We currently see there are more and more people we know who are allergic to some food. And it seems that apart from the number of allergy sufferers, the types of food which provoke it are also increasing dramatically.
Read this very interesting article about it:
Spain has declared a national state of emergency and imposed a night-time curfew in an effort to help control a new spike in Covid-19 infections.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said the curfew, which came into force on Sunday night, would be in place between the hours of 23:00 and 06:00
Under the measures, local authorities can also ban travel between regions.
Mr Sánchez said he would ask parliament to extend the new rules, initially in force for 15 days, to six months.
Spain was hit hard during the first wave of the pandemic earlier this year and at the time imposed a much more restrictive lockdown - one of the toughest in the world.
Like many other European regions, however, it has been hit by a second wave of infections.
In Italy, new restrictions were also announced on Sunday. The government said the steady rise in cases there was causing a huge strain on the country's health services.
Meanwhile France has reported a record number of new daily infections. A total of 52,010 infections were reported on Sunday, up from just over 45,000 on Saturday.
Mr Sánchez said different regions would have up to an hour of flexibility if they wanted to modify the duration of the overnight curfew.
Restrictions on movement between districts would be determined by regional leaders and was likely to be dependent on work and medical needs, he added.
The new measures announced include a limit on public and private gatherings of different households to a maximum of six people.
"The situation we are going through is extreme," Mr Sánchez said in a televised address on Sunday, adding: "It is the most serious in the past half century."
More than half of Spain's 17 regions had been calling for tighter restrictions, and the latest measures will apply to all regions except the Canary Islands.
The same level of emergency was introduced during the first wave of the pandemic in April.
Spain has passed one million cases since it began and nearly 35,000 people have died.
Should we be less optimistic?
For those holding on to hope of an imminent Covid-19 vaccine, the news this weekend that the first could be rolled out as early as “just after Christmas” will have likely lifted the spirits.
The UK’s deputy chief medical officer, Prof Jonathan Van-Tam, reportedly told MPs a vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca could be ready for deployment in January, while Sir Jeremy Farrar, Sage scientific advisory group member and a director of the Wellcome Trust, has said at least one of a portfolio of UK vaccines could be ready by spring.
Much has been said about how the world will return to normal when a vaccine is widely available. But that really won’t be true. It is important that we are realistic about what vaccines can and can’t do.
Vaccines protect individuals against disease and hopefully also against infection, but no vaccine is 100% effective. To know what proportion of a community would be immune after a vaccination programme is a numbers game – we must multiply the proportion of a population vaccinated by how effective the vaccine is.
The UK currently has among the highest national coverage of flu vaccine in the world, vaccinating around 75% of the over-65s against flu every year; most countries either do worse or have no vaccination programmes for older people. It is reasonable to expect that this level of coverage could be achieved for a Covid-19 vaccine in that age group in the UK.
Therefore, if the Covid-19 vaccine is 75% effective – meaning that 75% of those vaccinated become immune – then we would actually only protect 56% of that target population (75% of 75%). This would not be enough to stop the virus circulating. Almost half of our highest risk group would remain susceptible, and we won’t know who they are. Relaxing social distancing rules when facing those risks seems a bit like Russian roulette.
Now let’s look at people younger than 65 in medical risk groups. In a good year, the UK vaccinates 50% of them against flu. That means just over a third of them are going to be protected (50% of 75%). Just to make matters worse, regulators such as the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency have said that they would accept a 50% lower level for efficacy for candidate Covid-19 vaccines. If that efficacy level is fulfilled, we have to multiply coverage by 50% efficacy, not 75%, and suddenly it all gets more concerning.
As well as protecting individuals, vaccines can protect communities, through the interruption of transmission. One of the best examples comes from the UK meningitis C vaccination campaign of the late 1990s. There was a 67% reduction in the number of cases in unvaccinated children and young people because they were being protected by their contacts who had been vaccinated and were no longer transmitting infection.
If we want to see population protection from a Covid-19 vaccination, we are going to need high levels of protection (coverage x efficacy) across all ages – vaccinating not just the at-risk groups, as is being planned.
To stop transmission, we must vaccinate anyone who can transmit infection. Anything less means that our goal is only individual protection and not the interruption of transmission. A recent announcement from the head of the UK vaccine taskforce, that the strategy will be targeted vaccination, makes it abundantly clear that the UK vaccine strategy at the moment is not to try to interrupt transmission, despite having hundreds of millions of Covid-19 vaccine doses on contract. With less than 10% of the population showing evidence of having been infected, targeted vaccination will not allow “life as previously usual” to return.
Even if countries do decide to switch from a personal-protection policy to a transmission-interruption strategy, obstacles remain. Much will depend on the successful vaccination (probably with two doses) of people who have not previously seen themselves to be at elevated risk. The challenge will be persuading the young, for example, to be vaccinated, not for their own benefit, but for the benefit of others.
Adherence to recommendations for any Covid-19 interventions – social distancing, lockdowns, home working, cancelled holidays or vaccinations – depend on trust. If politicians are telling us that the present impositions on our lives are only going to last until we have vaccines, then the reality is that a false hope is being promulgated.
Vaccines are probably the most powerful public health intervention available to us. But unless their benefits are communicated with realism, confidence in all recommendations will be put at risk.
While hope and optimism are much needed in these dark times, it is important to be transparent. We need to communicate the clear message that although targeted vaccination may offer some protection, it will not simply deliver “life as we used to know it”.
David Salisbury
The Guardian, Wed 21 Oct 2020
Voice assistants such as Alexa and Siri will become common in children’s bedrooms, according to a new report from Internet Matters, the online safety body, which says it is critical for parents to spend more time understanding new technology.
The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of new technology at home by “three or four years”, the researchers said, and families in the UK will become much more reliant on voice-enabled devices over the next five years.
The report’s author, Lynne Hall, professor of computer science at the University of Sunderland, said we would even see the emergence of a range of celebrity voice assistants.
“You’d have Elsa from Frozen,” Hall said. “You can imagine that with every Disney film that came out there would be a new voice skin.” Amazon has already launched a novelty Samuel L Jackson voice for its Alexa devices, although it does not enable all voice commands.
The “Living The Future” report, based on interviews and surveys of parents and academics, says that 42% of families have been using tech together more often over the last three months – playing online games together (34%), watching tutorials (51%), streaming videos (41%) or online shopping (36%).
Only 7% of parents said they wanted to return to the workplace full time, which is likely to further fuel a boom in home tech controlled by voice assistants, the report said.
“The home is becoming less and less private and we need to think about what data is being shared,” said Carolyn Bunting, the chief executive of Internet Matters. “We need to make sure we’re not sleepwalking into a world where we’re just giving away all of this information without thinking about where it’s going, who’s holding it or how it’s being used.”
Although voice assistants usually process commands using voice recognition, Apple, Amazon and Google have all used call-centre staff to check recordings and some have heard children sharing the home address and phone number, according to a Bloomberg report last year.
Hall said her research showed that children were encountering voice assistants almost from the day they are born. “Women are buying a voice assistant for their child’s bedroom when they’ve had the baby,” she said. “If you’ve got your hands full, it’s much easier to say, ‘Alexa, ring my partner’.”
Children do not see voice assistants as their friends, Hall said. “They don’t anthropomorphise. It’s very much a tool. But voice assistants are starting to learn how little children speak. Children try to teach the voice assistant if it doesn’t understand – they give it more information.”
Since parents play a vital role in children’s acquisition of language, there are unanswered questions about how hearing a mother or father giving orders to voice assistants might affect their development.
Australian academics Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy have voiced concerns in their book The Smart Wife that the devices reinforce gender stereotypes since they are usually voiced by young women, take orders and are linked to domestic responsibilities.
There are potential safety benefits to using voice assistants, Bunting said, since children using them for information will usually accept the first answer.
Bunting called for better regulation. The government’s online harms bill, obliging social media companies to prevent children seeing harmful content, is likely to be published this winter, “but they are struggling with these softer issues,” she said.
She said that tech firms also needed to design an internet for children: “It’s wrong that in the Covid pandemic we saw six or seven-year-olds up to secondary school age children being thrust into Houseparty and Whatsapp video chats. None of those services are designed for little people. We need safe playgrounds for children online.”
The Guardian
Watch this interesting video and then get some ideas of your own about motivation. We'll share them in class.
Survey data reveals the scale of this "pandemic fatigue", estimated to have reached over 60% in some cases.
Many people are feeling less motivated about following protective behaviours after living with disruption and uncertainty for months, says the WHO.
Although weary, people must revive efforts to fight the virus, it says.
Until a vaccine or effective treatments are available, public support and protective behaviours - washing hands, wearing face coverings and social distancing - remain critical for containing the virus.
Coronavirus is continuing its spread across the world, with more than 35 million confirmed cases in 188 countries and more than one million deaths.
Dr Hans Henri Kluge, WHO's regional director for Europe, says fatigue is to be expected at this stage of the crisis.
"Since the virus arrived in the European region eight months ago, citizens have made huge sacrifices to contain Covid-19.
"It has come at an extraordinary cost, which has exhausted all of us, regardless of where we live, or what we do. In such circumstances it is easy and natural to feel apathetic and demotivated, to experience fatigue.
"I believe it is possible to reinvigorate and revive efforts to tackle the evolving Covid-19 challenges we face."
He says there are strategies to get us back on track, with communities at their heart:
He highlighted virtual celebrations during Ramadan or floating cinemas as successful new approaches that could help people adapt to the new conditions imposed by the pandemic.
The UK does its own regular survey on coronavirus and social attitudes and behaviours, based on a poll of around 2,200 adults.
Latest data suggests:
