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runlai_jiang

Moshe Holtzberg: The Israeli boy who survived 2008 Mumbai attack - BBC News - 0 views

  • One of the most evocative stories from the Mumbai attacks is that of the Israeli toddler saved by his Indian nanny as gunmen killed both his parents. He is now set to revisit the site of the attack with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. BBC Hindi's Zubair Ahmed met his family in Israel. Every night before going to bed, 11-year-old Moshe Holtzberg looks up at the photo of his smiling parents hanging above his bed and wishes them good night. Gabi and Rivka Holtzberg were killed in Chabad House, a Jewish cultural centre in the western Indian city of Mumbai, during a deadly attack in 2008. Moshe was barely two years old at the time.
  • The gunmen carried out a series of co-ordinated attacks across Mumbai targeting seven different locations, including two luxury hotels, the main railway station and the Jewish centre where the Holtzbergs had been living.Moshe was saved by his nanny, Sandra Samuel, who said she found him standing over the unconscious bodies of his parents. She is believed to have grabbed him and fled outside. It remains unclear what Moshe witnessed but, according to his family, he suffered nightmares for months and had trouble sleeping.
  • This will be Moshe's first time in India since the attack. It will be an emotional journey, Mr Rosenberg says. Moshe was invited by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi who had met the boy during his visit to Israel in July.
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  • Moshe, according to his grandfather, wants to be a rabbi like his father, Gabi. His parents had moved to Mumbai seven years before the attack to work at Chabad House. Their life in Mumbai had revolved around Jewish people visiting the city and other parts of India.
brickol

The missing six weeks: how Trump failed the biggest test of his life | US news | The Gu... - 0 views

  • When the definitive history of the coronavirus pandemic is written, the date 20 January 2020 is certain to feature prominently. It was on that day that a 35-year-old man in Washington state, recently returned from visiting family in Wuhan in China, became the first person in the US to be diagnosed with the virus.
  • In the two months since that fateful day, the responses to coronavirus displayed by the US and South Korea have been polar opposites.
  • One country acted swiftly and aggressively to detect and isolate the virus, and by doing so has largely contained the crisis. The other country dithered and procrastinated, became mired in chaos and confusion, was distracted by the individual whims of its leader, and is now confronted by a health emergency of daunting proportions.
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  • Within a week of its first confirmed case, South Korea’s disease control agency had summoned 20 private companies to the medical equivalent of a war-planning summit and told them to develop a test for the virus at lightning speed. A week after that, the first diagnostic test was approved and went into battle, identifying infected individuals who could then be quarantined to halt the advance of the disease.
  • Some 357,896 tests later, the country has more or less won the coronavirus war. On Friday only 91 new cases were reported in a country of more than 50 million.
  • The US response tells a different story. Two days after the first diagnosis in Washington state, Donald Trump went on air on CNBC and bragged: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
  • Though the decision to allow private and state labs to provide testing has increased the flow of test kits, the US remains starkly behind South Korea, which has conducted more than five times as many tests per capita. That makes predicting where the next hotspot will pop up after New York and New Orleans almost impossible.
  • Today, 86,012 cases have been confirmed across the US, pushing the nation to the top of the world’s coronavirus league table – above even China.
  • Most worryingly, the curve of cases continues to rise precipitously, with no sign of the plateau that has spared South Korea.
  • Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the US government’s response to international disasters at USAid from 2013 to 2017, frames the past six weeks in strikingly similar terms. He told the Guardian: “We are witnessing in the United States one of the greatest failures of basic governance and basic leadership in modern times.”
  • If Trump’s travel ban did nothing else, it staved off to some degree the advent of the virus in the US, buying a little time. Which makes the lack of decisive action all the more curious.
  • It was not until 29 February, more than a month after the Journal article and almost six weeks after the first case of coronavirus was confirmed in the country that the Trump administration put that advice into practice. Laboratories and hospitals would finally be allowed to conduct their own Covid-19 tests to speed up the process.
  • In the absence of sufficient test kits, the US Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) initially kept a tight rein on testing, creating a bottleneck. “I believe the CDC was caught flat-footed,” was how the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, put it on 7 March. “They’re slowing down the state.”The CDC’s botched rollout of testing was the first indication that the Trump administration was faltering as the health emergency gathered pace. Behind the scenes, deep flaws in the way federal agencies had come to operate under Trump were being exposed.
  • In 2018 the pandemic unit in the national security council – which was tasked to prepare for health emergencies precisely like the current one – was disbanded. “Eliminating the office has contributed to the federal government’s sluggish domestic response,” Beth Cameron, senior director of the office at the time it was broken up, wrote in the Washington Post.
  • It was hardly a morale-boosting gesture when Trump proposed a 16% cut in CDC funding on 10 February – 11 days after the World Health Organization had declared a public health emergency over Covid-19.
  • The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates the diagnostic tests and will control any new treatments for coronavirus, has also shown vulnerabilities. The agency recently indicated that it was looking into the possibility of prescribing the malaria drug chloroquine for coronavirus sufferers, even though there is no evidence it would work and some indication it could have serious side-effects.
  • As the former senior official put it: “We have the FDA bowing to political pressure and making decisions completely counter to modern science.”
  • Trump has designated himself a “wartime president”. But if the title bears any validity, his military tactics have been highly unconventional. He has exacerbated the problems encountered by federal agencies by playing musical chairs at the top of the coronavirus force.
  • The president began by creating on 29 January a special coronavirus taskforce, then gave Vice-President Mike Pence the job, who promptly appointed Deborah Birx “coronavirus response coordinator”, before the federal emergency agency Fema began taking charge of key areas, with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, creating a shadow team that increasingly appears to be calling the shots.“There’s no point of responsibility,” the former senior official told the Guardian. “It keeps shifting. Nobody owns the problem.”
  • So it has transpired. In the wake of the testing disaster has come the personal protective equipment (PPE) disaster, the hospital bed disaster, and now the ventilator disaster.Ventilators, literal life preservers, are in dire short supply across the country. When governors begged Trump to unleash the full might of the US government on this critical problem, he gave his answer on 16 March.In a phrase that will stand beside 20 January 2020 as one of the most revelatory moments of the history of coronavirus, he said: “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment – try getting it yourselves.”
  • In the absence of a strong federal response, a patchwork of efforts has sprouted all across the country. State governors are doing their own thing. Cities, even individual hospitals, are coping as best they can.
brickol

What World War II can teach us about fighting coronavirus (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

  • Eighty years ago, as Americans came together to defeat the fascism that threatened civilization, American factories poured out the weapons needed to crush Germany and the other Axis Powers.
  • Today America can do it again and create the arsenal that defeats this latest threat to civilization: the coronavirus. From ventilators and N95 masks, to anti-viral drugs and ICU equipment and hospital beds, American companies are being mobilized in the face of the most serious public health crisis in more than a century. But these companies will only be successful if we learn the right lessons from the industrial mobilization that won the world's biggest war.
  • Have a clear objective and a realistic timeline When war mobilization began in 1940-41, no one said the goal was to defeat fascism — and no one was able to mass produce tanks or bombers from a standing start. From the beginning, Washington set a more purposeful goal of building a modern, well-equipped military in case war came.
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  • Today, our window of opportunity is much shorter — perhaps as little as 30 to 60 days. In order to mass produce testing kits, antiviral drugs, ventilators, masks and hospital beds in that time frame, the administration will need to set production goals that are both within reach, but also meet our most immediate objective: halting the deadly spread of COVID-19 before it overwhelms our health care system.
  • Seek out the best, brightest and most productive During World War II, the federal government offered contracts to America's most productive companies like automakers GM and Ford and electrical companies like GE and Westinghouse to mass produce the engines, planes, tanks, torpedoes and weapons needed to arm America — even though they had never made them before. But Washington also incentivized companies that were already producing planes, like Boeing and Lockheed, to move into a higher gear by steadily increasing government orders while assuming the costs associated with higher production.
  • Getting Ford, GE and GM to produce ventilators is a great first step. But don't neglect companies like Medtronic, Johnson & Johnson and Becton Dickinson that already make the US a world-class leader in medical devices.
  • Find the right leadership
  • Have an exit strategy
  • Stay unified and unitedAs a master architect of the Arsenal of Democracy, Knudsen smartly put it: "We can do anything if we do it together." The same is true of defeating coronavirus: If we hit the right balance between what business can and must do, and what the federal government shouldn't and can't, we can do anything.
Javier E

Opinion | Germany Has Relatively Few Deaths From Coronavirus. Why? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Germany, it seems, is not immune to the ravages of the pandemic.
  • Except in one way: Very few people seem to be dying. As of Saturday, of the 56,202 confirmed cases of the coronavirus, just 403 patients have died. That’s a fatality rate of 0.72 percent. By contrast, the current rate in Italy — where over 10,000 people have died — is 10.8 percent. In Spain, it’s 8 percent. Over twice as many people have died in Britain, where there are around three times fewer cases, than in Germany.
  • What is going on here? And what can we learn from it?
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  • First and foremost: Early and persistent testing helps. And so does tracking people.
  • Across the country, the pattern was repeated. Local health departments and federal authorities worked together to test, track and quarantine exposed citizens.
  • Germany has also been better at protecting its older residents, who are at much greater risk. States banned visits to the elderly, and policymakers issued urgent warnings to limit contact with older people
  • Patients over the age of 80 make up around 3 percent of the infected, though they account for 7 percent of the population. The median age for those infected is estimated to be 46; in Italy, it’s 63.
  • many more young people in Germany have tested positive for the virus than in other countries
  • “Both skiing and carnival may have affected the low average age of the first wave of confirmed cases,”
  • In general, countries that test less and reserve it for those already very ill, like Italy, have higher fatality rates.
  • Though Germany’s health care system is overall in good shape — recently modernized, well staffed and funded, with the highest number of intensive-care beds per 100,000 patients in Europe — it hasn’t really been tested yet.
  • On average, a severely ill Covid-19 patient dies 30 days after being infected
  • It’s quite possible that Germany is just behind the curve
Javier E

The coronavirus isn't another Hurricane Katrina. It's worse. - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • the United States again faces a circumstance in which the problem may be larger than the institutions that normally deal with it.
  • Public health is mainly the responsibility of states and localities. Americans may think the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is leading a national response to the coronavirus. It isn’t. The CDC has a weak role in setting and implementing policy, and it is not sufficiently staffed to do the job people think it is doing.
  • The working group headed by Vice President Pence — while needed and helpful — only has the power of cajoling. In a public health emergency, there is no national coordinating function.
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  • some problems have a scope — say, fighting a war or constructing a national highway system — that overwhelms the theory of local control.
  • As America moves to the mitigation stage of the outbreak, social distancing measures — such as closing schools, ending mass gatherings and restricting travel — are the next line of defense. But the problem with such measures is that they tend to be imposed too late and/or lifted too early. And the current implementation of social distancing by states and localities can best be called spotty.
  • Dangerously and absurdly, political leaders have been using the low number of confirmed cases as the evidence of success when it is actually a measure of our blindness.
  • if sickness begins to come in a sudden rush, it will swamp the health-care system, leading to shortages of masks, hospital beds, ventilators and personnel (as it has in northern Italy).
  • “The glaring risk today,” as J. Stephen Morrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told me, “is that the elderly and those with fragile health suffer extreme illness but are unable to access life-sustaining care and die in large numbers.”
brickol

Live Coronavirus News, Updates and Video - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The Tokyo Olympics have been postponed. New York, now the center of the outbreak in America, braces for a flood of patients. The playwright Terrence McNally dies of complications from the coronavirus.
  • tocks rallied on the hope that Washington was close to producing a stimulus bill. Shares soared for airlines and other companies expected to benefit.
  • Trump expressed outrage at having to ‘close the country’ to curb the spread of the virus.
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  • Even as nations from Britain to India declare nationwide economic lockdowns, President Trump said he “would love to have the country opened up, and just raring to go, by Easter,” less than three weeks away, a goal that top health professionals have called far too quick.
  • he expressed outrage about having to “close the country” to curb the spread of the coronavirus and indicated that his guidelines on business shutdowns and social distancing would soon be lifted.
  • “I gave it two weeks,” he said, adding, “We can socially distance ourselves and go to work.”
  • “We are honored to serve and put our lives on the front line to protect and save as many lives as possible,” the American Medical Association, American Hospital Association and American Nurses Association wrote in an open letter. “But we need your help.”
  • Mr. Trump fell back on his comparison of the coronavirus to the flu, saying that despite losing thousands of people to the flu, “We don’t turn the country off.”
  • States including California, Maryland, Illinois and Washington have declared stay-at-home or shutdown orders, but other states have been looking for directives from the Trump administration. And countries in Asia are beginning to see a resurgence of coronavirus after easing up on restrictions.
  • For governors and mayors who have been trying to educate people about the urgent need to stay home and maintain social distance, Mr. Trump’s recent statements suggesting that such measures may be going too far threatened to make their jobs more difficult.
  • Mr. Hogan, the chairman of the bipartisan National Governors Association, said that health officials suggest that the virus’s peak could be weeks or months away. “We’re just trying to take the best advice that we can from the scientists and all the experts, and making the decisions that we believe are necessary for our states,” he said.
  • Both Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence said that a lockdown had never been under consideration for the United States.
  • But the president and vice president were resolute that they want the country reopened. Mr. Pence said the administration’s timeline for trying to get businesses restarted and workers out of their homes was shorter than the period that health experts have said would be necessary to flatten the curve.
  • “We’ll focus on our most vulnerable, but putting America back to work will also be a priority, in weeks not months,” Mr. Pence said.
  • Mr. Pence also said two malaria drugs, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for off-label use treating patients with Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. The F.D.A. did not immediately confirm that assertion, but two administration health officials said it was not true.
  • India, the world’s second-most populous country, will order its 1.3 billion people to stay inside their homes for three weeks to try to curb the spread of the coronavirus, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared on Tuesday.
  • Left unclear was how Indians would be able to get food and other needed supplies. Mr. Modi alluded vaguely to the government and civil society groups stepping in to help, but offered no details.
  • Mr. Modi also pledged to spend about $2 billion on medical supplies, isolation rooms, ventilators, intensive care units and training for medical personnel to combat the pandemic.
  • New York’s case count is doubling every three days, the governor says.
  • “We haven’t flattened the curve,” he said. “And the curve is actually increasing.” The governor, appearing in front of piles of medical supplies, spoke in a far more sober tone and delivered notably bleaker news than he has in previous days.The peak of infection in New York could come as soon as two to three weeks, far earlier than previously anticipated, Mr. Cuomo said, which would put even bigger strain on the health care system than officials had feared.
  • The governor said the state now projects that it may need as many as 140,000 hospital beds to house virus patients, up from the 110,000 projected a few days ago. As of now, only 53,000 are available. Up to 40,000 intensive-care beds could be needed. “Those are troubling and astronomical numbers,” he said.
  • In New York City alone, there have been around 15,000 cases.“Look at us today,” he warned the rest of the country. “Where we are today, you will be in four weeks or five weeks or six weeks. We are your future.”
  • Perhaps it was inevitable that New York City and surrounding suburbs would become the epicenter of the coronavirus epidemic in the United States. The population density, reliance on public transportation and constant influx of tourists — all would seem to make the metropolitan area a target.
  • But to stop the virus, scientists have to figure out which factors played a greater role than others. As it turns out, that is not so simple.
  • Perhaps the epidemic in New York had less to do with the virus than with discrete opportunities to spread: In so-called super-spreader events, one patient somehow manages to infect dozens, even scores of others. At one point, half the cases in Massachusetts were attributed to a single initial infection.
Javier E

Did Ohio get coronavirus right? Early intervention, preparation for pandemic may pay of... - 0 views

  • Now, Ohio may be realizing the benefits of early intervention in the pandemic by its government and medical community. With about 5,100 covid-19 cases, it has fewer than a third the number of people with the novel coronavirus than in three comparably sized states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Illinois. And Ohio has just a small fraction of the deaths reported in those states.
  • The Cleveland Clinic, which eventually beefed up plans to expand from 3,200 beds to 8,000 should the worst occur, held just 150 covid-19 patients (along with 2,000 others) this week and is preparing to scale back some facilities. It is moving to lend medical personnel to cities such as Detroit and New York hit hard by the virus.
  • In the Cincinnati region, models now show that peak occupancy of hospital beds by covid-19 patients may be just 10 percent of the predicted worst-case scenario.
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  • an early look at Ohio’s preparations and decision-making shows they reflect textbook recommendations for the way to handle an outbreak. Identify it early. Plan for the worst, hope for the best. Move swiftly because disease expansion will be exponential, not linear. In the absence of testing, assume the virus is spreading through the community. Communicate with the public clearly, and keep the message consistent.
  • Ohio has a well-established emergency medical response system. The state is divided into three regions, each clustered around major population centers in Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati. Planners call these zones the “three C’s.”
  • Their CEOs met and agreed to drop their historical competition for shares of the market and collaborate on just about everything, said Richard P. Lofgren, president and CEO of the University of Cincinnati’s health system.
  • As news of the outbreak in China began to spread in early January, epidemiologists and infectious disease experts at the three major medical centers in those regions began to track the spread. Soon, they were modeling the potential impact in Ohio and meeting more regularly to prepare.
  • In retrospect, the sports festival forced planners to confront the pandemic days, and in some cases more than a week, before other communities. DeWine would go on to close schools and businesses, and order residents to stay home, earlier than most other states. His March 12 school order was one of the first in the nation. Ohio State University, with 68,000 students on multiple campuses, went to online classes March 9 and extended it to the rest of the semester March 12.
  • Cincinnati’s peak is now forecast to be 291 cases — about 10 percent of the original prediction — on April 28, according to modeling Alessandrini received Tuesday. The number is so low she is hesitant to trust it yet. The peak is also later than originally predicted, and patients should arrive in a manageable order, not the crush that New York City experienced
  • Experts expect flare-ups as the pandemic fades — a saw-toothed curve rather than a smooth downward slope.
  • Persuading cooped-up residents to accept a very gradual return to something like their previous lives will require great discipline,
katherineharron

There's a lot of misinformation around what's happening at the border. Here are the fac... - 0 views

  • The Biden administration is facing an increasing number of unaccompanied migrant children crossing into the United States, placing added strain on a system operating under limited capacity due to the coronavirus pandemic.
  • The pandemic has taken a dramatic toll on Latin America, where Covid-19 cases and deaths have soared and economies once projected to grow have been decimated. The region was also hit with two devastating hurricanes. The decline in economic growth in 2020, according to the Congressional Research Service, is expected to worsen income inequality and poverty
  • The majority of border crossers since October are single adults, many of whom are from Mexico. In January, the US Border Patrol arrested more than 75,000 migrants on the southern border, up from around 71,000 in December, according to the latest data. Of those, single adults made up around 62,000 arrests.
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  • On average, over the last 21 days, the US Border Patrol arrested around 340 children who crossed the US-Mexico border alone, according to internal documents reviewed by CNN.
  • There are approximately 7,700 unaccompanied children in HHS care. The department has around 13,650 beds to accommodate children when not under reduced capacity.In 2019, the Trump administration faced large numbers of children and families at the US-Mexico border that overwhelmed facilities. While it's difficult to compare today's arrests with those of recent years because of the drastically different circumstances as a result of the pandemic, the increasing trend of children has raised concerns.
  • the Border Patrol encountered around 5,100 unaccompanied children. This past January, Border Patrol took roughly 5,700 children who crossed the border alone into custody.
  • The numbers of children coming into US custody may look higher when compared to last year because the Trump administration subjected children crossing the US-Mexico border alone to a policy that allowed for the swift removal of migrants.
  • In a holdover from the Trump era, individuals encountered illegally crossing the US-Mexico border can be swiftly expelled from the United States with little consequence under a public health order put in place last March. That's led to single adults trying to cross multiple times.
  • After being taken into Border Patrol custody, unaccompanied children have to be turned over within 72 hours to the Department of Health and Human Services
  • Once in care, case managers will work to place children with a sponsor, like a parent or relative, in the US, but as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, and precautions to avoid spread of Covid-19, the department is only able to use a little more than half of the beds it has for children.
  • HHS has an expansive shelter network nationwide equipped to care for children until they can be placed with family in the United States. These shelters are separate from Border Patrol facilities, which are not intended to house children, and have been used under previous administrations.
  • But on Friday, the Biden administration notified facilities caring for migrant children that they can open back up to pre-Covid-19 levels, acknowledging "extraordinary circumstances" due to a rising number of minors crossing the US-Mexico border, according to a memo obtained by CNN.
anonymous

Biden says "nothing has changed," but numbers of child migrants on record pace : NPR - 0 views

  • President Biden claimed Thursday in his first press conference since taking office that "nothing has changed" compared to earlier influxes of migrants and unaccompanied children at the border.
  • The Biden administration has been grappling with surging numbers of migrants, especially children arriving at the border without their parents. It is true, as Biden states, that numbers often rise during the early months of the year when temperatures begin to warm. But the number of children arriving today without their parents is considerably higher than at the same time in 2019 and 2020.
  • In fact, the number of unaccompanied children being apprehended by the Border Patrol were higher in February than they've been any previous February since 2014, according to data shared with NPR by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.
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  • Authorities encountered 9,297 children without a parent in February, a 30% increase from 2019 during the last major influx of unaccompanied children. To be sure, it's still below the peaks of 11,000 unaccompanied minors who arrived in May 2019 and above 10,000 in June 2014, but experts and administration officials expect those records to be broken this year.
  • Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said last week that U.S. agents are on pace to intercept more migrants on the southwest border in 2021 than they have in the last two decades.The reasons for the influx of migrants from Central America are vast and complex. They are also deeply personal for each family who chooses to leave their home.
  • Jessica Bolter, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, says they involve a mix of longstanding factors, such as poverty and corruption, as well as new factors such as two recent hurricanes and widespread unemployment due to the pandemic.
  • U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents apprehended an average of 5,000 undocumented immigrants per day over the past 30 days, including about 500 unaccompanied children, according to a senior Border Patrol official who spoke to reporters on Friday.
  • The official said the influx was "much different" than previous years, citing the large number of unaccompanied children and families traveling. As of Wednesday, more than 5,000 unaccompanied migrant children and teens were stuck in Border Patrol facilities waiting for beds in more appropriate shelters built for children, according to Department of Homeland Security data viewed by NPR.
  • The Border Patrol official told reporters Friday that agents are trying to discharge the children from warehouses and jail-like holding cells as quickly as possible, but there's a bottleneck because the government can't open child shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services fast enough to accommodate everyone who's crossing.
  • The Biden administration is working with other agencies trying find more bed space. They're using places like the San Diego Convention Center to hold unaccompanied minors so they're not sleeping in cells on the border. The challenges in Central America – and at the border – have become cyclical.
  • Like under previous presidents, the Biden administration was not prepared to shelter this many arriving children. But Bolter questions whether this is some kind of a new "crisis." She says this part of the same flow of migrants that the United States has been experiencing over the last decade.
  • Up until 2012, the vast majority of apprehensions at the southwest border were of young Mexican males coming across to find work in the United States. Two years later, the majority of cases coming across the southwest border were from Central America and were a mix people, families and unaccompanied children.
  • The Biden administration also has long term plans to deal more directly with these issues in Central America. They include developing more legal avenues to seek asylum so that migrants don't feel they have to choose illegal avenues. And Biden just sent three top officials to Mexico and Guatemala as part of efforts to tackle the root causes of migration, something he also just tasked Vice President Harris with leading.
  • He told NPR's Steve Inskeep Friday that the administration wants to help countries in the region create the right environment for international investment that drives economic prosperity, but also has ways to encourage better behavior from money launderers and other corrupt officials.
rerobinson03

A Collapse Foretold: How Brazil's Covid-19 Outbreak Overwhelmed Hospitals - The New Yor... - 0 views

  • The virus has killed more than 300,000 people in Brazil, its spread aided by a highly contagious variant, political infighting and distrust of science.
  • More than a year into the pandemic, deaths in Brazil are at their peak and highly contagious variants of the coronavirus are sweeping the nation, enabled by political dysfunction, widespread complacency and conspiracy theories. The country, whose leader, President Jair Bolsonaro, has played down the threat of the virus, is now reporting more new cases and deaths per day than any other country in the world.
  • At Hospital Restinga e Extremo Sul, one of the main medical facilities in Porto Alegre, the emergency room has become a crammed Covid ward where many patients received care in chairs, for lack of a free bed. Last week, the military built a tent field hospital outside the main entrance, but hospital officials said the additional bed space is of little use for a medical staff stretched beyond its limit.
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  • President Bolsonaro, who continues to promote ineffective and potentially dangerous drugs to treat the disease, has also said lockdowns are untenable in a country where so many people live in poverty. While several Brazilian states have ordered business shutdowns in recent weeks, there have been no strict lockdowns.Some of the president’s supporters in Porto Alegre have protested business shutdowns in recent days, organizing caravans that stop outside of hospitals and blast their horns while inside Covid wards overflow.
  • Epidemiologists say Brazil could have avoided additional lockdowns if the government had promoted the use of masks and social distancing and aggressively negotiated access to the vaccines being developed last year.
  • uch conspiracy theories about Covid-19 vaccines have spread widely on social media, including on WhatsApp and Facebook. A recent public opinion poll by the firm IPEC found that 46 percent of respondents believed at least one widely disseminated falsehood about vaccines.Mistrust of vaccines and science is new in Brazil and a dangerous feature of the Bolsonaro era, said Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, a Brazilian neurologist at Duke University who led a coronavirus task force in the country’s northeast last year.
  • The mistrust and the denials — and the caravans of Bolsonaro supporters blasting their horns outside hospitals to protest pandemic restrictions — are crushing for medical professionals who have lost colleagues to the virus and to suicide in recent months, said Claudia Franco, the president of the nurses union in Rio Grande do Sul.
hannahcarter11

Why The Record-Breaking COVID Count In India Is Likely An Undercount : Goats and Soda :... - 0 views

  • "There's a shortage of coronavirus tests. Nobody's getting tested! So the government's numbers for our district are totally wrong," he told NPR on a crackly phone line from his village. "If you're able to get tested, results come after five days."
  • This village's ordeal is not atypical. Across India, there are shortages of testing kits, hospital beds, medical oxygen and antiviral drugs as a severe second wave of the pandemic crushes the health infrastructure. The country has been breaking world records daily for new cases. On Friday, India's Health Ministry confirmed 386,453 infections – more than any country on any day since the pandemic began.
  • Part of the reason for the huge numbers is India's size: a population of nearly 1.4 billion. The rate of known coronavirus infections per capita is still less than the United States endured at its peak.
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  • But survivors, funeral directors and scientists say the real numbers of infections and deaths in India may be many times more than the reported figures. The sheer number of patients has all but collapsed the health system in a country that invests less on public health — just above 1% of its gross domestic product — than most of its peers. (Brazil spends more than 9% of its GDP on health; in the U.S., the figure is nearly 18%.)
  • Each day, he goes to every crematorium and burial ground in his district of the capital, tallying deaths from COVID-19. Of his 11 staff members, five currently have COVID-19, he said.
  • Last year, at the height of the pandemic's first wave in India, Sirohi said he was counting about 220 COVID-19 deaths a day. When NPR spoke to him Wednesday, he counted 702 for that day. He passes those numbers up the chain of command. But the death figures the government ultimately publishes for his region have been at least 20% lower than what he's seeing on the ground, he said.
  • He attributed this disparity to administrative chaos.
  • There is another reason why India's coronavirus numbers may be skewed: hubris. In early March, India's health minister declared that the country was in the "endgame of the COVID-19 pandemic." Daily cases had hit record lows of about 8,000 a day in early February, down from a peak of nearly 100,000 cases a day in September.
  • But over the winter, as cases began creeping up, some politicians didn't pay attention — or perhaps didn't believe the coronavirus could return.
  • There have also been allegations that some politicians tried to suppress inconvenient news about rising case numbers.
  • Fewer positive results mean fewer confirmed infections and fewer deaths attributed to the coronavirus. India's total pandemic deaths this week crossed the 200,000 mark. But that's still lower than the overall death tolls in the United States, Brazil and Mexico, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
  • There are reasons why fewer Indians might die from COVID-19. India is a very young country. Only 6% of Indians are older than 65. More than half the population is under 25. They're more likely to survive the disease.
  • By analyzing total excess deaths – i.e., the difference between total deaths in Mumbai one year, compared with the year before — he estimates that the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 would have to have been undercounted by at least two-thirds to account for the higher 2020 death tally.
  • Those calculations are based on data from Mumbai, India's richest major city, where access to health care is better than elsewhere. So the number of undercounted deaths could be even higher in less well-off parts of the country — such as in Santosh Pandey's village.
  • Scientists said recorded infections are even more of an underestimate. But they have a better idea of how much infections have been undercounted because they have serological data from random antibody tests that authorities conducted across large swaths of the country.
  • Results of a third national serological survey conducted in December and January showed that roughly a fifth of India's population had been exposed to the virus. That meant for every recorded coronavirus case, almost 30 went undetected.
  • She's a biostatistician at the University of Michigan who's designed models that show India's reported infections will peak in late May. She predicts India could be confirming as many as 1 million new cases a day and 4,500 daily deaths by then.
  • The institute's director, Chris Murray, told NPR that India may be detecting only 3% or 4% of its daily infections.
  • India's deaths in this latest wave would peak around the third week of May, according to the institute's model.
  • That could mean more shortages, fewer hospital beds and more tragedy on top of what India has already endured in recent weeks.
johnsonel7

How Ebola Conspiracy Theories Are Spreading in the Congo | Time - 0 views

  • “Those people like Ebola. They’re becoming famous and successful from it,” hollers a middle-aged male parishioner wearing a black suit, near the end of an 8-minute ramble. “They can keep it. Ebola will never reach this church,”
  • Mention Ebola in Goma and you’ll hear a riot of rumors, half-truths, and conspiracy theories about the disease: that it doesn’t exist; that it’s been imported for financial gain; that it’s being used to kill people as part of an organ theft plot. A study published in September in the journal PLOS One found that 72% of respondents were dissatisfied with or mistrustful of the Ebola response and 12% believed that the disease “was fabricated and did not exist in the area.” Misinformation is a key factor in making the outbreak so difficult to stamp out
  • Long an incurable disease, Ebola may someday be preventable and treatable thanks to recent drug advances. Still, with an almost 70% fatality rate during this current outbreak, Ebola continues to be obscenely lethal. To survive it, early medical intervention is key. But Pastor Jules Mulindwa, a compact man with a receding hairline and a thin mustache, has his own protocol. While he doesn’t discount medical science, he doesn’t believe it’s necessary.
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  • About 85% of those surveyed had heard statements about the outbreak being “fabricated for financial gains.” About 33% of respondents believed it.
  • “There are extremely poor infection control practices in many of these health clinics. Children are made to lay in beds previously occupied by Ebola patients and the beds have never been cleaned.” It’s potentially lethal and has hampered efforts to contain the outbreak.
  • For reasons that are unclear, however, Pastor Jules says the water available at the Cite de Refuge church is not used to cure Ebola. Rather, it’s the water from his followers’ homes that he transforms into an Ebola cure through prayer.
johnsonel7

Locked Out: How Britain keeps people homeless - The Bureau of Investigative Journalism - 0 views

  • councils have been increasingly encouraging those facing or experiencing homelessness to try renting privately, rather than wait for a council house. However, only 1 in 20 of two-bed properties in the research were affordable.
  • “The number of people who are living — and even dying — on our streets is truly disgraceful. More than a million families are stuck on waiting lists for social housing, with many parents bringing up their children in totally unfit accommodation in the private rented sector, priced out by sky-high rents and living with no security about their futures.”
  • Reporters from the Bureau contacted the landlords of 180 two-bed properties that would have been affordable on housing benefits. In each case the reporter claimed to be a single mother with an 8-year-old daughter. Half of those landlords said definitively that they would not let to anyone on benefits. Of those that were left, most said they would consider letting to our hypothetical family, but only if they could fulfil further conditions, such as paying six months’ rent in advance or providing a guarantor.
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  • “People up and down the country are having to make impossible decisions on whether to cut back on food for their family or heat their home just to make up the shortfall between their benefit and rent,” she said.
yehbru

Dr. Jerome Adams: US surgeon general contradicts Trump on Covid-19 death toll - CNNPoli... - 0 views

  • US Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams on Sunday said he has "no reason to doubt" the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Covid-19 death toll, contradicting President Donald Trump's claim that the agency has "exaggerated" its numbers.
  • "From a public health perspective, I have no reason to doubt those numbers,
  • "In many areas of the country, the hospital beds are stretched. People are running out of beds, running out of trained personnel who are exhausted right now," Fauci said
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  • Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House's coronavirus task force, also pushed back against the President's claim on Sunday when asked about it, telling ABC News that "the deaths are real deaths.
  • "It's about the hospitalizations, the capacity. These cases are having an impact in an array of ways and people need to understand there's a finish line in sight, but we've got to keep running toward it."
  • Trump and Fauci have had an at-times rocky relationship during the pandemic, with the top infectious disease expert occasionally criticizing the President's actions related to the crisis and Trump openly trashing Fauci and suggesting in early November that he might fire him after the election.
  • "In 6% of the death certificates that list Covid-19, only one cause or condition is listed," the statement added. "The underlying cause of death is the condition that began the chain of events that ultimately led to the person's death. In 92% of all deaths that mention Covid-19, Covid-19 is listed as the underlying cause of death."
  • Cases have skyrocketed after the Thanksgiving holiday, and while impacts from Christmas and New Year's celebrations are still unfolding, at least 123,639 people nationwide were in the hospital with the virus on Saturday, marking 32 consecutive days that the number of hospitalizations has exceeded 100,000, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
  • Adams, when pressed Sunday about his projection in December that there would be 20 million Americans vaccinated by the end of 2020, defended the administration's handling of the rollout, even as just 4 million people in the US have been given a shot.
yehbru

Los Angeles County ambulance crews told not to transport Covid-19 patients with little ... - 0 views

  • In a little more than a month, the county doubled its number of infections, climbing from about 400,000 cases on November 30 to more than 800,000 cases on January 2, health officials said Monday.
  • With no hospital beds available, ambulance crews in the county were given guidance not to transport patients with little chance of survival. And the patients who are transported often have to wait hours before a bed is available.
  • And a person is dying of the virus every 15 minutes, Los Angeles County Director of Public Health Barbara Ferrer said.
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  • But Los Angeles hospitals are now at capacity and many medical facilities don't have the space to take in patients who do not have a chance of survival, the agency said. Patients whose hearts have stopped despite efforts of resuscitation, the county EMS said, should no longer be transported to hospitals.
  • "We're likely to experience the worst conditions in January that we've faced the entire pandemic, and that's hard to imagine."
  • "Given the acute need to conserve oxygen, effective immediately, EMS should only administer supplemental oxygen to patients with oxygen saturation below 90%," EMS said in a memo to ambulance crews Monday.
  • "We are waiting two to four hours minimum to a hospital and now we are having to drive even further... then wait another three hours," EMT Jimmy Webb told CNN affiliate KCAL.
anonymous

Europe averted a Covid-19 collapse -- here's what the US could learn - CNN - 0 views

shared by anonymous on 20 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The country is now in the same situation that France, Belgium and the Czech Republic were last month
  • They slowed down the epidemics by imposing lockdowns and strict mask mandates.
  • But according to official data, around 25% of ICU beds and 45% of ventilators remained available in the Czech Republic, even during the worst of the crisis. Compare that with US states like Oklahoma, where only 6% of ICU beds remain available.
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  • "They need to look at the European situation, and I mean, by no means what we have done in Europe is perfect, these governments are probably reacting a little bit slowly, but they are at least reacting
  • Many European countries followed in the Czech footsteps by initially refusing new lockdowns and then going for the nuclear option.
  • one problem is that the rules across different US states remain inconsistent. "The country is so vast and population density in Nebraska is not the same as New York State for instance or California, so you maybe do need to think about slightly more local action
  • But when Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer banned indoor dining in an attempt to curb the rising spread of the virus, White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Scott Atlas criticized the move and urged people to "rise up" against the new public health measures.
  • "Over the last 10 days, there's been a decrease in the number of new Covid-19 cases, and the positivity rate has been declining so everything suggests that we have passed a peak of the epidemic,"
  • Germany, meanwhile, took a softer approach to lockdown. It closed restaurants, bars and clubs, but shops remained open and people were only advised, rather than ordered, to stay home and limit their social contacts.
  • The country didn't see the same slowdown in new cases as France.
  • The success of a lockdown also depends on the willingness of people to follow the rules.
  • Politicians are reluctant to impose lockdowns because of their undeniable negative effects, be it on the economy or people's mental health. But scientists like Tildesley say the repeated European experience shows the effect of this is even more damaging.
Javier E

Virus Exposes Weak Links in Peru's Success Story - The New York Times - 0 views

  • President Martín Vizcarra followed the best advice when the coronavirus arrived in Peru.
  • He ordered one of Latin America’s first and strictest lockdowns, and rolled out one of the region’s biggest economic aid packages to help citizens stay home. He shared detailed health data with the public, rushed to add hospital beds and ventilators and increased testing.
  • Yet instead of being lauded as a model of disease control, Peru has become one of the world’s worst coronavirus hot spots — its hospitals overwhelmed, its people fleeing the cities.
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  • The crisis has marred Peru’s veneer of economic progress, exposing the deep-rooted inequality and corruption that have thwarted its pandemic response.
  • “They asked us to stay at home, but a lot of people have no savings so that was impossible. They asked us to wash our hands, but one in three Peruvian households has access to running water,” said Hugo Ñopo, who works for a Peruvian research group, Grade. Only half of Peruvian homes have refrigerators, he said, forcing many families to return daily to crowded markets, a major source of contagion.
  • About 1.5 million people in Latin America have tested positive — and experts say the real number of infections is much higher.
  • In May, the death rate in Peru from all causes was twice as high as the average of recent years, according to data compiled by The New York Times, suggesting a coronavirus death toll two to three times the laboratory-confirmed figure.
  • “Results haven’t been exactly what we expected,” Mr. Vizcarra said last month. “This isn’t just a health or sanitary crisis, but a social and economic crisis without precedent.”
  • Peru’s swift descent from regional success story to calamity has demoralized its 32 million citizens and provoked national soul-searching.
  • Under a string of pro-business presidents, millions of Peruvians escaped poverty in this century, allowing them to send children to private schools, install running water or start small businesses.
  • Two decades of economic growth lifted many incomes but brought few stable jobs and little health care investment, reducing the effectiveness of President Vizcarra’s pandemic measures.
  • many Peruvians find themselves in the same situation as Mr. Domínguez — forced to risk catching the coronavirus, rather than stay at home and slide into poverty and hunger.
  • “Here we were congratulating ourselves in Peru for starting to be a middle-class country,” he said. “But it turns out our middle class is very vulnerable, very fragile.”
  • “Help didn’t arrive. It didn’t arrive. I was crying and screaming for help but no one would come,” Ms. Ponte said, weeping as her husband’s body lay in a bag outside the room where she sat on a bed with her 10-year-old son and 8-month-old baby.
Javier E

How a Scottish Moral Philosopher Got Elon Musk's Number - The New York Times - 0 views

  • a Scottish moral philosopher.The philosopher, William MacAskill,
  • his latest book, “What We Owe the Future,” became a best seller after it was published in August.
  • His rising profile parallels the worldwide growth of the giving community he helped found, effective altruism. Once a niche pursuit for earnest vegans and volunteer kidney donors who lived frugally so that they would have more money to give away for cheap medical interventions in developing countries, it has emerged as a significant force in philanthropy, especially in millennial and Gen-Z giving.
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  • In a few short years, effective altruism has become the giving philosophy for many Silicon Valley programmers, hedge funders and even tech billionaires. That includes not just Mr. Bankman-Fried but also the Facebook and Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, who are devoting much of their fortune to the cause.
  • “If I can help encourage people who do have enormous resources to not buy yachts and instead put that money toward pandemic preparedness and A.I. safety and bed nets and animal welfare that’s just like a really good thing to do,” Mr. MacAskill said.
  • Mr. Musk has not officially joined the movement but he and Mr. MacAskill have known each other since 2015, when they met at an effective altruism conference. Mr. Musk has also said on Twitter that Mr. MacAskill’s giving philosophy is similar to his own.
  • Mr. MacAskill was one of the founders of the group Giving What We Can, started at Oxford in 2009. Members promised to give away at least 10 percent of what they earned to the most cost-effective charities possible.
  • If the movement has an ur-text, it is the Australian philosopher Peter Singer’s article, “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” published in 1972. The essay, which argued that there was no difference morally between the obligation to help a person dying on the street in front of your house and the obligation to help people who were dying elsewhere in the world, emerged as a kind of “sleeper hit” for young people in the past two decades,
  • Traditionally, effective altruism was focused on finding the lowest-cost interventions that did the most good. The classic example is insecticide-treated bed nets to prevent mosquitoes from giving people malaria.
  • Mr. MacAskill argues that people living today have a responsibility not just to people halfway around the world but also those in future generations.
  • The rise of this kind of thinking, known as longtermism, has meant the Effective Altruists are increasingly associated with causes that have the ring of science fiction to them — like preventing artificial intelligence from running amok or sending people to distant planets to increase our chances of survival as a species
  • The two men first met in 2012, when Mr. Bankman-Fried was a student at M.I.T. with an interest in utilitarian philosophy.
  • Over lunch, Mr. Bankman-Fried said that he was interested in working on issues related to animal welfare. Mr. MacAskill suggested that he might do more good by entering a high-earning field and donating money to the cause than by working for it directly.
  • Mr. Bankman-Fried contacted the Humane League and other charities, asking if they would prefer his time or donations based on his expected earnings if he went to work in tech or finance. They opted for the money, and he embarked on a remunerative career, eventually founding the cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2019.
  • Bloomberg recently estimated that Mr. Bankman-Fried was worth $10.5 billion, even after the recent crash in crypto prices. That puts Mr. Bankman-Fried in the unusual position of having earned his enormous fortune on behalf of the effective altruism cause, rather than making the money and then searching for a sense of purpose in donating it.
  • Mr. Bankman-Fried said he expected to give away the bulk of his fortune in the next 10 to 20 years.
  • Mr. Moskovitz and Ms. Tuna’s net worth is estimated at $12.7 billion. They founded their own group, Good Ventures, in 2011. The group said it had given $1.96 billion in donations
  • Those two enormous fortunes, along with giving by scores of highly paid engineers at tech companies, mean the community is exceptionally well funded.
  • Mr. MacAskill said that he got to know Mr. Musk better through Igor Kurganov, a professional poker player and effective altruist, who briefly advised Mr. Musk on philanthropy.
  • In August, Mr. Musk retweeted Mr. MacAskill’s book announcement to his 108 million followers with the observation: “Worth reading. This is a close match for my philosophy.” Yet instead of wholeheartedly embracing that endorsement as many would, Mr. MacAskill posted a typically earnest and detailed thread in response about some of the places he agreed — and many areas where he disagreed — with Mr. Musk. (They did not see eye to eye on near-term space settlement, for one.)
  • Mr. MacAskill accepts responsibility for what he calls misconceptions about the community. “I take a significant amount of blame,” he said, “for being a philosopher who was unprepared for this amount of media attention.”
Javier E

How Sam Bankman-Fried Put Effective Altruism on the Defensive - The New York Times - 0 views

  • To hear Bankman-Fried tell it, the idea was to make billions through his crypto-trading firm, Alameda Research, and FTX, the exchange he created for it — funneling the proceeds into the humble cause of “bed nets and malaria,” thereby saving poor people’s lives.
  • ast summer Bankman-Fried was telling The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus something quite different. “He told me that he never had a bed-nets phase, and considered neartermist causes — global health and poverty — to be more emotionally driven,” Lewis-Kraus wrote in August. Effective altruists talk about both “neartermism” and “longtermism.
  • Bankman-Fried said he wanted his money to address longtermist threats like the dangers posed by artificial intelligence spiraling out of control. As he put it, funding for the eradication of tropical diseases should come from other people who actually cared about tropical diseases: “Like, not me or something.”
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  • To the uninitiated, the fact that Bankman-Fried saw a special urgency in preventing killer robots from taking over the world might sound too outlandish to seem particularly effective or altruistic. But it turns out that some of the most influential E.A. literature happens to be preoccupied with killer robots too.
  • Holden Karnofsky, a former hedge funder and a founder of GiveWell, an organization that assesses the cost-effectiveness of charities, has spoken about the need for “worldview diversification” — recognizing that there might be multiple ways of doing measurable good in a world filled with suffering and uncertainty
  • The books, however, are another matter. Considerations of immediate need pale next to speculations about existential risk — not just earthly concerns about climate change and pandemics but also (and perhaps most appealingly for some tech entrepreneurs) more extravagant theorizing about space colonization and A.I.
  • there’s a remarkable intellectual homogeneity; the dominant voices belong to white male philosophers at Oxford.
  • Among his E.A. innovations has been the career research organization known as 80,000 Hours, which promotes “earning to give” — the idea that altruistic people should pursue careers that will earn them oodles of money, which they can then donate to E.A. causes.
  • each of those terse sentences glosses over a host of additional questions, and it takes MacAskill an entire book to address them. Take the notion that “future people count.” Leaving aside the possibility that the very contemplation of a hypothetical person may not, for some real people, be “intuitive” at all, another question remains: Do future people count for more or less than existing people count for right now?
  • MacAskill cites the philosopher Derek Parfit, whose ideas about population ethics in his 1984 book “Reasons and Persons” have been influential in E.A. Parfit argued that an extinction-level event that destroyed 100 percent of the population should worry us much more than a near-extinction event that spared a minuscule population (which would presumably go on to procreate), because the number of potential lives dwarfs the number of existing ones.
  • If you’re a utilitarian committed to “the greatest good for the greatest number,” the arithmetic looks irrefutable. The Times’s Ezra Klein has written about his support for effective altruism while also thoughtfully critiquing longtermism’s more fanatical expressions of “mathematical blackmail.”
  • In 2015, MacAskill published “Doing Good Better,” which is also about the virtues of effective altruism. His concerns in that book (blindness, deworming) seem downright quaint when compared with the astral-plane conjectures (A.I., building an “interstellar civilization”) that he would go on to pursue in “What We Owe the Future.”
  • In both books he emphasizes the desirability of seeking out “neglectedness” — problems that haven’t attracted enough attention so that you, as an effective altruist, can be more “impactful.” So climate change, MacAskill says, isn’t really where it’s at anymore; readers would do better to focus on “the issues around A.I. development,” which are “radically more neglected.
  • In his recent best seller, “What We Owe the Future” (2022), MacAskill says that the case for effective altruism giving priority to the longtermist view can be distilled into three simple sentences: “Future people count. There could be a lot of them. We can make their lives go better.”
  • “Earning to give” has its roots in the work of the radical utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, whose 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence and Morality” has been a foundational E.A. text. It contains his parable of the drowning child: If you’re walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning, you should wade in and save the child, even if it means muddying your clothes
  • Extrapolating from that principle suggests that if you can save a life by donating an amount of money that won’t pose any significant problems for you, a decision not to donate that money would be not only uncharitable or ungenerous but morally wrong.
  • Singer has also written his own book about effective altruism, “The Most Good You Can Do” (2015), in which he argues that going into finance would be an excellent career choice for the aspiring effective altruist. He acknowledges the risks for harm, but he deems them worth it
  • Chances are, if you don’t become a charity worker, someone else will ably do the job; whereas if you don’t become a financier who gives his money away, who’s to say that the person who does become a financier won’t hoard all his riches for himself?
  • On Nov. 11, when FTX filed for bankruptcy amid allegations of financial impropriety, MacAskill wrote a long Twitter thread expressing his shock and his anguish, as he wrestled in real time with what Bankman-Fried had wrought.
  • “If those involved deceived others and engaged in fraud (whether illegal or not) that may cost many thousands of people their savings, they entirely abandoned the principles of the effective altruism community,” MacAskill wrote in a Tweet, followed by screenshots from “What We Owe the Future” and Ord’s “The Precipice” that emphasized the importance of honesty and integrity.
  • I’m guessing that Bankman-Fried may not have read the pertinent parts of those books — if, that is, he read any parts of those books at all. “I would never read a book,” Bankman-Fried said earlier this year. “I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.”
  • Avoiding books is an efficient method for absorbing the crudest version of effective altruism while gliding past the caveats
  • For all of MacAskill’s galaxy-brain disquisitions on “A.I. takeover” and the “moral case for space settlement,” perhaps the E.A. fixation on “neglectedness” and existential risks made him less attentive to more familiar risks — human, banal and closer to home.
Javier E

Why Ending Extreme Poverty Isn't Good Enough - Businessweek - 0 views

  • “We believe that we have a historic opportunity to end extreme poverty within a generation,” they declared, pledging to reduce the percentage of people living on less than $1.25 a day worldwide to 3 percent by 2030.
  • for most of history, most of humanity has lived on less than $1.25 a day.  As recently as 1990, more than two-fifths of the population of the developing world lived in extreme poverty, and even today, the proportion remains close to one-fifth
  • among those living on $2 a day or less in urban areas of Tanzania, only 21 percent have a water tap in their house. In rural areas, it is less than 2 percent. The number with access to electricity is similarly dire. In rural areas, nearly one in 10 children die before their first birthday—most from easily preventable diseases. Two dollars is not nearly enough to ensure the basics of the good life.
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  • What is a reasonable “income floor” above which we should hope all people worldwide live? At the moment, we define $1.25 as extreme poverty and $2 as poverty, plain and simple.
  • The global median income is around $3 to $4 a day. Despite the fact that 50 percent of the population of the planet lives on less than that today, that’s still an insufficient floor.
  • those living on more than $2 a day in developing countries see infant mortality rates five times those of the poorest and most deprived areas of rich countries. It’s possible to reduce death rates considerably using very cheap techniques, from bed nets to vaccines, but at some point the approaches start getting more expensive. 
  • Pritchett suggests the global floor should be something closer to the poverty lines of rich countries—around $15 per day. Other economists have suggested the “global middle class” bottoms out at an income of around $10 per day.
  • Worldwide, somewhere shy of 2 billion make it over the $10 line. But only about two percent (PDF) of sub-Saharan Africa lives on more than $10 a day, compared with 51 percent who live at more than $1.25 a day
  • until you get above $10 per day, high-income economies still see a very small proportion of their population in “global poverty.”
  • According to the World Bank, current world GDP is about $76.4 trillion, of which about 62 percent is consumed by households. If all 7 billion people on the planet lived on $10 a day, that would take $26 trillion, or (give or take) a $41 trillion global economy
  • If it weren’t for the incredible size of global income disparities, you could shrink the world’s economy, reduce our environmental footprint, and still get everyone over the poverty line.
  • There’s a lot more to quality of life than income. In fact, the greatest development success of the past 60 years has been to make the quality of life cheaper. 
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