Generate an explanation for the given claim using the provided supporting material from the paragraph. Please consider the following points while generating an output. 1) The claim will always have supporting proof in the paragraph, and the paragraph will have a clear point of view supporting the claim. 2) There can be instances where direct correlation to the claim is not available. Make use of the sentences in the paragraph to provide a corresponding output supporting the claim. 3) The explanation should be at least one and at most twelve sentences long.

Paragraph: In May 2020, a photograph started to circulate on social media supposedly showing a petri dish that was coughed on by a person not wearing a mask and a petri dish coughed on by the same person wearing a mask:  As the Twitter user noted, this image reportedly was taken by lab technician Katie Corley and shared to her public Facebook page. Corley’s original post was shared on May 6 along with a message to the “conspiracy theorists” who were refusing to wear masks during the COVID-19 pandemic: Visual experiment for you conspiracy theorists: I coughed on two petri dishes, one while wearing a mask and one not. Shocking! The one on the left with no growth is the one I used a mask for! The one on the right where I didn’t wear a mask is full of bacteria. So yeah, maybe cloth masks don’t give you much protection, but they protect the people around you. Maybe wear one if you insist it’s your constitutional right to eat at Chili’s. We note that many social media users who encountered this photograph made some incorrect assumptions about what it showed. For example, many people seemed to think that the petri dish on the right showed SARS-CoV-2, the strain of coronavirus at the center of the current pandemic, and that this photograph demonstrated just how effective masks were at stopping the spread of COVID-19. This photograph, however, simply shows “normal oral flora.”   In an edit to her post, Corley explained that the petri dish on the right contained “normal oral flora,” such as staph species, neisseria species, and corynebacterium. Corley also noted that viruses are much smaller than the bacterium shown in the petri dish, but noted that this small experiment demonstrated how masks can lessen droplet spread that can carry viruses. Corley added: There’s been a lot of questions regarding this experiment, so here’s some answers: 1. I used a cloth mask I made myself with disposable lab coat material. 2. I used blood agar. 3. The plate on the right looks “old” or “stale” because of the growth. Some of the organisms on this plate are alpha hemolytic, meaning they partially hemolyze blood. The agar itself is made with 5% sheep’s blood, so when it’s partially hemolyzed, it turns a dark green color. 4. As for the growth, it’s mostly viridans strep, staph species (not staph aureus), neisseria species, and corynebacterium. Pretty normal oral flora. 5. I realize that viruses are 1,000 times smaller than bacteria. The point of the masks is to prevent droplet spread, which carry bacteria as well as viruses. Corley, of course, was not the first person to notice how face masks lessened droplet transmission. Similar images showing bacteria from a person’s cough growing in a petri dish can also be seen in this article from the Microbiology Society. Rich Davis, the Clinical Microbiology Lab Directory at Providence Sacred Heart, posted a series of images of a similar demonstration: What does a mask do? Blocks respiratory droplets coming from your mouth and throat. Two simple demos: First, I sneezed, sang, talked & coughed toward an agar culture plate with or without a mask. Bacteria colonies show where droplets landed. A mask blocks virtually all of them. pic.twitter.com/ETUD9DFmgU — Rich Davis, PhD, D(ABMM), MLS 🦠🔬🧫 (@richdavisphd) June 26, 2020  Davis, like Corley, emphasized that this was not an experiment showing the efficacy of masks against the spread of COVID-19. Rather, it was a simple demonstration to show how masks lessened the spread of respiratory droplets, which can carry the disease. The British children’s television show “Operation Ouch!” also took a look at how much bacteria gets disseminated when a person coughs. While that episode did not include masks, it did compare a petri dish that was coughed on by a man with no mouth covering and a petri dish that was coughed on by a man who covered his mouth with an elbow. Here’s how the petri dish looked after it was coughed on by the man who covered his mouth (left) and the petri dish coughed on by the man who didn’t (right). As you can see, the results from “Operation Ouch!” are very similar to the results seen in Corley’s post:  Here’s the clip from “Operation Ouch!” (The cough experiment starts around the 50-second mark): A 2005 study published in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology noted that more than 700 bacterial species have been detected in the oral cavity. Covering your mouth when you cough (either with an elbow or a mask) can reduce droplet transmission and lessen the spread of potentially harmful germs. Professor Lindsay Grayson, director of infectious diseases at Melbourne’s Austin Hospital, said as much during a presentation at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in San Francisco in 2009 concerning research on the effectiveness of masks in slowing the spread of influenza. The New York Times reported: “If you’re wearing a mask to prevent yourself from catching it, they’re not so effective,” said Dr. M. Lindsay Grayson, professor of medicine at the University of Melbourne and one of the study’s co-authors. “But if you’re sick with the flu and coughing and sputtering, those masks do prevent you from spraying those bugs everywhere.” The researchers asked nine study subjects with documented cases of influenza type A or B to test two different types of masks — the standard, disposable surgical masks and a more costly, respirator-style mask. The flu patients coughed into a petri dish while wearing both types of mask as well as without the mask. The dish was then tested for the presence of flu virus. When either type of mask was worn, no virus was detected on the petri dish. But how effective are masks in preventing the spread of COVID-19? While the exact efficacy of masks on the spread of COVID-19 is still undetermined, health officials do recommend that people wear masks in public because these face coverings can prevent droplet transmission. Claim: A photograph shows one petri dish that was coughed on by a person not wearing a mask and another petri dish coughed on by the same person wearing a mask. 
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told us:

Paragraph: A significant drop in immunisation over the last few years has made Samoa highly vulnerable to outbreaks of the disease, with the World Health Organisation (WHO) saying vaccine coverage is just about 31% there. Schools have been shut and a mass vaccination effort launched in the nation of just 200,000 located south of the equator halfway between Hawaii and New Zealand, with its government saying 50,068 people have been vaccinated. The health ministry said 3,149 cases of measles have been reported, with 213 during the last 24 hours. Of 197 victims in hospital, 20 are critically ill children and three are pregnant women, it added. Deaths in the outbreak have now reached 42, the majority of them children under the age of four, the government said. Neighbouring New Zealand said it was sending more supplies and personnel, including emergency medical assistance teams, nurse vaccinators, intensive care specialists and Samoan-speaking medical professionals. “The Samoan health system is under serious strain with growing numbers of people, many of whom are very young, needing complex care as a result of the measles outbreak,” said New Zealand’s foreign minister, Winston Peters. New Zealand would also fund 100,000 more vaccines for measles and rubella, Peters added in a statement. Britain said a group of British doctors and nurses left on Friday to help Samoa’s efforts to rein in the outbreak, while Australia said it had also sent medical personnel and supplies. Measles is caused by a highly contagious virus that spreads easily through coughing and sneezing. Other nations in the Pacific, such as Tonga and Fiji, are also grappling with a spike in the number of measles cases. Tonga has said its outbreak followed the return of a squad of its rugby players from New Zealand, where Auckland, the biggest city, is tackling a growing number of cases. Measles cases are rising worldwide, even in wealthy nations such as Germany and the United States, as parents shun immunisation for philosophical or religious reasons, or fears, debunked by doctors, that such vaccines could cause autism. Claim: Samoa measles toll hits 42 as nations dispatch medical teams, supplies.
More nations were flying medical staff and supplies to Samoa on Friday to battle a measles outbreak that prompted the Pacific island nation to declare a state of emergency this month, as the death toll rose to 42, most of them children younger than four.

Paragraph: The California deaths were caused by a strain of the influenza virus that is sending sufferers across the nation to the doctor for flu-like symptoms at rates that are 50 percent higher than normal, said Lyn Finelli, head of the influenza surveillance and outbreak response team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “That’s way above the norm for flu,” Finelli said. “It tells us we’re still in the middle of flu season, and in the Northeast and California it’s going up, up, up.”  The flu strain responsible for the California deaths, H1N1, also predominates nationwide this year. It hits people hardest between the ages of 25 and 64, partly because some older people are believed to have more immunity due to similar outbreaks many decades ago. In California, 52 people died last week alone, including one child, the state’s chief of communicable disease control told reporters on a conference call Friday. “This influenza season continues to be a severe one as the increasing number of influenza-related deaths indicates,” Ron Chapman, director of the California Department of Public Health, said in a statement, urging Californians to get vaccinated. In addition to the 147 confirmed California flu-related fatalities this season among people under age 65, another 44 suspected flu deaths remain under investigation, said Dr. James Watt, chief of the state’s Division of Communicable Disease Control. Most of those felled by the disease had other health conditions, but not all, he said. Last year at the same time, the state had recorded just 14 flu deaths among Californians under age 65. The death of a 47-year-old television advertising executive in the state’s capital city prompted a renewed call for residents to become vaccinated against flu. Sacramento County, with 21 deaths so far, leads the state in fatalities. “After reading the heartbreaking story of Nancy Pinnella, went to CVS and got my first flu shot ever,” California’s first lady, Anne Gust Brown, posted on Twitter. It is not fully clear whether California is an outlier in the severity of its cases, because states are not required to report flu deaths to the CDC, and data is collected differently from state to state and county to county, said CDC spokesman Jason McDonald. The fatality data that the public health agency does collect, on pediatric deaths, is not useful in studying H1N1, because the virus is more likely to attack adults, Finelli said. The public health agency does, however collect information on why people go to the doctor, and whether they are hospitalized for flu. Those signs, she said, show that this year’s flu is likely to continue to hit hard. Although the number of cases nationwide appears to have plateaued, she said, that does not take into account that California and the Northeast are lagging other areas with a late flu season. Meanwhile, CDC data does show that far more people under the age of 65 are being hospitalized with flu-like symptoms than last year. As of last week, for example, 76 percent of those hospitalized for flu were under age 65, compared to less than 50 percent last year. Nationwide, the data shows that somewhat fewer people have contracted flu so far this year than last year, Finelli said. This year’s strain, however, appears to be causing severe illness in a population that is more typically robust, she said. Claim: California sees high rate of flu deaths in unusually severe season.

An unusually severe flu season has claimed the lives of at least 147 young and middle-aged people in California - 10 times the number killed by influenza viruses by the same time last year, public health officials said on Friday.