North Korea has remained unresponsive for the second day to South Korea's attempt to offer dialogue on COVID-19 medical supplies and health care cooperation, a ministry official here said Tuesday.
The Ministry of Unification had sought to deliver a related fax message to the North on Monday through their liaison office. It is seeking to hold working-level consultations on the ongoing epidemic in the impoverished neighbor and assistance in medical supplies, including vaccines, masks and test kits.
The two Koreas held their routine phone call at 9 a.m. Tuesday, but Pyongyang has not expressed its intention to accept the message yet, according to the unification ministry official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
"As North Korea is aware of our stance on cooperation in disease prevention, our government will wait for the North's response without pressing it," he said, stressing that the North will need time to review whether to accept the message.
If it receives a response from Pyongyang, the ministry will take a "practical and realistic" approach to review various ways to hold the working-level consultations, including an online videoconference, the official said.
During a plenary session of the diplomacy and unification committee at the National Assembly later in the day, Unification Minister Kwon Young-se said that providing the North with assistance through international agencies can be an option.
Now that "there are numerous political considerations as to why the North has not accepted the message yet, we need to think of ways to provide assistance through international organizations or nongovernmental aid in case we end up not providing it directly," he said.
Been so crazy that I forgot I was just exposed for the 4th time last Friday. Our Doc felt like crap all day and I could hear him weezing coming up the stairs. He left saying I think I have Covid ... Got a quick test and we found out he tested positive before we went home that night. My Mom gets admitted again, same afternoon for a wound infection and My plate runneth over with everything else.
BTW, our doc was 4 X Vax, wore K95's and gloves. Changed gloves after every patient, as he should. Very careful.
So as I wrap up the day and get ready for work tomorrow, I just remembered, oh yeah, I was exposed. I have no idea what is going on at work since then. I'll find out when I show up in the morning. That will be 5 days.
hope all parties involved pull through
yes, it sounds like your plate is full
don't forget to stop and breathe
Been so crazy that I forgot I was just exposed for the 4th time last Friday. Our Doc felt like crap all day and I could hear him weezing coming up the stairs. He left saying I think I have Covid ... Got a quick test and we found out he tested positive before we went home that night. My Mom gets admitted again, same afternoon for a wound infection and My plate runneth over with everything else.
BTW, our doc was 4 X Vax, wore K95's and gloves. Changed gloves after every patient, as he should. Very careful.
So as I wrap up the day and get ready for work tomorrow, I just remembered, oh yeah, I was exposed. I have no idea what is going on at work since then. I'll find out when I show up in the morning. That will be 5 days.
Three nasal spritzes, now in advanced trials, could trigger stronger immunity than shots in the arm
To block infections entirely, scientists want to deliver inoculations to the site where the virus first makes contact: the nose. People could simply spray the vaccines up their nostrils at home, making the preparation much easier to administer. There are eight of these nasal vaccines in clinical development now and three in phase 3 clinical trials, where they are being tested in large groups of people. But making these vaccines has proven to be slow going because of the challenges of creating formulations for this unfamiliar route that are both safe and effective.
What could be most important about nasal vaccines is their ability to awaken a powerful bodily defender known as mucosal immunity, something largely untapped by the standard shots. The mucosal system relies on specialized cells and antibodies within the mucus-rich lining of the nose and other parts of our airways, as well as the gut. These elements move fast and arrive first, stopping the virus, SARS-CoV-2, before it can create a deep infection. âWe are dealing with a different threat than we were in 2020,â says Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University. âIf we want to contain the spread of the virus, the only way to do that is through mucosal immunity.â
Iwasaki is leading one of several research groups in the U.S. and elsewhere that are working on nasal vaccines. Some of the sprays encapsulate the coronavirusâ spike proteinsâthe prominent molecule that the virus uses to bind to human cellsâinto tiny droplets that can be puffed into the sinuses. Others add the gene for the spike to harmless versions of common viruses, such as adenoviruses, and use the defanged virus to deliver the gene into nasal tissue. Still others rely on synthetically bioengineered SARS-CoV-2 converted into a weakened form known as a live attenuated vaccine.
The more familiar shots in the arm create a type of immune response known as systemic immunity, which produces what are called immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies. They circulate throughout the bloodstream and patrol for the virus. Nasal sprays assemble a separate set of antibodies known as immunoglobulin A (IgA). These populate the spongy mucosal tissues of the nose, mouth and throat, where the COVID-causing coronavirus first lands. Iwasaki likens mucosal vaccines to putting a guard at the front door, as opposed to waiting until the invader is already inside to attack.
While conventional injectable vaccines are generally poor at inducing protective mucosal immunity, nasal vaccines have been shown to do a good job of triggering both mucosal and systemic responses. Last year researchers at the National Institutes of Health conducted a side-by-side comparison of intranasal and intramuscular delivery of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. They found that hamsters that had received the vaccine through the nose had higher levels of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in their blood than those who received it through the muscle. The University of Oxford is now testing intranasal vaccination in a phase 1 trial, which will assess the safety of the vaccine in a small number of people.
proletariat resistance in china? they're about to learn a hard lesson ccp style
translation:
The Shanghai government forced the peopleâs apartments to be used as isolation points, and suppressed them if they refused. Shanghai is now like a concentration camp in Xinjiang and a street of protest in Hong Kong.
The Final Pandemic Betrayal Millions of people are still mourning loved ones lost to COVID, their grief intensified, prolonged, and even denied by the politics of the pandemic.
The number of people who have died of COVID-19 in the United States has always been undercounted because such counts rely on often-inaccurate death certificates. But the total, as the CDC and other official sources suggest, will soon surpass 1 million. That numberâthe sum of a million individual tragediesâis almost too large to grasp, and only a few professions have borne visceral witness to the pandemicâs immense scale. Alanna Badgley has been an EMT since 2010, âand the number of people Iâve pronounced dead in the last two years has eclipsed that of the first 10,â she told me. Hari Close, a funeral director in Baltimore, told me that he cared for families who âwere burying three or four people weeks apart.â Maureen OâDonnell, an obituary writer at the Chicago Sun-Times, told me that she usually writes âabout people who had a beautiful arc to their life,â but during the pandemic, she has found herself writing about lives that were âcut short, like trees being cut down.â On average, each person who has died of COVID has done so roughlyadecade before their time.
In just two years, COVID has become the third most common cause of death in the U.S., which means that it is also the third leading cause of grief in the U.S. Each American who has died of COVID has left an average of nine close relatives bereaved, creating a community of grievers larger than the population of all but 11 states. Under normal circumstances, 10 percent of bereaved people would be expected to develop prolonged grief, which is unusually intense, incapacitating, and persistent. But for COVID grievers, that proportion may be even higher, because the pandemic has ticked off many risk factors.
Deaths from COVID have been unexpected, untimely, particularly painful, and, in many cases, preventable. The pandemic has replaced community with isolation, empathy with judgment, and opportunities for healing with relentless triggers. Some of these features accompany other causes of death, but COVID has woven them together and inflicted them at scale. In 1 million instants, the disease has torn wounds in 9 million worlds, while creating the perfect conditions for those wounds to fester. It has opened up private grief to public scrutiny, all while depriving grievers of the collective support they need to recover. The U.S. seems intent on brushing aside its losses in its desire to move past the crisis. But the grief of millions of people is not going away. âThereâs no end to the grief,â Lucy Esparza-Casarez told me. âIt changes. It morphs into something different. But itâs ongoing.â
