in part through closure of strained facilities,” said The New York Times report.

Confirmed Covid-19 cases in the US has reached a total of 20,396,243 as the discovery of a highly contagious new virus strain in the country increases pressure to speed up the vaccination process.

The death toll currently stands at 349,933, according to the Johns Hopkins University.

The country, which makes up about 4 per cent of the world’s population, now accounts for nearly one-quarter of over 83.8 million cases and 19 per cent of 1.8 million deaths reported worldwide, showed the university’s data.

Also read:‘US vaccine rollout falls short’

“The shortfall is due in part to a lag in reporting data using new tools, government officials and health experts said…reports Asian Lite News

Three weeks into the most ambitious vaccination campaign in modern US history, far fewer people than expected are being immunised against Covid-19 as the process has moved slower than officials projected and is beset by confusion and disorganisation in many states, a media report said.

“As a result, the federal government came nowhere close to vaccinating 20 million people by the end of 2020, as it had promised,” Xinhua news agency quoted The Wall Street Journal report as saying on Saturday.

Of the more than 12 million doses of vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer and BioNTech that have been shipped, only 2.8 million have been administered, according to federal figures.

“The shortfall is due in part to a lag in reporting data using new tools, government officials and health experts said. But as the federal government has left it to states to determine what to do with the vaccines it ships to them, and with some states pushing decision-making to local health departments and hospitals, the process has gone far from smoothly,” The Wall Street Journal report said.

People in Florida are lining up for hours to get shots on a first-come, first-served basis.

Some West Virginians received a Covid-19 treatment instead of vaccines.

A medical practice in Texas had only two workers sign up to take the shots.

While some states received fewer doses than they expected and some hospitals got their first ones this week, other health-care providers have more doses than they know what to do with and are scrambling to find enough syringes to use them, according to The Wall Street Journal report.

On January 1, Senator Mitt Romney from Utah criticised the vaccine rollout, saying in a statement that the lack of a comprehensive federal plan to be shared with states “is as incomprehensible as it is inexcusable”.

So far, vaccines have mostly gone to healthcare workers and residents of long-term care facilities, in line with guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Essential workers like bus drivers or grocery clerks, plus older adults, are expected to be vaccinated next in 2021 as supplies increase and as more vaccination sites come online.

Confirmed Covid-19 cases in the US has reached a total of 20,396,243 as the discovery of a highly contagious new virus strain in the country increases pressure to speed up the vaccination process.

The death toll currently stands at 349,933, according to the Johns Hopkins University.

The country, which makes up about 4 per cent of the world’s population, now accounts for nearly one-quarter of over 83.8 million cases and 19 per cent of 1.8 million deaths reported worldwide, showed the university’s data.

Also read:Watershed moment in the battle against virus