TASK DEFINITION: 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.
PROBLEM: An influenza virus vaccine vial sits on the counter of medical center in Great Neck, New York, October 22, 2004. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton SS  But they said school closings would create significant  hardships for working parents, who might be forced to create  informal daycare arrangements that would undo efforts to  contain the spread of flu. “We find school closings would be less effective than some  studies have suggested,” said Dr. Simon Cauchemez of Imperial  College London, whose study appears in the journal Nature. “The main effect would be to slow and flatten the outbreak  — so the numbers becoming ill in the worst week of the  outbreak might be reduced by up to 40 percent, reducing peak  demand on health-care systems,” Cauchemez said in an e-mail. Health experts almost universally agree that a global  epidemic — a pandemic — of influenza is overdue. The most  likely cause now is H5N1 avian influenza, which could evolve  into a form that passes easily from person to person. Government estimates suggest vaccines and drugs will not be  enough to slow or prevent a flu pandemic. The U.S. pandemic  plan recommends closing schools and implementing strategies to  limit social contact as a way to limit transmission. If done quickly, such widespread measures combined with  drugs and vaccines might reduce transmission in a large city by  as much as 80 percent, by one estimate. But such estimates are often based on widely varying  assumptions, Cauchemez said. He and colleagues instead used  public health data from France that compared flu transmission  when school was in session and during school holidays. They found school holidays prevent 16 to 18 percent of  seasonal influenza cases. When extrapolated to a pandemic, they  said prolonged school closure might reduce the cumulative  number of cases by 13 to 17 percent, and peak attack rates by  39 to 45 percent. But that impact would be reduced if it proved too difficult  to keep children apart. “If we want the policy to have an  impact, children must be kept relatively isolated and not cared  for in groups,” Cauchemez said. U.S. cities that quickly closed schools and discouraged  public gatherings during the great flu pandemic of 1918 —  which killed tens of millions of people globally — had as many  as 50 percent fewer deaths than cities that took less decisive  measures, according to a recent study. Cauchemez said an especially deadly pandemic might provide  strong incentives for people to keep their children at home. “It might nonetheless be difficult for a lot of working parents  to be absent from their work for months to look after their  kids,” he said. Cauchemez said a prolonged outbreak might force working  parents to put their children into informal daycare settings, a  risk governments need to consider when they formulate pandemic  flu plans. “We can’t predict how people will behave, but we need to be  aware that if this happens, school closings might have no  effect at all on flu transmission,” he said. H5N1 bird flu only rarely infects people now. It has killed  239 out of 379 infected, according to the World Health  Organization, but could easily mutate into a form that one  person could pass to another, and governments around the world  are preparing for the possibility.

SOLUTION: School closings may be no holiday for flu pandemic.

PROBLEM: Kentaro Iwata, a professor of infectious disease at Kobe University, said on his blog on Thursday that it’s not clear that the outbreak in Japan will have subsided by the planned start of the Games in July. Also, the flood of foreign visitors could exacerbate the spread of the disease, known as COVID-19. Japanese government officials have said the Olympics will go ahead as scheduled and will not be held behind closed doors. “The Olympics are not just a mass gathering, but a mass gathering from all over the world, while COVID is a global pandemic,” Iwata wrote. “These two things don’t go together.”  Iwata boarded the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship in February and his YouTube videos decrying the conditions there garnered more than a million views. Iwata said that bureaucrats, and not infectious disease professionals, were running the quarantine, and that basic protocols on zoning and the use of protective gear were not followed. Japan has recorded more than 1,600 cases of the virus, including about 700 from the Diamond Princess. Thirty nine people have died, including seven from the liner. The virus has spread around the world, with more than 218,000 confirmed cases and 8,900 deaths.

SOLUTION: Diamond Princess critic says Tokyo Olympics should be halted.

PROBLEM: North Pole, Alaska - the Fairbanks suburb, not the spot at the top of the globe - has posted some of the nation’s worst air-quality readings in recent days, thanks to high levels of wood smoke streaming into stagnant cold air. Concentrations of particulates have made North Pole’s air “very unhealthy,” meaning children, the elderly and other vulnerable people should stay indoors and all residents should refrain from prolonged exercise, according to local government officials. The “very unhealthy” classification was given in the past few days. A search of airnow.gov - the government portal which monitors air quality - did not reveal any other U.S. community currently with such poor quality air. The problem stems from residents’ dependence on wood-burning stoves for heat in an extremely cold region prone to pollution-trapping temperature inversions, said officials with the Fairbanks North Star Borough, the regional government. “As long as it’s cold and the air is still, we have a particulate problem,” said Jim McCormick, a technician with the borough’s Air Quality Division. With temperatures in some spots below minus-30 degrees Fahrenheit (-34.4 C) and no relief forecast until next week, the air is expected to stay dirty, McCormick said. As of Friday, particulate pollution in North Pole was worse than in Beijing, which is notorious for chronic air pollution, a Fairbanks newspaper columnist reported, although Reuters was unable to verify the claim independently. Dermot Cole of the Fairbanks News-Miner said his research found only one city in the world, Guangzhou in southern China, with particulate readings that are currently worse than those in North Pole. Alaska’s pristine, mountainous landscapes suggest crystal clean air. But the city of Fairbanks also has had recent problems, with air quality classified by the borough on Friday as “unhealthy” - not as dire as in North Pole, but still triggering warnings against outdoor activities. The entire Fairbanks North Star Borough has been plagued for years with wintertime air pollution. It is consistently in violation of federal air-quality standards and is required under federal and state laws to come up with measures to clear the air, although they have proved elusive. A local program that allowed residents to swap out old wood stoves for more efficient models was halted by an anti-regulation initiative that borough voters passed in October. “That stopped it cold,” McCormick said.

SOLUTION:
"Wood stoves, extreme cold blight air at Alaska's ""North Pole""."