BOGOTA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Nearly 12 million women in poorer countries lost access to contraception in the pandemic, leading to 1.4 million unplanned pregnancies, the United Nations said on Thursday.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Roughly 4 in 10 Americans say they’re still feeling the financial impact of the loss of a job or income within their household as the economic recovery remains uneven one year into the coronavirus pandemic.
... People experiencing homelessness are especially vulnerable to disease and often live in close quarters. Reaching them for COVID-19 vaccination is crucial, public health officials say, yet also presents some unique challenges. Addresses and phone numbers change constantly. Few of the people affected have reliable Internet access.
Also, the pandemic put a halt to many mobile clinics and other outreach efforts to homeless encampments; in the meantime, patients scattered or avoided the clinic for fear of infection.
"If they're experiencing homelessness, all bets are off," says Kevin Lindamood, CEO of Health Care for the Homeless in Baltimore, a community health clinic that treats 10,000 patients a year and recently started patient vaccinations. "It's incredibly hard to reach people even in non-COVID times."
CAPE TOWN — A few months from now, a factory in South Africa is expected to begin churning out a million doses of Covid-19 vaccine each day in the African country hardest-hit by the pandemic.
But those vials will probably be shipped to a distribution center in Europe and then rushed to Western countries that have pre-ordered them by the hundreds of millions. None have been set aside for South Africa.
The country, which will help manufacture the vaccine and whose citizens have enrolled in clinical trials, does not expect to see the first trickle of doses until around the middle of next year. By then, the United States, Britain and Canada may already have vaccinated more than 100 million people.
The Trump administration has made pharmacies a centerpiece of the country’s historic coronavirus vaccination campaign — a decision that could bypass low-income and minority populations hardest hit by the pandemic.
JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Up to 150 million people could slip into extreme poverty, living on less than $1.90 a day, by late next year depending on how badly economies shrink during the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Bank said Wednesday in an outlook grimmer than before.
