The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Southern Cameroons abandoned by the international community is now increasing at an alarming proportion particularly in Bamenda the chief city in the Northern Zone that continues to host massive religious events.

Ever since the open air mass celebrated by the visiting Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin in Bamenda and the commissioning of Bishop Bibi as the head of the Buea Diocese, several  infections have been confirmed, according to Cameroon Concord News count, compiled from figures provided by national health agencies run by the Biya regime in Yaoundé.

Many people including some Roman Catholic clergy have lost their lives to Covid-19 recently in Southern Cameroons.

Cameroon Concord News understands that the vast majority of people infected with the virus recover, but some patients are now suffering from symptoms for weeks or even months.

The senior religious leaders reportedly claimed that Covid-19 has been defeated but it now appears that the war, unemployment and the preference of prayers instead of masks has prompted a soaring in cases to such an extent that even the church, schools and other public institutions are contemplating to openly issue warnings about the spread of the virus.

Unconfirmed reports say the Biya Francophone regime in Yaoundé secretly placed a ban on the publication of coronavirus virus figures. Our correspondent in Bamenda who contributed to this report hinted that two revered fathers including the Vicar for clergy in the Bamenda Archdiocese, Rev Fr. Patrick Nyuydini Lafon have died but the Church has refused to admit that they had the coronavirus.

Under mounting pressure from Cameroon Concord News, the exiled leader of the Southern Cameroons Interim Government Vice President Dabney Yerima said the virus is now in Southern Cameroons.  Yerima added that if the Bishops and leaders of other Christian communities including the Muslim Imams fail to act fast, they will be blessing coffins every five minutes in Southern Cameroons-Ambazonia.

The war in Southern Cameroons has prevented aid groups from implementing systematic testing, and the so-called regional and divisional hospitals continue to test only the most seriously ill.

By Fon Lawrence in Bamenda

Authorities in Cameroon say the coronavirus pandemic has led to a spike in excessive drinking – and in deaths from fake alcohol.  Consumer groups protested on Monday, saying authorities need to do more to crack down on both counterfeit alcohol and medicine.

Hundreds of people came out on Monday to watch the seizure of what authorities allege are “fake whiskies” from Elig-Edzoa market in Cameroon’s capital Yaounde.

Officials of Cameroon’s ministry of trade, customs and the police were cracking down on fake alcohol to mark World Consumer Rights Day.

Pauline Biloua is member of the Cameroon National Consumers Council, the government’s consumer protection body. She said thousands of fake alcoholic drinks have been seized from at least 200 shops and 350 bars across Cameroon within the past month.

She said since the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in Cameroon in March 2020, many people have lost their jobs and are now extremely poor. Consumers who can no longer afford to buy good quality whiskies now purchase fake locally brewed alcoholic drinks which are dangerous to health, she said. Many people have developed liver problems and died from consuming fake whiskies, she added.

Meanwhile, several dozen people took part in a protest Tuesday against the sale of fake and counterfeit goods.

Delor Magellan Kamseu Kamgain is president of Cameroon’s National Consumers League. He said he organized the protest because the government is still not doing enough to protect consumers.

He said poverty caused by the coronavirus is pushing most Cameroonians to go out for cheap products. Kamgain said unfortunately for consumers, the government has allowed fake and counterfeit products including medicines and whiskies that are highly consumed in Cameroon to be sold publicly. He said all that a consumer organization like his can do is to educate and sensitize people on the risks civilians are exposed to when they consume goods of doubtful origin.

Cameroon’s Medical Council says about three-fourths of the 7,500 deaths from liver problems in Cameroon in 2020 were due to the consumption of fake alcohol.

The police said some products are made from pure ethanol or with alcohol bought or stolen from pharmacies and hospitals.

Fake drugs are another problem. The government said about 380 people died of fake drugs in Cameroon in 2020, up from 223 in 2019.

The government said the true numbers are probably higher because fewer than 30 percent of civilians visit hospitals. Some buy roadside drugs and others prefer African traditional medicine.

Trade minister Luc Magloire Mbarga Atangana said he has ordered a crackdown on all the fake drugs and alcohol.

He said he has ordered investigations on the origin of all fake drugs and whiskies circulating in Cameroon. He said he has asked the police to immediately seize all fake goods in the market. He said customs officers have been asked to protect the border so that fake goods should not be smuggled into Cameroon.

Atangana said Cameroonians should report people suspected of producing or selling fake goods to the nearest police station.

Source: VOA

The Yaounde Central Hospital, one of the largest designated hospitals for COVID-19 treatment in Cameroon, received a batch of medical equipment donated by China to fight against the novel coronavirus.

The equipment includes ventilators, oxygenerators, electrocardiographs, among others.

“This donation comes at the right time. We are all together in the fight against COVID-19, a difficult fight for the health personnel. (…) We can only thank the Chinese government,” said Hassan Ben Bachir, head of the cooperation division of the Ministry of Public Health, who represented the Cameroonian authority to receive the Chinese donation.

This donation is offered as part of the cooperation mechanism between Chinese and African hospitals, an initiative proposed by China to help Africa in the field of health. A partnership has been forged between the Yaounde Central Hospital and the First Hospital of Shanxi Medical University in China.

“This is the start of a collaboration which will be growing”, said Pierre Joseph Fouda, director of the Yaounde Central Hospital, “it is a great emotion and a feeling of joy to receive this donation.We will use it wisely.”

Source: Xinhuanet

The total number of COVID-19 cases in the United States topped 29.34 million on Friday, with the national death toll reaching 532,384, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.

Nearly 4,000 infection cases of coronavirus variants have been reported in the United States as of Thursday, according to the latest data of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The number of variants reported will likely increase as more specimens are sequenced and if the frequency of variants increases, according to the CDC.

Experts are concerned about some worrisome variants that are in places like California and New York.

Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said in an interview Friday that he is “not surprised” that the COVID-19 pandemic is still spreading in the United States and the new variants of coronavirus is the biggest challenge for the country.

Studies are underway to determine whether variants are more transmissible, cause more severe illness, or are likely to evade immunity brought on by prior illness or vaccination.

A new poll from the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago showed that the African and Hispanic Americans are more likely to be affected by the pandemic.

About 1,500 adults were surveyed from Feb 25 to March 1. According to the results, African Americans and Hispanics are more likely to suffer income losses compared with the white Americans.

The data showed that 62 percent of Hispanic Americans and 54 percent of African Americans have lost some form of household income during the yearlong pandemic, including jobs, pay cuts, cuts in hours and unpaid leave, while the proportion for white Americans is only 45 percent.

The poll also found that 38 percent of Hispanic Americans and 29 percent of African Americans said someone in their household was laid off during the pandemic, but only 21 percent of white Americans said the same.

In addition, the results also showed that compared with white Americans, African Americans and Hispanics were more likely to have loved ones who died from the novel coronavirus, and they were less likely to receive the vaccine.

In addition, the rate of COVID-19 deaths among African Americans and Hispanics in the United States does not match their population, according to the latest data from the CDC.

(Source: Reuters)

China introduced the first “virus passports” on Tuesday in a bid to boost international travel as the United States and the European Union consider similar programmes. The EU has said it plans to propose an EU-wide digital vaccination passport sometime this month.

From digital certificates to “health passports”, countries and airlines across the globe are hoping to relaunch travel by letting people prove their Covid-free status.

But with patchy vaccine access around the world and mounting concerns over data privacy, questions are swirling about how the measures will work in practice.

There’s an app for that?

Most programmes under development are geared towards facilitating travel and come in the form of smartphone apps with varying criteria for a clean bill of health.

Vaccine passports, for example, are a popular way to approach proof of immunity with jab rollouts underway across the globe.

There are also apps that accept positive antibody tests as proof of immunity for those who have had the virus and recovered.

But the World Health Organization has warned that there is no evidence to show that recovered Covid sufferers with antibodies are protected from a second infection.

French President Emmanuel Macron recently suggested yet another, more localised form of Covid-free permission slip: the so-called “health pass”.

This certification would only be valid within France’s borders but would allow a fully vaccinated person to, for example, eat in restaurants and attend certain events.

Where can I sign up?

This week China launched a digital health certificate for its 1.3 billion citizens that shows the holder’s vaccine status and virus test results.

Greece and Cyprus have vaccination passports specifically for travel to and from Israel, which has fully vaccinated 44 percent of its population.

Denmark and Sweden are also looking to launch health passports soon, with the European Union promising to propose a “green pass” to ease movement within the entire Union despite resistance from France and Germany.

Is it an official travel document?

No, and there is currently no effort underway to establish a required document to travel between countries.

The Chinese health passport is an attempt to make it easier for its citizens to travel abroad, but without recognition from other countries it is of little use.

For the moment, the applications are meant to facilitate various health checks still in place at different borders, with airlines among major proponents.

Through several of its member carriers, the International Air Transport Association has been offering a digital pass allowing passengers to easily prove their health status before boarding.

Can we make it official?

Making health passports stricter or requiring them for travel could invite legal challenges.

A major worry is that banning unvaccinated people from travelling would exacerbate inequality since access to jabs is far from universal.

There are also concerns over how applications would access users’ personal data.

In France, there is already an official database of citizens who have been vaccinated against Covid-19, approved by the country’s privacy watchdog.

However, the body has warned it will re-examine the issue should the database be put to use in the context of a health passport.

(AFP)

The Senate on Saturday passed President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief plan in a party-line vote after an all-night session that saw Democrats battling among themselves over jobless aid and the Republican minority failing in attempts to push through some three dozen amendments.

The final bill includes $400 billion in one-time payments of $1,400 to most Americans, $300 a week in extended jobless benefits for the 9.5 million people thrown out of work in the crisis, and $350 billion in aid to state and local governments that have seen the pandemic blow a hole in their budgets.

The Senate voted 50-49, with no Republicans voting in favor, on what would be one of the largest stimulus packages in U.S. history.

Several Republicans left the chamber immediately after the vote, while Senator Bernie Sanders fist-bumped Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

The fight is not over as the bill needs to return to the House of Representatives, which approved a slightly different version a week earlier.

The standoff within the Democratic party over the jobless benefits and the all-night effort by Republicans to amend a bill that polls show is popular with voters illustrated the difficulty that Biden will face in pushing other policies through a Congress that Democrats control by the narrowest of majorities. The bill is a priority for Biden as the country battles a pandemic that has killed more than 520,000 Americans.

The chamber set a record in its longest single vote in the modern era — 11 hours and 50 minutes — as Democrats negotiated a compromise on unemployment benefits to satisfy centrists like Senator Joe Manchin, who often walks a delicate tightrope as a Democrat representing a state, West Virginia, that overwhelmingly supported Republican former President Donald Trump in the November election.

The extended unemployment payments, which are to be paid out on top of state jobless benefits, proved to be the most contentious part of the bill. The House bill had set the supplemental benefit at $400 a week, but Senate Democrats finally agreed to knock that down to $300.

The House bill also featured a measure to more than double the minimum wage to $15 per hour, which the Senate also rejected.

Moderate Democrats feared that the higher jobless benefits and minimum wage hike would overheat the economy and hurt businesses in rural states.

Senate Democrats used a process called reconciliation to pass the measure with a simple majority rather than the 60 of 100 votes normally required under the chamber’s rules.

It was unclear whether Democrats will try to use that manoeuvre on other policy goals such as legislation dealing with climate change and immigration.

One Republican, Daniel Sullivan of Alaska, left Washington on Friday night for a family funeral, meaning that Democrats did not need Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote in the normally 50-50 chamber.

Republicans have broadly supported previous stimulus packages to fight the virus and revive the economy. But with Democrats in charge of the White House and both chambers ofCongress, they criticized  this bill as too expensive.

The country has yet to replace 9.5 million jobs lost since last year and the White House says it could take years to do so.

Washington got unexpected good news on Friday after data showed that U.S. employment surged in February, adding 379,000 jobs, significantly higher than many economists had expected.

Source: REUTERS

Cameroon, one of the countries in Africa worst hit by the coronavirus pandemic, is set to receive “very shortly” more than one million doses of Covid-19 vaccines, Prime Minister Joseph Dion Ngute said on Friday.

Pointing to “a deterioration in the epidemiological situation” in the country, Dion Ngute told state radio that “more than one million vaccine doses will be available very shortly”.

He did not specify which vaccines they were.

Dion Ngute called on the population to get inoculated, but said the vaccination programme would be on a voluntary basis.

“In the space of one week, more than 3,000 new cases have been recorded, bringing the total number of people who have tested positive to Covid-19 to 38,988,” he said.

Cameroon, with a population of 26 million, has registered 588 deaths from coronavirus so far.

Source: Urdupoint

President Joe Biden said Tuesday the United States would have sufficient vaccine supply by the end of May to inoculate the entire US adult population.

“We’re now on track to have enough vaccine supply for every adult in America by the end of May,” said Biden — who had previously forecast it would take until the end of July to amass that many doses.

“That’s progress. Important progress. But it is not enough to have the vaccine supply,” Biden said, stressing the work still ahead to administer the vaccines once acquired.

“We need vaccinators, people who put the shots in people’s arms, millions of Americans’ arms.”

“Great news, but stay vigilant,” Biden said. “It’s not over yet.”

Biden made the announcement during a short speech in which he confirmed a deal for pharma giant Merck to produce rival Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose Covid-19 vaccine to boost supply nationwide.

“This is the type of collaboration between companies we saw in World War II,” Biden said.

The US leader said that Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine manufacturing facilities “will now begin to operate 24/7.”

The J&J vaccine is the third to receive US regulatory approval for emergency use.

Unlike the two-dose Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the J&J vaccine requires just one dose, and is stored at fridge temperatures, offering logistical and practical advantages.

Johnson & Johnson has so far said it aims to deliver 100 million doses to the United States by June.

(AFP)

The death toll from Covid-19 in the US surpassed 500,000 on Monday with President Joe Biden set to memorialise the staggering number of lives lost despite a recent decline in coronavirus cases.

It has been nearly a year since the pandemic upended the country with dueling public health and economic crises.

“It’s nothing like we’ve ever been through in the last 102 years since the 1918 influenza pandemic … It really is a terrible situation that we’ve been through – and that we’re still going through,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, White House Covid-19 medical adviser and the nation’s top infectious disease official, told CNN’s “State of the Union” program on Sunday.

The White House said on Sunday it planned a memorial event in which Biden would deliver remarks.

A White House spokesman said the president along with first lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff would hold a moment of silence on Monday and there would be a candle-lighting ceremony at sundown.

Biden last month observed America’s Covid-19 deaths on the eve of his inauguration with a sundown ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial’s Reflecting Pool.

Biden will use “his own voice and platform to take a moment to remember the people whose lives have been lost, the families who are still suffering … at what is still a very difficult moment in this country”, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters on Friday.

Still at ‘very high’ level

More than 28 million Covid-19 cases have rocked the United States and 497,862 have died, even as daily average deaths and hospitalisations have fallen to the lowest levels since before the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. The virus took a full year off the average life expectancy in the United States, the biggest decline since World War Two.

While the decline “is really terrific … we are still at a level that’s very high,” Fauci said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program. “We want to get that baseline really, really, really low before we start thinking that we’re out of the woods.”

Fauci told CNN that Americans may still need masks in 2022 even as other measures to stop the virus’ spread become increasingly relaxed and more vaccines are administered, and they may also need a booster shot depending on how variants emerge.

Less than 15% of the US population has received at least one vaccine dose, with nearly 43 million getting at least one shot and nearly 18 million getting a second shot, US statistics show.

More localities are easing some restrictions, such as on indoor dining, and moving to reopen schools even as millions await their shots, sparking debate over the safety of teachers, students and others.

Financial pressures also continue to weigh even as economists express optimism for the year ahead. Congress is weighing Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, with the House of Representatives expected to vote on it this week and the Senate seeking to pass it before March 14.

(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS)