Younger peoples need to be convinced of Pandemic risk:WHO chief

UN News/Daniel Dickinson

A park in Brooklyn, New York, has marked out circles in order to enforce social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    

30 July 2020

Although older people are among those at highest risk of COVID-19, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) has reminded younger generations that they are “not invincible” when it comes to the disease.

Evidence suggests that the spike in cases in some countries is partly due to younger people “letting down their guard during the northern hemisphere summer”, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Thursday.

“We have said it before and we’ll say it again: young people are not invincible”, he told journalists.

“Young people can be infected; young people can die; and young people can transmit the virus to others.”

He stressed that the world’s youth “should be leaders and drivers of change” during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Protect yourself and others

Tedros further advised that people everywhere must learn to live with the virus, and to take steps necessary to protect themselves and others, including those who are most at risk, such as the elderly and people in long-term care.

Many countries have reported that more than 40 percent of COVID-19-related deaths have been linked to long-term care facilities, and up to 80 per cent in some high-income countries.

In response, WHO has released a policy brief on preventing and managing COVID-19 in those facilities.

It lists key actions such as integrating long-term care in national response plans to counter the pandemic, ensuring strong infection prevention and control, and providing support for family and voluntary caregivers.

The brief also suggests ways to transform long-term care services so that older people can receive quality care that respects their rights, freedoms and dignity, Tedros added.

Experts to advise on behavioural insights

Twenty-two international experts in fields such as anthropology, psychology, neuroscience and health promotion will help WHO understand how people make decisions that support their health and well-being, including during the pandemic.

The newly established Technical Advisory Group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health, announced aon Thursday, will support WHO’s ongoing work in this area.

Tedros explained that while having reliable information about health is important, people make decisions based on a variety of factors, influenced by culture, beliefs, economic circumstances, or the status of national health systems.

“In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, countries are using a range of tools to influence behaviour: information campaigns are one tool, but so are laws, regulations, guidelines and even fines”, he said.

“That’s why behavioural science is so important – it helps us to understand how people make decisions, so we can support them to make the best decisions for their health.”

American legal scholar and former top US Government official Cass Sunstein chairs the Technical Advisory Group, whose members come from 16 countries.

“Our starting point…is that health involves behaviour. And whether we’re speaking of COVID-19, or sexual and reproductive health, or smoking, or other non-communicable diseases, human behaviour is at the root of it”, said Professor Sunstein, who is founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School.

“We know that habits are persistent, even if they aren’t healthy. And we know from a great deal of work that habits can be altered – and that can save lives.”

Eid al-Adha and a safe Hajj

Tedros also extended best wishes to all Muslims celebrating the annual Eid al-Adha festival, which falls on Friday.

He commended Saudi Arabia for implementing measures to make this year’s Hajj pilgrimage as safe as possible.

“This is a powerful demonstration of the kinds of measures that countries can and must take to adapt to the new normal”, said the WHO chief.

“It’s not easy, but it can be done. The pandemic does not mean life has to stop."

 Source:IN News

Ravages of acute hunger will likely hit six in 10 in Zimbabwe: WFP

WFP/Claire Nevill

In Harare, Zimbabwe, a single mother of three relies on food assistance from the World Food Programme (WFP) during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    

30 July 2020

The World Food Programme (WFP) is urgently seeking more international support to prevent millions of Zimbabweans plunging deeper into hunger. The COVID-19 pandemic has aggravated an already severe hunger crisis in Zimbabwe, UN humanitarians warned on Thursday.

In an appeal for an additional $250 million to support emergency relief for millions of vulnerable people, the World Food Programme (WFP) said that by the end of the year, the number of food-insecure people in the southern African nation, is expected to surge by almost 50 per cent, to 8.6 million.

Triple shock

That represents around 60 per cent of the population, the agency said in a statement, blaming drought, economic recession and the coronavirus pandemic as the main drivers of the crisis.

Galloping hyperinflation has meant that few families can now afford even basic food, WFP said, with the price of maize, the staple cereal, more than doubling in June.

Lola Castro, WFP’s Regional Director for Southern Africa, said that many Zimbabwean families were suffering “the ravages of acute hunger”, before appealing to the international community to help prevent “a potential humanitarian catastrophe.”

Unemployment rife

Zimbabwe’s food insecurity has been compounded by a nationwide lockdown which has caused massive joblessness in urban areas.

In rural areas, hunger is accelerating, as unemployed migrants return to their villages, without the vital remittances they once provided.

According to WFP, subsistence farmers make up three-quarters of Zimbabwe’s population and produce most of its food.

They are hurting because of a third successive drought-hit harvest this year which yielded only 1.1 million tonnes of maize, the staple cereal.

Harvest short by half

This amount is well down on last year’s already poor harvest of 2.4 million tonnes, and less than half the national requirement.

As a result, WFP has warned that that there will “even more severe hunger” in early 2021, at the peak of the next “lean” season.

With sufficient funding, the agency intends to assist four million of the most vulnerable people in Zimbabwe this year: those suffering “crisis” and “emergency” levels of hunger.

It intends to scale up this aid to five million people from January to April next year, the peak of the lean season.

This month, amid serious funding shortages, WFP will only reach 700,000 of 1.8 million intended recipients.

 Source:UN News

Security Council: Poverty deepens, along with need, across Syria

© UNICEF/Omar Albam

On 23 April 2020, a child washes dishes in the Maarat Misrin camp north of Idlib, Syrian Arab Republic.

    

29 July 2020

Humanitarian operations across war-shattered Syria are reaching 6.8 million people a month, but a worsening economic crisis is deepening poverty and pushing more and more Syrians into humanitarian need, the Security Council heard Wednesday.

UN humanitarian affairs chief Mark Lowcock said that the United Nations and its partners are working to address operational challenges arising from the Council’s decision following weeks of division, on 11 July, to reduce to just one, the number of border crossing through which food, medicine and other forms of aid can pass from Turkey into Syria.

The UN is also helping to tackle COVID-19 in Syria, where the number of confirmed cases remains in the hundreds, but the true number is certainly higher, Mr. Lowcock told the Council’s monthly meeting on the humanitarian aspects of the conflict in Syria that erupted in 2011.

Time of ‘extreme fragilty’

“The Syrian economy, devastated by nearly a decade of conflict, has entered a period of extreme fragility,” he added, marked by exchange-rate volatility, high inflation, dwindling remittances from Syrians working abroad, and lockdown measures to contain the novel coronavirus.

This year, the economy is expected to contract by more than 7 per cent, he said. Unemployment is close to 50 per cent, compared with 42 per cent last year and food prices are 240 per cent higher than in June 2019.

“What this means is that families across the country can no longer afford the very basics”, he said, noting that 9.3 million people in Syria are living with food insecurity – with over two million more, at risk of joining them.

Respect and protect

On the need to respect and protect civilians, Mr. Lowcock said that the ceasefire in northwest Syria - reached in March between the Russian Federation and Turkey - is largely holding, despite periodic shelling, airstrikes and bomb attacks that have killed or injured dozens of people, including children.

Elsewhere in Syria, the lack of regular humanitarian assistance is creating a critical situation for 12,000 civilians thought to be still in Rukban, near the Jordanian border.  Mr. Lowcock added that his team is also monitoring with concern an uptick in violence in the southern city of Dara’a.

Water, school woes

Water is another worry, with the Euphrates river at low levels and disruptions involving the Alouk water station affecting 460,000 people in Al-Hasakeh governorate, in northeast Syria, he said.

Meanwhile, a third of Syria’s school-aged children – some 2.5 million youngsters – are out of school, with another 1.6 million at risk of dropping out. Yet thousands of students are crossing frontlines to take national exams, hoping their future will take a turn for the better.

Mr. Lowcock reported that the fourth Brussels Pledging Conference on 30 June generated $7.7 billion in pledges for humanitarian, resilience and development activities in Syria and the region.  The biggest pledges came from the European Commission, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Norway, the Netherlands, France and Denmark.

$384 million still needed

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This year’s $3.4 billion Humanitarian Response Plan for Syria is 32 per cent funded so far, “making it one of our better funded operations,” Mr. Lowcock said, adding however that another $384 million is required for Syria under the COVID-19 Global Humanitarian Response Plan – of which 28 per cent has been received.

COVID, a crisis within a crisis

Also briefing the Council today was Amany Qaddour of Syria Relief and Development, a non-governmental aid agency, who described the COVID-19 pandemic as a crisis within a crisis that has exposed how fragmented the health sector in Syria is.

“We know that negative health outcomes don’t emerge in a vacuum,” Ms. Qaddour told the Council, which has been meeting via video-teleconference since mid-March when UN headquarters in New York closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

While the initial focus has been on trauma and emergency services, healthcare must be seen as a continuum that includes provisions for primary and community health, rehabilitative care for persons with disabilities, and mental health, she said.

Source:UN News

A third of world’s children poisoned by lead: UNICEF

World Bank/Curt Carnemark

Environmental pollution and degradation can be linked to a growing list of health conditions such as skin cancer, lung cancer, asthma, lead poisoning, mercury poisoning, malaria, Ebola and Zika.

    

29 July 2020

Lead poisoning is affecting children on a “massive and previously unknown scale”, according to a ground-breaking new study launched on Thursday by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and international non-profit organization focused on pollution issues, Pure Earth

The report, the first of its kind, says that around 1 in 3 children - up to 800 million globally - have blood lead levels at, or above, 5 micrograms per decilitre (µg/dL), the amount at which action is required. Nearly half of these children live in South Asia.

Lead has poisoned children on a massive and previously unknown scale.

UNICEF and @PureEarthNow are calling for urgent action.https://t.co/AisRPt4CsP

— UNICEF (@UNICEF) July 30, 2020

“With few early symptoms, lead silently wreaks havoc on children’s health and development, with possibly fatal consequences”, UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore warned. “Knowing how widespread lead pollution is – and understanding the destruction it causes to individual lives and communities – must inspire urgent action to protect children once and for all.”

The report - The Toxic Truth: Children’s exposure to lead pollution undermines a generation of potential - is an analysis of childhood lead exposure undertaken by the Institute of Health Metrics Evaluation and verified with a study approved for publication in Environmental Health Perspectives. It features five case studies in Kathgora, Bangladesh; Tbilisi, Georgia; Agbogbloshie, Ghana; Pesarean, Indonesia; and Morelos State, Mexico.

The report notes that lead is a potent neurotoxin which causes irreparable harm to children's brains. It is particularly destructive to babies and children under the age of five, causing them lifelong neurological, cognitive and physical impairment.

Childhood lead exposure has also been linked to mental health and behavioural problems, and to an increase of crime and violence, the report says. It is estimated to cost lower- and middle-income countries, $1 trillion in lost economic potential of these children over their lifetimes.

Sub-par battery recycling, slack regulation to blame

Informal and substandard recycling of lead-acid batteries is a leading contributor to lead poisoning in children living in low and middle-income countries, the report finds, where an increase in vehicle ownership and a lack of vehicle battery recycling regulation, has resulted in nearly half of lead-acid batteries being unsafely recycled in the informal economy.

Other culprits: Pipes, paint, consumer products

Other sources of childhood exposure include lead in water from the use of leaded pipes, lead from active industry - such as mining - lead-based paint and pigments, and leaded gasoline.

Lead solder in food cans, as well as in spices, cosmetics, ayurvedic medicines, toys and other consumer products, are also to blame. Parents whose occupations involve working with lead often bring contaminated dust home on their clothes, hair, hands and shoes, inadvertently exposing their children to the toxic element.

Education, public awareness campaigns critical

“The good news is that lead can be recycled safely without exposing workers, their children, and surrounding neighbourhoods, said Richard Fuller, President of Pure Earth, adding that “lead-contaminated sites can be remediated and restored.”

Further, people can be educated about the dangers and empowered to protect themselves and their children. “The return on the investment is enormous: improved health, increased productivity, higher IQs, less violence, and brighter futures for millions of children across the planet,” he said.

The report recommends that Governments in affected countries take a coordinated approach to building monitoring and reporting systems and installing prevention and control measures.

Equipping health systems to detect, monitor and treat lead exposure among children is essential, the report says. Continuous public awareness campaigns targeted at parents, schools, community leaders and health care workers are needed, as is legislation to enforce environmental, health and safety standards for lead-acid battery manufacturing and recycling sites.

A global metric needed

Globally, the report advocates the creation of global standard measurement units to verify the results of pollution intervention on public health, the environment and local economies. An international registry of anonymized results of blood lead level studies could also foster better detection. The study follows a major push by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2019 to sound the alarm. The Geneva-based agency launched the International Lead Poisoning Prevention Week of Action, from 20-26 October, advocating for laws, regulations or enforceable standards to stop the manufacture, import and sale of paints that contain lead.

Source:UN News

Building South Korea’s economy after the great pandemic recession

29 July 2020

Author: Troy Stangarone, Korea Economic Institute of America

In the span of a little more than a decade the world has experienced two economic crises. The Great Recession was precipitated by the global financial crisis of 2007–2008. Now an economic recession is being induced by government measures to stop the spread of COVID-19. South Korea came out of the Great Recession better than many other developed economies and is positioning itself to do the same after COVID-19.

South Korea was able to avoid economic decline during the Great Recession. While economic growth slowed, South Korean GDP grew by 0.7 per cent in 2009. South Korea was able to avoid a recession thanks to a banking and corporate sector that had become more fiscally sound in the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crisis a decade earlier, a diversified export portfolio and a fiscal stimulus package equivalent to 6.9 per cent of GDP between 2008–2010. The government also introduced a five-year Green Growth plan designed to spend 2 per cent of GDP to develop future green growth industries.

South Korea has not been as fortunate in the current moment, but should still outperform other developed economies. The economy has official entered a recession and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) expects South Korea’s GDP to decline by 1.2 per cent this year, while the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates that it will fall by 2.5 per cent. The United States, United Kingdom, Japan and the Eurozone are all expected to perform significantly worse.

Exports have declined for four consecutive months and were down by 25 per cent in April 2020 and 24 per cent in May year-on-year. But the declines began to moderate in June as an increase in shipments to China and growing demand for computer products helped to keep the decline in exports to 10.9 per cent.

South Korea’s unemployment spiked particularly over the first three months of the crisis, shedding a little more than one million jobs. The unemployment rate peaked at its highest level since January 2010, before declining slightly in June to 4.3 per cent. Government subsidies for unemployment benefits also reached a record US$917 million in June, the fifth straight month with a new high.

One area where South Korea has not outperformed its peers is youth employment. The pandemic has hit young workers hard. More than a quarter of economically active workers aged 15–29 are either unemployed or underemployed — up nearly 21 per cent from December 2019. The figure is the highest in the OECD. While the government is working to create 550,000 jobs for young and low income workers, these are primarily in the public sector rather than support designed to encourage hiring in private companies.

South Korea has been better prepared to deal with an infectious outbreak than many countries. After SARS and MERS, Seoul implemented new laws that allowed the Korean Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to access credit card and phone data, as well as CCTV footage, to track the movement of those carrying COVID-19. This helped Seoul manage the outbreak — South Korea quickly became a model for containing the coronavirus.

South Korea took immediate steps to address the economic crisis as well. The Moon administration announced an initial US$13.7 billion stimulus packaged in March focussed on dealing with the costs of the healthcare crisis and providing support to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In a series of supplementary budgets, the administration has increased loans to SMEs, provided funds to create new jobs and job training, and sent stimulus checks to citizens. South Korea’s stimulus packages totalled 14 per cent of GDP.

The Bank of Korea has also taken steps to support the economy. At an emergency meeting in March, it cut rates by 0.5 per cent to a record low of 0.75 per cent with a further 25 basis point cut in May. The Bank of Korea has established a US$60 billion bilateral swap line with the US Federal Reserve.

While the government moved quickly to provide support for SMEs, it was slower to provide support to airlines which have faced significant difficulties. It wasn’t until late-April that state-owned banks provided loans to South Korea’s two largest airlines. This contrasts with the United States where a combination of grants and loans were provided to keep US airlines afloat and protect workers in the airline industry.

The Moon administration’s economic plans extend beyond providing assistance to workers and firms. The administration will spend US$94.6 billion over the next five years as part of a New Deal package to spur future economic growth.

The New Deal is divided into the Digital New Deal and the Green New Deal. The Digital New Deal is focussed on making South Korea a leading player in data, artificial intelligence and 5G wireless technology. The Green New Deal is perhaps more ambitious in its scale with a pledge to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, end financing for coal plants overseas, introduce a carbon tax and continue South Korea’s push to develop a hydrogen economy.

South Korea has managed to navigate COVID-19 and the great pandemic recession thanks to the lessons it learned from managing previous viral outbreaks and a willingness to provide the stimulus that the economy needed. More focus is needed on youth employment and the airline industry. But the Moon administration is preparing the economy for future economic growth through the New Deal.

Troy Stangarone is Senior Director and Fellow at the Korea Economic Institute of America. The views expressed here are the author’s alone.

This article is part of an EAF special feature series on the novel coronavirus crisis and its impact.

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