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.

Input: Consider Input: Paragraph: Officials in Cumberland County say the Department of Health was told Saturday that a person affiliated with the university was hospitalized with a “possible diagnosis of a bacterial meningitis infection.” They did not say if the ill individual is a student. Officials say they are coordinating with the school and the state to provide antibiotics to anyone who had direct close contact with the individual. The university sent a campus-wide notification Saturday. Meningitis is an infection of the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord. The bacteria that cause the infection can spread through kissing, coughing and sharing beverages. Signs and symptoms of infection include high fever, headache, stiff neck and a rash. Claim: Officials investigate possible meningitis case at NC college.

Output: Health officials in North Carolina are investigating a possible case of bacterial meningitis at Methodist University.


Input: Consider Input: Paragraph: This summer, she’ll test her rowing talent in a far more challenging environment, where small crews of rowers rarely go: the Pacific Ocean. Dawson is taking part in a 2,400-mile rowing race from Monterey, California, to Honolulu. She and three teammates are aiming to break a world record — 50 days, 8 hours, 14 minutes, set in 2014 — for a women’s rowing team. Dawson and her three teammates will begin rowing across the Pacific Ocean on June 2. She plans to post updates on her personal blog, http://row4climate.com/ and on her team’s blog, http://www.rippleeffectrowing.com/ But they also want to put a spotlight on the far-reaching impacts of humankind on the Earth by rowing across parts of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a vast gyre of pulverized plastic garbage occupying an area roughly four times the size of California. Dawson, who studied atmospheric sciences at the UW and will begin working on her doctorate at Stanford University this fall, plans to send photos and videos of the garbage patch. She hopes to record the journey on her blog and the team’s blog as she goes. “It’s going to be a hard, demanding journey — and that’s what it’s going to take to combat climate change,” said Dawson, 22, who was a member of the UW crew in 2016 and 2017. The four women will alternate two hours of rowing with two hours of sleep, 24 hours a day, for 40 to 50 days. They’ll be rowing a specially designed oceangoing rowboat they’ve named the Ripple Effect. Their journey is part of the third Great Pacific Race, organized by New Ocean Wave, a British company. It involves eight teams of rowers crossing the Pacific. They are the only all-women team in the race. Dargan Frierson, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at the UW and one of Dawson’s former professors, described Dawson as “the type of person who tries to do things that seem impossible. “I hope it raises awareness about the types of changes we’re making to the environment,” he said “The oceans are different from when she was born (in 1996). They are a lot hotter, a lot more acidic. And, there’s a lot more plastic.” One day last week, Dawson and her coach, Conal Groom of the Seattle Rowing Center, carried a one-person shell out onto the water east of the Ballard Bridge. Dawson sat on the impossibly small seat and rowed the sleek shell past a line of brawny, battered commercial-fishing boats with names like Determined, Aleutian Challenger, Sea Venture and Botany Bay. Skimming along under a cloudy sky, she scattered a flock of ducks and passed a partly submerged plastic bag floating in the water. In an oceangoing race, “technique is useless,” said Groom, who rowed in the 2000 Summer Olympics. “It’s basically fitness. My job is to make sure she has enough training.” Dawson typically rows up to two hours a day in the morning. In the afternoon, she works out for another two hours, doing a range of fitness activities including cycling and weightlifting. When she’s not training, she’s working to raise $20,000 to help fund the journey. The race will hinge on things that are beyond her team’s control — weather, currents, waves. “And luck,” Groom said. Dawson has only met one of her teammates in person. Two are from Great Britain, and one is from Brazil. They connected over the internet. They’re coordinating the trip via daily Skype calls. They’ll meet in Monterey next month, for the final leg of training. The race begins June 2. “It’s going to be a crazy experience,” she said. Dawson has displayed a seriousness of purpose and fascination with the natural world that impressed adults when she was just a kid, growing up in Port Townsend. When she was 10 years old, she and her sister, Chloe, began volunteering at the Port Townsend Marine Science Center, where the girls met Libby Palmer, its co-founder. Palmer was struck by Dawson’s maturity, and her ability to do sustained, concentrated work and to absorb information like a sponge. In 2008, the science center started a four-year project to clean and reassemble the skeleton of an orca whale that had washed up on Dungeness Spit in 2001. Eliza and Chloe volunteered for four years, meticulously cleaning the bones and helping to assemble and position the 24-foot-long skeleton for display. Finding a fully intact orca carcass on a beach is rare — the mammals usually sink in open water when they die. Research revealed that the dead orca was heavily contaminated with toxins. “That was a wake-up call for me,” said Dawson. She’d grown up sailing and rowing in what seemed like the pristine waters around Port Townsend. How could a whale living in those same waters be full of toxins? The orca project sparked a growing interest in how the ocean was being changed by acidification and carbon dioxide. Those interests combined with her love of math and physics. “Climate change is a fact, not a belief,” she said. “It is mathematical equations. It is physics . it is clear the climate is changing, and it will affect everyone.” Frierson, the UW professor, met Dawson when she visited his lab as a high-school student and invited her to join his lab to do research as a freshman. “She has the determination, the intelligence that you don’t see in many students,” he said. He hopes students and faculty in atmospheric sciences will be able to aid Dawson’s journey — giving the team a heads-up about upcoming weather and other details like projections of wave heights. “Even just things like forecasting cloudiness might help her to know how long she can use her electric devices,” which are solar-powered, he said. “I’m hoping we can be useful to her, and get some good experience forecasting a place that’s not forecast that much.” Dawson is also working with EarthGames, a group of researchers, game developers and students who develop video and board games about the natural world, and who plan to release a game about Dawson’s journey shortly before it begins. This fall, she will start a doctorate program at Stanford University, where she plans to study why the Antarctic ice sheets are collapsing and what effect the retreating ice could have on sea-level rise. Dawson is confident in the boat, which has two very small cabins for resting and sleeping, and two seats for the rowers. An emergency vessel will be in the area, and a helicopter could airlift a rower to safety if the worst happened. “They’re going to have the latest technology — she’s such a whiz at everything technological,” Palmer said. “There’s nothing macho about their approach. They’re working with a lot of expert people who are lending her a hand.” The boat will contain all the food needed for the trip, most of it dehydrated, and is equipped with a desalinator to make potable water out of seawater, along with a GPS tracking device and a satellite phone. “I have a lot of trust in her, in knowing what her limits are,” Frierson said. “I just know this, from the academic side, that she’s not a person who tries to pretend she can do things she can’t.” ___ Information from: The Seattle Times, http://www.seattletimes.com Claim: Woman to row across ocean for environmental awareness.

Output: As a member of the University of Washington’s elite women’s varsity crew, Eliza Dawson honed her athletic skills on the sometimes-choppy waters of Lake Washington.


Input: Consider Input: Paragraph: The four-page letter, the contents of which were confirmed by U.S. officials to Reuters on Tuesday, described a bleak situation onboard the nuclear-powered carrier as more sailors test positive for the virus. The Navy puts the ship’s complement at 5,000, the equivalent of a small American town. The letter was first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle. Captain Brett Crozier, the ship’s commanding officer, wrote that the carrier lacked enough quarantine and isolation facilities and warned the current strategy would slow but fail to eradicate the highly contagious respiratory virus. In the letter dated Monday, he called for “decisive action” and removing over 4,000 sailors from the ship and isolating them. Along with the ship’s crew, naval aviators and others serve aboard the Roosevelt. “We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die. If we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset - our sailors,” Crozier wrote. U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters that nearly 80 people aboard the ship had tested positive for the coronavirus, a number likely to increase as all personnel on the ship are tested. Still, the Navy declined to confirm exactly how many people aboard the Roosevelt had been infected  The carrier was in the Pacific when the Navy reported its first coronavirus case a week ago. It has since pulled into port in Guam, a U.S. island territory in the western Pacific. U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said on Tuesday it was not time to evacuate the carrier, adding he had not read the letter in detail. In an interview with CBS News, Esper did not comment directly on Crozier’s proposal, at least in the portions that aired. Asked if it was time to evacuate the carrier, Esper said: “I don’t think we’re at that point.”  Admiral John Aquilino, head of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet, told reporters that the plan was to take some sailors off the ship, test and quarantine them, clean the ship and then rotate them with those on the carrier. He said that there would be some sailors who would be in quarantine and isolation on the vessel. Asked if he was following what the ship’s captain wanted to do, but was not able to do it at the pace the commanding officer wanted, Aquilino said: “That is absolutely the case.”  Acting U.S. Navy Secretary Thomas Modly said he had heard about the letter on Tuesday morning and that the Navy had been working for several days to get the sailors off the ship in Guam. Modly said Guam did not have enough beds and the Navy was in talks with the local government to use hotels and set up tents. “We don’t disagree with the (commanding officer) on that ship, and we’re doing it in a very methodical way because it’s not the same as a cruise ship ... that ship has armaments on it, it has aircraft on it,” he said on CNN. Reuters reported last week that the U.S. military had decided it would stop providing some of the more mission-specific data about coronavirus infections within its ranks, citing concern  the information might be used by adversaries as the virus spreads. The Roosevelt is just the latest example of the spread of the virus within the U.S. military. Navy officials say that sailors onboard a number of ships have tested positive,  including an amphibious assault ship at port in San Diego. The first U.S. military service member, a New Jersey Army National Guardsman, died on Saturday from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, the Pentagon said on Monday. As of Tuesday, 673 active-duty service members had tested positive for the coronavirus, an increase of more than 100 from the previous day, the Pentagon said in a statement. Claim: 'Sailors do not need to die,' warns captain of coronavirus-hit U.S. aircraft carrier.


Output: The captain of the U.S. aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, in a blunt letter, has called on Navy leadership for stronger measures to save the lives of his sailors and stop the spread of the coronavirus aboard the huge ship.