Monitor internationale voorbeelden stedelijke aanpak Covid-19
Elke twee weken maakt de gemeente Amsterdam een monitor waarin u ziet hoe andere steden in en buiten Europa omgaan met de coronacrisis. In deze collectie zijn alle monitors te vinden die in dit kader zijn gedaan.
Deze monitor is erop gericht om een algemeen beeld te vormen van de maatregelen die andere steden in Europa en daarbuiten nemen naar aanleiding van de uitbraak van Corona. Verschillende domeinen komen aan bod en alle voorbeelden zijn gericht op hun relevantie voor steden als Amsterdam. Ook bevat dit document een overzicht van EU-maatregelen en een overzicht van informatiebronnen toegevoegd die relevant zijn voor steden.
Op basis van behoefte zal deze monitor in de komende weken qua inhoud en structuur worden verbeterd.
For Heidi Larson, the founder of the Vaccine Confidence Project, dispelling vaccine hesitancy means building trust — and avoiding the term “anti-vaxxer.”
In late September, Heidi Larson, an anthropologist and the founder of theVaccine Confidence Projectin London, sat on a Zoom call with the project team for Verified, a United Nations-led group that is working to combat a rising tide of misinformation about potential vaccines for Covid-19.
Dr. Larson, 63, is arguably the world’s foremost rumor manager. She hasspent two decadesin war torn, poor and unstable countries around the globe, as well as in rich and developed ones, striving to understand what makes people hesitant to take vaccines. She is obsessed with the origin and evolution of rumors, which she calls “collective problem solving,” and has come to see most anti-vaxxers — a term she considers too oppositional — not as uneducated, science-denying individualists but as people with genuine questions and doubts in search of guidance. “This is a public cry to say, ‘Is anyone listening?’ she writes in herrecently releasedbook “Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start and Why they Don’t Go Away.”
These are busy days for a rumor manager, as they are for rumormongers. The Vaccine Confidence Project, which began in 2010, comprises more than a dozen staff with backgrounds in political science, psychology, mathematical modeling, epidemiology and more. They monitor news, social-media outlets and community conversations in nearly every country and in 63 languages, to catch wind of rumors that might undermine the acceptance of critical vaccines. Above all, with hard data gathered from the many surveys and questionnaires the team administers, they have shown that what once seemed like the ghost of a problem is something troublingly tangible and real.
In September, the team publisheda paper in The Lancetthat mapped shifts in vaccine confidence in 149 countries from 2015 through 2019, with data from more than 284,000 adults. For instance, in Indonesia during that period, the perception that vaccines are safe fell from 64 percent to 50 percent after Muslim leaders questioned the safety of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, that the vaccine contained forbidden ingredients. In Poland, a highly organized anti-vaccine movement has helped drive down vaccine confidence from 64 percent in November 2018 to 53 percent by December 2019.
Disrupting 'business as usual': Covid-19 and platform labour
Things are bad right now and they will probably get worse in the future. Once the global pandemic caused by COVID-19 is finally under control, the afterlife of this public health crisis is likely to have a devastating impact on our national and local economies for years to come. But not everyone will be affected in the same way and to the same extent.
We have already witnessed how pandemic brings into sharp relief long-standing inequalities with respect to income and wealth distribution. Some social groups will have access to the resources (e.g. time, space, capital, influence) necessary to weather this crisis, or even make a profit from it, while many others who lack these resources will scramble to protect their lives and livelihoods. In many ways, COVID-19 intensifies and accelerates these inequalities and will ultimately push them to a breaking point – a point governments – even conservative ones – have been trying to steer clear from by introducing economic rescue plans.
Importantly, the ongoing platformization of labor and livelihoods embodies a similar (albeit less drastic) logic of intensification and acceleration. While the term ‘disruption’ has been overused and may poorly describe the economic and social impacts that platforms like Uber, Airbnb, or Deliveroo are having at a global and local level, we nevertheless think it is safe to say that many of these impacts are significant.
This article is written by Hodan Abdullahi, Head of Exploration UNDP Somalia Accelerator Lab and Najoua Soudi, Head of Solutions Mapping UNDP Morocco Accelerator Lab
It doesn’t take a system thinker to point out that the pandemic has impacted every aspect of people’s lives, but it does take a system thinker to make sense of the underlying complexity of these connections, that too often go unnoticed, misrepresented, or unconsidered.
As the pandemic wears on, we are fast approaching thewickedest global economic recession. In the span of weeks, countries had to make hard decisions and many complex tradeoffs. Tradeoffs between citizen’s health and their data privacy, between the pace of medical innovation and its safety and, perhaps even more poignant,between Covid and non-Covid-19 deaths.
In our view, these choices made by policymakers everywhere often fall short of drawing upon a shared understanding of the new post-pandemic realities, let alone the new unintended effects and outcomes.
Inarguably,systems thinkingwould come in handy to depict complex, interconnected, and ambiguous challenges — that we are used to oversimplifying in biteable linear, fragmented ones. And as the pandemic is a great reminder, that’s risky. Sherlock Holme's way of deliberately seeing with new eyes and detaching from our auto-pilot modeis especially relevant in today’s liminal space. Applying a systems thinking approach would force us to expand our view to cascading effects and interconnections.
Even more importantly, it would inspire us to think divergently and convergently at the right time in the right place— teaching us to see our old and persisting issues with new eyes, as this quote fromA Scandal In Bohemia,1891 illustrates:
Sherlock: "You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear. For example, you have frequently seen the steps which lead up from the hall to this room."
Watson: "Frequently."
"How often?"
"Well, some hundreds of times."
"Then how many are there?"
"How many? I don't know."
"Quite so! You have not observed. And yet you have seen. That is just my point. Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have both seen and observed." Sherlock Holmes tells his chronicle Dr. Watson.
The current crisis has shown the rigidity of systemic design
Our primary focus over these last few months has been to try to sketch out what a sustainable recovery could look like for our two countries using a systems thinking method. One of our hypotheses builds on how a systems thinking approach could help draw a recovery outline for our two countries -where millions of people are at risk of being pushed into poverty.
Perhaps the most important insight we have gained over the past months is that there are so many complex variables at play that all come together to form an impact. For this reason, when policymakers and developmental designers avoidcomplexity, they may ultimately reduce the impact of their work.
Why economists have a hard time
Even though economists and policymakers have usually had linear approaches in dealing with economic crises and were mostly basing their models on direct correlations between inputs and outputs, economies could not be further from being linear.
For instance, economies that rely on remittances, exports of raw resources, foreign investments, SMEs and service sectors coupled with high degrees of informality, weak public services and limited fiscal space are likely to experienceadditional pandemic induced complexitythat results from underlying relations between factors specifically intertwined because of their underlying fragilities.
The current crisis has shown the rigidity of systemic design. The same follows in economic systems that have been made inflexible over time because of constant iterations to make them more efficient. This has made the global economy inflexible and fragile to disruption. Although the majority of theCovid-19 shockscan be felt directly in developed countries, because of thecascading effectit will be felt indeveloping countriesand fragile states after some delay. Both our countries have either directly felt the economic shock or are on the way to feeling its full effects.
The author's abstract Systems thinking diagram of Somalia and Morocco's economies and the effects of COVID-19. The figure identifies key economic nodes: formal economy, informal economy, population and links with global economies through foreign markets (supply chains) and global economy (finance). The direct links and indirect influences are expressed by bold and dashed lines respectively.
The author's abstract System Simulation of the economic effects of Covid-19. The catastrophic downward projection in the formal economy is caused by a reduction in direct financial cash flows: ODA-Official development assistance or foreign aid, FDI-foreign direct investment, domestic revenues from taxes and tariffs and diaspora remittances. The informal economy is projected to suffer from disruptions in supply chains but will show increased inflow from the population both in terms of finance, products and services keeping cash flowing but not enough to balance overall economic activity.
How systems thinking helps
We are still wrapping our minds around how making sense of system models, such as the one above that factors the flow of liquidity into local economies in low-income countries, could help boost subsistence workers and household’s resilience to shocks. The main subsystems we identified being foreign liquidity that flows into this economy mainly through remittances, foreign investment, donors, tourism, which is a direct connection between the formal economy and global economy.
Another subsystem we identified is trade and its complex relationship between exports and imports (supply/demand) between the local economy and the global. In the subsystem above we identified asthe informal economywhich has a large effect on both countries. Being on the lookout of double binds that might exist in subsystems — blind to the larger system of which they are parts— would mean keeping an eye on the resulting consequences that might be negating or undermining each other. Although too slow for a pandemic since they require us to consistently tap in our slow thinking mode, a systems thinking approach would serve exactly this purpose.
Counterintuitively, Part of our fast-paced learning and sensemaking is powered by slow thinking and mindfulness. And that is precisely why Sherlock Holmes' ability to be alert and awaremight help us notice connectionsand open our eyes to double-binds sometimes left unsolved by the linear or engineering solutions, now that business as usual is not usual anymore!
Now more than ever, we need to put together citizens and experts that span wide-ranging disciplines, whose collective — at a massive scale —wisdom and moral imaginationcould help uncover the nestedness and unintended consequences of new policies and disrupted citizens’ and businesses’ behaviours. They also require us to be more comfortable with ambiguity and to develop a Sherlock-esque ability to keep a lookout onconnecting seemingly disconnected dots.
It is known that the coronavirus pandemic is not gender-blind; it affects men and women differently and may exacerbate gender inequalities. Yet our knowledge of the gender impact of COVID-19 — and the varied ways it directly and indirectly affects different demographic groups — is incomplete due to data gaps across economic, education, health, and social dimensions.
We also know that gender roles will help shape adaptive responses to the pandemic, but it is unclear whether we have the necessary granular information (on regions, sectors, coverage, and severity) to design effective, gender-informed mitigation and recovery policies. To better understand what data exist, and where there are key gaps, Data2X and Open Data Watch have launched a joint, ongoing review of the principal international databases to understand how well we can track the gender impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.
Auteurs: Pedro M Folegatti*, Katie J Ewer*, Parvinder K Aley, Brian Angus, Stephan Becker, Sandra Belij-Rammerstorfer, Duncan Bellamy, Sagida Bibi, Mustapha Bittaye, Elizabeth A Clutterbuck, Christina Dold, Saul N Faust, Adam Finn, Amy L Flaxman, Bassam Hallis, Paul Heath, Daniel Jenkin, Rajeka Lazarus, Rebecca Makinson, Angela M Minassian, Katrina M Pollock, Maheshi Ramasamy, Hannah Robinson, Matthew Snape, Richard Tarrant, Merryn Voysey, Catherine Green*, Alexander D Douglas*, Adrian V S Hill*, Teresa Lambe*, Sarah C Gilbert*, Andrew J Pollard*, on behalf of the Oxford COVID Vaccine Trial Group†
COVID-19 has forced a re-evaluation of nearly every aspect of how we fight for social and ecological justice. Yet, when it comes to the issue of climate change it can seem as if the virus has changed everything without changing anything at all. The world we live in today looks nothing like it did at the start of the year, but the climate crisis is still the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced and global capital is still hell-bent on ignoring it.
In sharp contrast to their inaction on climate change, the world’s leading imperialist powers responded to the pandemic with a fervor not seen since the last time capital’s interests were so severely threatened at the height of the 2008 financial crisis. Their actions reveal what we have always known: these governments do not lack the power to mitigate the worst effects of climate breakdown. What they lack is the will.
The pandemic has also revealed the enormity of the changes needed to tackle the climate crisis. As the world went into lockdown, stories began to circulate about the pandemic’s unexpected benefits for the environment. With fewer cars on the roads, the air in major cities was cleaner, songbirds seemed louder and the skies bluer. With less fossil fuels being burned, emissions were also falling. Studies suggest that in early April, global emissions were 17 percent lower than they were at the same time last year.
This is impressive as far as it goes. But research also shows that the pandemic has made no appreciable difference to the world’s ability to meet the targets of the COP21 Paris Agreement. In May this year, with much of the world in lockdown, atmospheric CO2 swelled to 418 parts per million — the highest recorded in human history.
Visuele weergave van hoe het virus zich exponentieel heeft kunnen verspreiden.
Overheden passen verschillende soorten interventies toe om de exponentiële verspreiding te manipuleren. Maar wat is exponentiële verspreiding precies? En welke gevolgen voor de verspreiding zouden deze interventies hebben? Dit artikel van de washington post geeft antwoord op deze vragen.
Ondanks de geleverde inspanningen van overheden zoals quarantaine en reisrestricties, heeft het coronavirus zich groots verspreid. De NY-Times heeft een visualisatie gemaakt om te laten zien hoe dit heeft kunnen gebeuren
Days before the Easter holiday, when he realized that in 2020 friends and family would not get together to exchange the traditional chocolate eggs, graphic designer Victor Ghiraldini had an idea when standing on the balcony of his apartment. He imagined painting phrases of motivation and empathy on the streets to be seen from above and serve as a warning to the population.
‘Despite the recommendations of the health authorities, social distance is being questioned,’ Victor realized. ‘I felt that the movement in the streets had increased and perhaps the perception of the severity of the virus had been lost – how dangerous it can be.’
We have to move much faster than we are doing now if we are to change some of the fundamental features of our current period. One message this virus represents is that we cannot keep organizing our cities the way we are now
We have become increasingly aware of climate change and the rising fragility of more and more cities in diverse parts of the world. Flooding, overpopulation, the challenge of securing food for cities, desertification, and more, have emerged as visual actors in a growing range of debates.
And the challenges we confront and make it difficult to make change, are not just a question of households having the money to buy the needed tools. It is also the fact of expanding urban areas where there is not enough food close by and it may take an hour to get to a vendor. European cities are perhaps an exception in that they tend to be small and have long secured the option of growing some food in cities. This is something that is far more difficult in the major cities of the Americas and of much of Asia where food in all its diverse dimensions tends to be under the control of major enterprises.
And yet! Cities are key to changing how we handle this new era that has already started even if we are not always aware of this. It is not easy to detect a major transformation has happened when dealing with complex systems over which the average citizen has only little access and knowledge. Cities are one of the most direct places for growing food -avoiding shipping and trucks bringing in the food from far away regions. In our current era time has become of the essence. We have to move much faster than we are doing now if we are to change some of the fundamental features of our current period.
We must recover the critical role of urban space in the development of alternative modes of securing life and food. And if we want to develop at least some of this in cities, we will have to struggle against many major enterprises. Elsewhere I have developed an analysis of the key role played by streets in the making of sociabilities of all sorts and the comforts of trust. We will need to strengthen these conditions and options.
What the street brings to this type of project is an easy and minimal respect and appreciation of the other (see e.g. "The Global Street: Making the Political". Globalizations 8 (5), 2011:573-579)
The coronavirus crisis we are currently going through has become a powerful voice all its own. It has not asked anything from us, except a bit, a little bit of our blood. And for that little bit we are paying a very high price -at its most extreme, the price of our capacity to live on. This invisible actor, which makes no noise we humans can hear, which leaves no scratches on our legs or arms, can and will nonetheless kill a not insignificant share of us humans alive today. It does resonate with a larger world that makes aggression in cities more visible.1
Across the centuries, we have done vast migrations to escape negative conditions and find better worlds. Today's presence of the coronavirus feels like we have no space to run to. And we cannot escape.The only option is to stay in spaces surrounded by big walls and windows we can close.
And yet, this is a temporary condition, even though a recurrent one. Most of us humans whom the virus penetrated, have survived, but often barely. And far too many died.
But the fact that a majority of us survived matters. It matters not only because it tells us we can survive it. It also matters because its presence and its failure to kill most of us is significant. And it tells us that we can have a chance to survive it, but that chance needs to be made and developed. It does not fall from the sky ready made to defend us. We need to protect ourselves, and whenever it is an option we need to alert or help those who are at risk and do not know it. We cannot be silly or mindless.
One message this virus represents is that we cannot keep organizing our cities the way we are now.
For this interview series, Fabiana Natale and Gilles de Valk are interviewing experts from different backgrounds on the political implications of the COVID-19 pandemic. From their living rooms in France and the Netherlands they will explore the consequences the pandemic will have for (geo)political, security, and societal affairs. This interview series marks the launch of a new type of content for the Security Distillery, one which we hope can provide entertaining and informative analysis of an uncertain and evolving development in global politics.
On 6 May 2020, the historian and political writer Timothy Garton Ash asked in the Guardian: ‘What kind of historical moment will this turn out to be, for Europe and the world?’ What do you think, Matthijs?
It seems like a lot of people around me are optimistic about the future, although these people tend to have a background in social sciences. As a historian, you tend to be a little more suspicious of how large historical events turn out, so I’m a bit more sceptical. I think the “corona crisis” is a reinforcement of existing trends, rather than a rupture with the past. Authoritarianism, nationalism, and other undemocratic developments that were already taking place seem to be enhanced. Even though some people think of it as a time of solidarity, we have seen friction within the EU between the Netherlands and Italy, for example [the Dutch were initially hesitant about proposed financial aid to southern European countries, which sparked criticism]. Regarding nationalist developments, it seems like there is an emphasis on national self-sufficiency, rather than international cooperation or cosmopolitanism. This trend had already emerged before the crisis if you look at United States President Donald Trump’s policies or the trade war with China, but now we have witnessed nationalist reflexes in countries like Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany. This reinforcement of national self-sufficiency has not led to the exclusion of specific groups, but it can become that way.
You mentioned that you are not as optimistic, being a historian. Do you see similarities between the corona crisis and any historical event in particular?
We have seen moves towards nationalism and self-sufficiency after big crises before. The eighteenth century, for instance, was very much a time of commerce and free trade. After the French Revolution, which turned out very different from how the participants expected, you see a surge in nationalism and a focus on economic self-sufficiency, while the belief in international trade experienced a setback. Another period it makes me think of is the end of the nineteenth century, which was a period of globalisation. However, World War One caused another move towards national self-sufficiency. I would not compare the corona crisis to World War One, but generally speaking, you can see that crises can result in a more inward focus.
On the other hand, the corona crisis shows that some problems that seemed to be unsolvable can be solved. I’m thinking of “overtourism” in European cities such as Venice, Paris, and Amsterdam. At the same time, it seems like we are rushing less in our daily lives and the fact that we are travelling less can have a positive impact on the environment. Besides, it seems to have caused a revaluation of the public sector, especially the health, education, and law enforcement sectors.
“Pandemics do not materialise in isolation. They are part and parcel of capitalism and colonization,” says Edna Bonhomme, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, in this interview with GRIP on the COVID-19 pandemic and global inequality.
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To what extent could we now see global health inequalities becoming accentuated as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak?
In the United States, there are major disparities with respect to how the coronavirus is transmitted and who dies. Unfortunately, Black people in the United States are more likely to die from the disease. This disparity has to do with social inequities that translate to health inequities. African Americans are disproportionately more likely to suffer from a lack of adequate care, which is particularly dangerous amid this pandemic because their living conditions and employment may prevent them from following social distancing guidelines and put them at a higher risk of contracting the disease in the first place. African Americans are more likely to have essential jobs which keep the country going amid lockdowns, including in home health assistance, sanitation, public transportation and grocery stores. In New York City, at least 1,167 Metropolitan Transit Authorityemployees have tested positive for COVID-19 and 33 have died. African Americans are also facing health inequities in the prison system, where they are also disproportionately represented (a third of Black men are likely to spend time in prison).
How are the responses to the outbreak revealing the reverberations of colonial histories in terms of how pandemics are thought about?
In the viral Youtube video “Corona Lie,” Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, a pulmonologist, remarks: “Virologists created something very sensational here [with coronavirus].” He proceeds to downplay the virus as the flu, a seasonal occurrence that is being overblown. Wodarg believes that the reaction of governments and authorities to COVID-19 is inappropriate since the number of people with the flu in Germany – which he cited at 20,000 to 30,000 – currently exceeds the total number of coronavirus patients. Altogether, he sees the international response as part of a political plot to increase surveillance technology, government temperature checks, and panic. In a 14 March 2020 interview with Radio Eins, Dr. Karin Mölling, professor and director of the Institute for Medical Virology at the University of Zurich, also expressed some caution about how people and governments are responding. She indicated that coronavirus is not a serious killer virus and that the real problem is die Panikmache (“scaremongering”).
These are corona skeptics heralding caution in the name of science. At the heart of these comments is a lack of recognition for the marginalized and oppressed: an indifference that bleeds into eliminationism. Yet Wodarg and Mölling are not alone in their skepticism – in Europe and beyond. While the German response to COVID-19 is lauded worldwide as among the best and most successful, comparatively, xenophobia and racism against migrants may be its Achilles heel. While the restriction of transmission has so far been relatively effective, conspiracism, denialism, and racism in Germany have become a toxic stew, boiling below a placid surface; these may undermine successful public health interventions. What is more certain is that denialism and xenophobia directly threaten the lives of migrants now, through and in addition to spread of the virus itself.
Concerning colonialism, a striking example of how former colonial powers continue to infect their one-time colonies can be found on the African continent today: the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the Democratic Republic of Congo was from a Belgian citizen. The imprint of Belgian colonialism in the Congo continues to cripple the country’s health care system, which will now have to handle the pandemic in the shadow of an Ebola outbreak and a current measles eruption. Rather than receive international aid without strings, the World Bank is offering a $47 million loan to the DRC to combat COVID-19.
In what ways is the global outbreak of the virus also revealing the underlying political and economic drivers of heightening inequalities within a capitalist system?
Pandemics do not materialise in isolation. They are part and parcel of capitalism and colonisation. The countries that struggled to contain and control major epidemics in the recent past, from Haiti to Sierra Leone, had deficient public health systems prior to these crises, partially as a result of their colonial histories. Moreover, products of capitalism – from war to migration to mass production and increased travel – contribute massively to the proliferation of diseases. As Naomi Klein has pointed out, capitalism is the pandemic that is causing destruction to life.
De mensheid staat nu voor een wereldwijde crisis. Misschien zelfs de grootste crisis van onze generatie. De beslissingen die mensen en overheden de komende weken nemen, zullen waarschijnlijk ook de komende jaren de wereld vormgeven. Ze zullen niet alleen onze gezondheidszorgsystemen vormgeven, maar ook onze economie, politiek en cultuur. We moeten snel en daadkrachtig handelen. Tevens moeten we rekening houden met de langetermijngevolgen van onze acties. Bij het kiezen tussen alternatieven moeten we ons niet alleen afvragen hoe we de onmiddellijke dreiging kunnen overwinnen, maar ook wat voor wereld we zullen bewonen zodra de storm voorbij is. Ja, de storm zal voorbijgaan, de mensheid zal overleven, de meesten van ons zullen nog leven - maar we zullen een andere wereld bewonen.
Historicus en filosoof Yuvel Noah Harari heeft zijn gedachten op papier gezet voor de New York Times:
Voor degenen die zich achter de frontlinie bevinden en aan wie men uit solidariteit heeft gevraagd om niets te doen is het beslist zeer welkom dat de algehele ‘lockdown’ toevallig samenvalt met de vastentijd. Dit verplichte vasten, deze seculiere en republikeinse ramadan, biedt hen de kans om te overdenken wat nu eigenlijk wel en wat niet belangrijk is.
Het zou zomaar kunnen dat de interventie van het virus een soort generale repetitie is voor de volgende crisis, waarin iedereen een complete verandering van zijn of haar levensomstandigheden zal ondergaan, in alle aspecten van het dagelijks bestaan. Net als vele anderen denk ik dat de coronacrisis een opmaat is voor de klimaatcrisis. Deze hypothese moet nog wel aan een nadere beproeving onderworpen worden.
David Harvey: antikapitalistische politiek in de tijd van COVID-19
In deze aflevering vertelt prof. Harvey over de factoren en omstandigheden die ervoor zorgen dat COVID-19 een pandemie wordt en over de gevolgen voor de economie en het sociale leven.