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Post by Admin on Mar 19, 2020 19:30:42 GMT
Coronavirus: the effect on human rights www.amnesty.org.uk/human-rights-uk/coronavirus-effect-human-rights"As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads, people across the world face the devastating impact it is having now on families, friends and communities, and will continue to have long into the future. This is a human rights crisis in the most immediate sense – and a reminder of our common humanity and that we are all equal in dignity and human rights. The international human rights system as we know it today was born from the lessons of the 1930s and 1940s and the hopes of a better future. Today, human rights are central to the situation we all face. At their heart, human rights are both a protection from the power of the state and a demand that our governments use their considerable power to protect our lives, health and wellbeing. In the next days and weeks, we will analyse developments from a human rights perspective and publish updates. And as we do this, we will continue to scrutinise actions of governments here and elsewhere in the world."
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Post by Admin on Mar 19, 2020 20:03:33 GMT
Teaching Pandemics Syllabus Readings on the history of quarantine, contagious disease, viruses, infections, and epidemics offer important context for the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. daily.jstor.org/teaching-pandemics/"Last week, the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic. In an effort to slow the spread of the disease, schools and universities across the world have transitioned to online instruction. Educators find themselves wondering how to engage their students amidst the developing crisis. We all find ourselves scrambling for information and, let’s face it, ways to make sense of our fear and anxiety. While JSTOR Daily can’t provide new research on the novel coronavirus that’s causing COVID-19, we can offer important historical, scientific, and cultural context for this unprecedented situation. The essays and articles below—published over the last five years—look at the history of quarantine, contagious disease, viruses, infections, and epidemics. We’ll be updating this as we publish new content. As always, free access to the underlying scholarship cited in the stories is available to everyone."
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Post by Admin on Mar 19, 2020 20:08:48 GMT
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Post by Admin on Mar 19, 2020 20:20:58 GMT
Communist Party of Britain statement on the Covid-19 crisis morningstaronline.co.uk/article/communist-party-britain-statement-covid-19-crisis"DECADES of capitalist globalisation and neoliberal economic policies have left Britain and many other countries in a far worse condition to meet the challenge of a pandemic such as the Covid-19 crisis. In particular, the failure to rectify the deep structural problems of an economy dominated by the banks and their financial markets means that the Covid-19 pandemic has broken out as the international capitalist economy is heading for the brink of another economic downturn made worse by financial speculation and panic. Privatisation, financialisation, a disproportionate concentration of investment in the military-industrial sphere, huge tax cuts for the rich and big business and an obsession with extending free markets in commodities of all kinds — including capital and labour — have left the national and local state apparatus incapable of meeting the complex challenges now facing us all."
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Post by Admin on Mar 20, 2020 0:12:31 GMT
By José G. Luiggi-HernándezMarch 19, 2020 Anticipating the Psychological Consequences of COVID-19 Quarantines How to address the negative psychological impacts of necessary public health interventions like quarantine in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.www.madinamerica.com/2020/03/anticipating-psychological-consequences-covid-19-quarantines/Due to the rapidly escalating threat of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers at King’s College London undertook a review of the scientific literature on the psychological effects of quarantines. They aimed to provide information for the development of evidence-based preventative methods that would improve the short and long-term psychological distress associated with these public health measures. According to Dr. Samantha Brooks and her team: “Quarantine is often an unpleasant experience for those who undergo it. Separation from loved ones, the loss of freedom, uncertainty over disease status, and boredom can, on occasion, create dramatic effects. Suicide has been reported, substantial anger generated, and lawsuits brought following the imposition of quarantine in previous outbreaks. The potential benefits of mandatory mass quarantine need to be weighed carefully against the possible psychological costs. Successful use of quarantine as a public health measure requires us to reduce, as far as possible, the negative effects associated with it.” The psychological impact of quarantine and how to reduce it: rapid review of the evidence Samantha K Brooks, Rebecca K Webster, Louise E Smith, Lisa Woodland, Simon Wessely, Neil Greenberg, Gideon James Rubin www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2820%2930460-8
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Post by Admin on Mar 20, 2020 8:30:45 GMT
Coronavirus: temporary changes to the Mental Health Act 19/03/2020 Why are the government making emergency changes to the Mental Health Act? The Mental Health Act must continue to function effectively throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, in order to ensure the safety, care, and treatment of people severely affected by mental illness. Emergency legislation has been introduced to Parliament which includes temporary measures to change the Mental Health Act. This is because the government is concerned that Covid-19 will reduce the number of mental health professionals available to help people whose mental health places them at risk. www.rethink.org/news-and-stories/blogs/2020/03/coronavirus-temporary-changes-to-the-mental-health-act/
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Post by Admin on Mar 20, 2020 8:36:51 GMT
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Post by Admin on Mar 20, 2020 8:39:21 GMT
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Post by Admin on Mar 20, 2020 8:47:12 GMT
Coronavirus: Grave concern over impact of emergency bill on rights By John Pring on 19th March 2020 Category: Human Rights www.disabilitynewsservice.com/coronavirus-grave-concern-over-impact-of-emergency-bill-on-rights/A user-led network has raised grave concerns about the implications of proposed new emergency legislation on the rights of people in mental distress. Today (Thursday), the government is set to publish an emergency coronavirus bill that aims to give ministers powers “to take the right action at the right time to respond effectively to the progress of the coronavirus outbreak”. But the bill will include two measures that could affect the rights of people in mental distress, and the National Survivor User Network (NSUN) fears this could lead to both more coercion and more neglect, as well as fewer safeguards. According to information released this week by the Department of Health and Social Care, the bill will allow someone to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act with the approval of just one doctor, rather than the current two, which it says will relieve the burden on frontline staff. The bill will also allow the temporary extension or removal of some of the time limits in the Mental Health Act, if staff numbers become “severely adversely affected during the pandemic period”.
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Post by Admin on Mar 20, 2020 8:48:58 GMT
Coronavirus: UN rapporteur’s concerns over impact of crisis on rights By John Pring on 19th March 2020 Category: Human Rights www.disabilitynewsservice.com/coronavirus-un-rapporteurs-concerns-over-impact-of-crisis-on-rights/Little has been done across the world to provide disabled people with the support and guidance needed to protect them during the coronavirus pandemic, despite many of them being in a high-risk group, a UN human rights expert has warned. Catalina Devandas Aguilar (pictured), the UN’s special rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities, said disabled people feel as though they have been “left behind”. She said: “Containment measures, such as social distancing and self-isolation, may be impossible for those who rely on the support of others to eat, dress and bath. “This support is basic for their survival, and States must take additional social protection measures to guarantee the continuity of support in a safe manner throughout the crisis.” She called on governments to take reasonable measures to ensure disabled people can reduce contact with others and cut the risk of contamination. This should include allowing them to work from home, or providing access to financial aid.
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Post by snowstorm on Mar 20, 2020 17:43:14 GMT
UK Government stepping up financially judging by latest news.
Forum wide hugs to everyone reading this thread, dealing with all this will be a major challenge.
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Post by Admin on Mar 20, 2020 18:41:07 GMT
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Post by Admin on Mar 20, 2020 18:43:05 GMT
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Post by Admin on Mar 20, 2020 20:42:37 GMT
‘A Once-in-a-Century Pathogen’: The 1918 Pandemic & This One Mark Honigsbaum www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/03/17/a-once-in-a-century-pathogen-the-1918-pandemic-this-one/A little over one hundred years ago, a novel virus emerged from an unknown animal reservoir and seeded itself silently in settlements around the world. Then, in the closing months of World War I, as if from nowhere, the infection exploded in multiple countries and continents at more or less the same time. From Boston to Cape Town, and London to Mumbai, the “Spanish flu,” so-called because the first widely reported outbreak occurred in Madrid in May 1918, swept like wildfire through cities and communities both large and small. By the time the virus had burned itself out, in the spring of 1919, a third of the world’s population had been infected and at least 50 million people were dead. That is 40 million more than perished on the killing fields of Flanders and northern France (and elsewhere in Europe), and 10 million more than have died from AIDS in the forty years since the syndrome was first recognized in the 1980s. Yet, except for those who watched loved ones succumb to the deadly pneumonic complications of Spanish flu, or who nursed patients on influenza wards and lost colleagues to the infection, the virus left relatively little mark on the collective consciousness of society. “Americans took little notice of the pandemic,” noted the environmental historian Alfred Crosby America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (1989), “then quickly forgot whatever they did notice.”
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Post by Admin on Mar 20, 2020 21:41:19 GMT
This time, instead of isolated natural disasters, economic crashes, civil violence or migration crises, Corona has the global human village looking in the same direction, as if it is saying, nothing has made you slow down in a while, so sit down a minute and come still. Come still not just in your living rooms, but still inside, and still as a whole, in a way you haven’t been in decades. Sit down together––but a new kind of together– as a global organization that now gets a chance to meditate on its impact on the much vaster organization of life. In the organism of interbeing, the corona wave is swelling up and sweeping our lives as a self-propelling force, much like a tsunami wave or an avalanche that rises only in the right, unique conditions. Might it be arranging the perfect storm, a last resort perhaps, through which we can be deeply altered at long last? In the collective psyche, coronavirus is an archetypal movement and can be expressed as an archetypal creature. I have begun calling her Corona the Crone, and I think of her as manifesting universal intelligence, a raising of the voice of the Wild and Wise Earth who is often embodied as an old wise woman, and is now finding preverbal ways to make herself understood: Pressing pause NOW is only the start.... In our frantic ways, always on the go to maintain our comforts, our structures, our economic growth at all cost, we have not been able to hear what the Crone has been trying to say for much longer than we care to admit: We are not healthy. We are not in balance. We have not been in harmony with the web of life. We are not just now getting sick––we have been sick for a long time. And it seems to me that like a true Crone, Corona is mandating a single and inevitable unfolding: That we must do this together. We may be closing borders and socially distancing, but the truth is that under the spell of pause, we are beginning to sense and to feel our vast and irrevocable togetherness––that we are connected in terrifying and powerful ways, and that, quite literally, we hold our lives in each other's hands! And that this togetherness ripples through all of life. Read/share full essay by Stefana Serafina here: www.intuitivedance.org/single-post/2020/03/17/Corona-the-Crone-We-Must-Be-Changed
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