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: "The Republican Party of Texas marveled — not in a good way — at an admission of sorts by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi about the long-stalled health care overhaul before Congress. According to an e-mail the GOP sent Friday, Pelosi said “the Democrats have to pass their terrible health care bill so that the American people can actually find out what's in it.” Talk about a banana-peel moment. Did Pelosi improbably denigrate her party’s promised legislation and say people can find out what’s in it after it passes? GOP spokesman Bryan Preston pointed us to the text of Pelosi’s March 9 speech in Washington to the National Association of Counties. We learned, for starters, that while the Texas GOP thinks the legislation is terrible, Pelosi clearly doesn't. Instead, Pelosi's remarks celebrate aspects such as a ban on denying health coverage because of a pre-existing conditions, “robust support for public health infrastructure,” more spending on community health centers and reductions in uncompensated care by hospitals. Pelosi also says in the speech that the plan won't require anyone to pay a deductible for preventive health care doctor visits. She summarizes: “It’s going to be very, very exciting.” Yet there’s heft to the GOP's claim that Pelosi said the legislation has to pass so people can find out what’s in it. Pelosi adds: “But we have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of controversy.” Pelosi's words stirred critics from the right including Marguerite Higgins, a senior editorial services associate at The Heritage Foundation. In a blog, Higgins named the moment the video of the week and called Pelosi’s statement a “stunning demonstration of political condescension.” Separately, Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly offered this interpretation of Pelosi's comment: ""She meant there was so much talk about process (in Congress) that people have lost sight of what’s actually in the bill. Once it’s passed, we can remind them of all the good things that are in it."" Capital fusses aside, we wondered if Pelosi spoke accurately; will the plan need to pass before people know what's in it? We called the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation, which has posted side-by-side comparisons online of health care plans approved by the House and Senate. Its spokesman, Craig Palosky, reminded us that Congress posts the entire legislation online. Of course, that's not to say the final deal is settled — or, it stands to reason, open to public view. Palosky declined to comment precisely on Pelosi's forecast, saying her comment seemed more about politics than policy. ""It’s not our role to police such comments,"" he said. ""If you want to know what members of Congress are doing, you have to speak to members of Congress.” His nudge led us to call U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Lewisville, among a handful of physicians in Congress and an opponent to the Democrats' proposal. Burgess told us it's often true that the ins and outs of legislation aren't widely known until after a measure passes into law; that held true, for instance, for the Republican-steered measure providing government aid toward prescription drugs for seniors. Pelosi's ""right,"" Burgess said, though ""I don’t think that’s a good strategy (to declare as much). I wouldn’t recommend anyone actually broadcasting that."" So how does the GOP's statement shake out? The party's e-mail errs when it makes it sound as if Pelosi thinks the health-care measure is terrible. It's very much the opposite. But it accurately quotes Pelosi as saying people will find out what's in the plan after it passes."

SOLUTION: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said this week that the Democrats have to pass their terrible health care bill so that the American people can actually find out what's in it.

PROBLEM: Turkey reported its first infection just over two weeks ago. Since then, a surge in cases to 3,629 has outstripped rates in most other countries and the government has fallen short of its target to conduct 10,000 tests per day. In interviews with Reuters, experts have urged stronger stay-at-home orders and some said it was risky for Ankara to export 500,000 kits to the United States only to turn around and order a million more from China. “Our test numbers are low. We were certainly not prepared. Countries that are ready must have high test numbers,” said Sinan Adiyaman, chairman of the Turkish Medics Association (TTB). The government has said it took timely measures to delay the outbreak. But Adiyaman said Turkey was slow on some steps, including suspending sports leagues and quarantining those coming from abroad, especially the thousands returning this month from an Umrah pilgrimage. “Around 200,000 people arrived from abroad since the outbreak began, and they were just given a simple fever test and released across Turkey in an uncontrolled manner,” he said. “You cannot fight a pandemic this way.”  The coronavirus has so far killed 75 people in Turkey, an international crossroads with one of the world’s biggest airports in Istanbul. About 40,000 tests have been done including about 7,000 in the last 24 hours, suggesting Turkey is edging toward the target Health Minister Fahrettin Koca set out a week ago, but only two-thirds of the way there. South Korea, seen as the global leader, does more tests each day than Turkey’s total. (Click here here for a graphic of global tests; click here here for its global spread.) To contain the virus, Ankara has closed schools, cafes and bars, banned mass prayers, and suspended sports matches and flights. President Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey, which has a population of about 83 million, would overcome the outbreak in two to three weeks. Mustafa Cankurtaran, head of geriatrics at the Hacettepe University Faculty of Medicine, said his team is following the national guidelines, testing only “risky” patients with cough and fever. But next month will be critical since the outbreak will widen, he said. Earlier this week Koca said the kits sent to the United States were locally produced PCR tests for the coronavirus. He said Turkey had a monthly production capacity of 2 million tests, and added that the tests purchased from China were “rapid tests”, not PCR. The TTB’s Adiyaman said sending the test kits jeopardised the health of the public and medical personnel. “Exporting testing kits to the United States as Turkey needs them and while they need to be used here will be an unforgivable mistake,” he said. Irshad Shaikh, the World Health Organisation’s health security program Leader in Turkey, said the country now had little room for error and must test everyone who has had contact with the virus. He said, however, that the export of test kits to the United States, which he said was in a “perilous situation,” could be seen as a form of capital investment. “From now on, it’s a very slippery slope and razor-thin margin moving forward,” he said. “Now if the U.S. succeeds in vaccine development, we already have our invested cash in the bank in the form of our IOUs,” Shaikh told Reuters. Among the containment measures, Ankara said it quarantined Muslims returning from Umrah in Saudi Arabia. But Nihat Gonul, the local administrator of a village in  Sakarya province some 120 km east of Istanbul, said two returning pilgrims continued their lives normally and attended gatherings for days before authorities came to quarantine them. “There is this atmosphere of uncertainty in the village. People are scared, not sure what to think,” Gonul said.

SOLUTION: Turkey struggles to ramp up tests as outbreak reaches critical phase.

PROBLEM: Officials in Malaysia, as elsewhere, had initially rejected the use of the serology test kits, which can show the presence of antibodies in people who have been infected. Like other countries, it instead chose polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, laboratory tests, which detect the presence of the novel coronavirus itself and are seen as more reliable. But as the number of suspected cases needing testing has risen, the turnaround time for laboratory test results had increased from around 6 hours to as many as two days or more, the director-general of health Noor Hisham Abdullah told reporters. Malaysia reported 170 new coronavirus cases on Tuesday, taking the total to nearly 5,000 infections, the second-highest in Southeast Asia, with 82 deaths. It had done nearly 82,000 PCR tests as of Monday and reported over 8,000 pending lab results earlier this month, before it stopped publishing backlog data. To reduce the testing backlog, the close contacts of people infected will now receive the antibody tests at the end of their 14-day mandatory quarantine period. “On the 13th day, we will use the antibody or serology tests... and if it comes back positive, then we will carry out the PCR test again,” Noor Hisham said. “But if the antibody test comes back negative, then you’re in the clear. This is how we are trying to reduce the number of PCR lab tests.”  A person who tested negative can then be discharged from quarantine, freeing up state resources used to monitor them, but they would still be required to self-isolate under movement curbs imposed by the government until April 28 to limit the virus’ spread. Countries hope antibody tests may one day help them to ease movement curbs by identifying people who may have acquired immunity, but it is not yet clear if that is possible. Some doctors had been calling for Malaysia to use new rapid test kits - both antibody and antigen - to widen testing and reduce the backlog of cases, but like other countries, it has been awaiting trial results. A shortage of laboratory testing supplies and difficulty in procuring them have made it hard to ramp up capacity. Malaysia last week warned of a shortage of reagents, a chemical used in diagnostic tests to detect the presence of the coronavirus. Noor Hisham on Tuesday also warned that the country was running low on personal protective equipment (PPEs) for health workers, with supplies of some items expected to last just another 19 days.

SOLUTION:
Malaysia turns to coronavirus antibody tests to supplement laboratory checks.