Wednesday, April 8, 2020
Tuesday, April 7, 2020
Cuban Docs Fighting Coronavirus Around World, Defying US
AP. April 3, 2020
HAVANA — For two years the Trump administration has been trying to stamp out one of Cuba’s signature programs __ state-employed medical workers treating patients around the globe in a show of soft power that also earns billions in badly needed hard currency.
Labeling the doctors and nurses as both exploited workers and agents of communist indoctrination, the U.S. has notched a series of victories as Brazil, Ecuador and Bolivia sent home thousands after leftist governments allied with Havana were replaced with ones friendlier to Washington.
The coronavirus pandemic has brought a reversal of fortune for Cuban medical diplomacy, as doctors have flown off on new missions to battle COVID-19 in at least 14 countries including Italy and the tiny principality of Andorra on the Spanish-French border, burnishing the island's international image in the middle of a global crisis.
“I am aware of the position of the United States, but we are a sovereign country and we can choose the partners with which we are going to have cooperation,” Andorran Foreign Minister María Ubach said.
In the city of Crema in the hard-hit Lombardy region of northern Italy, 52 Cuban doctors and nurses set up a field hospital with 32 beds equipped with oxygen and three ICU beds.
“This is a strongly symbolic moment because the Crema hospital has been going through an extremely complicated situation from the start,” Lombardy’s top social welfare official, Giulio Gallera, said at the inauguration last week. “The number of patients who have filled and continue to fill the emergency room and departments has truly put the medical personnel to a hard test.”
The Trump administration has sought to cut off income to Havana as part of a long-term tightening of sanctions. And it continues to discourage countries from contracting Cuban medical workers despite the pandemic, arguing that their pay and conditions fall short of industry standards.
“The government of #Cuba keeps most of the salary its doctors and nurses earn while serving in its international medical missions while exposing them to egregious labor conditions,” the State Department said on Twitter last week. “Host countries seeking Cuba’s help for #COVID-19 should scrutinize agreements and end labor abuses.”
Cuba currently has about 37,000 medical workers in 67 countries, most in longstanding missions. Some doctors have been sent as part of free aid missions, but many countries pay the government directly for their services. In some other cases international health bodies have paid.
The most recent deployments of at least 593 doctors from the Henry Reeve Brigade — founded by Fidel Castro in 2005 and named after a 19th-century American volunteer who fought for Cuban independence from Spain — have also been to Suriname, Jamaica, Dominica, Belize, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, St. Kitts and Nevis, Venezuela and Nicaragua, some of them reinforcing existing medical missions.
All have been billed as tied to the coronavirus epidemic, even though some of the countries have few confirmed cases so far. None of the agreements or financial terms have been made public.
Havana has said it receives about $6 billion a year from the export of public services, and medical services make up most of that. When Brazil expelled Cuban doctors in 2018, a few details emerged including that the country had been paying $3,100 per month for each doctor with 70% of that going into the pockets of the Cuban government.
Doctors typically make less than $100 per month working on the island, so doing an overseas mission means a significant pay hike even if those salaries remain low by international standards.
Andorran newspaper Diari d'Andorra reported Wednesday, citing Health Minister Joan Martínez Benazet, that one of the 39 Cuban doctors in the country had tested positive for coronavirus and was quarantined in a hotel. The Cuban government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Infection is a serious risk for those on the front lines. In Italy alone, over 10,000 medical workers have contracted the coronavirus and more than at least 69 doctors have died.
For most people the coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. But for others, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause severe, life-threatening symptoms like pneumonia.
Cuban officials have been proudly posting videos of doctors being applauded as they arrive to begin work, and blasting the Trump administration for its criticisms.
“Shame on you. Instead of attacking Cuba and its committed doctors, you should be caring about the thousands of sick Americans who are suffering due to the scandalous neglect of your government and the inability of your failed health system to care for them,” Josefina Vidal, Cuba’s ambassador to Canada, wrote on Twitter.
Argentine officials have also said they are discussing possible coronavirus help from Cuba, and another mission should leave soon for Angola.
Cuba has a relatively high number of medical workers per capita — officials say there are currently about 90,000 in the country of 11 million.
The Henry Reeve Brigade has deployed previously on infectious disease missions, famously helping fight Ebola in West Africa in 2014.
That effort took place in cooperation with the administration of then-President Barack Obama, seen as easing relations ahead of the diplomatic thaw between the two countries later that year.
Bots Made 55 % of Pro-Bolsonaro Tweets About COVID-19
TeleSUR. April 5, 2020
A study analyzed 1.2 million posts on Twitter between January 1 and March 15 concerning the COVID-19 pandemic and the pro-Bolsonaro protests of the 15th.
Bots sent half of the posts by President Jair Bolsonaro's supporters on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic in the country and the pro-government demonstration and against the National Congress and the Judiciary.
A study by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and the Foundation of the School of Sociology and Politics of Sao Paulo (FespSP) shows that 55 percent of the 1.2 million publications that used the hashtag #BolsonaroDay were made by bots, automatic accounts.
Researchers collected data on the hashtags most used by the president's support groups on Twitter between Jan.1 and March 15. The group identified 22,000 hashtags that were classified in a list of the most used. According to the study, 66,000 accounts were identified as responsible for approximately 1.2 million tweets.
The bots who used the hashtag #BolsonaroDay posted about 700 tweets on Sunday, March 15, when the pro-government events took place. The most active profiles even posted an average of 1,200 tweets per day. The study also found that real users have an average of three to ten tweets per day. The most active among them reach up to 50 tweets per day.
The study was carried out by 12 researchers and coordinated by professors Rose Marie Santini of the UFRJ and Isabela Kalil of the FespSP.
The Brazilian president is not living his best moments since the approval rate of Bolsonaro has fallen to its lowest level since he took office last year.
Brazilians overwhelmingly disapprove of Bolsonaro's minimization of the COVID-19 pandemic and support governors and health authorities who have been attacked by the president for advocating social distancing measures or quarantine, showed two polls on Friday.
Brazil coronavirus: medics fear official tally ignores ‘a mountain of deaths’
Dom Phillips. The Guardian. April 4, 2020
Brazil is bracing for a surge in coronavirus cases as doctors and researchers warn that underreporting and a lack of testing mean nobody knows the real scale of Covid-19’s spread.
“What’s happening is enormous underreporting,” said Isabella Rêllo, a doctor working in emergency and intensive care in Rio de Janeiro hospitals, in a widely shared Facebook post challenging official numbers. “There are MANY more,” she wrote.
As Latin America’s worst hit country, Brazil officially has 9,056 coronavirus cases – including actors, singers, government ministers and Fabio Wajngarten, press secretary of the president, Jair Bolsonaro.
With 14 million Brazilians living in densely populated favelas where basic sanitation is frequently lacking, informal workers are struggling from lost income during lockdown, and social isolation is challenging or impossible. The first case has already been reported in an Amazon indigenous community.
Bolsonaro called the pandemic a “little flu” and insisted Brazilians would be immune because they were used to jumping in sewage. His government has distributed just 54,000 tests for a population of about 210 million. Last month the health ministry stopped releasing the numbers of suspected cases.
“In Brazil that’s certainly a critical issue, if not a crisis,” said Albert Ko, department chair and professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Medicine, noting that widespread testing helped Taiwan, South Korea and Germany blunt the epidemic’s rise.
“It is clear we have to improve the issue of tests, and improve a lot,” health minister Luiz Mandetta told reporters this week.
Estimates vary wildly. This week, Edmar Santos, health secretary for Rio de Janeiro, said the state could have 50 to 100 infected people for each of its 1,074 confirmed cases.
Brazil’s official toll of 359 deaths is just “the tip of the iceberg,” said Fernando Bozza, a researcher in infectious diseases at the government research institute Fiocruz who is modelling the pandemic. “You have a mountain of other deaths that are either directly or indirectly associated with the epidemic and they are not notified.”
Rêllo, who works in private and public hospitals in Rio, said test results can take up to seven days to arrive. She dealt with three deaths last week alone but results confirming coronavirus arrived after the patients had died – meaning they did not enter the count. The notification systems she deals with vary from handwritten forms to online ones.
“I’m just one doctor,” she said. “The number I am seeing of critically ill patients, of what I see and what people I know tell me about, does not match the number being disclosed.”
She and other doctors are worried about running short of personal protection equipment before the full force of the pandemic has hit.
“It’s chaotic, many cases arriving,” said Rodolfo Espinoza, a doctor working in Rio’s intensive care wards. “We know there are many suspected cases with no diagnosis.”
In São Paulo state, Brazil’s most populous with 44 million people and 4,048 cases, the government laboratory handling tests has a backlog of 16,000, state health secretary José Germann said on Wednesday.
At the Emílio Ribas public hospital in the state capital, tests are taking up to 15 days to come back, said Ana Ribeiro, its epidemiological service coordinator. The hospital – one of Brazil’s most respected infectious disease institutions – is currently waiting for 134 test results, including those of three who have died.
“There are many people getting symptoms and they cannot handle it,” Ribeiro said.
Cemeteries in São Paulo are burying 30 to 40 people a day with coronavirus symptoms but, in most cases, no test result, the Folha de S Paulo newspaper reported.
The non-profit group Viva Rio runs six health centres, called UPAs, in Rio de Janeiro, all near favelas and all almost exclusively dealing with respiratory cases.
“People are not going to UPAS for other reasons,” said general coordinator José Pacheco. “I just select the most vulnerable or most serious to test; the vast majority are not tested.”
São Gonçalo, the second biggest city in Rio state, has 10 confirmed cases. Resident Fabíola Lima, a financial specialist, believes there are many more.
She lives with her three sisters, all of whom went to private hospitals after suffering classic coronavirus symptoms like fever, headaches and dry coughs. They were told tests were not available, and sent home. They too were not included in the official tally.
“This number being released is totally unreal. This makes people think everything’s normal,” Lima said, while her sister Christiane, coughed incessantly in the background.
Despite outbreaks of Zika, dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever in recent years, the past three Brazilian governments slashed funding for science and technology, said Rodrigo Brindeiro, a molecular biologist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro who helped design the test Fiocruz uses.
Brazil is now competing in international markets to buy the test ingredients it needs.
“Our failure was long-term,” he said. “We know that if the diagnosis does not improve rapidly there will be a lot of underreporting in these favelas of Rio and this is extremely worrying.”
In an email, the health ministry said 40,000 more molecular tests were being delivered this week and another 15 million “are being acquired”. It has taken delivery of half a million antibody tests donated by mining giant Vale, which is expected to deliver millions more. Mandetta said the antibody tests have “various degrees of sensitivity”. Health ministry documents sent to states and towns said the tests were probably just 25% accurate in diagnosing negative cases.
These antibody tests will only spot people carrying coronavirus four to seven days after they become infected, said Brindeiro.
As Brazilians chafed under lockdown and largely ignored Bolsonaro’s demands to get back to work, there are signs that many people also sought reliable information instead of his anti-science, anti-media, populist posturing. Brazil’s biggest newspaper, the Folha de S Paulo – which Bolsonaro has described as “garbage” – reported a record 70 million readers in March.
An interview with biologist Atila Iamarino Iamarino on the TV show Roda Viva this week drew its biggest audience since Bolsanaro himself appeared in 2018, and has been viewed 3 million times on YouTube.
Concerns over the lack of testing were voiced.
“You have the tests, which are the flashlight you can point in any direction and know what’s happening there,” said Iamarino. “Without this flashlight, what you can use is a candle.”
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