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Public health statistics are not an exact science in the best of situations. A missed diagnosis, someone who never sought treatment, incompletely filled forms or other clerical errors – these things do happen. Then there is an almost universal temptation for politicians and institutions to play down, even suppress or lie about, unpleasant news.
Countries without free and independent news reporting amplify these problems. The absence of pluralism in places where there is only one legal party and it controls all legal media is the classic malady, but multi-headed business oligarchies and rival political factions with their own media can also enforce orthodoxies that are at odds with the truth. People in Panama, or in the USA, should understand about China’s strict information controls but hesitate to trumpet the superiority of the systems by which we get our news. If the Trump administration denounces the Xi administration for politically distorting facts, on a specific point the former might be factually correct, but Donald Trump and those whom he employs are notoriously unreliable sources.
By several indications, from various sources independent of one another, China’s official story of the coronavirus death count in Wuhan is way understated, likely by an order of magnitude. They say fewer than four thousand deaths in all of China, when crematoria data from Wuhan alone suggest more than ten times that.
Such discrepancies matter more about some things than they do about others. Whatever the numbers, the quarantines imposed by China appear to have gone a long way toward limiting the disease’s spread. But if other places design their responses based upon understated numbers, they may deploy insufficient resources to deal with the problem.
Panama’s pandemic response is Panama’s. We need to be aware of the experiences of other places. We need to be up to date with the state of the science, which is developing in many places. While not going into unreasonable denial, we need to look skeptically at information that comes in.
This is a matter of lives and deaths in Panama. It’s not an exercise in blame assignment. It’s not the construction a pecking order that deems some civilizations superior and others inferior. We can neither afford to be deceived, nor to shut our eyes out of fear of being deceived.
Here at The Crossroads of the World, we do have some sophistication about the ways of the many nations that trade or pass through here. A bit of worldly caution will save lives in our current crisis.
Panama’s various police forces are among the first responders to the current health crisis. One of their top officers, a subcommissioner, has died of the coronavirus. A bunch of their fellow cops, along with a lot of health care workers, have become sick. If you notice from their poster, these folks have masks to protect other people, but nothing like the protective gear that someone at high risk of exposure needs for self protection.
Do not put your desires ahead of their health or that of your neighbors. The cops don’t want to hear that. They will arrest you for violating quarantine and curfew rules.
Don’t be a jerk. Stay home.
Power without a nation’s confidence is nothing.
Catherine the Great
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.
Victor Hugo
Listening, not imitation, may be the sincerest form of flattery.
Dr. Joyce Brothers
Of course the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you — if you don’t play, you can’t win.
Robert Heinlein
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The defense of human life in the Americas, in the face of the novel coronavirus pandemic, has become an ethical imperative for progressive forces throughout the region and beyond. The manner in which each government is now responding to the crisis reveals a great deal about their respective social and economic priorities. Equally important, the response of civil society, not always in tune with constituted power, and even in some cases at odds with it, reflects something about the moral fabric of our peoples in this moment of crisis.
Some governments, such as the United States and Brazil, have hesitated to aggressively combat the pandemic, weighing the impact of timely social distancing and national quarantine, which China had demonstrated can save thousands if not millions of lives, against the “health” of markets. This is a false dichotomy. The health of an economy ought to be measured by the degree to which it meets human needs, not how much it puts in the pockets of ruling elites or buttresses the stock market. Moreover, empirical evidence demonstrates that nations which hesitate to effectively respond to the pandemic at an early stage are lost; their rates of infection and mortality become unconscionably steep, leading in any case to an economic downturn.
CODIV-19, a moral matter for governments
It is moments such as this that a clear moral compass for guiding public policy is essential. As the Argentine-Mexican philosopher, Enrique Dussel points out, an ethics of liberation advances human life in community by means of democratic procedures and opts for what is feasible under the given circumstances. If we translate these integral principles into public health policy, responsible governance requires measures be adopted with constituent input and implemented in a timely fashion against the spread of COVID-19. It also requires that healthcare providers be equipped with the tools necessary for the treatment of all those who have fallen ill as a result of infection. Any actions which hinder such measures and practices would violate these ethical principles.
It does not go unnoticed on the world stage, even in Europe, that it is the so called “authoritarian” governments — China, Cuba, and Russia — have come to the aid of some of the hardest hit countries. It is remarkable, but in keeping with Cuba’s international health mission, that this Caribbean island, despite the economic hardship imposed by six decades of US embargo, has deployed thousands of health professionals in a growing number of countries, regardless of ideological differences.
Sanctions constitute a crime against humanity
COHA urges that this is no time to draw hard partisan lines that compromise international cooperation; we are in this together. It is time for the US to end the embargo and cooperate with Cuba. Even the extreme right wing government of President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, which had expelled Cuban health professionals, has asked them to return.
The US response to the pandemic is also remarkable, but for less than honorable reasons. Washington has continued to impose crippling economic sanctions against Venezuela, despite pleas from the European Union and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to suspend the sanctions in order to save lives.
These sanctions against Venezuela, which have already killed thousands, arguably constitute a crime against humanity. They shock the conscience even more in the context of the pandemic.
What is most outrageous, is that at the very time Venezuelans are united against the pandemic and dialogue between the government and opposition is making progress, the US has issued unsubstantiated charges of drug trafficking against top Venezuelan government officials. The charges appear to be politically motivated, as the US maintains close alliances with Colombia, from which most of the illicit drug trafficking originates, as well as Honduras, where its government, led by the de facto president Juan Orlando Hernández, is the subject of accusations of illegal drug-dealing and complicity with national and international cartels. Washington, it appears, has taken collective punishment against Venezuelans to an extreme that only the most servile governments and the Secretary General of the OAS are willing to endorse.
The rates of infection and mortality due to the pandemic in the region is highly volatile and could change any minute. The data indicates that prompt intervention by the state in partnership with civil society to put in place appropriate public health measures and quickly mobilize medical personnel and resources can flatten the rate of infection and save lives. [1]*
Where there are deficiencies in a nation’s public healthcare system, international solidarity is critical to helping fill those gaps.
It is time the US and OAS become benevolent forces in the region
This is a time for a unified fight against COVID-19 in the Americas, yet the OAS continues to sow discord. COHA has taken an editorial position denouncing the reelection of Luis Almagro as Secretary General of this multilateral organization. This critique is consistent with the concerns expressed by our late founder and director, Larry Birns, who was very critical of the extreme partisanship with which Almagro had been leading the OAS. As a full partner of the Trump administration, Almagro has targeted Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba for regime change. He was also instrumental in perpetrating the coup in Bolivia in October 2019 and endorsing the 2017 electoral fraud in Honduras. His selective indignation over human rights abuses resulted in the OAS looking the other way during crackdowns against legitimate dissent in Chile and Ecuador, and has put him squarely on the side of the governments of Colombia and Honduras where human rights abuses are rampant. He is the wrong person to lead the OAS, especially at a time when hemispheric unity ought to transcend partisanship.
Larry Birns never gave up hope that someday the United States would become a benevolent force in the Americas, and assume a posture of mutual respect among sovereign nations instead of pursuing a coercive Monroeism. Only in this way can we ever hope to build a world “in which many worlds can fit” (to use a Zapatista expression). Yet that will only happen when we get our own house in order: establish a universal health care system and deal effectively with the CODIV-19 pandemic; end the persecution of immigrants; reform the racist criminal justice system; get big money out of politics; address growing economic and social inequality; and overcome the multiple hierarchies of domination which informs domestic and foreign policy.
* See also https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
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Ana Reyes de Serrano, president of the National Association of Nurses of Panama, in a message to all the members through their social networks, asked Ministry of Health authorities for more information about the condition of the nurses who across the nation are working in the country’s hospitals, treating and coming close to patients who are affected by the coronavirus.
Reyes de Serrano said they need to know how many nursing professionals have been infected, how many are in isolation and about those who may be in critical condition. She raised the question because families want to know their conditions, as in some cases they have had no contact and there is almost no information out of the ministry. The association also wants to know the best ways and times to lend their assistance.
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To fend off hackers, organized trolls and other online vandalism, our website comments feature is switched off. Instead, come to our Facebook page to join in the discussion.
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President Donald Trump on Monday came right out and admitted his Republican Party would soon be defunct if voting in the United States was easier in a way that allowed more citizens to vote in elections, telling a national television audience it was a good thing that Democratic proposals for increased voting protections and ballot access were left out of last week’s coronavirus relief package.
The comment came during an interview with Fox & Friends, the president’s go-to show for positive coverage.
“The things they had in there were crazy,” Trump said of the voter protection and expansion proposals in the bill. “They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
Watch:
The remark — as many were quick to point out — is what’s called “saying the quiet part loud.”
“This morning on live television, the president of the United States admitted he is opposed to laws that would make it easier for Americans to vote because that would hurt Republicans,” said Ellen Kurz, founder and board president of iVote, which seeks to expand voting rights for Americans.
As the Washignton Post’s Aaron Blake noted:
Trump didn’t expand on the thought. But he clearly linked high turnout to Republicans losing elections. The most generous reading of his comment is that he was referring to large-scale voter fraud resulting from the easier vote-by-mail options; Trump has in the past baselessly speculated about millions of fraudulent votes helping Democrats in the 2016 election. The more nefarious reading would be that allowing more people to participate in the process legally would hurt his party because there are more Democratic-leaning voters in the country.
That’s apparently true, but you typically don’t see Republicans expressing the sentiment so directly. Generally, they’ll connect tighter voting rules such as Voter ID to protecting the integrity of the process.
After progressive proposals to enhance voter protections and increased access were scrapped from the compromise bill that emerged from U.S. Senate—legislation that was ultimately signed by Trump on Friday—Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, called the shortcomings a major failing of the legislation.
“The coronavirus pandemic is a health and economic crisis,” Waldman said. “The $2 trillion dollar stimulus will help soften its effects on the American people. However, Congress failed to include sufficient, urgently needed funds in the stimulus to help states run elections in a time of pandemic. This could wreak havoc in November.”
“States simply will not have the resources so people can vote safely,” he warned. “Congress must do better when it composes the next stimulus package.”
While state election officials from both parties have made it clear they will need federal assistance in order to “hold a safe, fair, and secure November election under pandemic conditions,” Waldman said failure to provide that support could prove disastrous.
“By our estimate, state and local officials need at least $2 billion to prepare, an amount that would cover the equipment, supplies, staffing, training, and the other costs of adapting our voting processes to withstand the coronavirus,” he said. “That funding is not partisan and it is not a luxury. Time remains of the essence.”
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Contact us by email at / Contáctanos por correo electrónico a fund4thepanamanews@gmail.com
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