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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Question: Paragraph: The mosquito-borne viral infection has spread across the country, with 61 out of 64 districts reporting dengue cases by late Tuesday. The government has confirmed 15,369 dengue cases since Jan. 1. Of those, 9,683 patients were diagnosed between July 1 and July 30. As of Tuesday, about 4,400 patients, including many children, were undergoing hospital treatment. There have been 14 deaths. Officials from Dhaka, the overcrowded capital and the epicenter of the outbreak, have struggled to contain it, drawing criticism and spreading panic among some residents. Dengue is found in tropical areas around the world and is spread by a type of mosquito that mainly lives in urban areas. The virus causes severe flu-like symptoms, and while there is no specific treatment for the illness, medical care to maintain a person’s fluid levels is seen as critical. There are fears that the situation in the countryside will worsen as many residents of the city travel to villages to celebrate Eid-ul-Adha next month. Infected humans can serve as a source of the virus for uninfected mosquitoes. Ayesha Akhter, assistant director at the Directorate General of Health Services under the Ministry of Health, said an outbreak of dengue has accompanied every monsoon since 2000, but this year’s situation is the worst. A DGHS study identified a six-fold increase in the Aedes aegypti mosquito population in four months in Dhaka as the primary cause of the larger-than-average outbreak. Earlier this month, the World Health Organization said the dengue situation in Bangladesh was “alarming but not out of control.” Other countries in Asia are also facing a surge in dengue cases this year, including Thailand, where 53,699 cases and 65 deaths were reported as of July 23. Nevertheless, with dengue cases soaring in recent weeks, Dhaka hospitals have been running out of room and manpower to treat new patients. Prof. Abul Kalam Azad, director general of DGHS, said they had asked the hospitals to increase beds for dengue patients and to open dengue wards. The government also halved the charges for diagnosing dengue and directed public and private hospitals, clinics and diagnostic centers to do the same. Dhaka Medical College Hospital, the largest hospital in the country, opened a special ward for dengue patients, said A.K.M. Nasir Uddin, its director general. Prof. Uttam Kumar Barua, director of Shaheed Suhrawardy Medical College and Hospital, another major public hospital in Dhaka, said they were relying on senior medical students to assist doctors in the face of so many patients. “We don’t have manpower, logistic support and technicians as much as needed. That’s why we are having too much pressure. We have three times more patients than our bed capacity,” Barua said. He said they were admitting every dengue patient who entered the hospital but could not provide beds or even seats for everyone, adding that many had been asked to wait in hospital corridors and verandas. Champa Begum took her 8-month-old to Shaheed hospital on Wednesday. “I have other kids. I go to work leaving this one to another child. I have no way but to work,” she said. “I can’t take care of this child properly. This child is laid down anywhere. My home is above dirty water. That how this one was bitten and got dengue.” On Tuesday, Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina called for concerted efforts to fight the illness. “The government is working to tackle dengue,” she told an emergency meeting of her ruling Awami League party via teleconference from London, where she was on an official visit. “I urge everyone to keep their houses and surrounding areas clean. That will save us from the disease,” she said. The country’s opposition parties and urban planning experts blamed the central and local government’s lack of preparedness for the rise in dengue cases. People have taken to Facebook to vent their anger about city authorities’ failure to control dengue-carrying mosquitoes. Claim: Bangladesh grapples with country’s worst dengue outbreak.

Answer: Bangladesh is facing its worst-ever dengue fever outbreak as hospitals are flooded with patients, putting a severe strain on the country’s already overwhelmed medical system.


Question: Paragraph: The ruling Communist Party’s Politburo said on Friday it would step up macroeconomic policy adjustments and pursue more proactive fiscal policy, state media reported. With the world’s second-biggest economy expected to shrink for the first time in four decades this quarter, China is set to unleash hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus. The Politburo called for expanding the budget deficit, issuing more local and national bonds, guiding interest rates lower, delaying loan repayments, reducing supply-chain bottlenecks and boosting consumption. “We expect government ministries to roll out more tangible measures in the coming weeks as this Politburo meeting gave them no choice but to do more,” Goldman Sachs analysts said. The Politburo did not elaborate on plans for the central government to issue special treasury bonds, which would be the first such issuance since 2007. China should issue at least 2 trillion yuan ($282 billion) of such bonds to aid the economy, Morgan Stanley Chief China Economist Robin Xing said. Restrictions on foreigners entering the country went into effect on Saturday, as China reported no new locally transmitted infections and a small drop in so-called imported cases. Airlines have been ordered to sharply cut international flights from Sunday. Beijing has in recent days emphasized the risk posed by imported virus cases after widespread lockdowns within China helped to sharply reduce domestic transmissions. The Politburo said it would shift its focus to prevent more imported cases and a rebound in locally transmitted infections. “We must be extremely vigilant and cautious, and we must prevent the post-epidemic relaxation from coming too soon, leading to the loss of all our achievements,” the Communist Party’s official People’s Daily newspaper said in a front-page editorial. The authorities also reversed planned reopenings of movie theaters, the state-owned China Securities Journal reported, citing sources. With local transmission of the virus basically under control, China shifts focus toward rebooting paused businesses. China’s Ministry of Commerce said on Saturday nearly all of the country’s major supermarkets, convenience stores, shopping malls and farm produce retail markets have reopened, while all e-commerce platforms are operating. Meanwhile, 80% of restaurants and 60% of hotels are back in business, ministry official Wang Bin told a news conference. In a sign of businesses getting back to normal, wholesale prices of vegetables have dropped 16.5% from end-February, while pork prices have fallen 7.4% from a mid-February high. However, many street shops such as beauty salons are not yet open as “sentiment is reviving slowly, while people remain cautious about going out shopping”, Wang said. In China’s central Hubei Province, authorities had removed all highway checkpoints except those in its capital city Wuhan - the virus epicenter - and allowed traffic to leave the province as of Friday, the official Xinhua News Agency reported on Saturday. Hubei officials vowed to help businesses re-open and people get back to work. Gong Dingrong, mayor of Hubei’s Qianjiang, dubbed “lobster city”, said the government would promote sales across the country both online and offline, adding “there’s nothing to fear” eating lobsters from the city. China’s National Health Commission said on Saturday that 54 new coronavirus cases were reported on the mainland on Friday,  all imported cases. There were 55 new cases a day earlier, one of which was transmitted locally. The number of infections for mainland China stands at 81,394, with the death toll rising by three to 3,295, the commission said. Hubei province reported no new cases, and three new deaths. The province of 60 million, where the virus was first detected, has recorded 67,801 coronavirus cases and 3,177 deaths. Shanghai reported the highest number of new cases, with 17. An additional 11 cases were reported in Guangdong, six in Fujian, five in Tianjin, four in Zhejiang, three each in Beijing and Liaoning, two each in Inner Mongolia and Jilin, and one in Shandong. Chinese President Xi Jinping told U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday that China would support U.S. efforts to fight the coronavirus. The number of confirmed cases of coronavirus in the United States rose by at least 16,000 on Friday to nearly 102,000, the most of any country. George Gao, the director-general of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, urged people to wear masks to control the virus’s spread overseas. Gao told the journal Science in an interview published on Friday that the “big mistake in the United States and Europe has been the failure to wear masks, which “can prevent droplets that carry the virus from escaping and infecting others”. Claim: China readies stimulus measures as local virus cases dwindle.

Answer: China plans stronger steps to revive an economy hit by coronavirus, as the nation on Saturday reported no new locally transmitted infections for the previous day.


Question: Paragraph: But like the rest of 21st century life, technology is on track to render humans obsolete. A team of UNL plant scientists and biological systems engineers have built an automated system capable of detecting an individual corn leaf and grasping it with robotic precision to screen its temperature, chlorophyll and water content in less than a minute, the Lincoln Journal Star reported. At a time when driverless combines can harvest around the clock, drones can nimbly identify problem spots in a field, and cattle herds are fitted with wearable devices to monitor their individual health, the Plant Phenotyping Robot System marks another leap forward for precision agriculture. James Schnable, an associate professor of plant science who specializes in computational biology, said before hybrid corn “really took off” after World War II, there was little need to measure how a specific breed of corn physically manifested itself in the field. “When we started doing hybrid breeding, there became this mechanism where there was a lot of investment in breeding and suddenly you have this whole discipline of how you collect data to make breeding decisions,” he said. UNL has trained aspiring plant scientists in labs and research fields to phenotype various corn hybrids in the search for breeds with higher heat and drought tolerance that produce better yields. Phenotyping took a leap with the opening of the Greenhouse Innovation Center at Nebraska Innovation Campus, where an automated conveyor belt and camera system can record miniscule changes to individual plants in a controlled environment. That technology has been taken out of the greenhouse and into the field at various places in the state, including the Eastern Nebraska Research and Extension Center near Mead, where a Spidercam outfitted with special cameras, like those found at colossal stadiums, records the physical characteristics of plants in the field. “The challenge is we need to score bigger and bigger populations as we do more and more complicated breeding tasks,” Schnable said. “And the total population of students interested in spending their summers in cornfields as steam is coming out of the mud is not getting any bigger. “That’s why we need more complicated technology to look at much bigger experiments across more environment,” he added. Schnable, who partnered with a trio of biological systems engineers at UNL to develop the robot, said the goal is to verify the data collected from the expensive camera systems at ground level, and once perfected, do it faster and with more certainty than an army of human scientists can. Building a robot to automate those processes took years, as the team had to build a system that could identify the leaf from a corn or soybean plant, and then direct a robotic arm where to reach and how to grab it for a battery of measurements, said Abbas Atefi, a Ph.D. candidate in biological systems engineering. “For our task, we needed to find the 3D coordinates of each grasping point on the leaf,” Atefi said. Using a “time-of-flight” camera, rather than a standard color camera, the robot could be given hundreds of options for points to grab on an X, Y and Z axis. Atefi spent two years writing an algorithm that narrowed the hundreds of candidate sites into a single representative point before converting the coordinates into directions for the robotic arm to bend and twist toward a leaf, finally grabbing it without damaging it. Once that was accomplished, the team worked on refining the fiber-optic cable and temperature sensor installed on the gripper, which measure the biochemical and physiological processes of the plant through indicators such as chlorophyll and water content. After hundreds of tweaks to the algorithm, the team ran the robot through a series of tests in the Greenhouse Innovation Center, comparing the results to a series of benchmarks taken by both human researchers and the powerful imaging system already in operation. The results, which will be published in the academic journal Computers and Electronics in Agriculture in August, show that the robot is able to determine the temperature of a leaf with comparable accuracy to a human, while tests measuring chlorophyll, water content, and nitrogen still need more fine-tuning. But early results feed into the optimism the team has about the robot’s future, both in the greenhouse and in the field. “Integration is something we think about a lot,” said Yufeng Ge, an associate professor of biological systems engineering at UNL. The robot needs to be able to operate in a wide array of environments — wheeled around on a moveable platform in more conventional greenhouses, or woven seamlessly into the existing conveyor belt system at Innovation Campus — while providing a known degree of accuracy in each, Ge said. “If you have a graduate student, they are human, they will make errors,” he added. “But we can have a system where hundreds of robots are scattered throughout the greenhouse, each carrying a specific sensor to look at one aspect of the plants with great accuracy.” Schnable said automating certain phenotyping processes also frees graduate students to crunch the massive volumes of data looking for patterns that emerge in various hybrids. ″(Graduate students) may not want to stay in grad school if the first two years they are just walking around taking measurements,” he said. “Longer-term, there is a vision that this would be able to go out into the field, where I still do have grad students running around.” Santosh Pitla, an associate professor of biological systems engineering, said the robot will soon be tested on a robotic platform — essentially a small, driverless tractor with a 5-foot clearance and a toolbox full of scientific instruments that can navigate a cornfield on its own — that would allow for automated data collection in hundreds of field acres. If drone imaging or the on-board computers in a combine can sense higher plant temperatures in wider parts of a field, Pitla said robotics is the next leap in precision agriculture, allowing farmers to pinpoint the water, fertilizer or pesticide inputs down to the individual plant. “Right now, we still talk about things in pounds per acre or gallons per acre,” he said. “I think we could get to the point where we’re talking about per plant, and every plant has a name and each robot can go and tend to each plant’s needs. That’s the end goal, treating each plant separately.” ___ Information from: Lincoln Journal Star, http://www.journalstar.com Claim: University of Nebraska team creates cornfield robot system.

Answer:
Plant science students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln are still taught to phenotype by hand, wading into muddy fields to record the differences in physical characteristics between varying corn hybrids with a small set of tools and a pen and notebook.