Tag Archives: Death

In Turkey and Syria thousands of buildings have collapsed, death toll rising and bad weather is hampering rescue efforts after largest earthquake in 100 years

Matthew 24:7 For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places.

Important Takeaways:

  • Powerful quake leaves thousands dead in Turkey and Syria
  • More than 5,000 people have been killed and tens of thousands injured after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Turkey and Syria
  • Thousands of buildings collapsed in both countries and aid agencies are particularly worried about northwestern Syria, where more than 4 million people were already relying on humanitarian assistance.
  • Freezing weather conditions are further endangering survivors and complicating rescue efforts, as more than 100 aftershocks have struck the region.
  • The quake, one of the strongest to hit the region in more than 100 years, struck 23 kilometers (14.2 miles) east of Nurdagi, in Turkey’s Gaziantep province, at a depth of 24.1 kilometers (14.9 miles), the United States Geological Survey said.
  • The WHO warned on Monday that the toll could hit 20,000, and on Tuesday said 23 million people – including 1.4 million children – could be affected.

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Newsom declares National Emergency, orders evacuations in high risk areas 180,000 without power

Bomb Cyclone California

Luke 21:25-26 “And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and on the earth distress of nations in perplexity because of the roaring of the sea and the waves, people fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world. For the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

Important Takeaways:

  • Toddler dies and 180,000 are without power as mega bomb cyclone slams West Coast with torrential rains and winds up to 130mph: San Fran gas station buckles and towns including Montecito, where Harry, Meghan and Oprah live, are ordered to evacuate
  • More than 170,000 are without power in California during heavy wind and gusts
  • The storm knocked over trees and killed a child, aged one or two, as peak wind gusts reached up to 130mph in Central California, with many areas seeing gusts as low as 50mph.
  • The bomb cyclone is expected to bring up to one to seven inches of rain
  • Officials in California have also ordered evacuations in high-risk coastal areas and towns such as Montecito
  • Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency with some evacuations

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High temps are causing cattle to keel over and die

Revelation 16:9 “They were scorched by the fierce heat, and they cursed the name of God who had power over these plagues. They did not repent and give him glory.”

Important Takeaways:

  • Thousands of Cattle Reported Dead
  • The current heat wave blazing through Kansas feedlots has killed an estimated 10,000 head of fat cattle.
  • Temperature readings reported for Ulysses began to exceed the 100-degree mark on June 11. By June 13, the high temperature was reported at 104 degrees, with humidity levels ranging from 18% to 35%.
  • Veterinarian A.J. Tarpoff, who works with Kansas State University Extension, explained that when there is a “perfect storm” of too much heat and no opportunity for nighttime cooling, cattle can accumulate heat and die from the stress.

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Iraq passed bill criminalizing relations with Israel, punishable with death sentence

Matt 24:10,11 Then he said to them: “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be great earthquakes, famines and pestilences in various places, and fearful events and great signs from heaven.

Important Takeaways:

  • The legislation says that violation of the law is punishable with the death sentence or life imprisonment.
  • It was unclear how the law will be implemented as Iraq has not recognized Israel since the country’s formation in 1948
  • The legislation also entails risks for companies working in Iraq and found to be in violation of the bill.

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400 Million under Lockdown or Partial Lockdown across China

Revelations 6:8 “And I looked, and behold, a pale horse! And its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed him. And they were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by wild beasts of the earth.”

Important Takeaways:

  • The biggest risk to the global economy no one is talking about
  • Nearly 400 million people across 45 cities in China are under full or partial lockdown as part of China’s strict zero-Covid policy. Together they represent 40%, or $7.2 trillion, of annual gross domestic product for the world’s second-largest economy, according to data from Nomura Holdings.
  • Analysts are ringing warning bells, but say investors aren’t properly assessing how serious the global economic fallout might be from these prolonged isolation orders.
  • Most alarming is the indefinite lockdown in Shanghai, a city of 25 million and one of China’s premiere manufacturing and export hubs.
  • The quarantines there have led to food shortages, inability to access medical care, and even reported pet killings. They’ve also left the largest port in the world understaffed.

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Abortion: The Leading Cause of Death in 2021

Rev 21:8 KJV “But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and fornicators, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.”

Important Takeaways:

  • Abortion Was the Leading Cause of Death Worldwide in 2021, Killing 42.6 Million People
  • Statistics compiled by Worldometers indicate that there were over 42.6 million abortions world-wide in 2021.
  • By contrast, 8.7 million people died from cancer in 2020, 5 million from smoking, 13 million from disease, and 1.7 million died of HIV/AIDS.
  • That means abortions accounted for 42% of every death around the world last year.
  • In America, just under 1 million babies are aborted every year. Though abortion rates have been dropping in the past decade, abortion remains the leading cause of death in the United States as well.

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France’s COVID-19 cases reach national record while deaths also rise

PARIS (Reuters) -France had its worst-ever day in terms of new COVID-19 cases on Thursday, with more than 91,000 new cases being recorded while the number of deaths also climbed, as the country battles against a fifth wave of the virus.

“Today’s figures are not good,” said Health Minister Olivier Veran.

Veran had earlier told reporters that the case number would stand at around 88,000 for Thursday, but the final official tally from the health ministry showed 91,608 new cases.

Veran had already warned earlier this week that France would soon be at 100,000 new COVID-19 cases per day.

Data from the health ministry also showed that France registered a further 179 COVID-19 deaths in hospitals over the last 24 hours, while the number of COVID-19 patients in intensive care units reached 3,208, up by 61 from the previous day.

President Emmanuel Macron is hoping France’s COVID-19 vaccine booster campaign will help to contain the fifth wave of the coronavirus to hit the country.

He is aiming to avoid imposing tough, new restrictions, although the French government has said all options will be considered to tackle any rapid deterioration in France’s COVID-19 situation.

(Reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta and Juliette Jabkhiro, editing by Mark Heinrich, Barbara Lewis and Aurora Ellis)

Factbox – Latest on the worldwide spread of the coronavirus

(Reuters) – The Americas is facing an impending crisis in routine vaccinations because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Pan American Health Organization said, and vaccinations against the coronavirus are behind where they should be.

DEATHS AND INFECTIONS

EUROPE

* France is at the beginning of a fifth wave of the epidemic, Health Minister Olivier Veran said.

* Russia’s deaths hit a record in the previous 24 hours, two days after most of its regions emerged from a week-long workplace shutdown.

* People aged under 30 in Germany should only receive the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine as it causes fewer heart inflammations in younger people than the Moderna shot, an advisory committee said.

AMERICAS

* Over 900,000 U.S. children aged 5 to 11 are expected to have received their first COVID-19 shot by the end of Wednesday, the White House said, as the government ramped up vaccinations of younger children.

* The United States has brokered a deal between Johnson & Johnson and the COVAX vaccine-sharing program for the delivery of the company’s COVID-19 vaccine to people living in conflict zones.

* U.S. National Institutes of Health scientists played “a major role” in developing Moderna’s vaccine and the agency intends to defend its claim as co-owner of patents on the shot, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins told Reuters.

ASIA-PACIFIC

* South Korea encouraged citizens to take booster shots as more of the elderly fell ill and reported vaccine breakthrough infections, driving serious and critical cases to a record.

* Thailand said it will set aside up to 500,000 doses of vaccines for foreign workers.

* Vietnam will by the end of this month have sufficient vaccines to cover its population, a deputy prime minister said, as the country approved India’s Covaxin vaccine for emergency use.

MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA

* Israel’s pandemic advisory board backed administering Pfizer’s and BioNTech’s vaccine to children age 5-11, as a fourth wave of infections subsides nationwide.

* Bahrain will cancel working with its coronavirus travel red list from Nov. 14.

MEDICAL DEVELOPMENTS

* French vaccines company Valneva won European Commission approval for a deal to supply up to 60 million doses of its vaccine candidate over two years.

* Merck and partner Ridgeback Biotherapeutics said Japan will pay about $1.2 billion for 1.6 million courses of their COVID-19 antiviral pill molnupiravir.

ECONOMIC IMPACT

* Wall Street lost ground on Wednesday as surging consumer prices fueled fears of a longer-than-expected wave of heightened inflation dampened investor risk appetite.

* San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank President Mary Daly said she expects high inflation to moderate once COVID-19 recedes, and repeated that it would be “quite premature” to raise rates now or even to speed up the Fed’s bond-buying taper.

(Compiled by Devika Syamnath and Sarah Morland; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Sriraj Kalluvila)

Analysis – COVID-19 pills are coming, but no substitute for vaccines, disease experts say

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Oral antiviral pills from Merck & Co and Pfizer Inc/BioNTech SE have been shown to significantly blunt the worst outcomes of COVID-19 if taken early enough, but doctors warn vaccine hesitant people not to confuse the benefit of the treatments with prevention afforded by vaccines.

While 72% of American adults have gotten a first shot of the vaccine, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll, the pace of vaccination has slowed, as political partisanship in the United States divides views on the value and safety of vaccines against the coronavirus.

Vaccine mandates by employers, states and the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden have helped increase vaccinations but also fueled that controversy.

Some disease experts fear the arrival of oral COVID-19 treatments may further impede vaccination campaigns. Preliminary results of a survey of 3,000 U.S. citizens by the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Public Health suggest the drugs could “hamper the effort to get people vaccinated,” said Scott Ratzan, an expert in health communication at CUNY, who led the research.

Ratzan said one out of every eight of those surveyed said they would rather get treated with a pill than be vaccinated. “That is a high number,” Ratzan said.

The concern follows news on Friday from Pfizer, maker of a leading COVID-19 vaccine, that its experimental antiviral pill Paxlovid cut the risk of hospitalization and death from the disease by 89% in high-risk adults.

Pfizer’s results followed news from Merck and partner Ridgeback Biotherapeutics on Oct. 1 that their oral antiviral drug cut hospitalization and death by half. That drug, known as molnupiravir, won conditional approval in the UK on Thursday. Both need clearance from U.S. health regulators but could be on the market in December.

“By relying exclusively on an antiviral drug, it’s a bit of a roll of the dice in terms of how you will do. Clearly, it’s going to be better than nothing, but it’s a high-stakes game to play,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine expert and professor of molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine.

Six infectious disease experts interviewed by Reuters were equally enthusiastic about the prospect of effective new treatments for COVID-19 and agreed they were no substitute for vaccines.

Even in the face of the highly transmissible Delta variant of the virus, the vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech remain effective, cutting the risk of hospitalization by a combined 86.8%, according to a government study of U.S. veterans.

They said some unvaccinated people have already relied on monoclonal antibodies – drugs that need to be delivered through intravenous IV infusions or injections – as a backstop in case they become infected. “I think the Pfizer news is terrific news. It goes hand in hand with vaccination. It doesn’t replace it,” said Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University and Baltimore’s former health commissioner.

Choosing not to get vaccinated “would be a tragic mistake,” said Albert Bourla, chief executive officer of Pfizer Inc. “These are treatments. This is for the unfortunate who will get sick,” Bourla told Reuters in an interview on Friday. “This should not be a reason not to protect yourself and to put yourself, your household and society in danger.”

ANTIVIRAL CHALLENGES

One main reason not to rely on the new pills, the experts said, is that antiviral medications, which stop the virus from replicating in the body, must be given in a narrow window early in the disease because COVID-19 has different phases.

In the first phase, the virus rapidly replicates in the body. A lot of the worst effects of COVID-19, however, occur in the second phase, arising from a defective immune response that gets triggered by the replicating virus, said Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease expert and the CEO and founder of Just Human Productions, a non-profit multimedia organization.

“Once you develop shortness of breath or other symptoms that would lead you to be hospitalized, you are in that dysfunctional immune phase where the antivirals are really not going to provide much benefit,” she said. Hotez agreed. He said getting treated early enough could be challenging because the window when the virus transitions from the replication phase to the inflammatory phase is fluid. “For some people, that will happen earlier; for some, later,” Hotez said. Hotez said many people in the early phase of the illness feel surprisingly well and may be unaware that their oxygen levels are dropping, one of the first signs that the inflammatory phase of the disease has started. “Oftentimes, you’re not going to realize that you’re getting sick until it’s too late,” he said.

(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen; Additional reporting by Josephine Mason in London, Deena Beasley in Los Angeles and Manojna Maddipatla in Bengaluru; editing by Caroline Humer and Grant McCool)

Russia says at least 44,265 people died from COVID-19 in Sept

MOSCOW (Reuters) – At least 44,265 people died in Russia in September due to the coronavirus and related causes, taking the toll to around 462,000 since the pandemic began, state statistics service Rosstat said on Friday.

The figure was down from a peak of 51,044 in July, although infections and fatalities began to surge again in the second half of September and have repeatedly touched record levels this month, leading authorities to reintroduce stricter health restrictions.

The overall COVID-19 death toll reported by Rosstat is almost double the figure of 236,220 published by the Russian coronavirus task force earlier on Friday.

Authorities explain the discrepancy by the fact that the task force reports deaths from COVID-19 on a daily basis that do not need additional confirmation from medical examiners, whereas Rosstat publishes full data on a monthly basis.

Some epidemiologists say that measuring excess mortality is the best way to assess the death toll during a pandemic.

Based on the new data, Reuters calculated that the number of excess deaths in Russia between April 2020 and September 2021 was more than 632,000 in comparison with the average mortality rate in 2015-2019.

Authorities have blamed the latest surge on the more virulent Delta variant and on popular reluctance to take up the Russian-made Sputnik V vaccine.

(Reporting by Gleb Stolyarov and Andrey Ostroukh; Writing by Alexander Marrow; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)