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Jeff Bezos Says "Heartbroken" Over Tornado Deaths At US Amazon Warehouse

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<div class="ins_instory_dv_cont"><img alt="Jeff Bezos Says 'Heartbroken' Over Tornado Deaths At US Amazon Warehouse" src="https://c.ndtvimg.com/2021-12/nst266fg_jeff-bezos_625x300_12_December_21.jpg" title="Jeff Bezos Says 'Heartbroken' Over Tornado Deaths At US Amazon Warehouse" /></div>
Amazon chief Jeff Bezos said the news from Edwardsville is tragic. (File)
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Washington:
Amazon chief Jeff Bezos said he was "heartbroken" Saturday after at least six people were killed at an Amazon warehouse in the US state of Illinois when it was <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/us-tornados-kentucky-more-than-70-dead-as-tornadoes-flatten-city-blocks-in-5-us-states-2647099" target="_self">struck by a tornado.</a>
"The news from Edwardsville is tragic," Bezos tweeted about the town where the facility was located.
"We're heartbroken over the loss of our teammates there, and our thoughts and prayers are with their families and loved ones."
The warehouse was struck by a series of tornadoes that ripped across six US states, killing more than 80 people in total in what President Joe Biden said was likely to be "one of the largest" storm outbreaks in history.
Up to 100 Amazon employees working a night shift ahead of Christmas are believed to have been trapped when the warehouse collapsed, and it is not clear how many may still be trapped.
Earlier Saturday, Edwardsville fire chief James Whiteford told reporters that 45 people made it out of the building safely, one had to be airlifted to hospital for treatment, and at least six had died.
But he said the operation had turned from rescue to focus "only on recovery," fueling fears the toll could yet rise.
"All of Edwardsville should know that the Amazon team is committed to supporting them and will be by their side through this crisis," Bezos tweeted.
"We extend our fullest gratitude to all the incredible first responders who have worked so tirelessly at the site."
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
 
 
source <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/jeff-bezos-says-heartbroken-over-tornado-deaths-at-us-amazon-warehouse-2647343">https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/jeff-bezos-says-heartbroken-over-tornado-deaths-at-us-amazon-warehouse-2647343</a>

news world Jeff Bezos Says "Heartbroken" Over Tornado Deaths At US Amazon Warehouse

Amazon chief Jeff Bezos said the news from Edwardsville is tragic. (File) Washington: Amazon chief Jeff Bezos said he was "heartbr...

"Nobody Saw Them Crash": YouTuber Finds Car Of Teens Missing Since 2000 In US

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<div class="ins_instory_dv_cont"><img alt="'Nobody Saw Them Crash': YouTuber Finds Car Of Teens Missing Since 2000 In US" src="https://c.ndtvimg.com/2021-12/fddkfbeg_-submerged-car_625x300_12_December_21.jpg" title="'Nobody Saw Them Crash': YouTuber Finds Car Of Teens Missing Since 2000 In US" /></div>
A car reportedly connected to a 21-year-old case of missing teens found in Tennessee.
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Washington:
A scuba diver wiped away the algae on a submerged car's license plate and exclaimed: "It's them!" That discovery of two long-missing American teens' apparent remains was the latest tragic find for a subculture of YouTube sleuths.
Among the platform's viral hits scoring billions of views is a niche of YouTubers who use sonar devices to search waterways for vehicles linked to US missing persons cases -- and the bones they may hold.
That formula was central to revelations this week in a 21-year-old mystery in the southern state of Tennessee, one of a series of cold cases unravelled with the revenue generated by the clicks that these operations' clips generate.
Experts note the larger boom in internet sleuthing has had a mixed impact, with high-profile misfires and the temptation for viral content, but in some key instances the crowd's contribution has been critical.
Teens Erin Foster and Jeremy Bechtel disappeared in April 2000 from their small central Tennessee town of Sparta, leaving family and friends to hope they had just run away to start a new life.
But 42-year-old Jeremy Sides -- a scuba diver whose YouTube channel "Exploring with Nug" focuses on finding missing property and people -- posted a video on December 4 that has since been viewed some 1.4 millions times and which seems to have resolved the mystery.
"Once I confirmed it was the tag (license plate)...it was just a wave: This is going to be over, they get to go home, their families have answers," he told AFP of his dive to find the car in Tennessee's Calfkiller River.
This was the second time in about a month that Sides had been instrumental in seemingly closing a case -- the first was finding a car linked to a woman missing since 2005 in the Tennessee town of Oakridge.
Authorities in Sparta were on Friday still working to confirm the identities of the remains found by Sides, but local police said they believed they belonged to the missing teens.
"Nobody saw them crash"
Another group of YouTubers, Chaos Divers, said they have located the remains of seven missing people in the past two months in an intense push that has seen them travel some 8,000 miles (nearly 12,900 kilometers) in the United States.
The work unleashes intense emotions, especially breaking the news to families who lived in the limbo of not knowing what happened to their sons, wives or brothers.
"It's a heartbreaking, gut-wrenching feeling that you never want to give up. Because you are telling them and you're watching the tears roll down their face, but you're watching this weight lift off their shoulders," said 38-year-old Lindsay Bussick, who is Chaos Divers founder Jacob Grubbs' partner in the operation.
Illinois-residents Bussick and Grubbs said their work was not simply an effort to get the clicks on YouTube that determine how much of a financial return a video may generate.
"I'm sorry that I have to bring this content like this to be able to help defend the next family," said Grubbs, a 38-year-old former coal miner.
"But this is a way that we have figured out to be able to fund the help for another family," he added.
Adam Scott Wandt, an assistant professor of public policy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, said untrained "true-crime armchair sleuths" and their efforts have become a cultural phenomenon in the past decade.
But the results have varied greatly. He noted that some people pointed toward the social media swirl around slain US roadtripper Gabby Petito as helping police find her body this year.
At the same time, internet sleuths tarred an innocent college student in the fear-stoked effort to find the attackers who set off homemade bombs that killed three at the 2013 Boston Marathon.
"The public is getting better at it, but it still can be very self-serving," added Wandt, noting the temptation for seeking clicks. "But I'm definitely seeing more positive use over time."
Working as a complement to police, rather than shovelling tips and theories at investigators, is one way that freelancers seem to have found a role.
Police in the Sparta case said they had heard Sides was investigating in their area, but after noting he wasn't searching in the right place, they offered some advice on where to look.
The bittersweet discovery followed days later.
"I ended my search in that river in town, and that's where I found them. It looks like a simple car accident," Sides told AFP.
"They just went off the road and nobody saw them crash. So sadly that's where they sat for 20 years until I came along," he added.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
 
 
source <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/nobody-saw-them-crash-youtuber-finds-submerged-car-of-us-teens-missing-since-2000-2647263">https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/nobody-saw-them-crash-youtuber-finds-submerged-car-of-us-teens-missing-since-2000-2647263</a>

news world "Nobody Saw Them Crash": YouTuber Finds Car Of Teens Missing Since 2000 In US

A car reportedly connected to a 21-year-old case of missing teens found in Tennessee. Washington: A scuba diver wiped away the algae on...

Inflation is surging. Joe Biden is still optimistic.

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The price of consumer goods rose by 6.8 percent over the past year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics <a href="https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm">reported</a> on Friday, the biggest increase since the 1980s. “Essentially across the board,” <a href="https://www.vox.com/22811903/inflation-rate-2021-christmas-holidays-report-cpi">as Vox’s Rani Molla and Emily Stewart write</a>, everyday purchases from food to gas are costing more, and it’s going to be an expensive holiday season.
That part isn’t in debate. What is, however, is how worried everyone should be. In Washington, there’s sharp disagreement about what exactly is responsible for surging inflation and what the government can — or should — do about it.
Some of the causes are fairly self-evident: Entering the third year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the US — and much of the rest of the world — is grappling with a <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/10/24/22743104/supply-chain-inflation-shortages-2022">supply chain crisis</a>. That means most goods, from game consoles to oranges, are more difficult to get to store shelves for one reason or another, whether it’s a lack of critical tech components or a backup at ports due to labor shortages. US consumers, however, simply haven’t stopped buying, and that demand-supply disjunction has caused record inflation.
Some <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2021/11/10/22775092/inflation-cpi-october-economy-biden-fed">economists</a>, as well as President Joe Biden, take the view that the pandemic — and the pandemic-snarled supply chain — are the primary culprits, and inflation will ease as the US keeps combating the pandemic and implements supply-chain fixes. On Friday, <a href="https://twitter.com/kaitlancollins/status/1469405325350551552?s=20">according to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins</a>, Biden told reporters that “the reason for inflation is that we have a supply chain problem that is really severe.”
Others, though, are concerned the problem is bigger than that. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, for example, has also pointed to government spending as a reason for increased inflation, and believes it’s <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-10/summers-says-policy-makers-may-have-now-cemented-inflation-at-4">far from a bump in the road</a>.
The optimistic case for current inflation goes something like this: Though <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/10/24/22743104/supply-chain-inflation-shortages-2022">supply chain</a> problems have led to a shortage in many consumer goods, Americans haven’t stopped buying — and with more money in their pockets, they have the capacity to do so.
Specifically, lockdowns and being stuck at home — unable to travel or go to restaurants, bars, and live events — have shifted what Americans are spending their money on. Less money spent on travel or experiences, combined with stimulus funds, has driven many Americans to buy more consumer goods. That, combined with supply chain problems decades in the making, has led to the current, precipitous rise in inflation.
As vaccines make a return to normal life more possible, however, American spending habits are likely to begin to return to normal, which could also have an impact on inflation. Biden painted a relatively optimistic picture Friday, <a href="https://twitter.com/joeygarrison/status/1469386971411849222?s=20">telling reporters</a> he believes inflation has reached its peak.
“I think you’ll see it change sooner, quicker, more rapidly than people think,” Biden said. “Every other aspect of the economy is racing ahead.”
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
President Biden takes a question from <a href="https://twitter.com/kaitlancollins?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@kaitlancollins</a> on whether we’re seeking the peak of inflation:
“I think you’ll see it change sooner, quicker, more rapidly than people think. Every other aspect of the economy is racing ahead.” <a href="https://t.co/nIZEcOmlRX">pic.twitter.com/nIZEcOmlRX</a>
— Joey Garrison (@joeygarrison) <a href="https://twitter.com/joeygarrison/status/1469386971411849222?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 10, 2021</a></blockquote>
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Surging inflation doesn’t mean bad economic news across the board, either. As Claudia Sahm, a former Federal Reserve economist and senior fellow at the Jain Family Institute, <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2021/11/10/22775092/inflation-cpi-october-economy-biden-fed">told Vox in November</a>:
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Both because jobs have been coming back and also because the federal government put out a lot of economic relief, people — especially those who are at the very top of the heap — have, on average, enough money to pay those extra prices in the majority of cases.
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Still, while inflation numbers aren’t the only measure of economic health, the reality is that inflation is high after decades of hovering around 2 percent. That, <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2021/11/10/22775092/inflation-cpi-october-economy-biden-fed">as Sahm said</a>, is a “pain point” as the economy recovers from the Covid-19 pandemic, and it’s one that people notice because they interact with every day at the gas pump and the grocery store. But while the current numbers are higher than Fed targets, it’s nowhere near the level seen during the so-called <a href="https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great-inflation">Great Inflation</a>, when consumer prices shot up more than 14 percent.
Nevertheless, some influential voices, including Summers, have raised the alarm about long-term inflation problems and pointed to government spending as a driver of inflationary woes.
In a February <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/04/larry-summers-biden-covid-stimulus/">Washington Post op-ed</a>, Summers wrote that “there is a chance that macroeconomic stimulus on a scale closer to World War II levels than normal recession levels will set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation, with consequences for the value of the dollar and financial stability.”
In the same piece, Summers accused the administration of denying “even the possibility of inflation,” raising concerns that Biden wasn’t adequately prepared for the rise in prices that coincided with sweeping stimulus packages, and didn’t have the proper measures in place to act quickly to bring inflation down.
That concern — that the administration wouldn’t act quickly and that inflation would become a longer-term problem, rather than the transitory issue Biden predicted — is playing out, at least somewhat. So far, as November’s numbers show, inflation isn’t letting up.
While the US has spent trillions in pandemic relief, however, inflation is <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/11/24/22799217/global-inflation-us-eu-germany-uk">also occurring elsewhere in the world</a>, where governments have taken different approaches to dealing with the fallout from the pandemic — suggesting that government spending doesn’t tell the whole story.
While the Biden administration is doing what it can to fix supply chain issues and drive down rising gas prices, most of tools to address inflation are in the hands of the Federal Reserve.
“I don’t think [inflation] is changing very much any time soon,” Jason Furman, the former chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told <a href="https://www.msnbc.com/stephanie-ruhle/watch/jason-furman-says-inflation-may-not-be-changing-very-much-any-time-soon-128399941972">MSNBC Friday</a>. “I don’t think there’s a whole lot the White House can do about it, but for the Federal Reserve, a better economy and higher inflation both tell them they need to continue to pivot to get this under control.”
One way the Fed plans to cool the economy is “tapering” — gradually decreasing the $120 billion it spends per month on government-backed bonds, which has injected money into the financial markets during the pandemic. In November, Fed Chair Jerome Powell announced the central bank would reduce that amount by $15 billion each month. The purchasing program is supposed to end halfway through 2022, but as the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/business/powell-bond-buying-taper.html?partner=slack&smid=sl-share">New York Times</a> reported in early December, that program could finish more quickly as the Fed attempts to reduce inflation.
“At this point, the economy is very strong, and inflationary pressures are high,” Powell said in late November. “It is therefore appropriate in my view to consider wrapping up the taper of our asset purchases, which we actually announced at our November meeting, perhaps a few months sooner.”
Along with that could also come <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/business/powell-bond-buying-taper.html?partner=slack&smid=sl-share">interest rate hikes</a>, although the Fed has not announced specific plans to do so. Interest rate increases are a powerful tool in the Fed’s arsenal to slow down consumer spending, and thus inflation. And, as inflation continues to rise, that’s looking like a more likely tack for Powell to take, once the Fed’s satisfied that the economy has reached “<a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/feds-powell-touts-benefits-maximum-employment-2021-11-09/">maximum employment</a>” — a signal that the economy is healthy enough to withstand the withdrawal of government support.
Summers, though, sounded the alarm to <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-10/summers-says-policy-makers-may-have-now-cemented-inflation-at-4?utm_source=google&utm_medium=bd&cmpId=google">Bloomberg</a> on Friday, saying that the Fed would also need to increase interest rates — the amount that a lender charges a borrower for a loan or credit — repeatedly next year to help keep inflation in check.
“We’ve put in motion, for the first time in 40 years, excessive inflation caused by overheating of the economy,” he said, warning that the government had driven up inflation “way above 2 percent — perhaps in the 4 percent or even higher range,” and that could be permanent.
Beyond monetary policy, though, the other massive piece of the puzzle is the supply chain — and that’s something politicians and policymakers have much less control over. Biden has attempted to ease supply chain woes by running the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/us/politics/biden-port-los-angeles-supply-chain.html">Port of Los Angeles</a> 24 hours a day, clearing the docks so goods don’t wait for days on cargo ships stranded in the water. And the <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/11/23/president-biden-announces-release-from-the-strategic-petroleum-reserve-as-part-of-ongoing-efforts-to-lower-prices-and-address-lack-of-supply-around-the-world/">release of 50 million barrels of oil</a> from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve last month was geared toward reducing gas prices, which have <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-09/biden-cheers-falling-gas-prices-crediting-his-supply-efforts">already begun to fall</a>.
Most likely, however, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/business/economy/inflation-price-gains.html">the supply chain will remain snarled</a> for the foreseeable future — keeping inflation higher than we’re used to — and policymakers will have to react to that reality.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/12/11/22829221/inflation-rate-cpi-supply-chain-biden-transitory">https://www.vox.com/2021/12/11/22829221/inflation-rate-cpi-supply-chain-biden-transitory</a>

vox Inflation is surging. Joe Biden is still optimistic.

The price of consumer goods rose by 6.8 percent over the past year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday, the biggest increas...

My year of smells

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It was October 2020. The days were getting shorter; the news was getting worse. I was looking for a small distraction, something to look forward to in the coming pandemic winter. After a brief consideration of the limited available options, I decided to get into perfume.
After a little online research, I signed up for the subscription box Olfactif because, beyond forking over my credit card information, it did not require me to make any decisions. For the relatively affordable price of $19 a month, the company would pick out three sample-size perfumes on a vaguely seasonal theme and send them to my door. It was a way to guarantee myself something that had been in short supply that year: a nice surprise.
I wasn’t alone. After a dip at the start of the pandemic, fragrance sales <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/fragrance-sales-increasing-during-pandemic-explained-2021-6">started to rebound in August 2020</a> and were surging by early 2021, up 45 percent from the first quarter of 2020. “Last year was super busy,” Kimberly Waters, founder of the Harlem perfume shop MUSE, told me. Pandemic-numbed consumers “needed to feel like themselves, needed to feel new again, needed to feel something,” Waters said. “And fragrance was that vehicle.”
For me, perfume was a way to feel a little excitement amid the stress and monotony of the pandemic. I might not have been able to eat in a restaurant or see my parents or go a day without experiencing existential dread, but I could open up my Olfactif box and sample, for instance, Blackbird’s Hallow v. 2, a standout from the October collection with notes of benzoin, frankincense, and marzipan.
I couldn’t tell you what benzoin actually smells like, but I do know that Hallow reminded me of ghost stories, of forests and dark places, of fears that were fun and manageable, intriguing rather than consuming. Amid the long, isolated slog of late 2020 and early 2021, my perfume box became a reliable escape.
Then — maybe you knew this was coming — I got Covid, and I became one of the hundreds of millions of people around the world to suffer from anosmia, a partial or total loss of the sense of smell. Anosmia is generally seen as one of the milder symptoms of Covid-19; it’s not particularly dangerous on its own, and people presenting with anosmia tend to have <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7380219/#:~:text=Our%20data%20implicate%20smell%20loss,smell%20loss%20(Table%201).">less severe cases of Covid-19</a> overall. This was the case for me — I felt very lucky to emerge from quarantine with a messed-up nose as my only enduring symptom.
That symptom, though manageable, turned out to be significant. Covid-19 changed my relationship to smell, even — perhaps especially — as that sense began, slowly and strangely, to return. Learning to smell again came to symbolize resilience and healing, but also simply forward movement: a sign of personal, biological progress in a year when everything seemed stuck in a terrible cycle.
Smell, Waters said, is “how we navigate our lives.” And this year, regaining smell has been how I navigate, if not back to the shore we all left in early 2020, then at least to a place where I can recognize my surroundings, and start to make a home.
<hr class="p-entry-hr" />
Scientists know very little for certain about how Covid-19 damages our sense of smell. Danielle Reed, associate director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, studies taste and smell; she told me one popular theory is that the virus infects a group of cells called the <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00055-6">sustentacular cells</a>, which “support and nourish the smell cells” in the nose. When the sustentacular cells are infected, the smell cells lose their nutrition, and “that’s how things suddenly go south,” as Reed put it.
Another theory holds that when fighting SARS-CoV2, the immune system produces a substance that switches off the function of the smell cells. That explanation would fit with the experience of people who go to bed one night fine and “wake up the next morning and they can’t smell their coffee,” Reed said. Whatever the cause, loss of smell is extremely common: about 86 percent of Covid-19 patients lose some or all of their sense of smell, <a href="https://www.healthline.com/health-news/loss-of-smell-associated-with-milder-covid-19-cases#Most-patients-eventually-recovered">according to one study</a>, while others put the figure <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00055-6">even higher</a>.
The extent of the effect varies among patients. Some people lose everything, like Tejal Rao, a restaurant critic for the New York Times, who first discovered her Covid-induced anosmia in the shower. “At first, I mistook the lack of aromas for a new smell, a curious smell I couldn’t identify — was it the water itself? the stone tiles?” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/dining/covid-loss-of-smell.html">she wrote</a>, “before realizing it was just a blank, a cushion of space between me and my world.”
Others, like me, experience only partial anosmia — some smells are lost, while some remain. At first, I had no idea I’d been affected at all.
Every morning while my family was in quarantine, I put on perfume to lift my spirits. I chose House of James’s Sun King, a citrusy blend of mandarin, green tea, and black agar I’d received in my February 2021 box. While we were very fortunate not to get sicker, the first few days of our illness were tense ones — my husband quarantined in our bedroom, both of us double-masking at all times in a futile attempt to avoid infecting our then-2-year-old son. Perfume was a way to remind myself that I was human, not just a machine for converting raw anxiety into nose wipes, temp checks, and healthy snacks.
By week two, our son was mercifully fever-free (though extremely tired of being indoors), my husband was stuffy but on the mend, and I was sick of Sun King. I had told myself a new perfume would be my reward for finishing quarantine, and so when I finally got the all-clear from the New York City Test and Trace Corps, I popped open a vial of Musc Invisible, the only February fragrance I had yet to try.
Musc Invisible, by the fragrance brand Juliette Has a Gun, is supposed to smell like jasmine, cotton flowers, and white musk. Long a fan of musk fragrances (like many people, I enjoyed <a href="https://www.fragrantica.com/news/The-History-of-White-Musk-The-Body-Shop-and-Far-Beyond-12636.html">The Body Shop’s White Musk</a> in the ’90s), I was excited to sample it. But when I sprayed it on, it smelled like nothing with a hint of something — or like someone had wrapped my head in several layers of gauze and then opened a vial of perfume across the room.
Once I realized something was off, I went around the house sniffing everything in an effort to gauge the damage. Many objects smelled normal — I remember sticking my nose in a jar of peanut butter and being satisfied at its peanut-ness. Others had lost their scent entirely — the candles my mother had sent me in a birthday care package, once rosemary and lemon balm, were now nothing and nothing.
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<aside><q>The candles my mother had sent me in a birthday care package, once rosemary and lemon balm, were now nothing and nothing.</q></aside>
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Others still occupied a disconcerting middle ground, not as I remembered them, but not completely scent-less, either. The perfume I wore to my wedding, for example, a rose oil I still keep in a bottle on my dresser, smelled like the faintest hint of its former self — or maybe I was just remembering the smell, and not really smelling it at all?
Such experiences became commonplace this year, but before the pandemic, they were considered relatively rare. One of the few people to chronicle the loss of smell prior to Covid-19 was Molly Birnbaum, whose 2011 memoir Season to Taste details her recovery from a brain injury that damaged her olfactory nerves.
“When I lost my sense of smell in a car accident, it was devastating,” Birnbaum said. At the time a 22-year-old aspiring chef, she ended up having to change careers because her loss of smell had also affected her ability to taste. “All of the nuance of flavor, all of the details, ” she said, “that was gone.”
To this day I’m not sure if I lost taste along with smell in February. Food in general seemed to taste less good, but I couldn’t tell if I was actually experiencing dysgeusia — the technical term for an altered sense of taste — or simply stress-induced lack of appetite. I experienced my post-Covid sensory change not as a devastation but as a profound murkiness, of a piece with the anxiety and confusion all around me.
The pandemic had already wiped away so much that had once seemed certain: that children would go to school, that some adults would go to work in offices, that families could gather together for holidays. No one knew when it would be over; no one knew what the next month or week or even day would hold. I remember feeling that even the changing of the seasons was no longer a sure thing — in February 2020, I had told my husband, “at least winter will be over soon.” Then winter came for the whole world, and stayed for more than a year.
It seemed fitting, in this context, that I should no longer be able to trust my senses. Indeed, uncertainty is a hallmark of Covid-induced anosmia. There’s no single accepted clinical test, like an eye chart, to gauge people’s sense of smell, Reed said. There are tests used in research, but they aren’t readily available to the general public. That means people are generally left trying to gauge their condition, and their recovery, by trying to remember what things smelled like before Covid — a process that’s flawed at best. “If you take your temperature, you know if you’re getting better,” Reed said. “Your fever was 102, and now it’s 100.1.”
With smell, though, “there’s no real metric,” she said. “It’s very frustrating for people.”
<hr class="p-entry-hr" />
Most Covid-19 patients do eventually regain some sense of smell. But 10 to 20 percent of those affected are still experiencing significant impairment a year after their diagnosis, Reed said. The recovery process itself, meanwhile, can be disorienting, unsettling, and even disgusting.
Some people experience parosmia, in which smells are distorted — a French wine expert recently <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/19/world/europe/france-covid-smell.html">told the Times</a> that during her recovery, “peanuts smelled like shrimp, raw ham like butter, rice like Nutella.” Others are confronted with phantosmia, smells that aren’t there at all.
For me, it was the smell of coffee, which began wafting into my nose (or brain) every afternoon sometime around March, even though I haven’t had a cup of coffee since 2009. Others have more upsetting olfactory hallucinations: Some smell cigarette smoke or even <a href="https://www.webmd.com/brain/what-is-phantosmia">rotting flesh</a>.
For Birnbaum, it was “an earthy, garden-y scent” that seemed to follow her everywhere. At first, “I thought I was smelling my own brain,” she recalled, as though “my recovery process was allowing me to smell what was inside of me.”
But then, slowly but surely, real smells began to come back — first the smell of fresh rosemary, then other pleasant smells, and last of all, bad smells like garbage. “I was living in New York in the summer, and there was trash on the street corner, and I could smell it, which was very exciting,” Birnbaum said.
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<aside><q>All spring and summer I had the sense of smells returning to me out of nothingness, like figures stepping out of the dark.</q></aside>
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I, too, remember the excitement of recognizing a smell again after its long absence. I was walking in the park one day in May when I realized I could smell fresh grass again. I kept sniffing flowers and smelling nothing until, one day in July, I felt the winey sweetness of a red rose hit the back of my throat. All spring and summer I had the sense of smells returning to me out of nothingness, like figures stepping out of the dark.
Smell, for me, became a way to measure time — time since our illness, time since the pandemic began, time since we’d been vaccinated and things started to go back to some semblance of normal. I know I’m <a href="https://news.miami.edu/stories/2021/10/the-pandemic-has-played-with-our-perception-of-time.html">not alone</a> in losing my grasp of the passage of time since Covid-19 hit — often I still forget what month it is, even what year. But I know that now I don’t smell phantom coffee anymore, and I can, just barely, smell the lemon balm candle in my bathroom. Something must be progressing, no matter how slow.
<hr class="p-entry-hr" />
People who work with smell often emphasize its ability to ground us, to situate us in time and space. Every day during lockdown, Waters, the MUSE founder, says she used some kind of scent, whether it was perfume, incense, or a candle. “It was how I remembered life before the pandemic,” she said. “It made me feel like myself at a time when I was just so confused.”
I also kept using perfume, even after my incident with Musc Invisible. At first it was a source of anxiety — would I be able to smell the next vial? Was White Castitas — a sample from the June box with notes of lemon, sandalwood, and licorice — just very subtle, or was I still missing some crucial licorice sensors deep inside my nose?
Over time, though, those worries have faded. I’ve come to accept that my sense of smell is different now, that what’s still gone may never be coming back, and that I’ll probably never know if I’m back to “normal.”
For researchers like Reed, the prevalence of Covid-induced anosmia is a wake-up call that science and medicine need to take the sense of smell more seriously. She and her colleagues advocate for testing of taste and smell the same way we test for hearing and vision, and are at work on a new test to help doctors evaluate a patient’s sense of smell quickly and easily.
For Waters, the pandemic is a reminder to embrace our sense of smell while we have it. “Continue keeping your nose open,” she said. “We can’t take our ability to smell for granted.”
And for me, regaining smell is just another small way that I’m emerging, marked, from the last 20 months into whatever comes next.
I tried smelling Musc Invisible again as I was writing this story. I could definitely detect something: a kind of chemical sweetness, like bubblegum mixed with hydrogen peroxide. I don’t know if it’s the perfume itself or my still-wonky sustentacular cells, but I don’t care anymore. This perfume smells bad to me now. I’m going to throw it away.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22783776/long-covid-loss-of-smell-taste">https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22783776/long-covid-loss-of-smell-taste</a>

vox My year of smells

It was October 2020. The days were getting shorter; the news was getting worse. I was looking for a small distraction, something to look fo...

The one-dose problem is real

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There’s a public health challenge that has been lurking and largely ignored in the US, and that could become a major issue if <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/11/27/22804556/omicron-variant-covid-19-south-africa-explained">the omicron variant of Covid-19</a> becomes dominant: the one-dose problem.
There appear to be millions of Americans walking around who have received a single dose of <a href="https://www.vox.com/covid-19-coronavirus-treatment-prevention-cure-vaccines">a Covid-19 vaccine</a>, who may think they are protected against whatever the virus can throw at them — and who could be sorely wrong.
“I’m not sure we should regard them as equivalent to unvaccinated people,” Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, told me. “But they are at higher risk than fully vaccinated and boosted people.”
That was the early consensus among the experts I consulted, and the preliminary data <a href="https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1469376759342985216">shows</a>, as expected, low effectiveness against omicron after one dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. The effectiveness against omicron also declines over time after two doses but is restored to high levels (76 percent efficacy against infection) after <a href="https://www.vox.com/coronavirus-covid19/2021/12/1/22809878/covid-19-omicron-variant-vaccine-booster-shots">a third dose</a>. This was a fairly small study out of the UK, and more data will be forthcoming, but it gives an initial picture of how the vaccines are holding up against the new variant.
People who have received only one dose of a vaccine could conceivably be almost as vulnerable to infection from omicron as the unvaccinated. They may still have some level of protection against severe illness because of the multiple layers of immunity induced by the vaccines. But it’s an open question at this point — and may soon become an urgent one for the Americans who fall into this camp.
“I would not be surprised if those [with one dose] were essentially equivalent to unvaccinated when it comes to protection from infection,” Bill Hanage, a Harvard University epidemiologist, told me recently. “Other elements of the immune response might help reduce serious infections, though not to the same degree as those with more vaccination.”
Getting those people a second dose — and, eventually, a booster dose — could go a long way toward blunting the impact of omicron. The new variant appears to spread even faster than the currently dominant delta variant (itself already much quicker than the original version of the virus) and, while there is some optimism it will be somewhat milder than those previous variants, it’s also clear that full vaccination provides the best protection. Anything less than that means taking your chances with a virus that has <a href="https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html">already killed</a> nearly 800,000 people in the United States and 5.3 million people worldwide.
But there’s at least one enormous obstacle in the way of the United States fixing this one-dose problem: We don’t know who these people are, or even how many of them are out there.
The CDC vaccination data on which reporters and public health officials have relied is flawed, as Matt Yglesias <a href="https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-cdcs-vaccine-data-is-all-wrong">wrote recently</a>. Without more reliable data, it is really hard to accurately gauge the scale of the one-dose problem. Every expert I spoke to agrees that it exists. Nobody is sure how big the problem is, though, or for whom.
People over 65 or who are immunocompromised do not get the same protection from the full two-dose regimen as younger and healthier people. If a lot of those people didn’t even get the second dose, that poses a more serious public health problem.
“It would be helpful to have more granular data on how many people have not returned for a second dose and who they are,” Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, said.
Recognizing the flaws in data, we can still attempt to put some kind of estimate on the number of people who failed to get a second dose of either the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccine (which are by far most prominent in the US, accounting for <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-vaccine-doses-by-manufacturer?country=~USA">more than 95 percent of shots</a>) and how serious the one-dose problem might be.
To start with the national data: There is about <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-19-vaccine-doses.html">an 11-point gap</a> between the share of Americans who have received at least one dose (71 percent) and the share who are fully vaccinated (60 percent). That means as many as 36 million Americans are partially but not fully vaccinated.
Some of those people are simply in between doses: the CDC recommends a three-week gap between doses for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and four weeks for Moderna. But even with the current average of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-19-vaccine-doses.html">500,000 Americans receiving their first dose</a> every day — which translates to about 14 million first doses across four weeks, though the numbers are always changing — that is not nearly enough to explain the gap.
Those people are not as well protected as those with two doses. One study <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2108891">published in August in the New England Journal of Medicine</a> found one dose of Pfizer’s vaccine was 30.7 percent effective against any infection from the delta variant (still dominant for now in the United States), but was 88 percent effective after two doses. Experts expect similar patterns to emerge with omicron.
As Yglesias pointed out, state and local data tends to be somewhat more reliable than the CDC’s. So I checked out <a href="https://coronavirus.maryland.gov/#Vaccine">the trends in Maryland</a> and found a similar problem. The state has been averaging about 5,000 first doses per day so far in December. That would translate to as many as 140,000 people in the four-week interval between their first and second doses, if we use the longer Moderna schedule.
But the actual gap between the number of first doses versus the number of second doses? Nearly 500,000. That suggests a lot of people who got that first dose and never came back for a second.
Ohio likewise has <a href="https://coronavirus.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/covid-19/dashboards/covid-19-vaccine/covid-19-vaccination-dashboard">a roughly 550,000-person gap</a> between the number of vaccinations started and the number completed. In Washington state, <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/4/28/21235170/coronavirus-washington-state-lockdown-end-economy-restart">a paragon of good public health practices</a>, there are still <a href="https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/COVID19/DataDashboard">410,000 more people</a> reported as having initiated their vaccination than are reported to have completed it.
None of these states are averaging anywhere near enough new vaccinations for the gap to be fully explained by people waiting the prescribed three or four weeks between shots. There is a real one-dose problem.
“I think we can consider them not fully vaccinated,” Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told me. “People just don’t follow up because they are only so attentive to their own health or for whatever reason. Hopefully people don’t think they don’t need the second dose.”
By <a href="https://www.vox.com/coronavirus-covid19/22163315/covid-19-vaccines-doses-pfizer-moderna">the historical standards set by more routine vaccines</a>, the United States is doing pretty well with getting people their second Covid shots. For other multi-dose vaccines, research has found that as many as half of patients never show up for their additional doses. The CDC’s data has <a href="https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-total-admin-rate-total">about 85 percent</a> of people getting their second dose of the Covid-19 vaccines.
But in a pandemic, with omicron looking more transmissible and better able to evade immunity than its predecessors, any gap creates a public health problem. People probably have a variety of reasons for not getting another shot — an allergic reaction, they didn’t like the side effects, they don’t think they need it, they can’t get time off — but, in theory, they’re the low-hanging fruit for the country’s ongoing vaccination drive.
They’ve already shown a willingness to get the shot. They just need to come back to get another one. Policies like paid sick leave or programs like mobile vaccine clinics could lower the barriers for these people to finally receive their next dose, experts say.
“Someone who had bad side effects after their first dose may not get a second dose because of a lack of paid sick leave,” Rasmussen said. “Making policy that improves accessibility and ease of vaccination would make a big difference for the unvaccinated and partially vaccinated alike.”
But until the country’s vaccine data improves, finding the people to target with those efforts will be challenging — and omicron is raising the stakes of these failures.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/coronavirus-covid19/22826745/covid-19-pfizer-moderna-vaccine-omicron-variant">https://www.vox.com/coronavirus-covid19/22826745/covid-19-pfizer-moderna-vaccine-omicron-variant</a>

vox The one-dose problem is real

There’s a public health challenge that has been lurking and largely ignored in the US, and that could become a major issue if the omicron v...

US Imposes Human Rights Sanctions On China, Myanmar, North Korea

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<div class="ins_instory_dv_cont"><img alt="US Imposes Human Rights Sanctions On China, Myanmar, North Korea" src="https://c.ndtvimg.com/2021-08/m196ech8_us-china-flags_625x300_28_August_21.jpg" title="US Imposes Human Rights Sanctions On China, Myanmar, North Korea" /></div>
China's embassy in Washington denounced the US move. (Representational)
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Washington:
The United States on Friday imposed extensive human rights-related sanctions on dozens of people and entities tied to China, Myanmar, North Korea and Bangladesh, and added Chinese artificial intelligence company SenseTime Group to an investment blacklist.
Canada and the United Kingdom joined the United States in imposing sanctions related to human rights abuses in Myanmar while Washington also imposed the first new sanctions on North Korea under President Joe Biden's administration and targeted Myanmar military entities, among others, in action marking Human Rights Day.
"Our actions today, particularly those in partnership with the United Kingdom and Canada, send a message that democracies around the world will act against those who abuse the power of the state to inflict suffering and repression," Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said in a statement.
China's embassy in Washington denounced the US move as "serious interference in China's internal affairs" and a "severe violation of basic norms governing international relations." Embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu said it would do "grave harm to China-US relations" and urged Washington to rescind the decision.
The North Korean mission at the United Nations and the Washington embassies of Myanmar and Bangladesh did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The measures are the latest in a raft of sanctions timed to coincide with Biden's two-day virtual Summit for Democracy, where he announced initiatives to bolster democracy around the world and support for pro-democracy legislation in the United States.
Biden said on Friday that commitments made by some of the more than 100 world leaders at the summit would push back against rising autocracy around the world, fight corruption and promote human rights.
"This is going to help seed fertile ground for democracy to bloom around the world," he said in a speech closing the summit. The Treasury on Friday added Chinese artificial intelligence company SenseTime to a list of "Chinese military-industrial complex companies," accusing it of having developed facial recognition programs that can determine a target's ethnicity, with a particular focus on identifying ethnic Uyghurs. As a result, the company will fall under an investment ban for US investors.
SenseTime is close to selling 1.5 billion shares in an initial public offering (IPO).
After news of the Treasury restrictions earlier this week, the company began discussing the fate of the planned $767 million offering with Hong Kong's stock exchange, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said.
SenseTime said in a statement on Saturday that it "strongly opposed the designation and accusations that have been made in connection with it," calling the accusations "unfounded".
"We have complied with the applicable laws and regulations in relation to our business in all material respects in the jurisdictions where we conduct business," the company said.
UN experts and rights groups estimate more than a million people, mainly Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minorities, have been detained in recent years in a vast system of camps in China's far-west region of Xinjiang.
China denies abuses in Xinjiang, but the US government and many rights groups say Beijing is carrying out genocide there.
MYANMAR, NORTH KOREA
The Treasury said it was imposing sanctions on two Myanmar military entities and an organization that provides reserves for the military
The Directorate of Defense Industries, one of the entities targeted, makes weapons for the military and police that have been used in a brutal crackdown on opponents of the military's February 1 coup.
The Treasury also targeted four regional chief ministers, including Myo Swe Win, who heads the junta's administration in the Bago region where the Treasury said at least 82 people were killed in a single day in April.
Canada imposed sanctions against four entities affiliated with the Myanmar military government, while the United Kingdom imposed fresh sanctions against the military.
Myanmar was plunged into crisis when the military overthrew leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her government on February 1, triggering daily protests in towns and cities and fighting in borderlands between the military and ethnic minority insurgents.
Junta forces seeking to crush opposition have killed more than 1,300 people, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) monitoring group.
Campaign group Global Witness said the measures fell short of targeting Myanmar's natural gas industry, a key source of foreign currency for the junta, and were "unlikely to materially impact the military junta's bottom line."
The Treasury also blacklisted North Korea's Central Public Prosecutors Office, along with the former minister of social security and recently assigned Minister of People's Armed Forces Ri Yong Gil.
It also targeted a Russian university for facilitating the export of workers from North Korea. North Korea has long sought a lifting of punishing US and international sanctions imposed over its weapons programs and has denounced US criticism of its human rights record as evidence of a hostile policy against it. The Biden administration has repeatedly called on North Korea to engage in dialogue over its nuclear and missile programs, without success.
The US State Department on Friday also barred 12 people from traveling to the United States, including officials in China, Belarus and Sri Lanka.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
 
 
source <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/us-imposes-human-rights-sanctions-on-china-myanmar-north-korea-2646420">https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/us-imposes-human-rights-sanctions-on-china-myanmar-north-korea-2646420</a>

news world US Imposes Human Rights Sanctions On China, Myanmar, North Korea

China's embassy in Washington denounced the US move. (Representational) Washington: The United States on Friday imposed extensive h...