Health News at Your Fingertips

A manager at a pork plant in the US who was among seven people fired for betting on how many workers would contract COVID-19 said the office pool was spontaneous fun and intended to boost morale.
Don Merschbrock, former night manager at the Tyson plant in Waterloo, Iowa, told The Associated Press: “We really want to clear our names, “We actually worked very hard and took care of our team members well.” Tyson announced the terminations of the Waterloo managers on December 16th, weeks after the betting allegation surfaced in wrongful death lawsuits filed by the families of four workers who died of COVID-19. Tyson said an investigation led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder found sufficient evidence to terminate those involved, saying their actions violated the company’s values of respect and integrity. Merschbrock said managers were given the “impossible task” of maintaining production while implementing virus safety precautions. They had been working 12-hour days, six or seven days per week, he said. The office pool involved roughly $50 cash, which went to the winner who picked the correct percentage of workers testing positive for the virus, Merschbrock said. He added that those involved didn’t believe the pool violated company policy and thought the plant’s positivity rate would be lower than the community rate due to their mitigation efforts. “It was a group of exhausted supervisors that had worked so hard and so smart to solve many unsolvable problems,” Merschbrock said.

“It was simply something fun, kind of a morale boost for having put forth an incredible effort. There was never any malicious intent. It was never meant to disparage anyone.”
A Tyson spokesman declined to comment on Merschbrock’s comments.

Here is the full story on Covid-19 cases recorded in a single day rising above 40,000 for the first time in England.

The government said that, as of 9am on Monday, there had been a further 41,385 lab-confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK, while a further 357 people have died within 28 days of testing positive.

Dr Yvonne Doyle, medical director at Public Health England, said: “This very high level of infection is of growing concern at a time when our hospitals are at their most vulnerable, with new admissions rising in many regions.”

The nationwide curfew would move to 9pm-6am local time, Ramaphosa said. Public parks, beaches, dams, rivers and public swimming pools in hot spot areas will closed.

The president said several districts and municipalities had been added to the hotspot list. These areas could be subject to further restrictions, he said.

We now have to flatten the curve to protect the capacity of our healthcare system to enable it to respond effectively to this new wave of infections. These restrictions may be reviewed in the next few weeks if we see a sustained decline in infections.

Commercial centre Gauteng, tourist favourite Western Cape and coastal Eastern Cape are the worst-hit provinces and accounted for most of areas now considered hot spots. Areas in the northern Limpopo province were also added to the list.

South Africa has tightened restrictions, banning alcohol sales and extending a nationwide curfew, as infections passed the one million mark owing to a faster-spreading variant of the disease discovered in the country.

The president Cyril Ramaphosa said in a televised address that cabinet had decided to move the country to level 3 restrictions from level 1. This would include the total banning of alcohol sales, widespread cancelling of events, and making the wearing of masks in public a legal requirement. Ramaphosa said:

We now have to flatten the curve to protect the capacity of our healthcare system to enable it to respond effectively to this new wave of infections.

Spain’s death toll surpassed 50,000, while the number of infections per 100,000 people fell for the first time in nearly three weeks, health ministry data showed.

A total of 24,462 new cases were logged since Thursday, bringing the total to nearly 1.88m. The death toll rose by 298 to 50,122, showed the first set of nationwide data released since Sunday’s start of vaccination against the virus.

The incidence of the virus measured over the past 14 days slipped to 246 cases per 100,000 people from 263 cases on Thursday after climbing steadily from a low of 189 cases on 10 December. The health emergency chief Fernando Simón told a news conference the figures showed a “stabilisation” in the level of contagion and a reduction in the number of deaths.

Still, he warned the data could be revised in the coming days, as the Christmas holidays likely caused some disruption to the statistics submitted by regional authorities.

The French health ministry reported 2,960 new coronavirus infections over the past 24 hours on Monday, down from 8,822 on Sunday and from Saturday’s 3,093. Case numbers generally dip on Mondays as there are fewer tests conducted on Sundays.

As we reported earlier, the president Emmanuel Macron and some senior cabinet ministers are to review the situation on Wednesday. The number of people in France who have died rose by 363 to 63,109; up from 175 on Sunday. The cumulative number of cases in France now totals 2,562,646, the fifth highest in the world.

Germany is facing a growing threat of attacks by right-wing militants who deny the existence of the pandemic and its health risks, a senior security official has said. Burkhard Freier, the head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in North Rhine-Westphalian state, told the Tagesspiegel newspaper:

The apocalyptic thinking of conspiracy myth supporters is mixing with right-wing extremism.

This means that coronavirus deniers could also opt for “terror as a consequence”, Freier said. In October, suspected coronavirus deniers attacked the Robert Koch Institute for disease control in Berlin with incendiary bottles and detonated an explosive device near the Leibniz Association, which connects nearly 100 independent research institutions in Germany.

The biggest militant threat in Germany still comes from right-wing perpetrators acting alone, such as attacker who went on a rampage in Hanau in February, killing nine people from immigrant families, himself and his mother, Freier said.

In the UK, the Conservative MP Robert Halfon, the chairman of the Commons education committee, has urged the government to do everything possible to keep schools in England open.

Shortly before local health authorities announced the greatest number of confirmed new cases in a day since the pandemic began, he said ministers should ramp up testing while making those in schools a priority for the new vaccines. Halfon told the BBC Radio 4 PM programme:

We have to be very careful about what we are doing to our young children. Of course we care about the coronavirus but we don’t want an epidemic of educational poverty at the same time.

What needs to happen is volunteers – perhaps the armed forces, perhaps mobile units outside schools or in school playgrounds – making sure pupils and teaching staff are tested and also rolling out vaccinations as a priority for all those in schools.

It must be our priority to keep our children in schools to keep our children learning.

Today is exactly one year since China informed the World Health Organization that cases of “pneumonia with an unknown cause” had been reported in Wuhan, the WHO director general has told a press briefing.

Giving a brief history of the pandemic so far, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus hailed “the extraordinary cooperation between the private and public sector in this pandemic” which led to the fast circulation of diagnostic tests and, later, the development of several vaccine candidates in record time.

He went on:

There will be setbacks and new challenges in the year ahead. For example, new variants of Covid-19 and helping people who are tired of the pandemic continue to combat it.

You can read Tedros’s full comments in this Twitter thread: