Next Tuesday my department will be having a presentation on Zoom about COVID-19 in Latin America. During this discussion I’ll be talking about Bolsonaro’s leadership in Brazil, and the current pandemic trends in that country. Dr. Rodriguez will be talking about Argentina’s response, while Dr. Young will be discussing the experience of both Cuba and Mexico. Since I know little about the COVID-19 situation outside of Brazil in Latin America, I am particularly interested to hear what my co-presenters will say. The talk will be 2pm West Coast (US) time. Please RSVP if you are interested in participating.
Photo by Isabella Mori, who provides this context: In traditional Taiwanese night markets, since people / food stands are in close contacts, most people / vendors wear masks now, in order to protect themselves and others.
An Opte Project visualization of routing paths through a portion of the Internet. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5) via Wikimedia Commons.
Sadly, one of the most common cyberattacks is upon health care centers, particularly ransom-ware attacks upon hospitals. While digital records and telemedicine are proving essential during the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals’ reliance upon digital resources also make our health care systems vulnerable to attack. As this article by Jocelinn Kang and Tom Uren says, cyber-defense efforts now need to prioritize our health care systems.
If you are interested in hearing more about global topics, please listen to my podcast, Dispatch 7. You can find it on Spotify here, or by searching whichever podcast platform you prefer.
Local market sign in Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 17, 2020
The COVID19 pandemic is now moving quickly. While northern Italy has been overwhelmed by infections, Spain and Iran are also now experiencing a disaster. Here in the United States, there are serious outbreaks in Seattle and New York. So what are the best maps and other data visualizations to keep track of what is happening? Here are my top recommendations:
Outbreakinfo is an outstanding dashboard, which provides a vast amount of information in a limited space. This is one of the top three sources for tracking the pandemic.
The Worldometer Coronavirus webpage has a plethora of charts with data on the outbreak, in particular country by country data on infections, new infections, deaths and recoveries.
Health map provides another global map of the outbreak, although it is not accompanied by the data in charts that accompanies the John Hopkins’ map above. It does have, however, an “animate spread” feature that shows a visual history of the virus’s spread, which is hypnotic.
With the last week’s news many people have come to realize that COVID-19 is unlikely to be contained. Just as Korea, Iran and Italy are grappling with outbreaks, the same might happen here in the United States. Given that the US is currently incapable of testing at scale, as Canada or Korea has, when the outbreak is first detected here, it might be larger than in Singapore. If so, contact tracing might not be feasible any longer. So how can people prepare and not panic? The best guide that I’ve seen so far for individuals and families is this blog post by Australian virologist Ian Mackay. This is a pandemic and now is the time to take reasonable steps.
I am very grateful to Jim P. for this guest blog post.
One Expat’s Life In China In The Time Of Corona Virus
A PSU Alum’s observations
A few things to get out of the way up front. I moved to China after graduating from PSU in the summer of 2015, and getting my Type Z (Foreign Expert) visa which took a few months. I finally arrived here in late December of 2015. I live and work in the city of Yantai, on the northeast coast of the peninsula portion of Shandong Province. The city has a population of ~7 million, though it feels much smaller than Portland because it is spread out over a much larger area, and there are large swaths of agriculture (namely corn) between different areas of the city.
When the Corona virus was first announced, I was getting off work before the beginning of the two week long Spring Festival holiday (which is what most English people think of as “Chinese New Year”). The next day, I came down with a cold. Nothing like having a nasty cough when everyone is freaked out by a disease that’s major symptom is a cough (I didn’t have a fever, or flu-like symptoms). At first it seemed like most things were still open, and much like life as usual for the beginning of the holiday (except everyone had masks on). However, as soon as the fireworks were over, everybody went back inside, and ventured out rarely (mostly to take out trash). …
Today seems to be the day in which the words and numbers that international organizations and national governments used to describe the COVID-19 pandemic increasingly diverged from facts. To begin there was an overall context in which the virus rapidly spread in the Middle East, while cases dramatically climbed in Korea (833). In the Middle East, there were new cases in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates. Most of these cases were tied to Iranian travelers. In Italy the number of cases rose sharply. Venice ended the remaining days of Carnival. Italians in northern Italy rushed to stores, some of which were cleaned out and left with empty shelves. In the United States, ongoing problems with testing for SARs-CoV-2 has meant that health authorities have been unable to test at scale, as in Korea, Singapore and Canada. Finally, in China the rate of increase has slowed, but the nation still has over 77,000 cases. But neither the rising number of cases nor other problems caused corresponding expressions of concern by WHO or the Iranian government.
First, Dr. Tedros at the World Health Organization (WHO) said at a press conference that the WHO would not call COVID-19 a pandemic. Indeed, the WHO has stated that it no longer uses “pandemic” as a category. At the current time, there is ongoing transmission of a novel virus in multiple world regions, with a case fatality rate of perhaps two percent. If this is not a pandemic, what would be? The goal of deleting the term pandemic seemed to be more to avoid causing fear than to accurately describe reality. If the WHO does not play the role of declaring a pandemic, then who does? The risk of this is that the public in different nations may begin to lose confidence in the WHO. The pandemic exists even if the category does not. …
This letter written by Mi Fei. By 米芾（べい ふつ、1051年 – 1107年、中国の北宋末の文学者・書家・画家） [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsI am very grateful to our guest blogger, who teaches at a university in China, for this powerful guest blog post:
January 24th is the biggest holiday of the year in China: the lunar Chinese New Year. As usual, most Chinese prepared for it several weeks before the occasion: food, candies, tickets back home…Nobody expected this New Year would become a most unforgettable one even in his/her whole life. The coronavirus became a household word almost overnight and quarantine also came suddenly before people realized. Over the past almost a month, people, especially those in epidemic areas, went through hard times. On the other hand, we are moved by one story after another about the devoted doctors, nurses, volunteers and all those in the whole world that extended their hands to help.
The spring term in our university originally planned to start on February 17. At the end of January, it was clear that the starting date had to be postponed. The school administration sent some documents early in February notifying all the staff and faculty to make a plan for the month. We were asked to make better use of the online platforms and resources. As a result of the encouragement from the Ministry of Education and development of online courses, there have been thousands of moocs available on the Internet for free, which in my opinion cover nearly all disciplines. As for my course (college English), we have been utilizing the online platforms for the textbook developed by the publishing press over the past five years. Therefore, what we need is to transfer the platforms from kind of self-learning to more guided learning. At the same time, we selected some relevant moocs either as a required component of the course or as recommended resources. …
I am grateful to Celine Kuang for the following guest post:
Studied at Shanghai University, August – December 2019
Studied at Southwest Minzu University, January 2020
I’m a double major student in international studies and Mandarin Chinese. I mainly went to China to study the Chinese language and gain a broader cultural experience. I studied at Shanghai University for five months before going to Southwest Minzu University in Chengdu, China. During school breaks, I traveled around China to explore its cities, including Beijing, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Xi’an, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shaoxing, Suzhou, and more. Everywhere I went China emphasized its status of being the most populated country in the world. The virus changed all of China’s populous and vibrant cities to ghost towns within a week’s time. In December is when the virus first started to appear. The Chinese government thought the news would create fear amongst its citizens, so they restricted news of the outbreak. The government was right about fear and as a result, many rumors started going around on social media. One Chinese friend even asked me if the U.S. planted the novel coronavirus outbreak. I was shocked that someone would ask me that, but I answered that it’s not possible. That was only the beginning of a whirlwind of issues.
During Chinese New Year many Chinese migrate back to their parent’s home to celebrate which helped to spread the virus even faster than anticipated. Less than a week into the family gathering, the Chinese government started locking down cities, increasing health checks in neighborhoods, and restricting all forms of travel between cities everywhere. This caused serious traffic congestions and delayed resources from efficiently reaching consumers. I’m not suggesting that China shouldn’t take such drastic measures, but these measures do have economic consequences as many scholars and researchers have already explained. Yet, even more concerning may be the how the necessary resources such as medical face masks (to prevent the virus from spreading) are becoming extraordinarily rare in this short time period. Many people are unable to buy new masks. Some pharmacies even started selling face masks at ten times the original price to seek profit at another’s expense. Some people started to create and sell their own brands of face masks but the quality of the masks is so poor that it can be considered a scam for the less educated populations. My mom informed me of her friend asking if she would buy face masks from the U.S. and send the masks internationally to them. Soon after, the friend told my mom not to bother sending the masks because no packages right now can be received anyway due to travel restrictions all over China. The friend is hoping that steaming and boiling them under hot water would help disinfect the used the masks so the family may continue using them.
I, myself, barely made it out of China during this hectic time. Three days into the Chinese New Year break, the Chengdu program I was in said they’ll continue classes and we’ll all wear masks during lectures. The following day they said they will consider holding lectures through webinars. That next morning I woke up to a classmate knocking on my bedroom door asking for my Chinese visa extension receipt. She told me the assistant resident director will be going to the consulate to get the passports of several others and mine back from the Chinese Consulate. She said I should check the conversation going on in the group chats and that the program is now cancelled. I was dumbfounded that in such a short period of time every changed for the worse. I emailed my scholarship and said I need to return to the U.S. as my program is being cancelled and the heightened travel advisory went from level one to level four in a week’s time. That night I bought plane tickets to leave Chengdu. Besides me there are hundreds of other students on the same scholarship as I am. Two days after receiving numerous emails(including mine), the scholarship sent a mass email out telling us to leave ASAP. We must all leave within eight days they told us.
Every time I read the news it says how many flights are being cancelled between China and the rest of the world. I finally packed everything I needed to leave but one days before my flight it got cancelled. I became worried. I called my airline through an international call for forty minutes to change my tickets. Plane tickets went from around 400 USD to 1000 USD in two days. That’s when I realized the vulnerable situation I was in. I was lucky enough to make it out of China before being infected. To be certain I still went through the fourteen day self-quarantine after I returned to the U.S.
Many Chinese friends have posted on the popular messaging app of China, WeChat, that they hope school would start soon or they can’t stay indoors any longer. Some of them went out for the first time after weeks of quarantine at home with their family. They posted photos of deserted parks, streets, and metro stations. Some posted food they ordered from the few restaurants that are still open during this novel coronavirus outbreak. It is understandable why China is trying to protect the non-exposed population by restricting travel between cities. However, the problem of being able to provide the necessary resources, such as face masks, to citizens throughout China can really hinder the control of the virus. This is only one of numerous issues following that China and the rest of the world has to worry about. In three months’ time the death rate is over 2,100 (this does not include those who died at home without going to the hospital) which is nearly three times the death rate of SARS. Of course, there is the hope that the virus will be controlled sooner rather than later. Currently, over 16,000 have recovered from the virus but how many more will die before the situation is under control? I hope the worse will pass by soon for everyone in China and a cure will emerge for the infected.
