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How Covid-19 Is a Perfect Storm for Black Americans |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54150"><span class="small">Kenneth R. Alleyne, The Washington Post</span></a>
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Monday, 27 April 2020 12:25 |
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Alleyne writes: "As America fights its war against the novel coronavirus, there is a separate battle being fought by African Americans. This battle finds them outmatched, underresourced, undersupported and undertested. It is a fight none would call fair."
Two people walk in Chicago's South Side. (photo: Tannen Maury/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
How Covid-19 Is a Perfect Storm for Black Americans
By Kenneth R. Alleyne, The Washington Post
27 April 20
 s America fights its war against the novel coronavirus, there is a separate battle being fought by African Americans. This battle finds them outmatched, underresourced, undersupported and undertested. It is a fight none would call fair. As The Post reported this month, in the United States “counties that are majority-black have three times the rate of infections and almost six times the rate of deaths as counties where white residents are in the majority.” New York City’s health department recently released data showing that black residents are twice as likely to die of covid-19 as white residents. The coronavirus has further exposed the reality of racial health disparities in the United States.
I am a board-certified African American orthopedic surgeon. I continue to see patients and care for trauma cases, but I am not on the front line of this fight. My practice encompasses patients from some of the wealthiest Zip codes in Manhattan and from some of the poorest in rural and inner-city Connecticut. My wife, also a physician, works at a care facility for underserved areas, known as a federally qualified health center. It is from these perspectives I observe the inequities deeply rooted in the nation’s health-care system.
Many factors have fueled the racial disparities in covid-19 outcomes: lower access to health care and higher rates of asthma, diabetes and heart disease. There are social, economic and political reasons for these lopsided outcomes. We call them the “social determinants of health” — a group of nonmedical variables that impact up to 80 percent of health outcomes. These social determinants include access to healthy food, transportation, Zip code, health insurance and even mold levels. Most of these are not immediately correctable. New supermarkets to place fresh vegetables in communities that are food deserts will not be built tomorrow. The next day we will not narrow education achievement gaps.
To that long list of traditional social determinants affecting my community, I would like to add one more, with a 400-year context: the African American “essential worker” designation.
In the medical world, as elsewhere, these workers often go unnoticed and too often unnamed. They are the hospital cleaning personnel, the delivery, food service and warehouse workers, and municipal employees who truly are on the front line. They stand between us and pure social chaos. These workers are black or brown, low-wage and with limited formal education. They come in contact with the coronavirus in its most pernicious forms: on cardboard, stainless steel, on clothing and in the air. Pandemic 1, African Americans 0.
As if fighting this silent enemy were not enough, the communities of these essential workers often have low rates of testing and few testing facilities. Everyone I know who desired a test has managed to get one. My neighbors line their vehicles up for tests at one of Connecticut’s many drive-through sites, just as they lined up at Starbucks in January. Instead of using an app to order a latte, they grasp the winning ticket of a prescription for testing from their primary-care physician. I know of only a few walk-up testing facilities in the neighborhoods where the disease is most prevalent. For essential workers who don’t have a car or primary-care physician, and can’t find a local walk-up site, that means one thing: no covid-19 tests. Pandemic 2, African Americans 0.
In cities where essential workers rely on public transportation, they now find reduced train and bus schedules — placing more people onto fewer transports and making social distancing unlikely. With many doctors and nurses scrambling to find personal protective equipment, what are the chances that these workers — also laboring in proximity to the disease — are going to be adequately supplied? After work, they nonetheless must head home on that same overcrowded public transportation. Pandemic 3, African Americans 0.
I rely on telemedicine to help many of my patients, communicating with them through what is essentially a one-on-one video conference. Though minorities have high levels of smartphone ownership, telemedicine has largely failed to catch on in African American and Latino communities. That’s unfortunate, because it removes an important tool for screening, reassurance, education and care. Pandemic 4, African Americans 0.
In trying to inform the public about the pandemic, have we done our best to reach young people where they interact? I worry particularly about the young black men and women. Their media diet may not include CNN or The Post or other major news outlets. Why can’t the same systems used for flash-flood warnings and Amber Alerts be deployed to reach a population with high rates of cellphone use? Until that happens, Pandemic 5, African Americans 0.
Addressing any or all of these social determinants is not just the moral thing to do — it is vital for flattening the curve of covid-19 infections nationwide. African American outcomes are America’s outcomes.
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FOCUS: In Just Months, the Coronavirus Is Killing More Americans Than 20 Years of War in Vietnam |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36655"><span class="small">Nick Turse, The Intercept</span></a>
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Monday, 27 April 2020 12:00 |
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Turse writes: "For now, we need to keep counting the fallen and begin thinking about how to memorialize all the heartache, all the deaths faced alone, all the bodies consigned to mass graves, all the lives lost too soon."
A woman visits an empty Vietnam Veterans Memorial on April 14, 2020 in Washington, D.C. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
In Just Months, the Coronavirus Is Killing More Americans Than 20 Years of War in Vietnam
By Nick Turse, The Intercept
27 April 20
 orn in controversy, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is now the most poignant monument on Washington, D.C.’s National Mall. Designed in 1981 by a Yale undergraduate named Maya Lin, the memorial consists of polished black granite panels that form a 125-degree angle and are inscribed with the names of the U.S. military personnel dead from that conflict. The two walls, low at the ends and high where they meet in the middle, list the deceased chronologically — an individual accounting, day by day, of each American life lost.
It took 20 years, from 1955 to 1975, for the United States to lose 58,220 men and women — 47,434 in combat — to the nation’s most divisive conflict since the Civil War. In less than four months, just as many Americans will have died from the Covid-19 pandemic — the toll, on Sunday, stood at 55,383, a few thousand shy of the total number killed in Southeast Asia. In short order, America will pass that appalling milestone. If this is indeed a war, as President Donald Trump has described it — in his words, “We’re waging a war against the invisible enemy” — a question can be asked: Where and how will the dead of this conflict be memorialized?
Will a president who staked his legacy on a “big, beautiful wall” along the Mexican border actually be remembered for a very different wall: one that bears the names of scores of thousands of Americans who died on his watch? This wall could be inscribed with the names of all those who perished on the front lines of this pandemic, like Vitalina Williams, a 59-year-old immigrant from Guatemala and grocery store worker in Massachusetts; Ferdi German, 41, an Army veteran who worked as a subway car inspector in New York City; Craig Franken, a 61-year-old – married for nearly 20 years – who worked at the Smithfield Foods meatpacking plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; and four members of the Franklin family from New Orleans, 86-year-old Antoinette and her sons Herman, 71, Timothy, 61, and Anthony, 58, who survived a previous cataclysm — Hurricane Katrina, associated with (and exacerbated by) a prior U.S. president — only to succumb to another disaster, 15 years later.
Then there are the health care workers, the doctors, nurses, EMTs, and other medical professionals who — like so many of the Army medics and Navy corpsmen whose names appear on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial — ran toward danger and sacrificed their lives in an effort to save their fellow Americans. These courageous people include Celia Yap-Banago, 69, an immigrant from the Philippines who spent nearly 40 years as a nurse at the Research Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri and fell ill after caring for a patient believed to have had Covid-19 and Madhvi Aya, a 61-year-old Indian immigrant who worked as a physician’s assistant at Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, and treated Covid-19 patients wearing only a surgical mask.
About 300 feet from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial stands a sculpture made by Glenna Goodacre, who died, at age 80, on April 13. Modeled after Michelangelo’s “Pietà,” it depicts three women in uniform surrounding — and one of them gently cradling — a wounded male GI. “The emphasis of this tribute is centered on their emotions — their compassion, their anxiety, their fatigue, and above all, their dedication,” said Goodacre when the statue was unveiled. Could there be a better template for a sculpture honoring the efforts of health care workers like Yap-Banago and Aya to accompany a wall memorializing the fallen of this pandemic?
For years, American presidents touted progress during the disastrous war in Vietnam. “We can rightly judge … that the progress of the past three years would have been far less likely, if not completely impossible, if America’s sons and others had not made their stand in Vietnam,” said President Lyndon Johnson in March 1968. In August 1972, his successor, Richard Nixon, said: “I pledged to seek an honorable end to the war in Vietnam. We have made great progress toward that end.” Trump has repeatedly revived the Vietnam War-tainted phrase “light at the end of the tunnel” during this pandemic and similarly claimed headway despite the increasing deaths. “As we continue our battle against the virus, the data and facts on the ground suggest that we’re making great progress,” he said recently during his own version of the 5 o’clock follies.
Last week, Trump suggested that the death toll of the Covid-19 pandemic might top out at 50,000 American lives lost. “We did the right thing, because if we didn’t do it, you would have had a million people, a million and a half people, maybe 2 million people dead,” he said. “Now, we’re going toward 50, I’m hearing, or 60,000 people.” An April 20 prediction of an American death toll of 50,000 was as unrealistic as Trump’s baseless January claim that “we have [Covid-19] totally under control,” and his February fictions that the virus “will go away in April” and “within a couple of days [the number of Americans with Covid-19] is going to be down to close to zero.”
Earlier this month, at one of his coronavirus press briefings, Trump also touted the fruits of his efforts along the Mexican border. “We’re up to about 168 miles of wall,” he boasted. But having devoted far more time and energy over the past three years to that project than to pandemic preparedness, the body count of Americans killed by Covid-19 during his tenure has, in four months, exceeded two decades of armed conflict in Southeast Asia. (The number of Vietnamese civilians killed during those years is estimated at about 2 million, nearly the same as the worst-case scenario forecast of U.S. deaths without efforts to slow the coronavirus through social distancing.)
It took two 200-foot walls made up of 70 separate panels to list the more than 58,000 dead on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Just how many names — of grocery store employees, warehouse workers, delivery drivers, custodians, meatpacking plant workers, doctors, nurses, and EMTs — will need to be etched into a Covid-19 memorial won’t be known for years. Some projections put the total number at more than 67,000 Covid-19 deaths by August. The White House previously warned of the possibility of as many as 240,000 fatalities. Some estimates put the number at 300,000 Americans lost to the disease over the next several years.
For now, we need to keep counting the fallen and begin thinking about how to memorialize all the heartache, all the deaths faced alone, all the bodies consigned to mass graves, all the lives lost too soon. We already know that a wall to honor America’s Covid-19 casualties would be big, far too big. And we know, however poignant the design, however it stirs the soul, however iconic it becomes, there’s never going to be anything beautiful about it.
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FOCUS: The Media Is Hopelessly Addicted to Trump |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54147"><span class="small">Michelle Wolf, The Daily Beast</span></a>
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Monday, 27 April 2020 10:36 |
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Wolf writes: "I did my job at the Correspondents' Dinner. It would be nice if the news would do theirs."
Michelle Wolf. (photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
The Media Is Hopelessly Addicted to Trump
By Michelle Wolf, The Daily Beast
27 April 20
ack in February, when the hosts of this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner were announced, The Washington Post asked me to write an op-ed on my thoughts. I wrote something knowing full well that they would probably refuse to publish it because my foul language doesn’t follow their moral guidelines. I guess we can’t all be as kind and upstanding as their generous owner. You should see how I treat MY warehouse employees. Well, I was right about their refusal to publish it, but here it is anyway…
Confession: I Blew Trump
Why would I ever admit to blowing Trump even if it isn’t true? Because it doesn’t matter what’s in the article. All that matters is the headline. The only reason anyone thinks I made fun of Sarah Sanders’ looks is because that’s what the headlines were. If you look back at those jokes, there is not a single moment when I make fun of Sarah’s appearance. Also, contrary to headlines, I was not partisan. I made fun of the right, I made fun of the left, I made fun of myself, I made fun of the monkfish, I made fun of a lady who died on a Southwest airplane that week, and, most importantly, I made fun of the news. I called the news out on their gross, symbiotic relationship with Trump. Trump is great for their business, which is ironic since he’s catastrophic for his own. But the problem with criticizing the news is that they don’t like it—and they’re the ones who write the headlines.
So who’s been blowing Trump? Providing him sweet, sweet oral satisfaction? It’s The New York Times, it’s MSNBC, it’s CNN, it’s The Hill, it’s CBS, it’s definitely Fox News. It’s all of these media organizations and blogs and websites and books. It’s all the contributors who go on those shows and make money for every temper tantrum they throw. They’re all satisfying Trump, and then wiping their mouths with the money they made. And it’s also YOU. It’s you who’s reading this right now and watching all those shows because you can’t wait to hear how bad Trump is every single day, like an ex who you can’t get over. You’re not #resist, you’re #obsessed.
Is Trump the worst president? I dunno. We’ve had a lot of bad presidents. Nixon started the war on drugs pushing through mandatory sentencing, Reagan (and Nancy) couldn’t have cared less about the AIDS crisis, and one time Obama wore a tan suit. Trump is definitely the least refined president, but the worst? Hard to say. He’s just the first one that powerful white people cared was bad. And if there’s one group that is hoping he wins again, it’s the media. Both sides. And maybe some of you. It’s not often that privileged white people get to feel like the victim. I think the last time it happened was the Titanic.
Am I happy that the Correspondents’ Dinner has a comedian this year? No. The event shouldn’t exist. Why did I do the Correspondents’ Dinner if I’m so opposed to it? So I could do exactly what I did: call the media and the politicians out on their bullshit directly to their face. Whatever this year’s host tries to do, I’m sure it will include some jabs at Trump and his administration that one side of the news will label as “savage” and “eviscerating” and the other side will say is “offensive.” And if the dinner was hosted by a pro-Trump comic, they’d swap headlines quicker than spit at an orgy. (Don’t get fake offended at that. We all know DC has more dirt in it than the folds in Mitch McConnell’s neck—that is a joke about looks.)
But the real problem is that there are sides. The news should not have sides. It should not be entertaining. It should not be on 24 hours a day. The news should be a dry reading of events and facts. It should be a presentation of information, and that is it. It shouldn’t be “breaking” with the same story and no new information hour after hour. It shouldn’t have a panel of four of the loudest contributors where their only qualification appears to be that they can put—and keep on—a shirt. It shouldn’t have opinions or takes or, even worse, fake pearl-clutching in order to maintain their access.
I did my job at the Correspondents’ Dinner. It would be nice if the news would do theirs. The only thing anyone should have gotten upset at was the fact that I made fun of a lady who died—at no fault of her own—and that FLINT STILL DOESN’T HAVE CLEAN WATER. And guess what? They still don’t. Write about that you breaking news, outrage whores. But, instead, I’m sure you’ll continue to write the headlines that get you the most clicks and have contributors on your shows that’ll get enough viewers to keep the step-in bathtub company sponsor happy.
Side note: I wrote this before the virus when the dinner was still scheduled for this weekend. I think that was somewhere between two months and 10 years ago. It’s been rescheduled for August or whenever it’s deemed safe to breathe huffs of indignation on each other. But based on the media’s coverage of the virus, the administration, and what’s going on in general, I’m positive I’m still being too nice. The news’ ratings have spiked the way you said deaths from COVID would. Somewhere in your 24-hour cycle of fearmongering and that charming death ticker, I’m sure there’s good factual information. It’s just hard to find crammed between propaganda press briefings and all your opinions about it. It’s like trying to find a woman’s back Joe Biden refuses to massage. The media is doing us an unforgivable disservice. You’re blowing Trump and talking at the same time. And didn’t your mother ever tell you: it’s rude to talk with your mouth full.
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RSN: Behold the Beauty and Savagery of Nature |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=63"><span class="small">Marc Ash, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 27 April 2020 08:27 |
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Ash writes: "Mankind has been rapidly, voraciously consuming and laying waste to Planet Earth for at least 250 years, arguably longer. The result has been a fundamental altering and degradation of the delicate biological balance that makes Earth a unique life-sustaining planet."
Coronavirus detail. (image: Johns Hopkins Medicine)
Behold the Beauty and Savagery of Nature
By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
27 April 20
 ankind has been rapidly, voraciously consuming and laying waste to Planet Earth for at least 250 years, arguably longer. The result has been a fundamental altering and degradation of the delicate biological balance that makes Earth a unique life-sustaining planet.
Balance is the key to the survival and vitality of life on Earth. When things get out of balance, changes occur that have a major impact on the ecosystems that support life. One of the great wonders of the natural world is its ability to maintain the necessary balance.
Human life on Earth is altering the balance, in a big way. So much so that the situation has reached the point where extreme changes in the Earth’s natural environment are occurring in a way that is harmful to all life on the planet.
There are 58,320 names listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. Those deaths occurred over a span of at least a dozen years between 1963 and 1975. Arguably longer, if you take into account US covert operations in the region to support the waning French control of Indochina.
The first US death from the coronavirus/COVD-19 appears at this point to have been on February 6, 2020, in Santa Clara County, California. In roughly 83 days, the death toll from the pandemic will have claimed more American lives than the Vietnam War.
New deaths in the US are still being reported at a rate of more than two thousand per day. While politicians may talk of reopening the economy, if the dying continues at anywhere near the current pace, the economy as we have come to know it cannot function in the way that it has. It should also be noted that the entire concept of reopening the economy as though it were a simplistic, turn-key operation ignores the high probability of a resurgence of coronavirus infections in the fall.
The discussion of man’s impact on the Earth’s ecological balance in the current context unavoidably becomes a discussion of global warming. It’s not exactly mankind causing global warming, it’s the fossil-fuel engine of mankind’s economy that is the deadly catalyst. In either case, scientists and environmental activists have warned for years that it cannot continue and that, in fact, it does not need to.
There are of course more environmentally sustainable methods available and always have been. The problem is not a lack of better, safer methods, the problem is the desire for short-term profits on the part of entrenched industries. That is the reason mankind has not moved to more sustainable, more efficient technologies.
This coronavirus is now unleashed upon mankind. Nature’s methods of maintaining critical, life-sustaining balance are not subtle or even necessarily gradual. When things change, they can change with breathtaking speed. The decline to extinction of the dinosaurs was a process that likely took millions of years, but the defining event happened in the blink of an eye.
What scientists refer to as the Fifth Mass Extinction – (The K-T Mass Extinction) resulted from the impact and after-effects of the Chicxulub asteroid some 66 million years ago. The after-effects included both global cooling and global warming, among other things. The net result was, as the name implies, the fifth mass extinction in Earth’s history. The coronavirus may not be an asteroid, but it could be a meteoric, even prescient signal of things to come. The question is not if nature will rein in mankind. It’s only a question of when.
We have a time out, a moment to reflect, and if we can find the strength, a golden opportunity to chart not a new course but a course back to living a sustainable existence. We may go there voluntarily or we may be pushed there. Who will be prepared?
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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