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      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on women and the pandemic: what happened to building back better? | Editorial

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      One year into the pandemic, women have little cause to celebrate International Women’s Day tomorrow, and less energy to battle for change. Men are more likely to die from Covid-19. But women have suffered the greatest economic and social blows. They have taken the brunt of increased caregiving, have been more likely to lose their jobs and have seen a sharp rise in domestic abuse.In the UK, women did two-thirds of the extra childcare in the first lockdown, and were more likely to be furloughed. In the US, every one of the 140,000 jobs lost in December belonged to a woman: they saw 156,000 jobs disappear, while men gained 16,000. But white women actually made gains, while black and Latina women – disproportionately in jobs that offer no sick pay and little flexibility – lost out. Race, wealth, disability and migration status have all determined who is hit hardest. Previous experience suggests that the effects of health crises can be long-lasting: in Sierra Leone, over a year after Ebola broke out, 63% of men had returned to work but only 17% of women.The interruption to girls’ education is particularly alarming: Malala Fund research suggests that 20 million may never return to schooling. The United Nations Population Fund warns that there could be an extra 13 million child marriages over the next decade, and 7 million more unplanned pregnancies; both provision of and access to reproductive health services has been disrupted. In the US, Ohio and Texas exploited disease control measures to reduce access to abortions. The UN has described the surge in domestic violence which began in China and swept around the world as a “shadow pandemic”. Research has even suggested that the pandemic may lead to more restrictive ideas about gender roles, with uncertainty promoting conservatism.Coronavirus has not created inequality or misogyny. It has exacerbated them and laid them bare. Structural problems such as the pay gap, as well as gendered expectations, explain why women have taken on more of the extra caregiving. The pandemic’s radicalising effect has echoes of the #MeToo movement. Women knew the challenges they faced, but Covid has confronted them with unpalatable truths at both intimate and institutional levels.In doing so, it has created an opportunity to do better. Germany has given parents an extra 10 days paid leave to cover sickness or school and nursery closures, and single parents 20. Czech authorities have trained postal workers to identify potential signs of domestic abuse. But the deeper task is to rethink our flawed economies and find ways to reward work that is essential to us all. So far, there are precious few signs of building back better.Around 70% of health and social care workers globally are female, and they are concentrated in lower-paid, lower-status jobs. They deserve a decent wage. The 1% rise offered to NHS workers in the UK is an insult. The government also needs to bail out the childcare sector: without it, women will not return to work. It has not done equality impact assessments on key decisions – and it shows. The budget has admittedly earmarked £19m for tackling domestic violence, but Women’s Aid estimates that £393m is needed. And the UK is slashing international aid at a time when spending on services such as reproductive health is more essential than ever. Nonetheless, as a donor, it should at least press recipient governments to prioritise women in their recovery plans.Overworked and undervalued women have more awareness than ever of the need for change, and less capacity to press for it. Men too must play their part. Some have recognised more fully the demands of childcare and housework, and seen the potential benefits of greater involvement at home. Significant “use it or lose it” paternity leave might help to reset expectations both in families and the workplace. There were never easy solutions, and many look harder than ever. But the pandemic has shown that we can’t carry on like this. More

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      in UK Politics

      NHS pay rise: Nursing union sets up £35 million industrial action fund amid mounting anger

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      The RCN Council revealed it had voted voted unanimously last night in an emergency meeting to immediately set up a £35 million industrial action fund which will be used to support frontline nurses in the event they take strike action. Health unions responded angrily to the news and the chancellor Rishi Sunak was facing growing criticism over his failure to boost health or social care spending as he unveiled the Budget on Wednesday.“At that meeting, RCN Council voted unanimously for the RCN to immediately set up a £35 million industrial action fund.”It added: “A strike fund is an amount of money that can be used to support workers, who are members of a trade union, to provide some compensation for loss of earnings and campaigning during industrial action. More

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      in UK Politics

      Vaccine rate slowdown ‘to be expected,’ government and advisers insist

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      A slowdown in coronavirus vaccination rates is to be expected, officials have said, as the number of first doses administered dropped under 200,000 for two days in a row. Both a government minister and scientific adviser offered reassurance the figure would pick up again, following the recent dip to a level not seen since mid-January.When asked about concerns over the drop in daily vaccination rates, Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, deputy chief medical officer for England, said it was “very simple” to explain.“There are always going to be supply fluctuations. These are new vaccines, by and large the manufacturers have not made them or anything like them before,” he told Sky News on Wednesday.“The process of making a vaccine is one where, basically, you set the equipment up and leave it all to do its thing — a bit like beer-making really.“What you get at the end is not something that you can say is identical every time in terms of the yield, the amount of doses you can then make from that batch.”The deputy chief medical officer said it was “natural” to get variations in batch size because of this and it would take “a few months” before the manufacturers can get into a steady routine. There were also “global supply constraints”, he added.Prof Van-Tam said he was “confident in the long-term” the UK would meet its vaccination targets, and believed the “slowdown” seen in data from the last few days would “suddenly pick up again”.Around 141,000 people in the UK received their first dose of a coronavirus jab on 21 February, followed by 192,000 did on 22 February. The figure had been over 200,000 for weeks.More than 300,000 people were vaccinated every day between 16 and 20 February.The last time the daily vaccination figure previously dipped below 200,000 was on 17 January, when around 191,000 people in the UK received their first dose, according to government data. A government minister said he understood “people will raise concerns” but insisted there were no issues in the supply chain.“There is no problem in terms of flow of vaccines,” Gavin Williamson told radio station LBC on Wednesday, when asked about concerns.“We will be hitting incredibly high numbers. The prime minister has already made it clear we will be hitting all the adult population in record speed.”The government has said every adult in the UK will be offered a vaccine by the end of July in an acceleration of the rollout.Speaking about recent daily rates, Mr Williamson told LBC: “There will always be some days where it dips lower.” The education secretary added: “I have every confidence it will be rebounding back very shortly.”More than 17.9 million people in the UK had received their first dose of a coronavirus vaccine as of Monday, according to government data, while over 642,000 had received their second. More

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      Wales lockdown: Shops and hairdressers could open from mid-March, Drakeford says

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      Welsh ministers will discuss easing some coronavirus lockdown restrictions on non-essential retail in the coming weeks, Mark Drakeford has said.The first minister said hairdressers could be among the shops to reopen as early as 15 March, but warned any easing would be gradual.”I don’t believe it will be a wholesale reopening, we are going to do things in the way that Sage and the WHO recommend – carefully, step-by-step, always assessing the impact of any actions that we take,” he told BBC Breakfast.He added: “I will set out today some discussions that we will have with non-essential retail over the next couple of weeks to see how we might begin the reopening of non-essential retail.”If it is possible from 15 March to begin the reopening of some aspects of non-essential retail and personal services such as hairdressing then of course that is what we would want to do.”But it will be, as I say, in that careful step-by-step way and always making sure that we are carefully monitoring the impact of any lifting of restrictions on the circulation of the virus.”He said the devolved government would also work with tourist companies to look at easing of rules around Easter.Additionally, all primary school children in Wales will return to face-to-face teaching from mid-March provided the coronavirus situation in the country “continues to improve”, with Covid-19 cases at their lowest level since September, Mr Drakeford said. The youngest are set to go back on Monday next week.Some secondary pupils and college students may be able to return to class from 15 March.Wales, like the rest of the UK, is currently under a stay-at-home order which is to remain in place for the next three weeks.
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      We prepared for the wrong pandemic, admits former health secretary Jeremy Hunt

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      Former health secretary Jeremy Hunt has admitted the UK prepared for the wrong pandemic during his tenure by believing the next biggest threat would come from flu.In an interview with The BMJ, Mr Hunt, who was health secretary from 2012 to 2018, acknowledged decisions he made while in office could have hampered the UK’s response to the pandemic.Asked about mistakes in handling the coronavirus, he said: “We’ve really been on the back foot from the start on test and trace, and in some ways it dates back to the period when I was health secretary.”In 2015, the Cabinet Office published a national risk register of civil emergencies, which rated the chances of a flu pandemic higher than that of an emerging infectious disease. It rated the probability of a flu pandemic as high, but stated: “The likelihood of a new disease spreading to the UK is low.” In October the following year, the government carried out Exercise Cygnus, which involved 950 officials from central and local government, the NHS, prisons and local emergency response planners.The aim was to test plans for a future “worst-case-scenario” flu pandemic affecting up to half of the population, causing up to 400,000 excess deaths.Mr Hunt, who now chairs the Commons Health and Social Care Committee, said: “We did exhaustive pandemic preparations; we were lauded by Johns Hopkins University as being the second-best-prepared country in the world.“But we were sadly also part of a groupthink that said that the primary way that you respond to a pandemic is the flu pandemic playbook (with a focus on areas like vaccination and boosting hospital capacity), rather than the methods that you would use for Sars and Mers (surveillance and containment, community testing, contact tracing and isolation, and stockpiling personal protective equipment, and ventilators).”That thinking was not unique to the UK, he said, and was shared in the US and across Europe.“But it’s why there is this stark difference in the effectiveness of our responses compared with countries in East Asia.”Last year a memo revealed that a recommendation for all frontline NHS staff to be given protective equipment during a flu epidemic was rejected as too costly in 2017.Mr Hunt said the decision to centralise testing in May helped create a structure quickly but “one of the big lessons of the future is to have localised contact tracing capability”.He called for a long-term plan for recruiting and training doctors, nurses and other staff but suggested work could have been done earlier in his tenure.“I was very proud to push through very large increases [in recruitment] in 2016,” Mr Hunt said. “But the truth is that not a single doctor has yetentered the workforce as a result of those changes.”He added: “We should be asking ourselves, ‘What do we need to do now to turn this into a ‘1948 moment’ [when the NHS was founded] and give the workforce the confidence that there is a long-term strategic plan in place that will ultimately deal with the rota gaps, the pressures and the shortages?’”The MP also said the biggest mistakes in the social care sector during the pandemic were over discharging Covid-positive patients into care homes”.He added: “We have a lot to learn from countries like Germany that said that care homes were not allowed to take Covid-positive patients unless they were able to quarantine them for two weeks, and they were very strict about that.“That may be the single reason why their death rate has been so much lower.”Dame Donna Kinnair, chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing, agreed the UK needed a long-term plan to deal with the chronic shortage of nursing staff. “Successive secretaries of state have ducked this issue but the pandemic means the fragility of the nursing workforce is now aninescapable reality,” she said.Additional reporting by PA More

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      in UK Politics

      Jeremy Hunt says Covid restrictions should stay until cases fall to 1,000 a day

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      Jeremy Hunt has warned against lifting lockdown restrictions until coronavirus cases fall to 1,000 a day amid calls for measures to be eased by May.The prime minister is facing pressure from lockdown-sceptic Tory MPs to bring forward the lifting of social distancing restrictions as cases fall and the vaccine rollout continues.Mark Harper, chairman of the Covid Recovery Group (CRG), said he thought ministers could “get rid of restrictions completely” by the end of May when all those over aged 50 are likely to have received at least one vaccine jab.And Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee, said the government was in danger of falling out of step with public opinion if it delayed the reopening of schools in England to 8 March as planned.Paul Hunter, professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, also said he thought people would be able to meet up with friends and family in March as the decline in positive cases had given him cause for optimism – although he added some form of social distancing may need to continue until spring 2022 even with effective vaccines.However Mr Hunt, the former health secretary and current chair of the health select committee, warned ministers should listen “very carefully” to the scientific advice and aim to suppress the virus enough to allow a “South Korean-style approach” of intensive contact tracing possible, in an interview with The Guardian.He told the newspaper: “I think we have to recognise that the game has changed massively over Christmas with these new variants, and that we mustn’t make the mistake that we made last year of thinking that we’re not going to have another resurgence of the virus.”Mr Hunt’s suggestion that restrictions should not be eased until new infections are driven below 1,000 a day would likely mean measures remaining in place for an extended period of time.On Thursday, 20,634 new cases of coronavirus were reported in the UK, bringing the total to 3,892,459.Government figures showed a further 915 people also died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19, taking the UK’s death toll to 110,250.And while the latest Public Health England data suggests coronavirus cases have dropped across all regions in England and among all age groups, NHS hospitals are still under considerable pressure as seriously ill patients remain in intensive care.The prime minister on Wednesday told a Downing Street briefing the level of coronavirus infections in the country was still “forbiddingly high” and that it was too soon to relax current restrictions.Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said Boris Johnson should ease the restrictions “in a careful, measured way” to ensure “this lockdown is the last lockdown”.Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents trusts in England, also called for a “cautious, evidence-based” approach to any relaxation of lockdown restrictions in England, saying the social-distancing rules had been eased too early last year.He said there were still 26,000 Covid-19 patients in hospital, 40 per cent more than the peak last April, while the NHS was running at 170 per cent of last year’s intensive care unit (ICU) capacity.Additional reporting by PA More

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      in UK Politics

      Cold and flu symptoms should be viewed as potential Covid cases, doctors warn

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      While Covid-19 is far more severe than seasonal influenza, the two conditions do share a number of symptoms like a runny or blocked nose, a sore throat and headaches, the GPs said, arguing it was “vital” that Boris Johnson’s Cabinet raised public awareness and brought its defintion of the respiratory disease in line with that of the World Health Organisation (WHO) as part of the broader campaign to tame the pandemic.“These symptoms are often inadvertently picked up while dealing with patients’ other more pressing health issues,” the collective of 140 east London physicians and healthcare workers wrote to the UK’s chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty.“These patients have frequently not even considered that they may have Covid-19 and have not self-isolated in the crucial early days when they were most infectious. “The national publicity campaign [currently] focuses on cough, high temperature, and loss of smell or taste as symptoms to be aware of – only patients with these symptoms are able to access a Covid-19 test online through the NHS test booking site. GPs have to advise patients to be dishonest to get a Covid-19 test.“It is vital to now change the UK Covid-19 case definition and test criteria to include coryza [runny nose] and cold, making them consistent with WHO.”The signatories go on to advise Professor Whitty: “Tell the public, especially those who have to go out to work and their employers, that even those with mild symptoms (not only a cough, high temperature, and a loss of smell or taste) should not go out, prioritising the first five days of self-isolation when they are most likely to be infectious.“This will help to get – and keep – us out of this indefinite lockdown, as Covid-19 becomes increasingly endemic globally. Ignoring this will be at our peril.”The UK has suffered an estimated 3.84m cases of coronavirus and approximately 107,000 deaths since the pandemic struck last spring, with the government’s response heavily criticised and dogged by U-turns.But the country’s vaccine rollout has proven a success so far, with 12 per cent of the population already inoculated, a pace far outstripping that of the US and EU. More

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      in World Politics

      What Explains the COVID-19 East-West Divide?

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      COVID-19 has been ruthless in choosing winners and losers around the world. The obvious “losers” have been those countries led by right-wing nationalists: Brazil, India, Russia, the United Kingdom and (until recently) the United States. These five countries are responsible for more than half of the world’s coronavirus infections and nearly half the deaths.

      Just as obviously, the “winners” have been the countries of Asia. Although China and South Korea were both hit hard early on in the pandemic, they have managed to recover quite dramatically. The rest of the region, meanwhile, has suffered nowhere near the same magnitude of adverse consequences that Europe or the Americas have experienced. Taiwan has had fewer than 1,000 infections and only seven deaths. Vietnam had had about 1,500 infections and 35 deaths. Thailand has had over 13,000 infections but only 75 deaths. Mongolia has had under 1,700 infections and only two deaths.

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      Even the less fortunate countries in the region have managed to control the pandemic better than the West has. Burma has suffered over 130,000 infections, but just over 3,000 deaths. Malaysia has had 185,000 infections but only 700 deaths, while Japan has had over 360,000 infections but just under 5,200 deaths. Singapore has actually had the largest per-capita number of infections in the region but has registered only 29 deaths. The two relative outliers are the Philippines, with over 500,000 infections and 10,000 deaths, and Indonesia, with nearly a million infections and over 28,000 deaths.

      High Marks

      It’s not as if these countries have avoided the various surges that have taken place globally as a result of holiday travel, the loosening of restrictions or the new variants of the disease. But even among the outliers, the renewed outbreaks have been several magnitudes smaller than what Europe or the Americas have faced.

      To give you a sense of how relatively successful even these outliers have been, imagine if the Trump administration had handled the pandemic as poorly as the worst-performing Asian nation. Rodrigo Duterte is in many ways the Donald Trump of Asia. But if the United States had managed to follow the Filipino example, the United States would now be facing 1.5 million cases of infection and only 30,000 deaths. Instead, America not long ago passed the 25-million mark in cases and the 400,000-deaths mark.

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      Now imagine if the Trump administration had dealt with the pandemic as successfully as Vietnam. The United States would have been hit by under 5,000 infections and a little over 100 deaths. Not fair, you say, because Vietnam is a communist country that can impose draconian restrictions without fear of backlash? Okay, if we use Taiwan as the yardstick for comparison, the United States would have 15,000 infections and a little over 100 deaths. Not fair, you say, because Taiwan is an island? Okay, if we use South Korea as the baseline, the United States would have had 450,000 infections and about 8,000 deaths.

      Any way you look at it, the United States did worse than every single country in Asia. If America had just managed to handle the crisis as effectively as the worst-performing Asian country, close to 400,000 more Americans would be alive today.

      It’s easy to blame Trump for this woeful discrepancy between America and Asia. After all, according to the first Global Health Security Index released in 2019, the United States came out on top in terms of its readiness to deal with a pandemic. US hospitals routinely receive high marks in global lists. A failure of governance would seem to be the key distinguishing factor, particularly in light of all the mistakes the Trump administration made from day one, errors that the president compounded through ignorance, incompetence and sheer foolishness.

      But many of the governments in Asia made similar mistakes. Duterte has been widely criticized for delays and missteps. South Korean leader Moon Jae-in faced calls for impeachment early in the crisis because of the government’s failure to prevent the first outbreaks. So, perhaps at least some of the fault lies elsewhere: not in our political stars, but in ourselves.

      East vs. West

      After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the West indulged in more than a little triumphalism. Pundits fell over each other in their eagerness to declare that the individual had prevailed over the collective, capitalism had vanquished communism, and the West was the best (so forget about the rest).

      Many people in Asia, however, begged to differ.  Maybe you remember the debate in the 1990s around “Eastern” vs. “Western” values. Singapore’s leader Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, along with their house intellectuals, claimed that Asian countries had superior value systems than those of the West.

      Rather than unstable democracies, disruptive human rights movements and the overwhelming cult of the individual, the East valued harmony, order and the common good. These values, it argued, made possible the continuous economic success of the Asian Tigers — Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan — not to mention the earlier accomplishments of Japan, the leapfrogging rise of mainland China and the copycat efforts of the Tiger Cubs — Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam. The proof was in the productivity.

      The counterarguments came quickly from such august figures as Kim Dae-jung of South Korea, Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma, and Amartya Sen of India. They pointed out that there’s nothing inherently Western about human rights and democracy. Both South Korea and Taiwan, after all, democratized without putting a dent in their economic growth. Human rights movements had mass appeal in Burma, the Philippines and elsewhere in the region. After the Asian financial crisis of 1997, which devastated countries in the region, it became increasingly difficult to argue that the East was immune from the same economic problems that plagued capitalism in the West.

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      As a result, the “Eastern values” camp gradually faded from view. Good riddance to bad theory. The dividing line between East and West was spurious in so many ways, reminiscent of older stereotypes of the East as “unchanging” or “inscrutable.”

      And yet, today, COVID-19 has drawn a clear line between Asia and the rest of the world. What’s particularly striking about this latest divergence is the lack of significance in types of governance. The countries that have been successful in Asia have very different forms of government, from communist (Vietnam) to democratic (Taiwan) to military dictatorship (Thailand). Moreover, they have different histories, religious backgrounds, and relationships with the countries of the West. The only thing they share, it would seem, is what realtors are always going on about: location, location, location. So, should we be resurrecting “Eastern values” to explain such a startling difference in outcomes during this pandemic era?

      Three Reasons

      The most important reason that Asia reacted to COVID-19 with greater seriousness and better results has to do not with ancient history but with more recent experience. In 2003, the region was blindsided by the SARS epidemic. The first cases emerged in southern China in late 2002. By March, the new coronavirus was showing up in Hong Kong and Vietnam as well. Eventually, it would appear in 29 countries and result in over 700 deaths. By July, after unprecedented international cooperation, the World Health Organization declared the epidemic contained.

      Think of SARS as a virus that stimulated Asia’s immunological system. That system went into hyperdrive to fight off the infection. Once Asia successfully beat off the new disease, a certain immunity remained. That immunity was not biological, in the sense that the populations of the region had any resistance to novel coronaviruses. Rather, the immunity consisted of a heightened awareness of the problem, a new set of institutions and practices developed to fight future attacks, and a historical memory among a certain generation of political leadership. The rest of the world, which avoided the brunt of SARS, didn’t develop that kind of immunity.

      A second advantage that Asian countries have enjoyed is a coordinated central government response. After its initial denial of COVID-19, Beijing soon switched into high gear to contain the spread of the disease by locking down Wuhan and other hot spots and severely restricting internal travel. South Korea moved rapidly to institute a nationwide test-and-trace system. Taiwan quickly made masks available, imposed an immediate quarantine system and monitored citizens digitally. Countries in the region with less tightly federated structures — Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia — weren’t able to react as quickly or as consistently. But even they were models of central authority compared to the kind of policy clash between the center and the periphery that so complicated the pandemic response in countries like Brazil and the United States.

      The third advantage, and this comes the closest to a revival of the “Eastern values” argument, is the issue of compliance. The American anti-mask mentality, for instance, has no real counterpart in Asia. Sure, plenty of people in the region have issues with their governments and with state regulations. A number of the countries in the region, like South Korea, are notoriously low-trust. But throughout the region, citizens have greater respect for scientific authority and greater respect for community standards. And those who for whatever reason choose to flout this authority and these standards are quickly shamed into compliance.

      As Lawrence Wright points out in his thorough piece on COVID-19 in The New Yorker, consistent mask use stands out as a determinant of success in containing the spread of the virus. “Hong Kong was one of the world’s densest cities, but there was no community spread of the virus there, because nearly everyone wore masks,” he writes. “Taiwan, which was manufacturing ten million masks per day for a population of twenty-three million, was almost untouched. Both places neighbored China, the epicenter.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Anti-vaccine sentiment is also quite low in Asia. According to a 2018 survey, 85% of people in Asia believe vaccines are safe — the highest of any region in the world. Although anti-vaxxers have managed to spread their messages in Asia, it’s notably been in the two countries with the worst records on COVID-19: the Philippines and Indonesia. Elsewhere, vaccination levels have remained high.

      It’s not just deference to science or fear of public shaming. Compliance may also derive from a stronger sense of the common good. It’s not as if harmony prevails over Asia like a benevolent weather front. Look at the political polarization in Thailand that has led to multiple mass demonstrations and military coups. Or the rapid alternation in power of different political parties in Taiwan and South Korea. But underneath the great divisions in these societies is a persistent belief in pulling together during a crisis rather than pulling apart.

      It is impossible to imagine a scenario in any Asian country like what transpired in the United States during the January 6 insurrection. Lawmakers evacuated from the congressional floor found themselves packed into a small, windowless lockdown room. If ever there were a time for bipartisanship, it was during this attack on American democracy. Yet some Republican legislators, although they quite obviously couldn’t maintain social distance in this crowded space, refused to wear the masks offered to them. They couldn’t even pretend to care about the health and safety of others, and several lawmakers indeed tested positive for COVID-19 after this experience. This is the American response to the pandemic writ small: astonishing selfishness and ideological rigidity.

      In Asia, it’s very possible that the successful efforts by governments to contain COVID-19 will lead to a virtuous circle of trust, if not in the governments, then at least in social institutions like medical authorities, as this recent study from South Korea suggests. The West, meanwhile, is descending into a vicious circle of mistrust that vaccinations, herd immunity that the exile of Trump to Florida will not be enough to forestall. Forget about so-called Eastern values for a moment. The West needs to look more carefully at its own values since they are clearly not fit for purpose at a time of crisis.

      *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More