A Weekly Political News Magazine
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Editorial
A Weekly Political News Magazine
It has now been three months since the World Health Organisation declared the coronavirus as a global pandemic. In those three months, the lives of millions of people around the world took a dramatic shift, as many people have been confined in their homes to reduce the spread of the virus while several businesses around the world have been forced to temporarily shut down. It is hard to believe just how much has changed in this short timespan, however there is one aspect that has remained the same, the growing animosities between the US and China. As both global superpowers have been busy accusing each other of negligence and cover-ups, scientists have been placed in the middle of this war of words. Unfortunately, since modern science relies heavily on information sharing this political game might hinder scientific research on the virus. This week’s cover story by Yasmine El-Geressi focuses on how scientists in China and the US are struggling amidst this ordeal, as they find it hard to stay away from political conflict that is engulfing their respective countries. While Democrats have a reputation of being more “dovish” than their Republican counterparts when it comes to foreign policy, the recent Coronavirus pandemic has caused the party to adopt a tougher stance on China. Moreover, many leading Democrats have complained that Republicans aren’t as tough as they could be on China, thus paving the way for a rare bipartisan consensus in Washington. Joseph Braude writes on the Democrats’ stance on China and how that might impact the US’s relations with the country. The pandemic has caused many people around the world to become more subconscious about personal hygiene and physical health. However, mental health during the pandemic has still not been properly addressed, which is unfortunate considering the fact that uncertainties about the future and concerns about loved ones have surely made many people anxious, stressed or even depressed. Yasmine El-Geressi talks with two mental health experts, Professor Neil Greenberg of King’s College London and Dr. Joseph El Khoury of the American University of Beirut, as they discuss the toll the pandemic has had on people’s mental wellbeing and what people can do to maintain their psychological health. The coronavirus has taken a heavy toll on the entertainment and sports industry around the world. Cinemas have closed down, while sports leagues have been suspended. Ali El Shamy writes on how these industries are coping with the pandemic, and how they might implement several social distancing measures for the foreseeable future. In keeping with the sports and entertainment theme, Netflix recently released “The Last Dance” a five part documentary series that focuses on the Chicago Bulls team of the late 1990s, which impressively won six NBA titles in eight years. What also made that Chicago Bulls special was its myriad of star players such as Scottie Pippin, Dennis Rodman and, of course, Michael Jordan. Ellie Fawaz reviews the documentary series as he highlights what made that team so successful and how the NBA managed to capitalize on the Bulls’ success and make the NBA the global phenomenon we recognise today.
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A Weekly Political News Magazine
16 Coping with Coronavirus: Experts Share Insights
on Mental-Health in the Age of the Pandemic
Issue 1801- May - 22/05/2020
Keeping Entertainment at a
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Pandemic Exposes Dangers of 24 The the Informal Economy
32 After Kim Jong Un
28 Why Travel Bans Fail to Stop Pandemics
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London’s West End Faces Existen-
40 tial Crisis as Theatres Stay Dark
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People eat next to cardboard dinosaurs used for social distancing at Bar-B-Q Plaza restaurant at the Icon Siam luxury shopping mall as it reopened after restrictions to 19-halt the spread of the COVID coronavirus were lifted in .2020 ,17 Bangkok on May )Getty(
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People are seen practising social distancing in 19-white circles in Domino Park, during the Covid the in Brooklyn borough 2020 ,17 pandemic on May of New York City. Getty
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based U.S. Naval Forces Central Command said in a statement its notice was “designed to enhance safety, minimize ambiguity and reduce the risk of miscalculation”. It follows an incident last month in which 11 Iranian vessels came close to U.S. Navy and Coast Guard ships in the Gulf in what the U.S. military called “dangerous and provocative” behaviour. Tehran blamed its longtime adversary for the incident.
Palestinians Shun CIA After Declaring End to Security Coordination with U.S. and Israel
U.S. Blacklists Iran’s Interior Minister Over Human Rights Abuses The United States imposed sanctions on Iran’s interior minister on Wednesday, accusing him of engaging in serious cases of human rights abuse. Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli gave orders authorizing the Law Enforcement Forces (LEF) of Iran to use lethal force in response to antigovernment protests in November, leading to the killing of protesters, including at least 23 minors, the U.S. Treasury Department said in a statement. “His - and the regime’s - goal was to quash these peaceful protests and suppress the rights of peaceful assembly and freedom of expression at any cost,” U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a separate statement. The Treasury on Wednesday also blacklisted seven senior officials of the LEF, including commander Hossein Ashtari Fard, and a
The Palestinians have suspended contacts with the CIA after announcing an end to security coordinaprovincial commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, for their roles in the suppression of protesters.
After U.S. Warning, Iran Says its Navy Will Still Operate in Gulf The Iranian navy will maintain regular missions in the Gulf, the ISNA news agency reported on Wednesday, a day after the United States warned mariners there to stay away from U.S. warships. “The naval units of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman will continue their regular missions in accordance with professional principles as in the past,” ISNA quoted an unnamed military official as saying. The U.S. warning to mariners followed U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat last month to fire on any Iranian ships that harass U.S. Navy vessels. The Bahrain-
tion with Israel and the United States in protest at Israeli proposals to annex territory in the West Bank, a Palestinian official said on Thursday. Saeb Erekat, secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said Washington had been told of the move after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Tuesday his administration was no longer committed to agreements with Israel and the United States, including on security coordination. Later in the day, a senior Palestinian security official told Reuters that Palestinian forces had begun to pull back from some areas of the West Bank that they had policed in coordination with Israel during the coronavirus crisis.
Libyan Forces Aligned with Tripoli Government Capture Key Air Base Forces aligned with Libya’s internationally recognised government took control of an air base south-west of Tripoli on Monday after a sustained assault, in what could be their most significant advance for nearly a year. Watiya air base, 125 km
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(80 miles) from the capital, has been an important strategic foothold for forces loyal to eastern-based commander Khalifa Haftar, who launched an offensive to capture Tripoli in April 2019. The campaign sharply escalated a long-running conflict between factions based in eastern and western Libya and caused a surge in military intervention by foreign powers.
Afghan Mosque Attack Kills Eight Worshippers Breaking Fast Gunmen opened fire in a mosque in central Afghanistan on Tuesday evening, killing eight worshippers breaking their Ramadan fast and wounding five others, officials said. “Unknown gunmen fired on people praying inside a mosque during iftar time,” said Wahida Shahkar, spokeswoman for the governor of Parwan province, referring to
the meal eaten to break daytime fasting during the Islamic holy month. The Ministry of Interior confirmed the attack in Parwan’s provincial capital Charekar, blaming it on the insurgent Taliban. The Taliban denied responsibility and said Afghan security forces were to blame. The United Nations has warned of an alarming uptick in violence against civilians in Afghanistan. A shocking attack on a Kabul maternity ward last week killed 24 people, including newborn babies.
fewer than world No. 2 hot spot Russia, which trails the United States. President Jair Bolsonaro has been widely criticized for his handling of the outbreak. The far-right former army captain has long snubbed social-distancing measures, arguing instead for the reopening the economy. He has also become an increasingly strong advocate for the malaria drug chloroquine as a possible remedy for COVID-19, despite warnings from health experts.
Brazil Suffers Record 1,188 Daily Coronavirus Deaths Brazil registered a record of 1,188 daily coronavirus deaths on Thursday, with more than 20,000 total fatalities from the coronavirus outbreak, the Health Ministry said. Brazil now has 310,087 confirmed cases, the ministry said, just a few thousand
China Set to Impose New Hong Kong Security Law, Trump Warns of Strong U.S. Reaction China is set to impose new national security legislation on Hong Kong after last year’s pro-democracy unrest, a Chinese official said on Thursday, drawing a warning from President Donald Trump that Washington would react “very strongly” against the attempt to gain more control over the former British colony. China’s action could spark fresh protests in Hong Kong, which enjoys many freedoms not allowed on the mainland, after often violent demonstrations of 2019 plunged the city into its deepest turmoil since it returned to Beijing’s rule in 1997. Trump, who has ratcheted up his anti-China rhetoric as he seeks re-election in November, told reporters “nobody knows yet” the details of China’s plan. “If it happens we’ll address that issue very strongly,” he said.
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The Next Victim of US-China Coronavirus War of Words: Science
Political Chaos and the Resulting Information War Could Hinder Global Effort to Halt the Pandemic
by Yasmine El-Geressi As the world continues to grapple with the coronavirus outbreak, there is growing concern that the China and the US, two countries with the greatest resources, are stuck in a propaganda-fueled dispute over the virus’ origin. All the tough talk and finger-pointing is a dan-
gerous distraction from the crisis as the infections and deaths continue to rise at an alarming rate, and threatens to distort science-based investigation while also lending credibility to conspiracy theories. This political chaos and the resulting information war is bad news for the whole world as it could hinder the global effort to halt the pandemic.
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U.S-CHINESE DISTRUST Even before the outbreak of the coronavirus, U.S.China relations were mistrustful and combative. Trump waged a tariff war against China for most of his presidency and threatened the survival of Huawei, the telecom giant central to China’s strategy for state-ofthe-art 5G technologies. The fraying of trust on trade, technology, and military deployments has played out as Beijing has expanded its global footprint, raising questions about its ambitions to alter the U.S.-centered international order. But COVID-19 has made the geopolitical battle much worse. Relations between the two great powers have now reached their lowest point since the immediate aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989. Both countries have suffered large-scale loss of life and a sharp economic slowdown, but political officials in both countries are working to protect their own domestic standing by blaming the other’s government for the spread of the virus.
U.S. President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping (not shown) speak to business leaders at the Great Hall of the People on November 9, 2017 in .Beijing, China
Over the past few weeks, U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly blamed China for the pandemic, saying the country withheld information and should have stopped the virus before it spread past its borders, but perhaps it “chose not to.” In recent days, Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have doubled down on the assertion SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a poorly regulated bio-lab, not an outdoor market, in Wuhan, the city in central China where the first cases of COVID-19 were detected. Intelligence agencies around the world, including in the US, have not reached any conclusions about the virus’ origin but Trump has promised a “conclusive” report pointing to China. Trump has also expressed interest in suing Beijing for damages, with the US seeking $10 million for every American death and halted funding for the WHO, attacking the organization for “severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus” and being soft on China. While the US has been taking every opportunity to remind the world that China is responsible for the virus, in March, as it began to recover from the outbreak, Beijing’s propaganda apparatus launched a global campaign to repair its damaged carefully curated image, rewrite the narrative of the crisis, challenge those who question Beijing’s version of events and position itself as an emerging leader in world affairs. The claim that the virus orgininated in Wuhan lab has unsurprisingly drawn fierce rebuttal from the Chinese government, which described the accusation as “smear” intended to bolster Trump’s reelection chances. China quickly of-
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There is concern that the investigation into the Wuhan lab will divert resources away from science - and that is to the world’s detriment. fered humanitarian help and medical teams to hard-hit countries in Southeast Asia, Europe, and Africa, and its diplomats aggressively defended China’s handling of the crisis, even without evidence floating a conspiracy theory that the U.S. military created the outbreak in Wuhan. China is also increasingly aiming at the U.S. for bungling its own coronavirus response.
SCIENTISTS CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE While the coronavirus spat continues to make headlines in international media, scientists and public health officials are the ones caught in the middle of this war of words. There is concern that the investigation into the Wuhan lab will divert resources away from science and that is to the world’s detriment. The WHO’s emergencies chief, Michael Ryan, recently warned against politicising the scientific investigation into the origin of SARS-CoV-2. “We can learn from Chinese scientists, we can learn from each other, we can exchange knowledge and we can find the answers together,” said Ryan, adding that scientists should be at the center of exploring where the virus came from. “If this is projected as aggressive investigation of wrongdoing, then I believe that’s much more difficult to deal with. That’s a political issue, not a science issue,” said Ryan. “Science needs to be at the center. Science will find the answers,” he added. “The implications of those answers can be dealt with from a policy and political perspective.” Keiji Fukuda, a former top official at the WHO and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in an interview with CBC News that it is legitimate to question what happened in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, and that identifying the origin of the coronavirus is important. But he would prefer to see an investigation come after the pandemic is under control. If the U.S. and Chinese leaders are blaming each other to rally their bases and politicise the pandemic, it may help them, he says. “But if the intent is really to deal with the outbreak, which is what the public should hold
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leaders accountable for, then it’s not helping.” Fukuda says scientists already have a tough enough job trying to get the facts right about a virus nobody’s seen before. “When you put the political overtones on top of that ... scientists around the world have to worry about what it is that they say and how they present it,” he said. “We have a harder time doing our jobs, and that’s to everybody’s detriment.” Echoing similar sentiments, German sinologist Felix told Deutsche Welle: “Unfortunately, we are experiencing a situation where the question of COVID-19’s origin, and the various strategies in fighting the pandemic, have become the subject of a propaganda war between the American and Chinese governments.” He added: “If the international community does not find a common answer to the global challenge of this and the next pandemic, the future looks bleak,” he added. The Chinese government’s demonstrated lack of transparency has complicated the search into the origins of the disease and how it can be stopped. Beijing’s early response to coronavirus has been widely criticized across the world. Authorities in Hubei province initially tried to cover up the outbreak in Wuhan, punished doctors who spoke out and allowed millions of people to continue to travel. The delayed containment and mitigation measures potentially spread the pathogen further until it was too late to stop a global outbreak. Beijing is also accused of under-reporting both total cases and deaths from the disease. About 100 nations have called for an independent investigation into the origins of the pandemic. Understanding how the virus evolved and knowing how it
Conspiracy theories have poisoned the atmosphere for U.S.-Chinese collaboration in addressing the outbreak, which might otherwise have presented an opportunity to reset the strained relationship.
entered the US and other countries, would help public health experts and governments but so far, China seems unlikely to accept any international inquiry which is undermining efforts to hone the best countermeasures to the virus’s global spread. Pompeo has said that US authorities have made multiple formal requests for viral isolates and information about “patient zero”. When asked if he has received any replies, he told reporters they should ask the Chinese ambassador to Washington, Cui Tiankai. “Trying to obtain the earliest viral RNA in the pandemic is an important endeavour, but I just don’t understand the need to do that with the State Department first, and publicly with conspiracy theories that are still around,” David Larsen, a public health professor at Syracuse University who has studied the spread of malaria and other infectious diseases, told the South China Morning Post. He added: “Infectious disease doesn’t respect borders,” he added. “It doesn’t respect the political clashes between different nations, and so we need to figure out a way to
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An engineer looks at monkey kidney cells as he make a test on an experimental vaccine for the COVID19coronavirus inside the Cells Culture Room laboratory at the Sinovac Biotech facilities in Beijing on April ,29 2020. (Getty)
the Chinese were not behind some of the cyberactivity we’re seeing targeting U.S. pharmaceutical companies and targeting research institutes around the country that are doing coronavirus research, treatments and vaccines,” Demers said. Trump’s fury at the World Health Organisation and his decision last month to freeze hundreds of millions of dollars of financial contributions to the group in the middle of a global pandemic, accusing it of promoting disinformation from China about the outbreak, has also raised concerns about what it means for the fight against coronavirus. The US also skipped a virtual summit of world leaders on coronavirus yesterday, co-hosted by Boris Johnson, and China only sent its ambassador to the EU. The nubs from both countries, in addition to the WHO funding cut, and prompted fears that the two countries’ rivalry could jeopardise efforts to build a broad international alliance to pool resources, share information and coordinate actions in the search for a universally available vaccine.
FERTILE GROUND FOR CONSPIRACY THEORIES
work together, to have scientists work great together, because scientists could care less about the political drama.” The Chinese government have also been accused of trying to steal coronavirus-related research on vaccines, treatments and testing. The FBI, in a joint statement with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said this month that it is investigating “the targeting and compromise of U.S. organizations conducting COVID-19-related research by [People’s Republic of China]-affiliated cyber actors and non-traditional collectors.” The potential theft of this information jeopardises the delivery of secure, effective, and efficient treatment options, according the statement. “Biomedical research has long been at the heart of something the Chinese have wanted and something they have engaged in economic espionage to get,” John Demers, assistant attorney general for national security, told CNBC. “It would be crazy to think that right now,
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The Chinese government’s demonstrated lack of transparency has also provided fertile ground for conspiracy theories. The claim that the virus was man-made has been pushed by numerous conspiracy groups on Facebook, obscure Twitter accounts and even found its way on to primetime Russian state TV. While such rumours are not credible, given that neither the United States nor China has incentive to develop biological weapons, they are difficult to dispel, because military officials on both sides still view with suspicion each other’s motives in building biosecurity programs. And months into the outbreak, the conspiracy virus is continuing to spread and new, unverified claims have been promoted by government officials, senior politicians and media outlets in China and the US. The claim that the novel coronavirus is a biological weapon is not only harmful but also scientifically unsupported. Scientists have rejected conspiracy theories that the virus was “engineered” by China, pointing out that mutations in the virus are “completely consistent with natural evolution.” According to The Lancet, scientists from multiple countries have “overwhelmingly” concluded that the novel coronavirus originated in wildlife. But the conspiracy theories have poisoned the atmosphere for U.S.-Chinese collaboration in addressing the outbreak, which might otherwise have presented an opportunity to reset the strained relationship.
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A Rare U.S. Political Consensus to Get Tough on China American Views of China at an All-Time Low Amid Coronavirus Outbreak 14
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by Joseph Braude Amid the coronavirus crisis, foreign policy debates in Washington are coming to center around the future of America’s relationship with Beijing. While a casual reading of American media would suggest a traditional divide along partisan lines, with Republicans favoring a more hawkish posture and Democrats a more dovish one, a closer examination shows convergence — around an increasingly hawkish stance.
CONGRESS AND THE ADMINISTRATION SPEARHEAD INQUIRIES On May 5, Secretary Pompeo laid out a case for a new investigation into the origins of the virus, saying, “It is pretty clear that at the front end of this the Chinese Communist Party misled the world...China covered up the outbreak in Wuhan. Its National Health Commission ordered virus samples destroyed on January 3rd. China ‘disappeared’ brave Chinese citizens who raised alarms. It deployed its propaganda organs to denounce those who politely called for simple transparency.” As far back as March, Republican Senator Tom Cotton, who had been warning of the dangers posed by the coronavirus since January, has introduced new legislation calling for a repatriation of the American medical supply chain out of China. In the Senator’s words, «The Chinese Communist Party has threatened to cut off America›s access to vital drugs in the midst of a pandemic caused by its own failures. It›s time to pull America›s supply chains for life-saving medicine out of China and make the CCP pay for contributing to this global emergency,»
DEBATE WITHIN THE DEMOCRATIC CAMP Given that the dynamic of a presidential election year produces a strong political incentive for the opposition party to oppose new policy initiatives by the current administration, opposition to these initiatives has been relatively mild. Early in the crisis, President Trump’s travel ban on China was met with criticism from some Democrats as enabling bias against Asian Americans. “In our response we can’t create prejudices and harbor anxieties toward one population,” Democratic representative Ami Bera said. Kaiser Kuo, Democraticleaning editor at large of the website SupChina, expressed fears of a “race to the bottom,” in which “Asian Americans will suffer even more terribly from racism.” However, in recent weeks, the Democratic presidential
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Given that the dynamic of a presidential election year produces a strong political incentive for the opposition party to oppose new policy initiatives by the current administration, opposition to these initiatives has been relatively mild. campaign has attempted to position the party as equally tough on China, if not more so than the Trump administration. In an advertisement geared toward the general election, Biden’s campaign released a video claiming that “Trump rolled over for the Chinese.” This came on the heels of a similar advertisement, funded by Democratic political operatives, which depicted Trump as under the undue influence of Beijing while declaring that “President Trump gave China his trust.” And recently, senior Biden advisers have taken to highlighting the fact that “the president praised China and President Xi more than 15 times,” signaling a new line of campaign messaging which will seek to depict Trump as “soft” on China for the coming election.
EMERGENT POPULAR CONSENSUS Meanwhile, at the popular level, a new Pew poll shows that Americans have taken an increasingly dim view of China regardless of party affiliation. Nearly three-quarters of Republicans and Republican-leaning independent voters look on China unfavorably, as compared with over %60 of Democrats and Democratic leaners. Overall, roughly two-thirds of Americans hold a negative opinion of China, the highest percentage recorded since Pew began polling on views of China in 2005. Indeed, in the last few years, China’s net favorability rating in the US has collapsed from a modest 3- in late 2016 to a 40- today. According to Mark Penn, chairman of one leading polling firm, skepticism of Beijing “is as much of a consensus issue as you can get in today’s divided world.” Penn added, “overall, there’s very little trust for anything that the Chinese government says or does, especially its premier. Xi Jinping has less than half the credibility of President Trump in this poll.”
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Coping with Coronavirus: Experts Share Insights on Mental-Health in the Age of the Pandemic
As the Virus Sweeps Across the World, Many of Us are Feeling Worried or Stressed About How It Could Affect Our Lives by Yasmine El-Geressi The rise of the novel coronavirus outbreak has upended life across the globe. With billions of people adjusting to the limitations of life in the age of the pandemic, many struggling to cope with the stress related to the various ramifications of it. We’re worried about our own health and that of our loved ones. We’re concerned about paying the rent or mortgage, the future of our finances, and the impact of the outbreak on the world economy. This is enough to make anyone feel anxious. We›ve asked Professor Neil Greenberg, an expert in mental ill-health and consultant occupational and forensic psychiatrist based at King›s College London, and Professor Joseph El-Khoury, an expert in adult psychiatric and addiction conditions based at the America University of Beirut, to weigh in on the impact of the pandemic on mental health and how individuals can manage their coronavirus-related anxieties during these unprecedented times in modern history. What effects can self-isolation have on mental health? Neil Greenberg: In most cases, it will be frustrating with no long term ill effects. If the quarantine is poorly handled, in that the reasons for the isolation are poorly understood or not agreed with, there are insufficient basic supplies (food, medicines, sanitary products etc.), where remote communication is not possible and where the period of removal from the rest of society is elongated,
then there can be long term negative impacts such as depression or post-traumatic stress symptoms. Joseph El-Khoury: We have to keep in mind that a pandemic on this scale has not been experienced for over 100 years, despite some limited outbreaks in China (SARS1-) and Africa (Ebola) in the last three decades. The research on the impact is scarce. Instead we look at what happened in 1918 but this was a dramatically different world and the lessons are difficult to translate for our era. This specifically applies to quarantine and the level of isolation in terms of scale (many millions of people over many weeks and months) is completely new to all societies. What we know of quarantine we know from previous outbreaks which were smaller scale and impact. What we also know is from prisoners in self isolation or from astronauts or submariners, but these are especial groups so we cannot generalise. What is happening is that we are now learning the impact as we experience it and mental health experts are sharing their notes and expertise from across the globe. I think many people want to know, what approaches or practices would you suggest for managing one’s anxiety and stress while navigating this pandemic? What mental health «tools» have you personally been using? NG: The best things to do is to restrict your access to the media which can provoke anxiety in many people, to listen to and rely
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on official sources for information about the virus and what to do, to keep in touch with people regularly even if for short periods and to try and keep physically well in terms of diet, sleep, exercise and doing things you enjoy as a good state of physical health is good for your mental health too. I have been doing my best to stick to the guidance above. JE: The recommendations, which include the ones released by the WHO, are actually very simple but not easy to implement. All professionals agree that if you already have anxiety or a psychiatric condition you are more likely to suffer more anxiety during this phase. But also, some people who have never experienced anxiety will also develop it for the first time. This can become disproportionate and lead to behaviour that is distressing to them and others such as constant disinfection, constant checking of the news, limiting all activities to what they consider completely safe and neglecting quality of life ‘until corona has passed’. So, the advice for all people is to maintain a heathy routine, no matter how small, that retains elements of their pre-corona life. This includes healthy eating patterns, healthy sleep pattern, dedicating time for work and time for other activities. It is also advised to focus on one or two new ‘self development’ activities that can keep you motivated. A third piece of advice is around social connection. Technology has allowed us to stay connected with the world even when in physical isolation. Imagine how it would have been only 20 years ago. We need to make use of this advantage by not spending most of our time learning about pandemics and following 24 hours news but connecting with
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current circles and developing new circles. A final piece of advice is to avoid self-medication at all costs whether with pills or any substance. If you feel that you are not coping seek help. With many healthcare workers around the world dealing with unprecedented levels of overwork, how can they deal with emotions and stress? NG: To speak to colleagues and supervisors they trust and to try and create a narrative, with colleagues, about what they have done and why unpleasant outcomes occurred. It’s not helpful to spend a lot of time blaming yourself or others for not being perfect all the time – the situation is an exceptional one and everyone is fallible. If you are a supervisor, it’s really important that you upskill so you feel confident in speaking about mental health with your team. If you develop problems that are persistent and impairing seek help early on to prevent a crisis and help prevent you becoming seriously unwell. JE: Frontline healthcare workers are one of the identified high risk group. They must balance their safety, with that of their care to the patient, with being faced with high deaths rate among these patients and among their colleagues, with the safety of their families. The support has been consistent across the world from the public but what is needed is real material support in PPEs, financial support, shorter duties, testing, in addition to psychological support given by experienced professionals. This is being done in the UK, the US and even in Lebanon in the
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last few weeks. Unfortunately taboos and stigma still exist and many prefer not to seek professional help. We have heard of high profile suicides in the US lately and this is really tragic when help should be available. Fears around our mortality are weighing heavily on the minds of many and that’s something we don’t typically talk about. How can we respond to that? NG: Do not be afraid to speak about death and threat. Don’t overly dwell on it, but avoidance is not helpful and can sustain negative thoughts and fears. Speak a little to people you trust ideally ones who understand what you have experienced and have experienced similar things themselves. JE: Developed countries are much less comfortable with deaths in large numbers than countries where mass tragedies happen more or less regularly or where the population has not been exposed to recent war and conflict. I think the best way to approach this problem is to understand that death is inevitable, in particular for those of an advanced age. We can deal with the grief by providing the best care possible in the best condition but also ensure dignity in healthcare and in death. Some of the pictures we have seen and stories we have heard of overflowing morgues and not enough hospital beds creates a type of moral injury that will affect these societies in the long term. Are there steps that can mitigate emotionally distancing ourselves as we socially distance from people? NG: Use remote means, e.g. Skype, Zoom etc. to stay in touch. Try to connect with others a little and often just as you would most likely do if you were out more or at work. Also, try and build in time before or after meetings to connect socially (remotely)
“I fear that the pandemic will leave people with a primordial urge to self-preserve, which is instinctive, to protect themselves and those closest to them while neglecting the common good.” Prof. Joseph El-Khoury
rather than signing on a minute before a meeting starts. JE: Physical contact and non-verbal communication are essential needs for human beings who are ‘social creatures’. And some societies such as ours rely even more on it. While virtual connection has been very helpful it cannot replace this need. I feel that with the pandemic progressing into its maintenance phase we need to find ways to safely reconnect physically. This of course will depend on how much we learn about COVID19and whether we do develop this heard immunity or the testing that goes with it. Until then most people have been circulating in small ‘safe’ clusters (a family, a flatter etc.) It is more difficult for single people who live alone for example, as happens in many western urban centres. Children›s lives have changed dramatically. How can we help our kids deal with everything happening around them? NG: Be honest with them but don’t provide more information than they can cope with depending on their age. Also, try to contain their anxieties and don’t share your concerns about the future too much. Be confident for them and explain that whatever happens, you are all in it together. Also, allow and encourage them to stay connected remotely to their friends and your wider family. JE: Kids will be impacted by their parents primarily and their peers of course. Anxious parents will lead to anxious children. There are excellent resources online that are targeting kids of all ages trying to explain the pandemic. Parents need to again maintain a semblance of routine for children that would be created around a normal school day. I advise against lying to children and misinforming them as they will access contradictory information elsewhere and will lose trust in your message
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Professor Joseph ElKhoury, an expert in adult psychiatric and addiction conditions based at the America University of Beirut.
“I think the biggest impact will be from the financial impacts which will follow the crisis. We know that economic downturns are associated with poor mental health and sadly suicide rates increase.” Prof. Neil Greenberg share anything fun with friends and family to create a sense of community even if you cannot see people face to face. If someone is struggling stay in touch with them and encourage them to seek help. Professor Neil Greenberg, an expert in mental ill-health and consultant occupational and forensic psychiatrist based at King›s College London.
and beyond it. Instead frame the message realistically while providing reassurance that everything is being done to protect you and them. Also involve them in the safety measures so they feel empowered. With the constant barrage of confusing and overwhelming bad news, are there ways for people to stay informed without getting overwhelmed and making their anxiety worse? For example, should we be mindful of our news intake — how, and how often, we’re taking in updates about the virus? NG: Definitely restrict your exposure to never ending media stories especially if you find it makes you anxious. Try to check news only once a day and do not have alerts on your phone for each new news story. Rely on official sources of information for ‘facts’ rather than speculative media stories. JE: Disconnecting from 24 hours new as much as possible. Limiting notifications from such websites, avoiding pandemic related conversations that seem to lead to nowhere, and focus on analysis articles and commentaries that go beyond number counting and doomsday stories. Of course, using reliable sources that rely on references and valid experts. Also, focusing on other news, even when these are not positive but simply to remember that not all needs to be seen through the ‘coronavirus’ angle. The coronavirus counting apps are particularly toxic as they provide no context when all experts have warned against comparing countries. What are some ways that people can support family and friends during this time? NG: Be kind. Send gifts, messages, connect remotely and
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JE: Be there, available but do not overwhelm. Ask whether they want help (and what kind of help - may not be related directly to COVID19-). Do not impose it. Families have had to either distance themselves physically or actually spend all their time together. Both situations can have an impact. Be aware of your own ‹emotional space› and that of others. This will allow you to protect yourself psychologically and to be present for others effectively. What worries you the most when it comes to people›s mental health during this pandemic and do you fear that there will be a long term mental health impact of Covid19-? NG: I think the biggest impact will be from the financial impacts which will follow the crisis. We know that economic downturns are associated with poor mental health and sadly suicide rates increase. Thus, getting country’s economies going is going to be good for their population’s mental health. JE: In the early days of the pandemic there was hope that this global challenge would bring people together. The reality is much more complex whether we think of collaboration between countries or simply at the level of a community or a family. I fear that the pandemic will leave people with a primordial urge to self-preserve, which is instinctive, to protect themselves and those closest to them while neglecting the common good. Unfortunately, this is exactly the strategy that can lead to conflicts and social stressors. There is a big role for governments in being a source of trust and taking effective measures to ensure social security in its widest sense while protecting civil liberties. The longer the pandemic and its economic fallout persists the more likely the mental health impact will be deeper and more persistent.
Keeping Entertainment at a Distance
How the Sports and Cinema Industry is Adapting to New Realities by Ali El Shamy Earlier this month, a photo circulated throughout various social media platforms showing an excerpt from an Italian newspaper from the year 1962. The image showed a number of people driving cars in a busy street, however they weren’t driving regular vehicles. Rather they were driving these strange futuristic vehicles, which consisted of only one driver’s seat, which was enclosed in a vertical glass dome. The reason why this image was circulated online was because the magazine that had featured
it supposedly predicted that this was what driving would look like in 2022, thereby implying that the Italian magazine predicted that social distancing would become a phenomenon in the 2020s and even worse implying that it would become a necessary measure for a good part of this decade. While it is true that this image was featured in a 1962 issue of Domenica del Corriere newspaper, the year 2022 was never mentioned in the publication and more importantly the newspaper didn’t predict that we would be using single person cars for protective reasons. Rather, it said that due to the increasing
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use of cars, people in the future might try to adopt smaller sized vehicles to reduce traffic in the streets.
Schalke›s Austrian forward Guido Burgstaller (C) arrives with a face mask to the German first division Bundesliga football match BVB Borussia Dortmund v Schalke 04 on May 2020 ,16 in Dortmund, western Germany as the season resumed following a two-month absence due to the novel coronavirus COVID19- pandemic. (Getty)
In other developments, the German Bundesliga restarted last week making it the first European domestic football league to resume after temporarily stopping due to COVID19- lockdown restrictions. While this was welcome news to soccer fans that have been yearning to watch matches again, some oddities that occurred during the games did raise some eyebrows. Namely, there was the fact that players on the substitute benches were sitting two metres apart and wearing masks. This was strange because none of the players on the pitch were adorning facemasks, and the fact that no social distancing between players is feasibly possible in a contact sport like soccer. As such, it seemed redundant to implement social distancing on the substitute bench, although an argument could be made that if social distancing is possible during any point of a soccer game, then it is best for everyone to do so in order to minimize the risk of infection. While Germany seems to be on track to complete its season, many other soccer leagues are struggling with this conundrum; indeed many leagues have voided their seasons and awarded whichever team was league leader with the title. While this will be a problem that needs to be resolved sooner rather than later, there are questions on how leisure, business and travel venues can be reopened while maintaining the safety of their customers.
SPORTS EVENTS WITHOUT FANS As the world of sports is still coming to terms with the pandemic, there is one obvious solution to how you can protect audiences: simply playing matches without any fans present at stadiums. While this might seem like a straightforward solution, there is one massive hurdle: money. Though it is true that ticket sales aren’t the only major source of income for sports teams, as factors such as advertising deals and sponsors have grown to be one of the biggest contributors to a sports team’s annual earnings. However, the lack of ticket sales would be a massive monetary loss for the world of sports, and many administrators are trying to find a viable solution to the problem.
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The NBA’s current basketball season has been suspended since March, however it seems that it now looking to resume the season soon as it is making preparations to administer anti-body tests on players to see if players have previously contracted the virus and therefore, in theory, built immunity against it. Major League Baseball has had to delay its start to the season due to the pandemic, and now it is looking towards playing games without fans present at the stadium. To compensate for this loss, the league has sought to cut players’ wages, however the MLB Players Association (the union representing MLB players) have rejected the prospect of salary cuts. The Association argues that since the players are risking their lives playing these games, then they shouldn’t be asked to get a pay cut. While the MLB is still trying to resolve the problem, it is reportedly working on a list of new regulations to reduce the risk of infection such as banning hugs and high fives during celebrations, destroying baseball bats that have been used by multiple players and administrating 10,000 tests a week on players and their families. Meanwhile, the National Football League has yet to make any new changes since their annual season hasn’t started yet, moreover it has recently released its tentative schedule of games assuming that the season will go on as normal. The NBA’s current basketball season has been suspended since March, however it seems that it now looking to resume the season soon as it is making preparations to administer anti-body tests on players to see if players have previously contracted the virus and therefore, in theory, built immunity against it. The English Premier League, the most popular soccer league in the world, is looking to resume its suspended season as Liverpool is looking to end its
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-30year league drought. Thus far, we don’t know how the Premier League is going to restart but we do know that they’re looking to do so by the summer. A list of regulations are rumoured to be introduced, for example football halves might be shortened, and more substitutions might be allowed to alleviate player tiredness due to fixture congestion.
In the US the closure of regular movie theatres, saw a revival of drive-in theatres. This was a huge blast to the past considering that drive-in theatres peaked in popularity in the 1950s, and they have been on a downward spiral ever since.
DRIVE-IN MOVIE THEATRES STRIKE BACK As many countries around the world introduced social distancing measures, movie theatres have shut its doors to avid moviegoers. One month prior to the pandemic being declared, Sonic the Hedgehog was breaking box office records and receiving accolades from film critics. This prompted some people to post jokes online stating that Sonic might end up winning best film in the 2021 Oscars should movie theatres continue to be closed. All jokes aside, the movie industry is facing many obstacles, as many productions have had to stop, while many other finished films have had to delay their release date. While major Hollywood productions might be able to afford rigorous testing for cast and crew to keep up their schedules, smaller budget movies will struggle on that front. However, news broke out this week that, Songbird, a Michael Bay produced film will begin production within weeks. Although, it is being produced by one of Hollywood’s major directors/ producers, it is said to be made in the same manner of low budget indie paranormal thrillers. Moreover, its director Adam Mason has worked on a show called “Into the Dark” which regularly feature episodes with
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In this still image from video provided by the NFL, Logan Wilson, center, reacts after being selected by the Cincinnati Bengals during the third round of the 2020 NFL Draft on April 2020 ,24. (Photo by NFL via Getty Images)
Passengers watch a movie from their cars at a drive-in cinema outside the Mall of Emirates in Dubai ,2020 ,17 on May 19-during the COVID )pandemic. (Getty
as few as three characters and a few as one setting. As a result, he can implement such artistic choices to comply with social distancing safety. An article published by Indiewire also suggested that several indie filmmakers are adapting to the pandemic and might start doing their own safety measures such as banning face to face shots, not allowing more than one actor in the same room and only allowing script practicing via call applications such as Zoom. So on that front, the indie film industry might have an edge over mainstream cinema. But what of movie theatres? Earlier in April, Universal Studios decided to conduct a bold experiment. Trolls World Tour, a sequel to the 2016 animated movie Trolls was set to be released in theatres that month. As such, Universal had the option of delaying the release of the movie, but instead it opted to do a digital release on a number of streaming platforms such as Amazon Prime Video, YouTube and Google Play. While this might have been a risk, it ultimately paid off as it made 100 Million dollars from digital rentals, breaking records for the biggest ever-digital movie release. This raised questions over weather or not other studios will follow suit, and how profitable such an
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action could be. An argument could be made that the fact that many children were out of schools during this time period helped ramp up rentals, as such there is no guarantee that other film genres can be as successful. Meanwhile, in the US the closure of regular movie theatres, saw a revival of drive-in theatres. This was a huge blast to the past considering that drive-in theatres peaked in popularity in the 1950s, and they have been on a downward spiral ever since. However, because moviegoers can watch a film from the safety of their cars, then they can maintain social distancing safety measures. While a revival of drive-in theatres might work in a country like the US, which has a historic culture of drive thru theatres, such a revival might not be viable for other countries that lack such a cultural connection with the institution. Nevertheless, drive in theatres have been appearing across the world as of late, as countries like Spain, France and the UAE have been setting up their own drive in cinemas many of which showing older movies. Although, we are still adapting to our new post-COVID19-, it seems that our entertainment industry, which we took for granted, might still need to go through some growing pains before it fully redevelop itself for our new reality.
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The Pandemic Exposes Dangers of the Informal Economy
And It Is Not Just Developing Countries That Are in Trouble by Pascale Joassart-Marcelli The novel coronavirus has wreaked havoc on the global economy, shuttering businesses, disrupting supply chains, and causing millions of people to lose their jobs. But the pandemic has been especially devastating for the world’s two billion or so informal workers, who constitute roughly 60 per cent of the global labour force and often earn less than $2 per day. These workers, particu.larly in developing countries, face a looming economic calamity
Unlike workers in the formal economy, who benefit from legal and social protections, informal workers earn their living without a safety net. They are mostly women and mostly self-employed, engaged in occupations as varied as street vending, domestic work, transportation, and garbage collection. Some also work as off-the-books day laborers in factories, farms, and other formal businesses that don’t extend full rights or protections to all of their employees. Measures taken by many countries to fight the pandemic—including lockdowns implemented without signifi-
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cant assistance for those whose jobs are affected—have threatened the livelihoods of informal workers and pushed them further into poverty, hunger, and homelessness. In just a few weeks, millions of informal jobs have been lost and millions more have .been put at risk But the crisis in the informal economy is not affecting just poor countries—it is hurting rich ones, too. Nearly a fifth of all workers in the United States are informal, and they are particularly vulnerable to the health threat posed by the new coronavirus as well as to its economic consequences. The popular image of the informal American worker may now be a laborer in the technology-enabled “gig economy”—such as a driver for Uber or Lyft—but the shift toward a larger informal economy began under U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Regulations on employers loosened after 1980, allowing businesses to gradually offload risks onto subcontractors, day laborers, and other flexible workers. Lack of worker protections now makes the coronavirus crisis particularly acute in the United States: it is not just a health crisis or an economic crisis but a deeper social crisis decades in the .making
THE RISE OF THE INFORMAL WORKER
An Indonesian delivery driver is stopped at a checkpoint and cited for not wearing a facemask on May 2020 ,13 in Jakarta, Indonesia. (Getty)
Throughout the developing world, the pandemic has exposed entrenched social inequalities. In India, where upward of 90 percent of jobs are informal, the International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that over 400 million workers are likely to sink into deep poverty (defined as earning less than $2 per day) thanks to the nationwide lockdown announced on March 24. The existence of large informal economies in many poor countries also increases the risk that COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, will spread among the most vulnerable workers, who depend on daily earnings and cannot afford to stop working. Informal workers already face adverse health conditions, such as poor nutrition, limited access to sanitation, and chronic disease linked to air and water pollution. Unsurprisingly, informal workers have led protests demanding emergency public assistance in Colombia, Malawi, Uganda, and elsewhere. Some governments have taken small steps to support informal workers during the crisis. For example, in Peru, where almost three-quarters of jobs are informal, the government offered the poorest workers a onetime payment of about $100. But many countries have done little .or nothing to help such workers weather the pandemic Informal workers are also at risk in the developed world. Since the 1980s, informal labour arrangements have become increasingly common in industrialized nations. As economies became more globalized and governments embraced neoliberalism, demand for cheap and disposable labour increased along with the supply of people willing to work informally, including immigrants and other vulnerable people barred from formal jobs. In the United States, the public blamed big government for the economic turmoil of the 1970s, leading to drastic cuts in welfare spending and the deregulation of numerous industries over
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The pandemic has been especially devastating for the world’s two billion or so informal workers, who constitute roughly 60 per cent of the global labour force and often earn less than 2$ per day. the next four decades. In this regulatory vacuum, the informal economy grew: more and more jobs lacked employment security, health-care coverage, sick days, pensions, and severance packages. In other words, informality arose out of deliberate decisions by elected officials to dismantle welfare, ignore or remove hard-fought labour protections, skimp on affordable housing, and, more recently, prioritize financial firms over workers, reject .universal health care, and neglect immigration reform The share of American workers engaged in informal work has crept steadily higher in recent decades. Between 2005 and 2015, the percentage of U.S. workers whose main jobs were informal rose from ten per cent to 16 per cent. By 2018, at least a third of the U.S. adult population had engaged in some form of informal work, according to the Federal Reserve. That same year, the ILO estimated that informal employment accounted for 30 million jobs in the United States—or 19 per cent of the total labor force. These workers are ill-equipped to handle routine health problems, let alone a pandemic. They have no choice but to go to work, .even if they are sick They are also disproportionately people of colour, immigrants, and women. Economic and racial inequality has profoundly affected the way Americans experience the coronavirus crisis. Data from the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and from local public health agencies show that African Americans and Latinos are more likely to die from COVID-19 than nonLatino whites, challenging the notion that the disease is a “great leveler.” And death figures for these groups are most likely understated, given that vulnerable minority populations often lack access to testing and health care. Pundits are quick to point to individual “underlying conditions” such as obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes as an explanation for these disparities. But among the biggest risk factors for COVID-19 are social and economic inequality, which have been exacerbated by the informali.zation of the economy Many at-risk informal workers have suddenly been classified as “essential,” keeping the economy going during the pandemic even though they lack basic labour protections. These include
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restaurant workers, farmworkers, caretakers, cleaners, and delivery workers—none of whom can work from home. Thanks to this labour, more fortunate Americans can telework safely without having to expose themselves to the virus. What remains of the formal economy depends heavily on goods and services produced .and delivered by informal workers Such workers have limited access to the health care and other benefits needed to weather the pandemic and keep themselves and others safe. Even those whose employment is technically on the books, such as Uber drivers and Instacart shoppers, face a raft of disadvantages because they are classified as independent contractors. Many struggle to win unemployment benefits because their employers fail to pay insurance premiums or report wage .data to state agencies It remains unclear how the major relief and emergency measures passed by Congress, allocating over $2 trillion for paid sick leave, unemployment benefits, and food assistance, will help informal workers, because these measures contain onerous eligibility requirements and significant loopholes. But they likely won’t help the millions of informal workers who are unable to document wages and hours of work prior to the pandemic or who are ineligible for food stamps and sick leave because of their immigration status. What is clear is that the pandemic has deepened the precariousness of informal work in the United States, just as it has in India and other developing countries. Many workers don’t know how they will pay for their next meal, let alone their rent, making it more likely that they will continue working regardless .of the risk
TIPPING POINTS Major crises sometimes expose the root causes of societal and
Informal workers are also at risk in the developed world. Since the 1980s, informal labour arrangements have become increasingly common in industrialized nations.
economic problems, encouraging reform and change. The Great Depression set in motion the New Deal, which created the foundation of a new social contract that was further solidified in the years following World War II. The New Deal put in place social safety nets and laid the groundwork for more collective bargaining, facilitating the growth of the middle class, expanding social and legal protections of workers, and formalizing economic secu.rity for most working people Since the Great Depression, however, subsequent economic crises have had the opposite effect. They have allowed legislators to gut existing welfare programs, relax government regulations, demonize immigrants, and bail out large corporations that often rely on informal workers to fill their most menial jobs. The five major recessions since the early 1970s have eroded much of the country’s social safety net, driving many workers into the informal economy. In fact, net job growth in the decade after the Great Recession of 2008 was driven almost entirely by jobs created in the informal economy. The United States has created “bad jobs” much faster than “good jobs,” and American workers are suffering as a result. The employment figures much touted by U.S. President Donald Trump prior to the pandemic masked the fact that 44 percent of workers, or 53 million people, earned low wages, as defined by researchers at the Brookings Institution. Many of these workers were informal, laboring without legal and .social protections
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A delivery driver collects a meal as McDonald’s Chaul End Lane restaurant opens for delivery and pre orders in 2020 ,13 on May Luton, United Kingdom ). (Getty
It doesn’t have to be this way. The coronavirus pandemic seems to have generated an upsurge of solidarity. A number of organizations, such as the One Fair Wage Emergency Fund, the Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and the Undocumented Workers Relief Funds, have stepped up to protect informal workers and fill the gaps left by government programs in various U.S. cities. Although the work of these organizations is extremely important, it is not enough. If Americans want to minimize the most pernicious effects of the current crisis and better prepare for future crises, they must expand the social safety net and extend protections to in.formal workers The highly politicized protests to end state-imposed stay-at-home orders in Florida, Michigan, Oklahoma, and other states may be intemperate and even reckless, but they reflect deep economic insecurities among middle- and low-income Americans. Unfortunately, these demonstrations attack the wrong target. It is not the lockdowns that have caused economic insecurity but the informalization of the economy that has taken place in recent decades. To build a stronger country and healthier society, the United States must start using its coronavirus relief programs to require and provide greater protections for all working people, formal.izing the informal economy by recognizing its significance .This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com
This picture taken on April 2019 ,6, Indian weaver, Narsinhbhai weaving khadi (handwoven natural fiber cloth) denim jeans cloth at the Imam Manzil Khadi Weaving and Selling Centre run by the Badhia family, descendants of skilled weaver Ramjibhai Badhia, in Ahmedabad. (Getty)
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Why Travel Bans Fail to Stop Pandemics Hasty Border Closures Invite Chaos - and Can Seed New Outbreaks by Doug Saunders If the novel coronavirus pandemic were turned into a movie, a pivotal scene would capture the unforgettable events of Saturday, March 14, at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Three days prior, U.S. President Donald Trump had suddenly announced sweeping travel restrictions on most European countries that would go into effect at midnight on Friday, March 13. Although the travel ban was intended to apply only to foreigners, Trump declared on national televi-
sion that he was “suspending all travel from Europe to the United States,” prompting thousands of panicked Americans to cut short their vacations and business trips and rush back to the United States. Spilling into packed arrival halls, they found themselves shoulder-to-shoulder in nearly motionless customs and immigration lines, healthy travellers sharing the stale air with those who had picked up the virus, some of whom were sweating and coughing. Social media posts from O’Hare showed a seething human mass of contagion as far as the eye could see.
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Travellers waited in this tight-packed mob for as long as seven hours before they were “screened”—given a rudimentary questionnaire asking if they felt any symptoms or had been in contact with people known to be infected with the virus. Then most of them were allowed to return to their homes and communities, reportedly without clear instructions to self-isolate or quarantine. Similar scenes played out in at least a dozen other U.S. airports that day. There is no way to know for sure, since the United States had not—and still has not—organized adequate testing or contact tracing, but the airport rush of March 14 may well have set the United States on course to become the most COVID-19-infected country in the world. The events of that Saturday were not the result of open borders or free movement. Rather, they were a consequence of slamming the border shut with little warning. Officials at the state level had no chance to prepare for the influx of arrivals. For two days after Trump’s announcement, most returning Americans, healthy or otherwise, passed through U.S. airports without being screened or receiving any quarantine information. Rudimentary screening procedures were finally organized on Saturday, the same day the ban on European travellers was implemented, but their primary effect was to cause dangerous bottlenecks. “You could hardly invent a better scenario for superspreading events,” Jeremy Konyndyk, the former director of USAID’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, tweeted after seeing the images of stranded travelers. “Any cases of COVID in these crowds will have a far higher chance of spreading to others in these lines than if they were just allowed in unchecked.” Travellers arrive at the international terminal of the O’Hare Airport in Chicago, Illinois, on March 2020 ,15. (Getty)
By suddenly halting travel from Europe, the Trump administration ignored a timeless lesson of human migration: slamming borders shut usually has the opposite of the intended effect. Rather than ending cross-border movement, sudden immigration bans or caps create large and often unmanageable rushes of people hoping to make it across the border before it is too late. These surges occur immediately after bans are announced, when returning travelers rush to meet real or imagined deadlines, and often in the days and weeks beforehand, in anticipation of expected announcements. And when some of the people rushing to cross the border are carrying a potentially deadly virus, the result can be catastrophic.
BANS ARE MADE TO BE BEATEN Travel bans and border closures do little to halt the spread of infectious diseases even when they are implemented with sufficient notice and preparation. One study conducted during the 2014 Ebola crisis in West Africa and published in the Harvard Public Health Review found that flight bans and border closures were “ineffective” in controlling the spread of the disease and sometimes made fighting the pandemic more difficult. Another study published this year in the Annals of Internal Medicine examined outbreaks of Ebola, MERS, and SARS and found that travel restrictions had only a “limited effect.” Such restrictions
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By suddenly halting travel from Europe, the Trump administration ignored a timeless lesson of human migration: slamming borders shut usually has the opposite of the intended effect. reduced new cases by three per cent or less and ultimately failed to prevent outbreaks from spreading to new regions. And a study published by Science examined the spread of COVID-19 from Wuhan to other parts of China and to other countries and found that even near-total international travel restrictions have only a “modest” effect if the disease is still spreading rapidly within the source country. When travel restrictions are hasty and haphazard, they aren’t just ineffective—they can be counterproductive. The Trump administration was not alone in learning this lesson the hard way during the current pandemic. On March 16, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau closed his country’s border with the United States to all but essential business traffic and called on Canadians traveling abroad to come home immediately. The following week, more than a million Canadians returned, many from spring-break vacations in Florida, which at that time had among the highest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States. Canada was unprepared for the influx. Although Trudeau’s government asked returning travellers to self-quarantine for two weeks, it had no comprehensive system for enforcing this guideline or monitoring returnees. In at least some cases, border officials at overcapacity airports reportedly failed to deliver clear quarantine instructions. Many older “snowbird” couples were reprimanded by shopkeepers, neighbors, and fellow travelers for visibly ignoring the directive. One quarantine-flouting traveller who returned from abroad to the province of Newfoundland managed to infect 44 people with COVID-19 in a single visit to a funeral home. But it wasn’t until March 25, long after the border-closure rush had subsided, that Canada invoked its Quarantine Act and made it illegal for returning travellers to leave their homes for two weeks. By then, people returning home from abroad had seeded outbreaks of coronavirus across Canada: in Toronto, the number of daily cases nearly quadrupled by the end of the month, a rise health authorities attributed to spring-break returnees. Quebec was soon recording as many as 590 new cases a day as a direct result of people returning from the United States. It later emerged that nearly all of Canada’s initial COVID-19 infections came from the United States.
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Internal travel bans caused similarly dangerous stampedes in some European countries. Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s March 8 decision to lock down the entire country and ban intercity travel caused a large-scale rush to train stations in Milan and other northern cities, where packed trains carried thousands of people, many of whom were infected, to southern regions, where authorities were unprepared to monitor or quarantine them. Anticipation of Conte’s announcement “caused many people to try to escape, causing the opposite effect of what the decree is trying to achieve,” Milan virologist Roberto Burioni told The Guardian. A week later in France, the sudden imposition of internal travel restrictions sparked a similar exodus from Paris to less-infected peripheral regions, where officials struggled to enforce quarantines; one phone-tracking study found that a million Parisians fled the capital on tightly packed trains. When it comes to beat-the-ban border rushes, however, the United States is in a league of its own. Trump has made sudden border closures his signature coronavirus policy. The first one came on January 31, when he banned foreign nationals from entering the United States if they had been to China in the previous two weeks. By that point, more than 400,000 people had already flown to the United States from China, including thousands directly from Wuhan, in the four weeks since the coronavirus outbreak had come to the attention of U.S. authorities. Many of these people had rushed home in anticipation of a travel ban—or in the two-day period between the president’s announcement and when the ban went into effect. The ban had another flaw. Like all border closures, this one necessarily exempted U.S. citizens, as well as green-card holders
The countries that have done the best job preventing foreign infections of COVID19- have either closed their borders completely (barring all foreigners and subjecting nationals to mandatory quarantine) or left them open and carefully monitored new arrivals.
and their relatives. According to The New York Times, almost 40,000 people arrived in the United States on direct flights from China during the eight weeks after the ban went into effect. An even larger number may have arrived from China via connecting flights. And until mid-March, many of these people received no screening or quarantine instructions. Trump’s March 14 ban on European travel was even more disastrous. The crowds that descended on U.S. airports both following the president’s announcement and in the weeks leading up to it appear to have been responsible for outsized coronavirus outbreaks in many states, and especially in New York. One investigation of U.S. coronavirus data found that travel from Europe was responsible for the initial spread of COVID-19 in at least 13 states, while Chinese travel infected only six. Particularly dangerous were the weeks immediately before Trump’s announcement, during which many Americans working and traveling in Europe, having witnessed the China ban and anticipating a similar one for Europe, decided to return home. During that period, more than 10,000 direct flights from Europe arrived at 12 major U.S. airports, carrying an estimated one million passengers, none of whom received quarantine orders or contact-tracing interviews. And in the four weeks after the Europe ban went into effect, there were at least 246 flights to U.S cities from western European countries. The outsized COVID-19 epidemic in New York City appears to be directly traceable to the burst of travel surrounding the ban. Between February 5 and March 14, almost 4,000 direct flights
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Health Worker wait to screen passenger traveling fro Bangladesh during a nationwide lockdown imposed as a preventive measure against the COVID19coronavirus on May 18,2020 in NSCBI Air Port in Kolkata, India. (Getty)
nology and staff already in place from previous pandemics. But both nations have so far succeeded in keeping the virus in check: New Zealand has seen only 21 COVID-19 deaths to date, and Taiwan has seen only seven. Other places have succeeded with the opposite approach, leaving borders at least somewhat open and allowing citizens to return gradually while carefully monitoring the spread of the disease. Hong Kong allows travelers to fly into the city but requires them to take a COVID-19 test on arrival and then wait at desks in a gymnasium-sized isolation hall for eight hours until the results are ready. The crowded city has had only four coronavirus deaths.
from Europe arrived at New York’s international airports, and in the period after the ban, there were at least 246 flights. New York City’s infections, according to a study by New York University researchers who traced the virus substrains detected in patients, mostly originated in Europe; about two-thirds of the city’s cases were traced directly to Europe, and a large part of the other third came from states that also got their major infections from Europe.
OPEN OR CLOSED, BUT NOT AJAR The countries that have done the best job preventing foreign infections of COVID-19 have either closed their borders completely (barring all foreigners and subjecting nationals to mandatory quarantine) or left them open and carefully monitored new arrivals. New Zealand barred entry to nearly all travellers on March 19 and has seen hardly any coronavirus spread since then. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s government booked up a large number of hotels near airports, filled them with medical and catering staff, and turned them into “assisted self-isolation” facilities where returning New Zealanders were required to stay for two weeks. (Early on, some travelers were allowed to isolate at home, under police watch, if they could prove they had the space and resources to do so.) Taiwan enforced a similarly strict quarantine mandate, requiring all arrivals to have their precise location tracked for two weeks using smartphone apps. Police paid visits to those whose apps showed movement away from their homes. Such measures may have been easier in small, island countries: New Zealand has had only 40,000 citizens arrive during its lockdown, and Taiwan had quarantine-monitoring tech-
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Germany has also managed to slow the virus’s spread. After a big initial outbreak in February, when many young people returned from ski trips in Italy, the German government asked citizens to restrict travel. It set up checkpoints at some international borders, but it did not issue sudden orders for Germans to come home. The country’s normally busy borders with Belgium and the Netherlands remained open and unguarded, and airlines and trains continued to operate. Germany saw a rapid decline in new infections until very recently, when the country began reopening schools, businesses, and restaurants. Norway has had relative success with a similar strategy, shutting its ports and airports on March 16 but keeping its heavily trafficked border with Sweden open, relying on rigorous testing and contact tracing to control the disease’s spread. By not suddenly announcing travel bans or border closures, these countries avoided a rush that would have overwhelmed public health staff and resources. As a result, they were able to monitor the trickle of people crossing the border and quarantine them if necessary. From the moment it left China in early January, the novel coronavirus has proven to be a truly global traveler, stubbornly unconcerned with tough laws or bold proclamations intended to stop human movement. No country of any size has managed to prevent the coronavirus from entering its territory. What the last five months have shown is something that migration experts and epidemiologists have known for decades: that suddenly slamming borders shut during a pandemic is counterproductive unless large-scale resources and thousands of staff are deployed to isolate and monitor the inevitable cascade of returning nationals. Even the countries that closed their borders entirely and implemented strict quarantine measures for returning nationals did not assume that border closures alone would protect them. They did what the Trump administration has so far steadfastly refused to do: test, trace, and isolate until the virus was mostly stamped out. Although it is important to stop people from moving around as much as possible during a pandemic, one hard lesson of the coronavirus crisis is that closing borders quickly often does the opposite. This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.
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After Kim Jong Un
It Is Time to Plan for North Korea’s Inevitable Succession Crisis by Katrin Fraser Katz and Victor Cha Last month’s media frenzy over the health and possible death of the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un seemed in many respects like an indulgent diversion. During the nearly threeweek period, starting on April 11, when Kim did not appear in public, international media outlets amplified thinly sourced reports suggesting that he might be in “grave danger” or even dead following a rumoured cardiovascular procedure gone wrong. Satirical memes under the hashtag #KIMJONGUNDEAD, one of which depicted the leader as a pickle in a
“vegetative state,” took social media by storm. Kim’s May 1 reappearance, alive and seemingly well at a ceremony marking the opening of a fertilizer factory exposed the news reports as overblown. Beneath the surface of unseriousness, however, lay an important reminder that this nuclear-armed state could easily face a leadership crisis. In that event, outside powers could clash in an attempt to secure weapons of mass destruction or prevent refugee outflows.
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Kim’s brief disappearance has underscored the urgent need for the United States to adopt a regional security strategy for North Korea—one that coordinates the responses of the interested powers to the potential instability of the regime in Pyongyang.
UNCERTAIN SUCCESSION Kim Jong Un may be touring fertilizer factories today, but he is just a stent procedure away from passing like his father and grandfather. The reasons for his recent disappearance are still unknown and may never be known. But Kim’s significant health problems—including obesity, heavy smoking and drinking, and a family history of kidney and heart disease—are likely culprits. The North Korean leader’s health has been a concern for some time. In the fall of 2014, Kim vanished from public view for around six weeks and returned with a cane. South Korea’s National Intelligence Service later indicated that he had undergone ankle surgery on a cyst, a condition that could recur because of his weight and lifestyle. Kim’s father and grandfather were significantly older than he is when they died of heart attacks. According to the Washington Post reporter Anna Fifield, however, South Korean doctors who have analysed footage of Kim at summits assess that he is physically weak for his age. Although he is only 36, Kim’s premature death is a real possibility, which means that North Korea could undergo a leadership transition at any moment. No one knows who would take charge of North Korea if that happened or how long a new hierarchy would likely take to consolidate its power. North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un before a meeting with US President Donald Trump on the south side of the Military Demarcation Line that divides North and South Korea, in the Joint Security Area (JSA) of Panmunjom in the Demilitarized zone (DMZ) on June ,30 2019. (Getty)
Beneath the surface of unseriousness, however, lay an important reminder that this nuclear-armed state could easily face a leadership crisis. Kim Jong Un rules alone, as his two predecessors did. Kim’s successor could rule alone or govern as part of a leadership collective. Even a hybrid of these two structures is possible. The leadership transition period could be short or drawn out, depending on whether a power struggle ensues. But perhaps the greatest danger to the North Korean regime would be a power vacuum, which might emerge if no one is designated as a successor or if someone assumes the job but falters. North Korea’s last two leadership transitions went relatively smoothly, despite contrary predictions. But whether this one does or not, outside powers are unlikely to know much about North Korea’s internal situation. The new leadership’s externally directed behavior could be difficult to interpret: an insecure regime consolidating power or a secure one boosting support could each decide to test nuclear weapons or missiles, for example.
If, indeed, Kim Jong Un’s April disappearance was related to his health problems, the episode may have prompted him to identify and begin grooming a successor, just as his father and grandfather did years before they died. So far, however, Kim has not publicly designated anyone to replace him, and the North Korean constitution does not detail a process for transferring power.
Because the regional powers will face great difficulties predicting or assessing the dynamics within North Korea’s leadership circles, they will need to plan for different transition contingencies and keep in mind the many possible explanations for the leadership’s actions.
The health of the North Korean leader is one of the most closely guarded secrets in one of the world’s hardest intelligence targets, so any discussion of its future leaders is highly speculative. But among the possibilities is Kim Jong Un’s younger sister, Kim Yo Jong, who has risen in prominence in recent years and would offer the important advantage of maintaining the Kim family bloodline. Kim Jong Un’s uncle, Kim Pyong Il, recently returned to North Korea after several years of diplomatic service in Europe and is another possible successor. But the position could even go for the first time to someone outside the Kim family—an official from the military or political leadership, for instance.
If the North Korean regime were to collapse or become unstable, the regional powers would likely face threats to their security that they would not be well equipped to address alone. For example, if Kim were to die suddenly without designating a successor, or if he identified a successor who was unable to establish control, the United States, together with South Korea and Japan, would need to devise a plan to secure North Korea’s stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and provide basic goods and services to the North Korean people to avoid a humanitarian crisis. At the same time, these actors would need to ensure that neither North Korea nor the other regional powers misinterpreted their attempts to stabilize the situation as an invasion.
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A TANGLED WEB
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Complicating any such efforts is the fact that the powers with interests on the Korean Peninsula do not all share the same priorities. In the case of a succession crisis, the United States would likely focus first on locating and securing North Korea’s nuclear weapons. China probably would be most eager to maintain stability and prevent a flood of refugees from rushing its border. If American and South Korean forces were to enter North Korea to prevent weapons of mass destruction from being smuggled out of the country, Beijing would also be wary of any movement of their troops near its frontier. The United States and South Korea have reportedly worked on plans to respond to various collapse scenarios, including a classified set of operations popularly known as OPLAN 5029
The United States and South Korea have reportedly worked on plans to respond to various collapse scenarios, including a classified set of operations popularly known as OPLAN 5029 (Operational Plan 5029).
(Operational Plan 5029). But getting leaders in Washington and Seoul to agree on whether, when, and how to actually implement these plans would not be so simple, as much would depend on the politics and orientations of both governments. The current, progressive South Korean administration of President Moon Jae-in, for instance, has focused on engagement with Pyongyang and would likely resist implementing OPLAN 5029 if doing so would create the impression that Seoul was prodding North Korea’s regime toward collapse. Within the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, Randall Schriver, who served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs throughout 2018 and 2019, indicated that OPLAN 5029 did not come up in discussions on North Korea during his tenure. The divergence and sensitivity of the priorities and perspectives on North Korea among the major players underscores the importance of their policy coordination in advance of any crisis or collapse within the North Korean system. Without clear communication, the regional powers run the risk that their objectives would be open to misperception and that such misapprehensions could stoke a broader conflict. But current political conditions make this type of coordination more difficult than usual. The United States and South Korea are embroiled in contentious negotiations over a military cost-sharing agreement, during the course of which the Trump administration has demanded fivefold increases in Seoul’s contribution. Washington is set to start similar talks with Tokyo later this year. An intense wave of historical and
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North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un (L) and sister Kim Yo Jong attend the Inter-Korean Summit at the Peace House on April 2018 ,27 in Panmunjom, South Korea. (Getty)
U.S. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump welcome South Korean President Moon Jae-in to the White 2019 ,11 House April in Washington, DC. )(Getty
economic disputes has strained ties between South Korea and Japan since the fall of 2018. South Korean-Chinese relations remain mired in mutual mistrust following a row over the deployment of a U.S. missile defense system in the South. And the United States and China, already engaged in a trade war since 2018, have entered a downward diplomatic spiral in recent weeks as leaders trade accusations over the spread of the novel coronavirus.
FIRE AND FURY NEXT TIME Now more than ever, the United States needs a plan for addressing the possibility of regime instability in North Korea. Such a strategy would include elements of the one we have suggested in Foreign Affairs over the past two years to deal with North Korea’s nuclear program, including strengthening global sanctions, regional counterproliferation, and alliancebased deterrence initiatives. Grand strategic pivots are uncommon in the months leading up to a U.S. presidential election. But the Trump administration could take some helpful steps in the near term. Swiftly concluding military cost-sharing negotiations with South Korea and Japan would be a good start. The United States should also reinvigorate trilateral policy coordination with Seoul and Tokyo and create a mechanism for communicating with China and other regional powers about North Korean stability. Taking such steps would greatly strengthen U.S. policy on the peninsula and also help prepare for various leadership contingencies in Pyongyang.
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Kim Jong Un rules alone, as his two predecessors did. Kim’s successor could rule alone or govern as part of a leadership collective. Even a hybrid of these two structures is possible. Kim Jong Un may yet live a long life, even with his many health problems. If he were to die, the loss of a brutal dictator and serial human rights violator would be a welcome development in many corners of the world, and the transfer of power to a new leader could be relatively smooth, as it has been for North Korea in the past. But the United States must be ready to deal with scenarios to the contrary, including those involving threats to regional and global stability immediately after Kim dies. Absent region wide preparation, the chaos that could ensue has the potential to bring the Korean Peninsula as close to militarized conflict as it was in the “fire and fury” days of 2017. This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.
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Michael Jordan’s Last Dance Basketball fans around the world were given a special treat recently, as Netflix released a 10 part documentary series centred on basketball legend, Michael Jordan, and his achievements with the Chicago Bulls during the late 1990s. Audiences were able to relive these historical moments, which saw this team become NBA world champions six times in eight years thanks to Jordan’s talents, competitive spirit and work ethic that remained intact in spite of his fame and wealth. The viewers were also given insight into some previously unknown facts such as the decision to dissolve the team in 1998 preventing them from competing for a seventh NBA title, and details pertaining to the murder of Michael Jordan’s father, and how that personally affected the player.
by: Elie Fawaz
Michael Jordan and the Bulls took basketball as a sport to a whole new level. Michael Jordan’s gravity defying jumps (he was once asked if he could fly, he answered yes but only for a few seconds), talent and physical attributes greatly improved the sport as he and his team became a global phenomenon. Of course, this doesn’t take away from the contributions that his predecessors, such as Karim Abdul Jabbar, Magic Johnson or Larry Bird, made to the sport. Nor does that take away from his talented contemporaries such as Charles Barclay, Clyde Drexler and Carl Malone and many others. But Jordan’s accomplishments, qualifications and ,of course, highly competitive and disciplined nature made him overshadow these other players. Jordan was able to transform the game into an industry. Basketball fans will get an intimate view into Michael Jordan’s personal life, his relations with his club and his teammates, as well as the atmosphere and events that accompanied his career. Viewers will also get to see how basketball became a global sport, and how the Bulls played an essential part of that development. Jordan presented NBA directors with the perfect opportunity to radically change basketball, and that’s what they did. The popularity of Jordan and the Bulls helped spread the sport to 214 countries. Moreover, before Jordan’s professional career, NBA teams would only cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but during Jordan’s time, NBA team values rose to millions. Sports goods also enjoyed an unprecedented global renaissance, this is especially true for American clothing and sports equipment company, “Nike,” which Jordan represented. NBA finals have become some of the most watched global sports events, and news on player transfers have become widely covered by various media outlets. From here, it is important to acknowledge one other person, whose work is often overshadowed by the performances of Jordan and the Bulls. David Stern, former commissioner of the National Basketball Association, managed the industry skillfully. He recognized and took the oppurtunity of marketing the sport nationally and internationally through a big star like Jordan. Thanks to Stern’s marketing strategy, basketball quickly became a globally watched sport that could now compete with other global sports in terms popualarity. At the end of the day, success is the result of collective effort. Though fate undoutebly plays a role in success, its key is exploitation of opportunity and proper organization. Success places people on the front lines, in this case Jordan , his team mates and players from rival teams. However, people in the back lines also play important roles in any success story, and in this case we have David Stern who cleverly managed the NBA and watched it become the empire it is today. The success of the NBA during the late 1990s meant that it would continue to be a popular entity for years to come, furthermore the accomplishments of Jordan, the Bulls and Stern paved the way for future super stars such as Kobe Bryant, Lebron James and Stephen Kerry. This example shows how the West differs from the Arab world in most fields. The reason why Western institutions are more successful than ours lies in their better management, their better distribution of jobs and roles, their tendency to plan ahead for the future and their tendency to do what is in best interest for the group.
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A Weekly Political News Magazine
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Issue 1801- May - 22/05/2020
Dr. Moncef Slaoui: Trump’s Arab-American Head of ‘Warp Speed’ Covid-19 Vaccine Effort www.majalla.com
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London’s West End Faces Existential Crisis as Theatres Stay Dark
How the UK’s Theatre Industry is Coming to Terms With COVID- 19 by Alex Morales
But the coronavirus lockdown brought the famous production to an abrupt halt in March, along with the Agatha Christie’s murder mystery play, “The musicals Les Miserables — showing since 1985 — Mousetrap” has been staged continuously in London and the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom since 1952, making it the world’s longest-running of the Opera — staged since 1986. As the U.K. faces months of restrictions on social show.
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gatherings, there’s no prospect of any of London’s West End hits opening again soon. Live theatre in the land of William Shakespeare now faces a crisis from which many in the business fear it might never fully recover. When the lights went out at the end of a production of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre on March 14, the actors didn’t know it was for the last time. Two days later, Prime Minister Boris Johnson told Britons to avoid theatres. “Our business model just stopped,” Sheffield Theatres Artistic Director Robert Hastie said. “We lost nearly %90 of the money coming in, and that is presenting us with enormous business problems.”
Theatreland in the West End is eerily quiet and silent on empty streets as lockdown continues and people observe the stay at home message in the capital on 12th May 2020 in London, England, United Kingdom. (Getty)
The pandemic poses a threat to venues from the smallest provincial theatres to London’s West End, which draws tourists from all over the world to see musicals such as “The Lion King,” “Wicked” and “Mamma Mia!” musicals such as “The Lion King,” “Wicked” and “Mamma Mia!” According to Kane Burton, musical theatres need to be at %70-%60 capacity just to cover costs.
The government’s -60page strategy for getting the U.K. working again, published on Monday, doesn’t There are already casualties. The Artrix Arts Centre mention reopening the country’s more than 1,000 in Bromsgrove stopped trading in April. Nuffield theatres. Southampton Theatres went into administration on May 6. The Old Vic, one of London’s most prestigious Even as the U.K. takes what Johnson called its first theatres, is in a “seriously perilous” financial situation, “baby steps” to get the economy moving, the virus Artistic Director Matthew Warchus told the Guardian. makes it hard for theatres to host audiences. Social distancing rules — with people required to keep 2 “Progressively as you go through June, July, August meters apart in public — are “here to stay,” according and into September, theatres just start having cashto ministers. flow issues,” said Julian Bird, Chief Executive Officer of U.K. Theatre. He said the industry will need TOO RISKY government assistance not just for actors and theatres but for the “whole ecology” of the sector, including “If social distancing is maintained, theatres will not agents, lighting and sound designers, set builders, and be able to open: simple as that,” said Rebecca Kane costume and wig makers. Burton, Chief Executive Officer of LW Theatres, Lloyd Webber’s portfolio of venues. The performing arts and associated creative industry contributed 9.9 billion pounds to the U.K. economy The industry operates by packing strangers into last year, according to the Office for National cramped auditoriums, with actors in close contact on Statistics. Beyond the economic value, they improve stage and support crews behind the scenes. the lives of millions of people. “A West End production can cost 5 to 7 million pounds before it even hits the stage,” Kane Burton said. “Theatre producers are already incredibly bold for doing this in a normal environment. With social distancing in place, why would you take the risk with no prospect of breaking even, let alone any of the upside?” The pandemic poses a threat to venues from the smallest provincial theatres to London’s West End, which draws tourists from all over the world to see
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On Thursday, 245 musicians from 30 West End shows and major orchestras wrote to members of Parliament to warn the performing industries face “annihilation.” “They will be instrumental not only in getting our country back on its feet again, but in reminding us what life is supposed to be about,” they wrote.
TAX HOLIDAYS Some support is available. The government has
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brought in tax holidays, grants and a program for the state to pay the wages of furloughed workers through October and Arts Council England has announce a 160 million-pound (195$ million) emergency fund. “We are working with the creative and cultural sectors to plan for the future, understand their challenges and consider a variety of ways to ensure safe working,” the Culture Department said in a statement. “As soon as it is safe to do so, we will be encouraging everyone to visit the U.K.’s vibrant entertainment venues.” But many of the industry’s self-employed workers fall through the cracks in support programs, and the funding so far doesn’t come close to replacing revenue: U.K. theatres took in 1.3 billion pounds in 2018, with a combined audience of more than 34 million people. Last year, London’s West End alone took in 800 million pounds. Even if theatres are allowed to re-open, they’ll face major logistical difficulties. Long-running shows may need new cast members as well as fresh marketing campaigns to drive ticket sales, according to Kane Burton. Venues without a show will need months to audition and rehearse, as well as to build sets and arrange costumes.
Then there is the question of how to make venues safe. LW Theatres has bought hundreds of self-sanitizing door handles to test. The company is also looking at taking temperatures, providing staff with protective equipment and encouraging the public to wear facemasks.
Then there is the question of how to make venues safe. LW Theatres has bought hundreds of selfsanitizing door handles to test. The company is also looking at taking temperatures, providing staff with protective equipment and encouraging the public to wear facemasks. Other measures could include deep cleaning and one-way systems for audiences moving around the buildings. Giles Watling, a Conservative member of Parliament who’s spent 55 years in show business, said he’s urged Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak to
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An ad poster with the actor Andile Gumbi as Simba in the Lion King is on the door of a central London telephone kiosk for the Disney production. (Getty)
ensure the arts don’t get put to “the back of the queue” as they do “so often.” He stressed the importance of protecting regional theatres, which feed the more resilient London West End, adding that the industry “is a vital part of our world offer.”
In Sheffield, Hastie said the greatest concern is what happens at year-end, when the traditional program of holiday pantomimes and musicals would normally bring in a large proportion of annual income.
“It is what we do best and it sells U.K. Plc to the world,” Watling said in an interview. “From Shakespeare and others onwards, we have led the world on this, and if we lose that, we have lost something that is incredibly valuable.”
“The big fear that everybody’s got is can Christmas be made to work?” he said. “If we can’t do Christmas, things will look even bleaker.”
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Originally published in Bloomberg News
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Crucial Ways You Can Support a Healthy Immune System
Exercise, Sleep, Stress Reduction, and a Healthy Diet Play Important Roles in Protecting Health by Harvard Health Letter If only there were a pill that could keep the immune system in top shape. You could take the pill every day and feel more protected against viruses, infectious bacteria, and other bugs that threaten health. It would be a simple and easy solution.
Too bad the only “pill” we have to maintain robust immune health is one that many people find hard to swallow. It’s not a vitamin or an herb -- the evidence that those things ramp up protection just isn’t there. Instead, it’s a combination of healthy lifestyle habits.
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The only “pill” we have to maintain robust immune health is one that many people find hard to swallow. It’s not a vitamin or an herb -- the evidence that those things ramp up protection just isn’t there. Instead, it’s a combination of healthy lifestyle habits. GET MORE SLEEP One of the best ways to optimize your immune system is to get a good night’s sleep. “Research has demonstrated that people who get less than six hours of sleep per night are about four times more likely to catch a cold compared with those who sleep seven hours or more,” says Dr. Beth Frates, who directs wellness programming for the Stroke Research and Recovery Institute at Harvardaffiliated Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. Why is sleep so important? “Sleep activates the immune system, which fights infections and scans for cancers or other signs of illness. Sleep deprivation depresses the immune system,” explains Dr. Lawrence Epstein, a sleep expert at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
While we don’t have evidence that maintaining a healthy lifestyle will suddenly boost the immune system, we do know good habits contribute to overall health, supporting our ability to fight germs instead of creating new problems. And living a healthier lifestyle is something simple you can start right now.
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Try going to sleep 30 minutes earlier, maintaining the same sleep and wake schedule every day, and shooting for seven to nine hours each night. Avoiding caffeine past 4 p.m. and avoiding alcohol or food a few hours before bedtime can lead to more restorative sleep.
START MOVING MORE Exercising regularly is another key to supporting your immune system. Exercise reduces blood pressure, cholesterol, and the risk of heart disease, diabetes, depression, and more. Exercise
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also improves blood flow to the brain, thinking skills, bone strength, and the body’s “feel good” chemicals. The goal is to get at least 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity activity, like brisk walking. “But any amount of exercise that gets your heart and lungs working overtime will help, even just a few minutes per day. If you’re stuck inside, you can walk around, dance to music, or step or jump in place while you’re watching TV or talking on the phone,” suggests Dr. Suzanne Salamon, associate chief of gerontology at Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Chronic stress has many negative effects on health, and a suppressed immune system appears to be one of them.
REDUCE STRESS Chronic stress has many negative effects on health, and a suppressed immune system appears to be one of them. This could be because of the chemicals, such as cortisol, that the body releases in the “fight or flight” mode. “High cortisol levels lower the immune response, specifically inhibiting white blood cells called lymphocytes, which help you fight infection,” Dr. Frates says. She advises practicing deep breathing as a way to lower your stress and your cortisol levels. “Deep breathing helps to stop the fight-or-flight response and allows the opposite ‘rest and digest’ response to take over and create a sense of calm,” she notes.
IMPROVE YOUR DIET Good nutrition plays an important role in maintaining a healthy immune system. For example: “Fiber will positively affect the gut
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microbes that aid immunity. Nutrients from fruit and vegetables provide vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants that also support immune function,” says Debbie Krivitsky, a registered dietitian at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital. “Vary the colors of fruit and vegetables so that you include many different antioxidants that are protective against disease.” In addition to eating lots of fruit and vegetables, you should eat a diet rich in legumes, whole
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grains, fish, nuts, and seeds, Krivitsky advises.
ADDITIONAL STEPS Other steps to support your immune system: Stay up to date with immunizations, don’t smoke, drink alcohol only in moderation, maintain a healthy weight, and try to get underlying health conditions under control. The sum total will be better overall health and a better chance of protecting it.
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Dr. Moncef Slaoui: Trump’s Arab-American Head of ‘Warp Speed’ Covid19- Vaccine Effort Majalla – London United States President Donald Trump has appointed Dr Moncef Slaoui, a Moroccon-born BelgiunAmerican expert in immunology and vaccinology, as the new chief of what President Trump calls Operation Warp Speed. He is tasked with guiding a group of medical professionals to formulate a vaccine to battle the COVID19- pandemic, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. In his announcement, Trump introduced Slaoui as a “world-known immunologist” and «one of the most respected men in the world in the production and formulation of vaccines». A 2016 profile by Fortune magazine, which included him in its list of top 50 greatest leaders in the world or his work in under-researched diseases common in the developing world, describes his journey from city of Agadir on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in Morocco, to one of the world’s top immunologists. Moncef Slaoui was born and bred in Agadir, Morocco. His father worked in the irrigation business and died when Slaoui was still a teenager, leaving Slaoui›s mother to single-handedly raise him and his four siblings. Slaoui went through the Moroccan public school system until he obtained a baccalaureate from Mohamed V Secondary School in Casablanca. He left Morocco at 17 to study medicine in Europe and enrolled at the Free University of Brussels where he completed his BS and Masters degrees in biology. In 1983, Slaoui earned a PhD in Molecular Biology and Immunology from the same university and completed postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School and Tufts University
School of Medicine, Boston. Slaoui’s impetus for vaccine development is a deeply personal one: His sister died from whooping cough, an ¬immunisable disease, while they were growing up in Morocco. 1988, after consulting SmithKline-RIT for three years, Slaoui joined the company as a vaccine researcher. His career at GSK spanned 29 years, where he sat on its board of directors from May 2006 through March 2017. He was Chairman of Global Research and Development (R&D) from 2006 to 2014, where he led an overhaul of the company›s pharmaceutical R&D and was also responsible for commercial pursuits such as new product launches and lifecycle management, resulting in a substantial improvement in productivity, with a late-stage pipeline comprising more than 30 Phase III programs and a totally redesigned discovery organization comprising 38 highly focused and accountable Discovery Performance Units. In his role as leader of the Franchise Commercial Operation, he spearheaded a deep transformation of GSK’s launch and commercial strategy capabilities, and while at GSK Biologicals, Dr. Slaoui engineered the development of a robust vaccines pipeline, including Rotarix to prevent infantile gastroenteritis, Synflorix to prevent Pneumococcal disease, and Cervarix to prevent cervical cancer. He was also involved in the development of a vaccine against Ebola. In 2015, he won European approval for the world’s first malaria vaccine, which could limit the spread of a disease that kills more than half a million people a year. Dr. Slaoui was also Chairman of GSK›s vaccine division from 2009 until his retirement from the company in June 2017.
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After his retirement from GSK, the drug maker joined Medicxi Life Sciences as a partner. He also took on a number of independent board positions, including chairman of the board of Galvani, a bioelectronics-focused company jointly owned by GSK and Verily life sciences, and independent board director of Moderna, Sutrovax and Artizan Biotechnology. Faced with a formidable task as leader of «Operation Warp Speed”, Slaoui, who is now a venture capitalist, said that he had “recently seen early data from a clinical trial with a coronavirus vaccine, and these data made me feel even more confident that we will be able to deliver a few hundred million doses of vaccine” — enough to inoculate much of the United States — “by the end of 2020.” He did not identify which vaccine he was referring to, but Moderna, one of biotechnology companies that has an experimental coronavirus vaccine, where Slaoui served on the board, just entered Phase 2 of clinical trials to determine if it is effective. As the chairman of the Moderna board’s product development committee, Dr. Slaoui might have been privy to the early indications of tests of whether the company’s approach appeared promising, now that it is being injected into human subjects, according to the New York Times. Patient advocates have warned that Slaoui has «blatant conflicts of interest» because he sits on the board of multiple vaccine developers but Slaoui thas informed Moderna he plans to retire from its board and will divest himself of his 10$ million in stock options in the pharmaceutical company.
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When it comes to Syria, Russia Lacks a Strategic Plans and Continues to Resort to International Deception Recently, there have been a lot of talks surrounding the prospects of an Iranian withdrawal from Syria. It is also rumoured that Moscow is growing tired of the Assad regime’s intransigence and refusal to work with political opposition for a viable political solution, as such Russian leadership might vie to abandon its alliance with the regime.
by Alia Mansour
The Assad regime was on the verge of collapsing when Russia first sent its forces to Syria. Before Russia’s military involvement, Assad’s forces and the Shia militias loyal to the Iranian regime were no matches against opposition forces. Moreover, during Russia’s initial attack, President Putin claimed that Russian military engagement would only last three to four months. Four and half years on from that statement, Russian forces are still on the ground in Syria, some permanent Russian bases have been installed and many Syrian troops are stationed at said bases. Russian, Iranian and Assad forces have won many battles in the war as their success translated into retaking territories away from armed opposition forces. The regime would also retake other lost territories through international deals with Iran and Turkey, these deals ranged from the Astana Agreement to the Sochi Agreement. Even though Russia and Turkey signed the deals to reduce military engagement, the talks that lead to the signings did not take place until Russia successfully took back control of Syrian villages and cities, which Turkey had previously occupied. Thanks to these agreements, the Assad regime is now in full control of most of Syria’s territories, the only excep-
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tion being the eastern regions, which the US allied Syrian Democratic Forces control, and Idlib, which is currently under Turkish control. While Russia made an impressive military accomplishment in Syria, it has not been able to translate its armed success into political success. For one thing, Moscow has not been able persuade the international community of the need to kick-start the rebuilding process in Syria. It has also been unsuccessful in demonstrating the effectiveness of the reconciliations it made with armed factions. An example of such a deal was the one it negotiated between its allies in Daraa and As-Suwayda and the Fifth Corps factions, which it was fighting against. Today, Russia claims to be resentful towards Bashar Al-Assad as it is sending many mixed messages implying that it is annoyed the regime’s refusal to cooperate in Syrian Constitutional Committee. This is because Russia is looking towards political reconciliation in Syria, but the regime is obstructing all such efforts. However, to believe Russia’s current stance is to ignore its previous attempts to obstruct any steps towards political reconciliation in Syria, these attempts can be traced back from the early months of the revolution. Russia, along with China, used its veto priveliges 14 times in the UN Security Council in order to stop any resolution calling to resolve the Syrian conflict. This only increased Assad’s determination to militarily crush opposition. Even though Russia had participated in the
Geneva conference on Syria, it should be noted that it never really pushed for reconciliation. In the post talks press conference, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov gave an empty explanation of Russia’s stance on reconciliation, this led to mixed responses from Syrian opposition as some welcomed Russia’s statement, while others rejected it. Russia has always tried to demonstrate that it is not tied to the Assad regime, and that it could easily sever its relations with it. But, Russia will not cut ties with the regime because it fears that doing so will result in the collapse of the Syrian state. Moscow’s close ties with Assad was the biggest factor behind its vetoeing of reconciliatory resolutions. This also isn’t the first time in which Russian media launched attacks on Assad, rather Russian media has always portrayed the Assad regime as a weak lacky that Russia is in full control of. Russian media often uses videos of Assad meeting with Russian leaders and even Putin himself as proof of Russia’s total control over the regime.
tion that always led to Russian obstruction of political reconciliation efforts). While Russia did produce a military victory in Syria, it is this victory which has caused it major economic and material losses. No other country is willing or able to support Russia’s ventures in Syria: Iran is currently undergoing severe sanctions, while the Assad regime has spent the last nine years exhausting its resources fighting against his own people. Additionally, sanctions from other Arab countries and the Coronavirus crisis have caused even more trouble for the regime.
Russia is now racing against the launch of the Caeser Act, which will place heavy sanctions on Assad. Funnily enough, Moscow is trying to convince the world that it is not tied to the regime, in order to buy the regime more time. To to do this, it is now claiming to be in favour of political reconciliation as well as the removal of Iranian forces in Syria. Russia is implying that Iran is waiting for international orders to pull out of Syria, but if that were true that it would have abanAs it stands, Russia is stuck between a rock and a doned its expansionist ambitions after it faced attacks hard place. Syria is on the verge of economic col- from Israel or after General Soleimani was assasinatlapse, however the US made it clear that no recon- ed. This also implies that the international community struction in Syria would take place until a robust and isn’t aware of the vast number of Iranian militias curtrustworthy peace process takes place, said peace pro- rently present in Syria, and how these militias never cess would also need to be supported by Europe and withdraw from a region unless it is guaranteed another some Arab countries. James Jeffery, US special en- area to move into. voy to Syria, also said that Russia would not receive support from the international community as long as In reality, Iran will not give up its expansionist project it remains close with the Assad regime. Even though unless it reaches a concise deal with the US adminisRussia is showing signs of dissatisfaction with Assad, tration which would set limits to said project. Russia it will not cut ties with him because it sees no other is also out of strategic plans to help its ally in Syria. alternative to his leadership. Furthermore, we are cur- Furthermore, throughout the last nine years, neither rently weeks away from the implentation of the Cae- Russia nor Iran have shown the willingness to end sar Act which will stop Russia’s manipulative tactic a conflict that has caused hundreds of thousands of of pretending to be supportive of a political solution Syrians to lose their lives, pushed millions of Syrians in Syria, and not being clear of Assad’s intention to from their homes and destruction that put the world run in the next presidential election (a point of conten- on the verge of a third world war.
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