Corak: COVID-19 is not the great leveller. It’s the great revealer

2020/04/17 Leave a comment

Great and accurate commentary by Corak:

In a medical sense, COVID-19, as highly contagious as it is, can be thought of as the great leveller. No one has immunity, and we face the health risk of this virus with a sense of our common humanity.

But in a socio-economic sense, it is not as contagious. The jobs some of us hold give us an economic immunity, and we face the economic risk of this virus with a very different sense of our interconnectedness.

Last week Statistics Canada reported that more than one million jobs were lost as social distancing and mandated work shutdowns took force. A further two million people saw their hours of work fall dramatically, implying that over three million Canadians were directly impacted.

The big hope, the hope upon which the entire government response rests, is that the COVID-19 economic shock will be temporary. The goal is to freeze the economy until the winds of illness pass by, allowing us to start again where we left off. Public policy is focused on the challenge of adjustment and rebound.

But Statistics Canada’s look into the socially distanced economy also reveals longstanding inequalities that have been growing wider and wider for decades.

For many families, the bottom end of wage inequality means an insecure standard of living and lower prosperity for the next generation.

The usual economic parable claims that this is the price paid to foster growth, and eventually more prosperity for everyone. We need to adjust to win.

The market has sent a signal: tool up, get better skilled, move elsewhere and move onward. The next and better job is just around the corner!

And after all, if you have a job, even if you need more than one to stay afloat, there is always a sense of hope, a shred of dignity, the aspiration of a better tomorrow. Income inequality is easier to ignore in a full employment economy.

But the great revealer has arrived in the form of a virus, its economic fallout showing almost perfectly the divides between those who are vulnerable and those who are not.

Now, some of us do work that is not public-facing.

Some of us do work that is flexible and supported by technology and computers.

And of course some of us do work that gets us an income well above average, offering security, health, a home with space, and a comfortable family life.

This work gives us an economic immunity.

What is the big deal about working at home if you normally spend half your time working from an airplane seat?

But underlying Statistics Canada’s report are some dramatic differences.

The employment change among managers and those working in professional, scientific, or technical jobs was “decimal point dust,” but 300,000 people working in accommodation and food services lost work, a fall that wiped out 20 years of growth.

The foot soldiers in this very first economic battle against COVID-19 were the young and women, those who work in part-time and temporary jobs, with no union contracts and lower wages. Students and those who were already unemployed were also out of luck finding their next job.

Now that we are collectively facing a health risk that is spreading across space, we’ve been given the opportunity for empathy with many people who individually confront risks that repeat over and over again during the course of their lives, an accumulation of bad draws over time that leads to lower and more precarious incomes, housing that is less stable and of lower quality, families that are less secure.

In much of this there is no question of merit and just desert, it’s just bad luck.

It is nice for premiers and prime ministers to thank truck drivers and grocery store clerks for their essential work, but it will be hypocrisy of the highest order for our governments to only hope to start up again where we left off.

Inequality has been robbing many Canadians of security, prosperity and dignity for decades. That is what COVID-19 reveals.

No, we don’t just have an adjustment problem. We have — as we have long had — an inequality problem.

Source: ContributorsOpinionCOVID-19 is not the great leveller. It’s the great revealer

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Weaponizing the ‘paradox of prevention’

2020/04/17 Leave a comment

Interesting and relevant article by Max Fawcett:

Amid all the bad news being generated by COVID-19, it’s only human to try and find the silver linings. And when it comes to the current crisis, there’s a school of thought that suggests the lessons we’re all learning right now about self-sacrifice, social solidarity and mutual interest can be applied to the fight against climate change.

“We are learning, overnight, that simplicity isn’t necessarily austerity, frugality need not be privation, and that we can forgo quite a lot of our leisure and consumer entitlements if it serves some higher purpose,” The Intercept’s Charles Komanoff and Christopher Ketcham wrote in a recent piece.

With trillions of dollars of stimulus already sloshing through the global financial system, and more surely on the way, there’s even a hope that we can use this moment to build both a greener economy and a low-carbon lifestyle. “If our society can act, finally, to manufacture a million ventilators and a billion protective masks,” Komanoff and Ketcham suggest, “surely we can within a few years act on a far grander scale to erect, say, 1,000,000 wind turbines, insulate and solarize 100,000,000 buildings, carve ribbons of bicycle paths throughout our cities and suburbs, and so on.”

I wish I could share that hope. But I’m afraid that the opposite may turn out to be true, and the sacrifices we’re all making to limit the spread of coronavirus will only make it harder to do what’s needed to fight climate change.

That’s because there’s a catch-22 at work here, which is that the better we do at flattening the curve on this virus, the more people will question whether we ever needed to try so hard in the first place. As Emilie Mazzacurati, the founder and CEO of a California-based climate risk data firm Four Twenty Seven told Forbes recently, “if you do things right, it means you’re never proven right because you’ve prevented bad things from happening.”

In the comparatively genteel world of public health, this is sometimes known as the “paradox of prevention.” As the U.S. Institute of Medicine’s Harvey Feinberg noted in a 2014 presentation at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, there are a number of factors that stand in the way of efforts to prevent a negative health outcome rather than responding to it.

Some, like the long delay before rewards appear, and the fact that the benefits of prevention don’t always accrue to the person who paid for it, are unavoidable realities. Others, like the acceptance of avoidable harms as normal or conflicting with commercial interests, are reflections of our less admirable traits as human beings. But together, they make it far more difficult to take preventative action than it should be.

Those factors were on full display during a recent segment of Laura Ingraham’s television show on America’s response to COVID-19. In it, the Fox News provocateur called attention to the fact that the shortages of ICU beds and ventilators that public health officials had been warning about have yet to materialize. But rather than attributing that to the belated social distancing efforts that have been underway for weeks now, she blamed the models that informed them. “Americans should be furious about this,” she said. “This is a lot of money that we’re spending on a response that was based, again, on faulty numbers.”

The Toronto Sun’s Candice Malcolm also pulled on that thread in a recent column, arguing that “before we further destroy the economy and cause endless misery and suffering as Canadian businesses fail and families lose their homes, we should make sure the so-called experts we’re relying on have thoroughly double-checked their work.” And in an echo of her frequent criticism of anything to do with climate change and efforts to actually front it, she suggested that “the science is not yet settled on coronavirus.”

Indeed, for those who have made undermining the scientific consensus around climate change their life’s work, the disparity between the forecasted impacts of COVID-19 and its reality (so far, at least) will present an irresistible opportunity to cast further doubt on the wisdom of collective action and sacrifice. It will also serve as a template for how they’ll frame the efforts to fight climate change that are already underway.

Proactive climate policies, and the politicians who implement it, won’t get credit for the major hurricanes that don’t happen, the droughts that are averted, or the heat waves that aren’t as intense. They won’t get credit for the economic benefits associated with averting those outcomes either. Instead, they’ll get blamed for having warned people that they could happen in the first place—and for having spent money trying to avoid outcomes that never came to pass.

So how do we escape this paradox? When it comes to public health, Dr. Fineberg suggests using “multiple media channels to educate, reframe and elicit positive change.”

But as we’ve learned over the course of the Trump presidency, mere facts tend to get swamped by the hurricanes of bad-faith bluster that people like Ingraham and Fox News routinely whip up. Paying people to take preventative measures, and thereby effectively making prevention cheaper rather than free, is a more viable strategy, and it’s one that informs the push for carbon pricing. But as we may be about to learn with COVID-19, it’s hard to get people to respond to a threat when they can’t see its worst impacts—and when others insist on telling them they don’t even exist.

Source: Weaponizing the ‘paradox of prevention’

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Quebec considers lower immigration levels to offset rise in joblessness

2020/04/17 Leave a comment

While Quebec is distinct in its approach to immigration and selects its own economic class immigrants, wonder whether this questioning of immigration levels post-pandemic will also occur at the federal level and with provincial nominations:

Quebec Premier François Legault says everything is on the table as the province looks to mitigate the damage from the coronavirus pandemic – including reducing immigration levels to counter a rise in domestic unemployment.

“It’s something we will look at. I think we have to review everything,” Mr. Legault said on Tuesday. “The number of immigrants, with the high rate of joblessness we’ll have in the coming months, we could reduce the number.”

The province has some autonomy over its immigration levels. Some 40,500 immigrants were admitted into Quebec last year, a 20-per-cent decline from the year before.

The provincial government is also preparing to pump billions of dollars more into its economy and rescue distressed companies in the months ahead, Economy Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon said in an interview this week.

“There will be more money put into the rebound of the economy than [spent for] the shutdown,” he said. “We have to be very selective and think about the strategic sectors of the economy. We can’t let a very strategic sector fall.”

Mr. Legault’s government is conducting an analysis of Quebec’s economy and businesses as it tries to work out its funding priorities. And it has also begun an analysis of its trade balance with a view to producing more of its own goods.

The province has already unveiled a $2.5-billion emergency loan program for businesses in need of immediate liquidity, and it is now pledging more as the crisis stretches out.

“The word ‘bailout’ might be strong, but some will be bailouts,” Mr. Fitzgibbon said, adding the government could also take equity in certain companies and offer some aid that is forgiven. “I’ve got companies in my mind that may need a break for a couple of months and that’s it – they’re going to be as profitable as they were before. But others, you know, will have a long path to recovery. And the path could be 12 to 18 months.”

Quebec has been slowly working towards reopening its economy after enacting some of the continent’s most severe emergency measures.

On Monday, it announced that mining, residential construction and all auto repair and maintenance services would restart under strict conditions limiting human contact. The next logical sectors to reopen would be general construction and manufacturing, Mr. Fitzgibbon said.

The province is also working with public health officials towards allowing smaller retailers to reopen, particularly those who compete against big chains that have remained in operation, such as Walmart and Costco, Mr. Legault said on Wednesday.

Business groups, unions and social groups in Quebec are weighing in on how the province can recast its economic and fiscal policy in a more permanent way. On Wednesday, several organizations including employer group Conseil du patronat du Québec, the Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Québec union and environmental group Équiterre released a letter they sent to Mr. Legault spelling out measures they believe will help reboot the economy while building a resilient, low-carbon future.

Among the suggestions: Accelerate spending on $44-billion worth of planned public transit and high-speed internet projects, expand support for energy-efficient building renovation, and fund initiatives to increase consumption of locally grown food.

The groups suggest financing the measures in part by redirecting deposits currently earmarked for the province’s debt-repayment fund.

“We not only have to deal with this humanitarian and economic crisis, we also have to prepare what comes after that,” said Yves-Thomas Dorval, president of the Conseil du patronat, which represents major employers such as Rio Tinto Alcan Inc. and Royal Bank of Canada.

“It made sense to us to work with our civil-society partners to offer suggestions based on the broad social, environmental and economic consensus we have forged in Quebec over the last 10 years. Our widely shared goals are to make our society more resilient to shocks such as this pandemic, better equipped to deal with ongoing crises like climate change, more prosperous and socially strong and united.”

In trying to determine where best to direct aid for companies, Quebec is using models to look at data such as employment, salaries and business clusters where it sees strength, Mr. Fitzgibbon said. The province has in the past identified aerospace and engineering as two industries with the financial weight and profile crucial to its economy but “it’s not obvious” now which companies might be saved, the minister said.

Quebec has no shortage of companies in difficulty, but their ability to weather the storm varies wildly. Some, like Bombardier Inc., have significant debt and shrinking prospects for repaying it, while others with more tenable capital structures face cash-flow trouble as demand for their products evaporates.

Source: Quebec considers lower immigration levels to offset rise in joblessness

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Being Counted in Canada’s Coronavirus Data, Ontario’s lack of diversity data for COVID-19 is an embarrassment

2020/04/17 Leave a comment

Two good commentaries on the lack of diversity data, starting with Howard Ramos of Dalhousie:

The lack of COVID-19 data on immigrants and racialized minorities collected and shared by Canada’s many layers of government could lead to health inequities.

Canada is not alone in having a data gap on immigrant and racialized groups. In the United States civil rights groups and doctors have called on its federal government to release demographic data on coronavirus infections.

Analysis that looks at the number of COVID-19 cases based on publicly available American data and census information shows that counties that are majority African-American have three times the rate of infection and almost six times the rate of deaths as counties where white residents are in the majority. It is a trend that has raised alarm across American cities.

Understanding Canada-U.S. differences

Past research suggests, however, that Canadians should be cautious in reaching conclusions and not automatically assume that what takes place in the U.S. naturally holds true north of the border.

The ‘healthy immigrant effect’ debate, for instance, which shows that many newcomers to the country self-report better health than native-born Canadians may mean that immigrants, who are also largely racialized, may not follow the same patterns as seen in the U.S.

What is needed to answer that question, and many others, is access to quality data. And just like personal protective equipment – it is currently in short supply.

Part of the problem in capturing immigrants and racialized groups in health data rests with how they are captured. Health data is largely the domain of provinces and territories, leading to uneven data collection and reporting across them.

When asked if Ontario could offer insights on the pandemic’s impact on racialized communities, Dr. David Williams, the province’s chief medical officer of health, noted that “statistics based on race aren’t collected in Canada unless certain groups are found to have risk factors.”

Ironically, if data are not collected, one cannot tell if a group has risk factors to begin with. This could lead to health inequities for African-Canadian, Indigenous, racialized, and other new Canadians.

That scenario is a big reason why the African, Caribbean and Black Network of Waterloo Region recently launched a petition demanding that data on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and socio-economic status be collected and reported on.

Data gap flows all the way to Ottawa

The data-gap is also seen at the federal level too. For instance, the new and innovative crowd sourced survey on the social and economic impacts of COVID-19 run by Statistics Canada measures age and gender but not other demographic features. The same absence is also seen in the Public Health Agency of Canada’s ‘detailed confirmed cases of coronavirus disease’ data, which is hosted by Statistics Canada.

The detailed data does not provide geo-coding or additional information on the location of the cases which means that researchers cannot link it to census tracts or other geographic units to do the kinds of analysis that was done for American communities.

As a result, the maps offered through the interactive Canada’s COVID-19 Situational Awareness Dashboard are fairly coarse. In many cases, more detailed information can be found through non-governmental sites such as ViriHealth. But, once again, sociodemographic characteristics are not provided and the location data is where people are treated over where they live.

Lastly, once Canada begins to move towards recovery, Statistics Canada’s data on job loses and employment can report on immigrants and racialized groups. Much of this data is collected through the Labour Force survey, which is good news. It’s only logical that measures of health and wellbeing be captured with the same level of detail.

If there’s one thing silver lining to Canada’s experience during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s reinforcing the point that collecting data matters. It’s essential to insure that everyone, regardless of race or ethnicity, is treated equally as citizens.

Source: newcanadianmedia.ca/being-counted-…

Secondly, the Ontario situation by Adam Kassam a Toronto-based physician:

The United States recently earned the unfortunate distinction of having the highest number of COVID-19 cases in the world, at more than 575,000. The true number of infected individuals, of course, is likely much higher given the lack of widespread and available testing.

But in that U.S. data, an alarming trend emerged: The coronavirus appeared to be disproportionately killing African-Americans. Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a preliminary report suggesting that there were higher rates of hospital admissions and death among black Americans compared with other communities.

These revelations have intensified a nationwide conversation on the social determinants of health and the necessity to collect better data. The CDC report is far from comprehensive, which has led to presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden calling on the organization to be more transparent by releasing more information. Even U.S. President Donald Trump has expressed concern, and instructed his African-American Surgeon-General, Dr. Jerome Adams, to formulate a federal response to address the problem.

This discourse about diversity data and its impact on racialized communities in the U.S. stands in sharp relief against the Canadian experience. Last week, Dr. David Williams, Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, summarily dismissed calls for the collection of racial data. He asserts that statistics on race aren’t collected unless certain groups are found to have risk factors, and that “regardless of race, ethnic or other backgrounds, they’re all equally important to us.”

We have a problem in this country when Donald Trump sounds more progressive about racial disparities than our own public health officials. Imagine if our Chief Medical Officer of Health claimed that it wasn’t important to collect gender-based data? This would be a fireable offence. It is, therefore, inconceivable that this same official, in the country’s most diverse province, would willfully choose to effectively ignore the unique needs of the nearly four million visible minorities who call Ontario home.

This is the manifestation of structural and systemic biases that have been omnipresent within our medical community for generations. Canada’s poverty of diversity data has been an indefensible blind spot, both in terms of health care and in our educational institutions. It is the symptom of an insidious disease, whose current hallmark is a leadership that looks increasingly less like the communities which it serves.

How else could you explain the dearth of visible minorities in some of the top leadership roles in health care across Ontario? Public Health Ontario’s executive does not appear to include a single visible minority. A visible minority has never served as Ontario’s health minister. And because diversity data of this nature is not collected or made public, we don’t know how many deputy ministers of health, deans of medicine or chiefs of medical departments have represented diverse backgrounds.

In many ways, you only measure what you really care about. Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer has unfortunately made that very clear. Never mind that collecting race-based data wouldn’t be an onerous task; crucially, it is part of good science. Only by intentionally studying diverse populations have we learned that women experience certain health challenges, such as heart attacks, differently from men. In the same vein, disease has been shown to manifest differently for patients from different ethnic backgrounds. It is my belief that all people deserve to know the details of their lives and to know that their lives are worthy of study.

While we don’t know whether racial differences influence COVID-19′s effect on individuals, Canada should be invested in determining this definitively, instead of taking its cues from the World Health Organization.

Early reports from the U.S. have pointed to disadvantaged and marginalized groups – the poor, immigrant, black and brown communities – being more significantly affected, and this has prompted crucial scrutiny of the deep and enduring fault lines between the haves and have-nots. Yet we cannot have those conversations here, as we cannot know whether the U.S. data reflect Canada’s, even though just a border separates us.

In Canada, where we are quick to declare that diversity is our strength, we must now dispense with the empty platitudes and put our money where our mouth is. Our governments should openly commit to funding the collection and publication of diverse health data during and after this pandemic. Their explicit goal should be to create policy that improves the health care of all its citizens. What’s clear is that this ethos will only become a priority when our medical leadership more closely reflects the Canada of today.

Source: Ontario’s lack of diversity data for COVID-19 is an embarrassment: Adam Kassam

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Delacourt: Canadians aren’t rebelling against Dr. Theresa Tam’s orders, but they might be starting to bristle

2020/04/17 Leave a comment

Couldn’t resist posting given its reference to my Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism with respect to Alberta Premier Kenney’s critique of Dr. Tam:

Sooner or later, someone was going to say it: Who made Dr. Theresa Tam the boss of all Canadians?

The fact that it was Alberta Premier Jason Kenney is not surprising, historically or politically.

But Kenney’s words on Monday were a crack in a wall of remarkable deference to the authority of Canada’s chief medical officer over a month of national lockdown. As we now head into month two, the question is whether Canadians more generally are starting to bristle at the doctor’s orders.

The federal government issued an emphatic “no” on Tuesday.

“Canadians have demonstrated that they have a tremendous level of trust and confidence in our public health officials and in our medical system,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said. “And we are going to continue work with top medical officials like Dr. Theresa Tam to make sure that we’re doing everything we need to do.”

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said that Tam and other provincial public health officers have been conferred with the authority of “rock stars” in this crisis.

But Kenney’s remarks on Monday broke a united front of assent to Tam’s advice — not just as it applies to the future, but to the past as well.

The premier said that Alberta was going to seek out tests and medication to fight the pandemic without waiting for approval from federal Health bureaucrats. Then, in a bit of a drive-by swipe at Tam personally, he also threw doubt on the advice the doctor had already given in the early days of the virus outbreak.

“This is the same Dr. Tam who is telling us that we shouldn’t close our borders to countries with high levels of infection and who in January was repeating talking points out of the (People’s Republic of China)about the no evidence of human-to-human transmission,” Kenney said in an interview on CBC’s Power and Politics program.

There’s an old joke about how you get 50 Canadians out of a pool. You say: “Canadians, get out of the pool.” This pandemic, by and large, has made that joke feel a little too close to home, as a whole nation has put life as we know it on hold to comply with medical orders to contain the COVID-19 virus.

Deferential as we are, we likely wouldn’t have gone to these extraordinary lengths on the basis of political advice alone.

The federal government spent $30-million on a wave of ads with Dr. Tam as the sole spokesperson. (And no, that’s not the voice of Trudeau at the end of the ad, though it does sound an awful lot like him. I asked and the answer was no.)

Day after day, premiers and political leaders line up at podiums to give public briefings, backed by the latest information from the doctors in charge. Whenever a question is asked about what’s going to happen next, the unfailing answer is that governments will be heeding the instructions of the top doctors.

This in itself is evidence that we’re living in unusual times. We don’t always listen to doctors and medical experts, on matters of smoking, obesity, exercise or even climate science, for instance. Statistics aren’t always as persuasive as they are these days, when we’re all scouring charts for flattened curves.

Kenney, as mentioned earlier, has a long history of skepticism about stats and evidence as they’re used in the federal government. One of his own former bureaucrats in the citizenship and multiculturalism department, Andrew Griffith, has written some compelling work about how Kenney forced the public service to rebalance evidence and political considerations while he was minister.

The idea was that politicians are in government to weigh all kinds of public interests against the weight of impersonal numbers and charts, including the intelligence the political types gain from mixing with people outside the corridors of the civil service. So as I said, it’s not that surprising to see Kenney balking again at blind subservience to public servants’ advice, even from Canada’s top doctor.

Is that such a bad thing? Reasonable people might well agree, in fact, that while the medical health of Canadians has to be a priority in this pandemic, the economic health of citizens is owed some due deference too, especially as the financial devastation deepens.

Dr. Tam, for her part, stayed right out of the dispute on Tuesday when asked about Kenney’s remarks, saying only that it’s her job to take many things into consideration, including advice and insights from other countries.

It would be grossly unfair and probably unproductive to make Tam a target, even if Canadians are increasingly bristling at life under doctor’s orders.

But deference to authority in general is a fragile commodity, especially in a nation undergoing an endurance test of indefinite length. Canadians aren’t rebelling, at least not yet, but their deference has time limits.

Source: Susan Delacourt: Canadians aren’t rebelling against Dr. Theresa Tam’s orders, but they might be starting to bristle

Filed under Government Tagged with , , , ,

Cognitive Bias Codex

2020/04/16 Leave a comment

Filed under Other Tagged with ,

What Cancer Has Taught Me About Fear

2020/04/16 Leave a comment

During my cancer journey, Gubar was one of my regular reads and I still follow her columns. Her most recent column reflects as well my experience during these strange times and the increased vigilance, as well as finding ways to focus elsewhere (this blog and my various articles are one of the results of my “living with cancer”:

Sequestered during the pandemic, I find myself thinking that cancer patients’ expertise in fear can help others heed its warnings. We all need tactics not only to overcome the destructive capacity of fear but also to tap its protective potential.

An iconic portrait of one petrified creature, Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream” captures the fright gripping many people today — of an invisible threat that has caused an exponential explosion of infections, a shocking influx of patients into hospitals, mounting deaths and the ghastly appearance of refrigerated trucksparked next to hospitals as mobile morgues. Munch’s figure holds his helpless hands up, even though they cannot muffle his involuntary response to what his wide-open eyes cannot bear seeing. His silent shriek echoes outward only to further imprison him. In a public place, he is immobilized beneath a bloody sky.

Munch’s original title, “The Scream of Nature,” indicates how well he understood fear to be ontological, not psychological: a force of nature, not just human nature. Nature has turned our world into a sinister dystopia.

Cancer patients understand this phenomenon, for we deal daily with dread stirred by organisms produced by the body they attack. The masks worn by those touched by cancer and the coronavirus manifest identical, overwhelming and rational anxieties — about contagion, isolation, degeneration, impending death — that escalate when people with cancer struggle to subsist during a plague year.

Regardless of age, cancer patients and survivors need to be more fearful these days than healthy children, young adults and people in their prime. With immune systems compromised by various treatments, we are highly susceptible to the coronavirus. We must take every precaution — of repeated hand-washing, of social distancing and sometimes of self-quarantining — even though such measures will damage the support systems we badly need.

Worse, many of us depend upon periodic medical interventions that may be compromised by the stress put on institutions dealing with the virus. We get regular blood draws, scans, infusions, pills and surgical procedures in hospitals. But are they safe places to enter in a pandemic? Nurses have been concerned that cancer patients will get infected in some facilities. Yet despite the best of intentions, the virtual consultations set up for me at my hospital have been a travesty because of glitches in technology. Will oncology services collapse under the strain of massive viral care? Biopsies are being delayed, clinical trials are being shut down, and research is grinding to a halt. Will people hospitalized with the virus be denied ventilators, if they have cancer and if a scarcity of medical equipment means that doctors must choose?

And yet, having survived months or years of living intimately with the mortal threat of cancer, the members of my cancer support group — who now connect via email — manage to carry on while keeping as calm as possible during the current health crisis. Not fully resistant to bouts of contagious terror, we nevertheless find coping mechanisms.

We know that fear can be debilitating, but it can also be self-preserving. The chronic patients in my support group cultivate vigilant fear: They use their trepidation to do everything they can to extend their survival without being capsized into despair, hysteria or paralysis. One of us picks up her shopping wearing Nitrile gloves, just as she did when in chemotherapy. Upon returning home, she swabs what she has bought with a disinfecting wipe.

Beyond this sort of physical caution — which remains crucial for keeping the death toll as low as possible — how do we maintain mental health? For only when we are free from the vise of terror can we take protective measures, most of which these days involve staying at home without going stir-crazy.

Cancer patients who steer between the Scylla of alarmism and the Charybdis of defeatism have devised oblique stratagems to navigate the difficult passageway of fearful vigilance. Within its straits, we seek not to banish fear — an impossibility — but to filter, buffer, intercept, sidetrack or dilute it so it can serve as a safeguard without obliterating us.

Concentrating on something besides the fright — on breathing or stretching, on an intriguing task to accomplish — distracts us but also gives us a routine or objective over which we can exert some control. Just as happiness cannot be attained by making it a goal — John Stuart Mill believed one must aim at “something else” to stumble upon happiness as a sort of byproduct — fear cannot be defanged except through indirect methods.

Especially within the narrowed circumstances imposed by the coronavirus, it requires ingenuity to discover quotidian undertakings that can convert fear from a virulent to a vigilant emotion. While we strive to remain conscious of our interdependence — our vulnerability to people who may be contagious, our responsibility not to endanger others — we need to engage in small but innovative enterprises.

On a practical level, consider what activities you enjoy in normal times. Begin to bake bread, one member of my support group advises; go on nature walks, another says. Organize digital pictures into a photo album, practice the guitar, check out a remote learning class, put together a film festival or a playlist, take a virtual tour of a museum, cultivate a garden, set up regular FaceTime or Skype sessions with family, try woodworking, use apps to play games with distant friends, devise home schooling lessons, sing on your balcony as many Italians did or for Yo-Yo Ma’s #SongsofComfort project, contribute to a food bank, or do as I am doing: Learn how to knit socks.

Munch’s screamer clearly cannot heed instructions not to touch his face or to take shelter at home, but we are trying to do so and trying to use vigilant fear as a bulwark against incapacitating terror.

In the cruelest month of April, here’s what many of us hope: That we will be able to look back on this alarming period in years to come and say that the power of vigilant fear — for ourselves and for each other — has seen more of us through than we had ever thought possible.

Filed under Other Tagged with , ,

COVID-19: China tries to heal its coronavirus-hit image, but plan backfiring in the West

2020/04/16 Leave a comment

Good account:

As China in March became the first major country to recover from the coronavirus outbreak that spread from the central city of Wuhan, its officials kicked off another campaign: to heal its tattered international image.

President Xi Jinping held a flurry of phone calls with world leaders to promise aid. More than 170 Chinese medical experts were dispatched to Europe, Southeast Asia and Africa. State media outlets flooded the Internet with photos of Chinese masks arriving in 100 countries and stories questioning the epidemic’s origins. Ambassadors flooded international newspapers with op-eds hailing the sacrifices Beijing made to buy time for other countries without acknowledging how the outbreak erupted in the first place.

One month later, that campaign has yielded mixed results. In many cases, it has outright backfired.

In Britain, a parliamentary committee on foreign relations urged the government to fight a surge in Chinese disinformation. Officials in Germany and at least one state – Wisconsin – exposed quiet outreach attempts from Chinese officials hoping to persuade them to publicly praise China.

In Spain, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands, governments announced recalls of Chinese masks and testing kits after large batches were found to be defective, undercutting what China sought to portray as goodwill gestures. In Nigeria, the country’s professional medical association slammed a government decision to invite a team of Chinese doctors, going as far as claiming that they might carry the disease with them.

And on Twitter, Chinese diplomats have not only spread China’s message but gone on the counterattack. They publicly feuded with the Brazilian president’s son and his education minister, who accused Beijing of seeking “world domination” by controlling protective-equipment supplies. They tangled with Iran’s Health Ministry spokesman, who questioned the accuracy of Chinese epidemic data, and lashed out at a Sri Lankan businessman who criticized China’s epidemic response.

The wave of skepticism, sometimes from nations friendly toward China, underscores the size of the challenge facing foreign policymakers in Beijing as they look toward the post-pandemic global landscape. While governments from Washington to Brussels have been faulted for mismanaging the crisis or failing to galvanize an international response, China’s standing has taken a hit precisely at a moment when the country was positioning itself as an up-and-coming leader in world affairs.

“They know when the dust settles and people turn their eye toward whether Beijing was responsible, it’s going to be a very difficult situation,” said Nadège Rolland, a senior fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research, who described China’s globe-spanning, hard-sell campaign in recent weeks as public relations “on steroids.”

“They’re trying to get ahead of that narrative” of blame, Rolland added. “It’s as much out of fear as it is confidence.”

Chinese officials have appeared frustrated by the emerging backlash to what they say is simply altruism. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said this month that China was not using coronavirus diplomacy to burnish its image or extend its influence over countries. Chinese officials have also pledged to immediately crack down on shoddy medical equipment.

“We would like to share China’s good practices and experience with other countries, but we will not turn it into any kind of geopolitical weapon or tool,” Hua said. “Leadership is not gained by boasting or jostling.”

To be certain, many countries with growing investment ties with China, particularly across Southeast Asia, have responded positively. In Serbia, a billboard reading “Thank You, Big Brother Xi” went up in the streets of Belgrade. Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio, a member of the Euroskeptic Five Star Movement, uploaded a Facebook video showing him receiving shipments of Chinese medical equipment.

He said the Chinese aid validated his party’s decision to distance itself from the European Union.

“Joining China’s Belt and Road Initiative saved Italian lives,” Di Maio declared, referring to Xi’s signature policy to expand Beijing’s influence through infrastructure and loan programs, in comments widely reported in Chinese state media.

In several African countries, China’s reputation was bolstered by speedy donations made by Jack Ma, the billionaire co-founder of Chinese tech behemoth Alibaba.

“China led a master class in modern public diplomacy with its medical donations, leveraging a vast propaganda network that it built in Africa over the past 10 to 15 years,” said Eric Olander, co-founder of the China Africa Project.

China started to lose momentum in the “donation diplomacy” narrative after reports emerged that the quality of the masks may have been suspect, Olander added. But in the early weeks, the Chinese aid was “warmly received by the governing elites,” he said. “People were impressed.”

In many Western countries, it has not been so much China’s medical assistance that has drawn consternation, but rather Beijing’s departure from its traditional diplomacy into the realm of disinformation that had rarely been seen from China before the coronavirus emerged in Wuhan in late 2019.

Last month, when Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian and other diplomats questioned whether the virus was brought to China by U.S. military personnel, it provoked a furious response from Washington. A disinformation watchdog agency of the European Union rejected the Chinese officials’ conspiracy theory.

After Chinese state media widely reported that a renowned Italian researcher had said the coronavirus may have originated in Italy, not Wuhan, the nephrologist Giuseppe Remuzzi spoke to Italian daily il Foglio to correct the record, saying his words had been distorted for propaganda purposes.

Zhiqun Zhu, chair of international relations at Bucknell University and author of the book “China’s New Diplomacy,” said the coronavirus has sharpened a long-standing debate within Chinese diplomatic circles: Should China wage an all-out “discourse” war to beat back critics like Trump administration officials and assert its prerogatives as a world power? Or should it present a more humble, less confrontational face?

“There is no consensus in diplomatic establishment circles,” Zhu said. “Surely some diplomats know that outside, the world blames China, that the propaganda projecting China as its savior is counterproductive. But right now, the leadership also wants to boost nationalism at home.”

Zhu said more traditional-minded Chinese diplomats, including the long-serving ambassador to Washington, Cui Tiankai, have sought to tamp down the spread of fringe theories and the bureaucracy’s most combative impulses. In a couched essay in the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper this month, another senior official, former vice foreign minister Fu Ying, said Chinese diplomats should uphold “the spirit of humility and tolerance, and adhere to communication, learning, and openness.”

Chinese intellectuals have also worried about their country’s deteriorating image under the current diplomatic tack. A drumbeat has grown from conservative politicians in both the United States and Britain to demand economic reparations from China, although it’s not clear whether such an effort would succeed in international court.

In widely distributed essays, leading economist Hua Sheng warned China against spreading conspiracy theories about the origins of the virus or “gloating” when other countries were still struggling to overcome the pandemic. He urged China to have the courage to conduct an accounting of what went wrong in Wuhan.

“Some people say if we investigate our country’s culpability, we would be giving evidence to outsiders and give them a tool to hurt our national interests,” Hua wrote. “I must say, it’s precisely the opposite.”

Lucrezia Poggetti, a researcher at the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin, said China’s internal dynamics and the emphasis on saving face for the domestic population meant it was highly unlikely that the government would thoroughly admit fault or show weakness on the international stage.

But even if Chinese diplomats successfully manage the near-term public relations crisis, they might struggle to counter the longer-term trends already set in motion by the pandemic. As an example, Poggetti said, European countries – including France, Germany and Britain – and the United States and Japan are reassessing their dependence on China for critical health and national security-related supplies.

“There will be a reckoning after the pandemic ends,” she said.

Source: COVID-19: China tries to heal its coronavirus-hit image, but plan backfiring in the West

Filed under foreign policy Tagged with , , ,

New Survey Highlights Racial Disparities In The Coronavirus Pandemic

2020/04/16 Leave a comment

Yet more evidence:

A Pew Research Center survey conducted this month among 4,917 U.S. adults found that 27% of black people personally knew someone who was hospitalized with or died from COVID-19, compared to just 1 in 10 white and Hispanic people.

The results highlight how coronavirus is disproportionately affecting lower-income people of color.

The survey asked people how concerned they were about contracting coronavirus; of those polled 24% say they are very concerned about getting the virus. Of that group, one-third had lower incomes, versus just 17% classified as upper-income. Of that very concerned population, 43% were Hispanic, 31% black and 18% white.

Differences in income and race were also highlighted in responses to a question that asked people how concerned they were about unknowingly passing on the virus to others. Thirty-three percent of people surveyed said they were very concerned about passing on the virus without knowing; that percentage was composed by nearly half of Hispanic adults and 38% of black adults, compared to 28% of white adults. Thirty-eight percent of those very concerned that they could pass coronavirus to others unknowingly were lower income.

In the last weeks in places like New York city and Chicago, officials have reported people of color dying at higher rates from coronavirus compared to white people. Experts say this isn’t because minorities are biologically predisposed to the disease, but as Dr. Jerome Adams, the U.S. surgeon general, said at the White House briefing last week, people of color are “more likely to live in densely packed areas and in multigenerational housing situations, which create higher risk for spread of highly contagious disease like COVID-19.”

Source: New Survey Highlights Racial Disparities In The Coronavirus Pandemic

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Cotler: The Chinese Communist Party’s culture of corruption and repression has cost lives around the world

2020/04/16 Leave a comment

Former Justice minister Irwin Cotler  and Judith Abitan on the Chinese government’s responsibility for the spread of COVID-19 and associated repression:

There is authoritative and compelling evidence that if President Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had intervened and reported on its coronavirus outbreak three weeks earlier, transmission of COVID-19 could have been reduced significantly around the world. One study, from the University of Southampton, even suggested transmission could have been reduced by 95 per cent.

For 40 days, Mr. Xi’s CCP concealed, destroyed, falsified and fabricated information about the rampant spread of COVID-19 through its massive state-sanctioned surveillance and suppression of data; misrepresentation of information; silencing and criminalizing of dissent; and the disappearance of whistleblowers – all of which reflect the breadth of criminality and corruption in the party.

In late December 2019, Dr. Ai Fen, director of the emergency department at the Central Hospital of Wuhan, shared the lab results of a patient suffering from “SARS coronavirus” with relevant departments in her hospital and with a former medical school classmate; her information was then disseminated in medical circles. For this, she suffered an “unprecedented and severe rebuke” two days later.

Dr. Ai also detailed efforts to silence her in a story titled, “The one who supplied the whistle,” published in China’s People (Renwu) magazine in March. The article has since been removed – and Dr. Ai has herself recently disappeared.

After Dr. Ai initially shared the information, eight doctors were arrested, including Dr. Li Wenliang, now regarded by many in China as a “hero” and “the awakener.” They were reprimanded for spreading rumours and summoned to sign statements admitting to making false statements that disturbed the public order. Dr. Li died of COVID-19 on Feb. 7, prompting national outrage. The fate of the other seven people remains unknown.

On Jan. 4, Dr. Ho Pak Leung, the president of the University of Hong Kong’s Centre for Infection, indicated that it was highly probable that COVID-19 spread from human to human and urged the implementation of a strict monitoring system. But for weeks, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission continued to declare that preliminary investigations did not show any clear evidence of human-to-human transmission. On Jan. 14, the WHO reaffirmed China’s statement.

On Jan. 22, the WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, even praised the CCP’s handling of the outbreak, commending Mr. Xi and Premier Li Keqiang for their “invaluable” leadership.

On Jan. 23, Chinese authorities announced their first steps to quarantine Wuhan, but by then it was too late. Millions of people had already visited Wuhan and left during the Chinese New Year, and a significant number of Chinese citizens had traveled overseas as asymptomatic carriers.

Yet the CCP continued its crackdown on dissent. On Feb. 23, Ren Zhiqiang, a real-estate tycoon and long-time critic of the CCP, wrote in an essay that he “saw not an emperor standing there exhibiting his ‘new clothes,’ but a clown stripped naked who insisted he continue being emperor.” He spoke of a “crisis of governance” and criticized the strict limits on free speech, which he felt had magnified the COVID-19 epidemic. Mr. Ren has also gone missing, and it was reported only recently that the CCP has opened an investigation against him.

The world would have been more prepared and able to combat COVID-19 were it not for Mr. Xi’s authoritarian regime’s widespread and systematic pattern of sanitizing the massive domestic repression of its people.

The CCP’s 40 days of silence and suppression resulted in Italy – the epicentre of Europe’s COVID-19 pandemic – having a death toll of 12 per cent, more than double that of China’s, followed by Spain with a mortality rate of 10 per cent. At time of writing, the United States – where presidential leadership has been wanting – has become the pandemic’s new epicentre, and there is heightened concern about what could become of dense, developing countries such as India, and countries with large immunosuppressed populations, such as South Africa.

Indeed, as a New York Times editorial reported yesterday, “the global coronavirus crisis is poised to get much much worse… (spreading) through countries ravaged by conflict, through packed refugee camps and detention centers in places like Syria or Bangladesh…,” or deeply packed urban centers in fragile states without health systems.

In South Korea, health workers pioneered using COVID-19 testing centres to collect swabs from more than 15,000 people a day before quarantining the infected immediately thereafter – one of the only precedents and case studies to date for a situation in which the number of infections and deaths have significantly fallen. That had also seemed to be occurring in China in recent weeks, but various intelligence agencies and reports have suggested that Beijing failed to accurately report its data. There have now been reports of a second wave, but also reports of the CCP censoring scientific findings and related publications.

Attention should also be drawn to the CCP’s massive surveillance and suppression of data juxtaposed with its misrepresentation of information. China’s enormous data-collection efforts, through approximately 200 million CCTV cameras, not only precipitated the highest-tech epidemic control ever attempted by the CCP, but also underpinned the seriousness of its repression.

The CCP’s infodemic – in addition to its intense spinning of solidarity on social media and its framing of a “people’s war against the virus” – gave the farcical illusion of a coming-together in China. The extent of the CCP’s self-promotion and its portrayal of Mr. Xi as a hero ready to save the world, all while making Western democracies look grossly incompetent if not responsible for the virus, is as shameful as it is duplicitous.

Simply put, Mr. Xi’s government exacerbated the world’s COVID-19 health and systemic crises, which has paved the way for one of the greatest humanitarian crises in history.

The world is now watching. People in China no longer stand alone. Many are no longer fearful. They have already started publishing first-hand accounts of the CCP’s orchestrated cover-ups and monumental failures, revealing its rotten core.

In defending the struggle for democracy and human rights in China, the international community must stand in solidarity with the people of China in seeking to unmask the CCP’s criminality, corruption and impunity.

The Community of Democracies must undertake the necessary legal initiatives – be it through international tort actions as authorized by Treaty Law, or the utilization of international bodies such as the International Court of Justice – to underpin the courage and commitment of China’s human-rights defenders. This is what justice and accountability is all about.

Source: The Chinese Communist Party’s culture of corruption and repression has cost lives around the world: Irwin Cotler and Judith Abitan

Filed under Other Tagged with , , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →