RIO DE JANEIRO: Valnir da Silva died on the streets of a poor Rio de Janeiro neighbourhood on Saturday (May 16). His body lay on the sidewalk for 30 hours, according to relatives and neighbours.

Although they may never be sure, they suspect the 62-year-old was an uncounted victim of the coronavirus outbreak tearing through Rio’s marginalised communities and stretching public services past their limits.

As much of Asia and Europe pass the worst of the pandemic, Brazil is hurtling toward its peak, with more than 17,000 already dead. Latin America’s biggest country passed Britain this week in a grim toll of the most confirmed cases after Russia and the United States.

READ: Brazil sees record virus deaths as pandemic surges in Latin America

Deaths in Rio state trail only the more populous Sao Paulo. The outbreak is filling up intensive care units and thinning out the ranks of emergency services.

Ricardo Moraes, a Reuters photojournalist in Rio, was covering a police operation early on Sunday when he heard reports about the corpse in the nearby favela of Arara.

When he arrived at the scene around 7am on Sunday, Moraes found Silva lying on the same spot where locals said he had died on Saturday morning – sandwiched between a row of parked cars and a small soccer pitch.

A group of locals at a nearby bar said Silva’s life began to fall apart after the death of his wife a few months back, and he was soon living on the street.

On Saturday, when Silva complained that he could not breathe, the locals said they called an ambulance for him, but he died before it arrived.

Some residents thought he had died from COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus, but nobody was certain. The disease entered Rio via wealthier residents returning from vacation in Europe, but it has since spread into poorer neighbourhoods.

The ambulance arrived around 4pm on Saturday, locals said, but left without the body. Paramedics put his cause of death as cardiac arrest and another unknown cause, according to the death certificate seen by Reuters.

In a statement, the city ambulance service said it was not responsible for removing the corpse. They did not say whether Silva had been tested for COVID-19.

The next morning, Silva’s stepson Marcos Vinicius Andrade da Silva, 26, tried to find another authority to pick up the body.

He said he spoke with police officers on patrol, who alerted colleagues at the 21st Civil Police station nearby, to no avail.

A civil police spokeswoman said they only take charge of removing corpses in criminal cases.

After spending the day on the phone, the stepson said a funeral team arrived finally at 5pm on Sunday.

“We were very relieved that they had taken him away … but also very sad about what happened,” he said.

On Monday, da Silva was buried at a ceremony with four people, including Marcos and his mother, in attendance.

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Throughout the COVID-19 crisis , Bernadette John-Da Silva has relied on the TTC to get to her job at a homeless respite centre in Toronto’s Trinity-Bellwoods neighbourhood.

For the first leg of her commute from Jane Street and Alliance Avenue, she takes the 35 Jane bus. Although these days her shift starts in the afternoon when transit should be less busy, the first bus that arrives is often too crowded for her to feel safe to board. Sometimes she’ll wait for two or three to pass before she decides she can get on.

As more people start to go back to work in the coming weeks, John-Da Silva is worried bus crowding will only get worse.

“People are going to be breathing in each other’s faces” and “jam-packed like sardines,” she said.

She doesn’t drive, and if the buses get too full she’ll have to consider the extra expense of taking an Uber to work. “Or do I put a mask on and take my chances and take the bus?” she asked.

As COVID-19 forces Toronto to rethink its transportation network, residents like John-Da Silva who live outside the downtown core and depend on public transit risk being left behind.

Like other cities around the world, Toronto has given more road space for pedestrians and cyclists to physically distance as they move around during the pandemic, especially while public transit’s capacity to carry people safely is limited.

But Matti Siemiatycki, an associate professor of geography and interim director of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto, said such interventions have so far focused on dense, more affluent downtown areas where cycling and walking were already options for many.

To ensure the city that emerges from the pandemic is a more equitable one, Siemiatycki said policies to ensure safe, reliable transportation must be extended to Toronto’s less wealthy suburbs and inner suburbs, where distances between destinations are longer and cycling or walking aren’t always options.

The pandemic has revealed the deep inequalities in our cities, he said. “We need to address inequality in mobility” and “focus on how we’re going to provide a greater range of options for travel in the suburbs.”

Siemiatycki argues Toronto’s transportation recovery plan should include a network of dedicated bus lanes outside downtown.

The key, he said, is to create a connected network, because “if you just have one in a random location, that actually doesn’t provide that much benefit.”

Bus-only lanes could be created quickly and cheaply by using bollards and paint on wide arterial roads outside the core, he said.

In the long term, the best-performing lanes could be preserved and possibly upgraded to higher-order bus rapid transit or light rail lines.

In the short term, the change would “provide much improved public transit right across the suburbs,” he said.

Many transportation experts and policy-makers believe the disruption caused by the pandemic creates a window of opportunity to create more efficient and sustainable cities by reducing their reliance on private automobiles.

“Within this short window, we can position Canadian cities to thrive as we embrace a ‘new normal,’” reads the 2020 Declaration for Resilience in Canadian Cities , an initiative spearheaded by former Toronto chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat.

The document calls for transforming streets to meet the needs of pedestrians and cyclists, increasing transit service, enacting a moratorium on the construction of urban expressways and implementing congestion charges with revenue dedicated to transit expansion.

Cities around the world have already begun to implement some of these ideas.

In May, officials in London announced they would create one of the largest car-free zones in a capital city by converting some streets in the city centre for walking, cycling or bus trips only.

Closer to home, Montreal has plans to create 327 kilometres of bike paths and pedestrian streets this summer.

Although Toronto has been less ambitious, it too has begun shutting major streets to cars on weekends and is creating 57 kilometres of traffic-calmed “quiet streets.”

Last week, councillors approved a plan to rapidly install 25 kilometres of new bike lanes, a decision that will contribute to the largest single-year expansion of the Toronto’s cycling network in the city’s history, creating a continuous 15-kilometre bike lane on the Bloor-Danforth corridor that will straddle downtown and connect to new cycle tracks on the north-south arterial of University Avenue.

But the acceleration plan offers little for the suburbs: just two new bike lanes in Scarborough, one in North York and none in Etobicoke.

“This is an initiative that deals with cycling essentially in downtown Toronto,” Councillor Mike Colle (Ward 8, Eglinton-Lawrence) said in a speech to council.

With transit unable to safely carry the high ridership it did before the pandemic “we have to get people in all parts of the city, in Scarborough, in North York, in midtown, cycling more,” Colle argued.

From early in the crisis, there was evidence that those living in lower-income neighbourhoods outside downtown were more likely to be exposed to riskier commutes.

As TTC ridership evaporated in mid-March, normally busy streetcar and subway lines serving the core emptied out. But crowding persisted on 15 bus routes, most outside downtown.

The TTC determined the busy routes served low-income neighbourhoods and shift workers in essential sectors who had no option to work from home . The routes take labourers to grocery distribution centres, industrial bakeries and other workplaces vital to keeping the city going.

The TTC says that although it has significantly reduced bus crowding by adding more vehicles, the list of busy routes hasn’t changed.

Maps released by the city last week show a correlation between the more crowded routes and some of the neighbourhoods with the highest COVID-19 infection rates , particularly in low-income areas in the northwest of the city.

Two of the crowded routes, the 35 Jane and 52 Lawrence, intersect at the edge of Weston, the neighbourhood with the second-highest infection rate and where household incomes are $20,000 below the city average.

Dr. Vinita Dubey, associate medical officer of health at TPH, said there are numerous factors contributing to higher infection rates in specific neighbourhoods, “including occupation and community spread,” and it’s not clear to what extent crowded transit plays a role.

“Everyone should be aware that COVID-19 is still circulating in many different locations in Toronto, including public transit, and should take precautions,” she said.

Shelagh Pizey-Allen, director of transit advocacy group TTCriders, said low-income workers the city depends on are being forced to take risky commutes.

“If you’re not riding transit right now you can maybe forget about it” but “people’s lives are being put at risk by unsafe and crowded transit, and it’s people in the suburbs who are being most impacted,” she said.

Pizey-Allen supports calls for “emergency bus lanes” during the pandemic.

Before the crisis hit, the TTC announced plans to create dedicated bus lanes on five busy, mainly suburban routes over the next five years.

TTC spokesperson Stuart Green said the pandemic hasn’t changed those timelines, despite advocates arguing that blocking off lanes for buses would be easier during the crisis when car use has dropped.

David Cooper, the principal at Leading Mobility, a Vancouver-based consulting firm that works with Canadian public transit agencies, said there is urgency to improve service on surface routes.

TTC ridership is at about 15 per cent of pre-pandemic levels, and the agency has cut service to 80 per cent of normal as fare revenue has collapsed.

TTC officials say that if the service was ramped back up to normal levels, the network could safely carry about 30 per cent of pre-COVID ridership. Above that threshold, crowding could become dangerous.

Even if the TTC weren’t facing a financial crisis, the agency couldn’t buy more vehicles quickly enough to increase its capacity during the current phase of the pandemic. Having its existing fleet operate frequently in lanes unobstructed by car traffic could be the best bet to fight overloading on suburban routes.

“If we have a system that gets overcrowded because our buses and our streetcars can’t move” then physical distancing on vehicles will be impossible, Cooper said.

“The only way to put capacity on the streets right now is you’ve got to make the system more reliable,” he said.

REUTERS: West Indies named a 14-man squad for next month’s proposed three-test series in England, with three players refusing to travel due to the novel coronavirus outbreak, the islands’ cricket board (CWI) said on Wednesday.

CWI said batsmen Darren Bravo and Shimron Hetmyer and all-rounder Keemo Paul declined to travel to England for the tour that is scheduled to start on July 8 behind closed doors, subject to government approval.

CWI also named 11 reserve players who will travel and quarantine with the squad to ensure replacements are readily available in case of injuries.

“The touring party, who will all be tested for COVID-19 this week, are scheduled to fly to England on private charters on June 8,” CWI said in a statement.

“Darren Bravo, Shimron Hetmyer and Keemo Paul all declined the invitation to travel to England for the tour and CWI fully respects their decision to choose to do so. As previously stated, CWI will not hold this decision against these players when considering future selection.”

The touring squad is set to live and train at bio-secure venues during the tour and are scheduled to arrive on June 9 in Manchester, where they will be based for three weeks before travelling to Southampton for the first test at the Ageas Bowl.

The second and third tests are to be staged back in Manchester at Old Trafford from July 16 and July 24 respectively.

West Indies squad: Jason Holder (captain), Jermaine Blackwood, Nkrumah Bonner, Kraigg Brathwaite, Shamarh Brooks, John Campbell, Roston Chase, Rahkeem Cornwall, Shane Dowrich (wicketkeeper), Chemar Holder, Shai Hope, Alzarri Joseph, Raymon Reifer, Kemar Roach.

Reserves: Sunil Ambris, Joshua da Silva, Shannon Gabriel, Keon Harding, Kyle Mayers, Preston McSween, Marquino Mindley, Shane Moseley, Anderson Phillip, Oshane Thomas, Jomel Warrican

(Reporting by Rohith Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Alex Richardson)

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A bone fragment discovered from southeast Alaska has now answered a few questions on dog migration into the Americas. Researchers found that the thigh bone belonged to a dog that lived in the region about 10,150 years ago. Scientists say the remains represent the oldest confirmed remains of a domestic dog in the Americas.

Analysis of the mitochondrial genome revealed that the dog belonged to a lineage of dogs that diverged from Siberian dogs. Researchers ( Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences ) say in a release that this study provides not only the timing but also a location for the entry of dogs and people into the Americas. The study also supports the theory that this migration occurred just as coastal glaciers retreated during the last Ice Age.

The researchers from University of Buffalo, New York, who studied the bone say that canines did not arrive in the Americas all at once: some Arctic dogs arrived later from East Asia with the Thule culture, Siberian huskies were imported to Alaska during the Gold Rush and other dogs were brought by European colonizers.

The researchers did not set out to study dogs. They came across the femur fragment while sequencing DNA from a collection of hundreds of bones excavated years before in southeast Alaska by other researchers. The bone fragment, originally thought to come from a bear, was quite small, but when the DNA was studied, the team realised it was from a dog.

“Our early dog from southeast Alaska supports the hypothesis that the first dog and human migration occurred through the northwest Pacific coastal route instead of the central continental corridor,” Flavio Augusto da Silva Coelho notes in the release.

PARIS (AFP) – More than 43 million hectares of forest – an area bigger than Germany – have been lost in a little over a decade in just a handful of deforestation hot spots, conservation organisation WWF said on Wednesday (Jan 13).

Swathes of forest continue to be flattened each year – mainly due to industrial-scale agriculture – as biodiversity-rich areas are cleared to create space for livestock and crops.

Analysis by WWF found that just 29 sites across South America, Africa and South-east Asia were responsible for more than half of the global forest loss.

The Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado, the Bolivian Amazon, Paraguay, Argentina, Madagascar, along with Sumatra and Borneo in Indonesia and Malaysia were among the worst affected, it said.

In Brazil’s Cerrado region, home to 5 per cent of the planet’s animals and plants, land has been cleared rapidly for soy and cattle production, leading to a 32.8 per cent loss of forest area between 2004-2017.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a groundbreaking report on land use in 2019, in which it outlined a string of looming trade-offs in using land.

In that same year, the UN’s biodiversity panel said that 75 per cent of all land on earth had been “severely degraded” by human activity.

Forests are an enormous carbon sink, together with other vegetation and soil sucking up roughly a third of all the carbon pollution humans produce annually.

Yet they continue to disappear rapidly, threatening irreparable losses to Earth’s crucial biodiversity.

Humanity’s best interest

And, as wild species find their living space shrinking further each year, the risk of a repeat of zoonotic diseases – such as the Covid-19 pandemic – jumping to humans is ever higher.

“We must address over-consumption and put greater value on health and nature rather than the current overwhelming emphasis on economic growth and financial profits at all cost,” said Ms Fran Raymond Price, Forest Practise lead at WWF International.

“This is in humanity’s best interests: the risk of new diseases emerging is higher in tropical forest regions that are experiencing land-use change.”

She warned that if deforestation was not rapidly curbed, “we could miss out on our chance to help prevent the next pandemic”.

There is also a huge threat to indigenous communities that have lived off what forests provide for centuries or longer.

Ms Ana Mota da Silva, a member of the Mumbuca community in the Cerrado – where deforestation rose 13 per cent in 2020 – said she feared for the future.

“Knowing that our rivers are drying up, that so many trees are dying… the certainty that my sons, cousins, my descendants will not see what I have seen,” she said.

“We now face the Cerrado being devastated and us with it.”

Recent research has shown that, beyond a certain threshold, deforestation in the Amazon basin could tip the region into a new climate regime, turning tropical forests into savannah.

The WWF report urged citizens to do their bit by avoiding products linked to deforestation such as some meat, soy and palm oil products.

It also urged governments to work to secure the rights of indigenous peoples and conserve biodiversity-rich areas.