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According to the report from the National Aboriginal Capital Corporations Association, the National Indigenous Economic Development Board and the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business, Indigenous business owners were far less likely to find the help they needed during the pandemic, even as the government was taking steps to try to ease their burden.
In a survey of 825 Indigenous-owned businesses across the country between Dec. 18, 2020 and Feb. 1, 2021, almost half the entrepreneurs who responded said financial requirements were a major barrier to accessing aid during the pandemic. Three quarters said their business was negatively impacted by the pandemic, a percentage that's in line with Statistics Canada data on all types of businesses.
But more than a quarter of Indigenous-owned who applied for some sort of government assistance program had a hard time meeting the minimum requirements, the survey found.
Participation in the survey was voluntary and relied on a self-selection method, which means the data is not weighted and is not a truly randomized sample. But it nonetheless paints a picture of the unique problems faced by a key group of Canadian entrepreneurs.
While the future certainly looks brighter now than it did this time last year, even after all they've been through, almost half of respondents said they can't survive the next six months without help.
https://www.cbc.ca/n...covid-1.6075078
Though vaccination is enabling the resumption of some pre-pandemic activities in parts of the world, SARS-CoV-2 is rapidly working its way around vaccines by mutating itself. In this study, the nanobodies neutralized three emerging variants: Alpha, Beta and Gamma.
“Companies have already started introducing the variants of concern into the construct of booster shots of the existing vaccines,” said Kai Xu, assistant professor of veterinary biosciences at The Ohio State University and a co-lead author of the research. “But the virus is constantly mutating, and the speed of mutation may be faster than we can capture. Therefore, we need to utilize multiple mechanisms to control the virus spread.”
An accelerated article preview of the study is published online in Nature.
Nanobodies are antibodies derived from immunization of camelid mammals – such as camels, llamas and alpacas – that can be re-designed into tiny molecules that mimic human antibody structures and functions.
For this work, the researchers immunized llamas to produce single-chain antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. They also immunized “nanomice,” transgenic mice with a camelid gene that had been engineered by research fellow Jianliang Xu in the lab of Rafael Casellas, senior investigator at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), to generate nanobodies similar to those produced by camelids.
The team enhanced the nanobodies’ power by immunizing the animals first with the receptor binding domain (RBD), a part of the viral surface spike protein, and following with booster shots containing the entire spike protein.
https://news.osu.edu...ariants-attack/
Girls’ loss of schooling as a result of COVID-19 threatens to set back development, a report warns.
About one million girls in Sub-Saharan Africa may never return to school after getting pregnant due to COVID-19 school closures, a development that could derail Africa’s growth, a report says.
The Ibrahim Forum Report highlights the COVID-19-related challenges facing Africa, including an increase in sexual and gender-based violence, strain on already weak health services, rising instability and economic hardship.
The report released this month warns that school closures negatively impact girls’ socialisation, access to sexual and reproductive health services, and safe spaces. It says they become vulnerable to sexual violence and exploitation, female genital mutilation (FGM), forced marriage and early pregnancies.
“The Ibrahim Forum Report shows how school closures risk widening existing learning inequalities,” says Camilla Rocca, head of research, Mo Ibrahim Foundation. “Already in 2019, there was a 3.9 percentage points gap between the rate of out-of-school girls and boys in Sub-Saharan Africa.”
The analysis, Rocca explains, is based on data such as education enrolment and adolescent pregnancy rates.
Stay-at-home orders during the pandemic have triggered an increase in violence against women and girls across the world, notes Rocca, adding: “This is happening at a time when access to support and emergency services to curb SGBV [sexual and gender-based violence] have declined due to the pandemic and its related restrictions.”
https://www.alphagal...y/ItemId/209836
Whether it’s a work deadline, traffic jam, leaky roof or broken-down car, everyday stressors can undermine relationships. Routine annoyances tend to weigh on people, using up energy and making them more likely to lash out at a partner—even when the partner is clearly not to blame for the problem at hand.
But the COVID-19 pandemic is nothing like a demanding boss or a delayed train. It has upended the world, hammered national economies and dominated headlines for more than a year—making it a pretty conspicuous target for negative sentiments. Now a study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science shows that when couples blamed their daily stressors on the pandemic, each person ended up happier with their partner despite the unprecedented burdens brought on by the disaster.
“Stress turns us inward and exhausts us,” says lead author and relationship researcher Lisa Neff, of the University of Texas at Austin. This exhaustion can indirectly harm a romantic relationship, a phenomenon called stress spillover. But the effects of blaming stress on bigger problems—such as a natural disaster or a serious medical diagnosis—have long been unclear, Neff says. Some studies have shown that stress spillover occurs, while others have found that couples actually report greater satisfaction with their partners.
https://www.scientif...stayed-happier/
A researcher in Seattle claims he's discovered 13 partial coronavirus sequences from samples collected in Wuhan, China, that were deleted from a US database last year.
The discovery could mean scientists researching the origins of the pandemic have been working with incomplete data, he said.
Dr. Jesse Bloom, a researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, said Tuesday that he had recovered the deleted files from Google Cloud, and had reconstructed partial sequences of 13 viruses. He said they came from samples taken at the early stages of pandemic in Wuhan, where scientists first discovered SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
The data initially came from a study by Wuhan University scientists, he said.
*snip*
Bloom said that there was "no plausible scientific reason" for the sequences being deleted from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) database. The NIH said that it had removed the sequences in June 2020 at the request of the person that added them to the database, and said that allowing this was standard practice, CNN reported.
Prof David Robertson, an expert on viruses at the University of Glasgow, said in a statement that it was difficult to "conclude this is a cover-up rather than a more mundane deletion of data," based on Bloom's paper. "We also know already that the Huanan market wasn't the sole spillover event and SARS-CoV-2 was probably circulating in late October/November," he said.
Prof Martin Hibberd, of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said in a statement: "More work would need to be done to know how solid these findings are, particularly the accuracy and reasons for the sequence deletions, but it does look intriguing."
https://www.business...onavirus-2021-6
A British man who tested positive for the coronavirus over the course of 290 days said he was hospitalized for the illness seven times and expected to die.
Dave Smith, 72, from England, told the BBC that he tested positive 43 times and that he once coughed "non-stop" for five hours.
His infection is the longest active COVID-19 case ever recorded so far.
https://www.business...-7-times-2021-6
LONDON, June 24 (Reuters) - Over 2 million people in England might have had long COVID and suffered one or more COVID-19 symptoms that lasted at least 12 weeks, one of the biggest surveillance studies of the coronavirus found on Thursday.
The REACT-2 study, led by Imperial College London, found that more than a third of people who have had COVID-19 reported symptoms that lasted at least 12 weeks, with one in ten reporting severe symptoms which lasted that long.
"Our findings do paint a concerning picture of the longer-term health consequences of COVID-19, which need to be accounted for in policy and planning," said Paul Elliott, director of the REACT programme at Imperial.
The government-backed study was based on self-reported data from 508,707 adults between September 2020 and February 2021.
https://www.reuters....nds-2021-06-23/
Caltech’s David Baltimore, president emeritus and Distinguished Professor of Biology, is a virologist who received the Nobel Prize for his research into viral genetics. Baltimore was an organizer of the first Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA held in 1975 to discuss ethics and regulation of biotechnology. We sat down with him to discuss the debate over the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
https://thebulletin....-of-sars-cov-2/
https://www.caltech....s-of-sars-cov-2
In an excerpt of the book published in the Washington Post Thursday, it is revealed that Trump's blood oxygen level after catching COVID-19 last year fell below 90 percent, which is the point at which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends immediately starting oxygen therapy.
In addition to starting oxygen therapy, Abutaleb and Paletta write that "Trump's doctors threw everything they could at the virus all at once," including monoclonal antibodies, antiviral drug remdesivir, and the steroid dexamethasone, which the reporters note "is usually administered if someone is extremely ill."
The bottom line, Abutaleb and Paletta report, is that "the president was on a dizzying array of emergency medicines by now — all at once."
https://www.rawstory...ital-treatment/
More Than A Year After Pandemic's Start, Cuomo Declares State Of Disaster Emergency To End
https://gothamist.co...r-emergency-end
Longtime televangelist Jim Bakker and his Missouri-based ministry on Tuesday were ordered to pay $156,000 in restitution to listeners duped into purchasing a phony COVID-19 "cure" hawked by the prominent Trump supporter.
https://www.salon.co...-covid-19-cure/
