AlertsUSA subscribers were notified on Tuesday that the CDC and State Dept had issued parallel LEVEL 4 - DO NOT TRAVEL advisories for Spain urging Americans to avoid all travel to the country due to high levels of COVID-19. Spain has experienced a sharp rise in coronavirus hospitalizations and deaths in the past four weeks which have prompted authorities to impose fresh restrictions in many parts of the country. In turn, these new restrictions have triggered demonstrations and civil unrest.
Similar to the alert issued last week for the United Kingdom, the State Department's advisory for Spain also points out that terrorist groups continue plotting possible attacks in the country. The advisory warns that terrorists may attack with little or no warning, targeting tourist locations and all manner of public, private and government facilities.
WHY TARGET SPAIN?
Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have been responsible for multiple significant attacks in Spain. These include the March 2004 Madrid Train Bombings which killed 192 and injured more than 2000, as well as the 2017 Barcelona and Cambrils vehicle ramming attacks that killed 14 and injured more than 130.
Much of the stated motivation of the jihadists in targeting Spain stems from the fact that Moors from N. Africa invaded and ruled over the Iberian Peninsula and what is now Spain and Portugal for more than 700 years. This ended in 1492 when the military efforts of multiple Christian states over hundreds of years resulted in the fall of the last Muslim state of Iberia, known as Granada.
With the recapture of Grenada, Muslims were required to convert to Christianity or leave the combined kingdoms of Spain. Between 1492 and 1610, some 3,000,000 Muslims voluntarily left or were expelled, resettling in North Africa.
This "Reconquista" and expulsion continues to be a thorn, with multiple extremist groups having since threatened to recapture the area, and in particular, a region of southern Spain refereed to as Al-Andalus, for inclusion in the caliphate. |
On Friday of this week, AlertsUSA subscribers were notified that due to increasing COVID19 case numbers in the Nat'l Capital Region, the Department of Defense had ordered an increase in the Health Protection Condition of the entirety of the Pentagon Reservation. The move to HPCON Bravo acknowledges an area is experiencing increased community transmission of the virus and triggers masking and social distancing protocols, testing requirements, limitations on travel, limits to the size of gatherings, and more.
Approximately 27,000 military, civilian employees, and non-defense support personnel work inside the Pentagon each day.
President Biden announced on Thursday that on-site federal contractors, as well as all federal employees, must attest to their coronavirus vaccination status or be subject to restrictions, including the wearing of a mask, regardless of their location; social distancing from others with at work; weekly or twice weekly coronavirus testing, limited official travel, and more.
President Biden has also ordered the Defense Department to develop a plan to make vaccines for the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) mandatory for all members of the U.S. military. At present, COVID-19 vaccinations are voluntary for service members because the vaccines have not yet received full approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
THREE EYEOPENING REPORTS
Three reports were published this week that readers may find interesting.
The first is an analysis conducted by the Bloomberg. Sometime around the end of April, the Centers for Disease Control stopped comprehensively tracking what are known as "vaccine breakthrough cases." This is where a fully vaccinated person tests positive for COVID-19. At the time, the agency had identified only 10,262 cases across the U.S. with tens of millions of vaccine doses already administered.
The CDC said that it would continue to collect data on breakthrough cases only if the infections resulted in hospitalization or death, leaving a massive gap in the data needed to track the effectiveness of the vaccines. But just about the time the CDC stopped tracking non-hospitalized breakthrough cases, case numbers for the new Delta variant of the virus were on the rise.
While the CDC may have inexplicably stopped collecting the surveillance data, dozens of individual states did not. Bloomberg gathered data from 35 states and identified a surprising 111,748 vaccine breakthrough cases through the end of July, more than 10X the CDC’s end-of-April tally.
Not only is the Delta variant more contagious, the Bloomberg report states health officials believe it more readily causes symptomatic — and contagious — illness in vaccinated people.
Next is this week's Morbidity and Mortality Report from the CDC which contains a new paper looking at hundreds of cases of COVID-19 following a series of public events in Barnstable County, Massachusetts. Testing identified the Delta variant in 90% of individuals participating. Interestingly, the viral loads of the vaccinated and unvaccinated participants were similar.
These items raise serious questions about the effectiveness of the vaccines at preventing infection or transmission of the Delta variant.
The third report comes from SAGE, which is the UK government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies. As the title explains, SAGE provides scientific and technical advice to support government decision makers during emergencies.
This week, SAGE published a document titled "The Long Term Evolution of SARS-CoV-2" which looks at potential scenarios that could emerge in the not-so-distant future. Of those scenarios, a new COVID variant that could kill up to one in three people is a "realistic possibility."
According to the SAGE report, a process — known as recombination — could lead to a strain with 'increased morbidity and mortality'. For instance, a vaccine-resistant variant combining with the more transmissible 'Kent' Alpha or 'India' Delta variants.
AlertsUSA continues to monitor the domestic and international threat environment around the clock and will immediately notify service subscribers, via SMS messages to their mobile devices, of new alerts, warnings and advisories or any developments which signal a change the overall threat picture for American citizens as events warrant.
