MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
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Social Distancing in Black Spaces
By rmrd0000 on Thu, 04/16/2020 - 8:00am |I’m an African-American emergency room physician in Chicago. Recently, a friend called asking about his grandmother who lives on the South Side in a two-bedroom apartment with five family members, one of whom recently was diagnosed as COVID-19 positive.
He asked, “What can I do?”
When I told him to quarantine the infected family member from the grandmother and any other family members with underlying health conditions, my friend reminded me that their apartment has only two bedrooms. He also pointed out that the infected person still has to go to work.
I found myself at a loss for words. And then I started thinking about the larger factors that have now put African-Americans at the epicenter of the corona virus crisis, accounting for 70% of the deaths in a city in which we are just 30 percent of the population. So far, the response from governments at all levels is far short of what is needed.
To really address the issue of African American health risks in the age of corona virus, we need to acknowledge the root causes. Broadly speaking, our communities have suffered decades of disinvestment resulting in concentrated poverty. As with so many other issues in society, racism is a factor.
The practice of redlining, which kept African Americans segregated by denying them mortgages in certain communities, has produced astronomical disparities in wealth building for African-Americans. Today, the average white family in America has 10 times the wealth of the average black family.
Economic and social isolation leads to secondary levels of inequity. Food deserts, food insecurity and inadequate access to health care are driving gross disparities in life expectancy. Today, there is a 30-year gap in life expectancy between wealthy white neighborhoods of Chicago and low-income black neighborhoods.
Many, many African Americans are dying young from preventable deaths. Not surprisingly, these same economic and social disparities have laid fertile ground for African Americans to bear the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic in this city. We’re not dying because we aren’t washing our hands, staying home or doing social distancing. We’re dying because we’ve been “socially distanced” for decades.
URL:
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2020/4/9/21215630/coronavirus-covid-18-african-americans-chicago-social-isolation-physician-garth-walker
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homeless in shelters and prisoners are in worse situation right now. Furthermore, there are tons of seriously mentally ill in prisons, just watched a documentary bout that the other night, that that is a major problem espec. in CA, and Newsom frets about it constantly
lots of people of other colors, including white, crammed into tiny living spaces in NYC right now. Illegal immigrants notoriously so, sometimes 20 to a studio apartment, in shifts.
Which of all these problems should we address first after solving coronavirus?
Me, I'm for getting people who have no place to live a place to live before we get other people bigger spaces.And getting severely mentally ill out of prisons and off the streets. Crazy, I know.
by artappraiser on Thu, 04/16/2020 - 4:55pm
"a place to live" in infectious overcrowding obviously isn't an acceptable halfmeasure. Sure, give em a cruise ship... Sometimes the answer's "both at once". The man, the goat,the cabbage...
by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 04/16/2020 - 4:57pm
Rent in crowded urban islands like Japan and NYC is expensive (as it is in like: university town limits) and therefore people live crowded together with lots of roommates and they don't have cars as they can barely afford the rent and use mass transit and they end up like this if they are supposed to be practicing social distancing and isolation
On the other hand people who have cars, they can live in suburbs and exurbs where there is cheaper rent for much more space and they have a yard and a basement that they can go scream in if the family is getting to them when they might have to socially isolate. In addition when they go to grocery shop at the super dooper sized super market or YUGE Costco there is a huge parking lot and lots of space in the store so that they are 6 ft. away from people...
I could go on and on...
My first place in NYC was a Manhattan 11 x 17 ft. square studio with a 4 x 6 ft. kitchen and a 4 x 6 ft bathroom on the ground floor of a "newly fashionable Upper West Side" walk up, with 2 windows looking out on the street and no light, old and creaky building. It was rent stabilized but more expensive than what I left in Milwaukee, where my one-bedroom apt. with living and dining and kitchen and bath on the 9th floor of an elevator building had a view of Lake Michigan and the Art Center.
I fully admit I would have committed suicide a month ago already if I was stuck in isolation in that Manhatta studio apt. all day. It was a miserable place to spend time in. It was for sleeping and showering only. It's like most young people live when they first come there, it's not an exclusively Afro-American problem in NYC! It's ridiculous to say that. Upper middle class people pay a fortune for the same square footage that would be a lousy little ranch house in most cities.
My dorm room at UW Madison was like 8 x 12 ft cinderblock with two twin beds and two desks and two people trying to study in it. As one advanced in college one moved to an apt. on campus where rents were a fortune you got like 5 roommates together and you split the rent and hung Indian bedspreads to make the living room into two more bedrooms, those that took those "bed rooms" that weren't really bedrooms got cheaper rate, anybody that got a room to themselves paid twice. Guests got the bathtub.
I grew up in a neighborhood of rented 3 bedroom "flats" with families of like 6 to 10 kids, they stacked em like cordwood in bunk beds so the parents could have one bedroom to sleep in with the new baby's crib next to them and so that they could make more babies because they wasn't anything else fun they could afford to do. We had one car and shared a driveway with the other flat. Each two-flat building had a small yard where you could shoo the kids out of the house.
Location location location. It's easier to be poorer in some places than others. It's easier to be in isolation in some places than others.
I know for a fact the what's called "the inner city" in a place like Memphis or Milwaukee or Atlanta mostly consists of small single family homes with yards that are rented. The high rises are for rich pipple only.
I thought that was the plan, the urban plan, according to green people, to get rid of all the "urban sprawl" and cram everybody into high rises like ants so that they don't need cars and goods will be efficiently delivered to them.
How's that working out so far now?
This is actually why I bring that up and want to go there, actually not here to argue about Afro-Americans being more crammed into small spaces in Chicago than whites in Chicago. Nope, it's a much bigger question. It's Japan, too. "The American dream", the house with the picket fence in the burbs, it's looking pretty good right now. So is rural living. Everyone's oohing and aahing over all the pix of animals running around in the houses outside the city. Meanwhile all the new towers to excess in Manhattan are sitting empty and unsold.
I am so so grateful I am currently stuck in a house with more than one floor and two doors that go direct to two teeny yards, even though I could ill afford the mortgage and taxes and insurance months ago. It's just a fluke, maybe one of the few times I got lucky with unluckiness. There's only been a few years in my life where I had the luxury of this privacy. It's very precious. And I think a lot of millennials and immigrants and minorities are going to want it after this. Exurbs here to stay?
There's plenty of people who either don't have privacy right now or are tearing their hair going nuts alone in tiny apartments. I really don't see that as too race specific, it's not even class specific.
by artappraiser on Sun, 04/19/2020 - 2:07am
Is cover story of NYDaily News today. it's a cover because it will sell, it will sell because there's a whole ton of people that live this way. More room to live in is every New Yorker's dream. Photo is Yoly Sanchez and her large family in her small Washington Heights apartment.(Yoly Sanchez) Washington Heights is in Upper Manhattan. Market rate in that neighborhood is not so affordable as it used to be. She probably has rent stabilized and then she took in family members as they immigrated and then they couldn't find affordable rent anywhere!
New York City’s crowded apartments pose particular threat when it comes to coronavirus
In New York City, where many living situations are multi-generational and translate into a crowded home, many renters are struggling with how to quarantine and keep family members safe in conditions that are not conducive to either.
By CARLA ROMAN and MICHAEL GARTLAND
by artappraiser on Sun, 04/19/2020 - 4:17am
in Italy, in Vo, retrospective investigation showed that 80% of those infected caught the virus from family members who were unsymptomatic.
There may ultimately not be a practical alternative to universal testing and Wuhan 'dormitory for quarantine away from family members" (or vacant hotel rooms if the government is phat...).
by jollyroger on Sun, 04/19/2020 - 9:09am
yes, that is unfortunately the key-cruel and immediate real genuine quarantine away from everyone else including family--immediately upon testing positive. And we are eventually going to have it, as least in states that seriously care about re-opening without relapse before a vaccine is available. And libertarians left and right are going to scream bloody murder because real quarantine, not isolation by choice, is the classic stuff of dystopian novels. Dragging a kid away from his mother, and putting him in an isolation ward, anyone? Wasn't too popular already when Stephen Miller advocated it for immigration camps.
If Facetime just doesn't cut it for you, you can always allow the cherry-picker type visiting of sick family, I guess:
by artappraiser on Sun, 04/19/2020 - 7:27pm
"...authorities in Tuscany had begun putting infected people in hotels, which would ordinarily be filled with people visiting one of the world’s most beautiful tourist destinations. “It’s a good idea,” he said. “The hotels make some money since they are all closed. And you have isolation, which is necessary.”
Dr. C. Jason Wang, director of Stanford University’s Center for Policy, Outcomes and Prevention, said Taiwan has been a leader in isolating infected people from their families. The government pays hotel owners as much as $200 a night to house people under quarantine, providing three meals a day, a book to read and a stipend roughly equivalent to a young person’s daily salary. Anyone caught breaking quarantine faces a massive fine.
Wang said Taiwan learned from the 2003 outbreak of SARS, when people who were forced to isolate thought they were being jailed, and ran away. “We learned that when you put people in quarantine, you need to be very nice to them.” Now, patients are checked by health workers three times a day. “If a person gets sick, their symptoms worsen, they will make sure they get care,” he said.
While in the U.S., it may be impossible to force people to isolate away from their homes, “I think you can say, ‘Hey, wouldn’t you like to protect your family, and we prepared a nice room at the Hilton for two weeks for you, and you don’t need to pay for it.’ and you know, hopefully people will,” said Slavitt, who is now hosting a new podcast about the pandemic, “In the Bubble.”
Slavitt added that to pull this off, the federal government would need to provide funding to help pay for hotels."
https://www.propublica.org/article/coronavirus-advice-from-abroad-7-less...
So much for that good idea...
by jollyroger on Sun, 04/19/2020 - 9:44am