Russia is seeing a new covid surge. Workers in Moscow have been ordered to stay home for a week. There were 6,701 new cases there Saturday, the highest single-day total since December. Overall, Russia had 13,510 new cases, the highest since December. The government is urging people to get vaccinated. Fewer than 13 percent of the population has been vaccinated even though the Sputnik V vaccine has been available for months. Two-thirds of Russians say that they do not plan to get vaccinated. The reasons for this include not only distrust of authorities but also frequent state news reports describing coronavirus as almost defeated or not very dangerous.
The Copa America soccer tournament was scheduled to open with Venezuela against Brazil, the host country. One day before they were to play, at least 12 Venezuelan players and staff have tested positive. Another team, Bolivia, may have at least four people testing positive. Colombia vaccinated its team but not until Thursday, meaning there's no two-week post-injection period for the vaccine to really kick in.
Canada has rejected 300,000 doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine made in Baltimore. The US already rejected 60 million doses from the same facility. At the same time, though, the FDA will allow about 10 million other doses from the same facility to be distributed in the US or abroad with a warning that it cannot guarantee the manufacturer followed good manufacturing practices. I gotta ask, would you want one of these doses? I don't think I would.
Some quick notes from around the world. Saudi Arabia is limiting the hajj in July to 60,000 people living in Saudi. These people must have been vaccinated and be between 18 and 65 years old. Last year, only 1,000 people were allowed to attend. France extended the curfew for 5,000 fans Friday night so that they could stay at Roland Garros to watch the end of the French Open semi-final between Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. It was five sets well worth watching, as was today's five-set final. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, hospitals in the capital, Kinshasa, are overwhelmed. Friday yielded one of the highest daily new case totals there since the pandemic started. Finally, some countries, including Haiti and Tanzania, have given no vaccinations yet.
The US has given at least one dose of vaccine to over half its population. In India, with 100,000 new cases daily and 3,000 deaths, three percent of the population have been vaccinated. Brazil, with 11 percent vaccinated, is averaging 64,000 new cases and 1,800 deaths daily. Most African countries are unlikely to meet WHO's goal of having 10 percent of their population vaccinated by September.
Four times as many women as men suffer from long covid. Several other disease are more likely to affect women than men including chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and chronic Lyme disease, all often dismissed as hypochondria. Women's T cells are much more active early in an infection, possibly due to genetics. Women carry two copies of the X chromosome. Many genes that code for parts of the immune system are on X meaning that different immune responses are expressed more strongly in women. This may be why women are much less likely to die of covid than men. One theory on long covid is that fragments of the virus linger in remote pockets of the body for many months. This would explain why remnants of covid have been discovered in almost every tissue from brain to kidneys.
Finally, as covid cases decline in the US, so has testing, which will make it more difficult to identify outbreaks and track the spread of variants. And the G7 has renewed calls for investigation of the origins of the coronavirus.
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