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England dropped most of its Covid restrictions in July. One month on, here's how it's going – CNN

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3 years ago

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London (CNN)It’s been a month since England dropped most of its coronavirus restrictions, a move that was welcomed by much of the country’s hard-pressed business sector but criticized by thousands of scientists as a “dangerous and unethical experiment.”

In an open letter published in the Lancet medical journal, they argued that a rising number of Covid-19 cases, the new Delta variant and the fact that a large part of the UK population was not yet fully vaccinated made the move too risky.
But the government was determined to push ahead.
It removed all limits on mixing and allowed venues like nightclubs and sports stadiums to open at full capacity starting on July 19. Face masks are no longer required apart from in a few specific locations, such as airports and hospitals. And as of Monday, fully vaccinated people are no longer required to quarantine after coming into contact with someone who has tested positive for coronavirus.
A month on, it’s becoming clear that while vaccination works, the reopening has come at a cost.
“The UK is averaging around 90 deaths a day from Covid. Our reopening has been far from an unqualified success,” said Kit Yates, co-director of the Centre for Mathematical Biology at the University of Bath.
While the death toll is much lower than it was at the peak of the pandemic, when as many as 1,300 people were dying every day, experts like Yates say it’s still unnecessarily high.
And with roughly 800 Covid-19 patients ending up in hospital each day, the UK’s public health system is once again under pressure and unable to provide non-emergency care at the level that is needed, Yates said.
“There isn’t capacity to carry out all the routine treatment that’s necessary. As a result people are missing out on lifesaving treatment,” he said.
The number of people waiting for routine hospital treatment has risen to 5.5 million in July from 4.4 million in February 2020, according to NHS Providers.
“If there was one lesson I wish other countries would take from watching the UK’s attempt to reopen is that vaccines are not the whole solution to the problem,” Yates told CNN.
“Yes, they make a huge difference, but if you want to keep on top of this disease then you need to back vaccines up with other tried and tested public health measures: Mask mandates in indoor public spaces, ventilation in schools and work places, a functioning, locally-driven test, trace and isolate system in combination with support for isolation,” he added.

Cases dropped, then rose again

Epidemiologists expected the reopening would lead to an increase in the number of people becoming infected with the coronavirus — but this didn’t happen, at least not immediately.
While the number of new cases increased just before the restrictions were lifted, it went down in the first few weeks after the reopening. This unexpected drop was likely down to the fact that contacts between people didn’t increase as rapidly as some predicted, and because the Euro 2020 football tournament, which led to a spike in cases, ended on July 11.
“Thankfully, although technically we’ve lifted restrictions, the UK looks a very different place than it did before the pandemic. My workplace is still practically deserted. It’s quite clear that people are not behaving as they were before the pandemic,” said Mark Woolhouse, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh.
“There’s an awful lot of scope for people to change their behavior more to allow more transmission of the virus in the future. Whether they will, we don’t know — predicting people’s behavior in the face of an unprecedented pandemic is a fool’s game, really,” he said.
The spike in cases before the reopening meant a large number of people were in quarantine after coming into contact with someone who tested positive. More than 2 million people were “pinged” by the track and trace app in July alone, according to the NHS.
On top of that, the school summer vacation got underway in England on July 16.
Christina Pagel, director of the Clinical Operational Research Unit at University College London, said it has now become clear that schools played an important part in the overall picture, adding that cases in children have been halving every week since the beginning of the holidays.
But while the overall infection levels dropped in the first few weeks after the reopening, they have started creeping up again.
“In the last two weeks, cases in adults have started going up again, and more than you would know just from looking at the numbers, because they’re kind of masked by the big drops in cases in children,” Pagel said.
She said the increase in cases is worrying, because July and August are precisely the months when it should be easier to keep infection levels down.
“We’re still in a situation where we have a lot of cases and a lot of poor health from Covid, so I think there is kind of a bit of trepidation about what happens when we go back to school in September,” she said.
While hospitalizations in the UK are on the rise, the proportion of people who end up in hospital now is much lower than it used to be, thanks to vaccination.
“In January, before the vaccination program really got into full swing we were maybe seeing upwards of 10% of cases going on to be hospitalized. Now that figure is down to between 2% and 3%, so vaccines are making a huge difference,” Yates said.
The data also shows that while overall vaccination rates matter, the key is in the detail.
The UK has fully vaccinated 60% of its total population, according to Our World in Data, while in the US, that figure stands at 51%, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While the overall rate is similar, the US has more unvaccinated elderly people who are more vulnerable to the disease.
“In the over-50s, in our vulnerable populations, we have 90% to 95% fully vaccinated. And that’s making a really big difference. So we do have a lot of hospitalizations, but it’s nowhere near as high as it could be,” Pagel said, referring to the UK population.
“And if you look at places like Florida, which is seeing unsustainable hospitalizations, this is because they have a higher number of people who are still vulnerable, so even though they have high vaccination rates overall, it’s not helping them as much because of how its distributed in their population,” she added.
According to the Florida Department of Health, 79% of people aged between 60 and 64 and 86% of people above the age of 65 have been vaccinated.

Kids on the front line

In England, next month’s return to school is a major risk, because most kids won’t be vaccinated against the disease.
The UK medicines watchdog, the MHRA, has approved the Pfizer and Moderna shots for children and teenagers aged 12 and above, but only clinically vulnerable teenagers have been able to get the shots so far.
The government said Sunday that 16- and 17-year-olds will be offered the vaccine by next week, but there has been no announcement on inoculation for younger children.
“We will see lots of students meeting up indoors in schools at which few or no mitigations have been put in place … we should expect to see further rises in transmission when this happens, which will inevitably lead to more cases, more hospitalizations and tragically more deaths,” Yates said.
Deepti Gurdasani, a clinical epidemiologist and senior lecturer in machine learning at Queen Mary University of London, has long been critical of the government’s approach to the reopening, arguing that the plan put children at unnecessary risk.
“They may not individually get hospitalized or die at the same rate, but if enough of them get infected, then a large number will still get hospitalized and sadly, some will die. And they do get long Covid,” she said, pointing to data released by the Office for National Statistics earlier this month, which showed that 34,000 kids aged 17 and under are suffering from long Covid, with 22,000 of them saying their illness is having an impact on their day-to-day activities.
“These are not mild cases … 7,000 have had persistent symptoms for more than one year. That’s not mild,” she said.
Pagel said that while schools don’t appear to be major drivers of new injections when overall community transmission levels remain low, they become a problem when Covid levels are higher — as they are right now in the UK.
“Every other high income country is doing at least one of three things … they are either vaccinating adolescents, or they’re keeping in mitigation (measures) in schools such as masks and social distancing, isolation and (investing in) ventilation, or they’re keeping community transmission low … most of them are doing two of those things. We’re not doing any of them,” she said.

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Here is how to prepare your online accounts for when you die

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2 weeks ago

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October 24, 2024

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LONDON (AP) — Most people have accumulated a pile of data — selfies, emails, videos and more — on their social media and digital accounts over their lifetimes. What happens to it when we die?

It’s wise to draft a will spelling out who inherits your physical assets after you’re gone, but don’t forget to take care of your digital estate too. Friends and family might treasure files and posts you’ve left behind, but they could get lost in digital purgatory after you pass away unless you take some simple steps.

Here’s how you can prepare your digital life for your survivors:

Apple

The iPhone maker lets you nominate a “ legacy contact ” who can access your Apple account’s data after you die. The company says it’s a secure way to give trusted people access to photos, files and messages. To set it up you’ll need an Apple device with a fairly recent operating system — iPhones and iPads need iOS or iPadOS 15.2 and MacBooks needs macOS Monterey 12.1.

For iPhones, go to settings, tap Sign-in & Security and then Legacy Contact. You can name one or more people, and they don’t need an Apple ID or device.

You’ll have to share an access key with your contact. It can be a digital version sent electronically, or you can print a copy or save it as a screenshot or PDF.

Take note that there are some types of files you won’t be able to pass on — including digital rights-protected music, movies and passwords stored in Apple’s password manager. Legacy contacts can only access a deceased user’s account for three years before Apple deletes the account.

Google

Google takes a different approach with its Inactive Account Manager, which allows you to share your data with someone if it notices that you’ve stopped using your account.

When setting it up, you need to decide how long Google should wait — from three to 18 months — before considering your account inactive. Once that time is up, Google can notify up to 10 people.

You can write a message informing them you’ve stopped using the account, and, optionally, include a link to download your data. You can choose what types of data they can access — including emails, photos, calendar entries and YouTube videos.

There’s also an option to automatically delete your account after three months of inactivity, so your contacts will have to download any data before that deadline.

Facebook and Instagram

Some social media platforms can preserve accounts for people who have died so that friends and family can honor their memories.

When users of Facebook or Instagram die, parent company Meta says it can memorialize the account if it gets a “valid request” from a friend or family member. Requests can be submitted through an online form.

The social media company strongly recommends Facebook users add a legacy contact to look after their memorial accounts. Legacy contacts can do things like respond to new friend requests and update pinned posts, but they can’t read private messages or remove or alter previous posts. You can only choose one person, who also has to have a Facebook account.

You can also ask Facebook or Instagram to delete a deceased user’s account if you’re a close family member or an executor. You’ll need to send in documents like a death certificate.

TikTok

The video-sharing platform says that if a user has died, people can submit a request to memorialize the account through the settings menu. Go to the Report a Problem section, then Account and profile, then Manage account, where you can report a deceased user.

Once an account has been memorialized, it will be labeled “Remembering.” No one will be able to log into the account, which prevents anyone from editing the profile or using the account to post new content or send messages.

X

It’s not possible to nominate a legacy contact on Elon Musk’s social media site. But family members or an authorized person can submit a request to deactivate a deceased user’s account.

Passwords

Besides the major online services, you’ll probably have dozens if not hundreds of other digital accounts that your survivors might need to access. You could just write all your login credentials down in a notebook and put it somewhere safe. But making a physical copy presents its own vulnerabilities. What if you lose track of it? What if someone finds it?

Instead, consider a password manager that has an emergency access feature. Password managers are digital vaults that you can use to store all your credentials. Some, like Keeper,Bitwarden and NordPass, allow users to nominate one or more trusted contacts who can access their keys in case of an emergency such as a death.

But there are a few catches: Those contacts also need to use the same password manager and you might have to pay for the service.

___

Is there a tech challenge you need help figuring out? Write to us at onetechtip@ap.org with your questions.

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Google’s partnership with AI startup Anthropic faces a UK competition investigation

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2 weeks ago

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October 24, 2024

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LONDON (AP) — Britain’s competition watchdog said Thursday it’s opening a formal investigation into Google’s partnership with artificial intelligence startup Anthropic.

The Competition and Markets Authority said it has “sufficient information” to launch an initial probe after it sought input earlier this year on whether the deal would stifle competition.

The CMA has until Dec. 19 to decide whether to approve the deal or escalate its investigation.

“Google is committed to building the most open and innovative AI ecosystem in the world,” the company said. “Anthropic is free to use multiple cloud providers and does, and we don’t demand exclusive tech rights.”

San Francisco-based Anthropic was founded in 2021 by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, who previously worked at ChatGPT maker OpenAI. The company has focused on increasing the safety and reliability of AI models. Google reportedly agreed last year to make a multibillion-dollar investment in Anthropic, which has a popular chatbot named Claude.

Anthropic said it’s cooperating with the regulator and will provide “the complete picture about Google’s investment and our commercial collaboration.”

“We are an independent company and none of our strategic partnerships or investor relationships diminish the independence of our corporate governance or our freedom to partner with others,” it said in a statement.

The U.K. regulator has been scrutinizing a raft of AI deals as investment money floods into the industry to capitalize on the artificial intelligence boom. Last month it cleared Anthropic’s $4 billion deal with Amazon and it has also signed off on Microsoft’s deals with two other AI startups, Inflection and Mistral.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Kuwait bans ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’ video game, likely over it featuring Saddam Hussein in 1990s

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2 weeks ago

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October 23, 2024

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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — The tiny Mideast nation of Kuwait has banned the release of the video game “Call of Duty: Black Ops 6,” which features the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and is set in part in the 1990s Gulf War.

Kuwait has not publicly acknowledged banning the game, which is a tentpole product for the Microsoft-owned developer Activision and is set to be released on Friday worldwide. However, it comes as Kuwait still wrestles with the aftermath of the invasion and as video game makers more broadly deal with addressing historical and cultural issues in their work.

The video game, a first-person shooter, follows CIA operators fighting at times in the United States and also in the Middle East. Game-play trailers for the game show burning oilfields, a painful reminder for Kuwaitis who saw Iraqis set fire to the fields, causing vast ecological and economic damage. Iraqi troops damaged or set fire to over 700 wells.

There also are images of Saddam and Iraq’s old three-star flag in the footage released by developers ahead of the game’s launch. The game’s multiplayer section, a popular feature of the series, includes what appears to be a desert shootout in Kuwait called Scud after the Soviet missiles Saddam fired in the war. Another is called Babylon, after the ancient city in Iraq.

Activision acknowledged in a statement that the game “has not been approved for release in Kuwait,” but did not elaborate.

“All pre-orders in Kuwait will be cancelled and refunded to the original point of purchase,” the company said. “We remain hopeful that local authorities will reconsider, and allow players in Kuwait to enjoy this all-new experience in the Black Ops series.”

Kuwait’s Media Ministry did not respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press over the decision.

“Call of Duty,” which first began in 2003 as a first-person shooter set in World War II, has expanded into an empire worth billions of dollars now owned by Microsoft. But it also has been controversial as its gameplay entered the realm of geopolitics. China and Russia both banned chapters in the franchise. In 2009, an entry in the gaming franchise allowed players to take part in a militant attack at a Russian airport, killing civilians.

But there have been other games recently that won praise for their handling of the Mideast. Ubisoft’s “Assassin’s Creed: Mirage” published last year won praise for its portrayal of Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age in the 9th century.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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