Questões de Vestibular de Inglês

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Coronavirus is 10 times deadlier than swine flu: WHO

   COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus, is officially 10 times deadlier than the H1N1 swine flu strain that ripped across much of the world in 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed Monday.

   The only way to truly halt the spread is a vaccine, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a briefing from Geneva. More than 1.8 million people have been infected so far worldwide, and at least 115,000 have died.

   “Evidence from several countries is giving us a clearer picture about this virus, how it behaves, how to stop it and how to treat it,” Tedros said. “We know that COVID-19 spreads fast, and we know that it is deadly – 10 times deadlier than the 2009 flu pandemic.”

   While swine flu, as it was popularly known, killed 18,500 people, the true toll may have been closer to between 151,700 and 575,400, Agence France Presse (AFP) reported, citing The Lancet.

   “We know that the virus can spread more easily in crowded environments like nursing homes,” Tedros continued. “We know that early case finding, testing, isolating, caring for every case, and tracing every contact is essential for stopping transmission.”

   Pointing out that in some countries cases are doubling every three to four days, the disease accelerates fast but “decelerates much more slowly,” Tedros said. “In other words, the way down is much slower than the way up,” he said. “That means control measures must be lifted slowly and with control.”

   Tedros cautioned that restarting the shutdown portions of the economy in the U.S. and other countries whose leaders have been anxious to loosen restrictions could prove deadly. He also exhorted everyone around the world to work together, as several development ministers from the United Kingdom, Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Germany, Norway and Sweden had done in a recent joint editorial.

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The lessons Italy has learned about its COVID-19 outbreak could help the rest of the world

   Only carefully conducted epidemiological studies will bring to light exactly how and why COVID-19 took off in northern Italy with such speed. But in the midst of the emergency, experts say there are already lessons to be gleaned from Italy's fatal errors — and urgent messages for other parts of the world.

   "The biggest mistake we made was to admit patients infected with COVID-19 into hospitals throughout the region," said Carlo Borghetti, the vice- premier of Lombardy, an economically crucial region with a population of 10 million.

   "We should have immediately set up separate structures exclusively for people sick with coronavirus. I recommend the rest of the world do this, to not send COVID patients into health-care facilities that are still uninfected."

   Already, Italian cities in other regions are doing this, as well as field hospitals in Milan and Bergamo, Lombardy, which are almost complete.

   However, the virus was not only spread to "clean" — i.e. infection-free — hospitals by admitting positive patients. In early March, as the number of infected was doubling every few days, authorities allowed overwhelmed hospitals to transfer those who tested positive but weren't gravely ill into assistedliving facilities for the elderly.

   "It was like throwing a lit match onto a haystack," said Borghetti, who spoke out against the directive at the time. "Some facilities refused to take in the positive patients. For those that did [take them in], it was devastating."

   Along with the tragic misstep of putting infected people under the same roof as clusters of the most physically vulnerable, Borghetti and others point to a deeper structural factor that accelerated the outbreak in northern Italy: a highly centralized health-care system with large hospitals as its focus.

From: shorturl.at/cMRTW. Accesses on 04/09/2020

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   Boris Johnson should have taken his own medicine - The British prime minister tested positive for Covid-19 and went into isolation, but not before doing untold damage and setting a bad example.

   Boris Johnson, the prime minister of Britain, on Friday announced that he had tested positive for the coronavirus. In a brief video released on Twitter, he shared the basics: Having developed “mild symptoms — that’s to say, a temperature and a persistent cough” — he underwent testing and received the bad news. He will now be “selfisolating” until the illness has run its course.

   Looking mostly healthy, if typically disheveled, Mr. Johnson stressed that he would continue to “lead the national fightback” from his home via teleconferencing. He urged the British public to abide by the three-week lockdown put into place on Monday.

   The more effectively people stick with social distancing, the faster the nation and its National Health Service (N.H.S.) will “bounce back,” he said, before closing with the plea, “Stay at home, protect the N.H.S and save lives.” It was a responsible, no- drama message. If only the prime minister had displayed such leadership sooner, he — and who knows how many others — might have been spared this illness.

From: shorturl.at/dKV23. Accessed on 03/27/2020