Link Log Roundup for May 1, 2020
In this edition: essential workers, Islam and coffee, reopening Oregon, urban density, hate crimes, mass disinfection, autistic emotions, death predictions, suicide, the Chinese economy, ghost town quarantine, New Zealand, the physical world, the impact of cars, and increasing infections.
Your daily look at links I’ve saved to my Link Log (RSS) over the course of each day but didn’t necessarily address or highlight here on the blog. These are the links I logged yesterday, and not necessarily links to things published yesterday.
The Essential Workers America Treats as Disposable
While corporations are going on life support thanks to this huge government bailout, undocumented immigrants and their families, among them US citizens, are being allowed to suffer, to starve, and, without access to health care, perhaps even to die. As things already stood, undocumented immigrants were ineligible for any federally funded public health insurance programs. On top of that, they are now denied help in the form of a stimulus check or unemployment benefits, even as it has emerged that the virus is twice as deadly for black and brown people than it is for white Americans.
Our English word coffee comes to us from the Turkish word kahveh, itself from the Arabic Qahwah. This latter word was initially applied to other drinks, but after the discovery of coffee, became associated with the newfangled stimulant. Qahwah would famously be referred to be as “the wine of Islam.”
When Oregon Reopens, Bars and Restaurants May Be Required to Issue Last Call at 10 pm
Another draft document shows that any business that opens to visitors, not just restaurants, might be required to keep a log of each person’s name, phone number and date of entry. The idea is that contact tracers—epidemiologists who seek to track the spread of disease—could find anyone who was in a shop or office at the same time as a person diagnosed with the virus.
Urban Density Presents Unique Challenges In A Public Health Pandemic
The result was modern urban planning, new government and academic attention to how communities are built and how they’re regulated. The first modern urban planners and public health experts — the predecessors to the physicians and epidemiologists leading today’s COVID-19 response — worked closely.
Draft Guidelines Offer A Picture Of What A Reopened Oregon Would Look Like
Under the proposed rules, restaurants could be limited to 50% of normal maximum occupancy, while retail shops could set their own limits as long as they ensure proper social distancing. Retail establishments might be encouraged to use specifically designated entrances and exits to assure a “one-way flow.”
Oregon Hate Crime Reports Up 366% Amid Coronavirus Pandemic
At the state level, incidents reported to the Oregon Department of Justice ranged from refusal of services because of a person’s race, to businesses posting signs blaming closings on “the Chinese virus,” to hotel employees denying a person service unless they could prove they’d tested negative for COVID-19.
The Future of Mass Disinfection
The EPA already maintains a registry of disinfectants, like Barbicide, Asepticare, and Cavicide, that have been approved to kill the novel coronavirus. But because people and institutions around the country have inquired about the safety of new deep cleaning tools that aren’t on the official registry, the EPA is now researching the efficacy of ultraviolet light, ozone molecules, steam, and electrostatic sprayers and foggers, equipped with EPA-approved disinfectants, for large-scale cleaning efforts.
However, children with mild autism traits who scored high on tests of language had more severe emotional problems throughout the study. This could be because these children can better express their emotions than those with poorer language skills can, or because they are more often exposed to stressful environments, Simonoff says.
How high will it go? No easy answers as U.S. Covid-19 death toll tops 60,000
On Wednesday, April 29, the country blew past 60,000, more than three months before the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projected. (The 60,000 almost certainly undercounts Covid-19 deaths, by about 9,000.) IHME, whose model has been criticized by many epidemiologists, now says the most likely death toll on Aug. 4 will be 72,433, though it could be as low as about 60,000 (obviously impossible) and as high as 115,000.
Health care worker suicides hint at Covid-19 mental health crisis to come
Health care workers are well-trained to manage the intensity of a medical crisis. But few are equally comfortable managing its mental health aftermath, in themselves or in others. Even before the pandemic emerged, moral injury and burnout were rampant among clinicians. Coping with Covid-19 has magnified many of those challenges and added new ones with the reality of resource constraints.
Why is this interesting? - The China Edition
If this sounds pretty antithetical to our view of how economies should work today, it’s because it is. As James Fallows wrote in a piece for The Atlantic almost thirty years ago, we’ve done everything we can to erase this history. “While American industry was developing, the country had no time for laissez-faire. After it had grown strong, the United States began preaching laissez-faire to the rest of the world—and began to kid itself about its own history, believing its slogans about laissez-faire as the secret of its success.”
How to Quarantine in a Ghost Town
Today, some six weeks later, Underwood is still in Cerro Gordo—quarantined, snowed-in, and all by his lonesome. Without running water, he’s getting by on melted snow; without fresh food, a dwindling supply of canned goods and frozen chicken tenders; and without company, visits from a local bobcat and, perhaps, the occasional ghost.
New Zealand has ‘effectively eliminated’ coronavirus. Here’s what they did right.
Still, a recent survey showed that 87 percent of Kiwis support the government’s handling of the crisis. Having spent a month there during lockdown, I understand why: the streets were quiet and clean, public services were all functioning, stores were well stocked, and, most importantly, the risk of contracting COVID-19 seemed remote and diminishing.
But rather than prove that nearly anything is possible with an internet connection, the quarantine is calling attention to what digital technology can’t do. It was easier to think of the domestic cozy, online-first existence as not only possible but preferable when it was strictly a lifestyle choice. Being forced to live it, many of us are now discovering how much of the physical world we have taken for granted. Without distinct places for doing different activities like work and exercise, and bombarded by an accelerated news cycle, we’re losing our sense of time as well as space. Spatial variation helps structure the rhythms of everyday life and without the structure imposed by commuting, gathering with friends, and doing errands outside the house, days blur together and scheduling begins to feel arbitrary.
In New York, the parts of the city that aren’t defined by consumption are specifically what’s still open. Junkspace is closed and we can only occupy the interstitial spaces between establishments searchable on Yelp. The exterior urban environment has unintentionally decoupled from the economy, and to spend time outdoors in these conditions is to re-establish a more direct relationship to space that normally extracts value from us at every turn. The primary way we experience much of that space under normal circumstances is by passing through it on the way to somewhere else; now, momentarily, that “somewhere else” isn’t available.
The Pandemic Shows What Cars Have Done to Cities
Moments of crisis, which disrupt habit and invite reflection, can provide heightened insight into the problems of everyday life precrisis. Whichever underlying conditions the pandemic has exposed in our health-care or political system, the lockdown has shown us just how much room American cities devote to cars. When relatively few drivers ply an enormous street network, while pedestrians nervously avoid one another on the sidewalks, they are showing in vivid relief the spatial mismatch that exists in urban centers from coast to coast[.]
Indeed, infections are increasing in the reopening states. Today, Iowa reopened 77 counties on the same day the governor reported 740 new infections, a one-day high, and warned that a backlog on test data would likely mean higher numbers over the weekend. She then began to talk of reopening of churches. In Georgia, where Governor Brian Kemp was among the first to reopen his state, there were 618 new cases Thursday, and 1,228 new cases Friday.