Flood kills dozens in Morocco underground factory

 Rescue workers recover 24 bodies from Tangier property and rescue 10 survivors, state media reports.

At least 24 people have been killed after heavy rain caused a flood in an illegal underground textile workshop in a private house in Morocco, the state news agency reported.

Rescue workers recovered 24 bodies from the Tangier property and rescued 10 survivors who were taken to hospital, the MAP agency said on Monday, citing local authorities.

One government official at the scene said 25 people had died, 17 women and eight men, all aged between 20 and 40, according to a local journalist contacted by AFP news agency.

News footage from the site, broadcast on Moroccan television, showed emergency services carrying corpses out on stretchers under the eyes of clearly traumatized residents, as a stream of ambulances rushed to the scene.

Workers were saved thanks to a local resident who helped them out of the flooded basement with a rope, according to the journalist contacted by AFP, who spoke to witnesses.

Local media outlets indicated at least some of the victims may have been electrocuted as the incoming water interfered with power facilities, but officials had not confirmed this.

An inquiry has been launched to determine the cause of the accident and those responsible, the MAP agency added.

Morocco’s informal labour sector represents about a fifth of non-agricultural economic activity and labourers often work in unsafe conditions.

“How can dozens of workers enter the garage of a residential building for years… without the local authorities noticing?” asked local rights group the Northern Observatory for Human Rights.

Morocco registers some 2,000 deaths each year due to work-related accidents, “one of the highest figures” in the Middle East and North Africa, according to the Economic, Social and Environmental Council (CESE).

The North African country has experienced heavy rains in recent weeks, after a long period of drought.

In early January, the inclement weather caused several dilapidated buildings to collapse in Casablanca, the country’s economic capital, causing at least four deaths, according to local media.

Poorly maintained drainage systems often exacerbate flooding in cities.

Fifty people died in floods in 2014 caused by heavy rains in the south of Morocco.

SOURCE: NEWS AGENCIES

Oil prices shake off COVID blues as Brent hits $60

Oil prices rose to their highest levels in over a year on Monday, as output cuts and US stimulus hopes drive crude higher.

Oil prices rose on Monday to their highest in just over a year, with Brent nudging past $60 a barrel, boosted by supply cuts among key producers and hopes for further economic stimulus measures in the United States that can boost demand.

Global benchmark Brent crude was up 68 cents, or 1.2 percent, at $60.02 a barrel by 14:42 GMT, while US benchmark West Texas Intermediate rose 68 cents, or 1.2 percent, to $57.53 a barrel.

“Managing to breach $60 again feels like the market is finally resurfacing after the long struggle and [taking] a proper breath,” said Rystad Energy’s vice president for oil markets Paola Rodriguez-Masiu. “It offers a feeling of normality again.”

Both contracts were at their highest levels since January 2020.

“Oil prices are back close to pre-pandemic levels,” said Norbert Rucker, an analyst at Swiss bank Julius Baer.

 

“Support seems robust and the narrative sees the oil market swiftly burning through the remaining crisis surplus, potentially running into tightness later this year,” he added.The oil market continues to tighten, with Saudi Arabia pledging extra supply cuts in February and March following reductions by other members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies.

In a sign that prompt supplies are tightening, the six-month Brent spread hit a high of $2.54 on Monday, its widest since January last year.

OCBC economist Howie Lee said the world’s top exporter, Saudi Arabia, sent a “very bullish signal” last week when it kept monthly crude prices to Asia unchanged despite expectations for small cuts.

“I don’t think anybody dares to short the market when Saudi is like this,” he added.

A weaker dollar against most currencies on Monday also supported commodities, with dollar-denominated assets becoming more affordable to holders of other currencies.

Investors are also keeping a close watch on a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 aid package for the US that is expected to be passed by lawmakers as soon as this month.

And hopes that Iranian oil exports would soon return to the market have been dampened, further supporting oil prices.

President Joe Biden said the US would not lift sanctions on Iran simply to get it back to the negotiating table, while Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said all sanctions should be lifted first.

Stronger crude prices are meanwhile encouraging US producers to increase output.

The US oil rig count, an early indicator of future output, rose last week to its highest since May, according to energy services firm Baker Hughes Co.

SOURCE : REUTERS

Many die, hundreds missing as Himalayan glacier bursts in India

 Uttarakhand government officials say 26 bodies recovered while at least 171 people are still unaccounted for.

Indian rescuers are searching for more than 200 people missing in the Himalayas, including some trapped in a tunnel, after part of a glacier broke away, sending a torrent of water, rock and dust down a mountain valley.

Sunday’s violent surge below Nanda Devi, India’s second-highest peak, swept away the small Rishiganga hydroelectric project and damaged a bigger one further down the Dhauliganga river being built by state firm NTPC.

More than 2,000 members of the military, paramilitary groups and police have been taking part in search-and-rescue operations. Uttarakhand Director General of Police Ashok Kumar said late Monday that 26 bodies had been recovered.

Most of the missing were people working on the two projects, part of many the government has been building deep in the mountains of Uttarakhand state as part of a development push.

Videos on social media showed water surging through a small dam site, washing away construction equipment and bringing down small bridges.

“Everything was swept away, people, cattle and trees,” Sangram Singh Rawat, a former village council member of Raini, the site closest to the Rishiganga project, told local media.

Rescue squads were focused on drilling their way through a 2.5km (1.5 miles) tunnel at the Tapovan Vishnugad hydropower project site that NTPC was building 5km (3 miles) downstream and where about 35 workers were believed trapped.

“We are trying to break open the tunnel, it’s a long one, about 2.5km,” said Ashok Kumar, the state police chief. He said rescuers had gone 150 metres (490 yards) into the tunnel but debris and slush were slowing progress.

There had been no voice contact yet with anyone in the tunnel, another official said.  Heavy equipment has been employed and a canine squad flown to the site to locate survivors. On Sunday, 12 people were rescued from another, much smaller, tunnel.

Meanwhile, Al Jazeera’s Elizabeth Puranam in India reported that some rescue teams were out on the river hoping to find survivors.

“Our team is here searching. If we see anyone near the banks or in the river, our work is to recover them,” Manjari Negi of the State Disaster Response Force told Al Jazeera.

It was not immediately clear what caused the glacier to burst on a bright Sunday morning. Experts said it had snowed heavily last week in the Nanda Devi area and it was possible that some of the snow started melting and may have led to an avalanche.

Uttarakhand is prone to flash floods and landslides and the disaster prompted calls by environmental groups for a review of power projects in the ecologically sensitive mountains. In June 2013, record monsoon rains there caused devastating floods that killed close to 6,000 people.

A team of scientists was flown over the site of the latest accident on Monday to find out what exactly happened.

“It’s a very rare incident for a glacial burst to happen. Satellite and Google Earth images do not show a glacial lake near the region, but there’s a possibility that there may be a water pocket in the region,” said Mohd Farooq Azam, assistant professor of glaciology and hydrology at the Indian Institute of Technology in Indore.

Water pockets are lakes inside the glaciers, which can erupt, leading to an event like this. Environmental groups have blamed construction activity in the mountains.

Himanshu Thakkar, the coordinator of the South Asia Network of Dams, Rivers, and People, said that there had been violations of clear government recommendations against the use of explosives for construction purposes.

The latest accident had also raised questions about the safety of the dams.

“The dams are supposed to withstand much greater force. This was not a monsoon flood, it was much smaller,” said Thakkar.

SOURCE : AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES

New variants raise worry about COVID-19 virus reinfections

 Evidence is mounting that having COVID-19 may not protect against getting infected again with some of the new variants. People also can get second infections with earlier versions of the coronavirus if they mounted a weak defense the first time, new research suggests.

How long immunity lasts from natural infection is one of the big questions in the pandemic. Scientists still think reinfections are fairly rare and usually less serious than initial ones, but recent developments around the world have raised concerns.

In South Africa, a vaccine study found new infections with a variant in 2% of people who previously had an earlier version of the virus.

In Brazil, several similar cases were documented with a new variant there. Researchers are exploring whether reinfections help explain a recent surge in the city of Manaus, where three-fourths of residents were thought to have been previously infected.

In the United States, a study found that 10% of Marine recruits who had evidence of prior infection and repeatedly tested negative before starting basic training were later infected again. That work was done before the new variants began to spread, said one study leader, Dr. Stuart Sealfon of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

“Previous infection does not give you a free pass,” he said. “A substantial risk of reinfection remains.”

Reinfections pose a public health concern, not just a personal one. Even in cases where reinfection causes no symptoms or just mild ones, people might still spread the virus. That’s why health officials are urging vaccination as a longer-term solution and encouraging people to wear masks, keep physical distance and wash their hands frequently.

“It’s an incentive to do what we have been saying all along: to vaccinate as many people as we can and to do so as quickly as we can,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious disease expert.

“My looking at the data suggests … and I want to underline suggests … the protection induced by a vaccine may even be a little better” than natural infection, Fauci said.

Doctors in South Africa began to worry when they saw a surge of cases late last year in areas where blood tests suggested many people had already had the virus.

Until recently, all indications were “that previous infection confers protection for at least nine months,” so a second wave should have been “relatively subdued,” said Dr. Shabir Madhi of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

Scientists discovered a new version of the virus that’s more contagious and less susceptible to certain treatments. It now causes more than 90% of new cases in South Africa and has spread to 40 countries including the United States.

Madhi led a study testing Novavax’s vaccine and found it less effective against the new variant. The study also revealed that infections with the new variant were just as common among people who had COVID-19 as those who had not.

“What this basically tells us, unfortunately, is that past infection with early variants of the virus in South Africa does not protect” against the new one, he said.

In Brazil, a spike in hospitalizations in Manaus in January caused similar to worry and revealed a new variant that’s also more contagious and less vulnerable to some treatments.

“Reinfection could be one of the drivers of these cases,” said Dr. Ester Sabino of the University of Sao Paulo. She wrote an article in the journal Lancet on possible explanations. “We have not yet been able to define how frequently this is happening,” she said.

Democratic Republic of the Congo reports new Ebola case, months after end of its last outbreak

A woman has contracted Ebola and died in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), marking the first case since the Central African country ended its last outbreak last year, the health ministry said on Sunday.

The woman was found with symptoms of the virus in the town of Biena, near the city of Butembo, on February 1, and died in hospital on February 3. She was married to a man who had contracted the virus in a previous outbreak.

“The provincial response team is already hard at work. It will be supported by the national response team which will visit Butembo shortly,” the ministry said in a statement.

Health workers at an Ebola treatment center at Beni, the Democratic Republic of Congo, in July 2019.

The World Health Organization (WHO), which is helping response efforts, says it has tracked more than 70 contacts of the woman. The places she visited are also being disinfected.

It is not yet clear if this case marks the start of a new outbreak or if it’s a manageable flare-up from the last one. Samples from the woman have been sent to the capital Kinshasa to confirm the link to the previous outbreak.

“It is not unusual for sporadic cases to occur following a major outbreak,” the WHO said in a statement. It added that WHO epidemiologists are on the ground investigating, but that emergency response efforts had been hampered by ongoing insecurity in the region.

The emergence of more cases could complicate efforts to eradicate Covid-19, which has infected 23,600 people and killed 681 in the DRC. A coronavirus vaccination campaign is expected to start in the first half of this year.

However, an Ebola vaccine and a well-drilled health system means the country is better-placed than ever to deal with outbreaks, even in urban settings. Ebola has a much higher death rate than Covid-19, but unlike coronavirus it is not transmitted by asymptomatic carriers. And lessons learned from the fight with those multiple outbreaks have helped efforts to stop the spread of coronavirus, experts say.

A recurring problem

The DRC declared the end of its 10th Ebola outbreak last June, and of its 11th outbreak in a different region last November.

The Ebola virus disease can cause fever, headache, muscle pain, vomiting, and diarrhea, among other symptoms. It’s transmitted through contact either with infected animals or with the bodily fluids of infected people.

The DRC’s equatorial forests have been a breeding ground for Ebola. The disease killed nearly 2,300 people between 2018 and 2020, in the world’s second-largest Ebola outbreak on record.

The country has experienced 11 outbreaks since the virus was first discovered near the Ebola River in the DRC in 1976 — more than double any other country.

Furthermore, ongoing militia violence in the northeast, including attacks against health centers, have claimed the lives of residents and health workers. Nearly a million people were forced to flee their homes in 2019 alone, the UN agency said, making access to medical care and prevention even more difficult

British boy wakes from nearly year-long coma unaware of COVID pandemic

  

 A British teenager is slowly emerging from a coma nearly a year after being hit by a car, and he has no knowledge of the coronavirus pandemic even though he has caught the virus twice.

Joseph Flavill, 19, suffered a traumatic brain injury when he was hit by the car in the central English town of Burton-on-Trent on March 1 last year, about three weeks before a first national lockdown was imposed to curb the spread of the virus.

During that time his family has been largely unable to be near him and hold his hand due to coronavirus restrictions, mostly trying to communicate with him via video link.

“Recently Joseph has started to show small signs of recovery, which we are thrilled about… We know now he can hear us, he responds to small commands,” his aunt, Sally Flavill, told Reuters.

“When we say to him ‘Joseph, we can’t be with you, but you are safe, this is not going to be forever’, he understands, he hears you, he just can’t communicate,” she said, adding that he now signalled ‘yes’ with a blink and ‘no’ with two blinks.

Since Joseph’s accident, Britain has registered nearly four million COVID-19 cases, including more than 110,000 deaths, in a pandemic that has turned life upside down worldwide, shuttering schools, universities, shops and many other places.

“I don’t know how Joseph will ever understand our stories of this lockdown,” his aunt said, adding that he was still very ill and faced a “very, very long journey” back to some kind of normal life.

Joseph, who before the accident was a keen sportsman, is now receiving treatment at a care centre in Stoke-on-Trent, central England, and his family has started a fund-raising campaign www.josephsjourney.co.uk to help support his long-term recovery.

COVID-19: ANGOLA RECORDS 45 RECOVERIES, 24 NEW INFECTIONS

At least forty-five patient recovered and 24 new cases is the epidemiological balance reported in Angola in the last 24 hours

The health bulletin to which ANGOP had access indicates the recovery of 39 citizens in Lunda Sul, 5 in Moxico and 1 in Bié, whose ages range from 1 month to 72-year old.

According to the data, 15 new cases were diagnosed in Luanda, while the provinces of Zaire, Moxico, Bié and Huambo registered two cases each and 1 in Huila.

Of the new patients, whose ages range from 2 to 82-year old, being 18 men and 6 women.

The laboratories processed 537 samples on the basis of molecular biology (RT-PCR).

Angola has 20,086 positive cases, with 475 deaths, 18,540 recoveries and 1,071 active people. Of the active cases, seven are in critical condition, 11 severe, 81 moderate, 76 with mild symptoms and 896 asymptomatic.

At least 145 people are under institutional quarantine, 175 are hospitalized and 1,971 are under epidemiological surveillance.