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shake d livin wake d dead wrote:As of last night I have 4 family members in Long Island who were tested positive for the virus. All have underlying ailments from diabetes to HBP, ages from 40-70. After speaking to other relatives, they indicated that hey have to communicate with them via sign language because anytime they try to speak(it hurts and hurts badly). They are able to speak with them via vids calls etc
Social distancing is a privilege of the middle class. For India's slum dwellers, it will be impossible
By Priyali Sur and Esha Mitra, CNN
New Delhi (CNN) For two days, Jeetender Mahender, a 36-year-old Dalit sanitation worker, has not dared to leave his family's shanty in the Valmiki slum of northern Mumbai, India, except to go to the toilet.
His situation is desperate. The tiny home has no running water or toilet, his family is low on food -- and when he doesn't go to work, he doesn't get paid.
Mahender is trying to comply with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 21-day nationwide lockdown, intended to help stop coronavirus spreading further among the country's 1.3 billion people. India has recorded 1,024 cases and 27 deaths.
"Social distancing is not just for the sick, but for each and every person, including you and even your family," Modi said in a nationwide address last week.
That might work for India's middle and upper classes, who can hunker down in their condos and houses, preen their terrace gardens, eat from their well-stocked pantries and even work from home, using modern technology.
But the chaos unfolding across India in recent days has spelled out that for the 74 million people -- one sixth of the population -- who live cheek by jowl in the country's slums, social distancing is going to be physically and economically impossible.
"The lanes are so narrow that when we cross each other, we cannot do it without our shoulders rubbing against the other person," said Mahender. "We all go outdoors to a common toilet and there are 20 families that live just near my small house.
"We practically all live together. If one of us falls sick, we all will."
At least one person in a Mumbai slum has already tested positive for the novel coronavirus. As panic grows among India's most vulnerable, thousands of migrant workers are trying to flee the slums for their rural homes, by bus and even by foot, sparking fears they will import the virus to the countryside.
In a radio address Sunday, acknowledging the chaos the lockdown had brought India's poor, Modi asked the nation for forgiveness. But he also urged listeners to understand there was no other option.
1 toilet for 1,440 people
Water is one of the biggest reasons India's poor need to leave home every day.
Sia, a slum dweller and migrant construction worker in Gurugram, near New Delhi, wakes up at 5 a.m. and defies Modi's call to stay indoors. The reason? She needs to walk 100 meters (328 feet) to a water tank that serves her slum of 70 migrant construction workers.
She is not the only one. Most women from the construction site slum wash together there every morning and collect water for the day. With no showers or bathrooms in their homes, this communal tap is their only water source.
The government's Clean India Mission, launched in 2014 to improve infrastructure and eliminate open defecation, claims that 100% of Indian households now have access to toilets.
But Puneet Srivastava, manager of policy at NGO WaterAid India, said the focus of the Clean India Mission has largely been on building household toilets, and a considerable number of slum-like regions have not been included.
In Dharavi in Mumbai, for example, there is only one toilet per 1,440 residents, according to a recent CFS study -- and 78% of community toilets in Mumbai's slums lack a water supply, according to 2019 Greater Mumbai Municipal Corporation survey.
On Sunday, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs Secretary Durga Shanker Mishra said: "There is 100% toilet coverage in India, whether people have access to personal toilets in slums or not doesn't matter. They can use communal toilets."
Sania Ashraf, an epidemiologist who works on water, sanitation, hygiene and respiratory illness, said the Clean India Mission had increased private toilets as well as community or pay-per-use public toilet coverage -- but during a pandemic, having access to a shared toilet means little if it is not clean.
Furthermore, poor ventilation can trap contaminated aerosols and "facilitate transmission of the virus," said Ashraf.
That is especially worrying in light of evidence that patients shed the virus through feces, raising the possibility of transmission in communal toilets and places where there is still open defecation.
Workers at risk
The next reason slum-dwellers cannot isolate is simple: they need to work.
Daily wage migrant workers generally live hand-to-mouth, earning between 138-449 Indian rupees ($1.84-$5.97) per day, according to the International Labour Organization.
"They belong to the unorganized sector, they don't get paid the day they don't go to work," says economist Arun Kumar. "It's not just the past few days since the lockdown started, but the momentum towards it has been building up for the past 20 days.
"Supply chains have shut down. Employment is lost. They have no money to purchase essentials. And unlike the rich, they cannot afford to stock up. They buy on a daily basis but now the shelves are empty."
Sonia Manikraj, a 21-year-old teacher who lives in the Dharavi slum, said: "I have to step out to buy food and since grocery shops here are open only from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and the roads are quite narrow, there is always a crowd."
Consequently, workers are faced with an agonizing dilemma: go out to work and risk infection, or stay home and face extreme hunger.
Some workers have no choice. Cleaners, for example, are considered to provide an essential service, and are therefore exempted from the lockdown.
"They are required to go to work every day," said Milind Ranade, the founder of Kachra Vahatuk Shramik Sangh, a Mumbai-based organization focused on labor issues. "Some even collect hospital waste and then come back and live in these crowded chawls (slums)."
They are not given any protective gear, such as masks or gloves, said Ranade, and there has not been an awareness campaign to educate them of the dangers of coronavirus transmission.
"What will happen when they fall sick?" Ranade added.
The government's $22.5 billion economic stimulus package includes medical insurance cover of 5 million rupees ($66,451) per person for front-line workers such as nurses, doctors, paramedics and cleaners in government hospitals.
"It may cover the sanitation worker but what about all the others who live around him in the slum and who are equally at risk of contracting the disease from him?" said Raju Kagada, a union leader of sanitation workers in Mumbai.
Kumar said more vigorous coronavirus testing would help. As of March 29, India had conducted 34,931 tests, according to the Indian Council of Medical Research -- or 19 tests per million people. Kumar said testing at a private hospital or lab in India costs 4,500 rupees ($60), while free tests in government hospitals are very limited.
Mahender is a cleaner for a residential community in Mumbai, earning 5,000 rupees ($66) a month, which he uses to support his wife, three children and his 78-year-old father. If he needs medical care, it will not be covered by the stimulus package provisions.
"My phone has been ringing nonstop and the residents of the building where I clean have been calling me back to work," he said. "But I have to go into the building, outside each person's house and collect their trash.
"I have not been given a mask or gloves, not even a soap to wash my hands before my meals. I know if I don't go today, they will hire someone else?"
Migrants who want to go home
Over the weekend, tens of thousands of India's 45 million economic migrant workers began long, arduous journeys back to their rural villages. With India's rail network temporarily shut, many had no choice but to try walking hundreds of miles home
There was little reason to stay. Most had lost their jobs in the cities due to the lockdown, and the slums have the potential to feed the spread of the virus.
Researchers from the Center For Sustainability said last week that while the reproductive ratio (R naught) for Covid-19 -- the disease caused by the coronavirus -- globally is between two and three, in India's slums it could be 20% higher due to the dense living conditions.
As the slum exodus began, on Saturday the state governments of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Haryana arranged for hundreds of buses to ferry migrants home, causing chaotic scenes as thousands descended upon stations trying to claw their way onto buses.
On Sunday, however, Modi urged all states to seal their borders to stop the virus being imported into rural areas. Officials are now scrambling to find millions of migrant workers who had already returned to small towns and villages across the country, in order to quarantine them for 14 days.
Sia, who lives on the construction site in Gurugram, wasn't able to catch a bus. Her options of escaping the slum during the coronavirus outbreak are looking bleak.
"Since our work has stopped, I haven't been paid for 20 days. I get paid $5 a day, the little money I earn helps my family survive," she said.
"As everything is shutting down, I believe we have no option but to live in this poverty and filth in the city."
FORMER health minister Dr Fuad Khan says because of citizens’ “don’t care” attitude over the past weeks, there will be a spike in the number of covid19 cases in TT.
Khan said people have been operating as if they have “no care for social distancing.”
On Sunday, by phone, he told Newsday, “When I look and see how people (are) on Charlotte Street and in the market...people don’t care. When you look around you see everybody in close contact waiting on the grocery to open...There’s no social distancing except when you’re home.”
https://newsday.co.tt/2020/03/29/khan-c ... two-weeks/
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There's no traffic but a few cars
Daly Bread: Lingering credibility questions; gov’t ‘trying to control media narrative’
Martin Daly
When is an exemption to closed borders not an exemption after the borders are closed? I will return to this riddle, but let me first note that the limited testing for Covid-19 has been expanded in obvious response to queries about its previous deficiencies.
There was room to acknowledge that the Ministry of Health’s strategy to manage Covid-19 within infrastructure separate from the established hospital system seemed sound so far. However, apparent provisional success does not come with an immunity from full disclosure and accountability.
Regrettably, material full disclosure and accountability have suffered. The first death of a patient has revealed a serious kink in the updates and commentaries that the Ministry of Health was giving us. It seems that this patient was never accounted for in the statistics that were repeatedly updated about the number of cases and the sequence in which they were discovered.
Incisive questions from the experienced Ria Taitt, of the Trinidad Express, concerning the time lines of the onset of this patient’s disease and his subsequent death were crudely interrupted and then shut down in disregard of public interest considerations. Such interventions may suggest cover-up.
Ministers and other officials ought to restrain themselves from wishing to control what appears in the media. The truth and the fullness of their disclosures must be under constant scrutiny even when something is touted as going well.
The government’s performances at the media conferences last week were diminished by an authoritarian mindset, and lingering credibility questions. This was exemplified by not treating with the facts of the case that led sadly to the first death and by the puzzling students issue.
Minister of National Security, Stuart Young, had vehemently insisted that the decision to close the borders at midnight on last Sunday was firm and without exception and he made no mention of bringing home students from Barbados and Jamaica. Yet, lo and behold, the Prime Minister announced that students from Barbados and Jamaica would be brought home. That is the context in which the riddle arose.
The next day Minister Young, his previous assertions having been undermined, asserted that those students coming in was not an exemption. It was he said ‘always part of the process’. I will leave it to readers to figure out how the decision arising out of that process was not the creation of an exemption.
The moment we have to parse the words the government uses, credibility sinks. It is reminiscent of President Clinton’s notorious answer about his relationship with his intern: ‘It depends on what the meaning of the word is is’.
The moment also that we are set discussing whether students should come in as opposed to other citizens in Margarita, Barbados and Suriname, we get into a discussion with subjective moral overtones—made more full of thorns by Minster Young’s melodramatic disclosure that a citizen currently in Venezuela has the benefit of resident status there.
If resident status in another country is a demerit when the Government is making a policy decision then plenty Trinis, who are normally resident here, are in trouble.
The government later changed its tune. While appearing to presume to give directions to the Courts to whom the Barbados group might turn, Minister Young conceded that if the citizens in Barbados present themselves here they will be put into quarantine.
Here is the next potential non-disclosure: Have the students already come in after the deadline or when are they coming? What are the quarantine arrangements? An undisclosed operation would not be acceptable.
It is also troubling that Minister Young should find it ‘disappointing’ that the media should have reported the concerns expressed by nationals who cannot return home because the borders have been closed.
There are arguments on both sides of the issue whether our borders can be abruptly closed to nationals with threats of no exemption. Democracy and freedom of speech require that they should be ventilated in the media.
Paraphrasing my quotes from Sparrow published in last Sunday’s column, those damn citizens are entitled to bark.
Meanwhile I am trusting that there will be no election spending mixed up inside the financial assistance measures.
No_Name wrote:Gladiator wrote:Well that was a waste of 10 mins...The_Honourable wrote:Prime Minister's Short Address to the Nation 29/03/2020
Growls lookin real sick n tired tho...but he shouldn't be, he jus hadda do what d 1 puss dem say...
MaxPower wrote:No Testing = No Spike
paid_influencer wrote:cmo talking about local spread in T&T
pugboy wrote:Who have the pic with him and the buck chap?
MaxPower wrote:CMO Dr.Parasram well sharp,
On the ball with them questions....i admire how his speech flows, some probably bullsheit but he has to go along with the politics.
Not like the duncey Deyalsingh who always have to read notes before he speak.
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