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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.
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Paragraph: The Midwest was the hardest-hit region, as temperatures  plunged below zero Fahrenheit (minus 18 degrees Celsius). By nightfall the mercury was hovering at 0F in Chicago, 7F (minus 14C) in Detroit and minus 21f (minus 29C) in Minneapolis. Local television pictures showed the Chicago River and Lake Michigan filled with chunks of ice. The brutal blast known as the polar vortex is a stream of cold air that spins around the stratosphere over the North Pole, but whose current has been disrupted and is now pushing south into the United States. Officials warned Chicago residents, accustomed to chilling winters, to expect an unusually deep and dangerous freeze. Even the city’s supply of its signature deep-dish pizza was affected: The Lou Malnati’s chain announced it would stop taking delivery orders at 8 p.m. on Tuesday. “This could possibly be history-making,” said Ricky Castro, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Romeoville, Illinois. As much as two feet (60 cm) of snow was forecast in Wisconsin, and six inches (15 cm) in Illinois. Snow was expected through Wednesday from the Great Lakes region into New England. Some Chicago residents found warmth inside the Harold Washington Library Center, which planned to stay open on Wednesday. Gilbert Rothschild, 79, walked through a corridor wearing three sweaters and an undershirt underneath his parka. “The more layers, the more you’re insulated,” he said. Rothschild, the president of a liquor retailer, said he planned on keeping his stores open on Wednesday, figuring customers who were not working might want to pick up something to keep them feeling warm at home. Many Midwest cities opened warming shelters. Regional governments closed hundreds of schools and airlines canceled more than 2,000 flights, according to the Flightaware flight tracking website. Many had been destined for Atlanta, where the National Football League’s Super Bowl will take place on Sunday. Amy Patterson, a vice president at the Atlanta Super Bowl Host Committee, said there would still be time for fans to fly to Atlanta for the game, with the National Weather Service forecasting a high of a balmy 58F (14C) on Sunday. A low of minus 10F (minus 23C) was forecast in Chicago and elsewhere in northern Illinois on Wednesday. But with the wind chill factored in, temperatures will feel as low as minus 50F (minus 46C) through Thursday, the National Weather Service reported. Temperatures could reach lows of minus 30F to minus 40F (minus 34C to minus 40C) in parts of the Northern Plains and Great Lakes on Wednesday, the NWS said. The freezing weather may have killed a man in Rochester, Minnesota, who was found dead outside his home on Sunday, according to a report by WCCO, a local CBS affiliate. Rochester police officials did not respond to a request for comment. Jim Hayes, a National Weather Service meteorologist, warned that frostbite was possible within 10 minutes in the intense cold. For many across the region, life ground to a halt. In Chicago, home to the nation’s third-largest school system, officials plan to cancel classes for all 360,000 students on Wednesday due to the weather. Detroit also said all public schools would close, and Michigan State University said it would suspend classes, only the seventh time it has done so because of weather since 1855. The Chicago Zoological Society said it would shut Brookfield Zoo for only the fourth time in its 85-year history on Tuesday and Wednesday. According to the National Weather Service, the coldest recorded temperature in Chicago was minus 27 degrees (minus 33C) on Jan. 20, 1985. Officials in Des Moines, Iowa, opened warming shelters, but also suggested residents could stay warm inside shopping malls. In Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp shut government offices in 35 counties on Tuesday, and schools across parts of the state were also closed. In Fargo, North Dakota, where the temperature dropped to minus 24F (minus 31C), Dan Hallock, an advertising executive, marveled that people were still working outside as he bought coffee. “The garbage men of Fargo have my utmost respect,” he said. Claim: Polar vortex freezes U.S. Midwest with snow, dangerously cold air.
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A blast of Arctic air from the polar vortex brought dangerous, bone-chilling cold to a wide swath of the United States on Tuesday, stretching from the Dakotas through Maine, with snow expected as far south as Alabama and Georgia.


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Paragraph: An asthma sufferer wears a paper face mask as she is attended by nurses in this undated file image. REUTERS/Jason Reed The findings were published in the journal Lancet together with two other studies, which found that runny noses and wheezing early on in life may be strong predictors of asthma. In the first study, researchers pored through data provided by parents of more than 205,000 children and found paracetamol use in the first year of life was associated with a 46 percent higher risk of asthma by the time the children were 6 or 7 compared to those never exposed to the drug. Known as acetaminophen in the United States, where it is widely sold under the brand Tylenol, it is used to relieve fever, minor aches and pain, and is used in a liquid suspension for children. Medium use of paracetamol in the past 12 months increased asthma risk by 61 percent, while high dosages of once a month or more in the past year raised the risk by over three times. Medium use was defined as once per year or more, but less than once a month. Suspicions of a possible link between paracetamol and asthma emerged in recent years when experts observed an increased use of the drug to a simultaneous rise in asthma prevalence worldwide. One theory is that paracetamol reduces antioxidants in the body. Some experts think antioxidants, which stop unstable molecules known as free radicals from doing too much damage, can lower the risk of cancer, heart disease and other ailments. “Paracetamol can reduce antioxidant levels and ... that can give oxidative stress in the lungs and cause asthma,” one of the researchers, Richard Beasley at the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand, told Reuters in a telephone interview. As with asthma, monthly use of paracetamol doubled the risk of eczema and trebled that of rhinoconjunctivitis — repetitive sneezing, rhinorrhea, nasal congestion and hay fever — by the time children were 6 or 7, the study found. However, the researchers stressed paracetamol should remain the preferred drug to relieve pain and fever in children because its alternative, aspirin, was linked to the risk of Reye’s syndrome, a rare but serious complication in children. “The findings do lend support to the current guidelines of the World Health Organization, which recommend that paracetamol should not be used routinely, but should be reserved for children with a high fever (38.5 Celsius or above),” they wrote. Another study in The Lancet found that rhinitis, or hay fever and other allergic reactions causing a runny nose, was a strong predictor of asthma that develops in adulthood. Researchers monitored 6,461 people in 14 countries who were free of asthma at the start of study for more than 8 years. Those who suffered rhinitis and were allergic to an assortment of agents like house dust mites, cat, grass and birch were 3.5 times more likely to develop asthma later on compared to those who suffered no allergies nor rhinitis. The third study in Arizona in the United States found wheezing early in life may be an ominous sign of asthma developing in adulthood. Researchers pored through data on 849 people going back 22 years to the time they were babies. Of 181 cases of active asthma, 49 were newly diagnosed, of which 35 were women. “In over 70 percent of people with current asthma and 63 percent of those with newly diagnosed asthma at age 22 years, episodes of wheezing had happened in the first three years of life or were reported by parents at age six years,” wrote the researchers at the Arizona Respiratory Center. In an accompanying comment, Suzanne Lau of Charite University Medicine in Germany, wrote: “These findings identify a population at risk of chronic obstructive airway disease in early adulthood, and they already showed a predisposition during preschool years.” Lau was not involved in the study. Claim: Paracetamol use may raise asthma risk in children.
answer:
Infants who have been given the common pain reliever paracetamol may have a higher risk of developing asthma and eczema by the time they are 6 or 7, a large study covering children in 31 countries has found.


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Paragraph: Public health officials stressed Tuesday that the number could be less if people across the country bear down on keeping their distance from one another. “We really believe we can do a lot better than that,” said Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force. That would require all Americans to take seriously their role in preventing the spread of disease, she said. Added Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, “This is a number that we need to anticipate, but we don’t necessarily have to accept it as being inevitable.” Trump called it “a matter of life and death” for Americans to heed his administration’s guidelines and predicted the country would soon see a “light at the end of the tunnel” in a pandemic that in the United States has infected about 190,000 people and killed more than 4,000, according to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University. “I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead,” Trump said. The White House figures assume that Americans follow the rigorous social-distancing guidelines set out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the stricter “stay at home” restrictions set by many governors across the country. Still, the White House was not looking at a nationwide order. “We live in a nation that has a system of federalism, and the governors get to make the decisions,” Dr. Jerome Adams, the surgeon general, told NBC’s “Today” on Wednesday. “But we’re gonna give them the best possible guidance we can, and that’s to stay at home and to social distance.” “This is going to be one of the roughest two or three weeks we’ve ever had in our country,” Trump said. “We’re going to lose thousands of people.” The jaw-dropping projections were laid out during a grim, two-hour White House briefing. Officials described a death toll that in a best-case scenario would likely be greater than the more than 53,000 American lives lost during World War I. And the model’s high end neared the realm of possibility that Americans lost to the virus could approach the 291,000 Americans killed on the battlefield during World War II. “There’s no magic bullet,” Birx said. “There’s no magic vaccine or therapy. It’s just behaviors. Each of our behaviors, translating into something that changes the course of this viral pandemic.” Fauci called the numbers “sobering” and urged Americans to “step on the accelerator” with their collective mitigation efforts. “We are continuing to see things go up,” Fauci said. “We cannot be discouraged by that because the mitigation is actually working and will work.”  Birx said pandemic forecasts initially predicted 1.5 million to 2.2 million deaths in the U.S. But that was a worst-case scenario, without efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus through social distancing. She added that states that have not yet seen a spike in cases as New York has could take action to flatten the curve of rising hospitalizations and deaths. It’s not only social distancing that could make a difference but also the frantic efforts by hospitals around the country to prepare for an onslaught of seriously ill patients. The better prepared hospitals are, the greater the chances of lives being saved. There’s also a wild card when it comes to treatment: whether the experimental drug combination Trump has touted — a medicine for malaria and an antibiotic — will actually make a difference. That combination is already being used on thousands of patients, and Fauci said he would want to see a rigorous test of its effectiveness. Trump’s comments came after he announced Sunday that he was extending to April 30 the social distancing guidelines that advise Americans to cease large gatherings, work from home, suspend onsite learning at schools and more in a nationwide effort to stem the spread of the virus. Adams said that some areas of the country would likely need to maintain those restrictions into May. “Well, it will be for some places, it won’t be for others, depending on where they are on their curve,” he told ABC’s “Good Morning America.” It was an abrupt reversal for the Republican president, who spent much of last week targeting April 12 as the day he wanted to see Americans “pack the pews” for Easter Sunday services. Trump called the data “very sobering,” saying it was his understanding that 100,000 deaths was a minimum that would be difficult to avoid. He also sought to rewrite his past minimization of the outbreak, saying he rejected those who compared the new coronavirus to the flu when in fact he repeatedly did so publicly. “This could be hell of a bad two weeks,’” Trump said. He added: “You know 100,000 is, according to modeling, a very low number. In fact, when I first saw the number ... they said it was unlikely you’ll be able to attain that. We have to see but I think we’re doing better than that.” Trump played down concerns from New York’s Andrew Cuomo and other governors that their states’ hospitals don’t have enough ventilators to treat an anticipated crush of patients. Trump said the federal government currently has a stockpile of 10,000 ventilators that it plans on distributing as needed. “Now, when the surge occurs, if it occurs fairly evenly, we’ll be able to distribute them very quickly before they need them,” Trump said. “But we want to have a reserve right now. It’s like having oil reserves.” Birx said the experiences of Washington state and California give her hope that other states can keep the coronavirus under control through social distancing. That’s because they moved quickly to contain the early clusters of coronavirus by closing schools, urging people to work from home, banning large gatherings and taking other measures now familiar to most Americans, she noted. Trump said he would also ask Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to allow the docking of two cruise ships with passengers who have had contact with patients suffering from COVID-19. Passengers are anxious to disembark once they reach Florida, but DeSantis said the state’s health care resources are already stretched too thin to take on a ship’s coronavirus caseload. “They’re dying on the ship,” Trump said. “I’m going to do what’s right, not only for us for but humanity.” Trump also said he planned to curtail his travel for the month ahead and stay close to the White House to safeguard his health. The president hasn’t held one of his signature big-stadium rallies since early March. “I think it’s important that I remain healthy. I really do,” Trump said. “So for the most part we’re staying here.” Claim: Trump says ‘life and death’ at stake in following guidelines.
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President Donald Trump warned Americans to brace for a “hell of a bad two weeks” ahead as the White House projected there could be 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in the U.S. from the coronavirus pandemic even if current social distancing guidelines are maintained.