9, June 2020
Ambazonia Vice President on Mola Litumbe’s passing: Revolution lost very valuable personality 0
The Vice President of the Federal Republic of Ambazonia, Dabney Yerima has in a message offered the Interim Government’s condolences over the demise of the veteran Mola Njoh Litumbe.
In this week’s war cabinet meeting that examined the situation of Southern Cameroons media gurus targeted by the French Cameroun regime, the exiled Ambazonia leader also invoked the legacy of Njoh Litumbe and observed that “I extend my condolences on the passing away of Mola Njoh Litumbe to the people of Ambazonia and all fighters whose hearts are with the Southern Cameroons issue, especially the Ambazonia Restoration Forces and also the family of this blessed departed soul,” Yerima said.
Vice President Dabney Yerima added that “the Federal Republic of Ambazonia lost a very important figure and I hope that with the guidance and help of our ancestors and the Almighty God, Southern Cameroonians will get to Buea and honour Litumbe.”
The late Mola Njoh Litumbe helped to establish a strong and enduring Southern Cameroons governing authority and catapulted the Ambazonian cause to the international arena. He successfully took the Southern Cameroons case to all corners of the globe and dared the colonizer and its criminal network in Southern Cameroons territory on his own terms and left them defeated and humiliated.
By Chi Prudence Asong in London
9, June 2020
Covid-19 lockdowns saved millions of lives and easing curbs risky, studies find 0
Lockdowns imposed to curb the spread of COVID-19 have saved millions of lives and easing them now carries high risks, according to two international studies published on Monday.
“The risk of a second wave happening if all interventions and all precautions are abandoned is very real,” Samir Bhatt, who co-led one of the studies by researchers at Imperial College London, told reporters in a briefing.
Most European nations, worried about the economic impact of their lockdowns, have started to ease restrictions as the number of new COVID-19 cases falls.
The Imperial study analysed the impact of lockdowns and social distancing steps in 11 European countries and found they had “a substantial effect”, helping to lower the infection’s reproductive rate, or R value, below one by early May.
The R value measures the average number of people that one infected person will pass the disease on to. An R value above 1 can lead to exponential growth.
“But any claims that this is all over, that we’ve reached the herd immunity threshold, can be firmly rejected,” Bhatt said. “We are only at the beginning of this pandemic.”
The Imperial team estimated that by early May, between 12 and 15 million people in total in Austria, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland – around 4% of their combined population – had been infected with COVID-19.
By comparing the number of deaths counted with deaths predicted by their model if no lockdown measures had been introduced, they found some 3.1 million deaths were averted.
A second study by scientists in the United States, published alongside the Imperial-led one in the journal Nature, estimated that lockdowns in China, South Korea, Italy, Iran, France and the United States had prevented or delayed around 530 million COVID-19 cases.
Focusing on those six nations, the U.S. team compared infection growth rates before and after the implementation of more than 1,700 local, regional and national policies designed to slow or halt the spread of COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.
They found that without anti-contagion policies in place, early infection rates of SARS-CoV-2 grew by 68% a day in Iran and an average of 38% a day across the other five countries.
“Without these policies, we would have lived through a very different April and May,” said Solomon Hsiang, who co-led the second study at the University of California, Berkeley.
(REUTERS)