Health24.com | Coronavirus morning update: Cape Town’s ‘hotspots’, grim projections, and how the virus exploits smokers

Posted on 22/05/2020 by Boris Clair

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SA

Cases update:

The latest number of confirmed cases is 19 137.

According to the latest update, 369 deaths have been recorded in the country.

So far, more than 525 000 tests have been conducted, with more than 18 550 new tests

Latest news:

Five areas within the Cape Town metro have been identified as “hotspots” by the Western Cape government.

Lit up with red dots on maps of suburbs, the province has revealed where clusters of Covid-19 cases are being detected in the metro.

In a digital press conference on Wednesday, the province said it believed that having 62.6% of the national number of cases simply means that community transmission “seeded” earlier in the Western Cape, and that other provinces could soon follow suit.

They had identified clusters of outbreaks as “hotspots” and have focused testing, screening, tracing, support, and prioritising treatment of the most vulnerable from these hotspots.

Projections by a consortium of experts advising the government have been clarified to show that 12 million to 13 million Covid-19 infections could have cumulatively occurred in the country by November, of which only roughly 3.7 million will be detected.

News24 reported on Wednesday that the South African Covid-19 Modelling Consortium projected a figure of between 1 and 1.2 million infections and that the model was not a crystal ball prediction, but subject to change as more data became available.

During a further media briefing by the consortium and other modelling groups on Thursday, in conjunction with Health Minister Zweli Mkhize, it has now been clarified that the one million infections are the expected number of active cases at the peak of the country’s infection curve at that specific moment in time.

Peak infection is expected to occur between early-July (pessimistic, 1.2 million cases) and mid-August (optimistic, 1 million cases), according to the consortium’s model.

The total number of detected cases would be around 3.7 million to 3.9 million cases by November, a report by the consortium published on the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD’s) website shows.

RED MORE | Covid-19 projections show 12 to 13 million infections by November

The cause of death of the baby born prematurely, and said to have died of Covid-19 after a two-day struggle for survival, will be investigated, the Western Cape government said on Thursday.

“We are saddened by this tragic loss of such a young life and send our deepest sympathies to the family at this time,” said Western Cape Premier Alan Winde.

“Western Cape doctors are currently investigating the case, to better understand all the details.”

Health Minister Zweli Mkhize announced the death of the baby on Wednesday evening.

Parliament is expediting the passing of the budget, which would allow Finance Minister Tito Mboweni to table an adjustment budget earlier than what normally would be the case.

The budget will outline the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The National Assembly Programming Committee agreed on Thursday to scrap the mini-plenaries in which each department’s budget is debated. This annual process usually takes a few weeks of the Parliamentary calendar.

Instead, there will be a 90-minute debate on the budget and an opportunity for parties to make declarations on their vote for each department.

The Gauteng Department of Education says it expects 300 000 Grade 7 and 12 pupils back when schools reopen on 1 June.

But, before the reopening can take place, health protocols will have to be met by all schools, Education MEC Panyaza Lesufi said.

Lesufi was speaking at the province’s weekly Coronavirus Command Council briefing on Thursday.

The MEC said, in order for schools to be ready, it will need to have all the necessary personal protective equipment (PPEs) for pupils, while classrooms need to meet the necessary standards for physical distancing.

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN THE REST OF THE WORLD

Cases update:

For the latest global data, follow this interactive map from Johns Hopkins University & Medicine.

Early on Friday morning, positive cases worldwide were more than 5.07 million, while deaths were more than 331 000.

The United States had the most cases in the world – more than 1.57 million, as well as the most deaths – more than 94 500.

Latest news:

Wuhan, China, has banned the eating of wild animals and farmers in neighbouring regions are being offered cash incentives to stop breeding exotic livestock.

Both steps are part of China’s ongoing efforts to stem the transmission of viruses from animals to humans.

On Wednesday, authorities in Wuhan, a city of 11 million in Hubei and the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, announced eating wild animals would be banned, according to CBS News.

Wuhan would become a “wildlife sanctuary,” officials said, with a citywide prohibition on hunting except for “scientific research, population regulation, monitoring of epidemic diseases and other special circumstances,” according to the Independent.

Before it was shuttered in January, merchants at Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market sold and slaughtered beavers, porcupines, and baby crocodiles, National Geographic reported.

LATEST RESEARCH

New research from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) suggests that cigarette smokers may be more susceptible to Covid-19.

The research suggests that smoking encourages the lungs to produce more ACE2 (angiotensin-converting enzyme 2), the protein that makes it so easy for the SARS-Cov-2 to adhere to and infect the cells in the body.

This research was discussed in a news release and published in the journal Developmental Cell on 16 May 2020.

One thing that the researchers from CSHL noticed is the dramatic differences in how patients with Covid-19 experience their symptoms. In most cases, people experience mild illness that can be treated, but some cases require hospitalisation and may even lead to death. They also noted three vulnerable groups who seem to be more prone to severe Covid-19: men, older adults and smokers.

The new coronavirus has mostly spared children, making them represent only a tiny fraction of confirmed Covid-19 cases, while largely affecting the elderly and those with pre-existing chronic conditions and weakened immune systems.

According to research, less than 2% of reported infections in China, Italy and the US have been in people under the age of 18. In South Africa, out of a total 312 deaths (recorded on 19 May), none occurred in anyone under the age of 20. Yet, researchers are still on the fence on whether children are less likely than adults to get infected and spread the virus, notes an article in the research journal Nature.

The World Health Organization (WHO) previously reported that although children seem to be mildly affected with no fatalities, experts still warn that children can contract the virus, and that this warrants serious consideration. The reason behind mild cases in children is not exactly clear, but experts agree that adults may be more susceptible to infection because of their age, since, with age, our immune systems become less effective.

A study, published in Science last month, examined data from Hunan and found that for every infected child under 15 years, there were close to three people infected between the ages of 20 and 64. Still, the existing data is less conclusive when it comes to teenagers aged 15 and older, says Munro, further indicating that their risk of infection is similar to that of adults.

A new modelling study by the Stop TB Partnership suggests that the longer countries spend under lockdown, the more tuberculosis (TB) cases and deaths the world could see.

While that report is a modelling study, with all the uncertainties that entails, there is now compelling evidence that South Africa’s TB response is already severely impacted. Spotlight studied the various new reports and asked a range of experts how the country’s TB response is holding up under lockdown.

A recent report from the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) details a significant decline in TB testing since the beginning of the lockdown. In the weeks prior to the lockdown, the NICD conducted an average of 47 520 TB tests per week. This dropped to an average of 24 574 tests per week during the lockdown – a 48% reduction.

The report concludes that the decrease is largely due to restrictions on movement and public transport, rather than the availability of healthcare services.

Obesity makes Covid-19 worse and may lead to deadly blood clots in the lungs, a new study finds.

The researchers said that obese patients with Covid-19 may have nearly three times the risk of developing what is known as a pulmonary embolism.

“Clinicians can utilise our findings to aid in determining which patients should have evaluation for pulmonary embolism with pulmonary CT angiography, as the symptoms for Covid-19 and pulmonary embolism overlap,” said lead researcher Dr Neo Poyiadi, from the department of diagnostic radiology at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.

“Early detection of pulmonary embolism can allow prompt treatment with anticoagulation and minimise clinical problems,” he said.

HEALTH TIPS (as recommended by the NICD and WHO)

• Maintain physical distancing – stay at least one metre away from somebody who is coughing or sneezing

• Practise frequent hand-washing, especially after direct contact with ill people or their environment

• Avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth, as your hands touch many surfaces and could potentially transfer the virus

• Practise respiratory hygiene – cover your mouth with your bent elbow or tissue when you cough or sneeze. Remember to dispose the tissue immediately after use.

READ MORE: Coronavirus 101

^{Image credit: Getty Images}

Health24.com | Why do some children get sicker from Covid-19 than others?

Posted on 22/05/2020 by Boris Clair

As schools in South Africa are set to reopen for Grades 7 and 12, there is a debate whether children are less at risk from Covid-19 than adults and those with underlying conditions.

While the general consensus has been that children are not as severely affected by Covid-19 as the elderly, more severe cases in children have been recorded throughout the world.

A new report from paediatric anaesthesiologists, infectious disease specialists and paediatricians at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore and Albert Einstein College of Medicine describes some of the most significant clinical characteristics of children hospitalised with severe Covid-19.

This report was published in the Journal of Pediatrics and compared the cases of 46 Covid-19 patients aged between one month and 21 years. These patients were either admitted to the general unit or the Pediatric Critical Care Unit (PCCU) at Montefiore.

Inflammation, obesity, asthma as factors

According to the study, the most common symptoms at the time of admission among these children were coughing and a fever. Those who required treatment in intensive care had higher levels of inflammation and required ventilation and breathing support.

About 80% of these children who required intensive care in the PCCU had Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) and of these, 50% required ventilators.

The researchers found that obesity and asthma were highly prevalent in this study, but there was no evidence that these conditions increased the likelihood of the patients needing higher intensity care, although the presence of obesity could explain the fact that they were sicker than other children.

“We know that in adults, obesity is a risk factor for more severe disease, however, surprisingly, our study found that children admitted to the intensive care unit did not have a higher prevalence of obesity than those on the general unit,” said lead author Prof Jerry Y. Chao in a press release.

According to the study, more than half the children had no known contact with another patient with Covid-19, which emphasised that the virus could be spread by asymptomatic people.

Children are not immune

It is important to note that the study had several limitations as it only analysed cases from one medical centre in an urban setting. As this is a new virus, paediatric data is still limited, and it was the goal of the authors to add to the data.

“Thankfully most children with Covid-19 fare well, and some do not have any symptoms at all, but this research is a sobering reminder that children are not immune to this virus and some do require a higher level of care,” stated senior author Prof Svanand S. Medar.

^{Image credit: Aditya Romansa, Unsplash}

Compiled by Marelize Wilke

Coronavirus: Immune clue sparks treatment hope

Posted on 22/05/2020 by Boris Clair

Better understanding of Covid-19’s impact on the immune system gives hope an existing drug might aid recovery.

Health24.com | Covid-19: Amid caution over use of hydroxychloroquine, experts warn of possible irreversible blindness

Posted on 22/05/2020 by Boris Clair

Hydroxychloroquine, a drug used to treat lupus and rheumatological disorder, has received a massive amount of publicity this year. The reason? Its role in the Covid-19 pandemic.

The drug made headlines after being proposed as a preventative measure (prophylaxis) against Covid-19, as reported in the New York Times.

While hydroxychloroquine has generally fewer side-effects than its cousin chloroquine, which was also researched as a possible Covid-19 treatment, it was generally declared as ineffective against the novel coronavirus, based on several studies.

But, besides the fact that the hydroxychloroquine hype may cause those who really need the medicine for lupus not being able to find it, the drug can also have irreversible side effects, as discussed in the journal Nature.

Hydroxychloroquine’s effect on your eyes

Toxic retinopathy is a condition where vision is impaired as a result of optic nerves being damaged by a toxin, such as found in some medications.

Several previous studies have acknowledged that long-term use of hydroxychloroquine may lead to this condition. But with the heightened interest in hydroxychloroquine during the Covid-19 pandemic, the European Reference Network for Rare Eye Disease became especially concerned about the drug’s role in toxic retinopathy, especially in patients who already have inherited retinal dystrophy (a condition where one or both eyes lose vision over time).

Retinopathy caused by hydroxychloroquine is also sometimes referred to as bulls-eye maculopathy, as the condition affecting the retina surrounding the macula resembles a target or “bulls-eye” ring.

At first, the central vision isn’t affected, but a ring of disrupted vision around the centre of the eye is experienced. As it progresses to the centre of the eye, the entire vision can be affected and vision loss is permanent in most cases.

Those who are chronically on hydroxychloroquine for anti-rheumatic purposes or the treatment of lupus are generally more at risk, and should undergo comprehensive eye exams more often.

But according to Nature, not only patients on chronic hydroxychloroquine are in danger, but also those who take it as self-medication without supervision by a medical professional.

If a person suffers from any comorbidity such as renal impairment or obesity, they are also more likely to be at risk of vision loss.

Other problems with hydroxychloroquine

Besides the retinal effect of hydroxychloroquine, there are many other systemic side-effects that can be experienced when this drug is taken for the wrong reasons and in the wrong quantities.

One of these is cardiac complications that can potentially be fatal. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States has also issued a statement that hydroxychloroquine should not be taken without supervision by your medical advisor, as this may lead to heart rhythm irregularities.

Earlier in April 2020, Health24 published an article debating the potential of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as a Covid-19 treatment.

Professor Wolfgang Preiser from the Division of Medical Virology at the University of Stellenbosch recently stated that the evidence of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine being beneficial in Covid-19 patients is minimal, and generally flawed, and that panic buying could prevent those who depend on the drug for existing conditions from getting it.

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Compiled by Marelize Wilke

Preventing ‘cytokine storm’ may ease severe COVID-19 symptoms

Posted on 21/05/2020 by Boris Clair

For some COVID-19 patients, the body’s immune response may be as destructive as the virus that causes the disease. The persistent high fevers, severe respiratory distress, and lung damage seen in some critically ill patients are all signs of an immune system in overdrive.

Now, a new clinical trial will test a treatment that targets this overactive immune response, says Howard Hughes Medical Investigator Bert Vogelstein. He and his team at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine are currently recruiting individuals for the trial, which includes patients ages 45 to 85 at the Johns Hopkins Hospital who have COVID-19 but who aren’t on a ventilator or in the ICU.

Their treatment, a common type of prescription drug called an alpha blocker, might break a cycle of hyperinflammation before it ramps up, their findings from mouse studies and a recent analysis of medical claims data suggest.

“The approach we’re advocating involves treating people who are at high risk early in the course of the disease, when you know they’re infected but before they have severe symptoms,” says Vogelstein. If the trial’s results suggest the drug is safe and effective against COVID-19, it could potentially help many people recover safely at home and lessen the strain on hospital resources, he says.

Runaway reaction

A hyperactive immune response isn’t unique to COVID-19. People with autoimmune diseases and cancer patients receiving immunotherapy can experience similar symptoms. These responses are referred to as macrophage activation syndrome, cytokine release syndrome — or simply “cytokine storms.”

When macrophages (and some other kinds of immune cells) detect virus particles, they send out alert messages by releasing various proteins known as cytokines. Those cytokines recruit other immune cells to the scene – an inflammatory response that, in moderation, helps the body fight off a virus. But macrophages can also release other signaling molecules, called catecholamines, that amplify this response further, triggering the release of more cytokines. The result is a runaway feedback loop, like a snowball getting bigger as it barrels down a hill.

“It seems that once this process starts, there’s this inability to properly switch it off,” says Maximilian Konig, a rheumatologist at Hopkins who is helping to coordinate the trial.

Before COVID-19 hit, Vogelstein’s team was already exploring ways to ease the hyperinflammatory immune response in cancer patients treated with immunotherapy. The researchers were interested in drugs called alpha blockers, which are widely prescribed for prostate conditions and high blood pressure — and also interfere with the cell signaling that triggers cytokine storms. In theory, alpha blockers might stop a cytokine storm before it starts.

Giving mice with bacterial infections an alpha blocker lessened cytokine storms and decreased deaths, Vogelstein’s team reported in the journal Nature in 2018. And, the researchers found, the treatment didn’t seem to harm other aspects of the immune response.

Staving off the storm

As the COVID-19 pandemic escalated in the United States over the past few months and severely ill patients presented with cytokine storm symptoms, the idea of testing alpha blockers in humans has become more urgent, Vogelstein’s team recently argued in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

To obtain approval for an alpha blocker clinical trial, Vogelstein’s team first surveyed medical claims data. They combed through records from people hospitalized for pneumonia and acute respiratory distress and analyzed whether patients’ outcomes were better if they had been taking alpha blockers for unrelated conditions. The team’s tentative conclusion: taking alpha blocker drugs correlated to a lower risk of death from respiratory distress.

On its own, that’s not strong enough evidence to prescribe the drug for a wholly new disease like COVID-19, says Susan Athey, an economist at Stanford University who collaborated with Vogelstein’s team on the claims analysis. But it helps bolster the case for the team’s clinical trial.

In the trial, COVID-19 patients will take gradually increasing doses of an alpha blocker called prazosin, sold under the brand name Minipress, over six days, says Chetan Bettegowda, a neurosurgeon at Hopkins who is helping to design and run the trials. Then, the team will evaluate whether people who received this treatment had a lower ICU admission rate or ventilator use than patients who received the standard treatment. They’ll follow each patient for 60 days, but preliminary data from the first patients could be available within weeks to months, Bettegowda says.

If the trial’s results suggest alpha blockers are safe and effective, the team hopes to run a second trial with patients who have been diagnosed with COVID-19 but are not yet hospitalized. They’re also encouraging colleagues at other hospitals to join their clinical trial efforts, to gather patient data more quickly.

This treatment, if it works, would be a secondary form of prevention, Vogelstein says, mitigating symptoms before they become severe, rather than stopping infection in the first place. “Eventually, hopefully, a vaccine will be produced, and that will be the essence of prevention,” he says. “But until vaccines are available, secondary prevention makes a lot of sense.”

Capturing the coordinated dance between electrons and nuclei in a light-excited molecule

Posted on 21/05/2020 by Boris Clair

Using a high-speed “electron camera” at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, scientists have simultaneously captured the movements of electrons and nuclei in a molecule after it was excited with light. This marks the first time this has been done with ultrafast electron diffraction, which scatters a powerful beam of electrons off materials to pick up tiny molecular motions.

“In this research, we show that with ultrafast electron diffraction, it’s possible to follow electronic and nuclear changes while naturally disentangling the two components,” says Todd Martinez, a Stanford chemistry professor and Stanford PULSE Institute researcher involved in the experiment. “This is the first time that we’ve been able to directly see both the detailed positions of the atoms and the electronic information at the same time.”

The technique could allow researchers to get a more accurate picture of how molecules behave while measuring aspects of electronic behaviors that are at the heart of quantum chemistry simulations, providing a new foundation for future theoretical and computational methods. The team published their findings today in Science.

Skeletons and glue

In previous research, SLAC’s instrument for ultrafast electron diffraction, MeV-UED, allowed researchers to create high-definition “movies” of molecules at a crossroads and structural changes that occur when ring-shaped molecules break open in response to light. But until now, the instrument was not sensitive to electronic changes in molecules.

“In the past, we were able to track atomic motions as they happened,” says lead author Jie Yang, a scientist at SLAC’s Accelerator Directorate and the Stanford PULSE Institute. “But if you look closer, you’ll see that the nuclei and electrons that make up atoms also have specific roles to play. The nuclei make up the skeleton of the molecule while the electrons are the glue that holds the skeleton together.”

Freezing ultrafast motions

In these experiments, a team led by researchers from SLAC and Stanford University was studying pyridine, which belongs to a class of ring-shaped molecules that are central to light-driven processes such as UV-induced DNA damage and repair, photosynthesis and solar energy conversion. Because molecules absorb light almost instantaneously, these reactions are extremely fast and difficult to study. Ultra-high-speed cameras like MeV-UED can “freeze” motions occurring within femtoseconds, or millionths of a billionth of a second, to allow researchers to follow changes as they occur.

First, the researchers flashed laser light into a gas of pyridine molecules. Next, they blasted the excited molecules with a short pulse of high-energy electrons, generating snapshots of their rapidly rearranging electrons and atomic nuclei that can be strung together into a stop-motion movie of the light-induced structural changes in the sample.

A clean separation

The team found that elastic scattering signals, produced when electrons diffract off a pyridine molecule without absorbing energy, encoded information about the nuclear behavior of the molecules, while inelastic scattering signals, produced when electrons exchange energy with the molecule, contained information about electronic changes. Electrons from these two types of scattering emerged at different angles, allowing researchers to cleanly separate the two signals and directly observe what the molecule’s electrons and nuclei were doing at the same time.

“Both of these observations agree almost precisely with a simulation that is designed to take into account all possible reaction channels,” says co-author Xiaolei Zhu, who was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford at the time of this experiment. “This provides us with an exceptionally clear view of the interplay between electronic and nuclear changes.”

Complementary techniques

The scientists believe this method will supplement the range of structural information collected through X-ray diffraction and other techniques at instruments such as SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray laser, which is able to measure precise details of the chemical dynamics on the shortest timescales, as recently reported for another light-induced chemical reaction.

“We’re seeing that MeV-UED is becoming more and more of a tool that complements other techniques,” says co-author and SLAC scientist Thomas Wolf. “The fact that we can get electronic and nuclear structures in the same data set, measured together yet observed separately, will provide new opportunities to combine what we learn with knowledge from other experiments.”

‘A new way of looking at things’

In the future, this technique could allow scientists to follow ultrafast photochemical processes where the timing of electronic and nuclear changes is crucial to the outcome of the reaction.

“This really opens up a new way of looking at things with ultrafast electron diffraction,” says co-author Xijie Wang, director of the MeV-UED instrument. “We’re always trying to find out how the electrons and the nuclei actually interact to make these processes so fast. This technique allows us to distinguish which comes first — the change to the electrons or the change in the nuclei. Once you get a complete picture of how these changes play out, you can start to predict and control photochemical reactions.”

MeV-UED is an instrument of LCLS, a DOE Office of Science user facility. The research team also included scientists from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Stony Brook University in New York and the University of Potsdam in Germany. This work was supported by the Office of Science.

Coronavirus: Virus test with 20-minute results being trialled

Posted on 21/05/2020 by Boris Clair

Ten million antibody tests will also start being rolled out next week, Health Secretary Matt Hancock says.

Tracking the tinderbox: Stanford scientists map wildfire fuel moisture across western US

Posted on 21/05/2020 by Boris Clair

As California and the American West head into fire season amid the coronavirus pandemic, scientists are harnessing artificial intelligence and new satellite data to help predict blazes across the region.

Anticipating where a fire is likely to ignite and how it might spread requires information about how much burnable plant material exists on the landscape and its dryness. Yet this information is surprisingly difficult to gather at the scale and speed necessary to aid wildfire management.

Now, a team of experts in hydrology, remote sensing and environmental engineering have developed a deep-learning model that maps fuel moisture levels in fine detail across 12 western states, from Colorado, Montana, Texas and Wyoming to the Pacific Coast.

The researchers describe their technique in the August 2020 issue of Remote Sensing of Environment. According to the senior author of the paper, Stanford University ecohydrologist Alexandra Konings, the new dataset produced by the model could “massively improve fire studies.”

According to the paper’s lead author, Krishna Rao, a PhD student in Earth system science at Stanford, the model needs more testing to figure into fire management decisions that put lives and homes on the line. But it’s already illuminating previously invisible patterns. Just being able to see forest dryness unfold pixel by pixel over time, he said, can help reveal areas at greatest risk and “chart out candidate locations for prescribed burns.”

The work comes at a time of growing urgency for this kind of insight, as climate change extends and intensifies the wildfire season — and as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic complicates efforts to prevent large fires through controlled burns, prepare for mass evacuations and mobilize first responders.

Getting a read on parched landscapes

Fire agencies today typically gauge the amount of dried-out, flammable vegetation in an area based on samples from a small number of trees. Researchers chop and weigh tree branches, dry them out in an oven and then weigh them again. “You look at how much mass was lost in the oven, and that’s all the water that was in there,” said Konings, an assistant professor of Earth system science in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). “That’s obviously really laborious, and you can only do that in a couple of different places, for only some of the species in a landscape.”

The U.S. Forest Service painstakingly collects this plant water content data at hundreds of sites nationwide and adds them to the National Fuel Moisture Database, which has amassed some 200,000 such measurements since the 1970s. Known as live fuel moisture content, the metric is well established as a factor that influences wildfire risk. Yet little is known about how it varies over time from one plant to another — or from one ecosystem to another.

For decades, scientists have estimated fuel moisture content indirectly, from informed but unproven guesses about relationships between temperature, precipitation, water in dead plants and the dryness of living ones. According to Rao, “Now, we are in a position where we can go back and test what we’ve been assuming for so long — the link between weather and live fuel moisture — in different ecosystems of the western United States.”

AI with a human assist

The new model uses what’s called a recurrent neural network, an artificial intelligence system that can learn to recognize patterns in vast mountains of data. The scientists trained their model using field data from the National Fuel Moisture Database, then put it to work estimating fuel moisture from two types of measurements collected by spaceborne sensors. One involves measurements of visible light bouncing off Earth. The other, known as synthetic aperture radar (SAR), measures the return of microwave radar signals, which can penetrate through leafy branches all the way to the ground surface.

“One of our big breakthroughs was to look at a newer set of satellites that are using much longer wavelengths, which allows the observations to be sensitive to water much deeper into the forest canopy and be directly representative of the fuel moisture content,” said Konings, who is also a center fellow, by courtesy, at Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

To train and validate the model, the researchers fed it three years of data for 239 sites across the American west starting in 2015, when SAR data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellites became available. They checked its fuel moisture predictions in six common types of land cover, including broadleaf deciduous forests, needleleaf evergreen forests, shrublands, grasslands and sparse vegetation, and found they were most accurate — meaning the AI predictions most closely matched field measurements in the National Fuel Moisture Database — in shrublands.

Rich with aromatic herbs like rosemary and oregano, and often marked by short trees and steep, rocky slopes, shrublands occupy as much as 45 percent of the American West. They’re not only the region’s biggest ecosystem, Rao said, “they are also extremely susceptible to frequent fires since they grow back rapidly.” In California, fires whipped to enormous size by Santa Ana winds burn in a type of shrubland known as chaparral. “This has led fire agencies to monitor them intensively,” he said.

The model’s estimates feed into an interactive map that fire agencies may eventually be able to use to identify patterns and prioritize control measures. For now, the map offers a dive through history, showing fuel moisture content from 2016 to 2019, but the same method could be used to display current estimates. “Creating these maps was the first step in understanding how this new fuel moisture data might affect fire risk and predictions,” Konings said. “Now we’re trying to really pin down the best ways to use it for improved fire prediction.”

Your Work Attitude

Posted on 21/05/2020 by Boris Clair

This is one of my favorite quotes from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (in the passage on work):

Work is love made visible.

And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.

And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine.

And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.

Consider that the attitude and energy you bring to your work can enhance or poison your output and the ripples you’re creating.

Sometimes it’s easy to discount this for our own work, so flip it around and look at it from the other side.

Do you care about the attitude and energy other people invest in their work? Does that make any difference to you?

Would you prefer to buy products and services from people who enjoy and appreciate their work, who care about what they’re creating, who find the work purposeful and fulfilling, and who want customers to have good experiences?

Or is it all the same to you if people grudgingly show up to jobs they hate, working under poor conditions with bosses who are mean to them, feeling stressed and anxious while creating products and providing services they really don’t care about, so you can have that added value in your life?

If you see these two scenarios as meaningfully different when you’re on the customer side, how can you not see them as meaningfully different when you’re on the creator side?

Do you believe that your attitude affects (or infects) your impact?

Health24.com | Covid-19: Life under lockdown for people living with disabilities

Posted on 21/05/2020 by Boris Clair

Jemima Maotoe

For Jemima Maotoe, Covid-19 poses a major disruption stemming from the ignorance and fear of others. When the 44-year-old grandmother and administration specialist uses public transport, she says fellow passengers are loath to help her for fear of contracting the virus by touching her wheelchair.

“My mobility has been really affected by coronavirus,” says Maotoe. “People are not well informed. It is so hard to convey to people that they won’t get corona from touching my wheelchair. I show them I am sanitising my wheels, my chair. You know, when I use taxis I depend on people, fellow passengers or the driver to upload and offload me. But they don’t want to touch my chair. Even in the shop, I see fear in people’s eyes.”

Maotoe was born without lower limbs in Irene, Pretoria. She attended Tlamelang Special School in Mafikeng and Filadelfia Secondary School in Soshanguve, north of Pretoria. From 2014 until 2019, she served as North Gauteng facilitator of QASA (QuadPara Association of South Africa), a non-profit organisation that lobbies for people with mobility impairments.

In June last year, Maotoe started an internship with engineering automation company ICR in Midrand, working as an administration specialist. “Mainly I was processing e-bay logistics,” she says. “It was nice working in a different field, very exciting.”

When lockdown kicked in, Maotoe had to stop working. She left the room she rented in Thembisa near her office to move back in with her family in Soshanguve. During lockdown she is still earning her monthly salary of R4 000. Maotoe is the sole breadwinner for a household of six that includes her 92-year-old mother, her three children, aged 29, 23 and seven, and her two granddaughters, aged seven and three. She is busy divorcing her husband, who she says deserted her in 2011 without paying maintenance.

While Maotoe is speaking to Spotlight over the phone, children’s voices sound shrill in the background. She excuses herself, admonishing them in a hushed tone.

“Lockdown has been difficult,” she continues. “I’m the sole breadwinner. My mum is old and frail. I need to look after her. We are home-schooling the little ones. I mean, it’s not easy. School at home is not the same. But we’re trying our best to teach them.”

Who goes shopping for the household? “Normally I go shopping with my second daughter,” says Maotoe. “We stay next to the plaza. People with disabilities go to the front of the queue, so it is easier.” She has a motorised wheelchair, which was donated to her.

Meanwhile, Covid-19 safeguarding is posing a major financial strain. “Most people buy one bottle of hand sanitiser, that will last them so long,” says Maotoe. “We have to buy twice as much to sanitise my chair, too. It is so much responsibility. We’ve had to adapt our lifestyle quickly.”

Despite the challenges, Maotoe is grateful. “I made a choice a long time ago not to let my disability get in my way,” she says. “I had a lot of challenges growing up. These negative things were hindering me from reaching the level I wanted to reach in life. So, I learned to live with what I have. My children, well their love carries me. They see me not as someone with a disability, but as their mother. A lot of people with disabilities are rejected. The world out there is cruel. I had to raise my children to be strong. They would come back from school crying, because children had taunted them about having a disabled mother. Yes, my children never rejected or mocked me, and for that I am so grateful.”

For the most part, Maotoe considers Covid-19 a big setback in her progress to live a productive life. “So for me, I see corona as a setback for being integrated in society. People should be more aware, they should be more open to being educated. I really rely on public transport, on drivers and passengers assisting me in uploading and offloading.”

She hopes to return to her job once Gauteng reaches lockdown level two.

“I am still keeping my room in Thembisa,” she says. “With the hope that I will be going back to work. For it is hard to find accommodation, especially if you are a wheelchair user. I struggled to find a place until a kind lady gave me this room. It is expensive to keep paying, but ICR is giving me an accommodation allowance, so I can afford it. My company promised I will go back to work, once this settles.”

Simon Ndaba

Simon Ndaba was born deaf in the Free State town of Harrismith. He attended Bartimea School for the Deaf and Blind in Thaba Nchu. Then he studied art at Motheo College in Bloemfontein, completing his N6 certification in painting, drawing, ceramics, computer graphics, and jewellery. After working as a South African Sign Language (SASL) book illustrator at the University of the Free State, his journey led to the Boland town of Worcester, where he has been working as an SASL trainer at the National Institute of the Deaf (NID) for the past six years.

Ndaba is in lockdown with his fiancée and nine-month-old son in the staff quarters on the NID campus. Responding to questions from Spotlight, the 37-year-old art enthusiast relays how Covid-19 is hampering communication for those hard of hearing.

“Personally, communication is an even greater challenge,” he says. “Many businesses resort to phone calls only, and upon visiting open shops, it is impossible to lip-read when people wear masks. Masks are a great barrier to communication for most deaf people. To address the challenge of communication, I find my only recourse is to use a writing pad and to write to and fro,” he says.

“If people wear see-through masks, this eliminates the problem. Sign language interpreters are invaluable in any circumstance where communication is vital, such as a doctor’s appointment.”

Spotlight contacted Ndaba via Hannerie Swart, NID development manager, who relayed emailed questions to him.

Swart explained that the interview had been a challenge, as Ndaba’s first language is SASL, and not written English. “He struggles to read and communicate in written English,” she says. “Deaf children do not have the benefit of natural and timely language acquisition, therefore their language and vocabulary skills are impacted. Thus, the reason for his short answers.”

Swart noted the challenges posed by medical consultations for hard-of-hearing people.

“The medical challenges deaf people experience are usually due to the fact that hospitals, doctors and nurses don’t know or understand sign language. The deaf patient therefore needs to rely on an interpreter which isn’t always possible due to availability or cost. It’s also a big violation of their privacy and perhaps even embarrassing when they need to convey medical or confidential information to an interpreter. They also can’t make a doctor’s appointment without having to ask someone to call on their behalf. Hospitals and doctor’s rooms usually aren’t deaf-friendly. They call patients on an intercom and sometimes forget the patient is deaf. We’ve had cases where a deaf person had missed his appointment, because they called him on the intercom even though his file indicated he was deaf.”

Ndaba recounts trouble-shooting during a visit to the bank. “I needed to go to the bank to find out about payments. I was told that I needed to use the phone to call some office, but, of course, I couldn’t. The bank personnel had to assist. This is a challenge regardless of lockdown levels.”

At the NID campus, translucent face shields are worn instead of masks, allowing reading of people’s lips and facial expressions.

Elaborating on his job at NID, Ndaba says: “I teach staff at the National Institute for the Deaf. I am also involved with material development (creating sign language DVDs, posters, and training documents). South African Sign Language is a marginalised language in South Africa and has not received much support from Government in the past.”

Meanwhile, a Muizenberg man, inspired by his cousin who is hard of hearing, is making fashionable lip-reading masks at R85 each.

Roy Abbott

Roy Abbott of Goodwood in Cape Town heads up the Tygerberg Association of the Blind. His staff of eight weave and distribute wicker baskets, linen chests and baby cradles. Now, under lockdown, Abbott has had to impose a 50% salary cut to all his staff.

“Including me, we have eight people,” says Abbott, speaking to Spotlight via a video call. “Five of us are blind. We have two blind ladies who work from home. So, my driver will take the work to them and collect it from them again. Obviously, our driver is not blind, neither is the carpenter. Then we have a staff member who had polio; he does all the repairs.”

Abbott says he is dipping into the organisation’s reserves to pay salaries and that these savings will run out in June. “Like everybody, we’ve had a loss of income,” he says. “By June we will have to make another plan.”

Abbott says so far, all his staff are safe under lockdown.

“I spoke to one of my staff members in Delft this morning. He lives alone. All he can do is listen to the television. Fortunately for him, the shopping centre – Shoprite – is not too far from where he lives. So, what he does is once or twice a week he takes his basket and his long cane. And then he goes out there and the assistants help him. All the people there know him so they look out for him.

“Sometimes my employees use Dial-a-Ride, for trips to the shopping centre or the clinic in Parow. I don’t know anyone who has contracted the virus. I tell my staff all the time, please rather stay at home. We’re all in this situation together.”

Despite responsibility weighing heavy on his shoulders, the 69-year-old businessman’s face is jovial. He is in lockdown with his wife, their son and his wife and their seven-week-old baby. During the interview, Abbott angles his phone to show his guide dog Georgia, a golden Labrador, at his feet.

“Yes, meet Georgia,” he says. “This dog is one of the family; she’s spoiled. Georgia is old, she is eleven now. The problem is she was going to retire this year, but because of the lockdown she could not. But she is still fit. She walks fast. In the mornings during the exercise window I take her for a walk – 2.2 kilometres – with my poor wife running after us, trying to keep up. She still works extremely hard and well.”

Abbott was born with a rare genetic disorder called retinitis pigmentosa, which causes a breakdown and loss of cells in the eye. Formerly a civil technician specialising in concrete structures such as bridges, dwindling eyesight forced his retirement in 1993.

“Both my parents carried the gene,” he says. “Both me and my sister inherited it. As the years went by, my eyes got worse. Then in 2002, I was completely blind.” That’s when he founded the Tygerberg Association of the Blind.

When Spotlight relays a mobile number to Abbott, he memorises it within moments. “That’s the thing with blind people,” he says. “We learn to have good memories.”

Given business constraints, how does he keep his spirits up?

“There’s this story,” says Abbott. “Of a man who was complaining I have no shoes. Then he went around the corner where he found a man with no feet. See, there is no point in complaining. Sure, we have little income. But I have a roof over my head. I can listen to books and take my dog for walks.”

This article was produced by SPOTLIGHT – health journalism in the public interest. SIGN UP for our newsletter.

^{Image credit: Photo supplied}

Biénne Huisman

WellnessMaster

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