Category: Foreign

AT first, COVID-19 did not seem to discriminate in the United States (U.S.).

But in the last few weeks, there is a notable shift: Fewer white people have showed up at hospitals, while there has been a dramatic uptick in the number of black and brown patients.

The available data of the race of coronavirus victims – released by only a handful of states – bear out that observation, revealing a stark disparity between white and black residents.

The black and brown patients are lower-income service workers and essential workers – delivery drivers, police officers, subway workers, corrections officers – who do not have the luxury of working from home or retreating to a second home in a less dense community.

In Michigan, black people have died at more than eight times the rate of white people.

In Illinois, they have died at nearly six times the rate. In Louisiana, the difference is five-fold.

Public health experts said those figures reflected deep-rooted social and economic inequalities.

Not only are black Americans less likely to be insured and able to afford testing, but they are more likely to have underlying medical conditions such as asthma, diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease that could put them at higher risk for severe illness.

They are 60 per cent more likely than white Americans to be diagnosed with diabetes and 40 per cent more likely to have high blood pressure, according to the U.S. government.

“This virus is treading a glide path that unfortunately our society has paved through structural racism and poverty. It is finding its way into our most vulnerable communities, who in our country tend to be disproportionately black and brown,” said Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a former director of the Detroit Health Department.

The problem is compounded by the fact that many of the most vulnerable people work in service jobs that increase their risk of being exposed to the virus.

Fewer than 20 per cent of black workers are able to work from home compared with about one-third of their white counterparts, according to data from the Bureau of Labour Statistics.

Senator Bernie Sanders has suspended his campaign to become United States (U.S.) president.

The development clears the way for former vice-president Joe Biden to become the Democratic Party’s nominee.

Sanders, 78, told his campaign staff about his decision on a conference call on Wednesday before addressing his supporters online.

A self-described Democratic socialist, Sanders found early success making healthcare and working-class issues a key part of his election platform.

For a long time, the front-runner he has slipped behind Biden in the party’s primaries in recent weeks.

Sanders had pursued the presidential nomination before, losing out in 2016 to Hillary Clinton.

In recent weeks, Sanders had been hosting campaign events through online live streams due to health concerns from the Covid-19 outbreak.

Among the most left-leaning candidates during this year’s election cycle, the Vermont Senator campaigned on policies, including healthcare for all, free public college, raising taxes on the wealthy and increasing minimum wage.

While Sanders saw support from younger voters, he failed to win key African-American voters across the southern states in the Democratic primary elections.

Sanders noted that across the country, his campaign received “a significant majority of the votes…from people not only 30 years or younger, but 50 years or younger”.

“The future of this country is with our ideas.”

Sanders also congratulated Biden, and said that he will work with him to “move our progressive ideas forward”.

Biden tweeted shortly after Sanders’ live stream concluded: “I know Bernie well. He’s a good man, a great leader and one of the most powerful voices for change in our country.”

The former vice-president added in a statement that he was “grateful” to Sanders for putting America’s interest above all else and said he would be reaching out.

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, a fellow left-leaning Democrat and former presidential hopeful, also thanked Sanders “for fighting so relentlessly for America’s working families during this campaign”.

In his response, President Donald Trump said Sanders would have won more states if not for Ms Warren’s participation in the primary elections, and suggested the Democratic National Committee did not want him to be the nominee.

“The Bernie people should come to the Republican Party, TRADE!”

THE World Health Organisation (WHO) officials have denied that it was “China-centric”, arguing that the acute phase of a pandemic was not the time to cut funding.

It stated this on Wednesday after United States (U.S.) President Donald Trump said he may put contributions on hold.

The U.S. is the top donor to the Geneva-based body, which Trump said had issued bad advice during the coronavirus outbreak.

U.S. contributions to WHO in 2019 exceeded $400 million, almost double the second largest country donor, according to figures from the U.S. State Department. China contributed $44 million, it said.

“We are still in the acute phase of a pandemic so now is not the time to cut back on funding,” Dr. Hans Kluge, WHO regional director for Europe, told a virtual briefing when asked about Trump’s remarks.

Trump told a news conference on Tuesday that the United States was “going to put a hold on money spent to the WHO,” however, he appeared to backtrack later when in response to questions he said: “We’re going to look at it.”

It was not immediately clear how Trump could “block” funding for the organisation. Under U.S. law, Congress, not the president, decides how federal funds are spent.

Dr. Bruce Aylward, senior advisor to the WHO Director-General, also defended the UN agency’s relationship with China, saying its work with Beijing authorities was important to understand the outbreak which began in Wuhan in December.

“It was absolutely critical in the early part of this outbreak to have full access to everything possible, to get on the ground and work with the Chinese to understand this,” he told reporters.

“This is what we did with every other hard-hit country like Spain and had nothing to do with China specifically.”

Aylward, who led a WHO expert mission to China in February, defended WHO recommendations to keep borders open, saying that China had worked “very hard” to identify and detect early cases and their contacts and ensure they did not travel.

“China worked very, hard very early on, once it understood what it was dealing with, to try and identify and detect all potential cases to make sure that they got tested to trace all the close contacts and make sure they were quarantined so they actually knew where the virus was, where the risk was,” he said.

“Then they made it very clear that these people would not and could not travel within the country, let alone internationally,” he added.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has been lavish in his praise of China from early in the outbreak, praising President Xi Jinping’s “rare leadership”.

David Heymann, a professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine who led WHO’s response to the 2003 SARS outbreak, said any U.S. funding cut would be a huge blow.

“If the WHO loses its funding, it cannot continue to do its work. It works on a shoe-string budget already,” Heymann said in London. “Of course it would be disastrous for the WHO to lose funding.”