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: So far, Somalia has reported only three cases. But if the disease is unleashed, it could spread like wildfire through camps housing malnourished families who huddle under makeshift domes built from sticks and rags. Many of the 2.4 million Somalis displaced by conflict and other disasters live in such camps. Out of a total population of 15 million, around six million Somalis may not have enough to eat this year, the United Nations says, weakening their immune systems and ability to survive the pandemic. Islamist al Shabaab insurgents also hold parts of southern Somalia, making it hard for health workers to visit and impossible to do testing there. "I have witnessed wars, cholera, dysentery," Ahmed, tall and bespectacled, told Reuters. "A doctor who fears for his life cannot save people. I have learned to forget worrying and instead help rescue people." A decade ago, al Shabaab seized him as he was trying to stem a cholera epidemic in territory they held. They had seen a cross inside his ambulance and - wrongly assuming it meant he was a foreign spy - arrested him and his team. A phone call from a high-level contact saved their lives, he said. Right now, Somalia only has about 25 intensive care beds, 110 quarantine beds and 100 treatment beds available, Ahmed said. More are being built. In the capital, patients at the old Italian-built maternity Martini Hospital have been moved out to make way for a new coronavirus ward. The sound of hammering echoes through its wide, tree-lined compound as construction workers rush to finish repairs. The health ministry and prime minister's office have allocated about $11 million for coronavirus preparation, Ahmed said. Expenses are high - all medical equipment is imported and coronavirus tests are sent to Kenya for processing. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has trained 500 health workers in Somalia since January, said Dr. Mamunur Rahman Malik, the organization's country representative. The WHO also brought in personal protective equipment to handle the first 300 or 400 cases, Malik added. Ahmed's biggest worry is that the disease may spread very fast. Somalia has a tradition of physical greetings, and even wealthy people are reluctant to quarantine away from family. Many, like Faduma Abdikadir, simply have nowhere to isolate themselves. The 38-year-old mother is sleeping under a tree in a makeshift camp in the capital Mogadishu with her eight children, having fled fighting in the countryside. "Most of the time we use ashes and sand to wash hands. We are hungry. We beg people to buy water to drink and wash our hands," she said.

SOLUTION: Somali doctor, veteran of many battles, girds for war with coronavirus.

PROBLEM: Prime Minister Boris Johnson's top medical adviser, Chris Whitty, said on Wednesday that data on the extent and impact of the outbreak was encouraging but that it was too soon to focus the next phase of the government's response. "Our view is that it is probably reaching the peak overall," Whitty said at the government's daily news conference. "We are not yet at the point where we can say confidently and safely 'this is now past the peak and we can start thinking very much now about the next phases.'" So far, more than 12,868 people with COVID-19 have died in British hospitals, though new official data indicates the true death toll could be much larger. Whitty said the daily number of deaths could rise in coming days due reporting lags. The government is widely expected to announce on Thursday that it will extend the most far-reaching restrictions on daily life in Britain's peacetime history. But Johnson had initially refrained from approving the stringent controls that other European leaders imposed. He later closed down the country when projections showed a quarter of a million people could die in the United Kingdom. The leader of the opposition Labour Party, Keir Starmer, said the prime minister had initially been too slow to impose the lockdown, signalling the political row that is likely to dominate the national discourse for years to come. "I am worried that it looks like we are going to have a higher death rate than any other country in Europe and there will obviously be searching questions about why that has happened," Starmer told LBC radio. "I did think the government was going too slowly," Starmer said. "We will have to look back in due course." A widespread lockdown came into force on March 23. Prior to that the Conservative government had urged people not to make unnecessary journeys and to cut down on socialising, rather than closing establishments down. But Britons had still packed pubs and restaurants, and even the Cheltenham horse-racing event went ahead, bringing together thousands of punters. Johnson even joked about shaking hands with medical staff during a hospital visit. Starmer, a 57-year-old former prosecutor who won the Labour Party leadership earlier this month, also called on the government to publish its exit strategy from lockdown restrictions. Foreign minister Dominic Raab, who is deputising for Johnson while he recovers from COVID-19, will lead a cabinet meeting on Thursday morning, and in the afternoon chair an emergency response committee meeting to decide on extending the lockdown The United Kingdom's hospital death toll from COVID-19 rose by 761 to 12,868 as of 1600 on April 14, the health ministry said. The toll had gone up by 778 the previous day. The official British death toll is the fifth-highest globally after the United States, Italy, Spain and France. The United States has reported more than 28,000 deaths while Italy has reported more than 21,000. Several European countries have announced plans or already begun to relax restrictions, balancing the risk of reversing gains against further damage to battered economies. Starmer said Labour supported extending the measures in Britain but that to "maintain morale and hope", the public needed to have an idea of what is coming next. Government officials have defended their course of action regarding the start of the lockdown and said it would be a mistake to talk about how to end the lockdown before they were confident the peak had been reached. Amid the doom, though, there were rays of hope. A 106-year-old woman, thought to be the oldest patient in Britain to beat the novel coronavirus, was discharged from hospital. Connie Titchen, born in 1913, had battled suspected pneumonia and COVID-19. A 99-year-old war veteran, Tom Moore, has raised more than 8 million pounds ($10.03 million) for Britain's health service with a walk around his garden.

SOLUTION: UK virus outbreak 'probably' peaking, but too soon to ease lockdown.

PROBLEM: Ever since the mid-1950s, generations of children in North America (and, since the advent of the Internet, children from all over the world) have eagerly turned to an annual service provided by the U.S.-Canada North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) to help them track the progress of Santa Claus every Christmas Eve as he departs the North Pole and traverses the globe in his reindeer-driven sleigh, delivering presents to good little boys and girls around the world. NORAD's engaging well over a thousand people to provide a yearly Santa-tracking program seems to many like a rather whimsical venture for a staid defense-based agency to be engaging in. And, in fact, NORAD didn't set out to be in the business of providing real-time Santa updates every Christmas Eve: that service came about strictly by accident, the result of a misdialed number published in a local department store newspaper advertisement. Back in 1955, NORAD's predecessor, the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) was based in Colorado Springs, Colorado. At Christmastime of that year, a Sears department store advertisement placed in a Colorado Springs newspaper featured a picture of Santa urging children to "Call me on my private phone and I will talk to you personally any time day or night." Unfortunately, the phone number included in the ad was either misprinted or misdialed, and a child who called ended up not on the phone with St. Nick but rather with one Colonel Harry Shoup, the officer on duty that day at CONAD. Rather than informing his juvenile caller they had reached a wrong number and brusquely instructing them to get off the line, Col. Shoup opted to play along and asked his staff to accommodate the inquisitive youngster by providing them with updates on Santa's Christmas Eve progress. The story of the accidental origins of NORAD's Santa-tracking program has been told and re-told many times over the decades. Here's how Col. Shoup's daughter related it back in 2009: One morning that December, U.S. Air Force Col. Harry Shoup, the director of operations at CONAD, the Continental Air Defense Command NORAD's predecessor got a phone call at his Colorado Springs, Colo., office. This was no laughing matter. The call had come in on one of the top secret lines inside CONAD that only rang in the case of a crisis. Grabbing the phone, Shoup must have expected the worst. Instead, a tiny voice asked, "Is this Santa Claus?" "Dad's pretty annoyed," said Terri Van Keuren, Shoup's daughter, recalling the legend of that day in 1955. "He barks into the phone," demanding to know who's calling. "The little voice is now crying," Van Keuren continued. "'Is this one of Santa's elves, then? '" The Santa questions were only beginning. That day, the local newspaper had run a Sears Roebuck ad with a big picture of St. Nick and text that urged, "Hey, Kiddies! Call me direct Call me on my private phone and I will talk to you personally any time day or night." But the phone number in the ad was off by a digit. Instead of connecting with Santa, callers were dialing in on the line that would ring if the Russians were attacking. Before long, the phone was ringing off the hook, and, softening up, Shoup grabbed a nearby airman and told him to answer the calls and, Van Keuren said, "'just pretend you're Santa. '" Indeed, rather than having the newspaper pull the Sears ad, Shoup decided to offer the countless kids calling in something useful: information about Santa's progress from the North Pole. To quote the official NORAD Santa site, "a tradition was born." From that point on, first CONAD and then, in 1958, when NORAD was formed, Shoup's organization offered annual Santa tracking as a service to the global community. A phone number was publicized and anyone was invited to call up, especially on December 24, and find out where Santa was. Manning those phones over the years have been countless numbers of Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps personnel and their families, and for many people, turning to NORAD to find out where Santa is became something to look forward to each year. Grabbing the phone, Shoup must have expected the worst. Instead, a tiny voice asked, "Is this Santa Claus?" "Dad's pretty annoyed," said Terri Van Keuren, Shoup's daughter, recalling the legend of that day in 1955. "He barks into the phone," demanding to know who's calling. "The little voice is now crying," Van Keuren continued. "'Is this one of Santa's elves, then? '" The Santa questions were only beginning. That day, the local newspaper had run a Sears Roebuck ad with a big picture of St. Nick and text that urged, "Hey, Kiddies! Call me direct Call me on my private phone and I will talk to you personally any time day or night." But the phone number in the ad was off by a digit. Instead of connecting with Santa, callers were dialing in on the line that would ring if the Russians were attacking. Before long, the phone was ringing off the hook, and, softening up, Shoup grabbed a nearby airman and told him to answer the calls and, Van Keuren said, "'just pretend you're Santa. '" Indeed, rather than having the newspaper pull the Sears ad, Shoup decided to offer the countless kids calling in something useful: information about Santa's progress from the North Pole. To quote the official NORAD Santa site, "a tradition was born." From that point on, first CONAD and then, in 1958, when NORAD was formed, Shoup's organization offered annual Santa tracking as a service to the global community. A phone number was publicized and anyone was invited to call up, especially on December 24, and find out where Santa was. Manning those phones over the years have been countless numbers of Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps personnel and their families, and for many people, turning to NORAD to find out where Santa is became something to look forward to each year. A number of recent accounts have pointed out the inconsistencies that crept into Col. Shoup's story over the years (i.e., was it a newspaper misprint or a randomly misdialed number the led a child to call; did NORAD receive misdirected calls from multiple children or a single child) and have intimated that the whole tale was a concocted work of fiction. But the basic elements of Shoup's story (if not the finer details) remained consistent across time, and no disproof or plausible alternate version of events has been offered to contradict them.

SOLUTION:
NORAD annually tracks Santa's progress because a child trying to reach Santa via a newspaper advertisement called the wrong phone number.