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.

Q: 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.

A: School closings may be no holiday for flu pandemic.
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Q: The 6.6 magnitude quake hit early on Tuesday, damaging buildings, toppling power lines and triggering landslides in the central area of the Philippines’ southern island. A seven-year-old child and his 44-year old father were among those who were killed in the North Cotabato province after they were struck by a boulder, disaster officials said. Authorities said the death toll could rise further because many injured were not immediately brought to hospitals. “It was depressing to see the damage left by the earthquake,” Abril Espadera, a disaster official in North Cotabato, told Reuters, as he recalled seeing collapsed homes and demolished buildings in the province, including schools. Smaller tremors rattled nervous residents throughout the day and those who were afraid to return to their homes set up tents to shelter near school yards, Espadera said. In Magsaysay town in Davao del Sur province, rescuers were trying to recover three bodies after landslides in two separate towns swallowed parts of agricultural areas, police said. The quake, whose magnitude was initially put at 6.7 by the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre, was the second powerful quake to strike Mindanao in two weeks. Authorities had flagged the risk of landslides after the 6.3 quake on Oct. 16 in central Mindanao that killed seven and injured more than 200. Earthquakes are common in the Philippines, which is on the geologically active Pacific Ring of Fire. Power cables swayed in Davao city, the home town of President Rodrigo Duterte, where people rushed to open spaces, and some fainted out of fear. The quake also triggered power cuts in nearby General Santos city, media said. Some schools in the area have suspended classes. Duterte’s office has called for calm as it mobilized all government agencies to undertake damage assessment and to coordinate rescue and relief operations.

A: Death toll in southern Philippines earthquake rises to seven.
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Q: Peebles, a 30-year-old black man who’s skeptical of what he hears from the news media and government, initially didn’t see the need for alarm over the virus. “I felt it was a complete hoax,” Peebles said. “This thing happens every two or four years. We have an outbreak of a disease that seems to put everybody in a panic.” Peebles is among roughly 40 million black Americans deciding minute by minute whether to put their faith in government and the medical community during the coronavirus pandemic. Historic failures in government responses to disasters and emergencies, medical abuse, neglect and exploitation have jaded generations of black people into a distrust of public institutions. “I’ve just been conditioned not to trust,” said Peebles, who is now obeying the state’s stay home order and keeping his distance from others when he goes out. Some call such skepticism the “Tuskegee effect” — distrust linked to the U.S. government’s once-secret study of black men in Alabama who were left untreated for syphilis. Black people already suffer disproportionately from chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease and are far more likely to be uninsured. How the government and medical community responds to the crisis will be especially crucial for outcomes among black Americans, civil rights advocates and medical experts say. “We are right to be paranoid and to ask tough questions,” said U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts who joined other congressional leaders in asking the government to collect and release information about the race and ethnicity of people who are tested or treated for the virus that causes COVID-19. “History has shown us, when we do not” ask questions, said Pressley, who is black, “the consequences are grave, and in fact life and death.”  NAACP President Derrick Johnson, who hosted a coronavirus tele-town hall with U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams last month, said black and brown communities need reliable information about the crisis. “Now that this has been deemed a pandemic, I am most concerned with inequities in who’s provided tests, who’s provided treatment and how those tests and the treatments are administered, in a way that is open, transparent, and equitable,” Johnson said. For most people, the virus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. But for some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia and death. Cities with large black populations like New York, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee and New Orleans have emerged as hot spots for the coronavirus. Figures released by Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services show 40% of those who have died from COVID-19 are black in a state where African-Americans are just 14% of the population. And many Southern states with large black populations have been slow to mandate statewide restrictions shown to slow virus spread. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, black adults are 60% more likely than non-Hispanic white adults to be diagnosed with diabetes, 40% more likely to have high blood pressure and are less likely to have those conditions under control. Additionally, in 2015, black women were 20% more likely to have asthma than non-Hispanic whites. Those disparities make the availability of a treatment or vaccine urgent, even as the virus is currently projected to claim tens of thousands of lives. But given history, Peebles said he wouldn’t rush to accept a remedy. “If we got to a place where the government says, ‘OK, now it’s time to take a vaccine,’ then I’m definitely going to be skeptical of their intentions,” he said. Launched in 1932 by the U.S. Public Health Service, the Tuskegee study involved roughly 600 poor black men in Alabama who weren’t treated for the sexually transmitted disease so researchers could track its progress. The program was exposed and ended in 1972, and then-President Bill Clinton formally apologized in 1997. The Tuskegee legacy has helped pollute the black community’s relationship with American medical science. A 2016 paper found the fallout included mistrust of medicine among black men, along with fewer interactions with doctors and higher mortality rates. In Tuskegee, where many families include descendants of victims, many residents don’t trust government health information, said Lucenia Dunn, a former Tuskegee mayor. So volunteers trying to get the word out about coronavirus have gone door-to-door distributing fliers with cartoon-like illustrations that don’t look “too official,” she said. “We have a general distrust in this community,’” Dunn said. “I call it ‘subconscious rejection.’ The attitude is, ‘I’m going to rebel against this. You people have been telling us lies for years. Why should I believe you now?’” In Los Angeles, Jahmil Lacey helped found a public health group for black men and boys, TRAPMedicine, that educates black barbers and organizes workshops to address health disparities among their customers. “People will quote the Tuskegee experiment as the reason why black people don’t trust health care, but there’s so much more than just that one example,” Lacey said. “We don’t trust systems that are connected to white supremacy. So, we have to do the work to repair it.” Indeed, Tuskegee didn’t happen in a vacuum. In the 1950s, doctors at the John Hopkins Hospital used cervical cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks, a black mother of five, to pioneer medical advances and research that continue globally today. Lacks, who died in 1951, never gave her consent and her family has never been compensated. One way to begin healing the mistrust is to increase black representation in the medical field, said Dr. Nicollette Louissaint, executive director of the Washington-based emergency response advocacy group Healthcare Ready. “We have to make sure that ... the message itself and the messengers are being adapted to the appropriate audience,” said Louissaint, who is black. “It’s going to be really important that we get that right.” ___ Reeves reported from Birmingham, Alabama. Both are members of the AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. Follow Morrison on Twitter at http://twitter.com/aaronlmorrison. Follow Reeves on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Jay_Reeves

A:
Amid coronavirus pandemic, black mistrust of medicine looms.
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