Watch “COVID WAR: The Pandemic Doctors Speak Out” at 8 p.m. Friday, April 2 on CNN and CNNI. The special report will also be available on demand, on CNNgo and CNN mobile apps.
YOU ASKED. WE ANSWERED.
Q. Do my kids need to be vaccinated before going to summer camp?
Fauci stressed it was important for Covid-19 to continue declining and for infections not to plateau at a high level. But he pointed to the pace of vaccinations in the US as a main factor, which will invariably “drive the rate and the level of infections per day to a much, much lower level,” he said.
“If we get into the summer and you have a considerable percentage of the population vaccinated, and the level in the community gets below that plateau that’s worrying me and my colleagues in public health,” he said, “it is conceivable that you would have a good degree of flexibility during the summer, even with the children with things like camps.”
WHAT’S IMPORTANT TODAY
Paris hospitals could be overwhelmed amid Europe’s third wave
In an op-ed, published in the Journal du Dimanche newspaper, 41 ICU and emergency doctors said they had “never experienced such a situation, even during the worst terrorist attacks in recent years.”
On Saturday evening, there were 4,791 people in ICUs across France, nearing the peak of its second Covid-19 wave. The country has the fourth highest number of confirmed cases in the world, after the US, Brazil and India. French President Emmanuel Macron, who is up for re-election next year, has so far resisted imposing a third nationwide lockdown — against the advice of his Scientific Council, citing the potential impact a lockdown would have on mental health and on the French economy.
Signs of collapse across Brazil as Covid spirals out of control
Last Thursday, Brazil’s Health Ministry reported the gruesome figure of more than 100,000 new Covid-19 cases confirmed in a single day, the highest such figure in the country since the pandemic began. Brazil has accounted for 24% of all Covid-19 deaths worldwide in the past two weeks. “It’s a war scenario,” paramedic Luis Eduardo Pimentel in São Paulo told CNN. “I can barely describe what I’m seeing, it is so sad what is happening to the country.”
‘I spent a whole year indoors and upstairs.’ Life during the pandemic for people with disabilities
Elder-Woodward’s ordeal is just one of the many problems people with disabilities have had to endure during the pandemic and experts say they are not surprised. “Ignored at worst, and an afterthought at best,” people with disabilities have experienced a three-fold risk during the outbreak, disability experts argued in a commentary published in the Lancet earlier this month.
Those with disabilities have a bigger risk of severe or fatal outcomes from the disease; greater risk of reduced access to routine healthcare and rehabilitation, even though disabled people on average have a narrow margin of health; and harmful social impacts of efforts to mitigate the pandemic, the experts write.
ON OUR RADAR
- Dutch people are partying like it’s 2019 as a government-backed experiment attempts to work out how the events industry can get back on its feet.
- The Pacific Island nation of Papua New Guinea only has about 500 doctors for a population of 9 million people. Now it’s dealing with a Covid outbreak.
- India sees a muted festival of Holi, the Hindu celebration of colors, on Monday as it experiences its sixth consecutive day of record-high Covid-19 cases during its second wave.
- Louisiana Rep.-elect Julia Letlow on Sunday urged Republicans to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, citing her own tragic experience of losing her husband.
TODAY’S PODCAST
“Throughout the White House, there was a sense that I could not have access to national media. Now, I had no idea that people were requesting me until about November when someone wrote me directly and said, we have asked for you for weeks. And I was like, what?” — Dr. Deborah Birx, former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator.