monica jones is up next with the co-written 1000 stressful don't forget you can keep up to date with the latest news by heading to our website this year dot com and you can follow us on twitter and instagram our handle is at d w news i will rock and roll in on behalf of the entire news team thank you for spending part of. combating the corona pandemic. where does research stand. what are scientists learning. information and. our corona up to. 19 special next on d w. beethoven is for me. for .

beethoven is for. beethoven is for. beethoven 2020. 5th anniversary on you know. some 660000 people have died so far from covert 19 according to official statistics poor rich young old famous the virus doesn't discriminate. even care as doctors and nurses who were there to help succumb to the illness. france and spain are among the few countries that held public memorial stew on of the dead and whose departure has been especially difficult for loved ones many have not had an opportunity to say goodbye and thousands have been buried in mass graves. 19 was unexpected and

fast changing our lives and the world. how do you grief when bedside visits and funerals and. welcome to you are not in special here and you knew someone cajones and well and good to have you with us well normally we're here to talk about the latest vaccine studies or various other approaches to treat 19 but we shouldn't forget that the coronavirus also kills and so today we want to talk about deaths in times of a pandemic 1st a report from the us for amanda and gina their grandfather who see it was like a father to them he taught them everything heard them become who they are and dido the coronavirus one of the many in arizona it was horrible to leave him alone and him knowing we had to leave him alone like what was he going through at that time

knowing that he couldn't have his loved ones there to support him his basing everything pretty much alone and there's nothing we could do about it. i don't know it's. very heartbreaking. a situational aster has become all too familiar with even after 38 years in the funeral business the corona pandemic nothing is as it used to be. with these families so many of them haven't been able to be with their loved one at the time of death put into a hospital where they can't visit or into a nursing home where they can no longer seem so many people are dying alone and that emotionally it's challenging for families just to know that they can't be there and they can't you know be supportive and so are our challenge our job is to help them kind of deal with that and start to help them to heal and grieve and that's that's what we do. more than 2500 people have already died in

arizona leaving many hospitals overwhelmed with the sick and the dead. when we get a death call the hospital will say can you come quickly because we're archipelago at capacity we don't have anywhere to put these people they're trying not to get to these mobile units but they actually are so when we go now to a hospital transfer or someone in our care they have to actually have to look and see where the body is is it in the hospital facility or is it out in the mobile facility. it's been a little over a week since they've buried their grandfather amanda and gina still need time to come to terms with their loss but they already have strong feelings about who is to blame they could have handled it a lot better i feel they knew about this from john and they did nothing i understand price so the world wouldn't go in panic mode but at the same time like what's going on liquid occurred due to them knowing and not doing anything about it and i really do think they could have did a lot more to help

a lot of people and people are still getting sick people are still going to the hospital people are still dying and i don't understand why. i just don't and i don't think it's fair to any of us. their feelings are shared by many mourners in america that the lack of leadership from the white house is just as dangerous as the virus itself. so let's talk a bit more about deaths lydia humaneness your associate professor of the department of psychiatry and forensic medicine at the autonomous university of barcelona and she's also been part of a research team looking into the deaths and mourning process in the times of the corona virus pandemic could you have you with us let me start with the assumption western society tends to ignore the fact that we're mortal has the pandemic changed that yes. yes definitely this is the whole of that on some means that we are responding to

you know that until it arrives but these scripts are asked to make things very life easy now and then he's forcing sourcing and changing our consciousness or our rights usa your minds are martyrs and those that have been closer to someone in effect. you're ready have meetings change and those that are your are those home to persist in this move heartily we have a new challenge that is true and. exactly and of course i mean those who've experienced it and we've just seen that also in the reports many couldn't say goodbye to the dying relatives they couldn't even give them a proper burial how big a trauma is that and how do you recover from that. well she's hurt we should say that. person an accident nor do we expect that relatives will.

die and see me too or one of the sas that that was you didn't you just say oh i ought to do it retool our destruct start learning process and intensifies for awareness that. nest in a stigma reinforced. corey depends on many hot tours and those who have low to no social skills probably will need professional help. searching meaning in life and the star might make a difference with the situations and date and especially as this pandemic isn't over yet and it has already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives professor please stick around because we would just like to take a look at some numbers here this curve that we see now shows just how many lives were lost within a relatively short period of time it started slowly but then by mid february it became clear that we do have

a problem and by april we counted tens of thousands who died of covert 19 some 6 months into the pandemic some 660000 people lost their lives the highest death toll in the united states followed by brazil britain mexico and italy and as i mentioned and as we all know the pandemic is still on going back to professor hume in this yard in barcelona please tell me we're talking about statistics here but these are people these were lives lost why don't we see more public ceremony mornings the death. well how only because this store showed expressions of sympathy and relief as a collective all this come at the end of the tragedy the tragedy of the all there is fear we are conscious that we are all one who are together in them you know of these biotope still in the battle is not yet aware and also because. they are all

the countries that this theory in a more severe have of confrontation with the buyers so i think that these can be our one of the points that refrains is situations or who are immense in a state you have got that because we have and the waves but are many other countries we wait in a certain way that this is the art or distress wave is over and to this end the respect of the. right professor humanise york from the autonomous university of barcelona thank you so much time and thank you for sharing your c. research on deaths and mourning in times of a pandemic with us and you know. what now time for more of your questions over to our science correspondent eric williams. what's happening with the present flu season. this is

a really interesting question that made some headlines after a big wall street journal article on the topic last week don't forget that when it's summer time here in the northern hemisphere it's winter in the southern hemisphere so for the last 5 months there should have been a spike and in the number of cases of influenza as as flu season ramped up into full swing there but according to the w.h.o. global flu levels have remained astonishingly low for this time of year in many countries south of the equator in some places they drop by by 90 percent compared to average years and actually when you think about it it probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise of a loan with with heavily restricted travel all of the social distancing measures people have been observing to stop the spread of covert 19 are ones that would also

be effective at curbing the spread of flu we've just never used them against the flu before on this kind of a scale. could sauce cove to combine with influenza viruses to create a new strain. usually viruses evolve through a gradual process called genic drift which sees them slowly mutate as changes occur and their genetic material over time and many replications them what you're talking about is a phenomenon known as antigenic shift which describes abrupt major changes that can occur for example and some flu viruses when when 2 different strains recombine inside the host to produce a much more deadly pathogen appear. lee out of the blue that's what we think for example occurred with the h one n one flu virus that caused

a pandemic back in 2009 and fortunately antigenic shift that leads to the highly infectious new pathogens seems to occur rarely and we're pretty sure it only happens between very closely related pathogens so so some flu viruses recombine amongst themselves in this way and there's some evidence that that some coronaviruses might do it too but but the 2 different species we combine with each other to create some kind of super bowl. before we start worrying about to the next threat let's deal with the one at hand for people in hong kong this means no more dining in restaurants after a new upsurge in case numbers restaurants have been ordered to hold to dine and service and offer takeaway meals instead and while the threat is real with the use of such says of hong kong harbor well using outdoors may not be the worst way to

spend your lunch break as you see here 7 times of a pandemic. that's your one special for today for me and the team then dylan as always thanks for watching distaste. eco indiana top of the line product and bottom of the barrel profit that's what india 1000 farmers and the himalayan mountain are you. decided to band together and invest in new business models and innovative techniques because only together can be even standing tough competition. next on d. w. . is in life and the work has been romanticized and marketed

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