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.
--------
Question: Even before the new figures, the official British death toll was the fifth-highest globally and a senior scientific adviser to the government has said the country risks becoming the worst-hit in Europe. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said 5,979 people in England had died by April 3 with COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the virus, mentioned on their death certificates - 15% more than numbers published by the health service. “I am not remotely surprised there would be an undercounting,” Bill Hanage, associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told Reuters. “The UK hospital death toll that you are seeing - the one on the news each night - is a composite of things that have been trickling in over a period of time. It is not an exact number and does not include the numbers dying in places such as nursing homes.”   The new numbers, which reflect both deaths caused primarily by COVID-19 and where it is mentioned as a factor, show how limited official data has been so far. Daily figures published by the health ministry record only COVID-19 deaths in hospitals. Public Health England Medical Director Yvonne Doyle said the government was working with the ONS to speed up the information. “We just need to be absolutely clear that the cause of death that is attributed is correct and that is what takes time on the death certificate to get right,” she said, adding the government hoped to produce more rapid data, preferably on a daily basis. Compared with the ONS figures, the daily hospital counts had understated the true death toll for England and Wales by 52% as of April 3, although this had narrowed from 70% a week earlier. Still, it raises the likelihood that the latest death toll for the UK as a whole - 12,107 as of April 13 - is in reality thousands higher when deaths outside hospitals are included. “These new figures ... clearly show the impact of COVID-19 for the first time,” said Martin Hibberd, professor of emerging infectious disease at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. London was hit particularly hard in the week to April 3, when the ONS said nearly half (46.6%) of deaths in the capital involved COVID-19. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is now recuperating from COVID-19 complications that almost cost him his life, initially refrained from imposing the same stringent controls as other European leaders to counter the outbreak. But as projections showed 250,000 Britons could be lost to the virus, Johnson moved to shutter the world’s fifth-largest economy and told people to stay at home. “The UK response was fractured and it was too late, and allowed a large number of people to become infected who didn’t need to become infected,” said Hanage at Harvard. “This is the start of the pandemic, not the end, and people need to understand that.”  Hanage suggested a focus on testing, using new digital technologies to give targeted advice to the population, or even detecting the virus in sewage. Government scientists have said the United Kingdom will do well if it manages to keep the coronavirus death toll below 20,000. Italy has reported a death toll of more than 20,000. Including Wales, some 6,235 people had died by April 3, the ONS said. Separate data from Scotland last week showed 354 deaths involved COVID-19 as of April 5. In Northern Ireland, the toll stood at 79 as of April 3. Across England and Wales, deaths mentioning COVID-19 accounted for 21.2% of all deaths, compared with 4.8% in the previous week. The broader reading of total deaths showed that 16,387 people died in the week ending April 3 — the highest total since weekly death data started to be compiled in 2005.

Answer: UK coronavirus death toll could be far higher than previously shown.


Question: The story reports not only the cost of the blood test ($60), but the cost to detect one case (including follow-up), which the researchers calculated to be $28,600. This is excellent context. The story would have been better if it had noted that the people included in this study were at unusually high risk for developing this cancer. The 34 cases found after screening 20,000 people is almost 200 times the typical annual rate in the US and other countries (less than 1 per 100,000 people per year). The ultimate measure of cost is cost-effectiveness (cost per life-year saved) which requires survival data. These analyses can also be adjusted for quality of life. While most of this story is careful to note that this test has yet to show clinical effectiveness, that caution is trampled by the claim that this blood test “boosted patients’ chances of survival,” something that this type of study cannot determine. The claim that this test is more accurate than existing methods is also premature, since the study did not directly compare the blood test to existing methods. Finding more early-stage cancers is a necessary but hardly sufficient step in the pathway of demonstrating benefit for a new screening test. Clinical trials are needed to address issues of false positives, over diagnosis, over treatment, and survival. The story reports that developers of this blood test still need to show low rates of false positive or negative results. A low false negative rate means there are fewer missed cases of serious disease. The trade-off, though, is a higher false positive rate. All positive tests will need to be evaluated with a gold standard diagnostic test and the safety, acceptability, and costs of that gold standard test will profoundly affect the uptake of the new screening test. While the story reports that this study was a “proof-of-concept” experiment, it then says the test boosted survival, something that can only be known after directly comparing the new test to existing methods. Making treatment “dramatically more effective” can be proven only with randomized trials. All screening tests that can detect cancers at an earlier stage will be associated with an apparent increase in survival time, but as explained in more detail below, this does not necessarily mean that patients with screen-detected cancers actually live longer than they would have otherwise. Efficacy can be established only with an RCT. The story could have done a better job pointing out the many limitations in the work. For example, there was no follow-up testing for people who had negative blood test results. Even though the researchers surveyed participants a year after the testing, they didn’t produce any data on how many of the people with negative blood tests actually had cancer. What’s more, the researchers compared the survival rates of their patients to a different group of cancer patients from another study, which raises questions about how comparable the groups really are. There was also no discussion of the possibility that at least some of the tumors discovered through this screening might not have developed into dangerous cancers. The story does not address lead-time bias (that longer survival might be at least partly due to finding the tumor earlier in its natural course, rather than to just the effect of treatment). The researchers noted that the effect of lead time bias can only really be known through a randomized, controlled trial. We will rate the story satisfactory on this criterion because it is careful to note that this test is not ready for clinical use and that the study results apply to only one type of cancer. However, the story would have been better if it had pointed out just how rare this cancer is, less than one case per 100,000 people in the US per year. That is about 3,000 cases in the US per year — out of about 1.7 million cancers diagnosed annually. And the comment that the cancer “is prevalent” in southern China and Southeast Asia may be misleading. While it may occur more often in the region, rates are still on the order of 10 to 20 per 100,000 which is hardly widespread. The story squeaks by on this criterion because it includes a quote from an editorial in the journal that was written by an independent source. It would have been more useful to readers to include more comment and context from someone without financial ties to this study. The story is upfront about the financial interests of the researchers themselves and the company that owns the rights to their work, noting the keen interest in bringing this test to market. Although the story reports that “that nasopharyngeal carcinoma typically goes undetected until later on, when patients report symptoms such as recurring nosebleeds,” it does not tell readers anything about how often these cancers are found at an early stage. Readers are not given a sense of how patients typically fare with existing methods of diagnosis. The story clearly reports that the test is still experimental and that developers have yet to show that it could be practical and effective in clinical practice. The story highlights the desire for a new blood test that could be clinically useful. The story doesn’t appear to rely on a news release. It includes quotes from a telephone interview with an executive at the company developing this test.

Answer: Silicon Valley Startup Grail Sees Hope for Cancer Blood Test


Question: The Kansas Department of Health and Environment announced Wednesday it is partnering with Count the Kicks, a stillbirth prevention public health campaign. Kansas officials say the state records an average of 232 stillborn deaths each year. The campaign seeks to save 60 babies every year by decreasing Kansas’ stillbirth rate by 26 percent. The effort achieved that reduction in Iowa. Count the Kicks encourages expectant moms to track their baby’s movements once a day in the third trimester to determine how long it normally takes their child to get to 10 movements. If moms notice a change in the baby’s normal pattern, they are encouraged to call their doctors.

Answer:
Kansas launches campaign to reduce stillbirth rate in state.