An outright ban on wildlife trade may exacerbate the situation. Could carefully controlling these animal markets be the best answer?
Tag: coronavirus
The long lockdown period has only added to the frustrations people feel about their country’s unresolved class disparities, crass politics and history of violence.
PARIS — Growing up in Chicago, one of my favorite books was From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, the story of a brother and sister who run away to live in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Even as a kid, I could sense what a rare treat it could be to […]
Containing the COVID-19 outbreak came at a huge cost in terms of earnings and employment. And no one is taking a harder hit than China’s tens of millions of migrant workers.
As coronavirus shut down businesses around the world, red-light districts from Amsterdam to Bangkok to Frankfurt turned off their lights. But many continued to work illegally, risking infection and potential legal consequences in order to support themselves. As one Dutch sex worker told Die Welt, “The confinement does not mean that people stopped wanting sex.” […]
-Analysis- NEW DELHI — In a discussion on NDTV about the contents of the third tranche of Prime Minister Narendra Modi”s stimulus package for the economy, Yogendra Yadav, one of India’s most respected psephologists, called it “entertainment.” Yadav is a gentle human being who goes out of his way to avoid giving offense, above all on TV. So “entertainment” was the most civilized word he could think of. I will be a little more blunt. Not just the third tranche, but the entire “stimulus package” advertised by Modi on May 12 is a gigantic confidence trick being played upon a […]
Some researchers advocate shortening the procedure for clinical trials to develop a vaccine by infecting healthy volunteers with the live virus. This ‘challenge infection’ method raises an ethical dilemma.
In normal times, we might be writing this month about the annual momentum gathering for the Plastic Free July challenge. Launched in 2011 by the Australia-based Plastic Free Foundation, the idea is simple: refusing single-use plastics, from bags to packaging, for 31 days. But in 2020, that simple desire to go fully plastic-free for at […]
-Analysis- LONDON — “We’re at the end of our rope,” is a phrase you may hear these days among lower-income Iranians struggling to survive in a country heaving under economic sanctions and the coronavirus pandemic. It’s also a statement recently issued by a national pensioners association, which has been seen as a “warning” to a […]
-Analysis- You could almost hear a collective “Ha!” from around the world. The news yesterday that Jair Bolsonaro had been infected with the coronavirus comes after the Brazilian president’s response to the epidemic over the past four months that mixed arrogant dismissiveness with outright lies: The 65-year-old hardline right-wing leader first baselessly suggested Brazilians were […]
Social distancing measures and face masks will impact not only the atmosphere in theaters and concert halls, but also the bottom line.
Coronavirus travel restrictions have been a wake-up call for Europeans, especially since nearly a third of the population lives in cross-border areas like France and Belgium’s Eurometropolis Lillle-Kortrijk-Tournai.
People are taking to the streets in a challenge to the country’s long-serving president, Alexander Lukashenko, who expects to win a sixth term in next month’s elections.
Welcome to Monday, where the Pope is recovering from surgery, an indigenous woman helps Chile move past its Pinochet legacy, and the world record for competitive hot dog eating is broken. From Gaziantep, French daily Les Echos’ Catherine Chatignoux looks at the difficult integration of the four million Syrians living in Turkey. • COVID update: […]
“The worst is yet to come…” So warned World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in his assessment earlier this week of the status of the COVID-19 pandemic. The grim picture globally comes as many countries appear to be succeeding in greatly reducing the number of new cases, and quarantine and social distancing restrictions […]
Grief and catastrophe in and around the Italian city that became a symbol of the swiftness of the pandemic’s death and destruction.
Like so many before him, João took a bus to Rio de Janeiro in search of the kind of hope and economic opportunity that only big cities promise. “I came looking for something better, then the worst happened,” he told a Globo TV crew. The worst was COVID-19. As deaths skyrocketed in the city and […]
Even as the total number of cases of COVID-19 decreased In Italy, an outbreak flared up in the southern province of Caserta among migrant agricultural laborers. Writing in the Italian daily La Stampa, Mattia Feltri recounts how, once again, the pandemic is bringing long-simmering tensions, economic inequity and social injustice to the surface. Almost all […]
PRAGUE — As I walked down Avenue René Coty on a sunny day in late May, everything was like a Paris postcard — except that my glasses were fogging up over my facemask. But I knew the scenery by heart by then, as I had never left a one-kilometer radius around my student residence during […]
Here in the Italian region of Lombardy, which has been one of the pandemic’s deadliest epicenters, months of grief have now turned to anger. It began as relatives of COVID-19 victims formed a Facebook group Noi Denunceremo (“We will sue”), where 55,000 members are demanding the truth about Italy’s fumbled coronavirus response, La Repubblica reported. […]
In France more than anywhere else, employees seem to find it difficult to give up teleworking to come back to the office. They have more or less valid reasons to hesitate. But employers also have their own.
Welcome to Friday, where dozens are still missing in the Florida building collapse, Dutch and Hungarian prime ministers clash, and tourists are confused about Mexico City. We also turn to Les Echos for an analysis of the Sudan-Egypt tensions generated by Ethiopia’s Great Renaissance Dam. • Dozens missing after Florida building collapse: A 12-story oceanfront […]
Unlike the SARS and H1N1/09 outbreaks, which caused friction between the two countries, the COVID-19 pandemic has, if anything, improved Chinese-Mexican relations.
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The Vaccine Sprint Accelerates
The global death toll in the COVID-19 pandemic has passed 475,000, and the confirmed cases are now more than nine million worldwide. But there’s another number that looms: fear of the pandemic’s second wave striking countries in the coming weeks and months. Already, clusters of new outbreaks of cases have appeared in countries such as […]
There has been plenty of debate and questions surrounding the use of masks since the coronavirus pandemic started. Should we wear them or not? What type of mask works the best? Should countries make them compulsory? But even as a general scientific consensus has emerged that masks are one of the most effective tools at […]
The coronavirus crisis could reshape how the country’s leadership goes about its business.
Welcome to Wednesday, where Hong Kong’s pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily officially announces its closure, new clashes have broken out in Ethiopia’s Tigray region and the number of millionaires continues to increase despite the pandemic. Latin American business magazine America Economia also reports on how business schools around the world are now adding the environment to […]
The most common symptoms are fever, a dry cough and loss of taste and smell. The majority of deaths are due to respiratory failure. But more studies about COVID-19 are now focusing on neurological factors in what is still a largely mysterious pandemic. In the last few weeks, findings from around the world give support […]
Reunited and it feels so…? In France, a number of young adults chose to spend the confinement period with their parents. Families butted heads, of course, but also bonded.
The late American essayist Susan Sontag theorized that people are drawn to watching disaster films to help normalize and rationalize what we find psychologically unbearable. Watching a fictionalized apocalypse on the screen, she argued, inures us to the possibility that a real one may arrive. Sontag’s idea in 1965 about the need for a remedy […]
While it may make sense from a business perspective, healthcare facilities should focus on more than just optimizing space. Hospital architecture lessons from a pandemic.
-Essay- MEXICO CITY — Confinement has had few consolations, in spite of all the efforts to sell it as an “opportunity for personal growth.” The good news from where I sit is that I can see beer showing up again in Mexico City’s supermarkets and convenience stores. When the country imposed a nationwide shutdown, the […]
The world’s prevailing trade system was facing major challenges even before the pandemic. But that doesn’t mean globalization is destined to die.
Three months ago, as the pandemic began to spread beyond Asia, many worried that Africa was particularly vulnerable to COVID-19. Yet, so far, the toll has been relatively contained across the continent. In Africa, there have been a total of circa 200,000 recorded cases, compared to over two million in Europe and more than three […]
Building scientific beliefs is a long and arduous path that originates from a contradictory process. But facing a pandemic, it’s the best we’ve got.
MILAN — In our pandemic times, face masks are politics. Last Thursday, the debate arrived with fury at the Culture Commission of the Italian parliament. “I won’t be gagged and I won’t wear it!” barked Vittorio Sgarbi, a Parliament member from the center-right Forza Italia party. The obligatory face mask policy inside the Parliament, he […]
Globalized supply chains may be good for businesses, but they’re not always ideal for consumers, especially when they’re suddenly disrupted.
From schedule changes and face shields to full operational shutdowns, the pandemic has directly impacted the country’s industrial sector.
It was the kind of definitive piece of information that has been rare since the COVID-19 pandemic began: On Monday, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that coronavirus transmission has been officially eliminated in the country, since its appearance there in late February. According to the Director-General of Health, it has been at least […]
Beijing is stepping in to fill the leadership void left by a United States distracted and hobbled by its deep, structural divisions.