GUATEMALA
- Miasmatism, claimed that diseases were transmitted by poisonous vapors stemming from putrid organic matter, originating from contaminated environments.
- These competing views are sometimes framed in terms of the binary contagionism/anti-contagionism when one looks at the longer history of theories of disease transmission
- Contagion held that disease is spread by direct contact with the body of an affected person, advising measures aimed at repelling the causes of the disease, emphasizing quarantines, segregation and sanitary cordons.
- Infection held that disease is spread through the air or other distant means like objects, dust and water, leading to measures aimed at removing causes of insalubrity.
- The nature of COVID-19 seems so abstract and hard to do something about that people needing to take practical measures will find ways of deciding, by recurring to notions of disease transmission drawn from their experience and which resemble those of nineteenth century contagionism and infectionism.
But why sanitary cordons?
- Here is where narratives with militaristic overtones blend in with notions of disease transmission to inform control measures.
- Between mid-March and mid-May the Guatemalan government’s narrative about COVID-19 was one of defending the country from an external threat, that the country was at war and the virus was the enemy to defeat.
- people returning from Europe or the United States became the source of the virus that had to be kept away, but as it became evident that the virus was circulating in the country, community leaders adopted the same logic to protect their communities with the implementation of their own version of a sanitary cordon, and adding more people to the list of suspects.
global health’s emphasis on biosecurity have led to our current obsession with sanitary measures, losing sight of 150 years of advances in epidemiology and public health that had shown us that the object of epidemiology is people’s health, and its objective is to contribute to its improvement.
HOMELESS in California
- As growing fears of coronavirus contagion became more prevalent, it fell to officialdom to focus on demographics deemed particularly “at-risk” to assuage public concerns. Sensibly, the project aims to secure 15,000 hotel rooms for “homeless candidates” deemed particularly vulnerable to the virus.
- sufferers become objects, death and illness become statistics, lives become measurable and so the categorization of lives is (re)established.
- That is to say, the logic of Project Roomkey distinguishes the (hapless) lives to be saved from those who are able to save, setting in place the respective values of said lives.
- The most at-risk individuals include those already suffering from health problems which disproportionately affect those experiencing homelessness
- the present emergency-focus has meant authorities have avoided discussion of long-term solutions to homelessness.
- By temporarily “sweeping away” urban street dwellers from public areas into confinement, public concerns have been prioritized over efforts to effectively remedy homelessness.
- slogans such as “Stay at home” and, “Keep your distance” are behavioral luxuries that poorer communities and those experiencing homelessness can seldom afford
- The economics of homelessness
- Homelessness has served a necessary capitalist function beginning with the ‘wandering men’ – a mobile source of labour in the industrial city
- “Skid row” – with its Single Room Occupancy units (SROs) and cheap lodging – reflected US economic trends, shrinking in times of abundance and expanding in times of economic hardship
- Two Factors Changed this
- deindustrialisation.
- This marked the end of associating Skid row inhabitants with their reserve labour --Instead, the mostly single, white male occupants became only known for their failure to observe social norms or their duty to fulfill social, political, or community roles.
- their dwelling place directly implicated their personhood; their character, status, and value. Skid row and ghetto inhabitants were judged by where they lived, not who they were; the social imaginary of the “homeless” as a person, not an experience.
- deinstitutionalisation
- over the course of the 1970’s. Those suffering from acute mental illness were forced from state-funded facilities without sufficient housing or medical provisions, tripling the homeless population throughout many US cities.
- Negative effects from policies accelerated under Reagan’s administration during the 1980’s, when minimal welfare benefits under the New Deal and Great Society initiatives were abolished in favor of capital-first mandates.
- Public housing and SROs were sold and destroyed to make way for more profitable real-estate construction, forcing thousands onto the street.
- Class distinction increased and the poor who could no longer access low-cost housing options became increasingly marginalized to the point of invisibility.
- Government and public attitudes towards the resulting increase in Californian homelessness remained confined to this discourse of homelessness by “personal choice” and was addressed through punitive measures
- criminalisation of the poor
- is the product of the same discourse that implies poverty as matter of choice and continues to ignore evidence to the contrary.
- It ignores structural failures throughout the mental and physical healthcare services and the effects of stigma and social classification which this unchecked discourse recreates.
- Research quantifiably points to public medical failures leading to homelessness --Inability to work due to injury or illness and the expiration of personal resources to cope (e.g, limited insurance or family support) often ends in some form of homelessness.
- Physical conditions like tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, hypertension, vascular disease, seizures, and most other infectious and chronic conditions affect transient residents over their domiciled counterparts by factors ranging from two to twenty
- the lack of having basic storage for medicines means diabetes, asthma, and high blood pressure patients suffer the effects of these illnesses more acutely.
- individuals experiencing homelessness have a higher frequency of post-traumatic disorders, but homelessness itself is produces symptoms of psychological trauma
- homeless individuals have and do exercise agency by giving life to various communal spaces within the urban landscape; places which are synonymous with relationship, compassion and care.
- Project Roomkey’s Fallibilities
- 15,000 is only a scratch on the 150,000 surface of people experiencing homelessness in California.
- only one-fifth of the hotel rooms secured for the project have been filled as of July 19, 2020
- disaster capitalism?--the project is set to benefit hoteliers more than those from the homeless communities it ostensibly assists.
- COVID-19 has brought a sudden halt to travel and in lieu of tourism, state funds directed to Project Roomkey support these businesses in a time of economic decline
- This is ALSO evident on the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA)
- It covers the conditions for the temporary lodging scheme on issues concerning hoteliers specifically: the strict guidelines for eligibility, the extent of time the project would run for (three month term from when the hotel decided to open their doors, not when the pandemic subsided nor when it was safe for the new tenant to leave) and the assurance of twenty-four hour, on-site security, and of police readiness-to-respond.
- The contrast in motives behind fiscally driven “relief efforts” with the motives of service-provider agencies produces two very different and distinct outcomes.
- The former deems the temporary hotel occupant as a commodity – a rather objectifying approach.
- non-government organizations and non-profit volunteers are more effective in providing care for those in need.
- They identify problems with state-aid dependency under the disaster capitalism paradigm explaining: “Chronic disaster syndrome… [should] be used to refer not just to the individual diseases associated with the stress of disruption that manifest in individual bodies but also to the social conditions that produce distress, tied in nonspecific ways to larger political and economic arrangements that generate belief in, but ultimately prevent, recovery from disasters.”
- Denied essential political life, individuals experiencing homelessness are stripped to bare life; to be separated, regulated, and erased as officialdom sees fit.
- The relocation of those more vulnerable individuals to places for isolation has also generated stigma and negative attitudes (not in my backyard)
$150 million, could make a significant contribution towards long-term housing solutions or the establishment of medical healthcare facilities to provide preventative care for poorer populations.
Acceptance into the project also demands hotel residents abide by strict rules and curfew regulations, crediting the revanchist notion that “unknowables” should remain invisible and away from the public eye. The denial of agency and separation from one’s familiar local community is a high price to pay for the brief comforts of a stock standard interior of a hotel room.
does nothing to protect future sufferers of homelessness from the next pandemic – as history should inform us this will not be the last international pandemic.
Risk Perception and Political Division
- The increasing political divide in the U.S., and its reflection in where and how individuals consume news and, correspondingly, interpret facts
- different news sources may present different interpretations of factual data, instilling different perceptions of risk in their viewers—who may in turn respond differently to information provision or suggested social distancing choices.
- individuals have an increased tendency to view the world through a “partisan perceptual screen,” whereby their assessment of economic conditions and policies depend on whether their party of preference is currently in power
- Measuring Risk: Two streams of data
- Google health search:
- The higher the search share in a particular location and time period, the higher the perceived risk among that population.
- search share for unemployment-related terms (benefits, insurance, etc.), capturing individual’s perceptions of the economic risk of the pandemic.
- Cell Phone and Travel
- change in average daily distance traveled from the pre-pandemic period.
- distance traveled in the county relative to the average for the same day of the week from the beginning of the year up to March 8th (the “pre-COVID period”).
- the percent change in visits to non-essential retail and services from the average for the same day of the week during the preCOVID-19 period.
- Essential locations include venues such as food stores, pet store and pharmacies.
- Non-essential retail and services include, but are not limited to, restaurants and bars, clothing stores, consumer electronics stores, cinemas and theaters, spas and hair salons, office supply store, gyms, car dealerships, hotels, hobby shops and so forth.
- both measures follow expected patterns, decreasing sharply as the case load in the U.S. increases.
- Risk perceptions and political partisanship
- We document a muted response to preliminary cases in high Trump VS areas—even as state governments imposed a variety of school and business closures and stay-at-home recommendations—with a catch-up in attention only after prominent Republican figures were quarantined following the announcement of COVID-19 exposure at the annual CPAC meeting.
- As countries across the world struggle to flatten the curve of the pandemic and lessen the possibility of significant deaths and prolonged economic contraction, understanding how individuals and households react to information treatments and voluntary compliance measures becomes of ever more importance to the ultimate resolution of the current crisis.
- Our findings suggest that risk perceptions and—consequently—behavioral choices, may be shaped through the lens of politics, rendering certain types of interventions that rely on uniform interpretation of the risk associated with the outbreak less effective.
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