The most recent data indicate a decrease in the number of coronavirus infections in Italy. That means we could get out of the epidemic in the coming months. But why do we expect this trend? It is explained in the field of Science called “epidemiology” that studies how epidemics spread.
The first epidemiology studies date back to 1927, when two British researchers, Kermack and McKendrick, developed the “SIR” model (susceptible, infected, removed), still used today. However, the basis of these studies was the previous work of the American Alfred Lotka and the Italian Vito Volterra. A few years earlier, they had developed the model that we now call “Lotka-Volterra,” but also “predator-prey,” or “foxes and rabbits” (although neither Lotka nor Volterra ever spoke of foxes or rabbits).
Let’s explain. Imagine a green islet in the middle of the sea, populated by only two species: foxes and rabbits (there is no such island, but let’s take it as a hypothetical example). The population of foxes (predators) tends to grow when rabbits (prey) are abundant. It grows so fast that, at some point, the surviving rabbits can no longer reproduce quickly enough to replace those eaten by the foxes. The rabbit population reaches a maximum and then falls. At this point, Foxes starve. With few foxes around, the remaining rabbits can reproduce peacefully and the cycle begins again.
The model is based on the idea that predators tend to take more resources than nature can replace: it is what we now call “overexploitation” It always ends badly, but the model describes the trajectory of the populations that first grow and then collapse as a bell-shaped curve. An example of a real case is that of St. Matthew Island in the Pacific. There were no reindeer on the island before the US Navy brought some, in 1944. In a couple of decades they became thousands, they devoured all the grass, and then almost all died of starvation. Then, a couple of particularly harsh winters exterminated the last individuals, sick and hungry. Reindeer was the predators and grass the prey: a classic case of resource overexploitation.
Not that the model can explain the complex interactions in a whole ecosystem, but it is useful to provide us with a framework for what’s happening. And we can use it to understand the current epidemic. It is the same thing: the virus is the predator and the prey is us. The population of the virus is growing rapidly as it always happens when resources are abundant. But soon the virus will begin to run out of prey, fortunately not because infected people die (some, unfortunately, do). They are no longer prey because they become immune. Indeed, the epidemic is following the bell-shaped trajectory predicted by the Lotka-Volterra model.
So, nothing unexpected. Viruses are creatures looking for resources just like we do. They’re doing nothing different than what we did in the past by exterminating species like mammoths or the dodo. And, today, with the huge expansion of the human population over the last 1000-2000 years, we have become a great hunting ground for so many micro-organisms, also because of our tendency to live in crowded cities where it is easier to get infected. Thus, the past history is full of epidemics: plague, smallpox, cholera, influenza and many others.
In a way, we are at war: viruses attack us and we defend ourselves with vaccines, antibiotics, hygiene, and our immune system. But, if it’s a war, we won’t necessarily win it. Maybe we’ll find a vaccine for the Sars-VOC-2 virus, but don’t expect miracles.
Actually, species do not make wars against each other: they adapt, that’s how the ecosystem works. Viruses and bacteria are seen almost only causes for diseases, but our body hosts a large number of them and of many different species. They are not parasites, many are “symbionts” – creatures that help us with so many things, think of our intestinal bacterial flora. So, in time, we’ll end up adapting. And the virus will adapt, too.
Ugo Bardi teaches physical chemistry at the University of Florence, in Italy and he is also a member of the Club of Rome. He is interested in resource depletion, system dynamics modeling, climate science and renewable energy. Contact: ugo.bardi(whirlything)unifi.it
Before I found myself “sheltering in place,” this article was to be about women’s actions around the world to mark March 8th, International Women’s Day. From Pakistan to Chile, women in their millions filled the streets, demanding that we be able to control our bodies and our lives. Women came out in Iraq and Kyrgyzstan, Turkey and Peru, the Philippines and Malaysia. In some places, they risked beatings by masked men. In others, they demanded an end to femicide — the millennia-old reality that women in this world are murdered daily simply because they are women.
In 1975 the Future Was Female
This year’s celebrations were especially militant. It’s been 45 years since the United Nations declared 1975 the International Women’s Year and sponsored its first international conference on women in Mexico City. Similar conferences followed at five-year intervals, culminating in a 1995 Beijing conference, producing a platform that has in many ways guided international feminism ever since.
Beijing was a quarter of a century ago, but this year, women around the world seemed to have had enough. On March 9th, Mexican women staged a 24-hour strike, un día sin nosotras (a day without us women), to demonstrate just how much the world depends on the labor — paid and unpaid — of… yes, women. That womanless day was, by all accounts, a success. The Wall Street Journal observed — perhaps with a touch of astonishment — that “Mexico grinds to a halt. Hundreds of thousands of women paralyzed Mexico in an unprecedented nationwide strike to protest a rising wave of violence against women, a major victory for their cause.”
In addition to crowding the streets and emptying factories and offices, some women also broke store windows and fought with the police. Violence? From women? What could have driven them to such a point?
Perhaps it was the murder of Ingrid Escamilla, 25, a Mexico City resident, who, according to the New York Times, “was stabbed, skinned and disemboweled” this February. Maybe it was that the shooting of the artist and activist Isabel Cabanillas de la Torre in Ciudad Juarez, a barely noted reminder to an uninterested world that women have been disappearing for decades along the U.S.-Mexico border. Or maybe it was just the fact that official figures for 2019 revealed more than 1,000 femicides in Mexico, a 10% increase from the previous year, while many more such murders go unrecorded.
Is the Pandemic Patriarchal?
If it weren’t for the pandemic, maybe the Wall Street Journal would have been right. Maybe the Day Without Women would have been only the first of many major victories. Maybe the international feminist anthem, “El violador eres tú” (You [the patriarchy, the police, the president] are the rapist), would have gone on inspiring flash-mobs of dancing, chanting women everywhere. Perhaps the world’s attention might not have been so quickly diverted from the spectacle of women’s uprisings globally. Now, however, in the United States and around the world, it’s all-pandemic-all-the-time, and with reason. The coronavirus has done what A Day Without Women could not: it’s brought the world’s economy to a shuddering halt. It’s infected hundreds of thousands of people and killed tens of thousands. And it continues to spread like a global wildfire.
Like every major event and institution, the pandemic affects women and men differently. Although men who fall sick seem more likely than women to die, in other respects, the pandemic and its predictable aftermath are going to be harder on women. How can that be? The writer Helen Lewis provides some answers in the Atlantic.
First of all, the virus, combined with mass quarantine measures, ensures that more people will need to be cared for. This includes older people who are especially at risk of dying and children who are no longer in school or childcare. In developed countries like the United States, people fortunate enough to be able to keep their jobs by working from home are discovering that the presence of bored children does not make this any easier.
Indeed, last night, my little household was treated to a song-and-dance performance by two little girls who live a couple of houses down the street. Their parents had spent the day helping them plan it and then invited us to watch from our backyard. What they’ll do tomorrow, a workday, I have no idea. A friend without children has offered to provide daily 15-minute Zoom lessons on anything she can Google, as a form of respite for her friends who are mothers.
As recently as a week ago, it looked as if shuttered schools might open again before the academic year ends, allowing one New York Times commentator to write an article headlined “I Refuse to Run a Coronavirus Home School.” An associate professor of educational leadership, the author says she’s letting her two children watch TV and eat cookies, knowing that no amount of quick-study is going to turn her into an elementary school teacher. I applaud her stance, but also suspect that the children of professionals will probably be better placed than those of low-wage workers to resume the life-and-death struggle for survival in the competitive jungle that is kindergarten-through-twelfth-grade education in this country.
In locked-down heterosexual households, Helen Lewis writes, the major responsibility for childcare will fall on women. She’s exasperated with pundits who point out that people like Isaac Newton and Shakespeare did their best work during a seventeenth-century plague in England. “Neither of them,” she points out, “had child-care responsibilities.” Try writing King Lear while your own little Cordelias, Regans, and Gonerils are pulling at your shirt and complaining loudly that they’re booored.
In places like the United Kingdom and the United States, where the majority of mothers have jobs, women will experience new pressures to give up their paid employment. In most two-earner heterosexual households with children, historic pay inequalities mean that a woman’s job usually pays less. So if someone has to devote the day to full-time childcare, it will make economic sense that it’s her. In the U.S., 11% of women are already involuntarily working only part-time, many in jobs with irregular schedules. Even women who have chosen to balance their household work with part-time employment may find themselves under pressure to relinquish those jobs.
As Lewis says, this all makes “perfect economic sense”:
“At an individual level, the choices of many couples over the next few months will make perfect economic sense. What do pandemic patients need? Looking after. What do self-isolating older people need? Looking after. What do children kept home from school need? Looking after. All this looking after — this unpaid caring labor — will fall more heavily on women, because of the existing structure of the workforce.”
Furthermore, as women who choose to leave the workforce for a few years to care for very young children know, it’s almost impossible to return to paid work at a position of similar pay and status as the one you gave up. And enforced withdrawal won’t make that any easier.
Social Reproduction? What’s That? And Why Does It Matter?
This semester I’m teaching a capstone course for urban studies majors at my college, the University of San Francisco. We’ve been focusing our attention on something that shapes all our lives: work — what it is, who has it and doesn’t, who’s paid for it and isn’t, and myriad other questions about the activity that occupies so much of our time on this planet. We’ve borrowed a useful concept from Marxist feminists: “social reproduction.” It refers to all the work, paid and unpaid, that someone has to do just so that workers can even show up at their jobs and perform the tasks that earn them a paycheck, while making a profit for their employers.
It’s called reproduction, because it reproduces workers, both in the biological sense and in terms of the daily effort to make them whole enough to do it all over again tomorrow. It’s social reproduction, because no one can do it alone and different societies find different ways of doing it.
What’s included in social reproduction? There are the obvious things any worker needs: food, clothing, sleep (and a safe place to doze off), not to speak of a certain level of hygiene. But there’s more. Recreation is part of it, because it “recreates” a person capable of working effectively. Education, healthcare, childcare, cooking, cleaning, procuring or making food and clothing — all of these are crucial to sustaining workers and their work. If you’d like to know more about it, Tithi Bhattacharya’s Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression is a good place to start.
What does any of this have to do with our pandemic moment? How social reproduction is organized in the United States leaves some people more vulnerable than others in a time of economic crisis. To take one example, over many decades, restaurants have assumed and collectivized (for profit) significant parts of the work of food preparation, service, and clean up, acts once largely performed in indvidual homes. For working women, the availability of cheap takeout has, in some cases, replaced the need to plan, shop for, and prepare meals seven days a week. Food service is a stratified sector, ranging from high-end to fast-food establishments, but it includes many low-wage workers who have now lost their jobs, while those still working at places providing takeout or drive-through meals are risking their health so that others can eat.
One way professional class two-earner couples in the United States have dealt with the tasks of social reproduction is to outsource significant parts of their work to poorer women. Fighting over who does the vacuuming and laundry at home? Don’t make the woman do it all. Hire a different woman to do it for you. Want to have children and a career? Hire a nanny.
Of course, odds are that your house cleaner and nanny will still have to do their own social reproduction work when they get home. And now that their children aren’t going to school, somehow they’ll have to take care of them as well. In many cases, this will be possible, however, because their work is not considered an “essential service” under the shelter-in-place orders of some states. So they will lose their incomes.
At least here in California, many of the women who do these jobs are undocumented immigrants. When the Trump administration and Congress manage to pass a relief bill, they, like many undocumented restaurant workers, won’t be receiving any desperately needed funds to help them pay rent or buy food. Immigrant-rights organizations are stepping in to try to make up some of the shortfall, but what they’re capable of is likely to prove just a few drops in a very large bucket. Fortunately, immigrant workers are among the most resourceful people in this country or they wouldn’t have made it this far.
There’s one more kind of social reproduction work performed mostly by women, and, by its nature, the very opposite of “social distancing”: sex work. You can be sure that no bailout bill will include some of the nation’s poorest women, those who work as prostitutes.
Women at Home and at Risk
It’s a painful coincidence that women are being confined to their homes just as an international movement against femicide is taking off. One effect of shelter-in-place is to make it much harder for women to find shelter from domestic violence. Are you safer outside risking coronavirus or inside with a bored, angry male partner? I write this in full knowledge that one economic sector that has not suffered from the pandemic is the gun business. Ammo.com, for example, which sells ammunition online in all but four states, has experienced more than a three-fold increase in revenue over the last month. Maybe all that ammo is being bought to fight off zombies (or the immigrant invasion the president keeps reminding us about), but research shows that gun ownership has a lot to do with whether or not domestic violence turns into murder.
Each week, Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax hosts a chat line offering suggestions for help of various sorts. For the last two weeks, her readers (myself included) have been horrified by messages from one participant stuck in quarantine in a small apartment with a dangerous partner who has just bought a gun. Standard advice to women in her position is not just to run, but to make an exit plan, quietly gather the supplies and money you’ll need and secure a place to go. Mandatory shelter-in-place orders, however necessary to flattening the curve of this pandemic, may well indirectly cause an increase in domestic femicides.
As if women weren’t already disproportionately affected by the coronavirus epidemic, Senate Republicans have been trying to sneak a little extra misogyny into their version of a relief bill. In the same month that Pakistani women risked their lives in demonstrations under the slogan “Mera jism, meri marzi” (“My body, my choice”), Republicans want to use the pandemic in another attempt to — that’s right — shut down Planned Parenthood clinics.
The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent recently revealed that the $350 billion being proposed to shore up small businesses that don’t lay off workers would exclude nonprofits that receive funds from Medicaid. Planned Parenthood, which provides healthcare for millions of uninsured and underinsured women, is exactly that kind of nonprofit. Democratic congressional aides who alerted Sargent to this suggest that Planned Parenthood wouldn’t be the only organization affected. They also believe that
“…this language would exclude from eligibility for this financial assistance a big range of other nonprofits that get Medicaid funding, such as home and community-based disability providers; community-based nursing homes, mental health providers, and health centers; group homes for the disabled; and even rape crisis centers.”
Meanwhile, Mississippi, Ohio, and Texas are trying to use the coronavirus as an excuse to prevent women’s access to abortion. On the grounds that such procedures are not medically necessary, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has ordered abortion providers to stop terminating pregnancies. Earlier, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost sent letters to abortion providers in that state forbidding all “nonessential” surgical abortions.
A Return to Normalcy?
When Warren Harding (who oversaw a notoriously corrupt administration) ran for president in 1920, his campaign slogan was “a return to normalcy” — the way things were, that is, before World War I. What he meant was a return to economic dynamism. As we know, the “Roaring Twenties” provided it in spades — until that little crash known as the Great Depression. Today, like Harding, another corrupt president is promising a prompt return to normalcy. He’s already chafing at the 15-day period of social distancing he announced in mid-March. At his March 23rd press conference, he hinted that the United States would be “open for business” sooner rather than later. The next day, he suggested that the country reopen for business on Easter (a “very special day for me”), saying he wants to see “packed churches all over our country.” He can’t wait until everything, including our deeply unequal healthcare and economic systems, gets back to normal — the way they were before the spread of the coronavirus; until, that is, we can go back to being unprepared for the next, inevitable crisis.
Unlike the president, I hope we don’t go back to normal. I hope the people of Venice come to appreciate their sparkling canals and their returning dolphins. I hope that the rest of us become attached to less polluted air and lower carbon emissions. I hope that we learn to value the lives of women.
I hope, instead of returning to normalcy, we recognize that our survival as a species depends on changing almost everything, including how we produce what we need and how we reproduce ourselves as fully human beings. I hope that, when we have survived this pandemic, the world’s peoples take what we have learned about collective global action during this crisis and apply it to that other predictable crisis, the one that threatens all human life on a distinctly warming planet.
Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and is now at work on a new book on the history of torture in the United States.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Originally published in TomDispatch.com
Copyright 2020 Rebecca Gordon
To
Smt Nirmala Sitharaman
Union Finance Minister
Dear Smt Sitharaman,
Kindly refer to my letter dated 23-3-2020 on the subject.
Recently, you announced several relief measures to counter the spread of COVID19. In particular, you had announced that an insurance cover of Rs 50 lakh per person would be provided to frontline health workers – sanitation staff, paramedics and nurses, ASHA workers and doctors- who are working to tackle the COVID-19 illness and face the highest risk of contracting the illness. It is reported that the insurance cover provided to the health workers will be for three months with effect from March 25, 2020. This is expected to benefit 22 lakh health workers handling the COVID-19 crisis across India. I welcome this initiative on the part of your government.
However, more important that the insurance cover is the urgent need to provide every doctor, every nurse, every para-medical worker, every ASHA worker and every sanitation worker, facing day-to-day exposure the the virus, with personal protective equipment (PPE) including protective shoes. Without this, providing a mere insurance cover may not meet the requirement.
I have personally seen sanitation workers struggling to clean the streets, where there are suspected Corona case, without safe masks and gloves and without using safe shoes.
I have enclosed here an article, “Indian doctors fight coronavirus with raincoats, helmets amid lack of equipment” which sums up the situation. Even if there is some exaggeration in it, the position that prevails today is more or less what has been described in it.
The Prime Minister’s Relief Fund, I am told, has an unspent balance of around Rs 3,000 crores lying idle. Could not that amount have been spent on PPEs as soon as India came to know the magnitude of the COVID19 threat? I am somewhat surprised that a separate fund called PM-CARE Fund should be opened when the PM Relief Fund has unspent amounts lying. It is inexplicable that the Ministry of Health should wait till the end of March to place orders for PPEs/ ventilators etc. though the magnitude of the global spread of the virus was known to us in the last week of January itself. Perhaps, we have lost precious days in responding to the challenge.
Till date, the number of the virus affected cases, as established on the basis of tests conducted so far, has remained modest. However, the mass movement of the migrant workers, without any timely response from the government to provide them social security, has opened the floodgates to community transmission of the virus. Compounding this is the virus spread triggered by the Nizamuddin religious meet in which hundreds of suspected virus-affected persons have since travelled far and wide, making citifies like mine highly vulnerable. These developments are likely to push up the numbers of the virus affected persons in several States, posing a severe stress on the medical infrastructure. If those engaged on the medical and the sanitation fronts fall prey to the virus, the outcomes can be truly distressing.
I request you, as reiterated time and again, to make sure that the medical, para-medical and sanitation personnel are 100% equipped physically with the state-of-the-art PPEs and the hospitals provided with adequate numbers of ventilators on a war footing. Without this, the insurance cover will not inspire public confidence.
In the case of COVIND19, we cannot afford delays in decision making!
Regards,
Yours sincerely,
E A S Sarma
Former Secretary to GOi
Visakhapatnam
Co-Written by Jitamanyu Sahoo & Syed Mujtaba Hussain
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is expanding rapidly and had been detected in more than 190 countries globally. The absence of precise epidemiological and clinical data at the on-set of the out-break have upset the public health decision-making taken by several countries. At the time when health system runs on data, from disease modelers to government, from people quarantined to practicing physical distancing, all need potential data to increase the efficiency of the healthcare.
Fragmented data as we are currently witnessing in the battle against COVID-19 creates risk for individual patients and risk for care. Fragmentation also creates a risk for data privacy as disorganized and disorderly data is shared across various health actors. At the institutional level, the data fragmentation only provides a partial picture on which the health outcomes depend. Whether collecting and collating health data across jurisdictions will provide us real time epidemiological information to combat this global health crisis is yet to be seen.
In this critical period we need to firstly place reliance on the benefits of the collation of global health data and acknowledging the challenges it posses before us specifically the fragmentation problem and secondly guiding the health data to immediate health intervention and situational awareness.
Global Health Data Today
Blizzard of health data at an increasing rate is generated by the health systems in the midst of COVID-19 pandemic across 190 countries. The proliferation of data from traditional record keeping and using of sophisticated technology attempts to gives us a broader picture of the current crisis. But the varied healthcare systems across varied jurisdictions have held us to reach a common meeting ground of data sharing. Drawing lessons from the Spanish Flu, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), Ebola, and lethal influenza like avian and swine flu which have taken millions of life, we cannot let COVID-19 to haunt us from our past.
Another feature which the health data offers is a substantial promise to improve the healthcare. A recent study published in February 20200 lancet infectious disease by Xu & Kremer on COVID19 mentions “Consistent recording of epidemiological information is important to understand transmissibility, risk of geographic spread, routes of transmission, and risk factors for infection, and to provide the baseline for epidemiological modelling that can inform planning of response and containment efforts to reduce the burden of disease.” This is essential as it will translate into the providing us multiplicity of analyses providing a consensus for intervention in the current health crisis.
Fighting Pandemics with Data Analytics
Historical approaches versus data analytics which will prevail? The tussle on both sides remains that historical approaches are slow and reliable as they go through the hospital reports whereas on the other hand data analytics such as data mining give us a more accurate picture of when and where the next pandemic is going to emerge or how to avoid one which is unfolding before us. Both the approaches do add value in any given out-break and charting out progression for combating infectious diseases.
But novel datasets subjected to data-analytics do have enormous edge to overcome the challenges in pandemics including the current COVID19. A case in point is Blue dot which is an infectious disease data analytics firm which have successfully predicted Zika to the US by contextualizing ecological data, world itineraries, global population data, environmental and other factors.
What we know so far? The COVID19 have provided us with datasets of travel history, onset dates as well as confirmation dates, symptoms and a global map to chart on. Though the current data available is updated but at the same time lot of data are outdated as the pandemic is unfolding rapidly. It must be remembered no one sector, no one country, no one doctor and no one individual can solve the current global health crisis. To make sense of the raw data a unified behemoth effort is required by the health agencies and data firms to transmit and translate the practices on use of data across the globe.
Resilience in Global Health Data
The inaccessibility of health data, the perennial question of privacy and the fear of medical error are all questions of vital importance when addressing global health crisis. The search for balance and need to have access to data for valuable life saving inputs, identifying persons at risk and applying appropriate medical measures is where global health data can step in. Since the data on the current COVID19 leans heavily on information found online as well as the information released by the public health officials of each countries it is difficult to draw analysis to address the crisis on unverified data.
For the sake of resilience in Global Health Data the World Heath Organization has designed a SOLIDARITY trial which is a robust data sharing study to suppress and control the current pandemic as well as provide data for the most effective treatment for the fight against the COVID19. However, till date only 10 countries have joined the trial. SOLIDARITY will pool resources from across the countries and will provide verified and vetted information to battle COVID19. We urge all the countries that are fighting the current global health battle to share information and be part of this global health data movement.
The unpredictability of globalised pandemics needs health data to draw counter measures. The countries today need to avail the choice of global collectivism and cohesiveness which will lead to bridging the gap of information vacuum in global health data. This will lead to predict progression which will help prevent the current and future pandemics of the 21st century.
Jitamanyu Sahoo & Syed Mujtaba Hussain are Research Scholars working in (Comparative Heath Law, Human Security & Constitutional Law)
In view of some Asian countries slowing down the spread of the coronavirus, officially Covid-19, pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) experts have warned: No country should let its guard down.
“Let me be clear. The epidemic is far from over in Asia and the Pacific,” said Takeshi Kasai, WHO Regional Director for the Western Pacific.
Takeshi Kasai was talking to reporters on Tuesday.
The WHO expert said: This is going to be a long-term battle and we cannot let down our guard. We need every country to keep preparing for large-scale community transmission.
While positive news is coming from China and South Korea, whose response seems to have slowed down the spread of the virus, WHO technical adviser Matthew Griffith explained that this should not be interpreted as Covid-19 leaving particular areas.
He said: “Whereas countries and areas in this region have shown how to flatten the curve, outbreaks continue to pop up in new places and importation remains a concern.”
WHO chief calls for equitable distribution and free movement of essential health products
In his media briefing on COVID-19 on March 30, the WHO chief said:
“The COVID-19 pandemic is straining health systems in many countries.
“The rapidly increasing demand on health facilities and health workers threatens to leave some health systems overstretched and unable to operate effectively.
“Previous outbreaks have demonstrated that when health systems are overwhelmed, deaths due to vaccine-preventable and treatable conditions increase dramatically.
“Even though we’re in the midst of a crisis, essential health services must continue. Babies are still being born, vaccines must still be delivered, and people still need life-saving treatment for a range of other diseases.”
He reminded:
“WHO has published guidelines to help countries balance the demands of responding directly to COVID-19, while maintaining essential health services.
“This includes a set of targeted, immediate actions to reorganize and maintain access to high-quality essential health services, including routine vaccination; care during pregnancy and childbirth; treatment for infectious and noncommunicable diseases and mental health conditions; blood services, and more.
“That includes ensuring an adequate health workforce to deal with the many health needs other than COVID-19.”
He said:
“We’re pleased by the 20 000 health workers in the UK who have offered to return to work, and that other countries such as the Russian Federation are involving medical students and trainees in the response.”
The WHO chief said:
“To help countries manage the surge in COVID-19 cases while maintaining essential services, WHO has also published a detailed, practical manual on how to set up and manage treatment centers for COVID-19.
“The manual covers three major interventions:
“First, how to set up screening and triage at health facilities, using a repurposed building or a tent.
“Second, how to set up community facilities to care for mild patients;
“And third, how to set up a treatment centre, by repurposing hospital wards or entire hospitals, or by setting up a new hospital in a tent.
“The manual covers structural design, infection prevention and control measures, and ventilation systems.
“This is a life-saving instruction manual to deal with the surge of cases that some countries are facing right now.
“These facilities will also have longer-term benefits for health systems once the current crisis is over.
“In addition to having facilities for patients, it’s also vital that countries have sufficient supplies of diagnostics, protective equipment and other medical supplies.”
He said:
“Ensuring free movement of essential health products is vital for saving lives and curbing the social and economic impacts of the pandemic.
“Earlier today I spoke to trade ministers from the G20 countries about ways to address the chronic shortage of personal protective equipment and other essential medical supplies.
“We call on countries to work with companies to increase production; to ensure the free movement of essential health products; and to ensure equitable distribution of those products, based on need.”
He said:
“Specific attention should be given to low- and middle-income countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.”
He informed that WHO is working intensively with several partners to massively increase access to life-saving products, including diagnostics, PPE, medical oxygen, ventilators and more.
He said:
“We understand that many countries are implementing measures that restrict the movement of people.
“In implementing these measures, it’s vital to respect the dignity and welfare of all people.
“It’s also important that governments keep their people informed about the intended duration of measures, and to provide support for older people, refugees, and other vulnerable groups.
“Governments need to ensure the welfare of people who have lost their income and are in desperate need of food, sanitation and other essential services.”
The chief world health official reminded:
“Countries should work hand-in-hand with communities to build trust and support resilience and mental health.”
China finds no new case in Hubei
Chinese health officials reported on Tuesday that there were no new confirmed Covid-19 cases recorded in the Hubei Province – where the outbreak initially started – for the seventh day in a row. All new 48 cases reported on Tuesday were linked to people arriving from abroad.
Chinese authorities said that although the domestic transmission of the disease has been largely stopped, the growing number of imported cases risks triggering a secondary wave of the infection.
India and Pakistan convert trains into mobile Covid-19 hospitals
Pakistan’s national railway has converted all of its business class coaches into rolling quarantine wards for Covid-19 patients, adding thousands of beds to the fight against the virus, a move mirroring a similar project in India.
The mobile isolation units are ready to ship out to any part of the country connected by rail lines, offering much needed relief to local authorities in Pakistan’s hardest-hit regions, Railways Minister Shaikh Rashid Ahmad announced on Monday at the Rawalpindi train station in Punjab, a major stop on the Karachi–Peshawar line.
According to the newspaper Dawn, some 220 coaches have been specially equipped to house and treat patients, each containing nine beds. Train stations in all seven divisions administered by Pakistan Railways – in Lahore, Karachi, Quetta, Sukkur, Rawalpindi and Multan – have also been fitted with 100 beds and a ventilator each, further taking pressure off local healthcare systems.
Pakistan has suspended all passenger rail services amid the Covid-19 outbreak, allowing only freight cars to deliver vital food and supply shipments around the country. While Ahmad said he hoped passenger lines could reopen sometime in April, he noted they would remain shuttered until authorities could get a handle on the outbreak.
According to Johns Hopkins University, Pakistan has some 1,700 cases while the number of deaths is 21.
India, too, has signaled plans to convert rail cars into moving isolation wards, with the state-owned Indian Railways presenting a prototype for the project over the weekend.
Once cleared by authorities, the train operator hopes to convert 10 coaches into quarantine units each week to serve its 16 zones, which make up the world’s fourth largest rail network. Despite boasting a population of over 1.3 billion, India has confirmed only around 1,250 cases of the virus to date, with 32 deaths.
The coronavirus pandemic is influencing the entire human world. The pandemic’s impact and the changes it will bring are searched. After the crisis is over, there will be many changes. The longer the pandemic lasts, the more people may embrace new aspects of lifestyle.
The global oil industry has been hit hard. Oil prices have crushed. Long-term viability of many of the oil producers are being questioned. In some cases, the costs of shutting down a well are so high that drillers are paying customers to take oil away.
Low oil prices are forcing massive cuts to supply, which will be slow to return when demand bounces back. When demand outpaces supply, there will be inflation. Industries relying on petroleum will feel the pain of surging costs, and the industries may be forced to make long-term changes.
The way people live may be changing. Social distancing and home office may turn into a routine.
These depend on how long the pandemic keeps economic activity frozen.
Goldman Sachs’ Jeff Currie wrote in a note to clients on Monday: “The global economy is a complex physical system with physical frictions, and energy sits near the top of that complexity. It is impossible to shut down that much demand without large and persistent ramifications to supply.”
In his note, Currie explores the immense challenges the industry faces as it aims to balance supply and demand in a profitable way.
Currie wrote: “The climate change debate will almost certainly take a different course when the global economy emerges from this and is faced with the prospect of having to make large-scale investments into carbon-based industries.”
“The silver lining of the coronacrisis is that the virtual shutdown of key carbon industries – autos, airlines and cruise ships – is likely to cause carbon emissions to fall this year, with initial data from China pointing to a c.20%+ fall during the peak of the shutdown,” he added.
Currie wrote: “People are adapting to a more local existence and living off more sustainable activities, consuming less globally-produced fresh food, producing less waste with a more conservative approach to consumption, all of which may have lasting impacts on demand. Further, commuters and airlines account for c.16.0 million b/d of global oil demand and may never return to their prior levels.”
Currie added: “While oil prices are low today and physical constraints are forcing the behavioral changes, as oil shortages develop once economic activity normalizes, the high oil prices will likely accelerate the energy transition by constraining demand.”
He wrote: “Higher oil prices would also greatly improve the relative economics of EVs and hydrogen. But from the supply side, capital markets’ push for de-carbonization is likely to prevent the broad investment the industry will need to get out of this crisis and will reinforce a tight physical market beyond 2020.”
The Western mass media is extremely busy frightening its own citizens and the entire world with statements like:
“A leaked government document has suggested up to 500,000 people could die from coronavirus if the disease is able to infect up to 80 per cent of the country.”
That’s what The Independent wrote on 26 February 2020. And that horrifying number of the fatalities ‘could occur’ according to the ‘documents’ in the United Kingdom.
It all feels bizarre. As if the Western regime were preparing its citizens and the world ‘for the most awful scenario.’
As if there were no solution to this dire global crisis.
“Chinese Virus”, says the U.S. President Donald Trump. He pronounces it with spite, and naturally, China feels deeply insulted. Some citizens and the government officials had enough of the continuous, racist abuses, and they are openly protesting.
Well, first of all, do we even really know where the virus has originated from? In Wuhan? But how did it get to Wuhan, and what triggered the epidemy? We don’t know. Nobody really knows.
Without pointing fingers or drawing conclusions, what we do know is that the U.S. has been engaged in various chemical and biological warfare, in several parts of the world, including Latin America. It also does all it can to provoke and to even damage the People’s Republic of China: psychologically, politically, economically and, perhaps, physically.
These are facts. No need to draw conclusions, yet.
In the meantime, China is helping more than 80 countries worldwide to combat the epidemy.
The White House obviously does not like what China is doing. It is petrified that the most obvious facts would be detected by the people in the United States, in Europe and the rest of the Planet: that the North America failed, that the European Union failed, and that most of the allies of the West failed, squarely and patently.
And the more China is doing to save the humanity, the more punches it is receiving. And not only China, but also Cuba, and several other socialist nations, which are defending their people instead of business interests.
On 21 March 2020, The Daily Beast wrote in its report ‘White House Pushes U.S. Officials to Criticize China For Coronavirus ‘Cover-Up’:
“As the number of coronavirus cases continues to grow at a rapid pace in the U.S., the White House is launching a communications plan across multiple federal agencies that focuses on accusing Beijing of orchestrating a “cover-up” and creating a global pandemic, according to two U.S. officials and a government cable obtained by The Daily Beast.”
And that’s not all. The report continued:
“The cable was disseminated to officials at a time when the administration is engrossed in a communications battle around how to disseminate the flow of crucial health information to the American public while at the same time deflecting criticism that the White House was unprepared for the pandemic and that President Trump is at odds with members of his coronavirus task force.”
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On 20 March2020, RT wrote:
‘Washington has passed off blame to Beijing for its own failures in addressing the Covid-19 outbreak, China’s Foreign Ministry said, hitting back at the ‘Chinese virus’ rhetoric with the ironic term ‘Trumpandemic.’
“Some people in the United States attempt to stigmatize China’s fight against the epidemic and shirk its responsibility to China,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang told reporters on Friday, referring to the finger-pointing adopted by President Trump and other top officials (after weeks of US media outlets calling it the ‘Chinese’ and ‘Wuhan’ virus).
This practice ignores the huge sacrifices made by the Chinese people to safeguard human health and safety, and denigrates China’s major public health security contributions.”
The bottom-line is clear: China defeated the coronavirus in an incredibly short time. It shared its experience, then began helping many countries, including those in the West.
Chinese airplanes and even trains packed with equipment and medical staff are helping to save lives on all continents, in some 80+ countries. Russia is doing its best, too, and so is Cuba.
What is difficult to comprehend is why the Western countries refused to follow Chinese example? Approach of London, Washington and Rome is sporadic, schizophrenic, deadly.
Compared to what the West is doing now to its people, China, even at the height of the virus outbreak, was using relatively mild approach. Most of the major Chinese cities were never fully locked-down. While the battle of COVID-19 was raging, China continued to function. Every step of Beijing was logical and determined. Millions of lives were spared as a result.
So, why, despite of extreme measures applied, are hundreds of Italians dying every day, as well as hundreds of other Europeans and North Americans?
Italy is one of the richest countries on Earth.
Is it just a sloppiness of the Western medical system? Is it simply a bad planning? Or is it something much, much more sinister?
We will investigate, analyze, and find out soon.
But whatever it is, it is damaging the world, already ruining, directly and indirectly, millions of lives, perhaps irreversibly.
President Trump may be insulting those brave countries which are defending their citizens, as well as the countries that are fighting for the survival of men, women and children, regardless of their age, race and nationality. But it is China, Russia and Cuba, which are now clearing the mess created by Washington, Rome, Paris and London. The world is finally paying attention! And it is Beijing, Moscow and other capitals, which are now asking questions!
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Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Five of his latest books are “China Belt and Road Initiative”, “China and Ecological Civilization” with John B. Cobb, Jr., “Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism”, a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and Latin America, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website, his Twitter and his Patreon.
Shame on YOU. Ok, one need not be a financial genius or economist to know that in 2008-09 Uncle Sam gave away the store to the failing Wall Street banks and investment corporations. We paid for it, you and me working stiff taxpayers, to the tune of well over one trillion US dollars. What did the so called ‘ bailout ‘ do for we who punch in the hours at work? What was that original stimulus given to each of us? Perhaps what, a $ 1000 check in the mail? Meanwhile, the ‘ Too big to fail’ devious banks got taken off life support to the tune of billions for each of them. A must see film about the aftereffects of the Sub Prime scandal is Marc Levin’s 2012 documentary ‘ Lost on Long Island’. He follows a group of laid off employees from different segments of the Wall Street financial community… with shocking results. That is how many working stiffs suffered by that bubble burst and the ensuing Bush/Cheney and then Obama gift to those sharks. What many in the media like to label as ‘ The Middle Class’ revealed itself to be just working stiffs getting continually disappointed and screwed by the two headed monster: Predatory Corporate Capitalism and Good Old Embedded Uncle Sam.
This current pandemic, a worldwide phenomenon, is destroying both people’s lives and the economies throughout the world. Companies cannot operate, working stiffs get laid off, and once again Uncle comes to the rescue of who? Of course, the super rich who run this corporate capitalism on steroids US empire. The FED recently decided what it did 12 years ago and created money electronically , funneling it right to those Wall Street behemoths and other Big Business. We are talking trillions this time! Oh, the new carrot fed to the mule to make him compliant is of course that $ 1200 one time only check to each citizen… and of course a four month extension of unemployment insurance. Let’s see, the white collar and even blue collar working stiff who earns, let us say, $ 30 k a year, will get much less than the $ 600 a week he or she was used to getting. The higher up you go on that payroll scale the more the gap between one’s actual pay and the unemployment insurance check. Translated : How in the hell can folks make it through this pandemic, which could last more than a few months? Public banking advocate attorney Ellen Brown has been touting what former candidate Andrew Yang was on board with: A Universal Basic Income plan to give each citizen $ 1000 ( minimum) per month… not just a ‘one time only’. This UBI as they call it would be over and above one’s current earnings and would have nothing to do with unemployment insurance. Ellen says Uncle Sam has now bailed out the banks… now bail out working stiffs!
This writer leaves it to the slew of progressive economists like someone as knowledgeable as Dr. Jack Rasmus to go over the minute details of this current bailout AKA Stimulus. My concern is to point the finger at the Army of Predatory Capitalists who made out like kings in 2008-09, and are now going to have a repeat performance…on we working stiff’s dime. Go and read Aaron Glantz’s great book Homewreckers to see how those sharks made out from the Bush/Cheney and Obama bailouts. Just one for instance, already mentioned in a previous column of mine ( and through my recent interview with Aaron Glantz), is that of our current Treasury Sec. Steven Mnuchin. Glantz reveals how Mnuchin, an alumnus of the giant shark Goldman Sachs, watched how mortgage giant Indy Mac was ready to fold up. He and his fellow investors bought Indy Mac for peanuts, changed the name to One West, and were holding well over 100,000 toxic mortgages… well over! The FDIC, supposed to be our savior, became an indirect co-conspirator with Mnuchin’s company. Why? Well, here is how Glantz said it worked. When his One West company was holding a mortgaged home originally assessed at $ 300K, and now worth only $ 100K, the FDIC allowed One West to sell it for that $ 100k and then gave One West an additional $ 200 k. No kidding!! When my partners and I owned a failing cafe business in 2008, we had to sell it for 50% less than we put into it. Where was Uncle Sam then to help us?
So, what is the answer to this dilemma? Is it simply going out and voting in November, for whom, Twiddle Dum and Twiddle Dee politicians? Well, getting rid of the Trump crew is always a great motivation, but that is where it ends for we working stiffs. Currently, we cannot even rally in public, due to this pandemic. Yet, once the smoke finally clears a bit, we who labor for this empire need to get out and demand from our elected officials that they are supposed to represent us and not the 1/4 of 1 percent. Education of our young is priority one, along with education of the majority of working stiffs who most likely would not even see through the scam of this financial moment. Sad. Fool me twice, shame on ME!!
Philip A Farruggio is a contributing editor for The Greanville Post. He is also frequently posted on Global Research, Nation of Change, World News Trust and Off Guardian sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 300 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘ It’s the Empire… Stupid ‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at paf1222@bellsouth.net.
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