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Given a paragraph, generate a claim that is supported by the given paragraph. 1) The claim must contain information from within the paragraph. 2) A sentence within the paragraph can be used as a claim. 3) The claim should not have contradictions within the paragraph. 4) The claim should be at most one sentence long.
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Nguyen’s suicide has sparked a contentious legal battle headed to Massachusetts’ highest court over whether schools can be held responsible when students take their own lives. The case is being closely watched by colleges and universities, who say a decision against the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would place an unreasonable burden on untrained employees to stop suicides. “It would be groundbreaking,” said Gary Pavela, a consultant on law and policy issues in higher education and author of a book about legal questions surrounding student suicides. “It would cause alarm in higher education,” he said. The student’s family says his death was preventable and that the school had a legal duty to use reasonable care to protect him from harm. Nguyen’s professors and other MIT officials knew he was a suicide risk, but failed to get him the help he needed, an attorney for Nguyen’s family argues. Months before Nguyen’s death, a professor encouraged his colleagues to pass him or they might have “blood on their hands.” Moments before Nguyen jumped, the professor “read him the riot act” over an email Nguyen sent to another MIT official that they deemed inappropriate, court records say. “Academic freedom is not a license to needlessly and recklessly endanger students known to be at risk of death with impunity; and this court should not allow it to become one at institutions that routinely admit students — many with mental health issues — as young as their mid-teens,” attorney Jeffrey Beeler wrote in court documents. Beeler declined to comment and said Nguyen’s family didn’t want to speak to the media. MIT says the school wasn’t aware of the severity of his condition and he was treated by outside professionals and refused on-campus resources. None of the nine professionals who treated Nguyen while he was at MIT believed he was an imminent risk of killing himself, the school says. “Mr. Nguyen’s suicide was a tragedy. That does not warrant a legal conclusion that MIT or any individual associated with MIT had a legal duty to prevent it,” attorneys for the school, two professors and one dean named in the lawsuit say in court documents. MIT, which refused to answer questions about the case, said in a statement it “remains committed to the well-being of its students, offering a robust network of support resources, including comprehensive mental health services.” Nguyen’s family attorney disputes the idea that the man didn’t want help and has accused MIT of blaming the victim. No state supreme court has ever found that colleges and universities have a legal duty to prevent student suicides, MIT’s attorneys say. Courts have generally been reluctant to do so because, among other things, suicide is an impulsive act that’s difficult to predict, Pavela said. A Massachusetts trial court judge ruled in 2005 that an MIT housemaster and dean could be held responsible for the death of a woman who lit herself on fire in her dorm room. But Elizabeth Shin’s case, which was later settled for an undisclosed amount, never reached the state’s highest court. The Supreme Judicial Court will hear arguments in Nguyen’s case on Tuesday after a lower court judge tossed the lawsuit last year. A group of 18 colleges and universities — including Harvard University and Boston College — is urging the court to reject the case, saying a decision in favor of the family could have devastating consequences. Fear of liability may cause professors and others without mental health expertise to overreact to concerns, which in turn could discourage students from coming forward with their problems, the schools say. Dr. Paul Appelbaum, a psychiatry expert at Columbia University, agrees. “To the extent that you heighten every resident assistant’s sensitivity to the risk of suicidality, with the threat of liability hanging over them, they are far more likely to over predict, over intervene, see it where it’s not,” Appelbaum said. The Nguyen family attorney and their supporters — including the Massachusetts Academy of Trial Attorneys — say the schools’ concerns are baseless. Beeler, in his filing, said he merely wants the court to affirm that the duty to provide reasonable care “extends to the ivory tower as it does every other civilized corner of the Commonwealth.” Thomas Murphy, chair of the amicus committee of the Massachusetts Academy of Trial Attorneys, says a jury should get to decide whether MIT was negligent and caused Nguyen’s suicide. “Maybe the school can convince them that they didn’t cause (Nguyen’s suicide) and it was going to happen anyway,” he said. ___ Follow Alanna Durkin Richer at http://twitter.com/aedurkinricher. Read more of her work at http://bit.ly/2hIhzDb
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Case stirs question of school liability for student suicides.


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The outbreak comes ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday in late January, when many of China’s 1.4 billion people will be travelling to their home towns or abroad. The World Health Organization and Chinese authorities are taking steps to ensure the disease does not spread further. Thai health authorities said on Wednesday they were stepping up monitoring of passengers arriving at airports with infrared thermal scanners ahead of the holiday, when 800,000 Chinese tourists are expected to visit the country. Memories remain fresh in Asia of a 2002-2003 outbreak of SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in China and killed nearly 800 people worldwide. WHO has said there may have been limited human-to-human transmission of the new coronavirus in China within families. And authorities in Wuhan confirmed on Wednesday that a married couple were among 41 people diagnosed with pneumonia believed to be caused by the new virus. There were no new cases or deaths at the end of Tuesday, the city’s health authority said. The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission did not say in the statement whether the couple represented an instance of human-to-human transmission. But it said the husband, who worked at a seafood market suspected of being at the epicentre of the outbreak, was the first to fall ill and that his wife did not have any exposure to the market. Some of the other people diagnosed also denied visiting the market, the commission said. The authorities in Wuhan also confirmed that a Chinese woman quarantined in Thailand, the first case of the mystery strain of coronavirus to be detected outside of China, had come from Wuhan. The State Department’s notice referred to an alert by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urging citizens in China travelling to Wuhan to avoid contact with animals, animal markets or animal products, among other precautions. It also asked citizens those who had visited Wuhan and feel sick to seek medical care. The Wuhan health commission said in another statement issued late Wednesday that 7 of the 41 pneumonia patients have been released. The statement also said that 450 of the 763 people put under observation due to their close contact with known patients have been released.
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U.S. warns citizens in China about pneumonia outbreak.


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Cuomo’s cautiously upbeat report at a daily briefing came as the daily death toll across the state, the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, dropped to 540 on April 17, down from 630 a day earlier and the lowest in more than two weeks. The governor said total hospitalizations of patients being treated for COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the coronavirus, came to 16,967, a drop of more than 1,300 over the past three days. Intubations and admissions to intensive care units also continued on their downward trend. “If you look at the past three days, you could argue that we are past the plateau and we’re starting to descend which would be very good news,” Cuomo said. He said, however, that about 2,000 infected people were newly admitted to hospitals on Friday, which he characterized as “still an overwhelming number,” and reiterated that he would take a cautious approach to reopening businesses and schools. Cuomo repeated a call for the federal government to help coordinate and provide funding for the mass testing that he and other governors have said is needed to determine when it is safe for people to go back to work. Providing new details on the challenge, Cuomo said a survey of labs in his state revealed an inability to procure the chemical reagents needed to run the tests on machines supplied by private manufacturers like Roche Holding AG. “They bought the machine, they have the machine, they have the test, but they need the reagents to do a higher volume of tests,” Cuomo said, adding that makers like Roche are struggling to get the reagents from China. “That’s the logjam we are in.”  New York disclosed 7,090 new positive cases over the last 24 hours for a total of 236,732 cases, while deaths increased by 540 to 13,362, marking by far the largest number of fatalities of any state. Even with stabilizing numbers, Cuomo said the pandemic was taking a severe emotional and economic toll on people, and estimated the impact on society would prove to be the biggest challenge facing the country since World War Two. “On every level this is a terrible experience, Cuomo said. “It is as tumultuous a time as we have ever seen.”
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New York Governor sounds optimistic note as coronavirus numbers improve.