The Coronavirus Has Derailed The Citizenship Oath For Thousands Of Immigrants Who Are Anxious To Vote

2020/04/10 Leave a comment

As in Canada. Need to look at ceremonies by video conferencing as in Australia.

Of course, for the Trump administration and those Republicans wishing to discourage voting, this is more a feature than a problem:

Luis Molina had waited months to complete the final step in his decadeslong journey to become an American citizen: repeating the oath of allegiance to the United States along with hundreds of other would-be citizens on March 19.

Molina, a 51-year-old who left El Salvador as a young man, had planned to hold a celebratory dinner at his favorite restaurant in Pasadena, California — President Thai — after the naturalization ceremony in Los Angeles.

To become a US citizen, immigrants must go through a long, and at times arduous, process that includes an interview with an immigration officer and a test on American civics and the English language. The final step, however, is the easiest of them all: repeating 140 words in a celebratory event that’s often held in American theaters, convention centers, and courthouses.

This simple, but legally necessary step, is all that stands in the way of Molina being granted citizenship.

But that opportunity has been on hold: In March, naturalization ceremonies across the country were canceled due to the rapid spread of the coronavirus, and the agency that administers immigration benefits, US Citizenship and Immigration Services, closed its offices to the public. The ceremonies are supposed to be rescheduled, but like many other parts of American life, the timing is uncertain.

In the wake of the cancellations, immigrants like Molina fear that they not only won’t get the chance to call themselves Americans anytime soon, but that they won’t be able to vote in the upcoming presidential election. Experts warn that the delayed naturalizations could have an impact on the number of eligible voters in November, as many states require registration by October.

“I’m kind of nervous,” Molina said. He’s watched how the Trump administration has enforced the public charge rule, which penalizes green card applicants for using public benefits, and other restrictive immigration policies. “I’ve been thinking about how they change the rules and the laws and maybe I won’t be able to get citizenship. I feel intimidated.”

A USCIS spokesperson said field offices will send notices with instructions to applicants with scheduled interviews or naturalization ceremony appointments, which will automatically be rescheduled once normal operations resume.

Some ceremonies in Los Angeles that had been scheduled for later in May have yet to be canceled, but California officials have indicated that strict social distancing measures could last beyond that.

Under normal conditions, USCIS is able to naturalize 66,000 immigrants on average every month, according to Sarah Pierce, an analyst at Migration Policy Institute. The agency generally relies on in-person oaths at its office or in larger ceremonies outside of its own facilities.

“So far, because of COVID-19, there are already tens of thousands of immigrants who have had their naturalizations delayed, and these numbers will easily exceed 100,000 as this crisis drags on,” she said.

The agency regularly hosts ceremonies that pack more than 1,000 soon-to-be Americans in one place to conduct the oath altogether. If USCIS offices are able to open as planned on May 3, the agency will still face an inherent challenge: How will large groups of people be quickly naturalized?

“Unless USCIS implements an ambitious series of naturalization ceremonies once they are able to reopen in-person services, there will be tens of thousands of immigrants who will not be able to vote in this fall’s election, despite having completed nearly all the legal requirements to receive citizenship,” Pierce said. “Because naturalization ceremonies entail gatherings of large groups of people, there are a lot of outstanding questions about when USCIS will be able to restart these and what exactly they will look like. If the ceremonies are limited by public health concerns, unless USCIS comes up with innovative solutions, these delays could reverberate for years to come.”

Former senior USCIS leaders told BuzzFeed News the cancellations will inevitably have an impact on the number of people who are able to obtain citizenship this year.

“Field offices are 100% closed, meaning not just no naturalization ceremonies, but no naturalization interviews and also no green card interviews,” said Leon Rodriguez, former director of the agency under the Obama administration. “All of this was already severely backlogged before, so the problem will become much worse depending on the length of the closure.”

As of September 2019, there were already more than 600,000 naturalization applications pending.

The naturalization oath has been a long-held American tradition, spanning back to the late 1700s. Before the early 1900s, courts from across the country administered the oath in various ways, and it wasn’t until 1929 that a standardized oath was created. Later, the Immigration Act of 1950 added language to the oath that made immigrants promise to bear arms for the US and perform “noncombatant service in the armed forces of the United States when required by the law.”

There are waivers for the requirement to recite the oath, like if an individual does not agree to bear arms for the US because of religious circumstances or has a developmental disability that prevents them from understanding the oath, but in most circumstances it is required.

“It’s like being on the 1-yard line and suddenly there’s a timeout that may last for months. If you can’t take the oath of allegiance — a pro forma final step but a moving one — then you can’t become a US citizen,” said Doug Rand, who worked on immigration policy in the Obama White House and is now the cofounder of Boundless Immigration, a technology company that helps immigrants obtain green cards and citizenship. “That means you can’t vote, of course. It also means you can’t count on being safe from deportation or on protecting your family by sponsoring them for US citizenship.”

Rand has advocated for the agency to skip the live event altogether in light of the pandemic, while others have called for oaths to be administered via televideo.

Duncan Williams, a professor of religion at the University of Southern California, had also been scheduled to recite the oath of citizenship in Los Angeles on March 19. Williams, 50, came to the country as a 17-year-old from Japan for college. The Trump administration’s restrictive immigration policies — such as the travel ban and the policy that led to families being separated at the border — created a sense of urgency for Williams to obtain his citizenship.

“What is more unsettling is the uncertainty about the future implicated in the inability to complete the naturalization process,” he said.

Williams had expected to get his US passport and vote in the upcoming elections, confident in his status as an American.

“As a Japanese national,” he said, “I’ve been observing the rising anti-Asian sentiment in the US with some trepidation, with some regret that the protections afforded to citizens is not something I can secure at the present time.”

Source: The Coronavirus Has Derailed The Citizenship Oath For Thousands Of Immigrants Who Are Anxious To Vote

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China’s Coronavirus Battle Is Waning. Its Propaganda Fight Is Not.

2020/04/09 Leave a comment

Not surprising:

For months the Chinese government’s propaganda machine had been fending off criticism of Beijing’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak, and finally, it seemed to be finding an audience. Voices from the World Health Organization to the Serbian government to the rapper Cardi B hailed China’s approach as decisive and responsible.

But China could not savor the praise for long. In recent days, foreign leaders, even in friendly nations like Iran, have questioned China’s reported infections and deaths. A top European diplomat warned that China’s aid to the continent was a mask for its geopolitical ambitions, while a Brazilian official suggested the pandemic was part of China’s plan to “dominate the world.”

As the pandemic unleashes the worst global crisis in decades, China has been locked in a public relations tug-of-war on the international stage.

China’s critics, including the Trump administration, have blamed the Communist Party’s authoritarian leadership for exacerbating the outbreak by initially trying to conceal it. But China is trying to rewrite its role, leveraging its increasingly sophisticated global propaganda machine to cast itself as the munificent, responsible leader that triumphed where others have stumbled.

What narrative prevails has implications far beyond an international blame game. When the outbreak subsides, governments worldwide will confront crippled economies, unknown death tolls and a profound loss of trust among many of their people. Whether Beijing can step into that void, or is pilloried for it, may determine the fate of its ambitions for global leadership.

“I think that the Chinese remain very fearful about what will happen when we finally all get on top of this virus, and there is going to be an investigation of how it started,” said Bonnie Glaser, the director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “They’re just trying to repair the damage that was done very early on to China’s reputation.”

The crux of China’s narrative is its numbers. Since late March, the country has consistently reported zero or single-digit new local infections, and on Wednesday, it lifted its lockdown in Wuhan, where the outbreak began. In all, the country has reported nearly 84,000 infections and about 3,300 deaths — a stark contrast to the United States, which has reported more than 399,000 infections, and Spain and Italy, each with more than 135,000.

The numbers prove, China insists, that its response was quick and responsible, and its tactics a model for the rest of the world. During a visit last month to Wuhan, China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, said that “daring to fight and daring to win is the Chinese Communist Party’s distinct political character, and our distinct political advantage.”

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Beware of COVID-19 projections based on flawed global comparisons

2020/04/09 Leave a comment

Continuing on the data question, found this to be a good explainer given the variances in how data is collected across jurisdictions:

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, every day we are bombarded with numbers. Never before has the public been exposed to so much statistical information. You have been told that “shelter in place” measures are needed to flatten the curve of infections so that local healthcare systems have the capacity to deal with them. On the other hand, you hear that available statistics will not show if and when the curve of infections is flattening, and that existing projections are unreliable because input data are unsuitable for forecasting. Meanwhile, the issue of data and the pandemic fuels a debate in Canada over the release of federal and provincial forecasts of a COVID-19 death toll.

Should we then lose faith in the numbers altogether? The answer is no, but it is important to understand what statistics are available, what they measure, and which ones we should be looking at as the virus continues to spread around the world. One of the key areas where we need to exercise caution is especially when we compare ourselves with the situation in other countries.

As overwhelming as the flow of daily pandemic statistics might seem, data on COVID-19 around the world come from one source: health facilities’ administrative reporting about the number of positive cases, hospitalizations, intensive therapies, deaths, and recoveries. Most countries including Canada follow the guidelines of the World Health Organization and only test individuals with fever, cough, and/or difficulty breathing. Reported data on COVID-19 thus generally refer to symptomatic individuals who have presented themselves at health facilities and have met the established testing criteria.

One of the main indicators derived from these data is the overall case-fatality rate (CFR), which is the ratio between the total number of COVID-19-related deaths and the total number of confirmed positive cases. The CFR is an important indicator in an emerging pandemic because it measures the severity of the disease (how many infected people die from it). As of March 24, the CFR varied substantially across countries, ranging from 0.4 percent in Germany to 7.7 percent in Italy. In Canada and Quebec, it stands at 1.3 percent and 0.7 percent respectively.

It is well understood that different testing strategies for COVID-19 are responsible for a good part of the observed differences in the overall case-fatality rate across countries. For instance, South Korea, Germanyand Iceland adopted a large-scale testing strategy since the beginning of the outbreak, focusing on individuals in the wider population regardless of whether they were high risk or showing symptoms of COVID-19. Most other countries including Canada are following the recommendations of the World Health Organization to test only for COVID-19 symptomatic individuals.

These different testing strategies have a direct impact on the overall CFR because its value is smaller if asymptomatic individuals are included in the calculation, since the total number of positive cases (the denominator) increases. This is the first reason why the CFR is not immediately comparable across countries and should not be used as a measure of whether certain healthcare systems are dealing better with COVID-19 than others.

The second reason is that different testing strategies across countries also matter for the demographics of confirmed positive cases. As it can be seen in the figure below, because of widespread testing in Iceland, the age distribution of COVID-19 positive cases is much younger than in the Netherlands. This does not mean that younger people in Iceland are not respecting social distancing measures, or that the Netherlands has been more effective than Iceland in identifying infections among vulnerable elderly people. On the contrary, countries like Iceland that have effectively tested for COVID-19 early on have been able to identify and isolate clusters of potential infections before they spread to the more vulnerable segments of the population. By doing so, they have limited the number of COVID-19-related deaths and thus reduced the numerator in the calculation of the overall CFR. This is why the demographics of positive cases needs to be considered in the calculation of the overall case-fatality rate to make appropriate comparisons across countries.

The different demographics of COVID-19 positive cases underscore the importance of comparable data that are disaggregated by the patients’ most basic characteristics, notably age and sex. However, these data are only available for a handful of countries, because national health agencies release mainly aggregate figures on the total number of cases, hospitalizations, deaths and recoveries.

We all want to know how the COVID-19 pandemic will evolve. Considering the deep economic implications of the current worldwide standstill, there is a strong pressure to produce projections of the course of the pandemic and its human toll. Yet our efforts will continue to be misguided if we do not coordinate efforts to improve our understanding of where it is across countries through comparable statistics. This could be easily achieved by tracing the evolution not just of the total number of infections and the overall CFR, but also across age groups and for men and women separately.

National health agencies have been disseminating data and indicators about COVID-19 as they see fit because there is no global coordination about how to do so. The World Health Organization has not fulfilled its mandate to facilitate this coordination. Canada, thanks to its longstanding tradition of excellence in statistical reporting, is ideally placed to fill this gap and lead countries around the world to coordinate their monitoring efforts of the pandemic through comparable statistics. This may be one of the crucial steps to win the war against COVID-19.

Source: Beware of COVID-19 projections based on flawed global comparisons

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No time to fly blind: To beat COVID 19, Canada needs better data

2020/04/09 Leave a comment

As we always do! Bit surprised no discussion of what role the Canadian Institute of Health Information (CIHI) could play:

Accurate information is critical to fight a health emergency like the COVID-19 pandemic. Robust data identifies the scale of the problem. It enables the prioritization of human, financial and material resources for an effective and efficient response. It allows for public scrutiny, advocacy and accountability. It builds trust. It provides authorities with tools to counter misinformation. It will enable us to slowly and safely return to economic and social activity.

In short, good data can mean the difference between life and death – or in the case of a pandemic, tens of thousands of deaths. Yet in the face of the greatest international health crisis in a generation, Canada is falling short.

Prime Minister Trudeau promised better data. To deliver on this promise, the Public Health Agency must mandate standardized information reporting for provincial and district public health authorities. These standardized templates would outline the data and information to be reported, how it should be collected and how it should be shared. Moreover, the Agency should urgently provide financial and technical resources to improve information management at all levels of the public health response.

At first glance COVID-19 data appears to be plentiful – case numbers and graphs are splashed across news reports and public health websites. Public health agencies produce epidemiological reports with colourful graphs and charts. Officials quote modelling estimates of projected case numbers and fatalities.

But in reality the value  of this information is limited. Efforts to fill in information gaps with modelling is a short-term and imperfect substitute for real-time data.  The data that does exist is of questionable validity given low testing numbers within the population and delays in receiving test results. Moreover, the data is not gathered, compiled or presented in a consistent manner by health authorities across the country. Different case definitions make comparison within and across provinces difficult. Sex and age disaggregated figures are not always provided. Some areas report hospitalization and intensive care unit numbers, some do not. Warnings of medical equipment and personal protective equipment (PPE) shortages are widespread, yet inventories of PPE stockpiles are frequently not given.

Moreover, public health officials report cases but do not discuss population context. They do not present important statistics about communities including age, sex and socio-economic data and specific vulnerabilities. Authorities rarely provide information on the number of health workers employed in the response, hospital beds available or PPE stockpiles. Officials cite testing numbers with little concrete data on laboratory capacity or efforts to expand it.

It is confusing. Overwhelming. And unhelpful.

Without accurate data and information, authorities cannot identify and manage human, financial and material resources to engage in the fight against COVID-19.  Nor can they monitor the effectiveness of interventions and stop its spread.

We can do better. During humanitarian crises, which often occur in data-scarce contexts, central coordinating bodies prioritize the collection and transparent dissemination of information. They develop standardized “Situation Reports” at multiple levels – the community, the region and the country – to identify need, prioritize interventions and target scarce human, material and financial resources. In the health sector, reports include population size disaggregated by sex, age and vulnerability; the number of health facilities in operation; key causes and rates of illness and mortality; medical procedures and treatment courses. These reports are published openly and disseminated widely. Information is critical for an effective and efficient response in complex and rapidly changing environments. It allows resources to be targeted to save lives.

COVID-19 warrants something similar. We need to understand the progress of the disease and our response – in real time. Proper information management will not only improve the effectiveness of our interventions, but it will also enable the safe resumption of economic and social activity.

A standardized reporting template would include case numbers and hospitalizations (sex and age disaggregated).  But counting the numbers of outbreak cases is only one piece of the information puzzle. Reports should include community baseline data. Important information includes population demographics (age, sex and particular vulnerabilities), neighbourhoods with higher risks, and the number of vulnerable institutions (retirement and nursing homes, corrections facilities). Authorities would identify financial, human and material resources available and required. Reports should document laboratories with COVID-19 testing capacity and provide inventories of PPE.

Better data would allow us to identify critical intervention points to stop the spread of COVID-19 and to slowly get our lives and economy back on track. The lack of prioritization on testing is both a symptom and a consequence of Canada’s failure to prioritize information management. Given testing capacity, public health officials discourage tests for those with mild symptoms. This undermines the validity of most of the numbers used by public officials to track the COVID-19 outbreak. Without the total ‘real’ numbers of individuals infected, we lack an accurate denominator, which undermines the accurate calculation of hospitalization or case fatality rates. Lag times in test results also make accurate contact tracing very difficult.

More critically, without expanded testing, we lack the ability to quickly test health workers and those employed in other essential services (such as retirement homes) to protect them, their co-workers, patients or residents and the public. Nor do we have the ability to test people to gradually and safely scale up economic and social activity. Instead we are told to wait for testing innovations while COVID rates numbers rise. Yet many private labs as well as lab facilities in university and colleges remain unutilized over three weeks into Canada’s full scale COVID-19 response. With better information would come increased accountability for mobilizing such capacity.

COVID-19 has sparked one innovation in information production – the use of outbreak models to guide public health responses to COVID-19, often funded by public health authorities. The federal government recently provided $192 million to BlueDot – a Toronto based digital health firm, not a university research department – to support its modelling activities. After calls to release modelling estimates, some provincial governments have provided projections of case and mortality numbers.

But transparency warrants more. Modelling in general is extremely challenging and COVID-19 modelling is particularly complex. Population demographic characteristics appear to determine the speed of COVID-19 transmission as well as severe illness, hospitalization and fatality rates. While the professionalization of the modellers is not in question, research driving policy decisions should be published openly and subject to scrutiny. The lack of clarity contrasts unfavourably to models published in scientific journals, or those published online by Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, University of London. If governments release model estimates, they should release the assumptions and data that inform these estimates.

Moreover, modelling is an imperfect and flawed substitute for real data and concrete information about the response. Policy makers urgently need to pay attention to the generation and management of accurate and valid data, mandate standardized reporting from all public health authorities and provide public funds to make it happen.

We are in unprecedented public policy territory. Yet we lack the information needed to effectively navigate the COVID-19 pandemic and get our economy and our lives back on track. Prime Minister Trudeau’s commitment to better data and improved information management provides Canada’s Public Health Agency with the opportunity to exercise leadership. It is time to up our game.

Source: No time to fly blind: To beat COVID 19, Canada needs better data

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Is it constitutional to screen Canadians trying to board flights home?

2020/04/08 Leave a comment

These questions have been percolating for some time, with this legal perspective being an example of those arguing that it is not constitutional. The discussion by law professors Yves Le Bouthillier and Delphine Nakache is useful in setting out the constitutional test:

“1) that the measure is taken to address a pressing and substantial objective, 2) that the measure is rationally connected to the objective, 3) that the measure impairs as little as possible the right in question, 4) that the measure’s overall effects on the right protected is not disproportionate to the government’s objective.”

While they accept that the measures meet the first two tests, they argue it fails to meet the second two tests. It is highly unlikely that these measures will be challenged in court given that any judicial process would most likely take much longer than the temporary measures themselves.

Their arguments against over-reach are unconvincing during a pandemic, when perfect narrow screening at airports is impossible, whether by medical personnel or airline personnel. And of course, migration management is already carried out by airline personnel in the form of passport and visa checks. And more special flights, given the challenge the government is already facing in organizing a multitude of flights is simply not practical at this time.

Are these measures disproportionate? IMO, not so, given the nature of the pandemic, the number of cases, and the impact on healthcare and its capacity to handle COVID-19.

And while lawyers can argue that it is “the government’s message and actions should not leave behind any of its citizens,” the reality is that this is an impossible bar to meet. To the government’s credit, it has admitted that not all will be able to return to help manage expectations while at the same time organizing many flights for returning Canadians and permanent residents.

Part of my reaction to this commentary reflects my living with cancer for over 10 years, in and out of treatment, with the compromised immunity as one of the side effects and being at higher risk of COVID-19. The fact that the Ottawa Hospital experienced a case in the same ward where I received my stem cell transplants drives home the point even more for me. So I tend to accept legalistic arguments less than those of medical professionals that reduce, albeit imperfectly, risk:

As part of its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government has, unfortunately, adopted a measure that denies the right of some Canadian citizens to enter the country, a right guaranteed by s. 6 (1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

On Monday, March 16, the Canadian government asked air carriers to take measures to prevent all travellers abroad who present symptoms suggestive of COVID-19 to board planes flying to Canada. These measures apply to everyone attempting to come back to Canada, including the more than 3 million Canadian citizens abroad at any given time.

To enforce this new policy, the Minister of Transport, on March 17, issued an interim order under the Aeronautics Act saying that air carriers “must conduct” a health check and prohibiting the carriers from allowing a person who has suspected signs or symptoms of COVID-19 to board. In conducting the health check, the carrier must rely on questions from a World Health Organization (WHO) document that offers guidance for the management of ill travellers at points of entry.

However, here, the government is requiring air carriers to ask those questions before the plane departs from a foreign country.

The interim order came into force at 12:01 a.m. on March 19. Since then, two new updated versions of the order have been adopted (on March 20 and 24). The most recent version no longer refers to the WHO’s document.

Persons prohibited from boarding cannot get on an aircraft for at least 14 days unless they have a medical certificate stipulating that their symptoms are not related to COVID-19. Presumably, they could be refused again if they still have the symptoms. Moreover, the risk is that 14 days later, they can no longer leave a country either because there are no flights available or because that country has closed its borders.

Section 6 (1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms provides that “Every citizen of Canada has the right to enter, remain in, and leave Canada.” Since March 19, citizens refused boarding at the request of the federal government can no longer effectively exercise this right. S. 6 is one of the few provisions in the Charter that the Parliament or the provincial legislatures cannot derogate from by using the notwithstanding clause provided by s. 33 of the Charter. However, the government can justify limits to Charter-protected rights in accordance with s. 1 of the Charter if these limits can “be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”

Before looking further into the constitutionality of this interim order, it is worth examining other laws that address the type of situation we are confronted with to fully appreciate how extraordinary this measure is.

First, a ban on Canadians from returning to their country was not expressly contemplated by Parliament when it adopted the Emergencies Act in 1988. That Act provides for four types of emergency. The one applicable to the COVID-19 situation would be the “Public Welfare Emergency,” which authorizes only “regulation or prohibition of travel to, from or within any specified areas” in Canada for everyone: Canadian citizens, permanent residents or foreigners. Even a declaration of “International Emergency” (another of the four types of emergencies under the Act) to address a real or imminent use of serious force or violence, does not allow the government to refuse entry to Canadian citizens. For an international emergency, the government can regulate or prohibit “travel outside Canada by Canadian citizens or permanent residents and of admission into Canada of other persons.”

As for the Quarantine Act, adopted in 2005, one of its provisions grants the power to the Governor in Council to prohibit for a specified period of time “the entry into Canada of any class of persons who have been in a foreign country.” However, this kind of measure can only be taken if “no reasonable alternatives to prevent the introduction or spread of the disease are available,” a question addressed below.

To respond to the COVID-19 emergency, the government, on the recommendation of the Health Minister, adopted the Minimizing the Risk of Exposure to COVID-19 in Canada Order on March 18 (since updated with a new order on March 26). It is worth noting that the prohibition to enter Canada in both the March 18 and 26 orders are directed only at foreigners, not Canadian citizens and permanent residents.

Turning back to the constitutionality of the interim order, the government can justify it under s.1 of the Charter. However, to do so, the government has the burden to establish 1) that the measure is taken to address a pressing and substantial objective, 2) that the measure is rationally connected to the objective, 3) that the measure impairs as little as possible the right in question, 4) that the measure’s overall effects on the right protected is not disproportionate to the government’s objective.

There is little doubt that the Canadian government could meet the first two hurdles under section 1. The objective to protect the health of the Canadian population is pressing and urgent, and the measure, to ban travellers exhibiting signs or symptoms of COVID-19, is rationally linked to this objective. However, it is questionable that it could meet the other two conditions.

This measure does not impair the right in question as little as possible as it both overreaches and underreaches. It targets Canadian citizens exhibiting symptoms that could be indicative of COVID-19 but are also associated with many other conditions such as other types of infectious pulmonary diseases, non-infectious pulmonary diseases, a common cold, or flu. The Canadian government is asking for an assessment to be made by airlines representatives, who are not medically trained to conduct these kinds of assessments. As such, they could very well deny boarding to Canadian citizens who are not COVID-19 positive and accept on board some Canadian citizens who could be COVID-19 positive but are asymptomatic. Moreover, this measure also has the perverse effect of leading some travellers to hide their condition out of fear of being refused boarding, as has been reported by the media. Finally, critics claim that the transfer of migration management to private carriers increases risks of arbitrariness and discriminatory practices (racial profiling).

Apart from the fact that these citizens would need care if they were indeed COVID-19 positive, many of them could suffer from other conditions that would require continued access to medical care and medications, which is not a given for anyone suddenly forced to remain in another country.

There are alternatives that would allow for the repatriation of all Canadian citizens: on regular flights, airlines could isolate the few citizens exhibiting symptoms, or special flights could be arranged to repatriate these citizens. These alternatives could be costly and take some time to implement, but that in itself should not be sufficient to justify infringing fundamental rights.

As for whether the effects on the right protected are disproportionate to the government’s objective, this measure is preventing vulnerable Canadian citizens from getting back to their country.  Apart from the fact that these citizens would need care if they were indeed COVID-19 positive, many of them could suffer from other conditions that would require continued access to medical care and medications. That access is not a given for anyone suddenly forced to remain in another country, especially if this other country is or will soon be facing a crisis in its health sector. How can a measure that affects directly the most vulnerable, and that risks excluding from boarding some citizens who are not COVID-19 positive while allowing others who are, be proportionate?

Of course, in such unprecedented times, we recognize that there is no easy solution for the many Canadians abroad who want to come home. The Canadian government has acted in recent days to bring back citizens, permanent residents and members of their immediate family stranded abroad. After starting with Morocco, it has expanded this operation to several other countries with flights having taken place (or being planned for) in countries such as Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Peru and Spain. This is welcome news.

However, Canadian citizens who have suspected symptoms of COVID-19 can still be refused boarding. In our view, the government has an obligation not to create hurdles for the return of all its citizens. The Prime Minister has rightfully urged Canadians: “If you are abroad, it is time for you to come home.” To be consistent with the Canadian Charter, the government’s message and actions should not leave behind any of its citizens.

Source: Is it constitutional to screen Canadians trying to board flights home?

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With COVID-19 clampdown, number of asylum seekers at Canada-U.S. border slows to a trickle

2020/04/08 Leave a comment

As expected. Full March numbers not out yet so these interim numbers highlight the impact from March 21:

Sweeping changes at Canada’s borders under emergency pandemic restrictions have slowed cross-border traffic to an unparalleled trickle, including people claiming persecution abroad.

Six asylum seekers were turned back at Canada’s border with the United States under recent COVID-19 restrictions, four of them irregular border crossers, from March 21 to April 2, according to data from Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA).

March 21 was the day the highly unusual emergency order under the Quarantine Act prohibited entry into Canada by people claiming refugee protection.

Only one asylum seeker has been allowed to proceed into Canada under exemptions to the closed border rule, which could mean the person was an American citizen.

Of the four irregular crossers, which are sometimes referred to as illegal border crossers, two were stopped after crossing into Quebec and two into British Columbia.

The remaining two asylum seekers arrived from the United States at a border entry point in southern Ontario and were also turned back, CBSA said. The agency refused to say what country any of these people were seeking protection from.

“Failure to comply with a direct back order could result in the foreign national to become inadmissible to Canada,” said Jacqueline Callin, a spokeswoman for CBSA. “This regulation will be applied to all foreign nationals seeking to enter Canada if their entry is prohibited — regardless if they enter irregularly or at a designated land port of entry.

“Asylum claimants will be asked to provide basic identifying information and requested to return to make their asylum claim after the temporary prohibition has been lifted.”

That stands in sharp contrast to what is typical border activity.

CBSA would not provide the numbers of asylum claims for the same period last year. However, as a point of contrast, in all of March 2019, the RCMP made 1,001 interceptions of asylum seekers who did not cross at a formal border checkpoint: 967 in Quebec, 22 in B.C., and 13 in Manitoba.

That same month there were a total of 1,870 asylum claims made at formal border crossing points, which was itself one of the lowest monthly totals for the year.

There are far fewer new cases of refugee claimants at the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB).

The Refugee Protection Division of the IRB received 304 refugee protection claims nationally from March 21 and April 5, according to IRB data. While a specific comparison to the same period last year was not available, in 2019, the IRB had an overall average of 2,245 referrals in a two-week period.

This does not mean all 304 claimants crossed the border since the COVID-19 travel restrictions, however. There may be delays between a claimant’s arrival in Canada and a referral to the IRB, said Anna Pape, a spokeswoman for the IRB.

The steep drop in asylum seekers in Canada mirrors the unparalleled drop in all border traffic under COVID-19.

From March 23 to March 29, there were almost 82 per cent fewer land crossings into Canada compared with the same period last year, and an almost 85 per cent drop in people arriving by air.

On March 16, in an abrupt about-face, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said foreign travellers were prevented from entering Canada, except for U.S. citizens, to curtail the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Despite that, the next day, Minister of Public Safety Bill Blair said irregular border crossers would undergo medical screening but still be allowed to proceed for assessment of their immigration claims in Canada.

The following day,  borders were clamped down even tighter with the Canada-U.S. border closed to all non-essential travel, regardless of citizenship.

On March 20, in a further change, the government announced that asylum seekers will also be rejected at the border for the time being.

All travellers arriving in Canada — including Canadian citizens — are being met with increased intervention and screening in light of COVID-19.

Temperatures, however, are not taken by CBSA at borders or airports.

During a similar but less severe pandemic, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003, temperature testing was found to be an ineffective control, CBSA said. During SARS, 2.3 million travellers had temperatures taken at Canada’s airports.

“Despite this intensive screening effort, no cases of SARS were detected using these methods,” said Callin.

Source: With COVID-19 clampdown, number of asylum seekers at Canada-U.S. border slows to a trickle

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For some Canadians, this is the second half of the coronavirus battle. With family overseas, they’ve lived it for months

2020/04/07 Leave a comment

For so many of us, whether first, second or subsequent generations, connections to countries of origin or family members in other countries, this is very much or our reality. In our case, family members and friend in countries in Europe, the USA and the Mid-East mean we follow those statistics and situations as we do the situation in Canada:

Although it may have seemed an eternity, Canada has been on a travel lockdown for only two weeks due to the coronavirus pandemic, and many Canadians didn’t see major disruptions to their ordinary lives until mid-March.

For Canadians like Shahien Alipour, however, who have family in global epicentres of the pandemic, the coronavirus has been a cause of distress for months.

Alipour was born and raised in the Greater Toronto Area, but feels closely connected with his Iranian culture.

The York University student speaks fluent Farsi and together with his parents, he would visit Tehran once or sometimes twice a year to take in the historical sites and spend time with extended family.

“Just today, I got off the phone with my cousin. He told me he got it,” he said in an interview with the Star on Wednesday.

His cousin, who is 32, is expecting to make a full recovery from COVID-19, but several of their older relatives in Iran weren’t as lucky.

“Three of my dad’s cousins died from coronavirus. I hadn’t met them personally, but just …wow,” Alipour said with a tone of disbelief.

He is worried about his surviving relatives, because Iran was already in a precarious state with serious economic and political problems. Now, the country has been devastated by coronavirus, with more than 53,000 confirmed cases and at least 3,294 confirmed deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.

While Alipour has been reading the news from Iran and around the world since early February, he felt that many of his friends and acquaintances in Toronto weren’t taking the highly infectious disease seriously at first.

“I feel that Canadians do tend to live in a bubble where we assume bad things happen elsewhere,” Alipour said.

“Now that the bubble has burst, we’ve been re-examining our lives and I hope that leads to a breakdown of barriers between people and nations.”

As Yue Qian, a Vancouver-based native of Wuhan put it: “If we think of coronavirus as a global battle, there were first and second halves.

“For people with transnational ties, we’ve had to experience the whole battle. This adds more stress because we’ve been worrying about the situation since January,” she said.

Then there was the dynamic where Asians who quickly began to social distance and wear masks at the outset of the pandemic were being mocked for “overreacting.”

Qian is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia. Her current research focuses on a cross-cultural analysis of human experiences of the coronavirus pandemic.

“The effectiveness of quarantine and social distancing measures seems to differ between countries,” she said, speculating that cultural norms might have something to do with it, but there isn’t data to prove it.

For Laurel Chor, a Canadian-born multimedia journalist from Hong Kong who recently reported on coronavirus in Italy, the relatively relaxed response she’s seen from some Westerners has been baffling.

Chor lives in Hong Kong, where there has been intensive handwashing, social distancing and a near-universal wearing of masks in public. Despite its proximity to mainland China, there have only been four coronavirus-related deaths in the city.

“In Milan, I was really shocked. I didn’t understand what was going on,” she told the Star, adding she was very surprised by how people were reacting.

“I was there one week after the region had gone into lockdown, and at that point people were getting bored of it and already coming back out and saying the government was taking it too seriously and it was just the flu.

“I was at a café scripting, and on the other side, there was a man coughing uncontrollably at the faces of his three companions, and they didn’t care,” Chor said. “If this happened in Hong Kong, he would be kicked out by an angry mob. I just didn’t understand how everyone was being nonchalant.”

She thinks peer pressure and self-consciousness might have something to do with the different reactions.

“When people around you aren’t reacting, you don’t want to react. You don’t want to be the odd one out. And in Hong Kong, everyone was reacting, so you want to react.

“It’s interesting how the prevailing attitude indicates how everyone acts, because no one wants to be the odd one out.”

Alipour thinks that differing levels of trust in a society are a factor, too.

In Iran, many people have been disillusioned and angered by the government for so long, that even if officials there had responded more quickly, he doesn’t think that would’ve galvanized much public action.

“People in Iran seemed to start taking it seriously mostly after they saw that it was spreading and people were dying, so people started staying home and shutting down businesses … out of concern for their communities,” Alipour said.

“I would say to Canadians, don’t think this will happen only to other people. It can happen to anyone. But there are ways to protect ourselves, so keep your heads up and have hope.”

Source: For some Canadians, this is the second half of the coronavirus battle. With family overseas, they’ve lived it for months

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ICYMI: Dole out funding for COVID-19 ads soon, say experts, as ethnic media outlets face cash crunch

2020/04/07 Leave a comment

Of note as there is a percentage of the visible minority and immigrant population that ethnic media has greater reach than mainstream media:

As Ottawa looks to reach communities that do not speak English or French during the COVID-19 pandemic by buying ad space in some ethnic and Indigenous media outlets, one expert fears these news organizations could come “under the gun” in the next few weeks if ads are not rolled out soon.

“The viability and sustainability of ethnic media is under the gun,” said Madeline Ziniak, chair of the Canadian Ethnic Media Association. “We’ve been hearing from our membership [who say] that, ‘I don’t know if we can sustain another month, another month and a half, and things are getting very difficult.’ ”

Like many other mainstream and independent news outlets, ad revenues for ethnic media have begun to evaporate, with the mass closure of restaurants and other businesses that place ads.

On March 11, as part of its $1-billion COVID-19 aid package, the government said it would dedicate $50-million to the Public Health Agency of Canada’s  national public education campaign. Health Canada spokesperson Eric Morrissette said in an email on April 1 the goal was“to encourage the adoption of personal protective behaviours.”

About $30-million of that funding is set aside for advertising in 15 different languages: French, English, Italian, Farsi, Mandarin, Tagalog, Punjabi, Spanish, Arabic, Tamil, Urdu, Korean, Hindi, Inuktitut, and Cree.

According to the 2016 census, 7.6 million Canadians speak a language other than French and English at home, amounting to 14.5 per cent of the population. The Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages listed Mandarin, Cantonese, and Punjabi among the top five languages in the country, along with French and English.

Mr. Morrissette wrote that French and English ads have already begun airing, along with some radio ads in Farsi, Italian, and Mandarin.

Those three languages were chosen “based on the need to urgently share information in communities with links to countries where travel health notices were in place at the time of production,” but did not specify when those ads were produced, and which outlets had begun running them.

He also did not specify which newspapers will be running the ads in the remaining languages. The government’s list, he said, “is evolving because some publishers of content in languages other than English or French have suspended or closed operations because of COVID-19.”

Ms. Ziniak said the association has a database of 1,300 media entities “in languages other than English and French across Canada,” which could be useful for the government in its efforts.

“We’ve lobbied for a long time that there should be a relevant and updated database list of who’s out there,” she added. “And now, we’re in a situation where people are scrambling, and we’re offering our services as a nonprofit, free, volunteer organization.”

Mr. Morissette wrote that the languages for print ads were chosen based on the “top ethnic languages spoken in Canada,” and that consideration was given to the “availability and reach of the outlets in these languages.”

He did not provide a timeline for when the newspaper ads will begin appearing, nor specify the metrics for what the reach needs to be for such outlets.

He noted that the government is sharing fact sheets and infographics “in a variety of languages” online. One resource listing preventative measures that can be taken in the workplace, for example, is available for download in Bengali, Dutch, Gujrati, Vietnamese, and Somali.

According to Andrew Griffith, a former senior director in the government’s immigration department, there is an urgency with which the government should begin rolling out ads to target non-English and French speakers.

“I think you have to work on the assumption that not everybody is receiving the messages,” Mr. Griffith said in a phone interview this week. “The ethnic media, by and large, does not aim at second-generation Canadians. It basically is for the immigrant ones, and there are some that have limited knowledge of English or French.”

While he said the messaging around social distancing measures from ministers, the prime minister, and public health authorities has been “pretty  clear and consistent for the last week or 10 days,” thanks to daily press briefings, he added that “getting [ads in] ethnic media out in another 10 days, means you’ve probably missed the boat.”

In an effort to reach some of their constituents, some MPs like Liberals Omar Alghabra (Mississauga Centre, Ont.) and Salma Zahid (Scarborough Centre, Ont.) have shared their own online messages in Arabic and Urdu, respectively.

“It’s important that we get the message across to everyone. Sometimes there are language barriers, sometimes our seniors don’t understand English or French,” said Ms. Zahid in a phone interview.

Ms. Zahid, who herself was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer in 2018, said she is encouraging “community leaders” to similarly put out messages on COVID-19 in Tagalog, Tamil, Bengali, and Gujarati, which are spoken prominently in her riding.

Former MP Olivia Chow suggested that if the government is running broadcast ads, it should consider featuring prominent voices within Chinese-speaking communities, for instance.

“If they want the ads to be amplified, having community partners of each of those language groups would be useful,” said Ms. Chow in a phone interview, listing Dr. Joseph Wong as an example. A physician and philanthropist, Dr. Wong founded the Toronto-based Yee Hong Centre for Geriatric Care in 1987 and was chair for the United Way of Greater Toronto from 1990 and 1992.

“Different people [who speak] different languages from different communities have different spokespersons, that could know their media market and social media very well,” said Ms. Chow.

Daniel Ahadi, a Simon Fraser University professor in B.C. who studies ethnicity and media, suggested that funding could also be shared with community organizations like settlement agencies.

That would allow groups “to do outreach on their own terms, because I think most ethnic community organizations, they’re quite well-established within ethnic communities, and they have a broad network and can navigate those using email lists, newsletters, and other formats they’ve been using over the years,” he said in a phone interview this week.

But Andrés Machalski, president of media-monitoring firm MIREMS, which has worked with the Canadian Blood Services, Canada Post, and other federal departments in the past, cautioned against such an approach. The firm translates reports from a range of ethnic media outlets.

“I respect what agencies are doing, but you’re looking at an information distribution and communications program, not a help program,” he said in a phone interview.  “This is a journalistic job, a propaganda job, an advertising job, not a social service organization. And the people who are working there, are devoted to hands-on attention, [finding] solutions to problems. They don’t have people to go out and hand out flyers.”

Mr. Machalski later added that some shows, including  one hosted in Punjabi by B.C.-based Harjinder Singh Thind, explore multiple angles of the outbreak, such as details around wage subsidies and repatriation efforts. The show also has “a Punjabi speaking doctor come in almost daily to talk about COVID-19 and clarify any misinformation,” he wrote.

Mr. Machalski said that as of March 31, MIREMS tracked 650 stories under its health stream alone since the outbreak began, and noted that some outlets depend on taking existing stories from mainstream outlets and translate them for their own audiences, a pattern Ms. Ziniak said she too noted in her membership.

Ms. Ziniak also pointed to reports that noted some religious institutions, including some mosques, remained open last week, despite calls from public health officials to limit gatherings to contain the spread of the virus.

Over the past few weeks, officials from multiple levels of government have told Canadians to limit gatherings to under 50 people, a number that has since dropped to five, in the case of Ontario. According to CBC, one imam said some people may believe that “50 is a loophole in the law,” as some mosques tried to limit the number of worshippers to below 50 at the time.

“The seriousness of the situation has to be conveyed to a trusted source,” Ms. Ziniak said.

Source:  already under financial strain

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ICYMI: The number of detainees held in Canada’s immigration holding centres is declining amid COVID-19 fears

2020/04/07 Leave a comment

Of note, and addressing some of the concerns:

Dozens of people who were held in Canada’s immigration detention facilities have been released over the last week as advocates and lawyers have called for their release amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to data obtained from the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) by Global News, the total number of immigration detainees held in all three of Canada’s immigration holding centres dropped to 64 as of April 1 from 98 on March 25.

There are three immigration holding centres in Canada: one in Laval, Que., one in Toronto, and one in Surrey, B.C. However, hundreds of immigration detainees are held in provincial jails across the country — sometimes indefinitely.

The Toronto immigration holding centre, which has 198 beds, had the biggest drop in detainees, dropping to 21 detainees on April 1 from 41 on March 25. The Laval centre, which has 109 beds, went from 48 detainees to 35. And the Surrey centre went from having nine to eight in that timespan. CBSA said that no minors were in the facilities on those dates.

Earlier this week, TVO reported that an employee at the Toronto centre tested positive for COVID-19 and has been in isolation since March 18. So far, no detainees are confirmed to have contracted COVID-19.

A number of legal and advocacy groups have been calling for the release of people in immigration detention “unless they pose a danger to the public.” Canada’s immigration law allows CBSA officers to detain foreign nationals if they believe the person is unlikely to appear for an immigration proceeding like a hearing, if the person is deemed a threat to public safety, or if the person’s identity is under question.

Jenny Jeanes, the detention coordinator with Action Refugies, an NGO that works with people detained in the Laval immigration holding centre, said that she’s pleased that people are being released, and that the COVID-19 pandemic makes the situation even more urgent. She said that even more detainees at Laval have been released since April 1.

“Releases are picking up. And we were so relieved that after asking for a few weeks, finally some of the [detained] fathers who were separated from their families were released this week on an expedited basis,” Jeanes said in a phone interview.

“If people are released, it’s either because whatever issues there were that were leading them to be detained are resolved. So that’s been the case for some people. Some people were released in the past days because their identity was confirmed, (and) they were able to get the information that the CBSA needed to confirm their identity.”

Last month, detainees at the Laval centre started a hunger strike after sending a petition to the federal ministers of public safety and immigration, asking to be released from the centre over fears of contracting the virus in the facility.

Jeanes said that the hunger strike there was suspended earlier this week “but the distress of those inside has not ended.” Though her group previously conducted visits and work inside the centre multiple times a week, she and her colleagues recently moved to conducting their work remotely because of COVID-19, and have been communicating with Laval detainees over the phone.

“I’ve had people hang up in tears, sobbing with me on the phone this week because they see other people getting released. But they know that that doesn’t mean that they’re going to be released and they’re scared,” Jeanes said.

“At the best of times, detention can create anxiety, depression and other negative mental health effects. And I think right now, everybody, we’re all under strain. And so imagine that you’re in detention. It’s that much worse.”

“As this situation is fluid and evolving rapidly, the CBSA is continuing to closely monitor and assess the state of those in detention. All options are being considered at this time,” a CBSA spokesperson said in an email. “As always, should a detainee in CBSA care be seriously ill and in need of immediate medical attention, they would be referred to the appropriate local or emergency health authority for medical assessment without delay.”

Last week, Legal Aid Ontario said on its website that it was expanding its detention review hearing representation services for immigration detainees.

“We are pleased that in many cases CBSA is cooperating with detainees and their counsel to develop viable safe release plans; we think all involved recognize the personal and public health issues raised by detention during a pandemic,” Alyssa Manning, manager of Legal Aid Ontario’s immigration detention duty counsel project, said in a statement to Global News.

According to CBSA data, around 7,706 people were held in immigration holding centres in Canada last year, and around 2,249 people were detained by CBSA and held in provincial jails. The average time spent in detention was around 12 days.

Coronavirus outbreak: UN launches global appeal for $2 billion in aid to fight COVID-19

On Friday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked why civil servants are still going into work at places like immigration detention facilities when that could increase the risk of spreading COVID-19 to those held in the facilities and among employees and their families.

“We’re going to continue to ensure that essential services get done. Wherever possible, civil servants are encouraged to work remotely from home. We know there are significant things that need to be worked on to deliver for Canadians, to keep Canadians safe at this particular time,” Trudeau said.

When asked whether the federal government would be releasing non-violent offenders in general, Trudeau said that “action has been taken” and that the government has been working with Corrections Canada and “detention facilities of all types” to reduce the vulnerability to the spread of COVID-19.

“We continue to look at other measures that can be taken and we will take those measures in due course.”

Source: The number of detainees held in Canada’s immigration holding centres is declining amid COVID-19 fears

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Ai Weiwei: The virus in the body politic: We have lost our ability to cherish each other

2020/04/06 Leave a comment

Worth reading and reflecting upon:

I was living in Beijing in 2003 when SARS struck, and I can remember how that felt. It descended as an entirely new thing – a new concept, an unwelcome intruder, an ominous threat. It galvanized a new mindset in society and led the government to impose unprecedented defences. Some of those defences have been used again to combat the coronavirus, but to citizens, the two campaigns have felt different. SARS felt like a battle; coronavirus feels like a war.

With SARS, the government’s first response was to seal off all reports and to deny that a problem existed. The truth only emerged when an elderly military doctor, who had seen the government’s Minister of Public Health lie broadly to the Chinese people on television, wrote a letter to Chinese media that was leaked to the foreign press.

The government then drew on techniques used in the military and in prisons to suppress the outbreak. Ordinary folk, lacking better medical advice, resorted to herbal medicines, antibiotics, or hormones, which were either useless or harmful, and when they were harmful, they added to the death toll.

Sadly, the same thing has happened again. When the coronavirus first appeared in Wuhan last November, doctors who noticed it began passing along the news in text messages – only to be summoned by police, reprimanded and ordered to remain silent.

It took until Jan. 11 for Wuhan’s health commission to report the city’s first known death from this new kind of coronavirus, along with dozens of cases. At the same time, the commission insisted that the virus could not spread from person to person, which we now know to be false. Its purported origin was from a live animal market, but not long after that announcement, alternative theories began to circulate, given oxygen by a lack of transparency on the part of a Chinese government that has a poor record around trust. And just this Wednesday, a U.S. intelligence report declared that Beijing has been intentionally under-reporting the total numbers of cases and deaths there.

With the virus racing and information suppressed, the government eventually decided to abruptly seal off Wuhan and place its more than 11 million citizens under mandatory quarantine. There were strict rules and police enforced them. People could not enter or exit quarantine zones at will, and some people were not allowed to leave home. Some doors were even welded shut. Between mid-January and mid-March, quarantine and detention tactics were deployed across China. The country was in shock.

By late March, the number of new cases in China had slowed. But in the meantime, the virus had spread to more than a hundred other countries, where the total numbers of confirmed cases and deaths have now exceeded China’s. And where once there was only criticism for China’s unique station and particular response, other countries – democratic or otherwise – are now panicking through their own preparations and plans.

What the world needs now – in China, and in the world at large – is sober reflection on what it means to cherish life.

What, exactly, is a virus? About one-thousandth the size of a bacterium, a virus cannot survive or reproduce on its own. To live, it must enter, attach to and parasitize a living cell. Viruses have been doing this for tens of thousands of years – entering living bodies and dying when the host body either kills them with its immune system, or when the body dies itself. This happens because the immune system’s battle with viruses also kills normal cells, and if too much of that happens, the host body can perish, taking the virus with it. In this fight to the death, both sides can lose.

It’s a useful metaphor when considering how various countries have responded to their given outbreaks. The Chinese government is authoritarian, but that gives it huge advantages in combating the virus; it can set aside considerations of human rights and individual freedom, to say nothing of “cherishing life.” Virus control in democratic countries such as Italy, Britain and the United States, where the freedom of individuals is respected, is clearly more difficult and complex.

But there, too, cherishing life can feel impossible. The U.S. does not have a public medical system or universal guarantees of health. Its hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are private, and they operate on the principle of capitalism in the service of individual patients. And the full terror of such a health-care system has been put on display with this latest outbreak, exposing the fantasy of “the land of equal opportunity” for what it really is: a place where those with means are taken care of, while the rest are left to fend for themselves.

The only conclusion a reasonable person can derive from the semi-coherent ramblings of U.S. President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, when they answer questions about the coronavirus, is that neither man is focused on cherishing life, but only on how well bureaucratic capitalism is operating. One’s only source of cheer in observing the tiny coronavirus is to note its spirit of egalitarianism: You are a religious leader? A famous actor or high official? A politician who either does or does not think I am causing a crisis? Fine – I treat you all the same.

What are we learning from the disaster? Can we learn something about, as former Chinese Communist Party general secretary Hu Jintao once declared, a “community of shared destiny”? If such a phrase were to come from today’s Chinese leaders, who pursue crony capitalism while speaking of Marxism, it could seem like self-satire. In Karl Marx’s original vision, communism is the model of humanity’s ultimate ideals: a community of equals that accords with the basic characteristics of human life. China’s constitution and the charter of the Chinese Communist Party, however, both cite communism as the glorious endpoint of political “struggle.” Also by contrast, the Western capitalist world prioritizes commercial competition while taking democracy and human rights as its ethical base (even though, it must be said, that base has been regularly defiled and now is only a weak answer to the challenges of authoritarianism). With such divergent expressions of ideals in the world, how can we talk about a “community of shared destiny”?

The actual fate of the world today is a freakish amalgam of different systems. For Western capitalism to continue expanding, it has had no choice but to partner with exploitative, authoritarian states such as China, to profit in ways that the West cannot at home. By doing so, despite the seemingly deep ideological differences, Western capitalism has allowed Chinese communism into its structure, virus-like, and the two now share a fate. Indeed, just as how former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s guideline to “let some of the people get rich first” became the only fate that mattered to many Chinese people from the 1990s on, this viral hybrid system that resulted has continued to grow. It now threatens civilization’s immune system – just wait and see.

The insertion of an external element into an organism can demonstrate life’s uniformity, but also its fragility. The same key fits into all locks, be they black or white, Christian or Muslim, or a fearless atheist. Can humanity respond? Whether or not wisdom, science, medical expertise and the protection of various gods will be enough to see fragile humanity through this moment – we do not clearly know. At a minimum, a question will remain: If a similar disaster comes in five years, or two, or less, what will happen? Will humanity’s spiritual values and material wealth be able to hold up?

In the interim, we should be thinking about the true value of our fragile little bundle of life, and how it can live in harmony with nature at large. If we can do this, then no sort of political opinion, religion, war, or any other of the various concerns of mankind should be able to block our quest for survival. This is a question of philosophy that goes well beyond medical science or the arguments of politicians. A philosophy is realized only in the details of the joys and pains of human experience.

After death, a corpse cools and interment may follow, regardless of what has died – virus, human being, all of humanity, or all of life. Let’s hope that humanity begins understanding that there are no differences in the end.

When information is hard to access and people are prevented from drawing informed conclusions, hatred, bias, prejudice and violence come rolling out. A shared understanding of life is nearly impossible. The most fundamental humanist understanding is that life and death co-exist, and the attitudes necessary to reach such an understanding are tolerance, empathy, recognition of suffering and willingness to help others. This is so because other people are a part of oneself; protection of oneself calls for protection of human society. To see this point is to identify with the value of common existence, which is the reliable basis for all of our pleasures and happiness. Otherwise we live with nothing but empty illusions that a whiff of breeze can blow away.

To stand in awe of life itself is the best way to see the connections between an individual body and the rest of life. We despise war, we despise the barriers that separate people and we despise the political schemes that divide people into irreconcilable groups. The compensation that the coronavirus affords us is that we can view the world with a bit more wisdom.

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